Matt Taibbi

Yeah, that seemed especially clear and focused.

I like Warren too much to trust anyone who tells me she was a great candidate "kneecapped" by the establishment. It's much less congenial to me, and therefore much more believable, that people fundamentally mostly don't want the things that I want or admire the things I admire, and thus that Warren is just plain less appealing to most voters than she is to me.

he's otm that her health care flip flopping tanked her credibility with many progressives, especially with Sanders as her opponent for that lane

but he's very far from the first to point that out

I admired her attempting to thread a needle by avoiding a "your taxes will go up" soundbite, at first. But if she'd just gone for a "taxes go up, your costs come down" line and moved on, she wouldn't have left herself room to waffle later.

So Elizabeth Warren was kneecapped by the Dem establishment because she was a stalking horse for the *checks notes* Dem establishment?

Warren's great weakness was not having the courage to fully back up her own message. She got all tangled up in triangulation. It didn't help her that Sanders already filled much of the political space she most wanted to occupy and she was doubtless told by her consultants she had to differentiate herself from Sanders. Nope. She just needed to run hard, say her piece and let the chips fall.

But that was several eons ago.

So Elizabeth Warren was kneecapped by the Dem establishment because she was a stalking horse for the *checks notes* Dem establishment?

That’s not what he wrote.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, Warren’s health care turn confirmed suspicions that many voters had, that she was a stalking horse for party interests, a vehicle for marketing anti-corporate rhetoric who would abandon those positions at the first hint of criticism from above. It’s not an accident that Sanders rose as Warren was hurtling downward.

So, "party interests" rather than the "Dem establishment"? Is that the distinction you're drawing? I'm saying Taibbi doesn't give convincing evidence for what motivated this kneecapping. Not saying it didn't happen, but failing to support M4A doesn't seem like something establishment interests would have a problem with. If anything it would prove she was Very Serious Person.

I think it’s more that he’s not saying that Warren actually was a stalking horse, just that her decisions around M4A messaging made more leftist voters suspicious, while the establishment wasn’t comfortable enough to see her as the safe alternative to Sanders.

I’m drawing a distinction that he doesn’t call her a stalking horse. He’s continuing his point about progressives jumping ship when she started to hedge on things like M4A - making her appear to be moderating toward the machine interests, opening the door to Sanders’s surge. ‘Berniecrats’ feared she wasn’t as good as she portrayed herself initially (and, uh, yes that seems to be quite accurate as a read on their opinion circa January).

He says she was kneecapped by the establishment, and suggests they preferred people like Bloomberg. But he doesn't say why. Anyway, the article's actually NOT about what the Democratic Party should do to connect with working class voters - Taibbi has no idea - it's a laundry list of all the mistakes Taibbi feels the party made during this election. But if it WERE an article about what the Democratic Party should have done to connect with working class voters, I'm not sure that nominating Elizabeth Warren would have been the answer!

He says she was kneecapped by the establishment, and suggests they preferred people like Bloomberg. But he doesn't say why.

You skipped the part about her being an anti-corporate economic populist, I think?

You mean this part?

Warren didn’t blast the party structure or stoke crowds with Burn-the-Rich rhetoric

Yes, that’s the part where he illustrates her difference with Sanders and why the party should have been accommodating to her from the start in order to assuage the rebellious Berniecrats without spooking other people.

He does leave out how much people like Buttigieg and Klobuchar went after her on M4A, and she did make herself more vulnerable on that issue than Sanders due to not wanting to raise taxes. I'm not sure I buy the "kneecapping" line, she certainly was a good candidate on paper but her political instincts were a real drawback and I don't think a friendlier Dem establishment would have kept the moderate opponents from finding her weaknesses.

Y’all have to stop treating critics as a fifth column conspiring to destroy the Democratic Party at some point.

And you and Taibbi have to stop treating unnamed 'Dem strategists' as the Bohemian Grove. Taibbi casts Biden's nomination as a kind of conspiracy theory and I just don't see it. Axelrod, people like that - shadowy signeurs but victims of their own lazy thinking - they don't think real good like The One True Boy Matt Taibbi. If they did think real good, they'd have pulled the strings for Warren. And then... they'd be connecting with working class voters?

I think she has poor political instincts (leading to defensive DNA tests and backing down from M4A and so on) but it’s pretty obvious why the donor class would prefer Bloomberg or Biden.

What he describes is "the party’s unprecedented emergency effort to sink Bernie’s candidacy" in favor of Biden which... yes, is exactly what happened. Do you remember the weekend before Super Tuesday?!

That's not a conspiracy, it was out in the open.

He continues on to point out how this was necessary because they hadn't accommodated Warren to start with:

and elevate Biden before Super Tuesday, coupled with the kneecapping of Warren, took away the establishment’s most obvious play — backing Warren as the “capitalist to my bones” alternative to the Sanders “revolution.” They could have headed into 2020 equipped with a list of 50-point plans to counter any attempt at an anti-establishment message from Trump, and set themselves up as the working person’s party for a generation.

Axelrod, people like that - shadowy signeurs but victims of their own lazy thinking - they don't think real good like The One True Boy Matt Taibbi. If they did think real good, they'd have pulled the strings for Warren. And then... they'd be connecting with working class voters?

Tory adviser David Axelrod isn't ideologically compatible with Warren... that's the point. 'If they cared more about winning, now and in the future, than protecting the economic interests of the oligarchs which are threatened by the economic populism of the progressive wing, this is what they would have done.'

axelrod is such a dork I hate seeing him on tv

I would have preferred Warren but imagining her as the way out of the big donor trap Taibbi describes is wishful thinking imo.

I was ILE's #1 Warren stan but I knew the score.

i rapped on doors for liz but she doesn't have universal charisma or perfect judgment, regardless my opinions.

also the big donor trap is built in by citizens united et al., needs burning down. as shit is structured, the way out of dark money and big money is-- i dunno. not clear to me in what i've read or heard.

I think the social media companies are still grappling with how to stop their platforms from radicalizing people, but this latest move from YouTube seems foolish.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american-wrong

Most of blue-state America is looking aghast at news stories about 17 states joining in a lawsuit to challenge the election results. Conventional wisdom says that half the country has been taken over by a dangerous conspiracist movement that must be tamed by any means necessary. Acts like the YouTube ban not only don’t accomplish this, they’ll almost certainly further radicalize this population. This is especially true in light of the ongoing implication that Trump’s followers are either actual or unwitting confederates of foreign enemies.

That insult is bad enough when it’s leveled in words only, but when it’s backed up by concrete actions to change a group’s status, like reducing an ability to air grievances, now you’re removing some of the last incentives to behave like citizens. Do you want 70 million Trump voters in the streets with guns and go-bags? Tell them you consider them the same as foreign enemies, and start treating them accordingly. This is a stupid, dangerous, wrong policy, guaranteed to make things worse.

Do you want 70 million Trump voters in the streets with guns and go-bags? Tell them you consider them the same as foreign enemies, and start treating them accordingly.

Instead we should throw a welcoming arm around their shoulders and say, "We understand and respect your point of view, brothers! Let us all...agree to disagree!"

Fuuuuuck this rich, hypocritical, insulated-from-the-consequences-of-his-words legacy-media piece of shit forever.

my reaction to that taibbi piece is: man, what

Most of the Trump voters regard us as no better than foreign enemies so how much should I fucking care about their feelings

There aren't many journalists I trust, but he's one of them. Sometimes I think he holds back, but everyone is afraid of being accused of being a _____ supporter if you criticize the other. Glenn Greenwald, Whitney Webb are also good. John Pilger is still alive, Fisk just died. Seymour Hersh broke some great stories, but there's something about him I don't trust (and I don't care that he's a jerk).. Funny thing happened this year - I heard him call into C-Span's "Washington Journal", using a fake name, but I knew it was his voice after a few words, and he said everything he normally says about the CIA, etc.

I see you dropped in without reading any of the posts above yours.

Matt Taibbi explores the real negative effects of social media censorship:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-status-coup

I don't know how to address the problem of smaller YouTube channels getting subjected to tighter rules than large networks. A speech of a Trump rally from one YouTuber might incite their viewers toward violence, but viewers of a different channel may watch the same video and have a completely different reaction. Are they supposed to have algorithms to determine the intent of the poster?

speech video

i wish cancel culture was real so this guy would go away forever

I wish you'd never post in this thread again.

Fuuuuuck this rich, hypocritical, insulated-from-the-consequences-of-his-words legacy-media piece of shit forever.

― but also fuck you (unperson)

3rded

handwringing about fucking Youtube, GTFO

that site is a cesspool of Nazi garbage

xps looks like we'll both be disappointed

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.