Matthew Yglesias

Posted by Chris

I've been taken to task in the comments section of this post for incessantly recycling Matthew Yglesias posts. Well. Perhaps I should make more of an effort to distinguish myself from The Young Bearded One.

So how's this? Sometimes when Yglesias alludes to his views about normative ethics I wonder if he's smokin' crack. It's like he's Bentham reincarnated or something. (Bentham was famous for smoking crack.) And once in a while that nuttiness creeps into his views of other topics. On the whole, though, I notice that Yglesias manages to be very sensible on most topics in spite of his odd views about normative ethics. I find that both depressing and reassuring, since it seems to suggest that normative ethics is less useful than you might hope (though, of course, something can be valuable without being useful). It's like watching someone win a bike race with a rusty old clunker. You end up looking down at your fancy-schmancy racing bike and wondering if you haven't overpaid.

Also, I have the impression that Yglesias thinks that The Decemberists is a better band than The Arcade Fire - and if I'm right about that, then I think we have our second criticism. The Decemberists have some good stuff all right, but The Arcade Fire is surely the better band.

I admit that this is hardly a Sister Soujah moment. But I'm afraid that I've already used up this year's Sister Souljah moment on mysterious supervillain commenter Kegri. So this will have to do.

Anyway, the main mistake our good commenter seems to be making is to assume that I'm attempting to do anything as grand as blogging. As far as I'm concerned, I sort of gave up blogging as I knew it a while ago. These days I'm more interested in using blogging software to organize an online scrapbook/diary/mass friend email substitute/etc. repository. I'll let Paul handle the blogging.

Posted by Chris at April 22, 2005 05:22 PM