Matt Taibbi

one of my worst moments is a guy I felt my friend just impugning me, word after word, in front of a group of friends for no reason other than his own biases and my (relatively small town, assert your biases now) friends made at least a few comments about how I should have slugged him

now, if you feel shitty and conflicted about a part of your life, and someone who isn’t a trusted friend springs that on you, I am not going to fault for acting a little human

yeah i think mh has a point, tho imo there's a certain line that going from throwing coffee to menacingly following (if true) does cross. taibbi's a pretty big dude iirc

silby, you’re one of the greatest internalizers I’ve noticed in my social sphere and I completely relate, but imagine even 10 percent of your inner angsting externalized, and try not to immediately see that as a personal failing worthy of making someone a pariah

Fair point

FWIW I think there's *some* context worth examining, which is that, even in the author's own telling it comes through that he was being a dick to Taibbi as well, perhaps even wanted to get a rise out of him:

When I first contacted Taibbi for this story, he replied unenthusiastically. “Ugh. No way I can talk you out of this, huh?” he e-mailed. “In the end nobody really wants to read about a couple of overgrown suburban teenagers writing about anal sex and the clap and then calling themselves revolutionaries when some third-world dictator gets bored of letting them stay published.”

He then fell out of touch, re-emerged a month later, and agreed to meet me for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. I arrived late, and he was visibly annoyed. There was no boyish smile. “I just don’t see why you’re doing this story,” he said. When I told him that Ames was now living in New York he grew more agitated. I mentioned some of the Exile pieces of his I planned to write about, and he said, “That was covered in the book.” I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good.

“The book wasn’t good?” he said.

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said.

“My book?” he said.

“Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said.

At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.

The restaurant was packed with customers, and they all turned to watch as I sat there, stunned, coffee dripping from my face. The waiter arrived with the milkshake Taibbi had ordered. After wiping myself off a bit, I went outside, where Taibbi was putting on his coat, and asked him to calm down and come back into the restaurant. He walked up to me, glaring, beside himself with rage.

“Fuck you!” he yelled. “Did you bring me here to insult me? Who are you? What have you ever written? Fuck you!”

I tried to talk to him, but gave up when he walked away. I went back inside, paid the bill, left, and began walking up Sixth Avenue. Halfway up the block, I turned around, and Taibbi was behind me.

“Are you following me?,” I asked. He walked toward me, raising his arms as though preparing to throttle me or take a swing.

“I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you!” he said.

“Are you kidding?,” I asked.

And at that moment I thought he might be kidding. There was part of me that thought it must have been a prank. I half expected some old Exile accomplice, maybe even Ames, to jump out from behind a tree with a camera. Maybe they’d been setting me up all along. Maybe there was horse sperm in the coffee. But the anger in Taibbi’s eyes was genuine, and, after some more glaring, he fumed off. That was the last I saw of him.

love to have people mythologize me over a cof

Like, he presses him to do an interview on something Taibbi really doesn't want to do an interview about, shows up late, and then says "BTW your book (which you didn't want to do an interview about) sucks." And who knows what other details are left out.

you're relating way too much to taibbi mh

he's a professional writer who wrote a bunch of dumb provocative shit and this is how he responded to someone saying a book was bad. he flipped out, walked away, returned, flipped out again, walked away again, waited, and then followed and physically intimidated the guy. i have no idea why you're comparing this to an experience where someone was apparently denigrating your entire existence... and you still didn't react aggressively

and i probably would've understood a punch to the face if i was next to you in that situation! but there's a difference between being verbally assaulted like that and having a journalist say a mean thing about your book. by all means it sounds like taibbi had the upper hand throughout that entire exchange.

He flipped out because he knew that the book was indefensible and could ruin his career.

It wasn’t the journalist’s fault.

Xxp feel like your argument is redundant and discursive and you left a lot of the good stuff out

the book is really dumb, btw, because a lot of the original material is very relevant to time and place so they printed the most provocative bullshit to sell it to americans

I bought it in *seaches email* early 2010 and found it too repetitive and gross to finish

vlads

I'm just questioning this leap we seem to have made from outing genuine predators to trying to excise from the public people who had unhealthy levels of anger decades ago.

OK, let's consult what Matt Taibi has to say:

So now, for instance, if people go back and look at the offensive things that I wrote 18 or 20 years ago, and decide never to read my columns in Rolling Stone or buy I Can’t Breathe, that is completely just. It’s how this business works.

I presume this applies equally to 'offensive things that I did decades ago', so he actively endorses the idea that it's fair and just for us to say screw him, based on how much he has done or said offensive things in the past.

He's arguing in qualx's favor.

vlads

― mookieproof, Thursday, November 2, 2017 12:00 AM (forty-one seconds ago)

ok lol

lol mookie

qualx & silby & treeship OTM

the fact that he quit his podcast suggests he knows there's more to come

or that he values his friends, take your pick

I hate to be the guy to finally make the point but a long-time great ilxor is married to the other dude from the podcast, who I also appreciate

wait what, I mean the partner of, sorry for slip

Why on earth is that relevant?

because down chain effects matter

because family, friends, and relationships matter?

like I’m not going to come up with the angle “your mom’s a real piece of shit, Treeship!”

I’d wonder why she was taking the extra cookies from the village social to feed squirrels but ask it nicely

xp because having a friend who vouches for the dude has weight

^^

"do you feel he’s a reliable narrator here" not sure what would make him any less reliable than the droves of accusers who have spoken up in the past month?

accusers of Taibbi?

seems clear that dude is a bit of a dick, also that he's tried to get better - hopefully all of us are always striving for this too, whatever our flaws! - but a) the reporter's own account shows him pestering and antagonising Taibbi over something he was trying to process and move past, and b) being annoyed when someone insists on meeting you, to tell you that you suck, is not super-duper-equivalent to multiple violent rapes, so this seems like some fairly irrelevant whataboutism

Yeah that is totally true. I find the passages in that exile book sufficiently disturbing to make me not like him but I don’t necessarily think he did the stuff written in the book. I just seems like he went through a phase where he thiught misogyny was cool.

having a network of people you trust who can vouch for others is good

A sign of virility or something. It’s an extraordinarily destructive attitude to be promulgating in a quasi-popular newspaper and book.

Self xp

if you never thought it was cool to be a capital D-swinging dick dude then god bless you’re a better person than ms

if you never thought it was cool to be a capital D-swinging dick dude then god bless you’re a better person than ms

lol me anyway

i never thought sexual harrassment and bullying were cool. I might have been confused about where certain lines were wrt communication as a teenager but not as an adult.

Read the passage in the exile book. It’s not just him using laddish objectifying language it’s him saying it’s funny to harass people even when it clearly upsets them.

have you considered taking the book and tossing it out of the window, or at least tossing it back to the late 90s

anyway like i said congratulations on being a better pwrson

It’s good we are being as a culture more in tune with everyday sexism, but we shouldn’t lose the ability to recognize starkly abusive behavior for what it is. And that’s what is described in the book.

interesting that people who dislike Taibbi don't believe him now but think the book is an accurate document of what happened

you don’t need to think it happened to think it’s fucked up.

Jfc

I don’t think he should get fired or anything and I don’t dislike his writing but come on. That book is weird and he and his fans are minimizing it.

No no keep going you were doing so well

Look, that book — which I guess was mostly written by Ames but ehuch Taibbi signed off on — is misogynistic hate speech as far as I am concerned. If he had written a racist tract no one would handwave it as a youthful indiscretion.

You’re back on track now double down again

I don’t think he should get fired or anything and I don’t dislike his writing but come on. That book is weird and he and his fans are minimizing it.

― Treeship, Thursday, November 2, 2017 4:59 AM (nineteen minutes ago)

i don't think he does minimize it, at least not now. in his facebook post he says he regrets the entire exile era and says he finds it "horrifying, embarrassing, hurtful, and stupid" to reread, it struck me as a pretty genuine piece of self-reflection, a world away from some of the shitty apologies we've seen lately.

i'm not taibbi's biggest fan but i feel like we need more evidence than a semi-fictional book he wrote to label him an abuser. i assume other ppl who worked at the exile are still around and willing to talk about what it was actually like there.

Too goddamn long though

the line of tolerance for ANY bad behavior in (semi-)famous strangers' lives sure has gotten sharp for some pop music fans

thank God the Stones never made a misogynistic record

must have missed matt taibbi's career as a pop musician, what a horrible oversight on my part