13 Comments
Sep 13, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

Man, I’m so hyped! Few people can dissect this stuff app gloriously while still being fucking hilarious. Because with Matt’s work, we laugh AND we learn.

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Sep 13, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

Wow! I've never read MC, but I'm totally down with it's premise. Sounds like a great project and adds real value to this subscription. Thank you.

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Sep 13, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

Couldn’t be a better subject on the heels of TBSDD than this one. Looking forward to it Matt and looking forward to that reverse Anonymous interview.

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Sep 15, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

Excellent idea for the new book. Very timely as well. Really enjoyed the Dealing book. Funny, but serialized format had me reading the story faster than I would have in book form. I was eagerly awaiting the next installment. Like the serialized days of yore, what’s old is new again. Thanks and looking forward to the next one.

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Sep 15, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

Legal operations having to sell diseased product illegally was was eye both opening and disappointing in “Business Secrets.” It showed the double edge of regulation well. I’m staying tuned for sure and excited to read the “MC” revisit.

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Sep 14, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

I applaud your decision, it is extremely timely, given that the pre and post election Fiasco has saturated everyone to the point of nausea.

With regards to Anonymous, I know that the story has been told in it's b strokes but if you can coax a couple of vignettes out of him, it would be appreciated by all.

for example, when we were trimming in Mendocino, we had a colleague that was apprehended by the CHP for smelling the wrong way, and unfortunately not only did he have a couple of pounds in the back of his car, he had a baggie full of mushrooms which in turn had a few bindles of cocaine stuck with in it.

once he and the evidence were in the back of the CHP vehicle, due to a BMX accident when he was young he was able to dislocate his thumb pull his hand out of the handcuffs reach one handed behind the seat, undo the turkey bag full of weed, and find and consume the bindles of cocaine.

After we bailed him out of the clinker, within 12 hours, we saw nothing of him but a pink flash as he was running it off in the Hills nearby. since this was Harvest time we almost started a Deadpool with regards to his fate whether you would drop dead of heat stroke, heart attack, or a paranoid farmer shooting him.

at the end of the day he stood in the kitchen after all the work has been done, and I was able to offer him the last few ounces of whiskey that were in the bottle...

🤣

That kind of thing, I'm sure he has tons of them...

Cheers

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Sep 13, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

Thank you, Matt. I found Manufacturing Consent quite enlightening and hold Noam Chomsky in extremely high regard so really looking forward to your new project.

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Sep 13, 2018Liked by Matt Taibbi

Awesome Matt. Media propaganda is completely out of control. It's so rare to see investigative reporting or anyone questioning the status quo. Also now on the internet it seems like 99% of the media reporting is a report that someone else reported something.

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Thank you for writing this. For years, I’ve been troubled by how news media has evolved, without being able to put words to it. Since the mid nineties (when I came of age), I’ve felt like a horse being led to water. I was baffled that so many of my peers seemed unaware of their halters, and were so happy to drink.

Over the last two decades in particular, I’ve watched in bafflement as “news” drifted further and further from the hypothetical bedrock of objectivity and fact. I questioned my perception as the stories I was presented seemed to slide deeper into speculation and narrative, opinion dressed up in the thin veneer of “truthiness”, seemingly unnoticed by others. Was I biased by an unacknowledged cynicism? Was I, in short, paranoid with respect to what the media presented as reality?

Over the last four years this shift has seemed to accelerate. Paired with Trump’s unrelenting crusade against “fake news”, anyone questioning the veracity of the platter of insinuation and suggestion placed before us was deemed a “Trumpkin” and dismissed as a loon.

With this book you’ve shone a light under the bed. It turns out the the monster IS real. Now, however, I know it’s face. I can defend against this. It less daunting the the subtle terror of the unknown and incomprehensible danger hiding in the dark.

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Hey Matt, i"ve just started this thing and i'm happy to know that i'm also getting "The Business Dealings" book. Great bonus. i've read all your stuff with Rolling Buzz and Griftopia along with other things by you. i'm currently renting a house from a company Home Partners, Inc.

As it happens they are a horrible company to deal with. As i was talking to a member of their management team, she said that the parent company was owned by Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase. Well, the reason that we are renting is because our house was basically stolen by Jamie Diamond and JP fucking Morgan Chase. And you probably have plenty of subjects to look into, but something is VERY fishy about this set-up. If i'm not pissin up a rope here, i'd love to get your take on this shitty business.

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Matt -- I'm finding the Fairway to be BRILLIANT so far. It's a book we really need to make sense of the Trump era. I keep wanting to send it to friends and professional contacts, but it's hard to do in the Substack format. Are you going to find a mainstream publisher for this and get it out more broadly? This is a book that needs to be as public as possible!

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I welcome the prospects of your new project intended to follow up the Chomsky & Herman book “Manufacturing Consent”. I have been an avid follower of Chomsky going back nearly 50 years when he appeared with William Buckley on Firing Line April 1969, an occasion now called Buckley Chomsky Debate “Vietnam and the Intellectuals”. Your account of how Chomsky’s book affected you resonated with me as I recalled my own encounter with the concept of “power” through the reading of Gaventa “Power and Powerlessness” (1982) ,Michael Foucault “Punish & Discipline: the Birth of the Prison”, and Antonio Gramsci “Prison Notebooks”. Propaganda and hegemonic discourse are tools in the service of power. Given that background, the riveting debate between Chomsky and Foucault in 1971 remains fresh and timely especially today. If we throw in some McChesney, “The Problem of the Media” and a touch of Neil Postman “Amusing Ourselves to Death” one can begin to get a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Despite the complexity of modernity and the myriad explanations of how we got here, aided or not by mainstream media/ press coverage, for me, like the answer to the infinite regress problem, “it’s turtles (power) all the way down”.

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