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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Do you agree that bakery owner should be held to account for a racist ramblings of his teenage daughter over 6 years ago? Really?

Um, what? What did I say that you disagree with?

The bakery owner fired his daughter. The story says, "Majdi Wadi is trying to save the business and his family's reputation. He says he's also determined to make amends for his daughter's posts and learn to be an ally fighting anti-Blackness going forward."

If he wants to make amends (hey, he fired his daughter and seems genuinely think she did something wrong), then he thinks he has something to make amends for. He is holding himself to account. Are you second-guessing him?

The person he turned to for help was upset, but also sees a path to redemption. Do you have a problem with that?

But El-Amin, along with other Black customers, was still upset. "My family had supported his business for many, many years. He had a relationship with my mother as well, who also called me amidst this and was like 'What's going on with this?'" he said. "It's interesting that dynamic of how those who have suffered from oppression at whatever level have always been called on to be the ones to be forgiving, always been asked to be understanding, always the one to be called onto to provide the cover."

But he decided to hear Wadi out. Redemption — accompanied by accountability and justice — are cornerstones of his belief system, El-Amin said.

"God says, if He were to give all of us what's coming ... based on our activities, he wouldn't leave a single soul. That's sobering," he said. "It's through His mercy that he gives us the opportunity to give this chance. I believe if you want mercy, you've got to give mercy, too. But there's also accountability. That's also part of it."

It's an interesting article. Good luck to all of them. If your take-away is that bakery owner should not have to apologize for anything, you are the one who seems to be disagreeing with everyone quoted in that article, not me. Reading comprehension much?

Not sure what that article has to do with cancel culture in your mind, unless "cancel culture" means there should be no consequences for saying racist stuff.

Regarding Taibbi, he has no reason to repent. He's put himself outside the reach of cancel culture by deciding to make any enemy of it. Self-innoculation. But it's interesting you'd dig up his old stuff, which he has said was intended to be rude and offensive humor, but isn't entirely factual. Should the guy who wrote I Can't Breathe have the rest of his canon banished to Cancelledland because he wrote shocking and vile stuff thirty years ago in Russia? Sounds a bit like those attacks on Bernie for having written bizarre and offensive fiction in the 70s. If we run this level of attack to its cuckoo-pants conclusion, we really need to cancel Bret Easton Ellis. He wrote a book, White, about why he refuses to apologize for being white and a horror satire that uncomfortably made fun of the murder and rape of several women.

Do you think Taibbi needs to repent? To ask forgiveness and examine his ways? People fuck up. People engage in humor that offends others. People say things that are insensitive. Get over it. These hall monitors who make a life out of finding grievance with anything that can be portrayed as even slightly offensive are miserable bores who are ruining art.

Yes, I was pretty sure you would defend what Taibbi did without reading what I linked. Let me help:

Twenty years ago, when I was a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, two Americans named Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames ran an English-language tabloid in the Russian capital called the eXile. ....

A better description is this: The eXile was juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys. It is back in the news because Taibbi just wrote a new book, and interviewers are asking him why he and Ames acted so boorishly back then. The eXile's distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted me. ...

I came into the eXile's sights because David Johnson, a Russophile living in Washington who edited an online news group devoted to serious writing about Russia, asked his readers whether he should circulate the eXile's press reviews. "I'd like to encourage some discussion," he wrote.

Accepting his invitation, I replied. "Let a thousand flowers bloom, let Matt Taibbi print whatever he wants," I began. "But why reprint it? . . . In a recent eXile, the editor [Ames] wrote about how he dealt with his pregnant girlfriend when she refused to get an abortion. She wouldn't listen to reason, so he threatened to kill her. That worked! Then he muses on forever about another pregnant acquaintance who aborted and about his relief that this child — who would have been a 'sloped-head idiot' — was instead a dead fetus properly wallowing in the sewers." ...

"They decided to give [Lally] the treatment. They had a female friend call her and, posing as an anti-Exile sympathizer, ask her to help shut the paper down by giving a statement" to a reactionary Russian intelligence agency.

I remember getting a call from a woman whom I couldn't quite understand over a crackling Russian phone line. I had never heard the acronym for the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information. We got many odd calls at the bureau, some from the mentally ill, some from those with serious grievances, some from people with mysterious motives. I tried to put her off pleasantly by telling her I'd "think about it." It was a bogus sting, and its aim was to humiliate me. ...

The eXile published what it said was a transcript, which didn't sound at all like me. The paper quoted me agreeing to organize a boycott of the eXile's sponsors and saying I would consider being a witness in a criminal investigation of Taibbi and Ames. ....

[A]fter that, Ames and Taibbi ... ridiculed me in the eXile and, later, in their memoir.

When I wrote an article about advertisements that used sex to sell cigarettes — new for Russia — Taibbi addressed my Baltimore Sun editors in his eXile column: "Lally's article is pathological, illogical, inaccurate, makes no point, and is insulting and hypocritical besides. . . . Lally's gaffes may be comic, the wild meanderings of an aging woman nearing derangement." Once, the eXile declared me the winner of its "Gnarliest Elephantine Ass on a Journalist With No Ethics Award." Another time, it published a cartoon showing me in bed with my editor.

...

When "The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia" came out, the memoir had a few more surprises in store. "We dragged . . . Lally's charred [corpse] through the dust-and-fly-infested streets of our newspaper for all to have a laugh," Ames wrote. In the most unexpected anecdote, Taibbi said that another reporter, Fred Weir, described in great detail how the eXile had made me cry. "Good!" Taibbi describes himself shouting. I was aware of Weir; probably we had bumped into each other at news conferences. But I didn't know him. I couldn't imagine why I would ever have wept in front of him. ...

I sent the memoir's passage about my tears to Weir, the alleged source for that anecdote. He remembered me. "That is a totally invented conversation," Weir wrote back. "I can't recall you ever calling me up in tears or otherwise." He hadn't read the book and had no idea that the authors had attributed the tale to him. "If that sounds odd to you," he said, "just consider how bizarre it is that you yourself are only just bringing it up with me."

Then I got in touch with Taibbi and Ames, neither of whom has ever met or spoken to me. Ames did not reply to requests for comment. He has, however, described his stories of sex with 15-year-olds as satire. In a Facebook exchange with me, Taibbi gave some ground. "I certainly would not go about things now the way I did back then," he wrote. "And I apologize for the physical descriptions. That was gratuitous and uncalled for." But before he stopped answering my questions, he took some jabs, complaining about the "efforts to get us removed from the Johnson's list."

Finally, we are confronting men who have abused and sexually harassed women for years. That reckoning has been too long coming. But you don't have to grope a woman or force a kiss on her to humiliate her, to make her doubt herself, to silence and diminish her. Bullying, treating women with contempt, freezing them out of the lunches and meetings that build networks and authority: All are damaging, insidious and difficult to root out. That will take time — and more women who call men out. That's why I'm saying #MeToo.

I can't believe that you would read this and say, "people engage in humor that offends others. People say things that are insensitive. Get over it. These hall monitors who make a life out of finding grievance with anything that can be portrayed as even slightly offensive are miserable bores who are ruining art." Yes, I think Taibbi should repent, and I don't think he should be heard complaining about cancel culture until he owns what he did. It is beyond obvious that many of the people complaining about "cancel culture" have done things that are indefensible and would rather talk about "cancel culture" to avoid answering for them.

Those are your bedfellows and they are shitting the bed. If you want to stay in bed with them, that's certainly your right.