In that note, two guys I knew who were Young Republicans while in college are now Bernie Bros. Go figure.
If you could punch him for me, I would appreciate it. Metaphorically speaking, of course, as I am a pacifist.
I forgot my wife bought Griftopia until my daughter walked down with the book today as she liked the animal on the cover.
The destruction of the Big East is when it came home to me how much college sports was about money. It should have been clear sooner of course but I was young and seeing it happen helped me grow up.
So Fani's gonna beat Merrick to the punch? BREAKING: DA Fani Willis says DECISIONS ARE IMMINENT in her investigation.— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) January 24, 2023
Same thing in reverse in the late 70s-early 80s. From Che & Jerry on the dorm room wall to Reagan worship & Wall St. chode-dom.
Is it contrarian or did he just sell out on the Musk thing? I get why, for business reasons, he pretends the corrupt liberal news media can't be relied on, and only he brings you the real news. His substack, podcasts etc etc all rely on that conspiratorial narrative. Otherwise why bother with him. Griftopia was based on that idea - but at least had a good deal of foundational research. And the idea played well because everyone was mad with wall street and believed obama let them off the hook. Now i had a number of quite detailed discussions with Nice where he pointed out some fundamental issues with that book. For instance if a retail bank originates a dodgy loan - who has been defrauded? If the bank then sells a bunch of such garbage loans to another large sophisticated financial player - doubtful there is fraud IMO. And when this stuff was all packaged up into CDOs, clearly the big banks thought it was great as they all held lots of it. So there were huge stuctural issues - but Taibbi was off base on some stuff IMO. Big Short is a far better book. In any event, while there are problems with his ideas I never felt it was overly conspiratorial. But the Musk stuff is different. Anyone can see he is talking nonsense, and the value he delivers Musk is his personal credibility. Now utterly trashed. Even Bari Weiss ended up drawing a line with this. And it does make me wonder - when did Taibbi first become willing to do this? I don't trust any of his earlier work now.
Gotcha. I've never actually watched that film or read the book. Nice, is actually one of the only (non-Arsenal) BS posters I've hung out with in real life. He came to Atlanta once and once in London.