porfiria posted:

Based on listening to Greenwald a little bit recently, he's talked about how Bolsanaro won in Brazil because people (including many of Greenwald's own gay/poor/brown friends) were so disillusioned by the reigning neoliberal order that in their desperation they turned to the one guy who was promising Change.

I can't speak to how accurate that is for the Brazilian situation, but I think it's pretty clear he's extending that view to the USA--that the Nazi Chuds are just the inevitable, and perhaps genuinely desperate and downtrodden, fruit of the evil soil of neoliberalism. I think that's a pretty blinkered view in a lot of ways; for the most part Trump's people are the same old middle class GOP assholes who voted for Romney and Bush. And I wouldn't call those racist scumbags the "least powerful" constituency; they're all part of the same system that's, you know, putting people in concentration camps.

In any event I can hardly blame someone for getting more worked up over the dudes talking about wanting to murder them than Google having contracts with the DOD or whatever the gently caress Glenn's on about. Greenwald's major problem from what I can tell is he has no real broader political philosophy so he just kind of goes off on his particular bugbears; those bugbears are valid targets but his dumb rear end contrarianism causes him to then dismiss anything he's not currently mad at.

quote:

Say what you will about the death penalty – reasonable people can certainly disagree about it, and it’s one of the issues to which I confess an irresolvable ambivalence, usually leaning against it.

quote:

The countries which the European Left makes a passionate cause of defending – from the Palestinian Authority to Iran and Syria, not to mention Cuba, China and multiple other historic Communist regimes –- routinely imprison and/or execute people without any due process, for reasons ranging from criticism of the Government to adultery and homosexuality. None of that sparks “outrage among Europeans,” because none of that provides an opportunity to depict the United States as the world’s real evil. As a result, the European Left is uninterested in it.

quote:

Right under the noses of the European Left, European Muslim extremists – whom the European Left instinctively defends -- have been systematically executing scores of people for the last several years: innocent people, not mass murderers, who have been randomly slaughtered, without any due process or judicial appeals of any kind.

quote:

No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi

steinrokkan posted:

That's an unfair characterization. His position is that Bolsanaro won, obviously, because the candidate leading by a long shot, Lula, has been eliminated in a judicial coup. So many people voted Bolsonaro or did not vote not because he was their first choice, but because all other choices that weren't discredited, unelectable neoliberals were taken away from them.

So to extend that to the US suicide did, somebody other than Trump would have won instead of the right, had the left not been depressed by the lack of a leftist candidate.

porfiria posted:

Based on listening to Greenwald a little bit recently, he's talked about how Bolsanaro won in Brazil because people (including many of Greenwald's own gay/poor/brown friends) were so disillusioned by the reigning neoliberal order that in their desperation they turned to the one guy who was promising Change.

I can't speak to how accurate that is for the Brazilian situation, but I think it's pretty clear he's extending that view to the USA--that the Nazi Chuds are just the inevitable, and perhaps genuinely desperate and downtrodden, fruit of the evil soil of neoliberalism. I think that's a pretty blinkered view in a lot of ways; for the most part Trump's people are the same old middle class GOP assholes who voted for Romney and Bush. And I wouldn't call those racist scumbags the "least powerful" constituency; they're all part of the same system that's, you know, putting people in concentration camps.

In any event I can hardly blame someone for getting more worked up over the dudes talking about wanting to murder them than Google having contracts with the DOD or whatever the gently caress Glenn's on about. Greenwald's major problem from what I can tell is he has no real broader political philosophy so he just kind of goes off on his particular bugbears; those bugbears are valid targets but his dumb rear end contrarianism causes him to then dismiss anything he's not currently mad at.

Ytlaya posted:

The thing about Greenwald is that he only receives the negative attention he does because he has taken positions that run contrary to the bipartisan aims of the US government. He has some dumb views, but not to an extent any greater than pretty much literally any other journalist or public figure you can think of. In the greater context of US (or Brazilian in the case of his recent publishing of the Sergio Moro whistleblower stuff) journalism/politics, it doesn't make sense to consider him anything but a positive figure who has done good things outweighing any random dumb views he might have (and in the case of the Brazilians stuff, he is genuinely putting his life at risk).

He's basically a good example of how public sentiment can often be controlled and influenced without the need to tell lies (though that often happens too). All the media has to do is focus negative attention on the people (or topics) they want to attack or discredit, and that puts those people (and their defenders) on the defensive. It helps that harmful/bad mainstream views aren't perceived in nearly the same negative way. For example, Barack Obama is unquestionably a far worse person who has done and believed far worse things than Glenn Greenwald, but (at best) he gets more of a "yeah I disagree with him about some things" treatment instead of a 'lol look at this libertarian wacko" one. People just don't notice that double standard and how unreasonable it is, because any individual part might seem like it makes sense and they've been preconditioned to always assume good faith on the part of "credible" public figures.

Zas posted:

that's over-instrumentalizing him imo

he's not so important or heroic that he's above reproach for saying stupid poo poo

Panzeh posted:

Yeah, if you need Glenn Greenwald to know that imperialism is bad, you're pretty hosed.

porfiria posted:

In any event I can hardly blame someone for getting more worked up over the dudes talking about wanting to murder them than Google having contracts with the DOD or whatever the gently caress Glenn's on about. Greenwald's major problem from what I can tell is he has no real broader political philosophy so he just kind of goes off on his particular bugbears; those bugbears are valid targets but his dumb rear end contrarianism causes him to then dismiss anything he's not currently mad at.

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Chomsky has never been on the far left and I imagine he wouldn't place himself in it if you asked, or would do so with caveats if he did.

BeanpolePeckerwood posted:

Chomsky identifies politically as Anarcho-Syndicalist, which is far left.

bowser posted:

https://twitter.com/mooncult/status/1163589661677125632?s=19

This entire thread is pretty insane, I recommend reading it.

Somaen posted:

Is there any evidence that he is dead as opposed to in witness protection organized by the intelligence agencies to protect their valuable asset?

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

I mean, I'm mostly just assuming that because faking a death long-term is basically impossible nowadays unless the faked person plans to live like Osama bin Laden. If he's not dead, I can basically guarantee you that's gonna leak, and sooner rather than later.

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

Basically she's an intelligence asset and, most likely, so is the reporter involved.

Looking very likely that the CIA or Mossad killed Epstein. Motives say CIA, MO says Mossad.

Silver2195 posted:

Not sure if this is a joke or not.

Acosta's claim that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" strikes me as an rear end-covering lie. Given the sheer weirdness of the case, I suppose I could buy a US intelligence agency actually being involved somehow. But Mossad?

BeanpolePeckerwood posted:

They were all involved.

Robert Maxwell was literally a Mossad super-spy.

Wikipedia posted:

A hint of Maxwell's service to the Israeli state was provided by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, who described Maxwell's contacts with Czechoslovak Communist leaders in 1948 as crucial to the Czechoslovak decision to arm Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Czechoslovak military assistance was both unique and crucial for the fledgling state as it battled for its existence. It was Maxwell's covert help in smuggling aircraft parts into Israel that led to the country having air superiority during their 1948 War of Independence.

...

The British Foreign Office suspected that Maxwell was a secret agent of a foreign government, possibly a double agent or a triple agent, and "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia." He had known links to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), to the KGB, and to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.

Panzeh posted:

Yeah, Glenn will never actually poo poo on a fellow rich media personality. He's not really fighting Bolsonaro in any real sense in any case, he just whines from his ivory tower, similar to the #resistance because bourgeois 'journalism' is a waste of time.

BigBallChunkyTime posted:

https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1171227351818092544?s=20

BrandorKP posted:

BrandorKP posted:

GreyjoyBastard posted:

piffle and bullshit, the 'ukraine whistleblower scandal' is just a conspiracy theory meant to draw attention away from important matters

the democrats' obsession with it just proves that it's trivial at best, and more likely total nonsense