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Sam Pooley's avatar

Maybe it’s reassurance, but it’s not a waste of my 10 minutes if you do a proper takedown of these jerks, so thank you!

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Andrew T's avatar

Matt Taibbi (along with Mark Ames) wrote an entire book about how 1990s Russia at the nadir of the post Communist transition (hookers, hitmen and kleptocracy) was *awesome*. First, because in page after page he now claims was fictionalized, he could do drugs and fornicate with half the population of Moscow as a Godlike Westerner, and second because Moscow was not "beige" and awful, like the horrible America of the 1990s.

The America of the 1990s, you see, had bored rich kid Taibbi. The bland process of a functioning democracy, a booming economy and (towards the end of the decade) lowering crime was worse than a gulag -- it was bland. So he went to Mongolia to play basketball, landed in Moscow and invented himself as a "journalist" running a publication serving the expat community with nightlife ads that paid the bills and nightlife reviews that famously included a helpful system of one to four "flatheads" (for the number muscular men in leather jackets) and "fahkahee factor" (the chance that an newbie Westerner could go home with a local). Along the way they launched a nasty hate campaign against the squares actually trying to do things in Russia (Michael McFaul was a particular target), the rest of the English language media and with incredible juvenile bile expat females, who were not remotely comparable to the dollar bewitched local talent. And they happily published Eduard Limonov, the bohemian novelist slash ultra-nationalist who would go on to found the "National Bolshevik Party" as a cross between a cult, performance art and Gregor Strasser's inheritance because Ames thought it was edgy.

To be fair, occasionally they did some good investigative journalism alongside the paens to picking up local teenagers at the Mucky Duck, but it was always cynical and overblown-- the aid project in question or the management consultant spend wasn't just stupid -- it was clearly part of a vast system of corruption. Without exception. Taibbi is if nothing else a gifted polemicist with a nice turn of phrase. He put it to use later for Rolling Stone, among others. His "reporting" on the financial crisis was just as engaging, funny, searing and fundamentally dishonest as his reporting in Russia for the Exile or his work for the Twitter Files.

Matt long since cut ties to Ames (also a professional contrarian and crypto MAGA type, but one who struggles to publish) and tried to bury his past. But if you want to read him "joke" about how they made the Russian females working at his paper act, buy the book he would rather you didn't: https://www.amazon.com/Exile-Sex-Drugs-Libel-Russia/dp/0802136524. But I heard most of it from people who were there.

Dan, you have good enemies.

[End Rant]

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