Matt Taibbi

What exactly do you expect me to link to? A thousand "this video does not exist" pages? YouTube does not track its own moderation. That's part of the problem. Here are some well-written examples by Matt Taibi: https://taibbi.substack.com/?sort=search&search=censored Here is Glenn Greenvald explaining why he moved to Rumble: https://rumble.com/vl268j-welcome-to-glenn-greenwalds-system-update.ht… Note that he doesn't claim he was censored. He just doesn't want to support a platform that censors in general. ... The latest example I've seen directly was a strike against Dr. Mobeen Sayd's channel because he interviewed Pierre Kory. To put it into context, it's a channel from an MD with 10 years worth of educational content. It got a confirmed strike last week because he interviewed another doctor several month ago. There were also 50+ other videos deleted from the channel. This is the video in question: https://odysee.com/@DrMobeenSyed:1/dr.-pierre-kory,-ivermectin-(let%E2… Here is YouTube search confirming it does not exist on the original channel anymore: https://www.youtube.com/c/USMLEOnline/search?query=Dr.%20Pierre%20Kory… It's time-consuming to provide these examples and it's impossible to know when people are asking for proof in good faith and when they are just play-acting ignorance.

Over the last few years I've made a habit of trying to understand others as much as possible. Historically I only read left-leaning sources but after exposing myself to more, it became clear that I was blind to the other side's perspective. I've found that there was typically validity to multiple views on most topics, and that selection bias (what news sources choose to cover) was a big problem. So these days I visit a number of sources, which is easier today because there are sites that try to represent views from different parts of the spectrum. Staying informed does take time (at least an hour a day), money (supporting news via subscriptions), and effort (takes away mental energy from other things). Apart from the list below I also read and subscribe to a few different local news sources. Over the last several years, local news has been dying (financial issues) and I think that's a bad thing because it means you miss things happening around you that affect your life more so than national news, and because you only get a homogeneous national perspective (often reduced to a left versus right axis) instead of the more diverse issue-to-issue variation that is possible locally. I recommend identifying a few local sources near you if you have the time to read! UNCATEGORIZED 1. Hacker News (I check the first couple pages several times a day) 2. Matt Taibbi (https://taibbi.substack.com - investigative reporting by a former Rolling Stone journalist) 3. Glenn Greenwald…

Too bad, because he has a great account of how the Russiagate scandal was overblown by the media: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million?s=r You could choose to look at it critically and decide for yourself what you believe in. It is a factual, point-by-point destruction of your claim above. Zero percent of it hinges on how perfect Taibbi as a person is, or was 20 years ago. Your ideological purity, or whatever it is you think you are standing for here, serves only to close your mind.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/worlds-dullest-editorial-launches?s=r Matt Taibbi's great post on this same topic. 'This Times editorial is watered down almost to the level of a public service announcement written for the Cartoon Network, or maybe a fortune cookie (“Free speech is a process, not a destination. Winning numbers 4, 9, 11, 32, 46…”). It made the Harper’s letter read like a bin Laden fatwa, but it’s somehow arousing a bigger panic.'

Taibbi had a great take on this: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/worlds-dullest-editorial-launches?r=2iae… Why the hell did this editorial get the reaction it did? I can’t understand it and this “rebuttal” should not be front page HN.

Start here, actual journalists and actual "liberals": https://taibbi.substack.com My quote was from here: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-pandemic-censorship Also: https://greenwald.substack.com

Go and Google Matt Taibbi’s summary of all the new articles about Russiagate that were wrong and/or have been retracted. It’s quite lengthy with all the sources. Here it is: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official-russia Most if not all the Russiagate claims have turned out to be false, but more critically, the media who reported them either willfully didn’t bother to validate the information or ran with it knowing it was false. The best one was the FBI getting a search warrant based on an article by a reporter referencing an FBI source. How’s that for bullshit? Drop an anonymous tip to a reporter then use their article as proof your suspicion is valid.

I just read his post on NPR [0] and as a frequent listener of NPR, I am surprised to admit that I don’t entirely disagree. Taking a critical stance against established media outlets that one was previously closely aligned with, that seems difficult and substantial to me. [0] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/nprs-brilliant-self-own

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-the-vaccine-neurotic > As a student in the Soviet Union I noticed subscribers to what Russians called the sovok mindset talked in interminable strings of pogovorki, i.e goofball proverbs or aphorisms you’d heard a million times before (“He who takes no risk, drinks no champagne,” or “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods,” etc). This was a learned defense mechanism, adopted by a people who’d found out the hard way that anyone caught not speaking nonstop nonsense could be suspected of harboring original thoughts. Voluble stupidity is a great disguise in a society where silence is suspect.

NPR’s coverage of a leftist agenda is overwhelming, particularly on identity politics. They’re every bit as bad as the far right. Taibbi captured it well. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/nprs-brilliant-self-own

Recap of the tweet: "I heard that cant is fashionable and can even score you social and professional points. Allow me to jump on the virtual signalling bandwagon and help kick a fallen guy over a passage written years ago I'll quote out of context to show how horrible he is. Ain't I a great and caring person? Ain't I model of 21st century 'concerned' SV citizen?". A better take: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who-canceled

Bari Weiss's resignation letter from the NYT is probably the best place to start https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter Matt Taibbi has a good article on this too https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself Glenn Greenwald talks about this on his Substack a lot, too, and the malpractice of the larger media as a whole. This recent and highly topical Twitter thread is one of many examples. https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1383767882668986376

It is amazing how journalists from mayor outlets and even institutions have so much contempt for independent substack journalists. They think it's beneath them because somehow only working for those outlets gives their reporting legitimacy and a form of entitlement to publish therefor they try to demonize substack and delegitimize its writers because they are independent. I saw it being labeled as "onlyfans for journalists". That's mostly coming from mediocre journalists who probably secretly envy substack writers for their huge profile. Matt Taibbi recently wrote a piece about it that's worth reading https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack

Louis CK is a weak example mate. You whip your dick out, that's assault brotha. Wealthy companies aren't great either. They're doing the cancelling. Who needs physical enforcement when you can get people fired or threaten their livelihood? Take a look at Mark Crispin Miller. This chap is feeling the mob heat right now. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-mark-crispin-miller

Since you mentioned media's role, Matt Taibbi recently argued[1] that the media has somewhat recently departed from norms that were followed throughout the 20th century. To ensure the widest audiences possible, the CBSes and later CNNs of the world largely aimed to report stories from a "neutral" perspective (really a centrist perspective). Taibbi argues that in the last couple decades, though, even major media outlets have carved out biased perspectives to inspire more loyalty in smaller sets of people. Point being that I think you're right that the media played an important role in contextualizing mass communication and controlling bias. Not only does social media disintermediate mass communications, the intermediaries themselves are now ignoring roles they historically performed. [1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-post-objectivity-era

This post from Taibbi is in my opinion also worth a read: On “White Fragility”, A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

Awesome! Another reader of Taibbi's. By the way, the Post Gazette seems to have stolen that article, so maybe don't drive business their way. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1274747185507246081?s=20 Instead, here is Taibbi's substack. If you're off a mind, a subscription is only $40 per year, but the stolen article is nevertheless free. https://taibbi.substack.com/

i assume this guy is hes well know and continues use substack, idk if he gets a special rate due his previous success https://taibbi.substack.com/

citing the new york times :/ didnt they push for WMD in iraq? edit: ah yes, unquestioned reporting pushing the administration's policy of war. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublishing.usnew… isnt this what happened with collusion as well? oh yeah https://taibbi.substack.com/

Obligatory link: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway This was very insightful for me. I enjoyed how he interpreted Manufacturing Consent and pointed out that the obvious interpretation is mistaken i.e. that the media peddles lies. The thesis is more subtle than that.

Welcome to the American legal system. This isn't as strong a justification as one might imagine. That system sucks in many ways. Recently we learned that DoJ routinely take every document held by particular targeted law firms, without warrants, and then designate "taint teams" of DoJ lawyers who view every document and suggest which ones should be seen by investigators. [0] The idea is that the taint team will forget all the documents they've seen when they later investigate other clients of the targeted law firms. Many judges have ordered this practice stopped, but DoJ DGAF. This taint team concept obviously is unconstitutional and undermines justice, but ISTM the practice you describe is worse. When Meta's lawyers view documentation extracted from SimulaVR, they do so as agents of Meta. Their current stated goal may be to defend Meta in the present suit, but there's no reason to believe that's the only goal they'll ever have. Have Meta promised to throw away all documents after some of them have been presented to the court? Is there some sort of escrow concept that allows SimulaVR to trust someone other than Meta's lawyers? The danger to SimulaVR is actually greater if Meta are telling the truth that they are competitors! If Meta actually were competitors of SimulaVR, it would be easy to show that by hiring an expert to testify that "this service and/or product sold by SimulaVR competes with this other service and/or product sold by Meta". The sort of thing described in…

Don't worry everyone. Wikipedia says MintPress is a conspiratorial website spreading Syrian and Russian disinformation [1]. So even though all the claims in the article can be independently verified (through wikipedia itself [2], or if you go through LinkedIn's login wall), this article can be safely dismissed. It is better to wait for a trustworthy news source, such as the New York Times [3], to verify this. I'm sure they'll get around to it just as soon as they report on the 3-year-old story of Gordon MacMillan, an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit, that was revealed to be the Twitter executive for the Middle East [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristie_Canegallo [3] Why didn’t Snowden go to one of the big names at the Times? Could it be because one of the senior Times editors back then, Dean Baquet — now the chief — reportedly once killed a whistleblower’s story about a surveillance arrangement between AT&T and the NSA? Or because the Times had a history of sitting on damaging intelligence stories, including one about an analyst who doubted the existence of Iraqi WMDs that the paper held until after the 2003 invasion? - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack [4] https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec-as-britis… - Searching "Gordon MacMillan site:url" to this day finds no relevant articles on theguardian.com, bbc.com,…

I don't understand the bit about Taibbi. While he has some background as a general journalist, the overwhelming majority of what he writes these days is opinion work. More or less by definition, he has a perspective that colors his interpretation, and he wants to convince you that he's right. When you say you "trust" a broad news organization I generally expect you mean that you take what they report to be a reasonable representation of the truth and that they aren't hiding things from you or otherwise spinning the interpreation. When you say you "trust" an opinion journalist, really all you mean is that you agree with them[1]. Taibbi doesn't give you the whole story on anything! He gives you his perspective. This is what he wrote yesterday, for example: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/savor-the-great-musk-panic?s=r Now, sure, you might agree with that take. But you wouldn't hand this to your grandpa if he asked what all this stuff he was hearing about The Twitter was about. [1] Personally I find that brand of anti-anti-right leftist journalism really tiring. Taibbi takes shots against the center left that draw eyeballs from people who want to see those libs suffer and in broad service to entities (yes, including the Russian government) that oppose them. I can't think of the last time I saw him write about a problem that I, personally, would like to see solved. Instead he writes about the other problems (some of them legitimate) with people who are trying to solve…

One thing that is maybe missing in this discussion is that this is not a new phenomenon. Greek antiquity had a period of intellectual enlightenment when science became popular enough to rival religion (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura ) then long medieval and dark periods where this was no longer the case. Then a renaissance, many aspects of which were also non lasting. The important thing to realize, especially in democracies is that non intellectuals usually have the most political power and it's the job of the smart to convince them to give support to smart things. This requires bringing common people to science's side instead of making fun of them. Although I enjoyed this movie and the newer one tackling the same themes as comic relief of really sad real world parallel situations, in some ways these movie makes the problem worst. There could be ways to turn a lot of people around to support good causes and to prevent them from falling pray to dangerous manipulators. There are tons of common folks who's views are constantly shifting based on primal emotions and there is no reason they couldn't be shifted towards following science and truth if those who represented those concepts showed more respect. With elections often very close, just a few percentage points could make a huge difference. The people caricatured are often easy to manipulate, not very smart and are often aware they are not very smart. They are often looking for leaders to guide and…

The whole private sector censorship reminds me of a very good piece by Matt Taibbi: > "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies. > Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.” > The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship." https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea

> But there is some, there are formal ethical codices (i.e. see NPR's https://www.npr.org/ethics), there is proper journalism training (see e.g. the Annenberg schools). Publishing a code of ethics means absolutely nothing if it is not followed. For example, NPR’s code of ethics says “We know that truth is not possible without the active pursuit of a diversity of voices, especially those most at risk of being left out.” and “In all our stories, especially matters of controversy, we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity.” but just recently they had a segment where they spent an hour trashing free speech without a single person to argue in favor of free speech. So much for “diversity of voices.” https://taibbi.substack.com/p/npr-trashes-free-speech-a-brief-response > I'd argue that your standards are probably too high. Accountability is a shitshow and virtually nonexistent across the globe. It's a darn lucky situation if you even have some. I’d argue your standards are too low. Just because things are worse elsewhere doesn’t mean we should be content that things aren’t quite as bad here.

"Punching up" is just an excuse for racism. See Matt Taibbi's review of some popular pro-racism books here: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility I recommend watching the excellent BBC documentary World At War (1973) -- You can watch it on Daily Motion (c.f. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3p7c46). They had western reporters interview Nazi officials asking them to explain all the anti-jewish policies, and the answer is basically "We're punching up." They argued that jews were overrepresented and had too much power in German society; "we are merely righting the balance". In fact, if you talk to any racist, they will give you plenty of reasons explaining why the group of people they hate deserve to be hated and that he is merely "righting the balance". Everyone believes they are acting in the name of ultimate justice and that the hated group is deserving of the abuse. So I would recommend some self-reflection before making excuses for hate. None of these excuses are valid, they have all been tried before, and all these ideas such as "punching up" have been discredited since the 40s. Those sympathetic to Hitlerian race theory should not be sources of moral or ethical guidance.

The letter complains about Fox and OANN's partisan and inflammatory rhetoric, with supporting citations to sources on the left who trade heavily in partisan and inflammatory rhetoric. Just three citations in you get to Karen Attiah, Washington Post's Global Opinions Editor: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/29/karen-attiah-washingt… > “White women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s,’ and not calling for revenge,” Ms. Attiah tweeted to her 185,000 followers Sunday evening. > “Non, je ne regrette rien,” she wrote in another tweet, making it clear she had no regrets. Regarding misinformation, Rachel Maddow has suffered no negative consequences for jumping on every Trump-related conspiracy theory to pop up in the last four years: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-rachel-maddow-is-on-the-cover > From there, the floodgates opened. “Commentary television is not news,” snapped David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, himself just days removed from saying on Democracy Now! that “I think [Trump] is a Russian agent.” > He added: “Rachel Maddow in particular has certainly pushed the Mueller matter,” doing so in conjunction with “the facts at the time.” However, he said, her work was “driven by the commercial values of television.” It's fair to say that Maddow has an opinion show, not a news show. But that distinction doesn't seem to matter to the Congresspeople who wrote the letter here--they suggest censoring Fox News, which…

First, I looked up the term "regressive left" and you might want to know your use of the term doesn't match its general usage, which might make it confusing. Secondly, I think you're doing yourself a disservice if you dismiss these voices and are critical of them but not the mainstream pro-Democrat press. Ryan Taibbi, for example, clearly dislikes Trump, but also thinks the Democrats aren't responding to him well[1], which is an interesting perspective to understand if you are anti-Trump. If you are a liberal who fails to incorporate or understand even the criticisms of people who are close to being your allies, you may be less equipped to properly combat Trumpism. Basically, it sounds to me like you are advocating ignoring these people because you disagree with them, which doesn't strike me as the best way to rigorously improve one's political perspective. [1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-trump-era-sucks-and-needs-to

While certainly Greenwald's article could have been improved, this was an opinion piece and it seems clear that his editors wanted not just greater clarity but a different opinion. Using the code review analogy, the editors wanted not just cleaner code, but an entirely different result. As the author of the spec (his own opinion) Greenwald felt this was unwarranted. Had they restricted themselves to helping him better express his preexisting opinion, I don't think he would have "refused to be edited". How do you feel about Matt Taibbi's defense of Greenwald's actions? While "censor" might not be the right word, Taibbi seems to agree with Greenwald that the editors' pushback went far beyond editing for clarity: Finally, when an editor lays out “suggestions” about things that might “help” a piece “be even stronger,” it’s a signal both parties understand about what elements have to be put in before the editor will send the thing through. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/glenn-greenwald-on-his-resignation (I've seen your comments in the other threads, and appreciate your insight)