"a whole auditorium full of Tinker Bell clapping to keep it alive"
Yeah. It's like the guy with the chicken delivery truck that's low on gas, bangin' on the sides to keep the chickens flyin' til he makes it to market...
Never cared for Taibbi. That faux Hunter Thompson shtick goes nowhere with me. That " Say what you will about genocide - it's effective!" bullshit turns my stomach.
That commercial with the GMC drivers taking their hands off the wheel to clap along with Queen song is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
Ugh... Peej. He came to my campus as a speaker one time, and afterwards went out drinking with his frat guy sponsors at one of the main watering holes in my hoosier shithole.
After getting a good load on, I barged over to his table and loudly demanded to know how he'd come up with the "10 Women..." article and the line "You fucked me in the ass without grease!" which definitely scandalized the assembled Republican dorks with whom he was holding court. He declared he had not written it and it was all Ted Mann, which also flummoxed the shorthairs.
Anyway, he was a fucking ass boil.
Also, too... as invited by the host (and thanks for that), here's a link to my small chapbook of poems from a middle-aged, cis-het, white guy (as I think the kids are calling it now). It's priced to move with free shipping even:
Wanna know how to have driverless cars? Rescind the licenses of all the morons who don’t know where the turn signal lever is or as I once asked the nice DMV lady, “You only need 75% to pass this test? What 25% of traffic laws is optional?” The single occupant motor vehicle is the perfect representation of the atomization of the American populace. Anyway, who cares? There’s a COVID-19 variant coming from Africa and Israel to confirm the fears of the racists and antisemites that “those people” are going to kill them. Besides it’s Black Friday, go buy some shit and when it doesn’t work as promised, blame Biden.
I'm holding out great hope for the new covid variant. I'm hoping that the vaccine (or some minor tweak to it) is just as effective. And I'm hoping that the case mortality rate for the new variant is MUCH higher--maybe into the double digits.
This way all the Rightwing dipshits can continue to refuse to get vaxxed just to show that tyrant Joe Biden he's not the boss of them. Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis can continue to crow about how fantastic it is that their followers are dying in large numbers just to own the libs. Maybe Greg Abbott can have the Texas legislature pass a law mandating all unvaccinated persons must report to covid exposure centers to "gain natural immunity."
Thanks to the good Americans, the vaccine take up rate is way lower than it needs to be while fatales are disproportionately among the aforesaid good Americans so it’s pretty clear how this wave’s going to play out.
Meanwhile, the global leaders’ global failure to get the ‘Rona under control allows the’rona free reign to mutate into worse and worse versions.
I wonder how much news coverage of this new southern Africa variant will connect it to how we cheaped out on providing vaccines to the rest of the world. My guess is not much. I hope Joe Manchin can provide us with an accounting of how much the deficit was reduced by allowing ever-deadlier variants to breed freely around the world.
Looks like approx. 72% full vaccination is required. The US is at 59% so I don’t see us doing much better. Most nations are failing as well. Meanwhile, the ‘Rona is freely mutating, each version worse than the one before.
It’s the neoliberal one-world and like in a shit ton of other areas, our leaders are failing big time.
And none of this is getting anywhere the necessary coverage from the mainstream media.
My Dumb Senator, Ron Johnson, said he'd support vaccine mandates "If it was a deadly disease we were dealing with", so I guess poor lil' Covid-19 just wasn't deadly enough to meet the Johnson Standard. Gives future variants a goal to shoot for, I guess.
Well, it kills "only" 1% of the people who get it, so they can go around shouting "99% survive!" like that makes it the fucking common cold.
I always want to ask these guys, "If only 1% of commercial airliners crashed on takeoff, would you get on a plane?"
There's actual data on what normal humans consider "acceptable risk" when death is involved, it's the business of insurance companies and government regulators to track such things. What all of these "acceptable risk" levels have in common is the word "million", as in "the automobile fatality rate is one death per hundred million miles travelled." Not one in a hundred, which is four orders of magnitude more risky.
Thing is, humans are really REALLY bad at assessing risk. I know people who are convinced that getting on an airliner is still very dangerous, and the drive to and from the airport is not.
About 6 years ago, my future brother-in-law invited me to go flying in his Beech Bonanza. I had not flown in the airplane before, nor had I flown with him. So this would be a first. On takeoff, before he even had a chance to raise the landing gear, we got a call from someone on the ground saying the aircraft was trailing smoke. My friend asked me "What do you want to do? Should we keep flying and see if it goes away?"
Here was a highly experienced pilot--someone who should know better--who was perfectly willing to continue flying an aircraft that he had been told was trailing smoke. In-flight fires are extremely likely to end in fatalities.
I asked if he'd rather deal with a fire in flight or on the ground where we could get out of the airplane. He brought the airplane back around and we landed safely. The point here being that even when presented with obvious and immediate danger, many people are incapable of accurately assessing the risk they face.
Sorry to laugh at your near-death experience, but "I asked if he'd rather deal with a fire in flight or on the ground where we could get out of the airplane" did make me laugh.
State organized Covid Parties! Unfortunately that would also entail more infected maskless assholes wandering around grocery stores putting the rest of us at risk since no vaccine is 100% effective. I thought State sponsored live ammunition "training courses" would be a way to thin the Racistfascist Party ranks, but the cost of ammo is way up, I hear, thanks to Joe Biden.
Hey, now that we know the new variant is coming from AFRICA, would that be enough to get them to line up for the jab? I know that China Virus is scary, but this one comes with extra ooga-booga! Like those "Africanized" killer bees!
When Obama was elected, I watched most of my Rightwing friends run out and buy (more) guns and more ammo because they KNEW Obama was going to confiscate all guns. When that didn't happen, they told me "just wait--if he's re-elected, THEN he'll do it!"
So when Obama was re-elected, they all ran out to buy more guns and more ammo.
When Trump got elected, they all ran out to buy more guns and more ammo because they KNEW the liberals and MS-13 were coming, gonna start an armed insurrection against God Emperor Trump. That, of course, did not happen.
When Biden got elected, they all ran out to buy yet more guns and more ammo because . . .
It's the perfect business model, isn't it? Whatever the political situation, however horrendous the mass shootings, however high the murder rate, the answer always is to buy more guns.
Grownups shouldn't have to be continually be reminded that, hapless passive liberal revenge fantasies aside, the more of them that get sick & die get other likely nearby people sick & dead (like their children, disabled folks, the immunocompromised) and the morass of human carnage jams what little fuckery of a healtrhcare system to collapse -- and then we all suffer as a result because this is one sinking ship.
Taibbi could have just had a Colonel Jessup character screaming "WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH! NOW PASS THOSE GODDAMN MASHED POTATOES!" and spared his readers several hundred pointless words. But then so much for the substack big bucks.
And boy, the comments to Taibbi's empty polemic is a wankfest of glibertarians applying their patented logic and reason to show that the American version of slavery and genocide was really no big deal. A typical example:
"If the tables were turned and the Apache had guns and cannons and sailing ships and armies and large numbers and came to Europe where those things were unknown, how would that have played out? Similarly. It's a tragedy but humanity is doing somewhat better these days and we need to stop the self flagellation..."
The first response:
"Well put. Those truths are why I roll my eye at every descendant of a formerly enslaved group or abused tribe who claims current victim status. You are not a victim. You are a self-indulgent waste of human flesh."
This is why I spent yesterday giving thanks that I don't know any of these fucking people.
When the Wampanoag show up to confiscate their Cape Cod condos, then maybe I'll give a listen to these assholes.
Until then, they're just policing peoples' feelings, aren't they? "Some people feel bad about how we treated native Americans - stop that!"
Hey, Mr. cooler-than-cool glibertarian, why do you care so much about how other people FEEL? I thought not giving a shit about other peoples feelings was the core upon which you've built your whole identity? Oh no, you're not being SENSITIVE, are you?
Ah, Maestro, you could have taken the day off. Clearly, though, Taibbi's piece lit a fire under your ass (as opposed, I hope, to the more holiday-related Jonahesque emission).
While I continually harp on my opinion that literally the number of pundits worth a shit is no more than a handful, among the worthless horde Taibbi is special for being sooo broken. For those trained by the mainstream to be let's say challenged by the concept that there was a past of more than a few days:
•There was the debacle at First Look which, in part, involved Taibbi going too heavy on the asshole thing;
•The elevation of boyish bad behavior while starting out in Moscow; and
•His last two books sinking like lead, the one on his shitty mainstream media are, being no more than a counterpart to Fox and the Eric Garner book as well as, now that I think about it, a possible slab of fiction.
As to that media thing of his, first shitty as the mainstream media are -- and on the harm to the nation scale, the mainstream's pretty much neck and neck with the so-called conservative media. However, it's neither from some sort of liberalism nor are they in fact liberal politically. They're only liberal in the sense that the term is a perversion of language and a slander slapped on them by conservatives. And the reason the mainstream fails has nothing to do with liberalism but rather that their job is to support an establishment which -- stop the presses! -- actually not liberal but anti-democratic and oligarchic, content with empowering a woefully shitty response to the pandemic amongst many other sins. In other words, Taibbi's media analysis fails at the first step.
What makes this sad, though, is that he was once a pretty good reporter when he first came back from Moscow, and his post-2008 collapse reporting was terrific, pretty goddam good.
And the the other stuff happened.
So boo-hoo-hoo, Matty.
I should add that maybe the final tell that he's essentially an irrelevant conservative is his overweening sense of entitlement.
Ah, the fucking mainstream media. I always struggle with how much of the mix is establishment-supporting and how much is plain laziness and weak-mindedness and now click-hungry-ness.
A few days ago the Post or the Times (can't remember which and don't really give a shit either) ran a piece about conspiracy theories, with the brilliant idea that, just as conspiracy theorists are following a "narrative", so are the fact-checkers who oppose them. Because all people need narratives of some sort to understand a complicated world, I guess?
You know, like one guy has a narrative that the recent cholera outbreak is the result of witchcraft, and we need to burn any older women who are not currently the property of men, while Mr. Smarty-Pants is pushing the narrative that it's some "microbe" in the water, and maybe we shouldn't shit where we drink. Both are narratives, why should microbe-man feel like he knows more?
So what explains shit like this? Do the people involved in the production of it congratulate themselves for their openmindedness and fairness? Is it a "We don't want to be all judgy like them!" impulse that causes normally intelligent people to suspend all judgement and grade the people who want to kill them on a curve? I dunno, I got nothin'.
It's worse. Before Pasteur and the microscope, how many old time versions of our wingnuts were all, "How do you know it's the water pump, maybe it's because the vermin who used that one pump are despicable low-lifes with bad morals and also poor who happen to dwell in that neighborhood. Deport them and the problem will go away!"
Those people I get. They just don't care about people who don't share their religion or skin color, don't consider those people to be people, really.
What I don't get is people who aren't monsters but want to say we're not so different from the monsters, really, because we're both carbon-based life forms.
Entitlement, sure, and I know about his past (though I don't count it for much; all sinners may be redeemed). But I really do think in his case the motivation is attention. His old man was a hack journalist and I think Taibbi fils got from him a thirst for circ.
Maybe he’s just a little shit. Don’t know, don’t care past the point that I really, really like my theory.
As for redemption, sure, believe it or not, I tend not to write people off. Taibbi, at least up to the First Look debacle, did more than his share of good work, so who knows? Maybe he’ll become good again. But for now, he’s nothing good.
"currently he is involved in a thing called “American Consequences” published by investor bulletin bucket shop Stansberry Research . . ."
This is just so fitting because Stansberry is a convicted conman who stole millions from investors. Most excellent that Taibbi would find refuge among the grifters!
I swear, if you could market a variety of bitcoin that could guarantee that it was brought into existence on a server farm powered exclusively by coal, you could make a goddamn fortune.
No artisanal coal-powered bitcoin, though. This bitcoin is hewn laboriously from solid granite, deep in the mountains of a former nature preserve now cross-crossed by roads upon which huge, soot-belching machinery roar night and day, driven by big, hulking manly-men who attend MAGA rallies and, with tears streaming down their grizzled faces, say, “Thank you, Mr President, for making me proud of my currency again.”
Shame about Taibbi, but as I read Roy's account I thought: Oh, Taibbi's doing what right-wing comedians do--invoke a stereotype (Howard Zinn's book contains just two actors), and then mock it. So he joins Peej and Dennis Miller as one-eyed kings in the kingdom of the blind. And if it encourages the brutes and the choads to support the fascists, well, look, everybody has to make a living.
"Almost none of us are related to Pilgrims or Founders. Nearly all of us descended from those subsequent waves of weirdos and refugees who came from all over, some not by choice, and forged the real character of our stolen nation."
Tell me you don't know any Black people without telling me you don't know any Black people.
I like how he pretends that those later waves of immigration just sort of showed up and plopped themselves down in the suburbs of Cleveland and Sacramento ready to drive to their jobs at U.S. Steel or Bank of America. I don't think the Pilgrims wiped out the Sioux Nation.
Yah, what a fuck head. Speaking to the title of the post I found a long time ago that willful ignorance is absolutely the worst. I can be an ignorant buffoon from time to time but at least I'm trying *not to be*. Then there are those for whom willful ignorance is a choice.
Again, I gotta mention Taibbi's "Spanking The Donkey". His take on following Gore's 2000 campaign was, "Ha ha ha, it's all a big joke, not a dime's worth of difference, only suckers really care about this shit!" That certainly hasn't aged well.
As a white guy old enough to have marched with my family in MLK's '63 march when we happened to be in D.C., I have been wondering with horror and some shame what the fuck happened in the years since around 1972 that allowed people like me not to find out about simple history, like depriving blacks of GI Bill benefits, like driving while black, like the median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the Greater Boston region was $8 in 2017. What caused us to take our foot off the gas, or off the neck, of racism over those years?
A lot of it was just the Baby Boom generation moving into adulthood and jobs and families, but more of it was that we never actually had to drive while black or do anything else while black, and one of capitalism's biggest achievements is making it a sin to actually find out what the person next to you is making, and if you make more or less. Whatever it was, it sucks, and I'm sorry, and I'm not going to do that again - though I'm pretty sure I'll continue to ignore/deplore the suffering of people in foreign lands and unfamiliar cultures. Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is a fundamental human luxury, like sugar. And, like sugar, it's delivered on the broken backs of multitudes.
But willful ignorance is the right-wing currency of the day, and there's no excuse for trading in it, even around the Thanksgiving table. It takes a strong act of WILL today to be ignorant of black history and of police brutality against blacks. Or of climate change, or of Covid, or of the 2020 election results. You've got to WANT to do that, despite facts and all logic being against you.
Willful ignorance will kill us all if we let it. There is no more tending one's own garden and letting the rest of the world take care of itself. We've got to call it out even at the table. Thank you for your calling, Roy.
Im nto sur what yuor'e poit is.
"a whole auditorium full of Tinker Bell clapping to keep it alive"
Yeah. It's like the guy with the chicken delivery truck that's low on gas, bangin' on the sides to keep the chickens flyin' til he makes it to market...
Never cared for Taibbi. That faux Hunter Thompson shtick goes nowhere with me. That " Say what you will about genocide - it's effective!" bullshit turns my stomach.
That commercial with the GMC drivers taking their hands off the wheel to clap along with Queen song is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
Ugh... Peej. He came to my campus as a speaker one time, and afterwards went out drinking with his frat guy sponsors at one of the main watering holes in my hoosier shithole.
After getting a good load on, I barged over to his table and loudly demanded to know how he'd come up with the "10 Women..." article and the line "You fucked me in the ass without grease!" which definitely scandalized the assembled Republican dorks with whom he was holding court. He declared he had not written it and it was all Ted Mann, which also flummoxed the shorthairs.
Anyway, he was a fucking ass boil.
Also, too... as invited by the host (and thanks for that), here's a link to my small chapbook of poems from a middle-aged, cis-het, white guy (as I think the kids are calling it now). It's priced to move with free shipping even:
www.etsy.com/shop/TheWeepingManatee
Self-promotion is encouraged here! We already know you can write from your comments.
It is? Then I should have mentioned my RPG four years ago!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229582/
Wanna know how to have driverless cars? Rescind the licenses of all the morons who don’t know where the turn signal lever is or as I once asked the nice DMV lady, “You only need 75% to pass this test? What 25% of traffic laws is optional?” The single occupant motor vehicle is the perfect representation of the atomization of the American populace. Anyway, who cares? There’s a COVID-19 variant coming from Africa and Israel to confirm the fears of the racists and antisemites that “those people” are going to kill them. Besides it’s Black Friday, go buy some shit and when it doesn’t work as promised, blame Biden.
I'm holding out great hope for the new covid variant. I'm hoping that the vaccine (or some minor tweak to it) is just as effective. And I'm hoping that the case mortality rate for the new variant is MUCH higher--maybe into the double digits.
This way all the Rightwing dipshits can continue to refuse to get vaxxed just to show that tyrant Joe Biden he's not the boss of them. Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis can continue to crow about how fantastic it is that their followers are dying in large numbers just to own the libs. Maybe Greg Abbott can have the Texas legislature pass a law mandating all unvaccinated persons must report to covid exposure centers to "gain natural immunity."
I get it, but all in all I hope we luck out of that one.
Thanks to the good Americans, the vaccine take up rate is way lower than it needs to be while fatales are disproportionately among the aforesaid good Americans so it’s pretty clear how this wave’s going to play out.
Meanwhile, the global leaders’ global failure to get the ‘Rona under control allows the’rona free reign to mutate into worse and worse versions.
I wonder how much news coverage of this new southern Africa variant will connect it to how we cheaped out on providing vaccines to the rest of the world. My guess is not much. I hope Joe Manchin can provide us with an accounting of how much the deficit was reduced by allowing ever-deadlier variants to breed freely around the world.
Looks like approx. 72% full vaccination is required. The US is at 59% so I don’t see us doing much better. Most nations are failing as well. Meanwhile, the ‘Rona is freely mutating, each version worse than the one before.
It’s the neoliberal one-world and like in a shit ton of other areas, our leaders are failing big time.
And none of this is getting anywhere the necessary coverage from the mainstream media.
My Dumb Senator, Ron Johnson, said he'd support vaccine mandates "If it was a deadly disease we were dealing with", so I guess poor lil' Covid-19 just wasn't deadly enough to meet the Johnson Standard. Gives future variants a goal to shoot for, I guess.
All that shelf space they're clearing in our school libraries can be filled with Johnson's new children's book, "The Little Variant That Could."
If it was a deadly disease instead of just one that kills people or makes them die.
Well, it kills "only" 1% of the people who get it, so they can go around shouting "99% survive!" like that makes it the fucking common cold.
I always want to ask these guys, "If only 1% of commercial airliners crashed on takeoff, would you get on a plane?"
There's actual data on what normal humans consider "acceptable risk" when death is involved, it's the business of insurance companies and government regulators to track such things. What all of these "acceptable risk" levels have in common is the word "million", as in "the automobile fatality rate is one death per hundred million miles travelled." Not one in a hundred, which is four orders of magnitude more risky.
Thing is, humans are really REALLY bad at assessing risk. I know people who are convinced that getting on an airliner is still very dangerous, and the drive to and from the airport is not.
About 6 years ago, my future brother-in-law invited me to go flying in his Beech Bonanza. I had not flown in the airplane before, nor had I flown with him. So this would be a first. On takeoff, before he even had a chance to raise the landing gear, we got a call from someone on the ground saying the aircraft was trailing smoke. My friend asked me "What do you want to do? Should we keep flying and see if it goes away?"
Here was a highly experienced pilot--someone who should know better--who was perfectly willing to continue flying an aircraft that he had been told was trailing smoke. In-flight fires are extremely likely to end in fatalities.
I asked if he'd rather deal with a fire in flight or on the ground where we could get out of the airplane. He brought the airplane back around and we landed safely. The point here being that even when presented with obvious and immediate danger, many people are incapable of accurately assessing the risk they face.
Sorry to laugh at your near-death experience, but "I asked if he'd rather deal with a fire in flight or on the ground where we could get out of the airplane" did make me laugh.
I knew all those times I rode with stoned friends who were speeding, I had good reason to be concerned.
My niece, still in her 20's "survived" COVID but is still chronically ill.
Ugh, sorry.
You and RoJo should just wait. The latter there is supporting the ‘Rona’s ever growing ability to mutate as best he can.
State organized Covid Parties! Unfortunately that would also entail more infected maskless assholes wandering around grocery stores putting the rest of us at risk since no vaccine is 100% effective. I thought State sponsored live ammunition "training courses" would be a way to thin the Racistfascist Party ranks, but the cost of ammo is way up, I hear, thanks to Joe Biden.
Hey, now that we know the new variant is coming from AFRICA, would that be enough to get them to line up for the jab? I know that China Virus is scary, but this one comes with extra ooga-booga! Like those "Africanized" killer bees!
When Obama was elected, I watched most of my Rightwing friends run out and buy (more) guns and more ammo because they KNEW Obama was going to confiscate all guns. When that didn't happen, they told me "just wait--if he's re-elected, THEN he'll do it!"
So when Obama was re-elected, they all ran out to buy more guns and more ammo.
When Trump got elected, they all ran out to buy more guns and more ammo because they KNEW the liberals and MS-13 were coming, gonna start an armed insurrection against God Emperor Trump. That, of course, did not happen.
When Biden got elected, they all ran out to buy yet more guns and more ammo because . . .
It's the perfect business model, isn't it? Whatever the political situation, however horrendous the mass shootings, however high the murder rate, the answer always is to buy more guns.
There are state organized COVID parties. What do you think Florida is?
Grownups shouldn't have to be continually be reminded that, hapless passive liberal revenge fantasies aside, the more of them that get sick & die get other likely nearby people sick & dead (like their children, disabled folks, the immunocompromised) and the morass of human carnage jams what little fuckery of a healtrhcare system to collapse -- and then we all suffer as a result because this is one sinking ship.
Taibbi could have just had a Colonel Jessup character screaming "WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH! NOW PASS THOSE GODDAMN MASHED POTATOES!" and spared his readers several hundred pointless words. But then so much for the substack big bucks.
And boy, the comments to Taibbi's empty polemic is a wankfest of glibertarians applying their patented logic and reason to show that the American version of slavery and genocide was really no big deal. A typical example:
"If the tables were turned and the Apache had guns and cannons and sailing ships and armies and large numbers and came to Europe where those things were unknown, how would that have played out? Similarly. It's a tragedy but humanity is doing somewhat better these days and we need to stop the self flagellation..."
The first response:
"Well put. Those truths are why I roll my eye at every descendant of a formerly enslaved group or abused tribe who claims current victim status. You are not a victim. You are a self-indulgent waste of human flesh."
This is why I spent yesterday giving thanks that I don't know any of these fucking people.
When the Wampanoag show up to confiscate their Cape Cod condos, then maybe I'll give a listen to these assholes.
Until then, they're just policing peoples' feelings, aren't they? "Some people feel bad about how we treated native Americans - stop that!"
Hey, Mr. cooler-than-cool glibertarian, why do you care so much about how other people FEEL? I thought not giving a shit about other peoples feelings was the core upon which you've built your whole identity? Oh no, you're not being SENSITIVE, are you?
"WE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH! NOW PASS THOSE GODDAMN MASHED POTATOES!" Is pretty funny
I have no fascist friends. I have fascist family - I do not consort with them. Good for you.
Ah, Maestro, you could have taken the day off. Clearly, though, Taibbi's piece lit a fire under your ass (as opposed, I hope, to the more holiday-related Jonahesque emission).
While I continually harp on my opinion that literally the number of pundits worth a shit is no more than a handful, among the worthless horde Taibbi is special for being sooo broken. For those trained by the mainstream to be let's say challenged by the concept that there was a past of more than a few days:
•There was the debacle at First Look which, in part, involved Taibbi going too heavy on the asshole thing;
•The elevation of boyish bad behavior while starting out in Moscow; and
•His last two books sinking like lead, the one on his shitty mainstream media are, being no more than a counterpart to Fox and the Eric Garner book as well as, now that I think about it, a possible slab of fiction.
As to that media thing of his, first shitty as the mainstream media are -- and on the harm to the nation scale, the mainstream's pretty much neck and neck with the so-called conservative media. However, it's neither from some sort of liberalism nor are they in fact liberal politically. They're only liberal in the sense that the term is a perversion of language and a slander slapped on them by conservatives. And the reason the mainstream fails has nothing to do with liberalism but rather that their job is to support an establishment which -- stop the presses! -- actually not liberal but anti-democratic and oligarchic, content with empowering a woefully shitty response to the pandemic amongst many other sins. In other words, Taibbi's media analysis fails at the first step.
What makes this sad, though, is that he was once a pretty good reporter when he first came back from Moscow, and his post-2008 collapse reporting was terrific, pretty goddam good.
And the the other stuff happened.
So boo-hoo-hoo, Matty.
I should add that maybe the final tell that he's essentially an irrelevant conservative is his overweening sense of entitlement.
Fuck him.
Ah, the fucking mainstream media. I always struggle with how much of the mix is establishment-supporting and how much is plain laziness and weak-mindedness and now click-hungry-ness.
A few days ago the Post or the Times (can't remember which and don't really give a shit either) ran a piece about conspiracy theories, with the brilliant idea that, just as conspiracy theorists are following a "narrative", so are the fact-checkers who oppose them. Because all people need narratives of some sort to understand a complicated world, I guess?
You know, like one guy has a narrative that the recent cholera outbreak is the result of witchcraft, and we need to burn any older women who are not currently the property of men, while Mr. Smarty-Pants is pushing the narrative that it's some "microbe" in the water, and maybe we shouldn't shit where we drink. Both are narratives, why should microbe-man feel like he knows more?
So what explains shit like this? Do the people involved in the production of it congratulate themselves for their openmindedness and fairness? Is it a "We don't want to be all judgy like them!" impulse that causes normally intelligent people to suspend all judgement and grade the people who want to kill them on a curve? I dunno, I got nothin'.
It's worse. Before Pasteur and the microscope, how many old time versions of our wingnuts were all, "How do you know it's the water pump, maybe it's because the vermin who used that one pump are despicable low-lifes with bad morals and also poor who happen to dwell in that neighborhood. Deport them and the problem will go away!"
Those people I get. They just don't care about people who don't share their religion or skin color, don't consider those people to be people, really.
What I don't get is people who aren't monsters but want to say we're not so different from the monsters, really, because we're both carbon-based life forms.
Monsters with an explanation!
The reasons don’t really matter. They’re unbelievably awful and harmful. The solution is to keep away from them full stop.
Entitlement, sure, and I know about his past (though I don't count it for much; all sinners may be redeemed). But I really do think in his case the motivation is attention. His old man was a hack journalist and I think Taibbi fils got from him a thirst for circ.
Rommelman, I didn't know about. Thanks for the primer. She sounds like someone worth avoiding.
Maybe he’s just a little shit. Don’t know, don’t care past the point that I really, really like my theory.
As for redemption, sure, believe it or not, I tend not to write people off. Taibbi, at least up to the First Look debacle, did more than his share of good work, so who knows? Maybe he’ll become good again. But for now, he’s nothing good.
"currently he is involved in a thing called “American Consequences” published by investor bulletin bucket shop Stansberry Research . . ."
This is just so fitting because Stansberry is a convicted conman who stole millions from investors. Most excellent that Taibbi would find refuge among the grifters!
Bitcoin! The preferred currency for fentynal smugglers and child sex tourists.
Imagine trying to sell that to all the old folks they worked so hard to turn into goldbugs.(Gold - tangible value you can hold in your hand!)
Bitcoin - backed by computer programs!
I guess they could point out the environmental damage. Righties like that. They feel like they've accomplished something.
I swear, if you could market a variety of bitcoin that could guarantee that it was brought into existence on a server farm powered exclusively by coal, you could make a goddamn fortune.
Coal-rolled Bitcoin -- for connoisseurs!
No artisanal coal-powered bitcoin, though. This bitcoin is hewn laboriously from solid granite, deep in the mountains of a former nature preserve now cross-crossed by roads upon which huge, soot-belching machinery roar night and day, driven by big, hulking manly-men who attend MAGA rallies and, with tears streaming down their grizzled faces, say, “Thank you, Mr President, for making me proud of my currency again.”
Manchicoin??
That was O'Rourke, not Taibbi.
Ah! Reading comprehension fail on my part. Still, grifters gonna grift!
Sure it's Thanksgiving, but Taibbi still has his Halloween decorations up, his column is populated with an army of Straw Men.
Well, Taibbi will be able to shit from more than one orifice after what you wrote, Roy. Maybe three.
Shame about Taibbi, but as I read Roy's account I thought: Oh, Taibbi's doing what right-wing comedians do--invoke a stereotype (Howard Zinn's book contains just two actors), and then mock it. So he joins Peej and Dennis Miller as one-eyed kings in the kingdom of the blind. And if it encourages the brutes and the choads to support the fascists, well, look, everybody has to make a living.
Squawk, it's a living.
"Almost none of us are related to Pilgrims or Founders. Nearly all of us descended from those subsequent waves of weirdos and refugees who came from all over, some not by choice, and forged the real character of our stolen nation."
Tell me you don't know any Black people without telling me you don't know any Black people.
I like how he pretends that those later waves of immigration just sort of showed up and plopped themselves down in the suburbs of Cleveland and Sacramento ready to drive to their jobs at U.S. Steel or Bank of America. I don't think the Pilgrims wiped out the Sioux Nation.
Yah, what a fuck head. Speaking to the title of the post I found a long time ago that willful ignorance is absolutely the worst. I can be an ignorant buffoon from time to time but at least I'm trying *not to be*. Then there are those for whom willful ignorance is a choice.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-we-blame/201709/willful-ignorance-and-self-deception
Fuck those assholes.
I used to respect Taibbi's work and subscribed to the podcast he did with Alex Pareene but - damn - he's just creepy cringe now. Sad.
Again, I gotta mention Taibbi's "Spanking The Donkey". His take on following Gore's 2000 campaign was, "Ha ha ha, it's all a big joke, not a dime's worth of difference, only suckers really care about this shit!" That certainly hasn't aged well.
What can you do when you've built a career off wisecracks about "Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber" and then one of the two parties goes all fascist?
Reassess the situation and admit things have changed? Hell no, anything but that!
And I say this as someone who voted for Jill Stein. I'm a slow learner, but even I can see shit's changed and this is not a time to fuck around.
Another great post.
As a white guy old enough to have marched with my family in MLK's '63 march when we happened to be in D.C., I have been wondering with horror and some shame what the fuck happened in the years since around 1972 that allowed people like me not to find out about simple history, like depriving blacks of GI Bill benefits, like driving while black, like the median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the Greater Boston region was $8 in 2017. What caused us to take our foot off the gas, or off the neck, of racism over those years?
A lot of it was just the Baby Boom generation moving into adulthood and jobs and families, but more of it was that we never actually had to drive while black or do anything else while black, and one of capitalism's biggest achievements is making it a sin to actually find out what the person next to you is making, and if you make more or less. Whatever it was, it sucks, and I'm sorry, and I'm not going to do that again - though I'm pretty sure I'll continue to ignore/deplore the suffering of people in foreign lands and unfamiliar cultures. Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is a fundamental human luxury, like sugar. And, like sugar, it's delivered on the broken backs of multitudes.
But willful ignorance is the right-wing currency of the day, and there's no excuse for trading in it, even around the Thanksgiving table. It takes a strong act of WILL today to be ignorant of black history and of police brutality against blacks. Or of climate change, or of Covid, or of the 2020 election results. You've got to WANT to do that, despite facts and all logic being against you.
Willful ignorance will kill us all if we let it. There is no more tending one's own garden and letting the rest of the world take care of itself. We've got to call it out even at the table. Thank you for your calling, Roy.