Matt Taibbi

I’m mostly curious who in the media/activist/political sphere Left likes.

"media/activist/political sphere"

gross

icky, eh?

fp'd Left for the Zeppelin comment

Did you ever read what Ellen Sander wrote about them?

I have, yeah :(

shame bell

a "shame post" function is long overdue on ilx

This is good.

The coronavirus bailout could end up being the last chapter in this hideous story. Although we’re seeing a graphic demonstration of how “unskilled” workers like home health aides and delivery people and grocery clerks are actually the vitally important people in our society, they’re not getting the radical rescue. There’s no sudden universal health care, no guaranteed sick leave, no massive jobs plan, just Band-Aids. They will die in massive numbers and emerge from this crisis, if and when it ends, poorer and more vulnerable than before.

But the financial markets are getting the World War II-style “whatever it takes” financial commitment, based upon the continuing fallacy that “wealth creators” must be the first in line for rescue in any crisis. This was a wrong assumption on the decks of the Titanic, a wrong assumption after 2008, and a criminally wrong assumption now.

Continuing belief in the trickle-down myth that has been destroying and dividing this country for decades will kill us faster than any pandemic. If we’re going to spend in “unlimited” amounts, let’s for once do it in the real world and for the people who need it most.

go ahead

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself

This sucks, Morbs come get your boy

i am v curious about the story behind David shor’s firing. i suspect he didn’t get fired for the tweet; it didn’t actually get a bunch of engagement and no big accounts got mad at it, just some randoms in his replies. he also didn’t make a big deal out of it and apologized. feel like he prob has mixed feelings abt dumbasses like Sullivan and Taibbi using him as an example in their tone deaf rehashed culture war pieces

man what the fuck is going on in that newsletter

Cotton did not call for “military force against protesters in American cities.” He spoke of a “show of force,” to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling out of control. It’s an important distinction.

oh well that clears it up

His lumping in the Bon Appetit thing is flat wrong

yeah the left is... ruining journalism... by identifying racism in in their workplaces

kill all rapists

Tom Cotton wasn't calling for the government to give the mere appearance of potential force. You show force by applying force. The government is not empowered to control peaceful protest through the application of force. It is specifically forbidden from doing so.

Government officials have a duty to obey the law, including the first amendment. Fuck 'the perception that the situation was spiraling out of control'. Perceptions are easily manipulated by the media, which has no duty to the nation, only a human responsibility they are legally allowed to ignore, but morally called to observe.

the NY Times has always been big on moral observation of... eg, supporting and even fueling every US war ever

How does their past support for wars apply to this decision? Seems irrelevant.

times be timesin'

the NY Times has always been big on moral observation of... eg, supporting and even fueling every US war ever

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Saturday, June 13, 2020 5:29 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm sorry but is taibbi even making this point

idc

lol

Just let my man morbs cook please,brad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFELNIpeTjY

lol

kill all rapists

― If you choose too long a name, your new display name will be truncated in (Left), Sunday, June 14, 2020 12:10 AM (forty-seven minutes ago)

not relevant btw

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eap3DurXsAIGy7D?format=png&name=large

If you weren’t a fan, I’m guessing this won’t change your mind:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

This notion that color-blindness is itself racist, one of the main themes of White Fragility, could have amazing consequences. In researching I Can’t Breathe, I met civil rights activists who recounted decades of struggle to remove race from the law. I heard stories of lawyers who were physically threatened for years places like rural Arkansas just for trying to end explicit hiring and housing discrimination and other remnants of Jim Crow. Last week, an Oregon County casually exempted “people of color who have heightened concerns about racial profiling” from a Covid-19 related mask order. Who thinks creating different laws for different racial categories is going to end well? When has it ever?

At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences. Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way). It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.

he makes bad points imo

during the civil rights era there were racist laws on the books; removing those was a step towards ‘colorblindness’ but it wasn’t good because it was colorblind it was good because it was antiracist. implicit bias in colorblind law and policy now is also bad and changing it would be antiracist and good. how can you do reparations in a colorblind way?

it's wild that someone so ostensibly smart could be this dumb. how do you feel about Affirmative Action, matt? is that part of a conspiracy to 'keep us divided'? fuck's sake

wow that is terrible

so now I've learned Huckleberry Finn is "actually anti-racist."

I'm actually starting that book with my kids tonight and now all I'm going to be able to imagine is Matt Taibbi hunched over my shoulder and forcing me to say the n-word to them every time it appears.

plenty of good reasons to be wary of the white fragility book but i think the taibbi piece doesn't do the best job making the case - this is better:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/09/white-fragility-robin-diangelo-workshop.html

as is the ahmed piece linked to in it (that predates white fragility but is a general critique/theorization of whiteness studies):
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm

Actually, Taibbi's takes of late have indeed changed my mind, from occasionally enjoying his writing in the past to actively disliking him.

he was calling Democratic leaders hypocrites for saying that the anti-lockdown rallies were dangerous and then promoting the anti-police violence protests. zeroing in on greenwaldian territory.

i'll take asao inoue over matt taibbi thanks:

"Are you uncomfortable yet? Do you feel misunderstood? Are you thinking, he’s not talking about me -- he’s speaking of those other White folks, the less conscious ones. Are you thinking: I know, he ain’t talking about me. I’m so woke, I use the word 'woke.' But I am talking about all of you. No White person escapes it. And because I am often racially ambiguous, I cannot exclude myself either. In the right light, I can be White -- even if I don’t get all the privileges that habitus, or that set of dispositions, is meant to confer in our society. So, I’m not going to tell you that you are going to be alright. I’m not going to say that you -- you White folks in this room -- are the special ones. You thinking you’re special is the problem. It always has been, because you, and White people just like you who came before you, have had most of the power, decided most of the things, built the steel cage of White language supremacy that we exist in today, both in and outside of the academy -- and likely, many of you didn’t know you did it. You just thought you were doing language work, doing teaching, doing good work, judging students and their languages in conscientious and kind ways, helping them, preparing them, giving them what was good for them."

Whenever someone brings up Huckleberry Finn, I think of the time we read it in sixth grade in a jr. high in Florida in the early '90s and when I hit that word I went up to the teacher like "yo, look at this" and she told me to grow up, and iirc the class never talked about the word. the imprint I was left with was that everyone in my class was "mature" and I wasn't, but now years of discourse have me wondering if I was the lamest or the least lame kid in my class. This is probably a question for my therapist and not the Matt Tiabbi thread

ime jr. high teaching attracts bad teachers who can hide their incompetence there because too few teachers know how to work with that difficult age group. She sounds like one of the wrong sort. The core problem was that you all were sixth graders reading a very deceptive book with some very hard truths buried in it, without much, if any, adult guidance to understanding it. The rest of the class wasn't "mature", but then neither were you, and most especially not the teacher.

"grow up" is the correct thing to say to a sixth-grade whiney, i don't see how there can be doubt here

i think 6th grade is too young to read that book. we read Tom Sawyer in 7th. I didn't read Huck Finn until college actually.

We never read any Twain - seems weird in retrospect because it was definitely not an ISD concerned with inclusiveness or 'political correctness.' On the flip side we never read any Rand either, which seems to be commonly required based on the tables of school books at B&N.

I couldn't stand White Fragility, but I think Taibbi did a terrible job of trying to articulate why it was bad. The main impression I got from the book was of a self-centered white woman hijacking the concept of white fragility in order to make a bunch of money retroactively pwning everyone who didn't like her corporate seminars.

now he's apparently claiming that the FBI investigation of Flynn and Trump associates is worse than watergate (but only via substack, which you have to pay for, which I will not). WTF with this guy.

alt-left is real but it’s not antifa

tbh cheering on the FBI & getting outraged on behalf of Trump are both indefensible

WTF with this guy.

It feels a bit like he's setting himself up to go down the Rubin/Pool/Tracey path?

I was thinking Hitchens path, contrarianism rules everything around me