I got online in 1994. Before the dot bomb. Before Amazon. Before Facebook and Twitter. When I started (and started a website) it felt like a wide open world of possibility, where anyone could do anything. I did not know we were headed for a cloistered world of paranoia - worse than a panopticon. I used to love how free the internet was. I think now it has killed off what journalism used to be. All of this to say that what you are proposing here is the first time I've felt that sense of possibility we had back in 1999 with a wild, wild web. You have found a way outside the suffocating trap of media + social media. And once you do that, the possibilities are endless. So thank you. I can't wait to see what comes next.
I am so damn weary of being forced to sift through various sites trying to find non-bullshit news that I've given up. Now there is hope. I am really looking forward to this!
Love it and am into it. I am glad to see you are diving deep into this opportunity and hopefully leading the way for other reputable journalists in the future. Also glad to see you’re having some fun with it! Also I am just a bit upset we didn’t get “Matt Taibbi’s Daily Atrocity” as the name, but, I think your decision is far wiser and maybe that can be a bonus column every now and then :-)
Disagree. I vote for MT's Daily Atrocity, but, as with all of my votes throughout my lifetime of allegedly participating in a democracy, it will probably be unheard; if heard, unloved, un-agreed-with, and dumped in the garbage.
Matt, you are amazing. When I subscribed, I was thoroughly satisfied with your (ir)regularly delivered articles. This is now so much more than I anticipated, and I am thrilled!
$40 a year is very cheap for what you get compared to the MSM trash. I am not an optimistic person by nature, but I think this is the future for readers who want to know what's actually going on and real journalists who need to be fairly compensated for their work.
>> TK is typesetting and journalistic slang for “to come.” Yes, I know the last word is spelled with a “c.”
This is another piece of evidence that Matt is a Russian agent. Do you know who else spells c-starting works with a K? Russian athletes in the Kontinental Hockey League!
one theory behind the term "OK" is that President Zachary Taylor was so close to being illiterate that he would write on documents "OK" for "all correct"
However, my favorite explanation for the origjns of "OK" (which I find most plausible) is that during the American Revolution, French sailors would ask their American paramours to rendezvous them "aux quais"
Where do you get the energy for all this? Love your investigation reports which are mind-boggling - hope you continue on those "too big" to fail problems and keep your sense of humor.
As readers and commenters, we may have a variety of expressive styles, different tolerances for eccentricity, different ideas of what is "useful" or "valueless" or "disruptive", different views of what is informative, entertaining, distracting (or even insulting).
All that is not easily measured -- particularly with emotional and controversial political topics. And, after all, Matt's calling card as a writer is the fearless and forceful use of language and metaphor.
It's Matt's world and he rules. We should comply with any commenting guidelines or hit the road. But they should be specified (to the extent possible) in advance rather than enforced arbitrarily after the fact and without warning.
Who are the bad commenters who deserve to get purged?
My opinion is that the toll-gate weeds out the genuine spam -- people don't generally spend real coin just to troll -- but to each their own belief, I guess.
It's not about purging, in my opinion. It's about developing a community of commenters that reward useful contribution and discourage valueless or disruptive behavior. It's about the ongoing effort to develop critical thinking skills, which is itself a community project.
For example, I asked if Matt Taibbi plans to invest in moderating comments. This in does not at all equate purging people from the comments. It is disingenuous to imply that's what I meant.
For another example, there has already been on Taibbi's comments a deluge of the very well known kinds of worthless self-serving posturing and nastiness that downs out contribution of new information to a article and its discussion. So the paywall clearly doesn't help. Maybe even it makes people feel more justified in clogging the joint with comments that advance no kind of understanding.
The problem is familiar. It takes a lot of effort to improve an established bad culture of negative, nasty, personal comments. It takes much less effort if you start off with a clear show of the standards and culture you expect from your commenters and then perhaps later to relax the moderation.
If Taibbi chooses to invest nothing in moderation then I expect the situation, which on the more commented articles is pretty bad, to not improve by itself.
That's fair, and I admit I overreached with "purging." I apologize to you.
It's that the recent media furor over Twitter and Facebook censorship has left me in a bad humor. I don't like it, but at the same time they are private enterprises to whom no one is compelled to provide their custom. There seems to be a sense abroad in the land that they are public utilities, which they aren't. If Congress wants to go after them on anti-monopoly grounds, great, but I personally despair of Congress ever taking effective action against concentrated capital. Matt has been writing about these issues for years.
I will mildly disagree and say I think the paywall does help. I would much rather give my money to Matt than the NYT or WaPo. I think the quality of the commentariat, insofar as such a thing can be quantified, is higher. I also think trolls provide much of the spice of life, but I'm probably a troll.
But in the past month or so, Matt, on this very site, has expressed concern about that because these so-called "private entreprises" are performing censorship at the behest of various governments.
China is a huge market, and tech companies - and the NBA- are forced to toe the line of the CCP is they have any intention to be able to access this market
I understand the sentiment, I think. At the same time, no one is being coerced to utilize these platforms. I have neither a Facebook nor a Twitter account. There are many other means to communicate with others if one chooses to do so. The "monopoly" power of these social media platforms is directly dependent upon the number of people who choose to participate in them. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for those who succumb to peer pressure in an effort to feel "liked" or "popular," but that's the business model, and it's been a successful one.
It's weird that The New Enemy is China, after American corporations deliberately outsourced manufacturing there for the last 30+ years to exploit cheap labor and increase profits. It was a disaster for the American working class and probably not that great for the Chinese working class. For the last 4 years the mass media told us we were supposed to hate Russia. Before that we were supposed to hate dirt-poor Muslims who had the audacity to fight back when we invaded their countries. Before that we were supposed to hate the Soviet Union, i.e. Russia. Remember that brief period in the late '90s when we were told Serbs were even worse than Russians? Like, the Russians were 8 feet tall, but the Serbs were 10 feet tall. Good times.
When are Americans going to perceive and accept responsibility for the fact that the increasingly miserable quality of life for the vast majority of people in this country is due to our own political leaders capitulating to the demands of domestic financial interests, and not the inscrutable machinations of some all-powerful foreign enemy?
Osama bin Laden was from a wealthy construction family who was close to the Saudi Royal Family.
Khaled Sheik Mohammad is an alumnus of North Carolina A&T. So clearly he was of "means" and could afford to go half way around the world to get a degree.
I went to grad school with an alumnus of North Carolina A&T. She was from Chicago but she CHOSE to go to college half way across the country because it was founded by a "black female farmer". ANd yet when she went to France she was upset that everyone didn't speak English.
So, year, I can see from her how some foreigner going to that school would become "radicalized" and to hate America.
The only country who got invaded was Kuwait, AFTER they were caught stealing oil from Iraq.
Saudi Arabia was afraid that the same thing would happen to thim so they INVITED US Troops to their country to help defend them against Iraq.
The media has selective amnesia and insist on tying 9/11 to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but the explicit manifesto published after 9/11 that it was done in retaliation for having "infidels" in the Holy Land defending it instead of having Muslims defending the Holy Land themselves.
Bin Laden had even tried to overthrow the Saudi Royal Family for that very purpose, for letting Americans have bases in Saudi Arabia.
It's amazing how the media has selectively forgotten about the Khobar Towers bombing and the African embassy bombings. These were as a protest of having American bases in Saudi Arabia, NOT a statement in defense of the Palestinians.
Had we not removed Saddam Hussein from power, we would have continued, probably to this day, have US bases in Saudi Arabia to enforce the No-Fly Zones and thus our troops would have continued to be under attack from the forces that wanted us out of Saudi Arabia.
Once Hussein was deposed and our bases were abandoned, al Qaeda's original complaint was moot and then and only then did they embrace the "Palestinians".
And all we heard from the Left was "No Blood for Oil". But what oil? Why didn't we just take the oil, since we lost blood there?
(Thanks to Trump. we don't need the oil because we are now energy independent AND carbon emissions are down to 1985 levels)
And WHO were the Taliban?? The Taliban were the sons of the Muhajadeen who stayed behind to study the Koran while their daddies were off fighting the big bad Soviets. In other words, they are a bunch of egghead bookworms, who think that they know how everyone should run their lives better than anyone else did because they "studied".
Can you can say "Faculty of Harvard"?
Remember William F. Buckley, Jr.'s a propos comment?
"I would rather be governed by the first 100 names out of the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard"
And look at the previous Administrtion. Elizabeth Warren, Austin Goolsby. Richard Summers. The faculty of Harvard. THESE are the "American Taliban". The Egghead class.
"When are Americans going to perceive and accept responsibility for the fact that the increasingly miserable quality of life for the vast majority of people in this country is due to our own political leaders capitulating to the demands of domestic financial interests"
That's exactly why Trump was elected. His election in 2016 proved that the era of the donor class was over. Liberals have spent the last four years trying to say that Trump was "giving away money to his millionaire and billionaire donors" because they have not updated their playbook or their talking points.
Trump spent much less than his opponent and still won, proving that he didn't need their money and therefore wasn't beholden to them. The same applies to the Senate races in Kentucky and South Carolina that the liberals poured money into. When you have the pulse of the voters and are of a common mindset with them, donations really do not matter.
And clearly, it is now about the demands of Venezuelan Communists are are counting the votes.
Sorry if this sounds disjointed. There wasn't really a linear progression to get all my points in
The potential of this project is so, so exciting. I'm already reading through some of it right now. What the industry needs now more than ever is an injection of this kind of independent spirit. I'm waiting for the day a story in here inevitably becomes an international must-read and journalists realize they don't have to do things like they used to. Maybe we actually can turn this thing around. Thanks for all you do, Matt.
By the way, the tier I would've paid to sit in on that Tim Dillon x Matt Taibbi Zoom call...
I got online in 1994. Before the dot bomb. Before Amazon. Before Facebook and Twitter. When I started (and started a website) it felt like a wide open world of possibility, where anyone could do anything. I did not know we were headed for a cloistered world of paranoia - worse than a panopticon. I used to love how free the internet was. I think now it has killed off what journalism used to be. All of this to say that what you are proposing here is the first time I've felt that sense of possibility we had back in 1999 with a wild, wild web. You have found a way outside the suffocating trap of media + social media. And once you do that, the possibilities are endless. So thank you. I can't wait to see what comes next.
I am so damn weary of being forced to sift through various sites trying to find non-bullshit news that I've given up. Now there is hope. I am really looking forward to this!
I am going to be reading the fuck out of all of this.
Love it and am into it. I am glad to see you are diving deep into this opportunity and hopefully leading the way for other reputable journalists in the future. Also glad to see you’re having some fun with it! Also I am just a bit upset we didn’t get “Matt Taibbi’s Daily Atrocity” as the name, but, I think your decision is far wiser and maybe that can be a bonus column every now and then :-)
Disagree. I vote for MT's Daily Atrocity, but, as with all of my votes throughout my lifetime of allegedly participating in a democracy, it will probably be unheard; if heard, unloved, un-agreed-with, and dumped in the garbage.
Matt, you are amazing. When I subscribed, I was thoroughly satisfied with your (ir)regularly delivered articles. This is now so much more than I anticipated, and I am thrilled!
$40 a year is very cheap for what you get compared to the MSM trash. I am not an optimistic person by nature, but I think this is the future for readers who want to know what's actually going on and real journalists who need to be fairly compensated for their work.
thanks for the in depth update Matt!
love all of this. THANK YOU MATT!!
>> TK is typesetting and journalistic slang for “to come.” Yes, I know the last word is spelled with a “c.”
This is another piece of evidence that Matt is a Russian agent. Do you know who else spells c-starting works with a K? Russian athletes in the Kontinental Hockey League!
one theory behind the term "OK" is that President Zachary Taylor was so close to being illiterate that he would write on documents "OK" for "all correct"
However, my favorite explanation for the origjns of "OK" (which I find most plausible) is that during the American Revolution, French sailors would ask their American paramours to rendezvous them "aux quais"
Hah. It's like you coming into our houses loaded down with presents and saying, ”I hope you don't mind these packages are taking up so much room”
This increased value is wonderful. Thanks.
Where do you get the energy for all this? Love your investigation reports which are mind-boggling - hope you continue on those "too big" to fail problems and keep your sense of humor.
Incredibly witty and sarcastic comment TK
Fantastic! Can't wait. Thanks, Matt.
Excellent, just in time
Well, this is a pleasant surprise.
I like the sound of it!
Do you plan to invest in moderating comments? I'd pay more if you did.
Developing a capable, positive commentariate, as for example on NC or War Nerd, pays back big time.
As readers and commenters, we may have a variety of expressive styles, different tolerances for eccentricity, different ideas of what is "useful" or "valueless" or "disruptive", different views of what is informative, entertaining, distracting (or even insulting).
All that is not easily measured -- particularly with emotional and controversial political topics. And, after all, Matt's calling card as a writer is the fearless and forceful use of language and metaphor.
It's Matt's world and he rules. We should comply with any commenting guidelines or hit the road. But they should be specified (to the extent possible) in advance rather than enforced arbitrarily after the fact and without warning.
Who are the bad commenters who deserve to get purged?
My opinion is that the toll-gate weeds out the genuine spam -- people don't generally spend real coin just to troll -- but to each their own belief, I guess.
It's not about purging, in my opinion. It's about developing a community of commenters that reward useful contribution and discourage valueless or disruptive behavior. It's about the ongoing effort to develop critical thinking skills, which is itself a community project.
For example, I asked if Matt Taibbi plans to invest in moderating comments. This in does not at all equate purging people from the comments. It is disingenuous to imply that's what I meant.
For another example, there has already been on Taibbi's comments a deluge of the very well known kinds of worthless self-serving posturing and nastiness that downs out contribution of new information to a article and its discussion. So the paywall clearly doesn't help. Maybe even it makes people feel more justified in clogging the joint with comments that advance no kind of understanding.
The problem is familiar. It takes a lot of effort to improve an established bad culture of negative, nasty, personal comments. It takes much less effort if you start off with a clear show of the standards and culture you expect from your commenters and then perhaps later to relax the moderation.
If Taibbi chooses to invest nothing in moderation then I expect the situation, which on the more commented articles is pretty bad, to not improve by itself.
That's fair, and I admit I overreached with "purging." I apologize to you.
It's that the recent media furor over Twitter and Facebook censorship has left me in a bad humor. I don't like it, but at the same time they are private enterprises to whom no one is compelled to provide their custom. There seems to be a sense abroad in the land that they are public utilities, which they aren't. If Congress wants to go after them on anti-monopoly grounds, great, but I personally despair of Congress ever taking effective action against concentrated capital. Matt has been writing about these issues for years.
I will mildly disagree and say I think the paywall does help. I would much rather give my money to Matt than the NYT or WaPo. I think the quality of the commentariat, insofar as such a thing can be quantified, is higher. I also think trolls provide much of the spice of life, but I'm probably a troll.
In theory, yes.
But in the past month or so, Matt, on this very site, has expressed concern about that because these so-called "private entreprises" are performing censorship at the behest of various governments.
China is a huge market, and tech companies - and the NBA- are forced to toe the line of the CCP is they have any intention to be able to access this market
I understand the sentiment, I think. At the same time, no one is being coerced to utilize these platforms. I have neither a Facebook nor a Twitter account. There are many other means to communicate with others if one chooses to do so. The "monopoly" power of these social media platforms is directly dependent upon the number of people who choose to participate in them. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for those who succumb to peer pressure in an effort to feel "liked" or "popular," but that's the business model, and it's been a successful one.
It's weird that The New Enemy is China, after American corporations deliberately outsourced manufacturing there for the last 30+ years to exploit cheap labor and increase profits. It was a disaster for the American working class and probably not that great for the Chinese working class. For the last 4 years the mass media told us we were supposed to hate Russia. Before that we were supposed to hate dirt-poor Muslims who had the audacity to fight back when we invaded their countries. Before that we were supposed to hate the Soviet Union, i.e. Russia. Remember that brief period in the late '90s when we were told Serbs were even worse than Russians? Like, the Russians were 8 feet tall, but the Serbs were 10 feet tall. Good times.
When are Americans going to perceive and accept responsibility for the fact that the increasingly miserable quality of life for the vast majority of people in this country is due to our own political leaders capitulating to the demands of domestic financial interests, and not the inscrutable machinations of some all-powerful foreign enemy?
Uh.. they weren't "dirt -poor" Muslims.
Osama bin Laden was from a wealthy construction family who was close to the Saudi Royal Family.
Khaled Sheik Mohammad is an alumnus of North Carolina A&T. So clearly he was of "means" and could afford to go half way around the world to get a degree.
I went to grad school with an alumnus of North Carolina A&T. She was from Chicago but she CHOSE to go to college half way across the country because it was founded by a "black female farmer". ANd yet when she went to France she was upset that everyone didn't speak English.
So, year, I can see from her how some foreigner going to that school would become "radicalized" and to hate America.
The only country who got invaded was Kuwait, AFTER they were caught stealing oil from Iraq.
Saudi Arabia was afraid that the same thing would happen to thim so they INVITED US Troops to their country to help defend them against Iraq.
The media has selective amnesia and insist on tying 9/11 to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but the explicit manifesto published after 9/11 that it was done in retaliation for having "infidels" in the Holy Land defending it instead of having Muslims defending the Holy Land themselves.
Bin Laden had even tried to overthrow the Saudi Royal Family for that very purpose, for letting Americans have bases in Saudi Arabia.
It's amazing how the media has selectively forgotten about the Khobar Towers bombing and the African embassy bombings. These were as a protest of having American bases in Saudi Arabia, NOT a statement in defense of the Palestinians.
Had we not removed Saddam Hussein from power, we would have continued, probably to this day, have US bases in Saudi Arabia to enforce the No-Fly Zones and thus our troops would have continued to be under attack from the forces that wanted us out of Saudi Arabia.
Once Hussein was deposed and our bases were abandoned, al Qaeda's original complaint was moot and then and only then did they embrace the "Palestinians".
And all we heard from the Left was "No Blood for Oil". But what oil? Why didn't we just take the oil, since we lost blood there?
(Thanks to Trump. we don't need the oil because we are now energy independent AND carbon emissions are down to 1985 levels)
And WHO were the Taliban?? The Taliban were the sons of the Muhajadeen who stayed behind to study the Koran while their daddies were off fighting the big bad Soviets. In other words, they are a bunch of egghead bookworms, who think that they know how everyone should run their lives better than anyone else did because they "studied".
Can you can say "Faculty of Harvard"?
Remember William F. Buckley, Jr.'s a propos comment?
"I would rather be governed by the first 100 names out of the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard"
And look at the previous Administrtion. Elizabeth Warren, Austin Goolsby. Richard Summers. The faculty of Harvard. THESE are the "American Taliban". The Egghead class.
"When are Americans going to perceive and accept responsibility for the fact that the increasingly miserable quality of life for the vast majority of people in this country is due to our own political leaders capitulating to the demands of domestic financial interests"
That's exactly why Trump was elected. His election in 2016 proved that the era of the donor class was over. Liberals have spent the last four years trying to say that Trump was "giving away money to his millionaire and billionaire donors" because they have not updated their playbook or their talking points.
Trump spent much less than his opponent and still won, proving that he didn't need their money and therefore wasn't beholden to them. The same applies to the Senate races in Kentucky and South Carolina that the liberals poured money into. When you have the pulse of the voters and are of a common mindset with them, donations really do not matter.
And clearly, it is now about the demands of Venezuelan Communists are are counting the votes.
Sorry if this sounds disjointed. There wasn't really a linear progression to get all my points in
The potential of this project is so, so exciting. I'm already reading through some of it right now. What the industry needs now more than ever is an injection of this kind of independent spirit. I'm waiting for the day a story in here inevitably becomes an international must-read and journalists realize they don't have to do things like they used to. Maybe we actually can turn this thing around. Thanks for all you do, Matt.
By the way, the tier I would've paid to sit in on that Tim Dillon x Matt Taibbi Zoom call...