"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.
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.
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.
"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!
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
"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!
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.
"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.
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.
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.