Matt Taibbi

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

I'll just say: 1. He should have written this years ago. 2. I should have prodded him to write it years ago. For my part, I'm sorry. https://t.co/Be0BSig7vg

— slackbot (@pareene) November 2, 2017

gosh

An interesting Twitter thread linked in the replies to that Pareene tweet:

1/ THREAD Recent takedowns of @mtaibbi and @markamesexiled brought back memories of life in 90s Moscow, reading their newspaper eXile. pic.twitter.com/TZsH2aV4ou

— That Michael Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) October 28, 2017

2009 taibbi article also linked in those replies:

The Smoking-Hot Skank. It’s hard not to respect the thinking that leads men to the Tawny Kitaens and Anna Bensons of the world. If you’re just a working-class kid with a hose for an arm and the brains of a Clydesdale and your whole world is about making it to your first free agent deal with your rotator cuff intact, hell, you want a girl whose day job involves crawling on her hands and knees in her panties on the hood of a Jaguar in a Whitesnake video. It fits perfectly with everything you’ve been taught in life: Pound the strike zone with fastballs away, cover your heart during the national anthem, and bang the bar slut with the fake tits and the fleur-de-lis coccyx tattoo (and if you’ve seen her before on Cinemax, marry her). The problem with the Smoking-Hot Skank as a permanent life choice is that she eventually gets bored and starts calling up reporters to share her Important Political Opinions and her thoughts about your general manager’s personnel moves. Whether it’s from that or from his being haggard from all-night, reverse-cowgirl sex, inevitably the player’s career takes a sharp nosedive post-wedding.

The MILF Starkweather. A lot of elite athletes were already playing in AAU all-star games when their peers were still breast-feeding, which makes them easy prey for an unscrupulous older mother figure who ultimately talks them into cosigning loans in return for a few psychologically confusing blow jobs and some baby talk. Next thing you know, she’s leading the Cribs crew on a tour of the house, then emptying the joint accounts and storming off on highway crime sprees. It happens more often than you’d think. Just this year there was Amalia Tabata Pereira, the 43-year-old convicted arsonist who married Pirates prized prospect Jose Tabata and got arrested for posing as an immigration official and attempting to steal a baby from a Mexican couple. Then there was Cristal Taylor, the 38-year-old live-in girlfriend of 31-year-old basketball star Nowitzki; turns out she had a stack of warrants over her head as a career con woman and paper hanger when she got pregnant with his Teuton-fetus. And though the dynamic isn’t exactly the same, there were elements of the creepy psychosexual striving for a lost childhood in the chilling A-Rod/Madonna episode, with kabbalah bracelets playing the role of the security blanket.

more here http://web.archive.org/web/20091010030415/http://www.mensjournal.com/taibbi-guide-to-sports-wives

locker room talk i guess

this guy has always seemed like an asshole to me
it is no surprise whatsoever that he wrote/said/did(?) shitty things in the 90s. so many people did. even the smart ones.

it is no surprise whatsoever that he wrote/said/did(?) shitty things in the 90s. so many people did. even the smart ones.

The 90s were a shit decade that is best forgotten.

i wish i could forget! i guess to me it seems disingenuous to suggest that only now people are realizing that their friends/colleagues have been serious assholes when for most of the time i've been alive assholism was rewarded rather than reviled.