Matt Taibbi

http://observer.com/2000/06/from-russia-with-lust

cool guy

eXile was the best source of Russian news for years, even if Taibbi and Ames are / were creeps at times.

not likely

Seriously, it was probably the only source of unbiased, fearless Russia-based journalism in English until they were shut down by the government. Whatever dickishness they got up to (Ames used to review prostitutes in a regular column) their coverage was peerless.

sure and you prob think taibbis writing on american finance is good too

I rarely read it. Seems ok, if a bit simplistic.

eXile was genuinely great, though.

“We wrote a whole bunch of editorials about the size of Putin’s penis,” said Mr. Taibbi.

o taibbi u so crazy

“People are afraid of what our paper will write about them, so they give us free shit,” Mr. Taibbi said.

“That’s the thing about Russia,” Mr. Taibbi said. “It’s a totally unironic place. When I first was a student over there I had this girlfriend who had this mobster boyfriend, so she only saw me between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, but as a going-away present when I left my exchange program, she gave me this picture of herself naked in a bathtub. It was totally serious, like, ‘Here, for you to remember me by.’ An American woman would never do that except as a joke or to be sexy.”

american chix man

Journalist James Verini, while interviewing Taibbi in a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair, said Taibbi cursed and threw a coffee at him, and accosted him as he tried to get away, all in response to Verini's volunteered opinion that Taibbi's book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, was "redundant and discursive."[18] Taibbi later said the incident was "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years."[19]

taibbi's financial journalism has occasional issues, but for the most part is pretty good. i'm consistently surprised by how few other journalists have gone his route (in terms of financial reporting), all things considered.

b/c it's not as exciting as having Bloody Marys with Cokie and George Will?

anyway he uses obscenity in a whee-I'm-at-Rolling-Stone manner but he was the first journalist in 2008 and 2009 to explain credit default swaps and such in a clear manner.

legume what is your beef with dude's financial reporting exactly?

another politics thread of substance and enlightenment

legume what is your beef with dude's financial reporting exactly?

― the route is ban (k3vin k.),

was just going to ask this myself

he doesnt know what hes talking abt!

i mean 'clear' try wrong

also is writing is basically the worst

another politics thread of substance and enlightenment

― World Congress of Itch (Dr Morbius), Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:24 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this guy would appeal to you, because he is so substantial

legume what is your beef with dude's financial reporting exactly?

― the route is ban (k3vin k.), Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:10 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kevinclovestofu

oh, this is gonna be one of these threads

dude is overrated by people who think he is 'cool,' underrated on actual writing performance by people turned off by that perception

Malcolm Gladwell S/D C/D

nobody commented on this!

errors is a single piece http://prospect.org/article/errors-matt-taibbi

dude is overrated by people who think he is 'cool,' underrated on actual writing performance by people turned off by that perception

― mh, Thursday, June 7, 2012 10:42 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

o god stfu

um who are these people who think he's *quote* cool *quote*?

Hunter Thompson aficionados who are into the renegade/substance abuse style of writing? I've run into a few, and count that shit as a guilty pleasure sometimes

lag∞n, I get yr point but there's a place for a populist reporter who appeals to those who aren't picking up well-researched political mags on the regular

it'd be nice if dude had a fact checker, though

yeah itd be cool if there was a populist finical reporter who a. knew wtf he was talking abt b. wasnt the worst writer in the world c. wasnt a weird self involved misogynist

this person clearly is not matt taibbi

what abt someone like felix salmon

he writes mostly for a p financially literate audience and doesnt generally have taibbis passion for publicly s.h.a.m.i.n.g.i.n.g. the industry

yeah itd be cool if there was a populist finical reporter who a. knew wtf he was talking abt b. wasnt the worst writer in the world c. wasnt a weird self involved misogynist

kinda hard to argue against this

“That’s the thing about Russia,” Mr. Taibbi said. “It’s a totally unironic place. When I first was a student over there I had this girlfriend who had this mobster boyfriend, so she only saw me between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, but as a going-away present when I left my exchange program, she gave me this picture of herself naked in a bathtub. It was totally serious, like, ‘Here, for you to remember me by.’ An American woman would never do that except as a joke or to be sexy.”

american chix man

― lag∞n, Thursday, June 7, 2012 7:12 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol what a simp

in a way taibbi then is perfect -- nobody knows how this shit works but people know in their bones that something is grossly wrong and the great majority are being shafted.

felix salmon is great (great name too) but he wouldn't have come up with "vampire squid" either

but yes the exile crew and their 'aesthetic' are p gross

Indisputable that they were gross. 90% of their stuff was gutter-level gonzo / Vice offensiveness but the other 10% was worth more than pretty much every mainstream reporter working for an English-language paper put together.

i will admit to liking "war nerd"

Dolan/Brecher stuff was usually p.great. When I first became aware of Vice it seemed like the worst parts of eXile combined with NY/etc advertising dollars.

sharivari srs request for evidence here, also did they do like actual reporting or was it more that they were willing to print opinions that were taboo

Both. Can't really offer links atm but will look into it later.

There was a lot of very good reporting / analysis and a definite willingness to print things that other people were too gutless to look at. More importantly, i think they understood Russian politics better than any other news source and were willing to call out all sides, and the press, on their faults.

Nothing about Taibbi is gonzo/druggy, tho.

his style is kinda gonzo imho

Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. In one memorable scene, Taibbi dropped acid then interviewed the former chief of the Office of National Drug Policy—while wearing a Viking helmet.

hmmmmm

...while wearing a viking helmet

i know that in the US today where we're practically flooded with leftist writers tackling economic crimes w/ humor and outrage, Taibbi seems redundant and his flaws are magnified. but imagine an alternate reality where actually every financial writer is either a shill for Wall St. or a blathering pundit on the Sunday morning news programs, and you can see why, even for his flaws, people would embrace Taibbi (who is often very informative - okay, so he sometimes gets confused about how derivatives work, so do I). u know. theoretically.

his crimes against reality go way beyond not understanding derivatives

r u on the jp morgan payroll?

lagoon, would you recommend Michael Lewis

he's waiting for that one perfect anti-oligarchy journo

afaict the last good reporting Taibbi did was on Iraq war corruption in.... 2008?

Wow what great takes you all have. Yes who cares if only large corporations can broadcast live news on YouTube? They can make their own website then? Well no, because Amazon won’t host them. I guess anyone can still buy a printing press.

Not all tech bro like taibbi but everyone who likes taibbi is a tech bro (or Bari Weiss I guess. Presumably she likes him too.)

I don’t follow the right people on Twitter to see his substack get shared there, but they sure do like voting him onto the front page on hacker news.

Bring back the Tarfu Report

What a moronic series of content-free, bullying posts you guys have created. Bravo.

Taibbi is persona non grata now so only posts reminding us of that are allowed here anymore

I dont like taibbi for most of his recent pieces, but maybe i need to read this one more closely— to me it’s mainly just boring and not generally important.

That said, lately he has been _stupidly_ wrong, and i guess signals point to him being quite an asshole. Drink up.

I think the questions of how we regulate social media are complex and deserve discussion. A laissez-faire approach clearly hasn't worked, but all the other attempts seem clumsy/overbroad and asymmetrically applied, at best. I guess you could try to monitor comment sections to see if the conversation was turning ugly, but I could see groups gaming those algorithms to try to get their opponents kicked off the service.

DJI, I do agree with your statement, really. I should have stated it more clearly.

xp ok but i don't think many people on ilx think this guy has anything positive or unique or even good faith to add to that discussion, for reasons discussed extensively over the eight years this thread has existed, in between the trump stuff.

for tech/speech regulation, check out zeynep and tim wu, if you haven't already.

A laissez-faire approach clearly hasn't worked, but all the other attempts seem clumsy/overbroad and asymmetrically applied, at best.

In the past society developed very clear rules for holding people responsible for speech that harmed individuals or society, but those rules required that speech could be directly traced to its speaker and that publishers were responsible for what they published. Social media lobbied successfully to be sheltered from both these social responsibilities. All that is required is to rescind that special protection.

The fact that various internet companies are capitalized at hundreds of billions of dollars is the obvious hindrance to applying this simple and obvious remedy. I say that promoting profits over the social good is the only mechanism at work here and choosing sides ought not to cause a moment's hesitation or puzzlement.

xp thanks for the recs.

xp Which protection are you talking about? Making them responsible for what they publish, or requiring them to trace the identity of anyone posting content on their service?

The first one would basically shut down social media, and eliminate all kinds of diverse and important voices. The second one would require invasive technology. Both would probably require massive governmental intervention, which I'm not opposed to, but I don't think it's as simple as just removing safe harbor protection.

Which protection are you talking about? Making them responsible for what they publish, or requiring them to trace the identity of anyone posting content on their service?

The first one would basically shut down social media, and eliminate all kinds of diverse and important voices. The second one would require invasive technology. Both would probably require massive governmental intervention, which I'm not opposed to, but I don't think it's as simple as just removing safe harbor protection.

Perhaps social media should be shut down. And "diverse and important voices" will find other ways to make themselves heard, as they have in the past. There was a world before social media, you know. And people communicated with one another back then, too. The idea that social media is somehow necessary, virtually a utility, is a form of capitalist realist thinking — now that we've had it, life without it is unimaginable. But that life happened! Not that long ago! I mean, I remember when I signed up for Twitter. I wasn't born with a Twitter account, you know?

it's not really a specifically capitalist way of thinking. its the way of technology. once a technique is established - and generally techniques are established on the basis of being the most efficient way of doing something, in social media's case it is the most efficient way to communicate with the biggest number of people in the quickest time - it is never disestablished, whether or not the technique is beneficial or has improved our lives

I don't think it's as simple as just removing safe harbor protection.

If social media cannot happen without the massive harm it has been inflicting on society, then shut it down. If it can maintain accountability for those who are responsible, then let them figure it out and implement it. By removing accountability we have created a monster that is impossible to tame.

Exactly how is this a real problem, other than saying it is hard to do or unprofitable?

And "diverse and important voices" will find other ways to make themselves heard, as they have in the past.

https://i.swncdn.com/media/800w/cms/CCOM/66102-luther95theses-wikimediacommons.1200w.tn.webp

tbf there were a lot of interesting voices available before social media: Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Lyndon Larouche. It was cool back then.

Exactly how is this a real problem, other than saying it is hard to do

Real problems are hard to do.

This 'problem' is in some way analogous to the massive harm done by allowing wealthy individuals and criminals (but I repeat myself) to create networks of anonymous shell companies and legally funnel money into and among them via established financial institutions and international banking protocols. This shell game could be abolished very simply by requiring all banks to do business only with known individuals or corporations which fully disclose all officers, board members, and major shareholders. Nothing prevents this but the profitability for banks of letting it continue.

Just shutting it all down is not a serious idea. If you say you don't see any positive benefit to any of social media, I don't think you're being honest.

But as far as trying to remove safe harbor, should we have government-based social media with some kind of identity tracking? Should we have some kind of biometric ID?

Also, there are plenty of people who use anonymity to shield themselves from harm. Should we force those people to find a "respectable" media outlet before they can share their stories?

Would ILX now be responsible for the content of every post?

Real problems are hard to do.

No, real problems are hard to solve. If you define the solution as requiring that social media to remain much as it now is, but with some kind of technological mechanism that transparently identifies the authors of shared material, then combining those two traits might be very difficult.

If you define the solution as only requiring only that social media companies must meet their responsibility to allow accountability or they cannot exist, because lack of accountability is inimical to society itself, then the solution is not hard: they fix themselves or they die. Harboring powerful, vast, fast-growing, and wholly irresponsible entities is too dangerous to allow. You must either control them or kill them.

only requiring only

I don't think the government requiring something (verified IDs of users) that isn't possible without governmental help is a solution.

Or should the social media companies create their own biometric database of their users?

You're just way too attached to social media, is all.

LOL the only time I read Twitter is when Ned posts shit in the Poilitics threads.

I just like the idea of All Gas No Brakes Live TV

Or should the social media companies create their own biometric database of their users?

You know what? It isn't my problem to solve. But I don't understand why biometrics would enter into it, other than as a scary boogeyman to ward off calls for removing their safe harbor protections.

Matt Taibbi claims that "there's a core of emotional truth animating the Qanon conspiracy theory... but the Russia thing... doesn't really have a correlation to anything that makes any sense."
Maté agrees. pic.twitter.com/lzMMs7o3m4

— Matthew Dimitri 🐍🧪 (@themattdimitri) February 23, 2021

he's saying he feels a kinship with fascists and not with establishment liberals

I mean there IS a shady global cabal of powerful pedophiles tbf

i hope that that someday soon taibbi will be able to convince everyone to stop being so obsessed with this russia stuff. every time i look at the news, every headline is russia this, russia that. its all you hear about in the news, russia russia russia. enough already! we have to end this russia obsession. to accomplish this, lets talk at length about something rachel maddow said about russia two years ago.

there is a paedo elite and Q is bullshit (also trump and russia had mutual interests and "russiagate" is bullshit). so what if fascists are accidentally right about one thing when it's for the wrong reasons and they're wrong about everything else. shall we praise david duke for opposing the invasion of iraq

man, back in the day Taibbi would have rolled over someone who thought coining "Blue Anon" made them a clever boy

"core of emotional truth" = i am talking out of my ass

yup

I mean, there WAS a pedophile cabal, run by Epstein. There was also a ton of actual evidence in the Russiagate case.

but the evidence didn't resonate with the heart

I think it's a pretty fair argument to say that no one who wasn't already invested in hate-watching Trump news 24/7 gave a shit about Russiagate.

*weighs factors*

you are objectively pro-oligarch, howja like them apples, ha CHACHACHA?

Taibbi has succumbed to pundit's syndrome, a condition induced by the pressure to prove you are a worthy pundit by constantly coming up with fresh original thinking, but which finally just sucks your head further up your own ass.

It's when they slide from "see, the left also has an issue with this, to some extent" to "both sides are the same" where it turns into a dumb (and, sadly, lucrative) hot take.

sorry, awful sentence there.

I’ve gotten progressively less sympathetic to Taibbi over the last few years. I think the big blind spot that he either shares or somehow forgets to acknowledge is the bizarre oligarchy/kleptocracy that’s endemic to Russia, and to some extent, was inculcated there by the US through example and economic advisory consulting in the early/mid 90s. It was a great deal for the US to have an economic base run by entities that were, if not friendly, capable of grabbing enough power to destabilize any sort of resurgent Soviet tendencies.

This, as in the US where we’ve got entrenched corporations as opposed to individual oligarchs, has bitten the international community in the ass as these people have little interest in doing anything other than fucking with other individuals and entities in the interest of solidifying their own power and keeping others in chaos. I think the Russian state has some role, but they’re really busy negotiating a bizarre detente with their internal entities, who also would like to fuck with the US and other governments as well. So there’s a Russian state and an oligarch state, just like the US has a tenuous relationship with the corporate entities that would go nuts the moment they couldn’t buy influence and stability in our country

which is bizarre too because acknowledging & reporting on that was supposed to be the whole selling point of the eXile

i thought the selling point was how when you're a man they let you do it, you can do anything

Say what you will about Taibbi, but he's still doing yeoman's work on the unfairness and absurdity of the US economy:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/student-loan-horror-when-you-think

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/financial-devils-dictionary-spac