defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

most of his tweets are fine tbh

Amazing. Apparently his defense is that he confused him with his father. Believing that Ron Paul would react any differently is just as stupid, though.

He probably is a libertarian more than a progressive.

good to know, exactly what i was talking about

dp

xp***

doing great today lol

Xpost Yeah without question he’d vote for Rand over Bernie Sanders

I...don't actually think that's true

It's absolutely true that he wears cargo shorts, flip-flops, and his house stinks of dog.

He probably is a libertarian more than a progressive.

― Frederik B, 24. april 2018 19:00 (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah without question he’d vote for Rand over Bernie Sanders

― Nerdstrom Poindexter, 24. april 2018 19:15 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I...don't actually think that's true

― Simon H., 24. april 2018 19:16 (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, because Rand ain't Ron

does Nerdstrom report to gabbneb at the DNC?

i don't actually know what Greenwald's politics are but his husband is a socialist politician

i quit reading GG more than a year ago and he is very annoying on a lot of subjects, but he is not a libertarian, and it's "stupid" (to borrow the only adjective fred appears to know) to keep saying that

he's not libertarian much at all. He's just very strident in the contrarian positions that he takes. He's really treating Joy Reid like a chew toy in the past few days.

can't imagine why he'd be taking offense at joy ann reid right now

it ain't hard tbh

His focus on Joy Reid has been ongoing, MSNBC anchors are usually the culprit when the president or the GOP does something bad.. Also he’s definitely not the guy who gets to complain about anyone else’s problematic old blog posts.

yes the gay man cannot complain about homophobic posts

and he's been sooooo vicious about it

People have the right to change. I believed Joy Reid's apology for those anti-gay blog posts she wrote (they were before the Dem Party officially changed its views on these questions). But her claim that these newly discovered, horribly bigoted posts are fake needs to be verified https://t.co/LYd1rnT07f

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 23, 2018

When he praises Tucker Carlson and speaks wistfully about Ron Paul, yeah we can say the selectively is suspect in his case

i'm gonna say the gay guy can complain about old homophobic blog posts regardless of how much of a dumbshit he's been in history

Well yeah I definitely agree it shouldn’t be illegal.

it should just be criticized by straight men on the internet

Xpost Yeah without question he’d vote for Rand over Bernie Sanders

― Nerdstrom Poindexter, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 1:15 PM (three hours ago)

I always wonder when people say things like this whether they're dumb or just uninformed

like I certainly don't read all the tweets and essays of the people I hate, and I don't expect other people to. but it seems that the least one could do if they're not going to bother doing any reading or critical thinking is just not to say anything

greenwald is a progressive and a civil libertarian, but what's most important to understand is he's a contrarian, and for whatever reason he sees it as his duty to police the left. this can obviously become tiring pretty quickly but I think it's a legitimate beat. of course it's fair game to disagree with his conclusions

That's because there's not much of a click reward for being merely a skeptic--gotta go full blown contrarian to have a beat that pays.

k3vin otm

Greenwald styles himself a consistent advocate of free speech, but he celebrated the censorship and legal harassment of a leftist who wrote about "anti-establishment" fascist entryism. https://t.co/IqJGKxxvpY

— Charles Davis (@charliearchy) April 24, 2018

The Guardian and WaPo benefited professionally from his work w Snowden exposing the NSA, to the tune of both winning 2014 Pulitzer. somehow he's a bad contrarian and they aren't, even though they happily mined those "click rewards".

Charles Davis is a former Ron Paul fan and the article Greenwald was complaining about was both libellous and factually incorrect enough for the SPLC to apologise for slack editorial standards fwiw - containing allegations that the SPLC themselves had previously debunked.

The idea that you can’t be pro-free speech and against factually incorrect stuff being published by respected organisations is beneath Davis.

Yeah Davis wrote positively about Paul’s opppsition to the drone program in 2011, which is better than speaking wistfully about him in 2018. Wait, the thing The Southern Povertly Law Center was forced to retract was about Max Blumenthal’s Assadist tendencies, something he used his considerable inherited resources to intimidate that organization into not running. Do we actually disagree with that characterization of Blumenthal?

Whether we agree with the characterisation or not, an organisation with the weight of the SPLC probably shouldn’t be publishing factually-inaccurate pieces contradicted by their own research work.

I like Davis well enough but he’s far more guilty of ‘policing the left’ than Greenwald and is clearly driven as much by professional bitterness as principle.

Defending hack-work from a Geography teacher with an axe to grind on the “red brown alliance” fits with his absolute loathing of Norton, Blumenthal, etc but it’s not clear why anyone else would want to join in. There are plenty of critiques of that clique not relying on speculation and misleading info.

It wasn’t a fact based retraction per the SPLC though but seemingly threat based. Blumenthal hasn’t been clear about what facts were in dispute. The lawyer who sent the intimidation letters worked under one of the subjects of the piece (alt-right personality Cassandra Fairbanks) at “Sputnik”, which pushes the false flag narratives the piece was critical of.

Blumenthal has been fairly clear about the parts he was challenging, including the elements that the SPLC had previously identified as false in other reports.

I’m in no great hurry to defend him but this was a substandard piece of work.

He wasn’t even remotely specific about any single thing in the interview he gave RT about it. Just the broad generalities (“they are trying to stifle dissent”’). Weird....

The Guardian and WaPo benefited professionally from his work w Snowden exposing the NSA, to the tune of both winning 2014 Pulitzer. somehow he's a bad contrarian and they aren't, even though they happily mined those "click rewards".

I have to say I do love that GG is now such an obvious schmuck / useful idiot that we use this thread as a place to talk about the editorial standards of places he doesn’t work, instead

"useful idiot" -- McCarthyism is def dead

I don't find him to be a useful idiot at all. Just strident a little too often.

Yeah, let's not get back to the bad days where Joseph McCarthy called people a 'useful idiot' a lot. Boy, that was horrible.

Also, apart from it being amazingly stupid to reduce McCarthyism to calling people 'useful idiots', Greenwald literally published information given to him by a Russian Intelligence Agent with the thinnest of fig leafs. It's not even hyperbolic to call him a 'useful idiot', it's quite descriptive.

Useful idiot is a technical term

Fred, you're the other kind

Frederik 'Useful Genius' B

like Tony "Tiny" Lester

.@ggreenwald is on white nationalist @TuckerCarlson's Fox News show hyping the latest GOP-fueled conspiracy theory. #FearlessAndAdversarial pic.twitter.com/aMooy9AY89

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 14, 2018

You’d think the self-proclaimed adversarial journalist, who holds the powerful accountable, might want to expose literal internment camps instead of hob-nob on de facto state media shows.

— Ben Yelin (@byelin) June 14, 2018

Really just the classic trajectory

I’m starting to think that “holding the people in power accountable” isn’t actually what he’s about.

Are there still people on the left who give this asshole credence, and if so, why?