defend the indefensible: glenn fucking greenwald

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?

Pretty much all residual benefit of the doubt from the Snowden days.

He is sometimes good on specific points/subjects but overall seems too high on his own farts to see what he's actually doing. Never a big fan but soured on him a lot when he gave Tucker Carlson a very forgiving interview on the Intercepted podcast, allowing Carlson to put out all his soft-sounding justifications for his bigoted anti-immigrant and anti-minority rhetoric without a serious challenge.

and his earlier writings, obviously. in some ways the times have passed him by though, it' sad
xp

man alive, I disagree. He knows exactly what he's doing. I don't believe for a second that he's simply confused or misguided. I think he's actively working for the other side.

he's obviously not

What makes you say that? I don't think it is obvious at all. He's playing a useful role for Fox and the GOP, and enjoying all the attention he's getting from it.

He knows exactly what he's doing

let us dispense with the notion . . .

What makes you say that? I don't think it is obvious at all. He's playing a useful role for Fox and the GOP, and enjoying all the attention he's getting from it.

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles), Wednesday, June 13, 2018 10:38 PM (forty seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um, the fact that the rest of his work/writing suggests otherwise?

I wouldn't say that he's always played this role, or always wanted to, but I think he's found that his targets and Fox's targets have aligned ever closer to the point where his most receptive and widest audience can be reached through Fox. He's banged away on the same themes for years, but in the age of Trump, it's less palatable to leftists and very useful to the right.

It was funny to see these two tweets in succession today. Kind of like how he accused the guy who linked Russia to the NRA of being an insane conspiracy theorist and never apologized for being wrong when it became even more confirmed to be true. Par for the course with his approach to the Russia investigation.

Beyond the fact that she treats her audience like 8-year-olds - repeating the same banal points 5 times in increasingly dramatic fashion to make sure they retain it & believe it's earth-shattering - she's now the most militaristic, and the most conspiratorial, commentator on TV: https://t.co/5YrVLxVJki

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 13, 2018

President Trump Said He Got the Idea to End Military Exercises With South Korea from Vladimir Putin >>> https://t.co/Ij89UirPkZ via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 13, 2018

i don't see a connection between the two tweets (i'm sure a Pavlovian response to "Putin" takes care of that).

"State media" is a particularly cunty construction by the MSNBC zombies. It's megacorporate media lusting for an audience.

GG is quote tweeting the below in the first one. Of course the segment isn’t at all like it’s being described plus seeing him be that obnoxiously dismissive when the story turns out to be confirmed by Trump himself. But his description of Maddow is self evidently ridiculous (with or without noting that he goes on Tucker).

So after dramatically revealing to her audience that North Korea has a border with Russia -- gasp -- Maddow tonight went on an extended dot-connecting monologue where she darkly intimates that maybe somehow the real beneficiary of the Trump/Kim summit was... PUTIN. Beyond parody pic.twitter.com/a9bEwWn6l1

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 13, 2018

The description of Greenwald from that essay we discussed in the other thread was spot on: The man’s political illiteracy is exceeded only by his sense of self-righteousness. And it should be no surprise that once his political illiteracy caused him to do something majorly fucked up - like taking information from Russian Intelligence to ratfuck the Democratic presidential nominee - his sense of self-rigtheousness would demand that he did whatever he could to somehow, someway make it seem okay.

Putin is the beneficiary of the summit
Yam 'got idea' to end exercises from Putin

^These don't seem to be nec identical.

I'm going to let you two New Cold warriors jerk off in peace now.

Shouting “you want WWIII” over anyone who talks about the Russian govt in negative terms is in no way an embarrassing trope or bad for the discourse.

TFW you're slamming Rachel Maddow for conspiracy theories by linking to a guy who pushed Seth Rich, Syria false flag & Hillary health conspiracies (aka an actual conspiracy theorist) pic.twitter.com/kv2SUa8lQj

— Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 (@Wilson__Valdez) June 15, 2018

And as has been repeatedly pointed out to Glenn (including in the replies to this very tweet) the segment's premise was based directly on this reporting from the rw WSJ, that said the very thing that he is calling an insane conspiracy. pic.twitter.com/MYKk6eKECw

— Centrism Fan Acct 🔹 (@Wilson__Valdez) June 15, 2018

Good god that dude has gone off the deep end.

honestly what irks me most about GG is he's perfectly capable of a reasonable, well-balanced take or interview (what I saw of the Ocasio-Cortez interview was good, his recent Chapo appearance was pretty much completely unobjectionable AFAICT), but when he's wrong or misleading he invariably doubles down, deflects, or obfuscates instead of owning up to it (not a problem unique to him of course). This is a general problem with the pundit/journalist class - evolution is generally a liability

I for one am willing to admit I've mostly only noticed the OK takes cause I don't follow him on Twitter, meaning I only see the ones my followers have prescreened for approval