Matt Taibbi

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

seriously, fuck you

just seems like he went through a phase where he thiught misogyny was cool.

hey I laughed when Dean Martin came out on his TV show w/ the chorus girl on a leash, even if I was only eight.

(also Taibbi mentions on FB Raymond Chandler's greatness despite his vile attitudes twd certain classes of people)

he pitches his new book in the third sentence of his facebook note, thought that was a classy touch

tbh i think it's entirely possible that he does genuinely regret some of the stuff which appeared in the exile, and that an enthusiasm for hunter s thompson-esque blurred-line reporting crossed a line he is now uncomfortable with on a number of occasions

however, as someone who has previously enjoyed his rolling stone reporting (and the few tarfu report episodes i've heard) i'd be willing to give him more personal credit if he'd offered this apology earlier, ideally either on his own initiative or, failing that, on the previous occasions where he's had the opportunity to do so on a public forum.

doing it now, during a time where the public heat is being turned up on abusive men, reads as taibbi being forced to address the issue rather than choosing to do so, which is somewhat at odds with the tone of contrition and personal growth in his facebook post

i'd be willing to give him more personal credit if he'd offered this apology earlier, ideally either on his own initiative or, failing that, on the previous occasions where he's had the opportunity to do so on a public forum.

“Hey, before we talk about what I’m doing now, let me tell you about this shitty book I wrote twenty years ago and how sorry I am about it now. I know you’ve never heard of it, but that’s not the point.” *pulls on hair shirt*

'hey, i've been doing some personal reflection over the last few years and i'm really ashamed of some of what we did at the exile but i'm gonna wait until a concurrent groundswell of online discussion about my past and a cultural shift towards publicly discussing mens' abuses of power reaches some sort of apex, at which point i'll address it on facebook, a tool which i've had at my disposal all along' *adjusts hair shirt*

Yeah, this was a small story for a while, and Matt ignored it for as long as he could. And now people on this thread are angry that it's only coming up due to the Weinstein wave of allegations.

i'd ignore it for as long as i could too, cuz it's ancient motherfucking history. The Beastie Boys apologized for the tone of their early shit, but they didn't do it soon enough, you know?

he pitches his new book in the third sentence of his facebook note

He frames it as achieving growth from being the kind of person you're complaining about, but keep that dial set to Maximum Cynicism.

'be less cynical', advises ilx's cynic-in-chief