defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

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

Guys you don’t have to open the thread

Every time I do, it’s I'm hoping someone is posting an obit

What Alex Jones said was "Sandy Hook is synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured.” verbatim. what a scumbag Glenn Greenwald is.

Italy is on the verge of an election that will result in its first-ever female Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni.

One of Europe's most authoritarian politicians, the unelected EU Commission President @vonderleyen, is threatening to sanction Italy if its citizens vote for her party. https://t.co/vzLebA1vH7

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 24, 2022

Find someone who loves you as much as Glem loves far-right politicos

It is with the most profound sadness that I announce the passing away of my husband, @DavidMirandaRio. He would have turned 38 tomorrow.

His death, early this morning, came after a 9-month battle in ICU. He died in full peace, surrounded by our children and family and friends. pic.twitter.com/wtRvGyJyGl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 9, 2023