Matt Taibbi

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

Fox is one channel that no longer represents real institutional political influence in this country anymore. The financial/educational/political elite with all the power is on the other side, and I think they’re the people to be worrying about.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 3, 2021

Uhhhhh

TAKE THE RED PILL, NEO

next he'll say it was corporate shills who pushed him further right

Well done, snobs of the #Resistance. You made the Horseshoe Theory real.

ah, shit. Time to take a long look in the mirror, guys.

did this all start with him getting #metoo'ed over that book he wrote years ago? and ironically didn't that turn out to be false and propagated by the right (turned out book was mostly fictional)?

yeah it’s all the feminists’ fault

let me point out a yet again that he has a ton of active namesearchers on twitter to defend him on that specific issue which is suspicious af, that he & ames did not claim their writing was fictional or satirical until they were called out for how repulsive it was, that even it was it would be indefensible & anyone who doesn’t see that is a fucking danger, that this trajectory was entirely fucking predictable & was in fact predicted precisely by the people who were called shrill, scolds, witch hunters & far worse for taking these great men to task for their bullshit

also using the hashtag in that way is a scumbag move

then just like when every piece of shit like this goes openly right wing it’s somehow a huge surprise while those who called it from the beginning are still painted as hysterical PC harpies who are now somehow responsible for turning them fash in the first place

I will admit I didn't realize this was going to happen to Naomi Wolf though it somehow makes perfect sense in retrospect

Left, I'm sick of your "namesearching." Feels like every time this thread is revived you come over to go completely nuts and spread a bunch of disproven accusations (boldly accusing him of being "suspscious"). Taibbi is still doing good work on his substack. I think his media criticism stuff is not my favorite of his work, but I still think there is some validity to his arguments around media groupthink (similar to what Zeynap is writing about).

(looks at why this thread was revived)

otoh fuck Taibbi with that nonsense.

fuck you and this rapist needs to die

Can you not with the “fuck you?” Jesus.

my recollection was that the #metoo stuff that was being pegged on him was motivated by the right, and not backed up by anything in reality, which is why I'm surprised to see him pivot so hard right (although he's been trending that way for a couple of years). but I could be wrong.

he's a piece of shit without the #metoo accusations, thankfully

I would take allegations against Taibbi seriously if there were any, but there aren’t. He sure sucks now though.

Saw this follow-up, and I just don’t know how you can look at the current state of affairs and genuinely think this way unless you’ve just been hate-watching Maddow and Scarborough nonstop and paying zero attention to what Republican states are doing:

I found your informal reply in the comments way more informative and fascinating than the article. It’s less polished but enjoyable. Why not write that way more often? pic.twitter.com/QdhCGMAvqD

— Candice📚 Got Vaxed and Waxed🔥🐣 (@redshoe9) June 4, 2021

taibbi is a jerk and his actual work has become indefensibly awful but yes, the “accusations” against him have been thoroughly debunked

I just don't understand what account you can have of US politics in which control of state legislatures doesn't count as institutional power and where elected officials openly endorsing the idea that voter fraud put Biden in office doesn't make that claim "officially approved" -- they are, literally, officials, approving it!!

I really have zero knowledge of who this guy is as a person, I just think the idea that the extremely disciplined and powerful national Republican party and its state auxiliaries with their very fervent and consistent and largely successful attempts to undercut rival institutions (e.g. by defunding unions, by stripping power from governors and judges elected in ungerrymanderable statewide elections), does not count as a locus of "institutional power" is, well, very stupid.

Boy, he's lost it..

Let’s stop right here. Imagine writing, in June 2021, that it’s Democratic elites making “profound arguments against traditional tenets of democracy.” Republican elites are currently engaged in a “debate” about whether formally legal forms of stopping Democratic electoral majorities from governing or whether extralegal violence is justified, but this one dump op-ed by an AEI fellow shows that it’s the Democrat Party that really hates democracy and the “populist” Donald Trump.