Matt Taibbi

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..)

wheee-hooo

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

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, November 2, 2017 11:12 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was just about to post Jesus Jones though.

I miss when history was over

― .oO (silby), Thursday, November 2, 2017 10:48 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://americablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Jesus-Jones-right-here-right-now.jpg

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

― mh, Thursday, November 2, 2017 9:27 AM (forty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalin

this definitely started on January 1st, 1990 and ended on December 31st 1999

My takeaway from this conversation is that I need to put energy back into making and maintaining relationships with other black people.

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

eXile was a free-sheet given out in Moscow but the website was pretty influential outside of Russia, albeit within its own niche.

The Caputo thread does a reasonable job of summing it up but the whole 'if you weren't there, you wouldn't get it' vibe coming from Ames and some of their supporters is bunk. They have always been divisive among people who know what they're talking about, it's not just the Reddit cherry-pickers and right-wing opportunists.

They were loathed at the time, and remain loathed to this day, by a bunch of Russian / CIS leftists who regard their schtick as extremely xenophobic as well as misogynistic. The argument flares up as reliably as clockwork every two years with well-informed, well-intentioned people on both sides.

For a left-wing hero, Taibbi sure is leaning hard on a classic right-wing defense: "How can we take seriously the accusations of anyone stupid enough to take me seriously?"

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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.

slackbot otm.

This story is very upsetting:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-the-great-college-loan-swindle-w510880

Paul Campos and others have been crushing that beat for years and years, albeit with a more narrow focus on law schools, esp. the for-profit variety. Campos' distillation of the issue that was published in the Atlantic actually turned into the inspiration for the latest John Grisham novel.

So excited for my son to go to college in a few years...

Man that article is horrifying.

"By the time I die," she says, "I will probably pay more than $200,000 toward an $8,000 loan."

fuck, that should not be possible

It would have been a huge boon to Clinton's run if the DNC had welcomed not only Sanders but other serious candidates into the race, in the true spirit of what the primary process is supposed to represent – the winnowing of many diverse views into one unified message.

But the attitude in Washington is now the opposite. Primary challengers are increasingly seen as reprobates who exist only to bloody the "real" candidate. So they should be kept down and discouraged whenever possible.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-why-donna-brazile-book-on-hillary-clinton-primary-matters-w511099

There's a very good discussion/flagellation of Taibbi on the newest on the media podcast.

I hear OtM nearly w/out fail every week (the OG way on the radio) but missed this one, I'll give it a listen

brooke said its a podcast extra.. I think a more stripped down version of the interview will be on the newest ep later in the week