Matt Taibbi

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

ah gotcha thx

@mtaibbi stories are false. Spoke to eXile employees

It's a Gamergate-style attack: https://t.co/bhKkWd9xkm

Please RT #TaibbiGate pic.twitter.com/uzX5QzL5hh

— Alayne Fleischmann (@alayne_f) November 20, 2017

#TaibbiGate

This is the most pathetic defense yet.

??

apparently she talked to 12 ppl who actually worked at the exile and they confirmed that the stuff in the book is fiction. no idea why that amounts to a "pathetic defense."

Try reading the next line in the tweet, the one calling it a 'Gamergate-style attack'

Do you think the page or two of explanation she gives in the 21-pg document don't actually account for that description?

Did you listen to that On the Media podcast mayor jingleberries mentioned upthread? You think that discussion of Taibbi is like GamerGate?

Actually, it's not pathetic, it's gross. GamerGate made up stories and harassed people out of their homes. It's not the same thing as taking an old book presented as non-fiction, and claiming it is non-fiction. Taibbi had decades to reckon with the misogynistic bullshit he made his name on, and he refused to do so. Trying to portray the people upset about this as a right-wing mob is disgusting, and people doing that should in all honesty be shunned from the left.

I'm referring to the specific context she gives, in 21 pages, for using those two words in a 140-character tweet. The latter are a tiny pointer to the former, not the entirety of the defense, pathetic or otherwise. You appear not to have read the former, which makes dismissing it in toto v. bad faith.

xpost she's not doing that, she's talking about the ground-up disingenuousness of the inaccurate information.

taking an old book presented as non-fiction,

I hope you're thirty years into a campaign for every writer on Viz to be shunned from polite society.

I read the beginning of the document, that was absolute bullshit. I'm perfectly fine dismissing it. I repeat, have you heard the podcast?

The idea Taibbi made his name on that terrible book is funny, though

I can't find anything in the OTM podcast feed and there's no link provided here. What are you guys talking about?

It's the interview with Rebecca Traister, still up there.

nobody's read that book, you goon

I don't understand at all what those cernovich statements have to do with what that woman posted on twitter.

(not much then, and certainly not lately) xp

oh ok I read the actual link. interesting.

Well here’s some fun:
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/the-destruction-of-matt-taibbi.html

Featuring cameos from Jim Goad and the Gorilla Mindset himself!

This part I found aggravating:

However, the narrative that the book was an accurate portrayal of the lives Taibbi and Ames led in Moscow wouldn’t really take off until October of this year—ahead of the book tour for I Can’t Breathe, Taibbi’s look at the death of Eric Garner and its aftermath. Jessa Crispin of The Guardian included a reference to eXile passages in a piece about liberal misogyny on the Oct. 19. Days later, the news was appearing everywhere, from The Daily Beast to The Daily Caller; Jezebel to Newsweek; Reuters to Newsmax; The Nation to Breitbart, and so on. Even Cernovich got in on the action, writing a Medium post titled, “Matt Taibbi Confesses to Forcing Employees to Perform Sexual Favors.”

[...]

Despite how widespread the story was, not a single journalist or editor contacted the women named in the controversial passages. Crispin, whose Guardian piece appears to have set the train in motion, justified the decision by telling Paste over Twitter direct message that, “I have not written about these accusations as a journalist.”

Gunna go out on a limb here and say that this lazy shit doesn’t actually help anyone.

Crispin has elaborated a little on twitter:

I said Matt Taibbi boasted about harassing women in his book, not that he harassed women. Boasting, which is exactly what he did. To make a point about the misogyny among leftist men. Read the original piece.

so when she says “I have not written about these accusations as a journalist” I guess she means she hasn't written about the accusations in as much as she hasn't speculated on the whether the things described in the book really happened? people seem to be interpreting it as "I have written about these accusations, but I wasn't writing as a journalist, I was writing in another capacity which meant I didn't have to get my facts straight", but I don't think that's what she meant.

The same writer of that Paste piece fwiw https://t.co/cl1Tq1OuWH?amp=1

^not worth much imo

I did some house cleaning, turns out I had a box of junk I thought I'd thrown out. That is, if anyone knows a journalist who was saying the eXile book is out of print and hard to come by, let me know.