I was on Radio War Nerd with John Dolan and Mark Ames this week. We talked a bit about the disastrous trip Evgenia and I took to Russia this autumn, but mostly we discussed the latest spectacle of our bifurcated Perky Pat layout political system: Elon Musk’s “leaking” of The Twitter Files and the two journalists he entrusted with properly handling his political/public relations op: Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.
“Banger” of an episode! It seems all this is more spectacle that doesn’t affect normal people. Once again we get a view into the lives of the elite instead of opportunities to better our own.
I listened to this while biking 57 miles in pouring, cold rain for over the duration of the episode. Soaked and shivering but the pod kept on. 😀
Late to this party, but really found this podcast enlightening. I always thought Taibbi's shtick might have changed as a result of starting a family, which tends to remove certain I-don't-give-a-fuck luxuries and punk angst to make the space to work towards a more financially secure legacy. This conversation definitely added a lot of context to the whole picture. A lot of it checks out. His substack work has repeatedly drawn from that 'golden age naivete' (which rings like bland old exceptionalism). I always felt cop-out energy with the 'taking a break from Useful Idiots to work on a book' - we'll see how that turns out.
"You'll be nowhere" totally feeling that. Oh "political neutering platform" I got to remember that.
That "feeding the political-entertainment complex" framing sticks, like it or not.
I am being flippant here, but I have to admit, anyone who can write a sentence like this amuses me and gets some of my time 😉👇
"....It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
via Taibbi, discussing the Twitter Files process:
"....Two weeks later, I feel differently. In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.
This is especially the case since a major subtext of the Twitter Files project is what a burn it is on conventional/corporate media, whose minions tried for years to turn Twitter into a giant conformity machine, and cheered each new advance in censorship and opinion control. Those same people now have to watch in helplessness as one horrifying revelation after another spills out, guerrilla-style, into what was not long ago their private playground. This, too, couldn’t be scripted better. It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
I dropped Taibbi a while ago. I'm still on his unpaid mailing list, so I get notices of his posts and I sometimes watch the "read-aloud" videos of a few of them.
As you say, he has a good line on financial scams and mainstream media. He has a good style and can be funny when he chooses, too. But then I realised what the problem is: it's nothing I don't know already, from more honest, if not as festive sources. Pam and Russ Martens are just as good on finance, and basically everyone who follows Counterpunch knows what the mainstream media is about these days. They're low-hanging fruit, so one doesn't become any wiser about them by reading Taibbi, if only they also bother to read non-mainstream left-wing sites (or even the centre-wing ones, like Moon of Alabama). It's like admiring Putin because he calls the West out in his speeches: it's easy to be right about that, even if you're wrong about basically all the rest. Like, a six-year-old could call NATO out on their shit these days, should we give Putin a medals for being blunt about it?
I think this week's clusterfuck tells you all you need to know about Taibbi: while he was lost basking in the glory of once again exposing the Bidens for being what everyone knows they are already, I didn't hear one peep from him about the most important event of the week, namely the throwing under the bus of the rail workers. (Or maybe it just didn't get in my mailbox.) Which has been the main point of discussion in Counterpunch the entire week. So much for getting his priorities right.
My email notifications are on, so I'm able to rescue your response:
"You know, I wanted to revisit the part about Putin and NATO. Yes, to people like us who have been (and I'm assuming here) reading anti-Empire (proper noun intended) and left-wing critiques of the economy and neoliberalism for a long time, what he says is obvious. I also don't put any stock into the opinions of people who merely echo what Putin says and/or worship him or his words. That said, it isn't as though any other world leaders or even thought leaders are saying some of the truths he repeats about the US hegemon or NATO. I've read many machine translations of his speeches, and while of course many are full of propaganda, there isn't another world leader of his stature (and -alleged?- domestic approval ratings) who speaks as clearly and knowledgeably as he does (perhaps the same could have been said of Hitler, but I've never read any of his speeches TBH). Regardless, who else IS calling out NATO? Like who with a voice -AND- a platform? My thoughts on the Ukraine situation are complex - too complex to get into here - I'm as anti-war as you can get, but to deny that Putin (and Russia and the Douma) were provoked into this war is delusional. I just keep going back to the analogy of China staging a coup in Mexico - which they had already named to the pro-China military farm team, the states of Chihuahua and Guadalajara then demanding more autonomy in response to new right wing anti-American/English laws and roaming nazi-adjacent thugs and being shelled for 8 years because of it. What would the USA do? I'm certain the response would be far harsher than Russia's in response to the NATO-ization of NATO farm team Ukraine. I don't agree with Yasha's idea that Russia could have insisted on a peacekeeping force as this would have been viewed and sold to the western world through the Mighty Wurlitzer as Russian aggression and occupation. The rest of Europe (France, Germany, the EU and UN) clearly weren't interested in enforcing Minsk I or II and the USA and UK were busy actively arming up the Ukrainians and likely assisting their (genocidal?) campaign of terror directed at the Donbass region. I mean seriously, what SHOULD "Putin" (as though he's the monolithical decider of all Russian gov't actions?) have done? I'm not awarding him any medals and I likely wouldn't agree with most of his domestic right-wing Russian politics, but I am curious as to what any other leader in his shoes could have done? From what I gather the FUKUS/NATO favored "opposition" leader Alexy Navalny is even further to the right and more nationalistic than Putin. What are the other options?"
I'm more or less on the same footing as you are. Putin is an old-school ethnonationalist, an Orthodox choir boy whose domestic policy is basically austerity and letting the markets decide on outcomes. His foreign policy is shrewd most of the time, but in Ukraine I do think he genuinely believed himself out of options. But I do think he could've tried an embargo of energy sales to Europe (or of rocket engines and titanium to the US, for that matter) and other measures before moving for war. However, that might not have worked. There's also the fact, emphasised by Moon of Alabama's Bernhard, that in the couple days before Russia decided to invade the OCSE monitors of the ceasefire line showed an intensification of shelling coming from the Ukrainian to the separatist side, a fact mostly glossed over by the mainstream media. If we agree to his conclusion that Zelensky was preparing a major ground incursion into the LDPR side, Putin's line that Russia was trying to prevent a brutal assault against the Russian-speaking population there has at least some credence.
I have no sides in this stupid, sad war, which is causing suffering on both sides of the border among the common people, and having the arms dealers laugh all the way to the bank. But I can't say what I'd have done in Putin's place.
I noticed that silence as well, altho I'm not sure what I expected. Matt's content for the last year or three has felt like a lot of oblique, weak approaches to anti-woke stuff that seems like other outlets already pretty much got on lock down since it's their sole focus, so I'm not really sure what I'm hanging around for at this point.
Good comments especially about Taibbi morphing into Horowitz, how apt. I replied to some guy on Twitter who couldn’t understand why more progressives were excited about the Twitter files. I replied maybe it was questioning the wisdom of collaborating with a right wing oligarch and a journalist who is a supporter of Israeli apartheid, as well grovelling to one of the most loathsome right wing members of Congress (Jordan). Also is it a good tactic to go all-in with one faction of the oligarchy in its efforts to take down another faction. Right away I was swarmed by what I took were Greenwald, Taibbi and Dore fanboys and girls berating me for having the audacity to question the whole sordid effort, and some implying I must be a ‘shitlib’. I think the bigger issue is how progressives are to navigate between on the one hand collaboration with social-democrats who are willing to trade incremental improvements at home in exchange for support for empire (‘the squad’ in US, Labour in Britain, NDP in Canada), and on the other hand those who recommend collaboration with the populist right with its fake anti-elitism and ultra-nationalism (showing up on Tucker Carlson, joining right wing anti-war efforts etc.). Both are bad options.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post with some really good insights. Not living in the US and watching all of this North of the border, appreciate further information and explanation from people living there to help think through this thorny issue. I do agree that any details on how the deep state colludes with social media to promote preferred government narratives is valuable in terms of public awareness, even if it sometimes comes from unsavoury sources. My only concern is when Glenn Greenwald and others start doing victory laps while at the same time ignoring how Republicans and their deep state allies do the same thing as Democrats, but in different contexts. Right now Jim Jordan and the Select Committee on the COVID pandemic is meeting, and at the same time the FBI and DoE published dubious reports on the origins of COVID which support the Republican narrative (interesting that Greenwald takes these reports at face value even though they go against the accumulated scientific evidence). As you point out Republicans are not the lesser evil despite the actions of Biden, Blinken and the rest. Both parties are equally complicit in the crimes of empire.
Its a pleasure hearing the three of you talk...
“Banger” of an episode! It seems all this is more spectacle that doesn’t affect normal people. Once again we get a view into the lives of the elite instead of opportunities to better our own.
I listened to this while biking 57 miles in pouring, cold rain for over the duration of the episode. Soaked and shivering but the pod kept on. 😀
Late to this party, but really found this podcast enlightening. I always thought Taibbi's shtick might have changed as a result of starting a family, which tends to remove certain I-don't-give-a-fuck luxuries and punk angst to make the space to work towards a more financially secure legacy. This conversation definitely added a lot of context to the whole picture. A lot of it checks out. His substack work has repeatedly drawn from that 'golden age naivete' (which rings like bland old exceptionalism). I always felt cop-out energy with the 'taking a break from Useful Idiots to work on a book' - we'll see how that turns out.
"You'll be nowhere" totally feeling that. Oh "political neutering platform" I got to remember that.
That "feeding the political-entertainment complex" framing sticks, like it or not.
Hi Yasha and e.pierce
I am being flippant here, but I have to admit, anyone who can write a sentence like this amuses me and gets some of my time 😉👇
"....It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
via Taibbi, discussing the Twitter Files process:
"....Two weeks later, I feel differently. In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.
This is especially the case since a major subtext of the Twitter Files project is what a burn it is on conventional/corporate media, whose minions tried for years to turn Twitter into a giant conformity machine, and cheered each new advance in censorship and opinion control. Those same people now have to watch in helplessness as one horrifying revelation after another spills out, guerrilla-style, into what was not long ago their private playground. This, too, couldn’t be scripted better. It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with...."
Source: https://www.racket.news/p/note-to-readers-on-the-twitter-files
That is a great way of putting it: "enshittification" 👍
I remember reading Doctorow's "For the Win" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7241373-for-the-win ) many years ago....quite fascinating IMO.
Meanwhile, I know Yasha is no fan of Taibbi....I am unfortunately cursed with the tendency to see both sides, which is why I subscribe to both 🙄
I dropped Taibbi a while ago. I'm still on his unpaid mailing list, so I get notices of his posts and I sometimes watch the "read-aloud" videos of a few of them.
As you say, he has a good line on financial scams and mainstream media. He has a good style and can be funny when he chooses, too. But then I realised what the problem is: it's nothing I don't know already, from more honest, if not as festive sources. Pam and Russ Martens are just as good on finance, and basically everyone who follows Counterpunch knows what the mainstream media is about these days. They're low-hanging fruit, so one doesn't become any wiser about them by reading Taibbi, if only they also bother to read non-mainstream left-wing sites (or even the centre-wing ones, like Moon of Alabama). It's like admiring Putin because he calls the West out in his speeches: it's easy to be right about that, even if you're wrong about basically all the rest. Like, a six-year-old could call NATO out on their shit these days, should we give Putin a medals for being blunt about it?
I think this week's clusterfuck tells you all you need to know about Taibbi: while he was lost basking in the glory of once again exposing the Bidens for being what everyone knows they are already, I didn't hear one peep from him about the most important event of the week, namely the throwing under the bus of the rail workers. (Or maybe it just didn't get in my mailbox.) Which has been the main point of discussion in Counterpunch the entire week. So much for getting his priorities right.
My email notifications are on, so I'm able to rescue your response:
"You know, I wanted to revisit the part about Putin and NATO. Yes, to people like us who have been (and I'm assuming here) reading anti-Empire (proper noun intended) and left-wing critiques of the economy and neoliberalism for a long time, what he says is obvious. I also don't put any stock into the opinions of people who merely echo what Putin says and/or worship him or his words. That said, it isn't as though any other world leaders or even thought leaders are saying some of the truths he repeats about the US hegemon or NATO. I've read many machine translations of his speeches, and while of course many are full of propaganda, there isn't another world leader of his stature (and -alleged?- domestic approval ratings) who speaks as clearly and knowledgeably as he does (perhaps the same could have been said of Hitler, but I've never read any of his speeches TBH). Regardless, who else IS calling out NATO? Like who with a voice -AND- a platform? My thoughts on the Ukraine situation are complex - too complex to get into here - I'm as anti-war as you can get, but to deny that Putin (and Russia and the Douma) were provoked into this war is delusional. I just keep going back to the analogy of China staging a coup in Mexico - which they had already named to the pro-China military farm team, the states of Chihuahua and Guadalajara then demanding more autonomy in response to new right wing anti-American/English laws and roaming nazi-adjacent thugs and being shelled for 8 years because of it. What would the USA do? I'm certain the response would be far harsher than Russia's in response to the NATO-ization of NATO farm team Ukraine. I don't agree with Yasha's idea that Russia could have insisted on a peacekeeping force as this would have been viewed and sold to the western world through the Mighty Wurlitzer as Russian aggression and occupation. The rest of Europe (France, Germany, the EU and UN) clearly weren't interested in enforcing Minsk I or II and the USA and UK were busy actively arming up the Ukrainians and likely assisting their (genocidal?) campaign of terror directed at the Donbass region. I mean seriously, what SHOULD "Putin" (as though he's the monolithical decider of all Russian gov't actions?) have done? I'm not awarding him any medals and I likely wouldn't agree with most of his domestic right-wing Russian politics, but I am curious as to what any other leader in his shoes could have done? From what I gather the FUKUS/NATO favored "opposition" leader Alexy Navalny is even further to the right and more nationalistic than Putin. What are the other options?"
I'm more or less on the same footing as you are. Putin is an old-school ethnonationalist, an Orthodox choir boy whose domestic policy is basically austerity and letting the markets decide on outcomes. His foreign policy is shrewd most of the time, but in Ukraine I do think he genuinely believed himself out of options. But I do think he could've tried an embargo of energy sales to Europe (or of rocket engines and titanium to the US, for that matter) and other measures before moving for war. However, that might not have worked. There's also the fact, emphasised by Moon of Alabama's Bernhard, that in the couple days before Russia decided to invade the OCSE monitors of the ceasefire line showed an intensification of shelling coming from the Ukrainian to the separatist side, a fact mostly glossed over by the mainstream media. If we agree to his conclusion that Zelensky was preparing a major ground incursion into the LDPR side, Putin's line that Russia was trying to prevent a brutal assault against the Russian-speaking population there has at least some credence.
I have no sides in this stupid, sad war, which is causing suffering on both sides of the border among the common people, and having the arms dealers laugh all the way to the bank. But I can't say what I'd have done in Putin's place.
I noticed that silence as well, altho I'm not sure what I expected. Matt's content for the last year or three has felt like a lot of oblique, weak approaches to anti-woke stuff that seems like other outlets already pretty much got on lock down since it's their sole focus, so I'm not really sure what I'm hanging around for at this point.
Good comments especially about Taibbi morphing into Horowitz, how apt. I replied to some guy on Twitter who couldn’t understand why more progressives were excited about the Twitter files. I replied maybe it was questioning the wisdom of collaborating with a right wing oligarch and a journalist who is a supporter of Israeli apartheid, as well grovelling to one of the most loathsome right wing members of Congress (Jordan). Also is it a good tactic to go all-in with one faction of the oligarchy in its efforts to take down another faction. Right away I was swarmed by what I took were Greenwald, Taibbi and Dore fanboys and girls berating me for having the audacity to question the whole sordid effort, and some implying I must be a ‘shitlib’. I think the bigger issue is how progressives are to navigate between on the one hand collaboration with social-democrats who are willing to trade incremental improvements at home in exchange for support for empire (‘the squad’ in US, Labour in Britain, NDP in Canada), and on the other hand those who recommend collaboration with the populist right with its fake anti-elitism and ultra-nationalism (showing up on Tucker Carlson, joining right wing anti-war efforts etc.). Both are bad options.
Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post with some really good insights. Not living in the US and watching all of this North of the border, appreciate further information and explanation from people living there to help think through this thorny issue. I do agree that any details on how the deep state colludes with social media to promote preferred government narratives is valuable in terms of public awareness, even if it sometimes comes from unsavoury sources. My only concern is when Glenn Greenwald and others start doing victory laps while at the same time ignoring how Republicans and their deep state allies do the same thing as Democrats, but in different contexts. Right now Jim Jordan and the Select Committee on the COVID pandemic is meeting, and at the same time the FBI and DoE published dubious reports on the origins of COVID which support the Republican narrative (interesting that Greenwald takes these reports at face value even though they go against the accumulated scientific evidence). As you point out Republicans are not the lesser evil despite the actions of Biden, Blinken and the rest. Both parties are equally complicit in the crimes of empire.