fucking scab
Lower Manhattanite can write rings around Taibbi's tight-ass.
That's not much of an insult.
I'm going to assume that his career's taost at this point, unless he manages to pull a Bill Kristol and gets a high-paying gig on Fox News.
Lower Manhattanite can write rings around Taibbi's tight-ass.
That's not much of an insult.
Ed -
It wasn't meant literally.
*My eyes, my eyes*
I was kind of surprised to see him on the show. I thought writers would show some kind of solidarity. And then he SUCKED. I didn't understand the point of him being there.
(I know I shouldn't watch either TDS - now ADS - nor Colbert... but I'm weak. I don't support their advertisers though, hopefully that makes me less scummy)
I'm not watching much at all these days, largely because I can't stand what's on TV.
But you NEVER cross a picket line--ever. This was drilled into my head by my mother's mother who was an EARLY member of the AFT (we're talking 1940s folks).
"Picket lines are sacred. You either walk one yourself or stay away. But you never, ever, cross one. If you do, you're not my child."
Tough love, but I learned what was right and what was wrong.
Taibbi is a punk and a loser, who has no friends.
And my late grandmother would say he's EARNED his fate.
SCABS SHOULD NOT BE PICKED OR PLAYED WITH
http://leftedgenorth.blogspot.co...og-
post_03.html
I, too, was taught about the sacredness of the right of labor to organize, not crossing picket lines, supporting unions' boycotts (Cesar Chavez and lettuce, grapes, anyone?), however...
I'm with Barb in ATL on this one - feeling guilty about watching TDS/ADS and Colbert (as someone who writes, but not for a living, as yet). Still...
While it seemed Jon Stewart was picking on his fellow Guild members, he & Colbert are the only ones actually doing *anything* amounting to actual strike coverage - to say nothing of countering the MSM's pre-election/primary BS.
Some interesting excerpts below from the NYT [emphases mine]:
...
'Executives from Hello, Doggie, the production services company for the “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” as well as executives from Comedy Central, petitioned the union on several occasions over the last 10 days, seeking to reach an interim agreement like the one that allowed David Letterman to return last week with his full writing team.
The proposal asked that the shows be allowed to use their writers and committed them to the same terms Mr. Letterman’s company had agreed to. The request was never formally turned down, though an executive associated with the shows said, “We were told it wasn’t looking good.”
...
The denial of the request for an interim agreement left representatives of the two programs and Comedy Central disappointed and, the executive associated with the shows said, “confounded by the fact that the decision was so arbitrary.”
What most upset those involved in the effort was that the union gave no special consideration to the Comedy Central shows, even though the guild regarded it as a coup when it won a contract for “The Daily Show” in 2006. The series had just won an Emmy for best writing.
Like the other hosts whose shows have been picketed by the guild, including Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien on NBC and Jimmy Kimmel on ABC, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert had been paying the salaries of nonwriting staff members out of their own pockets.
... Last weekend, representatives of the shows tried again in two long negotiations to win an interim agreement.
“Given how important it was to the guild in 2006 to sign on ‘The Daily Show’ it is incomprehensible that they would turn down this opportunity,” said the executive associated with the shows, who asked not to be identified out of concern that it would alienate the union leadership.
But Ms. Mangan said the guild had “strategic goals and determinations to make, all of which figured into the mix” in denying the Comedy Central shows the same deal as Mr. Letterman. She said the production entities were different in the two cases. Mr. Letterman’s company, Worldwide Pants, actually owns its shows, she said, while Hello, Doggie, despite being the entity the guild dealt with in 2006, is a production services company, overseeing issues like payroll, and does not own the content of the two Comedy Central shows.'
You totally nailed it, however, about Taibbi: A scab, and *so* NOT funny.
what a disappointment. he really has written some cogent material occasionally, believe it or not. this is stooping quite low, for him. i'm really surprised he did this.
oh well - there's plenty of room for him in the dustbin of history.
My Dad thought unions were either Communist fronts or run by the Mafia, but even he advised me to never cross a picket line.
I'm confused. Its not cool to make fun of the Pope.
I'm sorry. I was raised by the catholic church (alter boy even) and as far as I'm concerned making fun of the Pope is Gods work. If there is a god the Pope would be in hell getting gangbanged by a series of child molesting priests who his organization protected while the weight of the hundreds of billions of dollars of stolen land and Nazi gold pressed down on his chest and crushed his lungs. As a victim of the church I am so pissed whenever I hear people talking about high ranking catholic officials as if they deserve any respect at all. They are enablers of child molesters and world class hypocrits. If you look at the harm done by their birth control policies alone, they are some of the evilist scumbags on earth. When did it become not OK to use humor to expose these evildoers and last vestiges of the Dark Ages?
BTW, fuck anyone who crosses a picket line. David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, Ron Paul, Huckabee, fuck em all. Dead to us.
Taibbi should be thrown out of the WGA, sure, but what about Colbert and Stewart? Aren't they *worse* than scabs? They don't deserve a free get out of jail card, there's enough bile around here for everyone.
I'm sorry. I reread your post. You are right. Those jokes were in bad taste. Not because they are about a dying pope though. They just suck. I misread you, thinking you were saying he was a punk for making fun of the dying Pope. That's not what you said. You were totally right. Those hack jokes were in bad taste. Just not funny or smart. Sorry for interrupting the regularly scheduled strike talk. On the other hand this guy could never get a wga job anyway. This isnt a guy who could do good work.
I buy colbert and Stewart on iTunes. 9.99 for 16 episodes. I reupped before the strike. Now I am forced to buy these writerless episodes because I paid for them in October just before the strike. I am trying to cancel it. I don't want anything to do with these shows while the writers are on strike.
You know, when my folks split up and my Mom was left caring for a 10-ish me and my infant brother, she went back to work as a substitute teacher.
Shortly after she started, there was a strike and the district apparently called every vulnerable, new-to-the-system sub and teacher that they could to BEG them to essentially babysit during the strike. I remember my Mom hemming and hawing--we were literally living hand to mouth; lots of egg salad on the menu.
And I remember her NOT crossing the line. I'm still proud to this day that she didn't. Of course once the strike was over (only 8 days or so IIRC), the subs who DID scab didn't get called, and the few tenured teachers who were dumb enough to scab became paraiahs. I remember one especially bitchy lady whom I didn't like was one of these, and she changed districts a few months after the strike.
Jen:
My grandmom was a teacher and she was also a widow. Grandfather died in August of 1929, mom was born on Oct 28, 1929, and the stock market crashed the next day.
Grandmom raised my mom as a single mom in the Depression. While most districts FIRED their married female teachers on the old "you can't serve two masters" rubric (the board or your husband), one district took pity upon the "poor widowed teacher" and hired her. She was a hell of a good English teacher, but in those days, teacher quality was less important that sexism.
It wasn't until the equal salary schedule did my grandmother see equal pay for equal work, educational preparation, and years of experience (for her, sometime in the 1960s). She spent the bulk of her teaching career being chronically under-paid, and it was a bitter, bitter pill.
The teachers' unions changed that. It's why she drilled the "no cross" rule into me. While she would have been loathe to serve on a picket line (too confrontational for her personality, and too risky when she was raising my mom), she NEVER would consider crossing one.
It's why the punks make me crazy. They're cowards of the worst sort. And they're hurting very real people by their actions.
I'm sorry. I reread your post. You are right. Those jokes were in bad taste. Not because they are about a dying pope though. They just suck.
If you look at Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, you see not a small number of popes being condemned to Hell. So the tradition of criticizing popes is old, indeed.
Scatology without wit. Unfunny.
I have no problem with making fun of anyone.
It's the lack of the funny. He failed to bring the funny.
Gilly once wrote that you can't do this gig drunk. Perhaps Hunter Thompson could write smashed to the gills. But I can't, and no one I know can, not worth a damn, anyway.
And don't give me any crap about how when you take enough heroin all the pain goes away and who wouldn't want to feel like that? I know ALL about making the pain go away. Take enough drugs and you're not writing pain free. You're writing in a drug haze and what comes out is shit.
But even that isn't the point.
Taibbi could write his whole life being a clown and I wouldn't give a damn if he was a stand-up guy.
He's not. It isn't just that he fails to bring the funny. It's that he fails to bring his spine.
He's all about me me me me me me me, and that, dear friends in solidarity, makes Matt Taibbi, a fucking punk.
When talking about this strike let's remember all of the workers that live in "right to work" states where unions are easily crushed by the heavy handed corporations and Republican politics dominate.
This is the model that the Republican elite wish to impose on all the country, using Wal-Mart as their spear. Think of a picket line around every Wal-Mart in this country and never cross it.
Lord...
That “Dying Pope” piece is a classic piece of New York newspaper bed-shittery. Understand that the paper itself—the NY Press is the city's wingnut alternative weekly and routinely prints over-the-top shit to get scant attention in a progressive town.
They're also the ones who ran the awful (and withdrawn from their internet edition) article on stalking Claire Danes—the one where they published her address and whatnot.
Taibbi's stock in trade is the difficult school of “cringe humor”. The Farrelly Brothers specialize (and occasionally misfire) in it. Judd Apatow does it quite well. But no one's done it as well recently as Ricky Gervais did in the original U.K. edition of “The Office” . It's a tough style to master and few do. Too many use it as a stalking horse for substituting fist-in-the-face cruelty for a little thought in composing humor. Taibbi's among the “too many”.
The fucknut's also using the strike as an opportunity to get a notoriety his talent level wouldn't command were it not for the paucity of guests thanks to the strike.
The Guild won't forget that. Certain producers will put him on their new staff writing short lists because of his willingness to “play ball” with management, but he's fucked for sure with his one-time brethren.
But man...he's as funny as a bent crutch.
Harsh!
Do you guys think that Colbert and Stewart are also being scabs now?
Do you guys think that Colbert and Stewart are also being scabs now?
They are required by their contracts to go back to work. That isn't being a scab.
Stewart especially has been terrific to the writers. He even went so far as to pay his own laid off staff (not the writers, the below-the-line staff) out of his own pocket through the end of the year.
The issue isn't Jon. It's that his show is being picketed. Anyone who crosses the picket, is helping the Producers, and we won't ever, ever, ever forget it.
Hmmm. So making a deal with Stewart's production company (a la the Worldwide Pants deal) would according to the WGA be unacceptable because it would help the Producers? (I'll assume ultimately we're meaning Viacom or similar by "Producers" in this context.) Because apparently both Stewart & Colbert's teams (I don't know how much overlap there may be) were trying to negotiate a deal and were turned down by the WGA.
If I read you right, because they're "required by their contracts to go back to work," S & C are not being anti-WGA, but then the WGA members themselves are not bound by their contracts but by their membership in the WGA. (Writers sign contracts, right? I can't imagine the business running without them, and this strike is apparently all about a contract between the WGA and AMPTP.) And any WGA members who should dare to work during the strike will be called scabs and ostracized, hopefully out of the profession, and in the case of Taibbi (a non-member of WGA as far as I know) out of the business of writing or publicly speaking at all. Hoookay.
So the WGA has control over all writers in America, or their ability to work in the entertainment industry, whether the writer is a member or not. (And in fact aren't all writers in the industry required to be union members?) Now as far as I know, the strike still allows WGA members to write in other media (print, blogs, etc.). But Jay Leno isn't allowed to write his own monologue (whether it would be any good or not is moot), and if, say, Ezra Klein or Duncan Black or Digby were to appear on his show good union members (and their supporters) would want the same for them as for Matt Taibbi.
I think one of the things we learn as adults (perhaps learning this is part of becoming adult) is that we are always going to be ethically compromised in some way if we're going to function in society. There are vast forces that predate and will outlive us all, and sometimes we get to shape those forces but in most cases as individuals we're as powerful as one letter in a script by Joe Eszterhas or Shane Black, probably a "q", "v" or "w". So we try to balance our principles and self-respect with the necessities of living. Vegans don't casually murder meat-eaters as they pass by burger joints, drinkers by and large don't intentionally run over teetotalers, busses and subways aren't slaughterhouses despite a certain amount of intercultural friction and overcrowding -- everybody wants to get to where they're going and they don't need any extra hassles on the way. Life is hard enough already. Ultimately the WGA and AMPTP are going to compromise to get at least some of what they want. The threat each holds is that they can destroy the other financially, but will likely be destroyed or maimed themselves in the conflagration.
To hear the writers tell it (and it does have the ring of truth, but any writer knows how hard it is to represent infinitely-valued reality in words, and the power of willful delusion -- isn't that half of writing right there?), the AMPTP hasn't even started seriously negotiating and wanted to provoke the strike in hopes the WGA will cave. (It's also saving them a ton of money skipping what would be a lousy TV season anyway, so it's arguable that the AMPTP is required to do all this by corporate shareholder value laws.) Hopefully something will be worked out, lest the critically rare talents behind the writing of Gigli, Jericho, George Lopez, Hidden Palms, and 300, among other cultural highlights, vanish and the resulting cultural void leaves the rest of us with nothing to do in the living room and cineplex but get to know each other's faces and participate in our lives instead of passively consuming them like cogs in a machine. It would also stop those insipid "Why We Write" omphaloskepsis sessions, for which I for one would give thanks.
George -
Hi.
Nice concern trolling. Have you done this a lot? You're not very good at it yet.
The issues are simple.
The AMPTP isn't negotiating and hasn't ever. When they come back to the table, they'll find the writers waiting.
As far as comprise, sure, on some things, no, on others. That's how it works.
Yes, obviously the AMPTP thinks they can make more money in the long run losing this season and maybe next, then settling. Otherwise they would have settled. This can't be all about who has the biggest dick, can it?
Jon Stewart's show can't make a separate deal as it is owned fully by Comedy Central. Comedy Central is owned by (I think) Viacom, who refuses to negotiate. Anyday which Viacom wants to make a separate deal with the WGA, then there isn't a problem. WGA policy is it will strike a separate deal with any production company, but it only negotiates with the senior-corporate entity. That is called making people take responsibility for their actions, and I endorse it 100%.
Strikes are about pain. People get hurt, but the point is to cause pain to the corporations who are acting like spoiled children.
The WGA doesn't actually control all writers. In a genuine emergency, writers can and do go financial core, and we don't begrudge them that if, for example, they're about to lose their home. But real writers are making big sacrifices to make sure the lame-ass producers don't succeed in their attempt to bust the unions and steal control of the internet, through refusing to pay a fair deal for the use of work the producers are simply unable to create themselves.
After all -- it all starts with the writing, and the writers are only asking for 2 & 1/2 cents. If that isn't fair, I don't know what is.
As for you, oh concern troll. If you don't want to watch the various writerly musings, change the channel. It isn't as if you're paying for them. In fact, why are you bothering anyway? Desperate for something written by a real writer, mmmm?
Yeah. Me too. Cold turkey sucks.
You think it's bad now, wait till the supply of new movies dries up as SAG goes out on strike in June if this doesn't get settled.
PS. If you're going to troll at GNB, we require that you amuse us. Otherwise we cut you off. Your writing wasn't funny. Try and do better next time. I mean, I know you're just some slack-eyed mid-level twerp at the studios or their lacky, trying to shill... but come on, it's just writing. You can do it.
Oh wait, you can't. 'Cause then you'd be a writer. Heh.
It's true, I am completely without writing talent or insight into what it must be like to be a writer (although I did read some Harlan Ellison a few decades ago, sorry, I mean H*A*R*L*A*N E*L*L*I*S*O*N). I can barely string three words together without breaking them, and I don't even know the difference between an adverb and an adjective. I smell funny too. Advantage: Wendel!
Cold turkey doesn't hurt me, I don't have a TV or cable. I haven't been to a theater since about 2002, I think, to see Die Mommy Die (nice film). I read books and magazines and the Internet. For example, I'm reading collections by SJ Perelman and Eric Frank Russell right now, and just finished Robert Charles Wilson's Spin (lousy and oversold). (Perelman wrote some Marx Brothers movies, don'tchaknow.) Frankly, if it weren't for the fiscal chaos it causes for the entertainment writers and their familes I'd be just as happy if TV didn't come back till after the presidential election, god forbid.
Fact is, I do pay for crap media (as well as the occasionally good stuff) whether I see it or not because the prices of goods I buy every day are increased by advertising costs. I live with it, my taxes are paying for my country murdering people around the world and it doesn't look like I can do much about that either.
Now, the definition of a concern troll I understand is one where the putative troll presents a point of view that is supposedly sympathetic to their antagonist, in order to "warn" their antagonists of some "critical error" in their thinking. The purpose is to trick the antagonists into working against their best interests, or to shape public opinion against the antagonists. Am I right?
There seem to be some reading comprehension issues here, or perhaps I just don't write good enuf. I said the AMPTP hasn't tried negotiating. I agree with you. I've got zero concern for the producers, or at least the executives who are pulling the negotiators' strings.
(I notice you and I mean different things when we refer to "writers". When you use it (eg, "real writers") you mean (correct me if I'm wrong) the writers of the entertainment industry, whether WGA members or not, but certainly those who are elegible for WGA membership. When I use it I refer to people who write -- anything. Well, not including laundry lists and the like...)
I'd like to see unions become a greater force in this country again -- even without being a member I as a worker receive the benefits of a well-paid and respected work force. I'd like to see the WGA get at least what they're asking for, and more besides. (As you say, 2.5 cents is a pittance. Why not a dime? I read somewhere the estimated total cost to the producers of the WGA's demands would be something like a few million bucks -- chump change to the mass entertainment industry. (Would I be pointing stuff like this out if I were a concern troll? Or less in love with parenthesis?))
I don't know if the WGA is (sorry if I'm getting these terms mixed up, I'm not in the industry) a closed shop like the entertainment trades unions, where you apparently need to be invited to join the union or your opportunities to work are severly limited regardless of your ability. I'll assume it's not, that it's open to anyone who sells their work in the industry. Still, there's a kind of arrogance here, and it's all about commerce and control of same, not creativity. And accusing people who seem to have a different point of view of trolling isn't going to help. (If you can't engage with people who are different than you, or even consider the possibility of changing your own mind in response to that engagement (which is what you're expecting of the other), my advice is to stay out of politics, you're wasting your time.)
Since it sounds like you're going to ban me (perhaps you have already, in which case this last hour(s) of trying to assemble words into meaningful sentences, which is such an effort for no-account punks like me, will have been wasted), I might as well let you know what I think is likely to happen without any sugar coating while I have the chance. Consider this a message from Cassandra when you think back on it in the future.
The mass entertainment industry, like the recording industry, has only been in existence about a century. Born out of the natural human need for socialization and entertainment, both industries have become in our culture substitutes for individual creativity. Where people used to socialize and entertain themselves (gathered around a piano, singing together, or putting on private plays, etc), now there is an industry (or two) based on mass (re)production, saying it's more efficient for "them" to specialize in bringing together the talents to make magnificent stuff than for "you" to do it yourself since you obviously won't have the raw talent or equipment to do it anywhere near as well.
"They" mass-produce the widgets (CDs, movies, TV shows) and when they get it right (which is only occasionally, for example it used to be that only one out of 135 bands that signed with a major label ever made back their advance) they reap the jackpot. And our culture has certainly prospered in some ways because of it (even at the price of interpersonal conviviality). Your list of great movies and TV probably wouldn't be the same as mine but we can probably both agree our lives are the better for it.
Both the industries mentioned above are being torn apart from their foundations on up. Technological advances are eating away at their business models, since alternate distribution and production methods are springing up like dandelions. Instead of spending $100-500K in a recording studio to make one album which costs thousands to master and distribute (and possibly makes it money back), you can spend $1-15K to buy the equipment, record as much as you want, distribute it yourself (CDs, downloads), keep most of the money for yourself, and still own the equipment afterward so you can do it more. Digital video cameras (like the RED) are becoming affordable and offer the advantages of greater recording capacity, greater portability, and needing less infrastructure. The result is an explosion of new production -- more people are making videos and music (among other things) than ever before in the history of humankind.
Sure, most of it is crap, Sturgeon's law applies to independent productions as much as to anything else, including mass entertainment, and yeah, you need talent, as a writer, composer, editor, producer (sometimes), whatever, to make something worth the time it takes for someone else to experience it. But there are so many more gems among the dross, now that there's ten times as much of it, gems that wouldn't make it through the rotating knives of the industry because the projections indicate they won't be profitable enough, or because the creators want to own their creations.
In my opinion everybody starts out creative, and most people get it beat out of them somewhere around third grade. Some of us survive, though we're often bent in ways that take a lot of effort and time to straighten out (the same is true of high intelligence, which I believe you've written about). The thing is, some of us are going to create regardless of whether there's any money in it. (I make music, myself, and of course Sturgeon's law applies to that as well.) And this is good, for several reasons: the conviviality I referred to up above, and also it's the driven types who will, Selznick willing, become the new professionals in their fields, like you once were or are. This is why "free" doesn't always mean "amateur" or "worthless" (for example, there's tons of excellent free electronic music available through net-labels on archive.org).
The other major technological problem for the M.E. industry is that now, like Windows Vista, every new creation is now competing against those that preceded it. Adam Sandler, Judd Apatow and Hugh Grant are up against Woody Allen, Buster Keaton and Cary Grant. Now that the goods are no longer scarce and there's an abundance of media, the only scarcity is time to experience it all.
Hoookay. If you've been able to follow all that expository setup (gotta get it in all at once since I won't be able to explain once I'm banned), here's the predictions:
A pyrrhic victory for both sides. Plenty of bad blood that will last longer than it took for Elia Kazan to get his lifetime achievement Oscar. Writers leaving the industry. Worst case: WGA is broken and writers are back to chattel. Best (and unlikely) case: AMPTP blinks and cooler minds prevail. Either way, the prominence of both sides takes a hit as smaller, swift-footed mammals evolve to take the places vacated -- the strike as business opportunity. The masses adjust to the absence, and find other means of entertainment; they'll come back but never as loyally (some of that from bitterness about how the writers were treated). An influx of nonunion writers, including bloggers (who are used to writing for free even now, the scabs). (Not sayin' these are brilliant predictions, by the way, just wanted to get them in to beef up my concern-troll credentials.)
Jesse, thanks for this wonderful opportunity. I'd like to think this shows the value of conversation in learning from each other (a peer relationship) as opposed to pontification from the superior (you) to the inferior (me) -- the broadcast paradigm. Worship is good for the ego, and whore-ship for the bank account, but when we are talking about what we value in narrative fiction, it's usually the connection from one human heart to another that is most dear. Good health and prosperity to you and yours in the new year. Sorry if I'm not funny-haha enough for you (I tend toward funny-amusing, like Pe
Jesse, thanks for this wonderful opportunity. I'd like to think this shows the value of conversation in learning from each other (a peer relationship) as opposed to pontification from the superior (you) to the inferior (me) -- the broadcast paradigm. Worship is good for the ego, and whore-ship for the bank account, but when we are talking about what we value in narrative fiction, it's usually the connection from one human heart to another that is most dear. Good health and prosperity to you and yours in the new year. Sorry if I'm not funny-haha enough for you (I tend toward funny-amusing, like Perelman or Benchley), but I hope it was interesting enough to read to the end. Meeks out.
[Wow, over 10000 words -- must ask Peter Chernin for raise.]
That doesn't rise to the level of banning.
Heh.
Aww, and here I thought you were just pissy because I made you look up "omphaloskepsis"...
See... you can be funny when you try. *smiles*
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