I Can't Breathe: Matt Taibbi's scorching book on the murder of Eric Garner and the system that let the killers get away with it

boing
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Thanks. We’re in substantial agreement, I believe, since I hardly “entirely overlook” their sins. They’ve both apologized profusely, for what that’s worth, and I think both are going to suffer financially.

I only noticed this issue (which I think their worst detractors will admit was rightly overshadowed by Roy Moore news, etc) because a funny and informative podcast by MT and Alex Pareene was shut down when I’d just discovered it and started paying $5/month for it. Matt didn’t want Alex getting hurt by the association.

I’d had some thin hopes of seeing them relax and re-start it when the Lally piece on the huge WaPo platform pretty much ended those hopes for good. I feel the poorer for it, but they, more so - if they had even 1000 subscribers, (admittedly, I have no idea), they’re losing $60K/year between them, for years going forward.

So that’s some punishment at least! Surely some sort of disincentive for others to follow in those particular “gonzo-journalism”(?) footsteps…

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I’ve been reading this stuff and Ames is… well not looking good in the exchange. He might not like that he is in the wrong, and Lally (and her peers) quality of journalism was certainly worth lampooning - but his rant here starts with some easily discredited statements in favor of the kind hyperbole that is the reason The eXile looks bad in hindsight.

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I’d wager it is to most people, and most would read your qualification as back-peddling. But I’ll accept on face value that you meant it non-dismissively. Only you’ll really ever know for sure.

It’s the harassment of other journalists through damning false quotes that concerns me. If the women in the eXile’s own workplace said the harassment of them depicted by Taibbi and Ames in their zine was fictional, I’m not going to dismiss Taibbi’s current journalism on having poor taste in what’s satire. But I have yet to hear how Alayne Fleishmann’s research (feel free to link to it BTW) exculpates them from harassing their critics. And I’m not talking about their disgusting antics like Fat Ankle News. I’m talking about lying about what Kathy Lally, Fred Weir and Carol Williams (at least) said.

For me it’s a question of credibility. The allegations that Taibbi and Ames made up quotes from Lally and other journalists in order to attack them in the press (be it a zine or a mainstream paper) makes me think there are better advocates for the BLM movement and Eric Garner.

Nor I, but anyone who does should have the full scope of information at their disposal to make an informed choice. To that end, I appreciate @Heraclito providing the link to Ames attempt to defend his actions and I would like to read Fleishmann’s research to see if it does indeed demonstrate that the invented quotes were not after all invented.

According to Lally, they invented quotes from their critics to smear them. That’s more than an insult. Someone is lying. The quotes can’t be both true and not true at the same time.

Moreover, fighting for a good cause isn’t license for harassment, as Al Franken recently learned the hard way.

Comparing harassment to worse harassment doesn’t change either. Harassment isn’t graded on a curve.

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Actually, I’m going to have to apologize and withdraw the “hit piece” term. I honestly thought it was defined as I said, and was different from “smear” which is also adversarial but uses lies, exaggerations, and out-of-context quotes. But at least some web-dictionary definitions say “hit piece” is taken a us indicating falsehood, so “smear” and “hit piece” would appear to be redundant terms. May I substitute “J’Accuse”? The original was a strongly-worded condemnation that was basically accurate. Thank you for making me look it up, I can avoid “hit piece” in the future…unless it’s a smear.

Certainly I can provide links:

Fleischmann, not having a journalistic platform, used twitter:

But her work was presented in an article at something called “Paste Magazine” that I’ve never heard of, and isn’t big enough to appear in a google on Taibbi:

Her twitter images do highlight an interesting point that I expect to be dismissed as irrelevant: the “hit” effort started with Mike Cernovich, a terrible alt-right trolley.

Alt-righters who dredge up muck about those they see as “SJW” or whatever, will definitely find eager helpers among their normal opponents, (as here). But journalists who highlight ugly past deeds of right-wingers will get nowhere. This creates an inequality in journalism much like Franken-vs-Moore. I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot fewer “alt-right-haters” in journalism in another year or two. I hope the alt-right victory is temporary.

Franken is being replaced by a perfectly good and effective female politician, and I suppose there are past-free equivalents of Taibbi out there who will take his place and have their journalism more respected. (By folks like us, at least, since they won’t be respected by Mike Cernovich even if they come straight from a convent.)

I’m not complaining; this is just tough crap for those of us who hate Mike Cernovich.

“Comparing harassment to worse harassment doesn’t change either. Harassment isn’t graded on a curve.”

And there we differ. Strongly. I won’t even attack that statement, I don’t think I have to. Speaking of your phrase “I’d wager it is to most people”…

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I’m not sure an apology is really necessary, but accepted all the same and thank you for admitting the misnomer.

If you assume I’m that closed-minded, then why are you bothering engaging? Anyway, no, I don’t think they’re irrelevant. I think they’re part of this story.

Um, no. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy.

Not to drift off-topic, but if we hold our allies to a lower standard for present strategic advantage, it will be to our ultimate detriment. The Minnesotans who voted for Franken aren’t going to vote for a Republican because Franken disgraced himself. Now they can vote for a Democrat more worthy of representing them.

I agree with Maher. What Franken did wasn’t as as bad as Moore. But it was still bad and it’s entirely possible to hold him accountable without drawing a false equivalence between the two.

That’s my belief.

Cernovich is scum.

Your prerogative. I suspect this reveals a divide in our deontology. While a discussion of the divide might be fruitful, I think it would derail the thread entirely and so we should indeed agree to disagree on that for the time being.

I would however hope that your goal in general is to debate with me, not attack me. I personally have no interest in anything other than a good faith discussion to get at the truth. Winning arguments on the internet is a waste of time, bandwidth and electricity.

The more I read of that site, the worse everyone involved comes out looking. Based on Fleischmann’s tweet, Lally does seem to have been dishonestly selective in her WaPo article, and her Russia reporting appears to have been neocolonialist at best. When he’s not writing excuses for his behavior, the writing of Mark Ames is downright septic.

The supposed transcript is either true or not, and it’s his word against hers. I don’t know if I trust Lally’s account, but I trust Ames less. I might be more inclined to give Taibbi a second chance if he denounced his association with Ames, because Ames isn’t really apologizing, and he seems downright proud of his eXile tactics simply because unjust people opposed him. But being against injustice is no guarantee of being for justice. Just because you’re a leftist doesn’t mean that transgressing human decency (through misogyny, bullying and childish pranks) is the same as creating a transgressive left. Transgressive left doesn’t mean being an asshole who excuses one’s means by appealing to one’s ends.

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Sorry, I wasn’t engaging with you specifically, this is a public discussion, everything is a shout into the wind. I meant that nobody, who wants to remain scientific, discredits truth just because it comes from a detestable source. It’s still truth.

In practice this means that Jezebel, the first non-alt-right forum to bring this up, basically saluted Mike Cernovich and did his bidding. That’s a harsh way to put it, but the fact is that Cernovich can count on this reaction and move accordingly, and will continue to. Expect more.

We should indeed table the discussion of whether one should cut people a break for “community service” as it were, like a judge giving a suspended sentence to a war hero. In the long run, you need to purge; I just admit I’m pained by the price. All of Taibbi’s journalism could be characterized as highlighting the exploitation of the weak by the strong, be they banks or cops; surely there’s at least irony in his elimination on the charge of using male privilege to attack a person without it.

The digression I can’t stop, is agonizing over what term I should have used. I remember where I got my use of “hit piece” now: student journalist, U.Calgary paper, “The Gauntlet”, 1979. The editor used it extensively when asking for hard-hitting editorials, which he liked to be fact-filled rather than opinion-filled, “but the facts can be all on your side; they can send in their own editorial”. (Even then, journalism loved conflict.) A piece that is not dishonest but entirely one-sided. I’m not sure if it was just his way of using the term, or if the meaning has changed in 40 years.

Both “polemic” and “jeremiad” have connotations of mostly being opinions, and my “J’Accuse” I’d probably have to explain too often. So I’m at a loss.

As a final digression, I love your Alfie Bester reference.

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Journalistic credibility however is built on character. Ames seems to have none. Taibbi might, but I’d like to know what he thinks of Ames’s defense of their tactics.

The carelessness of media outlets, however, does’t change the truth, it just makes it harder to uncover. Ames still doens’t get a pass and Taibbi has some work to do to distance himself from the eXile. While people will be judged by the company they keep, I don’t think associating with an asshole like Ames at age 20 should damn Taibbi’s career. It’s good Taibbi has said he’s not proud of his eXile tactics. But if he stays silent on Ames’s defense of those same tactics, whether it’s out of friendship or something else, he owns that association. Disowning Ames is something Taibbi has the power to do any time he wants.

If it bleeds, it reads is an age-old problem.

Polemic would be my term of choice just because I feel it has the most contemporary currency and thus would have the best chance of being understand as meant. For example, back when I bothered, when people would sign up here to accuse Cory Doctorow of bad journalism, I’d point out that he isn’t a journalist but rather a polemicist. Which is not to say that a person can’t write both.

Grazie.

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Now I have to reply to my OWN damn post. Perhaps I’m wrong on the “there is a difference between bad and worse” issue:

…it apparently being an unacceptable opinion of Matt Damon’s that there’s a “spectrum”.

My suspicion remains that after a number of women with experience in categorizing crimes (women judges, prosecutors) have offered opinions on the subject, some spectrum of punishment will arise, at least. Women judges make their living giving one guy community service for giving a black eye and another 3 months for breaking a nose.

But it’s entirely possible that the minimum punishment - the equivalent of a suspended sentence - will be that you never work in journalism again. Or movies, or dentistry, or whatever. No apologies are acceptable, no good deeds compensate. Out. Period.

We’ll see over the next few years; clearly, men must sit back and await the decision.

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So, once again, unless it’s a violent rape where there is absolutely no chance that the victim might have brought it on themselves, and we can’t ever speak up, for fear of a guy who ONLY patted a woman on her butt might have to face consequences…

powerpuff-girls-mojo-oppressed

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The judgement of the State through Law and Court is restrictive. It can be, should be and is constrained by broadly interpreted rights.

One of those rights the right to associate or not with other citizens, including the right to divest, shun and ostracize. You don’t have to like it and you’re free to speak out against it, but equating the judgement of public opinion to the judgement of the State is simply factually incorrect. The US is a constitutionally-limited representative democratic republic. We in the US do not live in a direct democracy (thank the founding fathers). Public opprobrium resulting in losing career status within industry is not equivalent to State punishment. And if I sound a little short, it’s because that same fallacy is trotted out every. single. time. there’s a discussion about the court of public opinion.

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OMG ! There is so much poison, today, that you thought that was sarcasm.

No. When I said, Damon’s opinion was “unacceptable”, I used quotes to say it was her opinion, not mine. But that does not mean not ACCEPTING this situation.

I do accept it. It is women’s call, and, yup, like Damon, I simply didn’t see that this is how most(?) women see it, that so-called “small” affronts are taken just as seriously. Accepting that is a seismic shift, a joke I’ll explain later.

But that post was intended to accept it. There’s so much nastiness going on here that I should have been way more explicit that it was not sarcastic.

This is not a legal process; it’s not a political fight, it’s the very opposite of political correctness - it’s a change in the culture, like divorce becoming OK. (Female suicide rate plummeted.) It requires huge majority, thus, not 50.1%. Agreement from women that it is being addressed must be really high, so a high bar is needed - but I posted the story about Damon to admit I’d just been flatly contradicted by an eye-rolling celebrity saying of course I was wrong on the spectrum-of-seriousness issue.

I disagree, but I must defer. If my/Damon’s opinions are that clueless, we actually do have to defer, and shut up, and sit back. Honestly.

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Well then why did you compare it to one?

Look, I really want to believe you didn’t just sign up here to trolley us. But the way you’re coming across is jumping between hostility, civility and astonished claims that you’re misunderstood. In short you’re tone is really confusing.

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I compared it to one because we have no other mechanisms to compare. There are established legal cases about sexual harassment, people with experience in a variety of complaints. If the new cultural standards must be developed by women (not just signed-off-on), I would say that women with experience in that previous process still have the most subject-matter-area experience. I suspect that their voices will be most-listened-to by other women because of their experience. But whom “other women” listen to is not my call, again. Just my guess.

I’m slowly realizing something from your references to “trolling us” and “hostility” and so on. I’ve been assuming I was posting to the entirety of a forum, discussing ideas; but you write as if I had been addressing the person-replied-to only and arguing with them. Nastily. Not intended.

As to shifts in the last few posts, I thought last time I was clear: I posted an opinion, ran about ten minutes later into evidence it was so wrong as to be stupid-sounding, and went back, yes, with some astonishment I must confess, to say that had to be accepted as wrong. That I don’t agree that it is wrong, still, but I do accept it.

That “seismic shift” is a joke needs a whole blog page to explain, but I’ll try the very short version and maybe do that blog page at brander.ca sometime later. As briefly as possible, it smacked me in the face that I have another power law here, and one could prove -mathematically- that Matt Damon (and I) were wrong. Look up “power law”. There are 10X as many Richter 5 earthquakes as Richter 6. But each Richter 6 releases 10X the energy of a Richter 5. This applies all the way up and down. There is just as much energy release from the million daily Richter 1 earthquakes, in a century, as from the one Richter 9 every century.

So it hits me that the total cultural damage from all “levels” of harassment and assault are the same. There’s just as much damage from gross looks and remarks as from physical contacts, because so many more of them.

I can NOW see that because of a career working with stats, I just had to see the problem from the right angle. But Damon’s critics saw it intuitively from experience. Which means men will always miss something, and we really should shut up.

I went through that realization - today, here, posting pretty much in real time. Badly, mostly. Probably again now, I’m missing dessert, so I won’t even edit. Sorry.

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I’m in complete agreement. That was my point about this being a cultural shift that is not about laws - at least mainly. Changes to law may come out of the cultural shift, over time, as things formerly not called crimes will be. (More likely, the existing language in legislation will be more-broadly interpreted.)

I mean that Taibbi may well find his book sales plummet, calls for him to be dismissed by Rolling Stone, etc - just as you said, the community can have its own standards that far exceed the law. As I noted, “a shift like divorce being ok”. You could get one legally long before you could get one and not be ostracized.

Yes, this may happen; there could be very much higher standards insisted upon in short order.

Or, not, and just a gradual shift in standards: stuff that was let slide will get criticism, stuff that got criticism will get firing/ostracization, and so on up.

Whether the cultural shift is revolutionary or evolutionary is going to be up to women, and men should just support their call and, I’ve just learned, not even offer input: it’s seen as so biased as to be stupid, which I learned today. (Also, I just briefed my wife on this, and she agrees on both points: that Matt Damon is not all wrong, and that he and I should shut up anyway, because attempts at input are counterproductive.)

Evolutionary is always easier, but progress is not always easy, famously:

“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

…if the loss of Matt Taibbi’s contributions is needed for a real, effective, permanent change on this issue, well, that’s how it will have to be. The “power law” theory I espoused says the smallest of offenses are the most common, injuring (nearly?) all women, and often. Which we already knew! But I wasn’t seeing the full implications.

Maybe the way to stop the small offenses is with small penalties, that’s the “Damon theory”, I guess; but maybe the way to stop it is with draconian penalties. And that’s what men should stop the input on, as well as questions like what “small” and “large” offenses even are.

In sum, I showed up here today on the theory that:

a) insults in print from a tabloid against a more-powerful journalist, even if they did use misogyny, are a lesser offense that sexual harassment in the office, and so

b) deserved lesser cultural penalties, i.e. apologies, retractions, shaming, not book boycotts - which is what some posters were calling for.

But whether I’ve changed my opinion on that, is irrelevant next to the realization that I should not have spoken up on the matter at all, I should have listened; that this input is not (cannot be) taken as helpful or welcome.

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There’s clearly been a breakdown in communication. I wish you well and am glad you’re focusing on listening to women and survivors. That’s something we can agree on is a goal we all as men can worthily embrace.

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