Matt Taibbi

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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

that would make more sense, can't see the dumb and dumber path working out

i can see him morphing into Tulsi Gabbard in six months

he's def said some dumb stuff lately but if someone could pull a real quote that would be helpful

can't count how many times I've been irked by an argument that it turns put someone wasn't really making thanks to the internet, aka the world's biggest game of broken telephone

Blue-state voters will not want to hear this, but this investigation of a major-party presidential candidate (and later a president) by a combination of the FBI and hired Democratic Party oppo researchers is much the same story as Watergate, only worse: https://t.co/VIIyo1yIF4

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) August 9, 2020

I refer to Hitchens there because it may be a more nuanced take than even his headline points to.

Uh, the investigation into the Trump campaign was based on initial evidence that it might be engaged in specifically criminal activity; the investigation was legally initiated through proper channels and court-approved. The Watergate burglary was purely criminal breaking and entering, initiated extra-legally by Nixon, and only intended to steal information from the opposing campaign for the purpose of defeating the opponent.

Much the same, eh?

cheese finally slid off his cracker completely

It really bums me out that he's probably going to be hanging out with Tracey and Bari Weiss at the worst possible NYC cocktail parties in six months. That attempt to cancel him for the Exile stuff apparently left a scar.

I don't think its for definite he's going to go down that path, but there are signs

As an aside, I really can't imagine Tracey at a cocktail party!

There were some pictures that I think he posted of he and Anna Khachiyan at a rooftop party recently. But I will stipulate that she might've invited him as a cruel joke.

It really bums me out that he's probably going to be hanging out with Tracey and Bari Weiss at the worst possible NYC cocktail parties in six months. That attempt to cancel him for the Exile stuff apparently left a scar.

try doing a turn in Cuban heels tho

meanwhile Ames is cheering on the cops in Belarus, Zaid Jilani doing the same for the Portland police. contrarian quasileft pundit crowd really covering itself in glory once again

why does there always have to be a heel turn narrative whenever one of these dickheads finally breaks plausible deniability- none of this shit is new or unexpected

Holy fuck, I agree with Left. Taibbi was always a piece of shit garbage person - folks in this thread just used to agree with him about more stuff, is all.

It depends somewhat on if you think there is a meaningful distinction between this type of person and the Pool/Tracey/Rubin people

I still don't think he's trash, just focused on the wrong thing.

Pool/Tracey/Rubin don’t have any worthwhile accomplishments - honestly it puzzles me as to why Tracey has any profile at all, does he even produce anything other than tweets? I haven’t read Taibbi’s books but by most accounts they’re competently researched and readable.

It’s kind of odd to me how Taibbi was so much more measured about the Russia stuff a few years ago, I remember reading an article from around the time of “if it’s what you say I love it” where he cautioned that the Russians involved seemed like low-level grifters (he had met one of them), but also acknowledged that the Trumps were acting extremely guilty. Did he just spend the next few years hate-watching MSNBC?

I guess so. I mean, I get where he's coming from, and any arguments I have seem to be in the vein of "why are you focusing on this," which is a pretty easy argument to refute, if it turns out there was something conspiratorial about Russiagate. OTOH, if it was all a bunch of BS, why continue to fan the flames of this story, which as far as I can tell, most people don't care about anymore.

When the House of Representatives chose not to impeach Trump over the Mueller Report's findings and the Senate blocked any further action to sanction Russia or impede its further interference in the 2020 election, then Russiagate sank into the general swamp of Reasons Why Trump Is Evil and Must Be Resisted. It has no further political relevance beyond that, until Trump is gone and possibly the Senate flips. After that we'll have to see if there is any further comeuppance.

I couldn't make through either of his latest articles (his, or the one his source wrote) on this subject. As someone who was never that interested in Russiagate, this just feels like a tedious postscript.

Matt Taibbi appears on Iranian state-owned, anti-Semitic Press TV, to deny that President Donald Trump ordered Proud Boys and far-fight extremists to 'stand by,' at debate@PressTV pic.twitter.com/fyoixF4Tiz

— Matthew Dimitri 🐍 (@themattdimitri) October 4, 2020

I watched that clip from the debate and I don’t think trump was ordering the proud boys to “stand by.” He followed up with a condemnation: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-proudboys/trump-says-he-condemns-all-white-supremacists-including-proud-boys-idUSKBN26N09B

This is not to excuse his other dog whistling (like all the crazy racist shit about the suburbs getting destroyed), but I think this was more of a gaffe than some kinds of racist bat signal.

It doesn't matter what he meant. It was interpreted as one because that's how it came out. That's what happens when you're a racist idiot. Funny how his "gaffes" just happen to always be stoking violent racism and never the other way around.

I don’t think trump was ordering the proud boys to “stand by.”

Um, he literally said "Stand back and stand by". And even if he'd said "stand down", that is no condemnation, but assumes he is their leader and gives them instructions!

I mean this is a general trend in journalism like when the Grammy guy said “step up” and everyone dunked on him. And it’s like, yeah, he probably didn’t mean it that way but everyone hates this asshole and are gonna take their shots when they can. It’s absolutely absurd to think Trump would say something as lucid as “stand by” but he’s a racist and sucks so everyone gets their dunks in.

*Caring* about this dissonance and being a huge *well, actually* nerd about it on TV is lame

yup

i think it's funny what a ridiculous voice he has