Slate, the Group Blog That Troll-Baits With Provocative Stupidity: Second in a Series

Matt Yglesias is actually not nearly so important a contributor to Slate's All-Dumb Rebranding Effort as LV Anderson. It's not that Matt Yglesias isn't profoundly stupid -- Oh, he is -- it's that people already know he's stupid. And also boring and tedious and walking around with a certain kind of I've Made It Now, Bitch swagger that doesn't suit someone who writes blogposts for a failing group blog.

LV Anderson, en revanche, is an Unknown Factor. You don't know that she's an idiot you're not supposed to take seriously, so she tricks you sometimes into reading her retard-bait blogposts and thus often has Slate's most trafficked articles of the day.

Nevertheless, although Matt Yglesias is sodden with failure-sweat, he did show the Stupid Flag today as well, and must be mentioned.

Provocative Title:

"We Need Government Handouts, Not Equality of Opportunity."

Outstanding start. Gentlemen, start your troll-engines.

Writer: Matt Yglesias, a Socialist who owns a million+ dollar condo despite not having the sort of salaried position which would usually produce the income enough to purchase such a palace.

Gee I wonder how he swung that.

Evidence of Trolling Intent: What's especially hate-trollish about this is that he attempts to offend both the right and the left in order to generate some Failure Links for Slate. Of course his headline seems like it's calculated to grab some Outrage Traffic from the right -- but his article is actually a repudiation of Barack Obama's statement that people need opportunity, not hand-outs.

Thus, he seeks to troll both sides.

Being Matt Yglesias, he fails. Not only is he too boring to read, but you're too bored even reading my attack on him for me to continue much longer, and so it is I will try to wrap up quickly.

Estimated Time It Took To Produce This Work: I would guess about twenty minutes. Well, for Matt Yglesias, I'd say an hour and change.

There's almost nothing to it. He quotes Obama, and then makes a series of assertions which he doesn't bother supporting.

Suggesting that this isn't seriously intended as an argument; it's just a headline crafted to get linked, with some verbiage beneath it to make it look like a Real Blogpost.

Crescendo of Stupid: Most of it, of course, so I'll just quote a bit, more or less at random.

The entire piece is confused because he didn't bother actually writing a piece, he just wrote a grabby headline and then doodled for 500 words. He cavalierly confuses "hand outs" with government's role in regulating things like lead paint and requiring seat-belts for highway travel. So none of his offered examples even bother to try to make the headline's provocative case that "people need more hand-outs."

And I guess this is where he tries to really amp up the Outrage:

You think about the good old days of the pioneers when you could pull up your bootstraps and go work a farm out west (if you were white, that is). Well, that was a government program! You didn't confiscate that land from its native inhabitants. Somebody else made that happen.

I thought the same thing about your $1.175 million condo, Matty. I cry myself to sleep thinking about the land your parents must have appropriated from the Indigenous Condo Board.

Okay, I shouldn't have done this post at all and should have gone right to #3, which is a doozy. But here's the crap post, now out of the way, and I'll get on Slate's Screamingly Stupid Blogpost of the Day Year.

posted by Ace at 04:07 PM

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