defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

ugh, the worst, right? anyway, i just really wanted to share this lustrous takedown of him from some guy's blog i don't know:
http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/drooling-self-love-dime-store-third.html

One will search Greenwald’s writing for coherence in vain because, although he espouses moral relativism when it suits his agenda, as we’ve just seen, he’ll vehemently disown it with his very next breath. His is not a thoughtful, principled commitment to a philosophy he’s prepared to defend or apply consistently. Rather, his geopolitical outlook might be best described as a half-understood kind of dime-store Third Worldism; a gruesome combination of a thoroughgoing Western masochism with an ostensible compassion for the wretched of the earth that masks the same racist condescension and contempt typified by the worst kind of colonialist paternalism.

hes cooler than you

isms in my opinion aren't good

it was funny when the exile would troll him by only referring to him as "glenn greenwald of the libertarian cato institute"

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OoUEP8atZl4/UY8Z5RFJ5mI/AAAAAAAAALg/ftL1Q9ZSCTc/s1600/greenwald.jpg

he looks like an older mark zuckerberg here

Principled, consistent, systematic political philosophers do not become pundits. Greenwald's inconsistencies merely validate his membership in that group. Apart from that shocking accusation, all the rest of the takedown quoted above is pure vilification. iow, it is a less witty version of what Greenwald does for a living. pot calling out the kettle.

no no I meant it as a compliment

By calling him the "worst", you are being as simplistic as he sometimes is.

I think he is a bad writer but I agree with most of the points he makes.

good thing i'm only making threads on ilx and not opining for a major newspaper xp

Mordy does simplistic a lot, with relish

mordy doesnt like glenn-chan because he refuses to kiss israel's feet and lips and buttlips. let's just be real about it

well that's why he's the worst!

Mordy, I've only read the Thatcher article, show me what he wrote that you didn't like?

Like any pundit he's useful when you need him to prove your point. Explaining how presidential administration quietly or openly chip away at civil liberties is his strength; he lacks the subtlety to explain what makes civil liberties worth preserving and the style that would make him consistently readable. Like all brands, he's taken for granted.

^ i agree with this

"thoroughgoing Western masochism" = we hadda kill those people, dammit.

Works well for Israel, too.

like most men, he looks vile in cargo shorts

http://www.out.com/sites/out.com/files/GlennGreenwald1.jpg

goddamn his husband

He looks better in cargo shorts than glenn does

goddamn to hell colored flip flops.

lol this thread

greenwald is occasionally (ok, more than occasionally) long-winded but he is easily the best political blogger of the last decade.

treeship mostly otm

also i think we've gone over this ground p thoroughly in the last 5 years

also that blog you linked to really sucks!

harry's place, LGF, euston manifesto in the blogroll... labor hawks, man, 2004 in effect

mordy didn't you love greenwald until a few years ago

mordy's not an obama stan but i did sort of notice that he lost a lot of fans around 2009 or so, weird

who lost fans, GG, obama or mordy?

i did love greenwald until a few years ago - i remember when i forced myself to unsub from his rss feed. this was when he was still at salon.

Hmm. It seems to me that the only reason Greenwald is perplexed by accusations of relativism is that he doesn't understand what the term means. [goes on to define moral relativism]

yes thanks much fucker

anyway he's at his best when he just writes about the law and doesn't try to pundit so much, and once you read like 100 of his columns you pretty much know what he's going to think about everything and he becomes less necessary to read on a daily basis. he's definitely a necessary force for good in the world of political writing. even if i don't need to read him anymore, i wouldn't want a blogosphere without him

have to say some of the clones he's produced are pretty dire, like him otm more often than not but with even less style and just clearly not as smart or well-researched. forget these dudes names atm but it's not important, they're like slate writers or something. also goes without saying his commenters are generally the scum of the earth but i haven't read any of his comments in years either

i used to find his writing very interesting - he'd present new material (especially legal material) that i wasn't familiar with, he'd analyze it very insightfully, etc. now he just rants and writes arguments about how ideologically impure everyone but he is. also i think he's doubled down significantly on the wrong side of liberalism. like when he asked recently why Israeli can bomb Syria without condemnation when obv if Syria bombed Israel ppl would be hysterical. obv equivalencies like that are immediately intellectually suspect (um, Assad has been lobbing shit into Israel for months w/out much attention), but also it's just this really facile kind of geopolitical analysis. at some point he traded in what he was good at - legal analysis - for ideological tirades. i think it really destroyed any value he held.

lol at that 'lustrous takedown,' which includes gems like this:

Those of us who recognise the universal importance and desirability of the above, have little difficulty in ascribing inferiority to a culture that is - conversely - obscurantist, theocratic, misogynistic, racist and oppressive, such as that of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

dismissing a 'culture' (rather than a government) as 'inferior' sounds pretty racist to me.

cultures aren't synonymous w/ races

maybe it's culturist tho!

yeah i mean it's kind of a dickish thing to say no matter how you slice it.

nah, some cultures obv suck

i am a big fan of both gg and mordy, i am sad they can't be friends

they can walk in flip flops and shorts together

now he just rants and writes arguments about how ideologically impure everyone but he is

eh he inserts enough qualifiers and equivocations to suggest otherwise, but he IS fond of adverbs

feet and lips and buttlips

I love you

Greenwald has also criticised the US detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on the grounds that they deny those held there the protection of the rule of law and due process. But if these are markers by which it is possible to judge the American administration's commitment to human rights, why are they not also suitable markers by which to judge that of the Iranian or Syrian regimes, whose behaviour by these standards is demonstrably much worse? And if these markers are deemed legitimate points of universalist comparison by Greenwald, then why not others such as the emancipation of women, and the protection of LGBTQ rights? And why the reluctance to judge, and where necessary indict, cultures accordingly?

oh, the bush years. remember this shit? lol

i do think GG used to be better than he is now -- he rarely surprises me anymore. i usually skip the pieces where he just complains about cable news. this was one of his better pieces from the last couple years:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/02/obama-civil-liberties-history

let's summarize Mordy's points:

tuchus

i did make fun of mordy's cargo shorts once which i regret

i think JD's point that he's the best political blogger of the past decade (ever?) is pretty tough to argue with; even if you dislike his more recent punditry (something i can sympathize with), his strengths make him on balance pretty invaluable. you can even just choose to remember the good times

Greenwald can only withhold judgement of Iran's dismal human rights record or Syria's campaign of sectarian slaughter by affirming that Persians and Arabs are simply not culturally suited to the liberties and protections derived from Enlightenment thought to which Westerners rightly feel they are entitled. Instead, they must be perceived as childlike, simple and sometimes savage peoples whose cultural proclivities demonstrate a preference for subjugation, violence, injustice and fear over liberty and peace, and who are incapable of understanding egalitarian concepts of human rights due to their uniquely 'Western' character.

maybe the best domestic blogger critic of america but he's so outclassed by like every other geopolitical blogger

the blue and the dim of feet and lips and buttlips
i would spread my lips on those buttlips

i think that's pretty otm. i've felt for a long time like there's a racism of low expectations at play in post-colonialism + cultural relativism xxp

like stephen walt is hardly a friend of israel but he's so much more worth reading than greenwald. he actually writes new material and has insights that seem valuable. and he doesn't rant.

nah, some cultures obv suck

― Mordy , Tuesday, May 21, 2013 2:37 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark

agreed, for example the racist settler state known as Israel

Greenwald has also criticised the US detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba on the grounds that they deny those held there the protection of the rule of law and due process. But if these are markers by which it is possible to judge the American administration's commitment to human rights, why are they not also suitable markers by which to judge that of the Iranian or Syrian regimes, whose behaviour by these standards is demonstrably much worse? And if these markers are deemed legitimate points of universalist comparison by Greenwald, then why not others such as the emancipation of women, and the protection of LGBTQ rights? And why the reluctance to judge, and where necessary indict, cultures accordingly?

oh, the bush years. remember this shit? lol

― goole, Tuesday, May 21, 2013 2:40 PM (3 minutes ago)

ha wait, who's the relativist now?

gg has said on numerous occasions that he focuses on the US because he's a US citizen. seems pretty simple

why is that simple? he doesn't live here, he writes for a UK paper, etc. why should the coincidence of his birthplace be the most important driver in his work?

to repeat: i haven't ever been able to make my way thru an entire GG column even in his best days and don't even attempt it now, he's a shitty writer and stunningly ignorant and unimaginative about how politics works (esp anything domestic or money-related), but he's undeniably right about his core concerns (the law), and also this 'lustrous takedown' is str8 cheap garbage

xp because he's a constitutional lawyer

stunningly ignorant and unimaginative uninterested about how politics works (esp anything domestic or money-related)

fixed

as a middle-aged Jew currently wearing cargo shorts I am following this thread closely so I know what political views to espouse

he doesn't live here because of DOMA. he's said that a thousand times and anyone who criticizes him for writing about US policy as an expat is a scumbag straight up

And why the reluctance to judge, and where necessary indict, cultures accordingly?

if i can answer this one for myself, because 'indictment' means war? fuck that, man. no war.

i'm not saying he shouldn't write about US policy bc he's an expat. I'm saying that the coincidence of his birthplace is not a slamdunk explanation for only writing about the US.

the 'takedown' reads like the guy never heard of greenwald before and was given half an hour to churn something out. gg has assigned himself a remit and he is pretty clear about what he is/isn't going to write about. which is really up to him and doesn't need a justification?

political pundits who are uninterested about how politics works are strange people

I know, he read that thing Chomsky wrote once and it really stuck with him but it's not the end of the conversation. Plenty of people born in particular countries write about other countries. Especially when they leave that country for whatever reason.

I mean greenwald is not alone in that category but it does describe him pretty well

i don't think i'd want to see the greenwaldian style applied to brazil even for lols

Maybe Greenwald writes about the US for the Guardian because that's what they hired him to do?

political pundits who are uninterested about how politics works are strange people

― iatee, Tuesday, May 21, 2013 2:50 PM (26 seconds ago)

this is definitely a frustrating thing about GG but i think ppl would be better served not reading his columns as prescriptive (even if that's his intent!) and instead using them to be like "ok everything he's saying is otm, this is at least something to keep in mind"

like he can be ridiculous but he's necessary when he's at his best no one is/was writing about the things he was writing about, at least no one with a fraction of his audience

period after necessary

this aggrieved (or often enough, chuckling) attitude that a homosexual has to be a neocon because traditional or autocratic societies are sexually restrictive is so fucking gross

wait what?

that GG takedown has been written a hundred times before, only it went 'noam chomsky can't see anything good about america, but he NEVER writes about how bad the soviet union is.'

that's 'jacobinism' dude's argument!

xp

chomsky is a guy who i loved in high school. i used to listen to his (political) lectures all the time but i think in some ways he's even worse than greenwald. his theories about how power works are totally divorced from what i'd consider sharp analysis of the world, or politics, and though his style appealed to me when i was younger it became clear that he's just a really intelligent conspiracy theorist.

this is definitely a frustrating thing about GG but i think ppl would be better served not reading his columns as prescriptive (even if that's his intent!) and instead using them to be like "ok everything he's saying is otm, this is at least something to keep in mind"

Scolds are often right.

J.D. otm

I am essentially uninterested in how politics in 21st-century America works bcz Obama.

Chomsky even said after the election that Bam was the lesser evil, what more do you want?

http://972mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/rsz_gp3.jpg

i have some issues with chomsky but i don't think it's accurate to call him a conspiracy theorist -- if anything the problem is that he's the opposite, someone who denies that human agency can make a difference in history at all. like, in his reading, the cold war somehow has almost nothing to do with harry truman and dean acheson, but 'about' america's corporate interests, which somehow (never specified) pulled all the strings behind the scenes and controlled american foreign policy. one thing i do like about GG is that he (mostly) doesn't do this.

"but 'about' america's corporate interests, which somehow (never specified) pulled all the strings behind the scenes and controlled american foreign policy"

how is this not a conspiracy theory? vague, non specified accusation of someone pulling all the strings behind the scenes!

"someone"

citizens united yo - it's the LAW

well conspiracy theorists tend to be fixated on the actions of actual individuals -- FDR and pearl harbor, the 'real' JFK assassins, et al. i guess you could call chomsky an institutional conspiracy theorist in that he blames everything on institutions -- the press is bad because it's owned by corporations, wars happen because wall street wants them, etc etc.

i think they're different versions. plenty of conspiracy theories about organizations/governments secretly doing x, y, z

chomsky's theories don't require anyone to know what they're doing, though

Here's a Greenwald phrase from a column of his that annoys me:

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and killed Muslims

Greenwald failed to acknowledge that in north Mali, fundamentalist Muslim extremists were taking over and killing and oppressing moderate Malian Muslims. His "key context" is based on his simplistic Western colonialists return to kill noble Muslims thesis, when the facts are more complicated. A better columnist might have addressed each country individually and as for Mali, not simply lumped together all types of Muslims, while better making his point re Western imperialism.

citizens united yo - it's the LAW

― Mordy , Tuesday, May 21, 2013 3:23 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the citizens united issue is actually a pretty good example of him breaking with party-line liberalism and convincing me to question my instincts. i see it as a much more complex issue after reading his writing on the case

i wasn't making a corporate personhood reference i meant i think the distinction between what jfk headz believe and what chomsky believes is a distinction between conscious conspiracy and the automatic self-perpetuating behavior of systems

i grew up on chomsky but nowadays i tend to think that (like a lot of leftists) his reflexive anti-americanism gets in the way. i know i sound like a conservative, but his worldview (or view of history) seems constructed around the unshakable notion of the United States as a Bad Actor (and not just a bad actor, but _the_ Bad Actor around which all other Bad Actors appear to swirl and take succor) and everything else just kind of falls in line with that. which is not to say that the United States has not been a Bad Actor many, many times and that Chomsky has not rightfully (and righteously) helped to expose some of those occasions. but I think Chomsky is basically a bad historian and does not respect due diligence in research, it's just too easy to drop each new event into this master template that he doesn't care to revise.

greenwald is not that programmatic, although he's becoming more by the day. but unlike chomsky I still find him readable.... usually. whenever he talks about popular culture you have to roll your eyes.

still, a lot of the greenwald quotes up above are pretty damning. at least in terms of painting him as a guy who can't see beyond a manichean logic (which is often chomsky's problem). but yeah he's capable (thus far) of more complex reasoning.

there is a kind of unnavigable interzone between analysis of how power works and 'conspiracy'. i don't know the names & schedules of the people working here http://www.api.org/ but i'm sure they're up to some shit. i suppose the difference is i woulnd't come out and say they're up to some shit w/o some proof of what it was

xpost

(there's a reason why historians don't like chomsky or zinn btw, and it's not because they're a conservative bunch.)

DLH otm, my problem is that chomsky takes his 'institutional' critique so far that he doesn't leave any room for individuals, their flaws and ambitions and motives. like, i don't believe that truman invaded korea or JFK invaded vietnam because of 'the automatic self-perpetuating behavior of systems.' (i've also never heard him talk about political parties, which is a huge hole in any attempt to analyze the politics of the u.s.)

my own worldview is v much anti-conspiratorial, since my belief is that power is exorcized out in the open, it's just too boring and complicated for anybody to pay attention to in a sustained way (cf. 19/20 supreme court cases, 999/1000 things congress does on a given day)

yeah i think you are right, plus even when the a.s-p.b.o.s. does matter, as in say lbj's decisions to escalate, it's still incomplete to ignore who lbj is and what he wants and why xp

i mean they both matter pretty much literally all the time

rather weird to study history and not care about personalities. Even Hobsbawm does.

i pretty much hate zinn, mainly because his chapter on the civil war has to be one of the worst things ever written on the subject. i blame it for every argument i had on the subject in college. (also at least partly to blame for some of the stupid kneejerk left-wing reactions to spielberg's 'lincoln').

yeah, it's kind of a piece of junk. there are a few high-profile takedowns of "people's history" by historians.

i had a kind of revelation about this around age 16, right around when folks around me were like "have you read this amazing book?" i realized that zinn was insulting my intelligence in not trusting me with a version of history tainted by complexity.

also zinn gave a "talk" at my school that was just a bunch of leftist/"movement" clichés strung together (I mean literally, he had no script and no "theme," he just got up there and riffed on "change begins with you" over and over). it was so lazy (and therefore so contemptuous of his audience and the honorarium they had presented to him) that it kind of shook me out of whatever remaining adulation I had for zinn.

'people's history' does have a lot of great quotes and excerpts from other authors -- it'd be a great oral history, except that zinn's commentary invariably reduces it all to the level of a bad fairy tale. this is a pretty good takedown:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/howard-zinns-history-lessons

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/337311650275278848

i apologize in advance for the length of this post.

i am confused about what i feel about howard zinn. my favorite part of the dissent article is when it argues that zinn's book does a disservice to the losers of history by describing them as naive, well-intentioned bumblers that keep getting defeated by the elites, and in that sense doesn't even make good on its promise to be a history of what is usually overlooked/deliberately marginalized, esp. in terms of workers' movements. i think an openly biased popular history book that tries to create a strong narrative of left wing radicalism as a counterbalance of the strong narrative people know about the founding fathers, lincoln, etc. might be a legitimate project, but i'm not sure if zinn's book is that.

i used to be a big chomskyite and thought that institutions had lives of their own, basically, and perpetuated their interests somewhat independently of human agents, who are always relegated to niche roles and never really get a sense of the bigger picture, and might well be deluding themselves as to the real meaning of the roles that have been prescribed for them. i think this is true of corporations... i think they are like this, because they need to maximize short term profits and can't do anything, really, that would undermine this narrow goal. i think i might have been attracted to thinking "institutionally" bc i have an aversion to judging individuals morally and didn't want my politics to be based on calling individuals greedy, corrupt, whatever because i suspected that these things are diversions, and have little effect on what is really going on.

i think i am at a confusing juncture in my political thinking because i don't have a good answer for what the united states should do with the immense power it has, and the postcolonial legacy that comes with it, which involves a large part of the world being really fucked up for reasons relating to US interventionism, military, covert, or otherwise. i suspect there isn't a good answer for when "intervention" becomes necessary, or even for what the "actual reasons" for our past "interventions" have been, which is frightening. wtf was even the point of the war in iraq for instance? chomsky's shrugging answer that it was just about perpetuating the interests of the ruling class seems wrong, but then again, i don't think it was about anything the bush administration said it was about either. i think dick cheney himself has a different perspective today on why he was into the idea of war in iraq than he did in 2003.

one thing i agree with greenwald on though, unreservedly, is that the US needs to hold itself to a way higher standard than fucking assad or whomever, i don't think it's at ALL hypocritical for him to argue that if nations like the US and israel aren't hewing to strict human rights standards -- not torturing people, giving POWs fair trials, not bombing densely populated areas all the time because come on, how necessary really was it to kill anwar al-awlaki -- then NOBODY EVER WILL.

nobody ever has, nobody ever will

dude really does love dogs i'll give him that

i guess i mostly agree with kevin itt... i haven't read greenwald regularly in years and find him a bit ridiculous and borderline self-parodic at this point but he says things that a lof people won't/don't and he's often right so eh

i think the war in iraq is a good example of leftist blind spots re How Things Happen because i don't think it was a cynical project. oil and contracts and father issues matter but more than anything else (and especially given the i guess the word is carelessness w which the invasion was handled) i think the war was real earnest hubris. the imperial disease. athens in sicily, britain vs the boers. it's about getting the upper hand w the spartans and it's about the gold mines in the transvaal but it's also just about power and the terror that power not grown will shrink. alcibiades: "it is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire we want to have. the fact is we have reached a stage where we are forced to plan new conquests." in that sense i guess i do think it was an institutional reflex? but one that also depended on devout individuals being busy busy beavers. (behind alci's theorizing he's lusting for personal glory.) trotsky sometimes hints he understands how history is both inevitable and dependent but i never follow him when he explains.

the problem with a people's history is it conveys exactly the same sense of untroubled certainty you get from the textbooks it's supposedly correcting. zinn never doubts and he never muddies. it's just the textbooks backwards and it sucks for all the same reasons.

ignore that part about the boers i don't really know what i'm talking about.

lots of leftists saw the iraq war as earnest imperial hubris! that's something that stands out in my memory about the discussion and protests of the time, the exasperation at how *belated* and out of time so much of the appeal to invasion seemed.

don't disagree with your larger point obv

yeah you're right. lots had NO WAR FOR OIL bumper stickers too, though.

i feel like the iraq war was such a perfect storm of carefully nurtured (for decades!) imperial dream-lust and blowback historical circumstance, that no opposition argument is really *too* reductive, no matter much it may seem. they really were after oil! and regional hegemony! and looking for new piles of rubble to cheer on. it's all there no matter how distractedly you look.

this is a great thread. treeship and difficult listening hour are BRINGING IT.

in 2003 my international relations professor said that if you weren't a fan of american hegemony there was something encouraging about the iraq war, because truly powerful hegemons don't need to send in troops. that america was reduced to going to war in order validate its hegemonic credentials was the first sign of its decline as hegemon.

i'm wrong, there's totally a professor out there somewhere with an argument too reductive, i take it all back

do you think he was wrong? seems pretty on point to me

i don't believe that truman invaded korea or JFK invaded vietnam because of 'the automatic self-perpetuating behavior of systems.'

oh, rrrrreally

Truman didn't invade Korea.

I suppose we could allude to Frederick Jackson Turner and frontier theory, with imperialism the means by which a nation MUST use its considerable resources to find new markets as well as use those fancy battleships and planes, etc. Henry Adams said at the turn of the century that power requires a way to test it, therefore it was inevitable that nations like Germany and Japan, growing at an astonishing rate, would eventually provoke war; they were powder kegs ready for explosions.

nah, some cultures obv suck

― Mordy , Tuesday, May 21, 2013 2:37 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark

agreed, for example the racist settler state known as Israel
--turds (Hungry4Ass)

Key troll

kinda one-note imo. if you're not furthering the parameters of the troll u're just running in place

don't be defensive Mordy acknowledge the burn

i thought he meant his own trolling

it burns

he's got a point. good trolling doesn't stick to old boundaries, it needs to expand, it needs to, you know, establish an ongoing presence in contested areas

Lolol

otm. trolling creates new facts on the ground.

the problem with Hungry4Ass was that he was not trolling enough

he's our own little suicide bomber

yeah, that's the thing. trolling me about israel is so easy that even morbz can do it. i thought hungry4ass was into the next level trolling.

if there's one thing the history of ilx has taught us, it's that trolling will not be contained. trolling breaks free. it expands to new territories; it crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, ah... well, there it is.

trolling finds a way

also trolling israel is already glenn's shtick so it's kinda just reframing the question
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/337357514440077312

when we troll, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll troll again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's trolls ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

a+

GG pwned Bill Maher a few weeks ago x1000 when he was off on one of his usual blaming everything on religious extremism tangents.

morbs: yes, rrrrreally

C'mon HST just rejiggered Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism from Hiroshima on, and JFK ran with it.

trolling me about israel is so easy that even morbz can do it

Which side of your reversible Bibi Netanyahu/Cole Hamels pajamas are you wearing now?

well yeah, but i don't see that as a system 'automatically perpetuating' itself so much as a series of presidents actively and aggressively seizing more and more power for themselves (enabled by congress, natch). trust me, no truman/JFK apologist here!

i do have a soft spot for TR despite the obv problems.

TR is a complicated figure.

C'mon HST just rejiggered Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism

what on earth does this mean?

Harry taught TR how to dance?

i initially read it as 'hunter s. thompson just rejiggered teddy roosevelt's imperialism.'

My main problem with GG is personal. Set the politics aside and he's a pompous ass who responds to all criticism with sneering and condescension. I could agree with everything he says and still think he's a dick.

that is the only way to respond to people who are wrong.

GG is a pretty nice guy in person.

That's interesting. I've heard the opposite.

C'mon HST just rejiggered Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism

what on earth does this mean?

it means that if you stand on san juan hill and look north you can almost see the high-water mark

He seems like he'd be nice irl... Nerdy, earnest, literal-minded xp

i saw him speak last year and chatted with him for about 10 minutes afterward and he was really nice, i assume he gets out all his aggression through vicious exchanges on twitter.

tbh i'd be a dick sometimes too if ppl kept calling me a libertarian.

I agree with DL though. I don't like the rhetorical style where u act like your opinions are SO OBVIOUS that it's a shock when someone doesnt automatically agree with you. Jezebel is like this, I think, and it's annoying to me even when i agree with them which is often.

xp Anyone can be decent chatting to someone who agrees with them but I can't think of another major pundit, left or right, who is so pompous and graceless when responding to even mild dissent, except maybe Bill O'Reilly.

yeah, that's the thing. trolling me about israel is so easy that even morbz can do it. i thought hungry4ass was into the next level trolling.

― Mordy , Thursday, May 23, 2013 11:15 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

tbh i didnt know you were 'into' israel until a few weeks ago. thought you were one of the good ones b4 that

oh well now you know the awful truth that i am a bad one

thought you were one of the good ones

damn fine trolling there. he raised his game a notch.

yeah, that's the thing. trolling me about israel is so easy that even morbz can do it.

― Mordy , Thursday, May 23, 2013 11:15 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

Morbz has a pretty low batting average but tremendous trolling power when he connects.

good slugging percentage tho

i'm very sincere when it comes to issues of jewishness and israel. it involves my family and friends and it is something i feel very emotional about. i try very hard on ilx to discuss it intelligently and engage ppl in legitimate debate on the topic. i suppose it's fair game to troll me on it but when i read morbz do it, or hungry4ass, or gukbe, or the numerous ppl on ilx who have trolled me on the issue, i feel momentarily sad and disappointed and i try not to get into a fight about it. on the other hand if it seems like someone has a legitimate point they want to discuss, it's one of my favorite things to talk about.

so yeah, good trolling dudes. i got the feels or however the kids describe it these days.

sorry.

mordy if this pathetic routine is just a ploy to make us feel sympathy for you and your racist settler state... well then it's working--come on in for a hug ya big ole lump!

lol

mordy -- my political perspective is obv a bit different from yours but i actually genuinely appreciate + have learned from your posts on this subject, and sincerely regret if i've ever trolled you abt it (i can't remember, but my penchant for posting lazily ill-thought-out quippy stuff on political threads while at work tells me i prob have).

yeah i learn a lot from mordy posts and i have to think about stuff in ways i haven't before, so thanks

GG's passions do seem obviously on-target to me, as does how the Israeli government tends to act against its own long-term interests re the Palestinian question.

but complaining about self-righteousness re an 'indefensible' subject lol i guess

Drone attacks continue, the FBI killed an unarmed witness, and Obama aides cash in

Update

American expat wears cargo shorts with gay Brazilian lover, Beltway elite shrug

Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily

The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".

The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

...

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

in which new guy ackerman & greenwald deliver

This guy does good work.

thx

lol

lmao i cant IMAGINE what the original draft of that greenwald piece looked like

http://www.out.com/sites/out.com/files/GlennGreenwald1.jpg

Good work GG. I may not like him but credit where it's due.

Actually I like him more every time I see the walking-the-dogs picture. That doesn't look like a guy who would question my reading comprehension.

i wore cargo shorts last weekend tbh

It's a good look

prefer skinny shorts, neutral-colored flip-flops, Labradors, and a Constitution.

They were discussing this article plus a drone operator's interview with NBC on "Morning Joe" this morning, and Joe was predicting Holder would soon be going through Greenwald's phone records

and by Greenwald's phone records you mean

I will leave the jokes to you.

do we have to use the Crazed Zionist's thread to praise GG?

wow dude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFRbZJXjWIA

When is it time to let go of a friendship?

yeah i said "wow dude" when he started a trollthread just cuz moral objections to the manifest destiny of Israel gets his shorts in a bunch

I'm sorry you're sick dude but damn if you're not the biggest dick on ilx.

yeah it's definitely your noble political impulses & not your bitter misanthropic rage driving your personal attacks on Mordy. you have such undying compassion for the palestinian people that you can't help but sprinkle your snark with some light anti-Semitism. get the fuck outta here.

tsk tsk don't let bigots get away with that smokescreen

yeah it's definitely your noble political impulses & not your bitter misanthropic rage driving your personal attacks on Mordy. you have such undying compassion for the palestinian people that you can't help but sprinkle your snark with some light anti-Semitism. get the fuck outta here.

― ttyih boi (crüt), Thursday, June 6, 2013 11:28 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah it's definitely your noble political impulses & not your bitter misanthropic rage driving your personal attacks on Mordy. you have such undying compassion for the palestinian people that you can't help but sprinkle your snark with some light anti-Semitism. get the fuck outta here.

― ttyih boi (crüt), Thursday, June 6, 2013 11:28 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

lol, antisemitism. they got to u too huh curt

btw i practice a warm, seductive misanthropy.

i practice a warm, seductive flag post

roots of creation, airwair

Greenwald's piece on James Comey, the Bush official nominated to be the next FBI director was worth reading

i practice a warm, seductive flag post

― Mordy , Thursday, June 6, 2013 3:43 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nice

lol

get the fuck outta here.

point taken

Rep. Louie Gohmert: "We've all got an Obama phone now"

hahahahaha

that line is funnier than anything jon stewart might say tonight

You're not alone.

welp greenwald is owning us all the last couple days

carrying us around in one of his many pockets

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 58s
I wish English language were broader so I could express my simultaneous contempt & mockery for the investigation threats emanating from DC

ha hes still not a very good writer tho

http://twitter.yfrog.com/z/4jg2jrj

The bird/key logo is pretty terrible too

don't really get the complaints about his writing, he's not mencken or anything but i can think of like a dozen prominent bloggers who are much worse stylists

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 58s
I wish English language were broader so I could express my simultaneous contempt & mockery for the investigation threats emanating from DC

yes, it's the fault of the english language

Spyware built in from the first grunts.

The next Zeitgeist movie is gonna be so dope

Will Saletan: BOW YOUR HEADS!

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2013/06/stop_the_nsa_surveillance_hysteria_the_government_s_scrutiny_of_verizon.html

@BarackObama 25m

"In a country where we expect free wifi with our coffee, why shouldn't we have it in our schools?" —President Obama in North Carolina today

GOOD TIMING

he said "Chill"!

More good timing:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113399/nsa-collecting-verizon-records-why-internet-companies-fight-back

My privacy is safe with Google. They do not collect data about me or share it with others.

^^ plz repeat until believed

http://s1.dmcdn.net/a5cU/526x297-iik.jpg

"My name is Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht."

NY Times!

So he lives in Brazil

he wears cargo shorts too

Maybe you should post that photo one more time

“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”

Seems a little paranoid

hahahaha

he's clearly hoping the government goes after him

"oh plz not the briar patch!"

Jesus Christ Mordy

is there any doubt? i'm sure he'd love to confront the US government head on and in the public eye.

you're right mordy, what a ridiculous person

the opposite of silly i'd think. such a confrontation would be very good from his pov.

*obama drone strikes glenn greenwald's brazilian sex mansion, leaving only a charred pair of cargo shorts*

[glenn greenwald in Macklemore - thrift sthop voice] This is fucking awesome

lol

i'm sure any government response won't involve dropping a drone on glenn, and i don't think that's what he's expecting. he's probably expecting some legal action ala manning or assange.

more likely some kind of sex crimes charge

if you can't imagine why he'd want to get involved in a public legal battle w/ the united states government i think you don't really get glenn greenwald

ya if he goes to jail he'll be a national celebrity / reddit martyr etc

Guys, only Mordy "gets" Glenn Greenwald

what if waterface were gleen greenwald

The only way Gleen Gleenwald is going to jail is if the fashion police arrest him for his corgi shorts.

walderface

i don't really "get" waterface - does it have a point?

waterface is a personification of all the bile and assholishness on ilx over the last decade, if everyone just started being nice to each other waterface would just disappear

nah man you can't pin him down. he's a slippery one, that waterface.

Being at the center of a debate is a comfortable place for Mr. Greenwald, 46, who came to mainstream journalism through his own blog, which he started in 2005. Before that he was a lawyer, including working 18 months at the high-powered New York firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he represented large corporate clients.

What was the thread where I defended the appointment of former "corporate lawyers" to regulatory positions and said that I knew big firm lawyers who were further left than any of my other friends, and I got mocked for it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/whistleblowers-and-leak-investigations

I think I'm nice!

I'm just a truth teller

you are the darkness inside of all of us

I am Shiva, destroyer of words

you are a weak version of a tired archetype but it's cool to have you on board

Thank you, Spiral!

he's probably expecting some legal action ala manning or assange.

― Mordy , Friday, June 7, 2013 10:18 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok you undersand that manning already is going to be in jail for decades and if he's convicted on the other charges he could be in jail for life.

so no i don't think greenwald would 'welcome' this?

well, Manning leaked the information whereas Greenwald benefitted from a whistleblower. Now's the time to wonder whether Eric Holder will keep to his week-old promise not to prosecute journalists who publish this sort of intel.

why did you put the word welcome between apostrophes?

What was the thread where I defended the appointment of former "corporate lawyers" to regulatory positions and said that I knew big firm lawyers who were further left than any of my other friends, and I got mocked for it?

― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), F

Not sure you got mocked for it (Supreme Court thread maybe re Obama corporate law, Bush admin. attorney nominee for DC Circuit)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Sullivan <>
Date: Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 3:31 PM
Subject: Re: glenn greenwald
To: "Kaufman, Leslie" <

I count Glenn as an honest blogger whose passions in real time can sometimes lead to misreadings of others. But we're all vulnerable to that in the blogosphere, and in our various spats, I've always enjoyed the give-and-take, rather than resenting some of the occasionally unfair barbs. They come with the territory. But once you get into a debate with him, it can be hard to get the last word. A friend described debating him as like engaging with a rhetorical trampoline. But I actually enjoy rhetorical trampolining, as long as no one gets hurt too much. I do not take anything he writes about my work personally.
His passion is a great antidote to the insidery access-driven village of Washington journalism, but at times, I think he has little grip on what it actually means to govern a country or run a war. He's a purist in a way that, in my view, constrains the sophistication of his work.
Yes, we're friends. We've hung out a bit, and are bonded by a couple of things. He relies on readers for much of his income (and I rely on readers for all of mine) - and has made online debate much sharper in many ways. I've benefited from his criticism, even as I remain to his "right." And he is forced to live abroad with his partner David because the US refuses to acknowledge the validity and dignity of bi-national gay couples. I was in that exact position for a long time with my American husband - and our shared experience matters a lot to me. Our husbands have also bonded over the same issue.
And I genuinely like him as a human being.
you can use any all or none of that
cheers
andrew

I think thats a good reading of GG... ^^^

"ugh, the worst, right? anyway, i just really wanted to share this lustrous takedown of him from some guy's blog i don't know:
http://jacobinism.blogspot.co.il/2013/05/drooling-self-love-dime-store-third.html";

Mordy's initial post is terrible.. incredibly biased.... clearly GG doesn't fit into 'defend the indefensible'

that jacobinism article.... is ... just.....

so who leaked the NSA stuff?

As Mr. Greenwald tells it, the last decade has been a slow political awakening. “When 9/11 happened, I thought Bush was doing a good job,” he said. “I was sucking up uncritically what was in the air.”

This surprised me but it explains a lot - the zeal of a convert.

Wish the thread title was changed too.

Corner ites often allude to Greenwald's past.

So Sully knows how to run a country and start a war eh

^my thoughts exactly

xp Oh great, what splendid company to be in.

David Simon weighs in - "bullshit" apparently

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

...All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal. Why?

Because they aren’t listening to the calls.

i distinctly remember mcnulty listening in to the actual calls

considering the many year existence of the israel suck it thread, i think you guys can deal w/ the title of this thread

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G4LXzA6PezQ/TpnXosoh0CI/AAAAAAAAACM/v1_-8N10W_U/s1600/DEAL-WITH-IT.jpg

Hmmm the title of that thread is "Israel TO WORLD: 'Suck it!'" not "Israel, suck it!" but OK.

i distinctly remember mcnulty listening in to the actual calls

that was herc and prez!

@ggreenwald: I'll be on with Anderson Cooper tonight discussing the various disclosures, along with . . . Ari Fleischer.

hah

david simon can suck it

Greenwald's local roots.

panicked libertarians and liberals and Obama-haters

sort of thought simon was above this tbh

there are some cheap shots in there but also some good points? idk i thought it was interesting

simon isnt really above anything, his shows are real good but as an essayist he p belligerent and awful

the belligerent parts of that were so funny tho

david simon can suck it

― mimicking regular benevloent (sic) users' names (President Keyes), Friday, June 7, 2013 7:37 PM

OTM x10

considering the many year existence of the israel suck it thread, i think you guys can deal w/ the title of this thread

shit, I forgot that GG practiced apartheid and wholesale slaughter.

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 8m
Dear NYT: no matter how often you call us "British site," it won't stop being factually false. Rise up above those petty resentments.

emptywheel ‏@emptywheel 5m
@ggreenwald But you're still a loner. Admit it.

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 2m
@emptywheel Will you be my friend, Marcy?

lol

David Simon is the rich man's Buzz Bissinger.

Calling the Guardian a "British news site" is hilariously petty coming from the NYT

http://twitter.com/edwardsnowden

"Yes, I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me. Or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

This guy hiding out in HK really underscores how fucked we are.

True.

I wonder if he is still in HK though? The interview was taped three days ago, he might have moved?

He's in Hong Kong. He's living a Zevon song.

send bloggers, guns and money

so snowden peaced out

disappear or disappeared?

#teamedward

Hayes Brown ‏@HayesBrown 5m
Rep. Peter King just blatantly called for @ggreenwald's arrest on Fox News. Amazing.

Greenwald cohort seem to possess a belief that only the rich or privileged can be evil, and a weird almost autistic inability to recognize cultural or ideological (non-economic) fascism.
OTOH, fuck Rep. Peter King.

you're right, focusing on your area of expertise as a writer clearly means an 'autistic' lack of interest in anything else

Weird almost autistic inability to read a sentence?

Which Greenwald cohort? Snowden? Where does he (or whichever "cohort" you are talking about) express views as you suggest? Can you flesh out your varying types of fascism argument?

Maybe I missed something upthread.

Cohort is a plural, curmudgeon.

Ah, it is. So who's in this group?

What are you talking about MV? What other types of fascism?

Sorry i see now curmudgeon's covered those questions

Greenwald cohort seem to possess a belief that only the rich or privileged can be evil, and a weird almost autistic inability to recognize cultural or ideological (non-economic) fascism.

so sick of people calling Greenwald autistic.

Islamofascism, d00ds. Ever think about THAT, u aspie fux?

― MV

i remember a while back a bunch of prominent liberal bloggers decided that greenwald was obviously a libertarian because he 'never wrote about labor issues.'

i think there are certain writers who do write as if they are the only writer you read but idk if glenn greenwald is one. he's, yknow, a channel.

i guess no good writer would write that way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/14/glenn-greenwald-reader-profile-interactive#615

what the hell

sad libs

in 10 years the front page of the nyt will be nothing but crowdsourced mad libs

Glenn Greenwald, a dominant hero for the Guardian, whose writing has been described as erotic, revealed orgasmic new information regarding the NSA and its surveillance programs last week.

- A humble student from Michigan

this is the saddest media thing I've ever seen, and last week I saw this: a thread for local TV news insanity

we have a thread for the guardian. load all messages for ten years of increasing disillusionment.

I think he is a bad writer but I agree with most of the points he makes.

― Michigan seems like a dream to me now (Treeship), Tuesday, May 21, 2013 12:41 PMBookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

^^He went from lawyer to blogger to journalist without ever really having an editor.

^^^ tagline of Greenwald biopic

GG is a fine writer imo, i'd take his dogged earnestness over a dozen jaded quipsters like alex pareene any day

i.f. stone was not a great stylist either, yknow

As a lover of both, not a good comparison.

pareene could stand to ditch the bloggy voice (this goes for almost everyone who blogs) but he's always a good read

actually i really like pareene, he's not the best example, just the first one that popped to mind.

How much do you want to bet that before the summer is out we'll be saying stuff like "Wow, you'd think Greenwald would've known to not take his car down a canyon at night. SMH I guess he really liked to live on the edge."

hmmmmmm nope

Richard Clarke, the former chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, believes that Hasting’s death may have been the result of a cyberattack on his car.

http://www.ibtimes.com/michael-hastings-car-hacking-theory-latest-attempt-explain-suspicious-death-richard-clarke-says#

do you guys even think Obama knows who michael hastings is

Sure. He reads Andrew Sullivan.

oh no buzzfeed is turning against me I guess I have to kill some people

maybe the white house should start an animated gif department to counter buzzfeed's gaining influence, also then they won't have to kill so many journalists

when the us govt wants to get rid of a journalist it doesnt kill him it tries to leverage access w/ other papers and influential ppl to discredit him and prevent him from getting a job. and maybe he kills himself later or something, but it doesnt matter.

when it wants to kill a us citizen it connects him with terrorism and sends a drone in

it doesnt... hack... his car. i mean the sort of willful disregard of the actually weirdly open and transparent workings of power here, which hastings himself had mentioned in the past!

like, if someone said, the MOB took him out, i might buy that?

without even knowing hastings it seems p clear that the poor guy was strung out and paranoid in the final weeks of his life, not hard to end up crashing your car at 4am in a state of mind like that

i suppose you could arrange a kind of aaron swartz style path of causation. but the fbi wasnt investigating him.

max is only saying this so he doesn't get killed

max u better check the firewall on yr kick scooter

that being said i guarantee you obama knows who hastings is. hastings is the reason he fired mcchrystal!

Max this is exactly what the government wants you to think, that it won't go down like this. Think abt it.

guys you realize richard clarke sees cyberattacks EVERYWHERE right? i mean if you're looking at one individual to point at as to why we have this ridiculously large cyber intel infrastructure now clarke's yr man.

guys i dont think the government killed michael hastings or will try to kill gg or snowden ftr

i just think its sort of insane and lol that ~richard clarke~ implied this

guys

i mean give the guy credit for blasting the bush admin's incompetence leading to 9/11 (condi rice hadn't even heard of al qaeda on 9/11, head of the fucking nsa) and their immediate (as in 9/12) move to focus on iraq but he's the classic case of maslow's hammer. dude was still beating the 'cyberattacks is the terrorism, WE MUST DIRECT ALL EFFORTS TOWARD FUTURE CYBERWARS!' drum after 9/11 (when it seemed pretty apparent that 'splosions would probably remain the terrorism of the near future at least).

here comes the character assassination: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/greenwald-reporter-broke-nsa-story-lawyer-sued-porn-biz-article-1.1383448

Haas said he called the deal off because Greenwald was “demanding changes to the content of the videos which were and are unacceptable.”

suits thinking they have artistic talent smh

In a 2003 lawsuit, he and his then partner, Werner Achetz, were sued by their West Side condo board for having a dog that was bigger than building by-laws allowed.

oh man Glenn I take back everything nice I ever said about you

most damning is that his consulting company was called Master Notions

Bit of a fluff piece but worth reading. His family grew up 25 miles north of me.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/how-glenn-greenwald-became-glenn-greenwald

i haven't read greenwald in years but what other journalists are trying to do to him is fucking gross

the hagiography should make up for it

not really

Daily News article is bizarre, but I guess Daily News is bizarre.

This is pretty tremendous: http://youtu.be/Uulv4ve6RJ8

have to admit i was pleasantly surprised he kept the conference on his schedule after all this stuff broke, i thought he might bail to avoid "zomg look greenwald is a socialist" bs

socialist, libertarian, whats the difference

step 1 spend your life promoting government paranoia step 2 socialism

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

a thing that exists xp

heh, yeah, i remember that wiki article really blowing my mind in 10th grade

it's....not a very coherent ideology

kinda bummed that a hoos thought he had to post that for me tbh

just like man up and go full maoist or go home imo

cf black flame, the existence of competing ideas under a name with disputed claims doesn't make the strain with a historical claim to legitimacy incoherent

but that's another thread

socialists want to fix the government, iatee... fix it BUT GOOD

idk it's interesting how infrequently that narrative comes out

hate the government reading yr emails ur gonna love the government telling you where to work

thx to this thread i always mentally interpose a "fuckin" whenever i read this dude's name

mordy fucking mordy

the dead man switch would make an awesome tom ripley novel scenario ~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/13/reuters-article-dead-man-s-switch

The oft-repeated claim that Snowden's intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. When he gave us the documents he provided, he repeatedly insisted that we exercise rigorous journalistic judgment in deciding which documents should be published in the public interest and which ones should be concealed on the ground that the harm of publication outweighs the public value. If his intent were to harm the US, he could have sold all the documents he had for a great deal of money, or indiscriminately published them, or passed them to a foreign adversary. He did none of that.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald-guardian-partner-detained-heathrow

this is pretty amazing

Mr. Miranda, 28, was questioned about the curious cargo shorts he wears in every photo extant of him and his partner Greenwald

absolutely disgusting

yeah. really shocking. v curious to hear about the fallout, it seems stunningly confrontational, & at such a heated moment.

according to twitter, in the UK the rent-a-cops (or whatever you'd like to call the airport security) don't even need suspicion to detain someone for 9 hours, under their antiterrorism statute

This fucking thread title never ceases to annoy me.

has greenwald been back to the US since the snowden stuff started?

nah, he even skyped in to conference he'd been scheduled to keynote in chicago

nine fucking hours

what assholes

really just so dumb

crazy they have his stuff.

This is pretty shitty but goddamn it Greenwald please stop writing things like "This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ."

STOP MINDREADING THE INTENTIONS OF BUREAUCRATS, GLENN. I strongly suspect the reality of the situation was somewhere NEAR what he says but shading ever-so-slightly towards "stupid fuck-up by an asshole overstepping their bounds", which is the explanation for 99.9% of all airport detentions everywhere. I think. I guess. But I'm not going to write that in a newspaper unless I can prove it. That never stops Glenn. He knows what everyone is thinking.

Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offence to refuse to co-operate with questioning under schedule 7

this is fucking crazy.

I strongly suspect the reality of the situation was somewhere NEAR what he says but shading ever-so-slightly towards "stupid fuck-up by an asshole overstepping their bounds"

but like, 9 hours? specifically asking about his reporting?

Did he ever get his phone and laptop back?

That never stops Glenn. He knows what everyone is thinking.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, August 19, 2013 12:17 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup

Did he ever get his phone and laptop back?

It sounds like not? Which is like, stealing, by most definitions???

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/europe/britain-detains-partner-of-reporter-tied-to-leaks.html?_r=0

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden. The British authorities seized all of his electronic media — including video games, DVDs and data storage devices — and did not return them, Mr. Greenwald said.

I just don't see how they can do they if the guy hasn't been charged. It's not like a bag of weed. It's a USB stick.

at borders they can pretty much just take stuff generally

part of why they went out of business

they're still chill at barnes & noble tho

xpost dammit

tracer it's in one of the articles that less than 1% of airport detentions under the same provisions last for the full 9 hours

"stupid fuck-up by an asshole overstepping their bounds", which is the explanation for 99.9% of all airport detentions everywhere = this is the 0.1%

i would certainly be interested in knowing who gave the order

http://lh3.ggpht.com/-xB_tkBXOw00/UR1cnnmfB2I/AAAAAAAAa3g/VKgKt-edapc/Jack-Nicolson-you-cant-handle-the-tr.jpg?imgmax=800

turns out it was snowden

xp dammit

n/m cant handle it

This is a country, like the US, without a bill of rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Act_1998

this is almost certainly illegal, it's just it would take years for any actual ruling affirming it

"stupid fuck-up by an asshole overstepping their bounds", which is the explanation for 99.9% of all airport detentions everywhere = this is the 0.1%

OK sure, maybe, who knows, but Greenwald just goes ahead and says it like it's cast-iron truth that the (UK?) AUTHORITIES are sending a MESSAGE to JOURNALISTS to TREAD LIGHTLY. i mean really? is that really what the UKBA are doing? or are they just power-hungry bastards who thought they smelled a tip that confidential info might be crossing a border and figured they'd put the guy through the wringer? if they were the kind of illuminati that greenwald makes them out to be they'd have realized a mile away that giving dude this kind of treatment would reap nothing but shit

I dunno. I might be scared of dating a Greenwald in the future?

OK sure, maybe, who knows, but Greenwald just goes ahead and says it like it's cast-iron truth that the (UK?) AUTHORITIES are sending a MESSAGE to JOURNALISTS to TREAD LIGHTLY. i mean really? is that really what the UKBA are doing? or are they just power-hungry bastards who thought they smelled a tip that confidential info might be crossing a border and figured they'd put the guy through the wringer? if they were the kind of illuminati that greenwald makes them out to be they'd have realized a mile away that giving dude this kind of treatment would reap nothing but shit

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, August 19, 2013 12:56 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you are describing the same thing twice, only in the second scenario they aren't as good at it

the ukba being retards and the ukba having authorization from the home office or equivalent are not mutually exclusive possibilities

or are they just power-hungry bastards who thought they smelled a tip that confidential info might be crossing a border and figured they'd put the guy through the wringer?

How is this different than indeed sending a message to tread lightly?!

its the authorities fucking w greenwalds sex life for sure, open yr eyes

if they were 'just sniffing' it wouldn't take nine hours

I don't get why they're exchanging documents that way when public key cryptography exists. Good luck trying to break a 15360-bit RSA key. Literally you could just send stuff to each other via gmail, using your real name, with body text "here are some more secret documents from Snowden, enjoy!" It is dramatic though.

yeah the implication is the same xxp

i think the differentiation tracer is making is if it was the bad idea of some lower level functionaries or the plotting of higher level functionaries

greenwald has a hyperbolic prose style, everyone knows this, i haven't read his article about this anyway but the reasons for what happened are fairly obvious, if not provably so

which is imho a meaningful differince

higher level functionaries, with 98% certainty

there u go

and like, i dunno. come on. if greenwald likes to imagine that he's in a spy novel he should start acting like it. if you are in possession of info that multiple national governments have classified as confidental and detrimental to national security if disclosed, etc etc then you don't just get a magical shield with "journalist" written on the front of it that means nobody hassles you about it when you're crossing borders with it. maybe in greenwald's ideal world you do, but if anybody knows how far from that ideal the world we live in is, it should be greenwald. now, i think the snowden info is important and needs to be known by the public. but you have to be a little smarter than sending your extremely cute and relatively well-known boyfriend through several countries to act as a courier for information that you know is highly contentious!

which is imho a meaningful differince

― lag∞n, Monday, August 19, 2013 1:02 PM (1 minute ago)

the higherups who authorized it will never admit it though, it's the only inference to draw

If your boyfriend was detained the max limit without arresting him while you're publishing revelatory NSA stuff who ordered it is immaterial. Remember "denialibility"?

It's a meaningful difference, maybe, but the outcome is the same: you can get held for nine hours, your stuff taken away from you, and basic human rights don't count any more.

Whether it was Camerom himself or just two cops goofing about it important, I agree, but in both cases it is clear that as a journalist - or partner of, even - you aren't safe.

Tracer, I question whether David Miranda is cute.

you have to be a little smarter than sending your extremely cute and relatively well-known boyfriend through several countries to act as a courier for information that you know is highly contentious!

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 19 August 2013 18:03 (1 minute ago)

uhm that is the assumption the ukba or their superiors made

there is no suggestion his boyfriend was actually carrying state secrets on his wii or whatever

He's relatively well known for a photo in which he walks a dog in cargo shorts and flip-flops.

There's no way they would have even known who he was without someone at a reasonably high level telling them. The security services would almost certainly have been involved, I think.

It's a meaningful difference, maybe, but the outcome is the same: you can get held for nine hours, your stuff taken away from you, and basic human rights don't count any more.

― In the airplane over the .CSS (Le Bateau Ivre), Monday, August 19, 2013 1:06 PM (50 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when you cross borders you surrender a lot of rights, they can search you take yr stuff etc, you enter into this situation voluntarily via crossing the border, tho in this case he was just transferring at the airport which obvs complicates the situaiton

Pretty tacky dog imo

Yes. And what complicates it even more is that he is GG's partner.

Xp

There's no way they would have even known who he was without someone at a reasonably high level telling them. The security services would almost certainly have been involved, I think.

― Inte Regina Lund eller nån, mitt namn är (ShariVari), Monday, August 19, 2013 1:09 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah he was for sure at least on some watch list, which is pretty dubious

Tracer, it sounds like you're saying this isn't dubious behavior because Greenwald (a) didn't figure this could happen and (b) writes hyperbolic prose.

naw hes saying greenwald is jumping to conclusions re the machinations that led to the dunbiousnes

and like, i dunno. come on. if greenwald likes to imagine that he's in a spy novel he should start acting like it.

I like to think that Miranda was a decoy and this was specifically to write hyperbolic prose about because he knew it would happen. The real docs went some secure digital way, as above.

I mean if it's a spy novel that's like Misdirection 101.

there were no real docs, its all a ruse in order to... blog

can the UKBA do this 9hr detention with olbigation to cooperate thing to british citizens too?

usb sticks? wtf?

yes. i'm also saying that he should choose maybe a more sneaky way of transferring extremely sensitive info than like, his boyfriend and a usb stick. i'm not suggesting that what happened is JUSTIFIED either morally or probably even legally, just that greenwald is maybe being kind of dim about it?

there is no suggestion his boyfriend was actually carrying state secrets on his wii or whatever

nakh did you read goole's post?

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden.

Mark me down as another one kind of amazed neither Greenwald nor Poitras has ever heard of WeTransfer. "I'll put all these documents on a flash drive, because this is a movie, and it's 2007."

maybe this is just his way of breaking up

miranda is gg's husband ftr

so Miranda would have been stopped even if he was not GG's spouse -- is that what some of you Mordyites are saying?

Maybe GG knows what everyone's thinking the way Obama 'skeptics' know that the True Librul in O's heart of hearts detests the authoritarian policies he vigorously pursues.

anyway, after reading Maass's NYT Mag piece on Poitras I would've thought she and GG were more careful about thius stuff.

ah i did not know. i feel like he's always referred to as "partner" so i extrapolated. wrongly.

no i didn't read that and probably should have but it seems sort of superfluous because all of that could be fully encryped and sent electronically anyway

reading comprehension morbs, as always

Morbius me too! the second graf, when she gets the first dump from snowden, she literally pulls the ethernet cable out of her computer immediately and shuts it down.

"oh plus we have to meet in berlin. why? don't worry about it, it'll be cool."

seems the detention was by the police, not the ukba, which is worse in a sense, because in their defense, the ukba are merely incompetent.

if miranda had classified material from a foreign security agency (nsa) then that would still be ultra vires wrt the terrorism act

i don't give a fuck about glenn greenwald and sure this treatment could hardly have come as a surprise to him

so he may be a hysterical imbecile playing at spy games or he might just have arranged this in the expectation ukba would engage in a counterproductive interception and the optics would help greenwald/snowden

it's not like the only transfer from berlin to south america is via london.......

yeah the detention was by police but i guess it would have been ukba who intercepted him? so substitute the names but it doesn't affect the rest of the argument

jesus ppl on this thread are ruthless.

wtf is wrong with everyone.

Who's ruthless exactly? Because not everyone is saying the same tbh

this treatment could hardly have come as a surprise to him

really

the art of pretend fascism

waiting for it...

What I do hate is ad-homs like 'he should have known' this etc. if only Greenwald was so smart as we all are eh?

can the UKBA do this 9hr detention with olbigation to cooperate thing to british citizens too?

Yes, they can do it to anyone at airports, sea ports and international rail terminals.

Abuse of power and the ignoring of basic human rights here are glaringly staring in everyone's face here. Yet some still can't go beyond 'whaa he didn't see this coming'?

yeah unless u were very lax or retarded u would know uk govt will always go out of the way to help america, greenwald would probably know this

lbi and hoos idk if u are just being dense or

Nakh, even if he should have known better - because I agree that he was naive probably - that still isn't the biggest thing here is it? The main point is that his husband was detained for 9 hours. 'Knowing the uk will always help the us' doesn't take anything away from this being a disgraceful act.

oy

Abuse of power and the ignoring of basic human rights here are glaringly staring in everyone's face here. Yet some still can't go beyond 'whaa he didn't see this coming'?

― In the airplane over the .CSS (Le Bateau Ivre), Monday, August 19, 2013 1:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbf seems like people were saying this as an aside

saying this was hardly unexpected does not somehow mean this wasn't unconscionable, lest that weren't obvious from the posts where i said it was a disgrace etc

@fivethirtyeight
"Never connect at Heathrow if you can possibly avoid it" is right up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia"

otm

True.

Xxxp and xxp

i wouldn't get a partner mixed up in this stuff. but then i wouldn't get myself mixed up in this stuff either.

@fivethirtyeight
"Never connect at Heathrow if you can possibly avoid it" is right up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia"

― polyphonic, Monday, 19 August 2013 18:41 (2 minutes ago)

yeah i can't imagine greenwald would not know this, or have been told by his wikileaks friends

@GGreenwald
A real mystery: suspenseful RT @OKnox White House won't say whether US tried to discourage UK from detaining @ggreenwald's partner.

hey did we discuss julian assange coming out as an old-right pro lifer anywhere

The White House "was informed" about Miranda being detained at Heathrow, I'm reading. Ow

Lol Goole no I don't think so :) that was o_O though

haha wait he's pro-life?? i saw he was into ron paul, which, of course

You could meet a person in a cafe and pay them $500 plus the cost of their ticket to deliver anything in the world that doesn't smell like drugs or explosives and they'd never be looked at. It just doesn't seem like this could possibly be accidental. This is zero comment on whether it's unscrupulous personal harassment, which it obviously is.

Also in case anyone needs anything, you can pay me $500 plus the cost of my ticket to deliver anything that doesn't smell like drugs or explosives, just ftr.

haha wait he's pro-life?? i saw he was into ron paul, which, of course

― max, Monday, August 19, 2013 1:48 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and RAND paul!

So,

and like, i dunno. come on. if greenwald likes to imagine that he's in a spy novel he should start acting like it.

I mean, I know it's annoying when people think they're in a spy novel. Sure. Is that what GG's actually doing, though? Really?

if you are in possession of info that multiple national governments have classified as confidental and detrimental to national security if disclosed, etc etc then you don't just get a magical shield with "journalist" written on the front of it that means nobody hassles you about it when you're crossing borders with it.

I'm still following up this story, and cannot for the life of me work out whether or not Miranda had anything on him. Did he or did he not? Help me out here.

a thumb drive w secrets

a thumb drive w <s>secrets</s> next season's line of cargo shorts

shit

I've got a fistful of secrets if yaknowwhatImean

a friend of mine told me that in israel a sandisk is a big employer and everyone calls thumbdrives disc-on-key

Nilmar is basically saying GG is not one of the smart -- naaaahhhh

k

I do think Greenwald's biggest mistake today was saying he will write more aggressively and release more classified info now. He should have released the anyway.mnow it almost sounds like "ok guys I was going to give youse a break but you've gone too far now!' Which is nagl a motivation for a journalist.

yeah journalism is not really his natural habitat

Nilmar is basically saying GG is not one of the smart -- naaaahhhh

― Miss Arlington twirls for the Coal Heavers (Dr Morbius), Monday, 19 August 2013 18:58 (3 minutes ago)

did you actually read this post

defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

GG says Reuters tore his remarks out of context.

I will be on the Snowden thread.

I dunno

I'm not sure whether or not I 'give a fuck' about GG either but it's kind of the principle of the thing isn't it

yeah you can't read either

Also Nilmar are you coming from a 'giving away classified documents is a dangerous, stupid thing to do' angle or a 'This man is annoying to me' angle?

I'm open to the first (but probably need to have it spelled out to me) and the second is understandable in that people find people annoying

Lagoon, all I'm saying is it makes him come across as someone acting out of vengeance instead of just journalism. He's making it personal. I know it was made personal by detaining his husband but you need to try and separate the two, no?

Nilmar isn't coming of neither angles iirc, he's better than that.

Either, not neither

xp and Nilmar I'm not a Snowden/GG/Assange 'fan' or whatever, just trying to get a handle on all this. Spare a thought for people whose comprehension moves slightly slower than political events

i just want to make sure i understand--i'm being willfully naive if i think it's a problem that a guy publishing information about government spying by one country has his partner detained at an airport for 9 hours to be questioned about further publications by another country? is that the general idea? whether he should have 'expected' it or not is entirely beside the point--that it occurred at all is outrageous, and to deny that is to make peace with the notion that this is normal. and fuck that.

I don't really like that the whole NSA discussion is done in those thread, because for future reference/posterity, it'll be troublesome to locate some info, but anyway.

I've not read everything everyone has said, but my take is pretty simple, and I do make a few inferences, so take it with a grain of salt.

My conclusion is that Greenwald was very suspicious that there was a high probability of this happening to his partner--even higher if it was Greenwald himself transporting the data, so why not make it more interesting? Yes, I feel very strongly that this is a game to see who outwits the other. I have no problems with him doing this, because it is what moronic governments deserve. I'm not singling out a country, I am referring to my own country of Canada, plus the UK, and the USA.

Exhibit A: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?pagewanted=10&_r=1&

"Their discussion turned to the question of coming back to the United States. Greenwald said, half-jokingly, that if he was arrested, WikiLeaks would become the new traffic cop for publishing N.S.A. documents. “I would just say: ‘O.K., let me introduce you to my friend Julian Assange, who’s going to take my place. Have fun dealing with him.'"

Poitras prodded him: “So you’re going back to the States?"

I had a problem with this article because of its long-form. It puts people off. I question whether it got anywhere near the same amount of reads as other shorter articles, making certain details inaccessible to readers who are put off by 10 pages of literature.

We also have this: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-snowden-s-files-are-out-there-if-anything-happens-to-him.html

“When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”

When asked if Greenwald believed his computer was being monitored by the U.S. government. “I would be shocked if the U.S. government were not trying to access the information on my computer. I carry my computers and data with me everywhere I go.”

Greenwald knows. People who are keeping up with the story know.

WikiLeaks leaked an AES256 encrypted insurance file. It's on the Internet. I'm not going to link to it but a simple Google search will locate it. The assumption is that they used openSSL and is something the NSA can easily crack. I tend to agree with this line of thought.

This was a test. To see what the gov't would react. Just as the gov't played along, seeing how Greenwald would react.

In that sense, it might've been a decoy, but their is also the assumption that the NSA already know everything Snowden/Greenwald/Poitras have. So all this confiscation is part of the theatrical drama played out for the mainstream public. Link/bait/etc.

Thing is, Greenwald is playing that game and trying to use it against them.

Just my opinion.

to be expected or not, it should not be fucking occurring. that simple.

xp

I'm with you Hoos, but tbf everyone here acknowledged it shouldn't have happened already.

saying this was hardly unexpected does not somehow mean this wasn't unconscionable, lest that weren't obvious from the posts where i said it was a disgrace etc

― No results found for "churl sweatshirt" (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Monday, August 19, 2013 5:41 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry i flew off the handle, i missed this post. my bad.

there's a pretty simple narrative here and it keeps getting clouded up. like the history of this thread itself is ppl basically saying 'greenwald is occasionally ok i guess, but he keeps making outrageous accusations' and then you get leaks that substantiate those outrageous accusations and more and then ppl say 'oh man, i guess its ok greenwald published this stuff, but i wish someone less prone to outrageous accusations did' and then the next thing happens and its amnesia all over again: wait? on what basis is greenwald suspecting the worst? we live in a nation of laws lololol.

and then this triple-layer spy vs. spy shit projected on top -- maybe snowden was a false flag and greenwald false-flagged that and then secretly they're both false flags of the big cover-up from the athletic-doping complex, i mean really?

i mean i guess nutty conspiracy theories are easier to accept than just the government is spying on everyone and detaining whoever it likes and that's the world we live in, full stop.

i just want to make sure i understand--i'm being willfully naive if i think it's a problem that a guy publishing information about government spying by one country has his partner detained at an airport for 9 hours to be questioned about further publications by another country? is that the general idea? whether he should have 'expected' it or not is entirely beside the point--that it occurred at all is outrageous, and to deny that is to make peace with the notion that this is normal. and fuck that.

― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, 19 August 2013 19:13

just summarizing my prior posts, though they weren't that ambiguous

- this detention is an affront to justice in letter and spirit, even if you aren't a greenwald fanboy
- greenwald has plenty of useful acolytes including the main leftwing uk newspaper so he probably was not taken completely by surprise at the shitty conduct of uk authorities
- just maybe he was aware that if it happened, a few hours inconvenience for his boyfriend would yield good optics & the data was securely encrypted anyway
- now it has happened and greenwald is getting the most sympathetic press since the first round of snowden stories broke, his boyfriend is free and unharmed

glen greenwald's boyfriend was an inside job

my issue with greenwald's article is the issue i always have with him, which is that the truth is bad enough, he doesn't need to gild the lily by claiming that the UK Border Agency is "sending a message" to journalists. he has no fucking idea what the UK Border Agency was thinking, or who was directing them.

every day people are detained for an hour, two hours, three hours for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON AT ALL, other than like, they once bought a car from a guy who donated to a church that had a congregation member arrested on suspicion of having a telephone call with a member of hezbollah. now here we have a guy who is carrying classified national security documents. like, actually carrying them. it is entirely predictable that, as greenwald's partner, he will be nabbed with these. having re-read the NYTimes Mag article on poitras and greenwald, it really is hard to believe that she and greenwald were this naive. it's REALLY hard. they took endless precautions. so i kinda suspect when the NSA finally cracks the USB sticks it's gonna be rickroll.jpg?

just to make things clear to hoos and underrated aerosmith bootlegs et al, yes i also think it's despicable that he was detained for nine hours and completely loco that his stuff was essentially stolen even though has wasn't charged with anything.

having re-read the NYTimes Mag article on poitras and greenwald, it really is hard to believe that she and greenwald were this naive. it's REALLY hard. they took endless precautions.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 19 August 2013 19:35 (5 minutes ago)

this is what lends credibility the INSIDE JOB narrative, the holographic missiles or the tnt or whatever

america had several sovereign nations refuse airspace and force a foreign president's aeroplane to land on the mere suspicion snowden was aboard, the chance that the most deferent nation of all would somehow neglect to intercept a snowden accomplice is virtually nil, it's just implausible that greenwald would be so naive not to know this

can we just say what this really is, which is now that ostensibly democratic governments are targeting and detaining white dudes for talking shit about them, it's finally unacceptable?

theyve gone too far this time

ctrl-f "buttlips" - found

They came for the white dudes, and I said nothing, because I was not a white dude.
(oh wait...)

yeah nobody gave a fuck when they sent chuck d to nicaragua and tortured him to death for stealing documents from the nsa

.....

...and i said nothing because i was not a white dude with a thumbdrive full of secrets in my cargo shorts

there isn't really any direct precedent to snowden &c

america is a white supremacist nation, everyone knows this, it doesn't really pertain to what is happening here or lend any light to this minor injustice by relating it to an unrelated and much greater injustice

can we just say what this really is, which is now that ostensibly democratic governments are targeting and detaining white dudes for talking shit about them, it's finally unacceptable?

― OH MY GOD HE'S OOGLY (DJP), Monday, August 19, 2013 2:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

David Miranda isn't white

dun dun DUN

Srsly why bring in skin colour?

Srsly why bring in skin colour?

― In the airplane over the .CSS (Le Bateau Ivre), Monday, August 19, 2013 3:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in case this thread didn't have its ticket punched to clusterfuckville

Hey i didn't bring it up. DJP hasn't been in here before, came in to drop that, and left again.

Which is fine. But a recipe for derailing the thread tbh