Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1
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@Jolly said in Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1:
Isn't all journalism narrative based?
Taibbi has built a career dissecting popular narratives. Where Jon's disdain comes from, was in his take down of Goldman Sachs 15 years ago. Remember when Jon was palpably afraid of mob anger against investment bankers? That's around the time Taibbi was gaining fame with his journalism exposing some of the industry's worst practices. So the process in jon's head began, where Matt became a marginalized and dismissed human being. It's a psychological threat-countering mechanism, and it well explains jon's rage against Trump's brand of populism too.
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It’s a rather strange worldview that every opinion you don’t share must be the result of some psychopathology.
It’s always something.
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@jon-nyc said in Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1:
It’s a rather strange worldview that every opinion you don’t share must be the result of some psychopathology.
I think you have a very normal psychology. Books have been written about normal and prectable error in human thought, judgment, and perception. I bet you've even read them.
Education is extremely important.
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Why don’t you read his famous “vampire squid” article and tell me if you think that represents good journalism, and that only someone’s fear for their personal safety could lead them to think otherwise.
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The ironic thing is the only substantive thing we learned from this Twitter thread that we didn’t already know is that the GOP also had back channels to Twitter to report tweets.
It’s always something.
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@jon-nyc I didn't know that Twitter blocked DMs between people, a practice usually reserved for the most reprehensible things - child porn.
I didn't know that Trump's press secretary was suspended.
The fact that the GOP had access to report tweets is interesting. Did they, in fact, report those?
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@jon-nyc said in Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1:
Why don’t you read his famous “vampire squid” article and tell me if you think that represents good journalism, and that only someone’s fear for their personal safety could lead them to think otherwise.
Maybe you could point me to a serious refutation of that piece? I can't read the original as it's behind a paywall.
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@George-K said in Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1:
@jon-nyc I didn't know that Twitter blocked DMs between people, a practice usually reserved for the most reprehensible things - child porn.
I didn't know that Trump's press secretary was suspended.
You or I might not have known but it was known and reported about.
The fact that the GOP had access to report tweets is interesting. Did they, in fact, report those?
Matt didn’t tell us, I guess it’s not part of his narrative.
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Searching for serious rebuttals to Taibbi's piece, I found one person's attempt to describe the mainstream fallout:
https://archives.cjr.org/the_audit/taibbi_goldman.php
Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.
The Rolling Stone writer cemented his status as the enfant terrible of the business press with “The Great American Bubble Machine,” a 10,000-word excoriation of Goldman Sachs, a muckraker’s-eye view of Goldman history, exploring the bank’s and Wall Street’s contributions to various financial disasters, starting with the Great Depression, skipping to the Tech Wreck, the Mortgage Wreck, the oil bubble of 2008, the bailout, and the looming cap-and-trade plan. Salted with “fuck”s, “shit”s and written with brio and hyperbole in the New Journalism tradition, it caught the financial community, which very much includes the financial media, utterly off-guard, unused as it is to hearing its flagship described as a “giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”
Financial cognoscenti quickly sought to dismiss the piece as so much conspiracy-mongering perpetrated by a financial illiterate. Funny, but that illiterate’s piece ran more than a month ago, and people can’t stop talking about it. Perhaps not coincidentally, it feels like the general financial news has been all-Goldman, all-the-time ever since.
Ex-Deal and Wall Street Journal staffer Heidi Moore stepped into a buzzsaw last week week when she wrote one of the biggest non-sequiturs of the financial crisis, a column in Slate’s Big Money arguing that Goldman’s success comes from the fact it’s better at what it does than everyone else, therefore, apparently, criticism is unwarranted.
As Taibbi (who needs no help defending himself) pointed out on his own blog, Moore addresses precisely none of the substantive criticisms that have been leveled at the bank, including big ones, like (1) buying predatory loans, (2) selling defective mortgage-backed securities while (3) shorting them at the same time, and (4) buying defective insurance from American International Group, then having those bad bets redeemed in full by government programs ratified by ex-Goldman executives. This is to say nothing of the role ex-Goldman alums played in laying the groundwork for the decade’s financial recklessness—Robert Rubin’s contribution to deconstructing financial regulation and Henry Paulson’s lobbying to loosen capital restrictions in 2004, to name just two.
And it goes on. As the author of that piece notes, it's generally eyerolls and giggles in place of rebuttals. Yep, that's how that works. We can watch it here too.
For all the clamor, criticism of what Taibbi’s actually written has been surprisingly weak. The best critics could offer was that Taibbi exaggerated Goldman’s particular role in this or that crisis and that financial crises are far too complex for this frame (or for them, I suspect, any frame at all) —that and make disparaging remarks about Taibbi’s alleged self-righteousness, amateurism, ignorance, etc. While the attacks on Taibbi aren’t couched as defenses of Goldman, the net effect is the same.
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Trump literally calls for suspending the constitution over this big “reveal”.
It’s always something.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1:
@jon-nyc the RWEC called Trumps
tweetpostmessage political suicide.I wonder if they mean that literally, as intentionally ending things. Sometimes suicide is used to describe an accidental consequence of a stupid action. I can see it in the literal sense (as in intentionally ending his political aspirations), and I hope that's what it is. But it's not clear to me that he wouldn't continue pursuing the nomination with that messaging in place.
Education is extremely important.
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Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson Don’t Understand the First Amendment
By David French
tl;dr
"Twitter is a private company—not the federal government."
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1:
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson Don’t Understand the First Amendment
By David French
tl;dr
"Twitter is a private company—not the federal government."
Tell Mr. French that Twitter was a PUBLIC company while they were pulling their shenanigans.
Secondly, the law is usually behind society, particularly technology. I've long agreed with the position that social media such as Twitter or Faceypage is the modern equivalent of the town square. It's time for the law to catch up.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
If what the DNC did would have been illegal for a government actor to have done, then Mr French has presented a technically correct argument that still won’t pass the sniff test of anybody concerned with keeping the government away from Twitter moderation.
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If Twitter was a public company, I fail to see how that changes anything. The fact that it's private now lets Musk do pretty much whatever he wants, and that includes disclosing whatever he wants.
If, as @jon-nyc said, the GOP had access, the question remains what, if anything, was done with that access. The fact that I own a handgun is irrelevant unless I use to commit a crime. I have access, but...
A lot of the deflection is directed toward the allegation that the censoring of the laptop story is because of the First Son's dick pics. That's a legitimate concern, of course, but it's a deflection to the larger story which alleges that there is evidence of influence-peddling by the VPOTUS.
As to government interference, I haven't seen anything to indicate that the government actually interferes with Twitter - yet. I saw a story that the Trump White House communicated with Twitter regarding stories. If the communications regard issues of national security, I have no problem with it. If they regard coverup of corruption, then there's a problem of course.
Finally criticism has been made of Taibbi's style of reporting, in that he is omitting things that don't fit his argument. That may well be true, but unless you can show that what he revealed is demonstrably false, that's irrelevant.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K How is it irrelevant ?
Is it irrelevant when the NY Times does it?
It’s always something.
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@jon-nyc said in Taibbi - The Twitter Files, Part 1:
@George-K How is it irrelevant ?
Is it irrelevant when the NY Times does it?
A fair point. But, selectively omitting parts of a story (as you suggest he did) is substantively different from omitting the entire story, as the NYT did.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
