Where is my mind?

Going to do this in bullet points:

• A couple of years ago Matt Bruenig published some very poorly reasoned stuff about why lawyers should make less money. He got the facts regarding what lawyers and law graduates actually make all wrong, and then took a bizarre theoretical position: that lawyers making less money was simply a good thing in and of itself, without any regard to whether this result would produce any beneficial effects for anyone else.
• I wrote a brief thing on LGM criticizing him, to which he responded in a sophomoric way, doubling down on his previous mistakes and throwing lots of gratuitous insults around for good measure.
• Last week Bruenig lost a freelancing gig writing for Demos because he got the facts all wrong about a policy issue, then doubled down on his previous mistakes and threw a lot of gratuitous insults around for good measure. He may or may not have then refused to promise to the people at Demos (a partisan think tank) that he would stop gratuitously insulting people whose good opinion Demos would like to cultivate. In any case he was fired.
• He then squeezed $25,000 out of the internet by posting an appeal on GoFundMe that was less than scrupulously straightforward about his actual employment situation.
• I posted something about the ironies of the above series of events, which in the first line disavowed any opinion on whether the loss of his freelancing side job was a fair outcome under the circumstances.
• This then inspired several luminaries of the People’s Front for Judea, or possibly the Judean Peoples’ Front, to attack Erik Loomis for failing to stand up for labor rights, or something.

Thoughts:

• My interactions with Bruenig have been limited to these two incidents. Scott and djw avow that substantively speaking his stuff in general is very good, and I have no reason to doubt them.
• To wax avuncular, Bruenig is in his mid-20s, and I more than suspect I would have been similarly obnoxious on many occasions if they had had the internet and the twitter and the snapchat etc. back when I was a snotty young know it all. He is apparently a talented young person and I hope he does great work in the future.
• Twitter in particular seems like a terrible medium for any kind of exchange of views. It’s apparently the cyber-equivalent of getting real drunk before getting into an argument.
• Blaming Erik for failing to opine on these matters is the very definition of absurdity, even by Twitter’s abysmal standards or lack thereof.
• Yesterday I had an extensive phone conversation, at her request, with Matt’s wife Elizabeth Bruenig. She is very distraught about these events, and although I’m not free to discuss the details, our conversation left me with a strong sense of how toxic the social network has become in regard to political debate and commentary in particular, and how this toxic atmosphere has particularly bad professional and personal effects on women journalists and commenters.
• The people who are trying to get Matt Bruenig fired from his primary employment, and who are harassing Elizabeth Bruening, are the scum of the earth and should be treated as such.

[SL] [UPDATE] Since someone asked in comments whether Elizabeth Bruenig was “really being harassed,” the answer is “yes.” When someone says that their tweets are damaging their family and ask to take the discussion offline and you refuse, that’s unambiguously “harassment.” Foust also contacted Matt Bruenig’s day job employer, which is scummy behavior and threatening their employment whether you explicitly ask for them to be fired or not. Foust writes to dispute that he contacted Bruenig’s employer. Since his Twitter feed is now private I can’t dispute his characterization, so I withdraw the charge. MY apologies; I should not have made the claim without access to the original Tweets, and I regret the error. The first I obviously stand by.