Matt Taibbi

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.

the tattoos and hot takes will last forever

I guess being a bedroom raver was key to really enjoying the 90s; almost all of my associations with that decade are super positive, particularly once I got out of school.

I have never followed Matt Taibbi's career closely and had no idea eXile existed until this week. I wouldn't have read it had I known about it because I would have classified it the same way I did Vice and rolled my eyes whenever it came up.

eXile was unavailable in the USA, or am I wrong? Only the book that followed it was.

sad but no less true: being a man surely helped in the effort to really enjoy the '90s :(

I didn't much like em fwiw, except I had more disposable income and sex (w/ men).

seem to remember white dudes congratulating themselves on fixing sexism, racism, and the economy while being very misogynist, racist, and dismantling the social safety net and praising investment banking

not a phenomenon restricted solely to the 90s unfortch

the 90s never ended

I remember being at a reasonably diverse company in the middle of tech boom where my career was supported and encouraged, as well as singing with some fantastic ensembles and seeing my personal fortunes buoyed to the point where I could shape most of my social interactions to my liking, eliminating most of the explicit racism I'd encountered up to that point.

I remember being a child and watching tons and tons of television that I didn’t even enjoy

^Also describes the Onion A/V Club editorial model

Haha

i remember that history had ended

I remember reading about how people had thought that and that they were wrong in the 2000s

I remeber that William J Clinton ended "welfare as we know it."

Probably killed a few thousand people, but at least he didn't haras -- oops...

history never ended but, as we know now, the mayans were right and the world did in fact end on december 21 2012 and we've been living in hell ever since

time elapsed between morbs' 'ancient motherfucking history' dismissal upthread and his digging up clinton's misdeeds yet again: two hours and 18 minutes

I miss when history was over

yeah gazzara, just make your usual* adhominemstrawman equivalency btwn two unrelated things

*This isn't fair -- using "usual" means I have memories of any of your posts before today.

if clinton is unrelated to the topic of this thread then why did you bring it up at all

because people went on a hilarrrrrious tangent about the '90s and I'm a team player.

Anyway who's gonna read MT's book about Eric Garner?

it's true, team players are often the subjects of multiple bans

honestly I had no idea it existed until I read that apology xp

see this is why smart people put mentions of their new books in the opening lines of their facebook apologies, it's just good marketing

All this 90s talk and no Britpop mention well done everyone (I know its a US thread but still..)