Matt Taibbi and the disappointing lack of cultural awareness

Matt Taibbi used to be one of my favorite writers, but then I learned about his ugly misogyny (which he unconvincingly claimed was made up), and I was never able to look at his work in the same way. So I cancelled him. By which I mean I stopped reading him. Apparently he has sensed the declining number of eyeballs gazing at his writing, and the fading number of tongues wagging his praises, because he is mad about it, and I had to read something new of his. I am disappointed even more.

It’s the usual spittle-flecked screed we usually see from disgruntled right-wingers, with but one message: the Left is just as bad as the Right! They’re all prudish, finger-wagging authoritarians at heart, but the Lefties are just the worst! We can’t even discuss how stupid the Left is, he says as he writes about how stupid the Left is, because they’ll descend on us with great force and crush us!

Doing so would have meant opening the floodgates on a story most everyone in media sees but no one is allowed to comment upon: that the political right and left in America have traded villainous cultural pathologies. Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip.

That he can claim this in the era of Trump, when badgeless cops in unmarked cars are grabbing civilians off the street, when cops are maiming citizens with rubber bullets and truncheons and pepper guns, when our president openly considers not respecting the outcome of the next election, is weird and dumb. The old Taibbi had sharp perceptions; this one seems blinded with resentment that his good ol’ boy rape fictions have damaged his reputation.

The centerpiece of his gripe with the Left is a tweet by Byron York (yeah, NRO York, far right apologist for every one of Trump’s excesses), which mocked the National Museum of African American History and Culture for producing this graphic:

Personally, I think it aimed at a bad target. It’s not about “whiteness” itself, it’s about the assumptions of the dominant culture of modern America, and as an exercise at looking at ourselves, it’s useful and insightful. Of course, it doesn’t matter anymore, because the right-wingers were so outraged and expressed the same attitude as Taibbi and the graphic was “cancelled”. Oops. They keep self-owning themselves.

Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.

Oh? And how will you propose combating racism, by pretending it doesn’t exist?

It’s a shame, because look at what it highlights. This is not examining the obvious or necessary components of a successful culture, it’s pointing out unconsidered values we hold and asking us to think about them. Consider alternatives.

For instance, “rugged individualism”. You can’t doubt that this is an implicit value in American culture, and in fact many of the comments responding to York are aghast that we could even question this. But what if an alternative were “cooperative communities and mutual aid”? That would be a better solution to America’s problems, but no, we’re supposed to love the cowboy myth.

Or “family structure”, the heterosexual pairing of a dominant male breadwinner with a subservient female marital aid and housecleaner. Why is that assumed by the American culture at large to be an ideal? It has oppressed more than half our population for centuries and has done us nothing but harm.

Or take “emphasis on the scientific method”. I love the scientific method, I’m a scientist, I apply it all the time. But linear thinking often fails in complex issues with multiple contributing causes, and people are emotional animals who rarely make purely objective decisions. When you limit yourself to only one path to a solution, you’re circumscribing the range of possibilities to such a terrible degree you’re going to miss equally good or better alternatives.

“History”: oh sweet jesus, spare me the monstrous chimera of the “judeo-christian tradition”. All they have in common is the Old Testament, which is a compendium of barbarities and superstitious evils. There are more than 7 billion people on the planet, and they are making a legitimate complaint that our version of “history” is a biased collection of rationalizations for the oppression of the majority by a minority.

Or the “Protestant work ethic”, which is simply an awful way to indoctrinate labor to serve the needs of their bosses. How about work/life balance? How about about recognizing that “hard work” is usually unrewarded with anything but the bare minimum of necessities (sometimes not even that), and that the true path to riches is theft and inheritance, under our current system?

None of these are actually “white” values, although they do serve to maintain the status quo and benefit the majority, who are mostly white, and it’s unsurprising that a museum of African American history and culture would find it worthwhile to point out our biases…and for an angry mob of far-right conservative assholes to squash it. Yet somehow Taibbi finds the African American side to be the one that must be deplored and chastised, while the lunatic right-winger is his ally, and thinks this is a great example of the Left being more evil than the Right? Does he even realize that the graphic is intended to demonstrate the unthinking, implicit assumptions of the American public? This is Anthropology 101 stuff, nothing radical, it doesn’t even make any judgments on whether these are good or bad values, it simply describes the traditions of American culture. People commenting on it are all saying “great values!” and “this is the way to succeed!”, etc., etc., not even aware that they are all confirming the accuracy of the graphic.

But no, to Taibbi this just confirms that the Left (it’s not even written from a leftist perspective!) has gone insane and is worse than the Right. Apparently, questioning your values is not something anyone is supposed to do in Matt Taibbi’s America.

OK, Taibbi, this is going to hurt you a lot worse than it will me — I shall resume the cruel torture of not reading your work any more.

I’ll never be able to read Matt Taibbi again

I’ve enjoyed his scathing, ferocious approach to political reporting, but I just learned today that he takes the same ferocious, scathing approach to women. He and Mark Ames were columnists writing for an expat paper in Moscow years ago, and they apparently had a grand time being outrageous. When I first read a few quotes, I thought for a moment that they had to be faked — that these were ginned-up accounts written up by political enemies, of which they have more than a few.

But no. These were their own words. They wrote them up in a book-length account of their adventures in Russia. They were bragging about these attitudes.

It’s not ironic–Ames and Taibbi explicitly scorn the bourgeois safety net of irony–and it’s not just a rhetorical stance. “You’re always trying to force Masha and Sveta under the table to give you blow jobs,” complains their first business manager, an American woman, in chapter six, “The White God Factor.” “It’s not funny. They don’t think it’s funny.” “But…it is funny,” replies Taibbi. They take particular glee in trashing several former female staff members in print, taking multiple potshots at the aforementioned business manager’s “gorilla ass.” They’re equally nasty to her replacement, who quit in disgust after they went on a four-month “brain-sucking speed binge.”

It’s OK if you want to stop there. It gets worse. Much worse.

[Read more…]

Ugh, Taibbi, that doesn’t make it all better

You know all that dreadful ghastly misogynistic crap Matt Taibbi wrote about his time in Russia? Where he and his co-conspirator bragged about raping and harassing young women? He’s claiming now that it was a work of fiction, despite the clear statement in the book that all of the characters and events depicted in this book are real.

Even if it was all a lurid, revolting fantasy with no basis in fact, I have a tough time forgiving him for it. It was a glimpse into his mind, and it’s an ugly nest of snakes in there. I said this past summer that I’d never read Taibbi again, and that resolve is unchanged, even if he is now changing his story. And if he is changing his story now, that makes him a liar, and why should I trust a journalist who publishes books he retroactively claims are all lies?

Taibbi among the teabaggers

Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite political writers, and he’s perfect for scrutinizing the Tea Party movement — he’s a gonzo swashbuckler who specializes in exposing the inanities of American culture, so plopping him down in the midst of the teabaggers is like opening the henhouse door for a wolf.

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.

Read the whole thing. Who are the teabaggers? Cranky, ignorant old racist hypocrites who are all about me-me-me-me, deftly manipulated by the big business establishment.

Fight!

Please god, SHAVE

Matt Taibbi has learned that you can’t be friends with Elon Musk. He has posted some of the exchanges that he and Musk had after the failure of the #TwitterFiles nonsense. They are pretty much totally alienated from each other now.

“Elon, am I being shadowbanned?” the exchange begins. “We went on lockdown after discovering that Substack had stolen a massive amount of our data to prepopulate their Twitter rip-off,” Musk replied.

“Looks like there is still a blanket search ban. Should be fixed by tomorrow.” Musk added: “Going forward, tweets with Substack will not appear in For You unless it is paid advertising, just like FB/Insta/etc. They will appear in ‘Following.’”

Taibbi shot back with an exasperated response. “Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack,” he wrote. “Is there a reason why I’m being put in the middle of things? This really seems crazy.”

“You are dead to me,” Musk answered. “Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.”

Those two deserve each other.

What meritocracy?

Elon Musk is doing a fine job of wrecking the reputation (what there was of it) of rich people. Here’s his idea of a clever joke.

Juvenile. Stupid. He bought this thing for $44 billion, and now he spends all his time mocking it and literally deprecating it. He threw away over $20 billion so far, and is determined to destroy all the rest.

Worse is what he’s doing to Matt Taibbi. I don’t much care for Taibbi — he’s also juvenile and gullible — but he was defending Musk, incompetently, and was paid by Musk to fire off that damp squib called the “Twitter Files,” but now Musk is cutting off Substack, where Taibbi makes his money, and has gone so far as to ‘shadow ban’ Taibbi on Twitter.

Musk is a petty 3 year old child. I browsed his Twitter feed to see what’s going on in his brain, and even his deep thoughts are shallow and trivial. Like this one:

Wait, what? Your left arm is the same age as your right, and the two are genetically identical, and typically have similar environmental exposure. How is this an example of precision? How does this tell us that aging can be fixed?

Although…I did once meet a man, a truck driver, whose left arm was ruddy, scaly, and weathered, while his right was pale and smooth. He liked driving with the side window down, and his left arm resting on the door. I guess I’ve cured aging, then — simply stay out of the sun.

The latest non-scandal

I don’t care about this guy at all.

The right wing has flared up in another desperate attempt to crank up the hysteria over Hunter Biden. It’s a non-starter. All I get from it is a sense of how obsessed these loons are.

The source is Elon Musk, of course. He has dug up some boring internal documents from Twitter, then fed them to Matt Taibbi, who then shat them out onto Twitter again, claiming that they reveal First Amendment violations and that Twitter, before Musk, was in bed with the liberal Left. I already don’t care.

Musk is an ass.

Taibbi…my contempt for Matt Taibbi knows no bounds. I can never trust anything he ever writes.

As for Hunter Biden, I DON’T CARE. He’s the son of our current president, and that’s about it, and Joe Biden seems to love his son, which is only to be expected. Hunter seems to be a bumbling opportunist, but his profile in government is limited and he’s been given no power. Contrast him with Ivanka, Donald Trump’s daughter, who was brought along to all kinds of confidential meetings, and who, with her husband Jared, has profited mightily. Talk to me again when Hunter Biden scoops up $2 billion from the Saudis.

I might believe that Hunter Biden has done wicked things, but that doesn’t affect me or the US government. If there is evidence that he’s a bad guy, lock him up…but that’s where it ends. These wingnuts are only seeing a way to torment a president they don’t like. All the evidence they have consists of wild conspiracy theories about a laptop dropped off for repair that they claim contains all kinds of revealing information, but none of the stories are backed up with a solid connection to Hunter Biden.

There’s nothing there, but Musk & Taibbi blew it up into an absurd dark tale that falls apart on even casual inspection.

Elon Musk released the anticlimatic “Twitter Files” about “free speech suppression” by the social-media platform on Friday evening. On Monday, he teased the release, writing, “The public deserves to know what really happened …”

What followed after was a series of tweeted snippets detailing what the public has known—and what Twitter executives themselves have detailed over the past two years—about the company’s deliberation surrounding the New York Post’s publication of files from Hunter Biden shortly before the 2020 election.

“What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter,” Matt Taibbi, Substack writer and former longtime Rolling Stone writer, darkly intoned Friday evening. But contrary to the melodramatic billing, the files mostly show what’s already been documented: that Twitter removed links to the Post’s story and files from Hunter Biden’s laptop and struggled with how to react to the surprise revelation of the leak of files from a presidential candidate’s son.

Right. The New York Post story, which claimed that a laptop abandoned at a repair shop was full of secrets, was not credible, and Twitter dithered over whether they should allow such nonsense to be promoted. The story was comparable to that Pizzagate crap, which claimed that a child porn & murder ring was operating the basement of a pizza parlor which did not have a basement. Unless you’re some faux free speech absolutist, that’s the kind of thing that should definitely be quashed on the grounds that it is a lie.

Furthermore, much of what Twitter censored out seem to have been photoshopped dick pics of Hunter Biden.

In examples of what Taibbi characterized as wrongly removed content, the Substack blogger cited a number of tweets containing non-consensually posted intimate imagery of the former Vice President’s son, commonly referred to as “revenge porn.”

That says nothing but that there was some surprisingly obsessive behavior by the MAGA nitwits.

Also, as far as the claim that Joe Biden and the state were intentionally compromising free speech to suppress ‘information’ about the President’s son — take note that all the terrible tinkering with Twitter stories occurred prior to 2020. I know, we’d all like to forget who was president then, but it wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Trump.

More details: this was a revelation that Musk made a pinned tweet and claimed was a violation of the Constitution’s first amendment. It was a series of blocked tweets that contained:

The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff.

There was a tweet from a Chinese account featuring a naked woman on top of Hunter Biden, as well as a family photo. Two pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, one with another woman in the background. Taibbi’s next list of material was removed by Twitter after being flagged by the Democratic National Committee. They include a picture of Hunter Biden smoking crack and getting his feet rubbed and a link to a Hunter Biden sex tape.

And that’s the big hubbub. Social media company removes unwanted dick pics: News at 11.

Constitutional crisis!

Ian Murphy has died

I didn’t know him personally (which may have been for the best), but I followed his work. He did what a satirist is supposed to do, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and he was especially expert at the latter. Now Murphy has died.

Friends and colleagues of journalist and satirist Ian Murphy, former editor of the recently revived Buffalo Beast, an alternative online news site in Buffalo, NY, report that Murphy has died. Murphy passed away on July 17, 2019, Buffalo Beast staff said. He was 40 years old. The cause of death has not been confirmed.

In life, he was a professional weirdo.

Ian Murphy is the editor of The BEAST (buffalobeast.com), a half-satirical news and opinion website dedicated to militant rationalism and quasi-journalistic hijinks, which was founded in 2002 as a Buffalo, NY biweekly rag by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. Murphy is best known for prank calling Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wherein he posed as arch-libertarian moneybags David Koch. He’s also infiltrated the grand opening of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” by posing as a Christian reporter afflicted with “Asperger’s Syndrome by proxy,” gone undercover in the Church of Scientology while on hallucinogens, canoed to Canada to expose ineffective and profit-driven post-9/11 border security, and proudly received hundreds of death threats. In the spring of 2011, Murphy ran as the Green Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives to fill the seat vacated by disgraced “Craigslist Congressman” Chris Lee. While reaping a pathetic one percent of the vote, Murphy nonetheless scored a comedic victory, and national press, for creating a scathing parody of his Republican opponent’s website. Murphy has also been published by Alternet, Crooks & Liars, The Daily Beast, Free Inquiry, and The Progressive. And as of this writing, Murphy is standing trial for “disruption of a religious service” with a dildo. In reality, he was arrested for filming a police officer while covering a National Organization for Marriage anti-gay marriage rally. So if he doesn’t show up, he’s probably in jail.

He was the gonzo commentator for our era, and now he’s gone. He was a better reporter than the sad fumbledums working for the 24 hour news networks, that’s for sure — we’d be living in a better world if he’d been hired to replace Chris Cilliza. Actually, we’d be better off if the corpse of Ian Murphy replaced Cilliza — it’s not too late!

Finally! Someone I agree with on the Russian interference

I believe Russia did meddle in American politics, at least in the sense of assisting Republican propaganda. I could easily accept that their tinkering, and partisan influence from what should be non-partisan bureaucracies (like the FBI) shifted the vote margins by a percentage point or two. You can even argue with me by how much of a percentage and I’d just shrug and go along with it.

But what made an even bigger difference, what really made Trump possible, was an incompetent, smug, conservative Democratic party that bumbled the election at every point. It looks like Matt Taibbi shares my opinion.

Did the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max. But the press right now is flying blind. Plowing ahead with credulous accounts is problematic because so many different feasible scenarios are in play.

On one end of the spectrum, America could have just been the victim of a virtual coup d’etat engineered by a combination of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which would be among the most serious things to ever happen to our democracy.

But this could also just be a cynical ass-covering campaign, by a Democratic Party that has seemed keen to deflect attention from its own electoral failures.

The outgoing Democrats could just be using an over-interpreted intelligence “assessment” to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration and force Trump into an embarrassing political situation: Does he ease up on Russia and look like a patsy, or escalate even further with a nuclear-armed power?

Emphasis is mine. All the news about Russian interference is just playing to the media and giving the DNC an excuse, all while distracting the party from actually confronting their deep internal problems and doing something about it.

Because, I fear, they don’t want to do anything about it.