I don't know. The hang-up on particular performers is one of the very things most worth exploring, that people can't have a sane conversation about Paris Hilton or Ashlee Simpson because, you know, it's Paris Hilton or Ashlee Simpson. But, at least in regard to my column, people like Simon Reynolds and Mark K-Punk and Anwyn Crawford were into winning arguments rather than understanding the world, so projecting stupid ideas and then stomping on the ideas they'd projected and imagining themselves victorious is what they were going to do no matter what. Which isn't to say that they're like that 24/7, and as you know I'd had some friendly convos with Reynolds back in '99 and '00, though he tended not to have much follow-through even then. The deeper problem with the bliss crew - at least this is what I'm speculating from their near-psychotic behavior towards me - is that they've convinced themselves they have a working critical apparatus, that they have a set of tools and an overall framework, and they actually don't: their basic strategy seems to be to assign motives to people that the people don't actually have. But for Reynolds et al. to relinquish their poor tools and start anew would come at too high an emotional price for them. (Now I'm assigning motives to them, but they certainly didn't come at me with ideas.)

Nor do I think it's in their best interest necessarily to try to understand, since what they want to influence is policy change by galvanizing friendly readers

Well, yeah, maybe in the short run this is how one wins elections and gets people to write letters, but in the long run it promotes bigotry and ignorance among one's own and drives away potential allies and coalition partners who don't identify with one's particular lifestyle markers. And it makes one narrow and stupid. If this is what Yglesias is doing in regard to popular culture (I haven't read him much, but I've tended to like what I've read, which hasn't been about culture), he most certainly can and should do better.