Scott is one of the most successful and prolific bloggers of all
time. I assume he’s just an extreme genetic outlier in certain ways and
writing is something he gets way more out of than he puts in.
I guess the last part is true, he puts in zero effort and gets paid
unseemly amounts of money.
Some interminable acx post or another. Supposedly he got offered a deal to either take the flat fee and only part of the subscription fees for that year, and he was lamenting that he'd have been better off choosing to be paid only the subscriptions in full.
When substack was starting out their business model was basically to try to get all the 'cancelled' people in one place, so paying prominent people was probably par for the course. I started checking out acx to see what the fuss was about with some psychiatrist blogger getting doxxed by the times, so it must have been quite a while ago.
Taibbi's heel turn continually depresses me because he was *so* good. I've been reading him since the eXile days, and he seemed to be an excellent communicator of systemic issues that are otherwise ignored by the media as "too complex."
**edit: the below commenters have provided important context which calls into question the allegations made here. Be sure to read and make up your own mind. Egg, meet face**
Yeah it‘s a shame he was a, self professed, serial sexual harasser and abuser. It only came to light in \*checks notes\* 2000, so I could understand why his selling out to right wing causes has garnered more controversy.
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-taibbi-idUSKBN1CX0QC](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-taibbi-idUSKBN1CX0QC)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/comments/4s1tdh/matt\_taibbi\_and\_mark\_ames\_are\_serial\_rapists/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/comments/4s1tdh/matt_taibbi_and_mark_ames_are_serial_rapists/)
The guy has always been a prick, he just happened to be a prick that could read the room and pandered to the left so it was acceptable.
Taibbi [said](https://pastebin.com/zmiDeNLm) that the sexual harrassment/abuse stuff in The eXile was tasteless fiction that he regrets in retrospect, and an [investigation](https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/matt-taibbi/the-destruction-of-matt-taibbi) showed that in the case of The eXile stories involving named women who worked there, they all confirmed the stories were wholly fictional. No one who knew him came forward with any actual accusations.
I agree Taibbi has taken a heel turn in other ways, especially on trans issues and also in the way he completely acquiesced to Elon Musk's narrative-building with his "Twitter files" reporting (though I still think his reporting calling into doubt claims about the scale of Russian election interference is worth reading), but I don't think there's any good reason to disbelieve his claim that those eXile writings were fiction.
Fair enough, I can‘t argue with the evidence here, or rather the lack thereof regarding his own professed impropriety at eXile.
thanks for the info! have edited my above comment so as to allow others to find your comment and to consider the evidence you posted
Even what wasn't "satire" was [pretty not great behavior](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html).
Thankyou for providing some more important context, I have spent some time this afternoon trying to get my feelings straight on this matter (not the most productive use of my time, perhaps) and this is helpful.
He does sound like he was once a terrible person. He may have changed once upon a time, but as I mentioned in a different comment, I'm still inclined to believe that the man he has revealed himself to be recently is the man he has always been.
Many of the refutations he has provided to the accusations against him seem to rely on the fact that he and his associate simply invented much of what they were writing. This is supported by the women he claimed to have abused coming forward to clear him, which I have no reason not to accept, however, this brings to light a point that the author of the piece you linked frames as a question, regarding Taibbi and his associate.
>As a reader, can you tell the difference between what they are making up and what they are not
Given that he himself seems happy to insist that much of what he wrote was untrue, and his recent slithering into the right wing grift sphere, I would add:
How can anyone take anything he has ever written at face value?
He may not have abused the women he claimed to have in his book. But he certainly abused the truth then and has proven he is willing to do the same now.
The parts of his career that I have seen plenty of perfectly reasonable people qualify as good journalism are bookended by lies and manipulation, which draws everything into question, in my opinion.
Respectfully, Taibbi had addressed his behavior from the eXile days and altered his behavior. Nothing can change what he's done, and what he's done does not change the quality of the reporting he did on major issues that were undercovered in the media. There's no defense of what he did, but a fair amount of the eXile was satire and exaggeration of expat activities in Russia in the aftermath of the wall falling and was read as at least as much fiction as gonzo journalism, Ames was a more consistent producer of those articles and no one has accused Taibbi of any continued negative behavior in the decades since.
His rightward shift, and the intellectual defenses he's made of it, are very different from his reaction to his eXile days and reveal a level of hypocrisy that was not apparent when discussing his past with the eXile. I'm not concerned with him being a prick, I'm concerned with him being a disingenuous propagandist. Nor was what he was saying back then pandering- he was deeply unpopular with the a lot of the left or raising issues that were unknown. You know, doing good journalism. Hell, the first link you shared was to a piece discussing his history right after he released a book on Eric Gardner and the systemic lack of police accountability.
You raise some good points and I will have to agree to disagree as to whether his behaviour then is reflexive of his behaviour now.
It doesn’t change the quality of his journalism, and if that journalism did some good, then that does work in his favour, whether pandering or not.
I have the same reaction whenever I see people lamenting his shift as though he used to be one of the good ones, when it is far less clear cut than that, with his indiscretions were very much a matter of public record for many years, and by his own hand no less.
I do wonder if how much of his shift was dictated by the reaction to his book, when people finally started actually taking note of what was written. I personally believe his crusade was never on the side of justice other than incidentally, rather on the side of whatever allowed him to feel like he was punching up which is what has allowed him to compromise his morals, but that’s far from uncontestable
I apologise if I came on somewhat combative.
It's entirely okay, I can sympathize with strong reactions towards public figures in situations like this (the "is everyone taking crazy pills" feeling) and his past behavior absolutely should be considered. His writing does not give him a pass, even if he'd stayed "good."
I don't know if he was on a crusade for moral or ideological reasons (his perspective was relatively consistently targeted against hypocrisy and inequality. He was ahead of the game on Occupy and the financial crash, back when the financial incentives didn't support it, and the modern pop culture left hadn't really showed up.
This is one of the rare occasions where "agree to disagree" is an entirely acceptable resolution to a comment and reply.
Given some of the other context provided I have to walk back my assertion that he is guilty of sexual misconduct, as there appears to be no evidence for it, and enough against it. Have edited my prior comment to reflect that.
I still don‘t like what he is up to now, but that‘s a separate matter. In my defense my acquaintance with his writing only extends to some of his Stone articles and one of his books, and the allegations were borne of things he had written of himself in a book which purported to be non-fiction, which seems like a case of mistaken identification on the behalf of his publisher.
I fully admit that I wrote him off as a likely suspect without doing the leg work and have fallen into the trap of having my misjudgement confirmed, to my mind but without adequate evidence, by his recent behaviour.
edit: respect your attitude by the way, I didn’t comment on your even handed response above, but I appreciate it.
I appreciate your willingness to both take in new information and adjust your beliefs accordingly, and hope to see more people follow it in the future.
I can't really say and it's always possible I'm misremembering. I googled site:acx $250,000 and it came up with [https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics) where instead of copping to an amount he cites Yglesias' receiving 250K to move to substack and leaves it at 'draw your own conclusions'.
Also I didn't see the humblebrag that opting to get paid the subscription fees in full would have been more profitable, so this is likely not the post I'm thinking about. I remember it being kind of an offhand remark so there isn't much context to help searching, sadly.
He may have put some interesting ideas on paper, but he has never done so in a way that I would consider well written.
One can be an interesting thinker (which I also wouldn't concede that Siskind is) but that doesn't necessarily mean one is also a good writer.
At the end of the day, whether or not someone enjoys his style is down to preference. I could give a number of reasons why I think his writing is not compelling, but those reasons might appeal to another.
Lol whot. Like a badly chosen sentence cannot fuck up a basic
conversation. Like speeches and presentations don’t take a lot of time
to prepare and often suck if you just wing it. Like [gestures vaguely at
Yuds recent media appearances]. Time was not kind to this post.
> Like a badly chosen sentence cannot fuck up a basic conversation.
And at least in a basic conversation you can use tone & facial expression to moderate your meaning, and see your conversational partners' reactions live and correct yourself if you've misspoken!
(I say as the person whose last post on this sub included a typo that led to my comment making the opposite point I intended in a particularly gnarly way.)
I once saw a rat give a talk about EA that was so bad that I didn't realize that it was a cult... These guys don't know how to present. Not that it matters as they don't have any ideas worth presenting.
I got about 750 on my verbal (or something like that – I can’t be
arsed to remember the exact number, so let’s say 730 plus or minus 30)
and a perfect 800 on my math SAT, and I guarantee you, it has done
absolutely nothing to help me in life.
It’s a test for kids who want to go to college. (Due to my life
circumstances and relative poverty, my score didn’t even let me go to a
prestigious school or anything, so my score might as well have been 1000
total.) The questions are all questions kids can answer within a minute
each. It doesn’t give you fukkin superpowers. It doesn’t measure skill
at any actual large task. It doesn’t even check whether you’re able
to do difficult things. It mostly checks whether you’re either good
at taking tests or affluent enough to get trained in doing its arbitrary
selection of easy questions for kids quickly and consistently.
Whoa, I feel compelled to reply because this is weirdly similar to my story (was not at all affluent as a kid but was good at taking tests, aced one of the sections of the sat -- I think it was reading for me? -- and got basically nothing out of it).
Seconding that if you're good at taking tests it's really not that hard to do well on the SAT, because it's designed to be passed by rich high schoolers. But it turns out 'being good at taking tests' is a useless skill, because (a) being smart isn't about being good at taking tests and (b) even if it were, *life* isn't about being good at taking tests, lol. You'd think the people who ~~came up with~~ always go on about how "the map is not the territory" would see the flaw with this thinking. And yet.
they (assuming you mean Rationalists) didn't come up with "the map is not the territory", the map-territory relation (in these precise terms) has been a topic of discussion since the first half of the twentieth century, and the relation between objects and their representations in general since way before that.
I was going to go in there and pick a fight but honestly it’s just so
goddamn depressing in there I don’t think I want to.
Do these guys realize they sound like gushing teens talking about a
pop star, just substituting “gifted class cred” for whatever the current
flavor is? I don’t throw the word “cringe” around a lot, because cursing
is usually more fun, but jesus
I’m a decent writer. I’m not a decent writer because I’m a super
English braingod guy. I’m a decent writer because I write often. It’s
just practice. Almost everything comes down to practice.
>Scott's writing always feels so logical and coherent in a way that most writing doesn't
>in a way that most writing doesn't
>most writing
Holy moly, get a grip
This whole thread is top quality sneer material.
I guess the last part is true, he puts in zero effort and gets paid unseemly amounts of money.
Having zero internal editor is also a talent of sorts
(Really, really wish these people would stick to fiction writing)
Lol whot. Like a badly chosen sentence cannot fuck up a basic conversation. Like speeches and presentations don’t take a lot of time to prepare and often suck if you just wing it. Like [gestures vaguely at Yuds recent media appearances]. Time was not kind to this post.
lmao the IQ-SAT circlejerk in the comments
I got about 750 on my verbal (or something like that – I can’t be arsed to remember the exact number, so let’s say 730 plus or minus 30) and a perfect 800 on my math SAT, and I guarantee you, it has done absolutely nothing to help me in life.
It’s a test for kids who want to go to college. (Due to my life circumstances and relative poverty, my score didn’t even let me go to a prestigious school or anything, so my score might as well have been 1000 total.) The questions are all questions kids can answer within a minute each. It doesn’t give you fukkin superpowers. It doesn’t measure skill at any actual large task. It doesn’t even check whether you’re able to do difficult things. It mostly checks whether you’re either good at taking tests or affluent enough to get trained in doing its arbitrary selection of easy questions for kids quickly and consistently.
Just admitting that his shlock is stream of consciousness journalling lmao
I was going to go in there and pick a fight but honestly it’s just so goddamn depressing in there I don’t think I want to.
Do these guys realize they sound like gushing teens talking about a pop star, just substituting “gifted class cred” for whatever the current flavor is? I don’t throw the word “cringe” around a lot, because cursing is usually more fun, but jesus
I just read through most of that comments section and thought I was on SneerClub, and that everyone was just having a really sarcastic moment. Oops.
And here I was thinking all his illogical reasoning and unsourced generalisations were cover under which he could ship his racist ideas.
I’m a decent writer. I’m not a decent writer because I’m a super English braingod guy. I’m a decent writer because I write often. It’s just practice. Almost everything comes down to practice.
Does He Know?
I mean, if you don’t care about creating quality content, you can write quickly about whatever…
But if you want to write well, you have to make an effort. And this takes time.