Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting.
If whenever you mention someone’s good deeds you must also mention their sins then those sins are not forgiven.
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I would rank sexual assaults that happen in real life above such ones as happen in fiction.
Thanks for the read…I agree with your evaluation.
Dunning meets Krueger.
Because you can tolerate ambiguity when the evidence is in?
If you read it not knowing it was satire, and can then identify with someone else identifying with it… that’s not on Taibbi. Is it? What was his responsibility then that translates to this? I don’t get it.
It’s being kind to journalists to say that Taibbi’s story was shown to be true when all the women who worked with them were called up and simply asked about their actual behaviour.
That was done, not by ANY journalist, but by Wall St. whistleblower, Alayne Fleishmann, who presumably has some sympathy for Taibbi as he publicized the destruction of her career for speaking out against financial crimes.
Journalism is just doing research, really, a specialty form of it. And that she could do. None of his colleagues bothered until her twitter posts exposed her data and drew the interest of “Paste Magazine”, which I’m afraid I’d never heard of, and isn’t big enough to show on the first page of Google results for “Matt Taibbi” a week later.
The hit piece in the WaPo, of course, has millions of readers the next day. Many thanks to the former Baltimore Sun journalist in Russia that wrote it, 20 years after all her cheering-on of America’s plundering of Russia, which was what eXile was satirizing. Perhaps the actual Russians who were phoned up should be asked of their feelings about her.
FTFY.
Did they also track down the then underage girl Ames once claimed he took to her prom when he was 34?
Ames described going to the senior prom of an international high school with a 17-year-old date he called his “Jew-broad”; he was 34. Back home she would be “jailbait,” he wrote in the eXile , but Russia “permits sex with a fourteen-year-old, so long as you had reason to believe she was sixteen, the legal statutory age.” A photo shows Ames in the front row with his date.
No harassment eh? Did Kathy Lally and Carol Williams just make it all up?
Speaking of making shit up…
First I sent the memoir’s passage about my tears to Weir, the alleged source for that anecdote. He remembered me. “That is a totally invented conversation,” Weir wrote back. “I can’t recall you ever calling me up in tears or otherwise.” He hadn’t read the book and had no idea that the authors had attributed the tale to him. “If that sounds odd to you,” he said, “just consider how bizarre it is that you yourself are only just bringing it up with me.”
I must admit that I find his critics more credible than Ames, and Lally cites sources that can be checked in her allegations of Ames and Taibbi’s campaign of harassment. I don’t know absolutely who’s telling the truth, but I’m not comfortable accepting Ames’ dismissal that it’s a smear campaign.
I’m sure @doctorow means well and was unaware of the harassment of other journalists or the WaPo article, but he’s backing the wrong horse and hopefully a friend of his will let him know since he refuses to read the comments in this forum.
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Welcome to Boing Boing, comrade.
Oh, right, I forgot that women who allege harassment are to be dismissed out of hand even when they cite sources but bros who began their career with an orgy of misogyny are beyond reproach and their word is gospel. /s
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Nah, unimportant because important men are doing important things that we like… so she’s irrelevant. As usual.
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Women lie, right! /s
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Not guilty. I’m sure all of Lally’s facts are in order, she’s a fine journalist of long experience. But calling an essay a “hit piece” is not dismissing it at all; they can be defined as a report that contains accusatory information but skips all exculpatory information, leaving that to ‘defenders’ in order to stimulate debate.
Lally’s piece fits that description, skipping the research of Alayne Fleishmann, and thus leaving the impression intact that Taibbi/Ames not only engaged in a print-war of insults, but did indeed harass their own fellow employees. Which is fine! Lally published in the opinion section, and she’s under no obligation to be kind to guys who insulted her personally.
My other points were that the exculpatory coverage is almost impossible to find, and the accusations are now in the WaPo, with about a 1000:1 ratio of readers reached by the two pieces of journalism, which “dismisses” nothing; and that the plundering of Russia by Americans, eXile’s main topic, probably caused vastly greater harm to Russia than an ugly insult-war in their English-language newspapers.
As long as I’ve had to come back to prevent words from being stuffed in my mouth, I might as well add that I think Lally is really opening up a new topic of complaint here (not an illegitimate one, but a different one) in that a “flame war” (except in weekly papers, not on the Net) where the “combatants” have never met personally, is not the same thing as physical or even verbal harassment. Even “gamergate” had anonymous attackers and a clear sense of physical threat, which Lally does not describe about this feud. She specifically said her self-image was not touched.
But, there was a huge power differential. That power was exercised by Lally and Williams, cocooned in their respectable big journalism sinecures. Their attackers were a small alternative, left press that Lally and Williams and their colleagues dismissed as untruthful and thought were trafficking in dangerous ideas anyway. Ideas like the Russian economic program following the crash of the Soviet government being an immoral free-for-all, looting consciously abetted by US policy. Ames, et. al. lobbed far more of their juvenile, sometimes satirically made-up, ad hominem attacks at the powerful men in Russia, US and the media involved in that orgy, which is why the Exiled crew ultimately got thrown out of Russia.
Edited:
Right after I finished posting the above, I found out Mark Ames published the below. His words should speak for themselves.
Reading the rest of the thread I just want to say that I often try to call attention to the way that other people have laser focus on one part of an argument without paying attention to how that makes them come across in the full context. Here I think I come across like I’m defending Taibbi’s previous work and defending him against allegations of sexual misconduct.
I liked the Usual Suspects, but I’m not really losing anything important from my life if I choose not to watch any future Kevin Spacey work. I can leave Mel Gibson and Louis CK out of my media diet and that’s fine. The extreme opposite would be if a ragingly misogynist firefighter showed up to pull my kid out of a burning building - I’m not going to turn down their help on principle. The story of Eric Garner’s death and how various forces come together to create the environment in which it happened and to create an environment that would excuse the people who killed him isn’t an immediate life or death situation, but it’s pretty far from a fun movie I can do without seeing as well.
With Spacey I see no balancing considerations at all. Here I do.
So it’s one thing to say “I won’t read Taibbi’s book because I don’t want to support him,” I’m not judging that value system. It’s another thing to say that because he’s done bad things in the past we know the book is not of value. Eric Garner’s story is an important story. I also won’t judge the value system of a person who decides to buy the book, and I definitely wouldn’t judge anyone for putting it on hold at the library.
For me, it’s an easy choice because I don’t read things.
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Wow. I knew in a vague way that American journalists had been cheerleaders for the economic destruction of Russia, but I had no idea it was that bad.
It really is an almost-unknown story, that probably deserves a whole book to be read by all. There were at least a few books about the submissiveness of American media when an administration declares a war, but economic warfare, not so theatrical, and so, not covered.
Now I’m really glad this came up so I could read Mark’s article.
Okay. I still don’t think that the rampant misogyny they employed in their zine was okay, though. I mean, maybe I’m being a little touchy, but even if it was all made up with the intent to satirize American imperialism, why do women have to be the focus of the satire?
It’s a little tedious for that to be the excuse (oh, it’s JUST a joke, it’s ONLY satire, etc) over and over again.
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Read Mark’s reply. The (large) majority of their targets were male.
When Lally wrote that “Taibbi accused a friend of mine” (of taking money to write something positive about an oligarch), she neglected to mention it was a very powerful male, Fred Hiatt, now WaPo editorial page editor. Who published her article when others turned it down.
I did actually. I still don’t find the misogyny acceptable and am disappointed that people here are willing to entirely overlook it as unimportant.
I like much of Taibbi’s work, too. He’s a good writer and he’s written on some important issues. That doesn’t mean that he can’t be criticized for work that he did which was questionable, at best. That shouldn’t get him a pass, however.
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Agreed!
The answer is women shouldn’t have to be the focus of the satire. I’m probably touchy about Ames and some others (not accused) that worked at the Exile. I’m not going to defend their misogynistic satire, even if deployed against the Empire.
I just want it to be properly oriented. Mark Ames, and his defenders, have presented detailed, contrary evidence in a way that is extremely unusual for these cases. Let’s remember, the original accusations were limited to the rape and sex with underage girls as described in the Exiled book itself, and which has been shown to be not true according to the purported victims and other witnesses.
I agree. And it’s not like the 90s were the fucking 40s, and we just didn’t know any better.
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And it’s not like it was not possible to know better in the 40s for that matter.
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