As much as I can't stand the type of people he is talking about, Glenn Greenwald has slowly been loosing his mind.
If someone is studying what happens to people who spend 24x7 reacting to Hypocrisy, that too on fucking Twitter of all places, please study Glenn.
I happen to think Glenn is right about a lot of things, so if your claim that he has lost his mind is true, what falsifiable prediction would you propose as a way to determine if it is the case?
I'd be happy to see more reporting on other topics mixed in with the media contrarianism. It's an important point and I agree with it but he becomes the thing he criticizes at a certain point.
Glenn has been making reasoned arguments about the threat posed by centralized control of information, which isn't controversial. He uses examples to support his statements of principles he's defending, and makes predictions about what will happen next. That the takeaway from his opponents is that he's crazy, is very 1984-like, and a testament to how ad hominem argumentation dominates the discourse.
Is he losing his mind, or is it more along the lines of, if you find out just how fucking corrupt the interplay between business, media, and government is, you become so angry and jaded that it looks like you're losing your mind?
For all the shit you know, there's more out there that even's worse, and there's another load of shit that's classified that you'll never know.
When I was attached to a Naval special operations unit as their quartermaster and small boat coxswain, I had a top secret clearance and I had access to Intellipedia. I made the mistake of just sitting down after watch and reading. And reading. And reading more. I quickly came to the realization that its a good thing I don't have Superman's powers. The amount of people that not only deserve to be dead, but need to be dead is enormous.
Can we get this flagged right now (see last sentence about people needing to be killed)? This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that is going to get people killed. Not cool.
This is exactly the sort of mind reading and motive attributing that we don't need.
The US has the death penalty. How do you know the GP isn't advocating for them to be tried and sentenced for actions carrying that penalty, such as murder or treason?
The comment is indeed flagged right now, so this intended essentially a private reply: this is just depressing. We literally just saw a clear-as-day incident of political violence in this country, and it was inspired by rhetoric just like the above: general, abstract, yet absolutist remarks that paint the commenter's (and your) enemy as worthy of death for reasons that aren't ever quite elucidated but seem extremely important nonetheless.
We need to stop that. We need to stop it everywhere. Trying to excuse it is just buying into the frame that your enemies are existential threats and not just your neighbors.
Exactly which people is the parent going to get killed, or calling for violence against? Nothing in this comment targets a specific demographic, or group, or individual. Right up to the line? Maybe. But I don't think it crosses it.
Intellipedia was a great way to kill time if you were on watch in a SCIF with no unclassified network access. They used to allow blogging as well, so I had a classified blog where I went over different IT-related issues I came across while working in IT.
Actually, I got in touch with an old hacker friend from the AOL days over classified chat (basically IRC). He had gone Army, but we were able to meet up on secret chat and shoot the shit. Good times.
That's an interesting comment in terms of your personal experience but that last sentence obviously crosses far outside what is ok to post to HN. Please don't do that.
Twitter does have the affect on people to go crazy. I think your wrong about Glenn he is correct. Just look up the facts. Glenn gets more respect the more you study him.
Another possibility... everyone else is loosing their minds and ushering an authoritarian pseudo-communist state in the United States. Glenn sees it, and is trying desperately to warn us.
I happen to agree with Glenn on most things, in fact I think most people do. Probably <10% of the US is on Twitter regularly. Everyone off Twitter thinks the world has lost their minds.
A third possibility: Greenwald has bought heavily into the same cultural zeitgeist that is extremely prevalent on this forum: that "SJWs" and progressives will somehow destroy the fabric of neoliberalism. He's not warning us of something only he can see, so much as he's repurposing the same, tired alt-right arguments for an audience that doesn't necessarily identify as alt-right.
Except this exact same argument, nearly verbatim, was one of the alt-right anti-Obama talking points! It's a solid criticism too - don't get me wrong.
But it's a single argument, reused over and over, to do more than simply criticize the actions of an administration - rather, to construct a grand conspiracy about how modern Democrats and progressives are secretly authoritarians. Nothing Greenwald writes these days goes beyond this tired trope. (Which, I suppose, would make perfect sense to anyone who has similarly bought into this conspiracy.)
“to construct a grand conspiracy about how modern Democrats and progressives are secretly authoritarians“
Can you explain where the idea that there is a conspiracy, or a secret comes from?
I don’t see Greenwald or the other repeaters of this ‘tired’ argument actually claiming there is a conspiracy.
The argument seems to be that people who say they are liberals are behaving like authoritarians when you actually look at their actions, rather than their words.
I don’t see why a conspiracy is needed for that to be true.
Greenwald has been writing about what an terrible enabler of the survellience state Nancy Pelosi was for almost 15 years. She hasn't changed her opinions much in that time.
And to be fair, the Democratic Party, while mostly still tethered to consensus reality, would be a center-right party in pretty much every country in Europe.
I’d say your first paragraph is facts, and the second is an opinion that is often cited but only partially true because what left-right means in ‘Europe’ is different from what it means in the US.
However...
It’s unclear what these two points have to do with either the original piece or my comment to which you replied.
Can you relate them in some way?
How do they shed light on the idea that Greenwald is not claiming there is a conspiracy?
The relationship is that Greenwald is a progressive, and would likely be more supportive of the democratic party if they were an actual left-wing party.
I'm sure he'd still be as upset by the survellience, but he'd probably cut them more slack if he liked their policies more.
Also, it's naive to expect the Dems to be better on survellience when we have years of evidence that this is not the case.
I agree that it’s ‘naive’ to expect the Dems to be better on surveillance, but it’s not clear how this relates to what Greenwald wrote. He is writing about what he sees happening, not his expectations.
Can you explain where the idea that there is a conspiracy, or a secret comes from?
My use of the words secret and conspiracy was, at least in part, in response to the parent comment:
> everyone else is loosing their minds and ushering an authoritarian pseudo-communist state in the United States. Glenn sees it, and is trying desperately to warn us.
This is conspiratorial thinking. The whole "wake up, sheeple" mode of political argument is based in the paranoid belief that clandestine groups and powerful actors have a certain degree of control and agency over the world, and that there are those in possession of awareness or knowledge who can "reveal" the truth to the masses.
Rather than making more political-sounding quips, and in the interest of providing something more substantial to this forum, I will recommend a web series called "This is Not a Conspiracy Theory," which is a great overview of the history of conspiracy theories through to the modern day, and how the best conspiracy theories are often rooted in the kinds of facts, uncertainty, and paranoia that resonate with the zeitgeist of their respective eras.
“ This is conspiratorial thinking. The whole "wake up, sheeple" mode of political argument is based in the paranoid belief that clandestine groups and powerful actors have a certain degree of control and agency over the world, and that there are those in possession of awareness or knowledge who can "reveal" the truth to the masses.”
Except nothing in the quote says anything about clandestine actors.
You are adding that.
Also nothing about warning people has anything to do with paranoia or ‘wake up sheeple’.
Again you are adding something out of whole cloth that simply isn’t present in what he is saying.
There is nothing ‘paranoid’ about saying that a liberal democracy can become authoritarian if it adopts certain priorities and practices, or warning of this when those practices are being adopted.
Commenting on an observable trend is not the same as claiming that there is a conspiracy behind it.
On the other hand, dismissing ideas as ‘conspiracy theories’ can be a way of simply discrediting one’s political opponents, so we need to be careful not to do it casually.
I think this is what creates that perception. People whose worldview is shaped predominantly by the media outlets that have jumped the shark encounter cognitive dissonance when someone correctly points out their failings, and are more invested in trusting the establishment than what some guy has to say about them, even if that guy is correct.
Notice that it's "Glenn Greenwald has gone crazy" and not any substantive refutation of anything he said.
I follow him on twitter too. I don't see what's wrong with him. Some people complain he isn't "balanced" i.e. 9/10 of his criticisms are aimed at comparatively "good guys" i.e. liberals, while he rarely talks about conservatives. But I think that's perfectly fine, his niche is feeling a void left by hyper-partisan mainstream media- not everybody have to be expert on everything.
The problem is that if you read Greenwald during the Bush years, you'd see a very different person. And not just for partisan reasons. Greenwald during the Iraq was absolutely was an expert on the stuff he wrote about, and took shots that were well-aimed and decisively argued.
Now he whines abstractly about vaguely libertarian ideas and complains about democrats and establishment journalists almost exclusively. He used to be a serious foreign policy wonk!
Definitely not. He started on a blogspot site, Unclaimed Territory and argued about free speech and got into fights with Andrew Sullivan. This is well before he got married and moved to Brazil, started the Intercept. He has not always been like this. I stopped reading him before the Intercept. The old Glenn Greenwald would have never have written this article.
I started reading him when he was on Salon back in the Bush years (remember when Democrats believed Dominion had hacked the voting machines?) and he's been super consistent in his views, at least from my perspective.
Someone like Greenwald will always end up in trouble, because he appears to have principles that don't match neatly to either Team A or B, with the result that everyone ends up hating him.
I read some of his stuff back then and remember thinking that was being an illogical contrarian. He didn't break much news at all but rather layered lots of opinions that I didn't think we're well supported by facts.
Journalists love Twitter, and I don't think it's possible to spend any significant amount of time on there without losing your mind. Is it just a Glenn Greenwald issue, or something with all journalists? I wish there was a way to get decent quality news from people who stay away from its influence. I've never met a person in real life who acts like the people on blue checkmark Twitter do.
I'm genuinely of the opinion that Greenwald was compromised somehow right around the time of the Snowden revelations. Before then, he was an acerbic jerk writing with moral clarity about the persistent overreach of the US security state. His writing had crunch and specificity, and his targets were all over the political map.
But post-Snowden, he took a hard partisan turn. He'd enter regular tiresome disagreements where really the only argument was over who was being more hyperbolic or hypocritical. And he... ignore stuff you're really expect he'd care about. He spent years flogging the media for overemphasis of Russian interference because it was a "crazy conspiracy theory" but I swear he never once said a peep about Q. Really, if you knew nothing about the guy's history and just read his 2016-20 writing, you'd just figure he was an oddbally high brow Trump fan.
And very notably: this was true ONLY in his writing about US policy. His Brazil stuff was widely regarded (by others -- I don't speak Portuguese nor am I an expert on Brazilian politics) as just as good (and acerbic) as his earlier work about the Bush administration.
Maybe it's just branding. Maybe he figured he'd do better career-wise selling his work into a right wing market than he would continuing to criticize everyone. But... that doesn't sound right to me, because he's not exploiting typical right wing audiences nor using right wing platforms to do it.
To me, I think that the core of his criticisms are still valid, but it seems like he's adopted an accelerationist's take on politics. That it's possible to provoke the security state to self-destruction. Which I feel is, at best, a naive take.
Come on, you are saying that greenwald is compromised because he attacks the left, yet he’s done good work at the same time on Brazil and bush? So which is it? He’s crazy when he’s talking about others but not your side?
Could it be that he is correct and you are unable to process the fact that Obama was in fact absolutely terrible for whisteblowers and journalists?
Alternatively, you could argue that maybe Greenwald when writing about Brazil is doing good work because he has a first person perspective about a country in the grip of an authoritarian whose views are particularly threatening to GG because of his sexual orientation.
Whereas when he writes about the US, he argues from a detached accelerationist perspective that letting it all burn down is good because it gets rid of the security state he so detests (and not, I might add, without reason). But this detachment in this case does not do his writing any favors, because it both glosses over the very real harm being done by this burning down, and takes a massively over-optimistic view of accelerationism as a strategy.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments, flamewar-style comments, or personal attacks to HN. It's exactly what we're trying to avoid on this site, and you predictably provoked a flamewar. Maybe you don't owe Greenwald better but you definitely owe this community better if you're posting here. No more of this, please.
I think he is completely right. Journalism today looks more like advocacy.
Free-speech liberalism are at odds with the political establishment. The liberal camp has been decimated recently with the rise of both the authoritarian right/left.
From my perspective, what is happening in the US right now is somewhat similar to what happened in the Latin American countries in the 60s and 70s.
I'm very happy I discovered https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
It gives me access to articles written about the same subject from both perspectives. What I think it super interesting is how journalists omit certain facts to further their point of view.
OK, but please do not post unsubstantive or flamebait comments here, and especially not name-calling or personal attacks. That's what used to be called trolling. It maybe still is, but it used to be as well.
> Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general, from the beginning was not to censor. They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians
There's the headline quotation right there and I gotta say it does not make a lick of sense to me. Journalists didn't drive this at all.
Yes they did. For 4 years they blamed and attacked FB and Twitter for letting trump win. The pressure was enough. Enough for these platforms to disable private messaging of bad Biden news story links. Whether you think it was true or not, it’s insane that these platforms did this 2 weeks before an election.
> Meaningless blanket generalization and definitely false.
You're just parsing it uncharitably. Saying journalists are authoritarians is like saying turtles are slow. The fact that you can find the occasional turtle with a rocket sled and is thereby not slow doesn't really disprove the general principle.
The context also indicates that he's referring to journalists at specific enumerated publications, in which case it might reasonably refer to the entirety of them if the structure of those institutions is pushing out anyone who isn't.
He pressed that point pretty hard without qualifying it at all. He's both a professional journalist and a lawyer who should be an expert and speaking precisely. He either really means it, or he's deliberately being hyperbolic to obscure the reality. Neither of which reflect well on him.
That's a blanket statement and Greenwald is still connecting a lot of unconnected dots and then adding a completely subjective assertion on top of it. Obviously there was a ton of reporting on the spread of disinformation, hate speech and even foreign sock puppeting on social media because it was all 100% true.
If you want to blame "journalists" or "the media" then blame Greenwald too because he's one of them. Otherwise you have to acknowledge there was wide range of public and professional opinion. And that social media orgs have all done what they felt they had to do to protect their businesses bottom lines.
Greenwald left The Intercept because his editors had the audacity to ask for edits. That's like living in a Gestapo prison as far as he's concerned. So his absolutely paranoid belief that journalistic authoritarianism is directly to blame for private companies taking action to hide incitement to armed revolution is just far-fetched to me.
One form of how this works is something along the lines of: activist journalist find something on the platform they don't like, they write about it, go after the advertisers and try to lump them into it like "Look at what disgusting views you're funding with your money, are this the views your company represents?". Advertisers don't like any controversies so they threaten the platforms to pull their money, platforms establish measures to please the advertisers.
Another one is: journalists don't like their outlets getting outperformed by some "whackos/conservatives" on facebook, they go directly after facebook and demand that they downgrade those channels and promote theirs. They demand fact checking routines which are then in part outsourced to outlets that share their values.
>Advertisers don't like any controversies so they threaten the platforms to pull their money, platforms establish measures to please the advertisers.
Advertisers love controversy if they think it will help them sell stuff and don't like it if they think it will alienate their customers, it depends on who the companies cater too.
I think you (and Greenwald) are giving journalists too much credit. They generally write what they think their readers want, advertisers react based on what they think is best for their bottom line.
Are you sure he’s not referring to how journalists are continuously calling for censorship? For example, a headline from the outlet he just left:
> Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump
The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles.
It also sounds like he thinks that illiberal millennials graduated, got jobs as journalists and editors, and now are happy to parrot propaganda from government authorities rather than investigate and report on accounts from whistleblowers.
I wouldn't use the word Journalist but... There are 1001 pieces of outrage-porn every day about how someone said a bad thing on some socials media and what will BiGTeCH do about it.
I'm pretty sure that Facebook, Twitter etc. have absolutely no will to engage themselves in politics, at least openly. They'd be perfectly happy to focus on technological issues and ways to make more money through advertising. Very reluctantly they had to acknowledge their role in the political debate and start taking decisions, because people were asking them to. And people mostly repeat the opinions and views they've read in the press.
Can you keep a professional job in media if you believe public institutions are corrupted and you bring that standard to your work? You can write, you can be popular on social media, and you can even get the odd freelance gig, but if you align yourself against real power itself, I think he's saying you cannot be an employee, editor, or producer.
I can't see how a serious writer would want to be a journalist now anyway, and Greenwald seems to recognize that there is no "back" to go to. What forward looks like for writers is much more interesting.
Correct. A lot of millennials have a warped view of power. Greenwald is very gen-x: skeptical, questioning authority, seeking out the organic and real ("i listen to 'alternative' music, dude"). Millennial culture is heavily trusting, self-righteous and therefore heavily media influenced. Fertile ground for authoritarian regimes and corruption. The right defends the Kushners, the left defends the Bidens, everyone loses.
I'm reading this hoping for good points, but I mostly am seeing weak arguments. Also the title is baity.
>> The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was to say mean things about them in tweets. Those aren't assaults on press freedom.
It's hard for me to imagine him not understanding why consistently denouncing the legitimacy of print media in an era of conspiracy theory (especially post pizza-gate) may matter.
>> [Facebook and Twitter] had to start censoring…because journalists at CNN and NBC and The New York Times demanded they do so.
I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
>> [Seems to be arguing that millenials care about free speech less because they are coddled]
I'm not even gonna touch that one.
>> They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others. That's just unfortunately the modern-day mentality of the journalist.
If he hadn't slipped the word authoritarian in there, I think this might be the most interesting point of the piece. I think a lot of people, including journalists, scientific journals, textbooks, wikipedia, even HN believe in rating/filtering information on its quality (is it true?, is it divisive?, does it have an agenda?). In fact, the filtering/amplifying of information is the primary job of such platforms.
As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform. We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses. Based on the results of the great experiment (Qanon, Trump presidency, "stop the steal", capitol riots) people want to pull back to the tried-and-true pre-web-2.0 journalism (i.e. gatekeepers).
This is where a good-faith exploration would really be interesting.
>> [Seems to insinuate that the NYT doesn't believe in whistleblowers like Snowden.]
> It's hard for me to imagine him not understanding why consistently denouncing the legitimacy of print media in an era of conspiracy theory (especially post pizza-gate) may matter.
What's the alternative? Traditional media gets a pass for everything wrong they do because pizzagate?
> I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
Not when they've been calling for it since long before the riot. (I'm not sure when it became riots. Was there a second one?)
> As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform.
> As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform. We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses. Based on the results of the great experiment (Qanon, Trump presidency, "stop the steal", capitol riots) people want to pull back to the tried-and-true pre-web-2.0 journalism (i.e. gatekeepers).
It's worth noting that the invention of the printing press caused massive social change in Europe, and was not looked upon very kindly at the time by many.
I think the internet analogy writes itself, and I hope that we maintain the ability of humans to converse about what interests them regardless of how crazy they are.
Just remember kids, words are not actions. I can say that I'm gonna burn Y-combinator down (I don't even know where it is, to be honest) but that is not the same as actually burning down their buildings. I worry that we're conflating these two things too much in terms of what we see on the Internet.
And to be fair, the major driver of the craziness of the Republican party is TV and talk radio, not social media.
I'm very ambivalent about Greenwald. One the one hand he produced essential work with the Snowden revelations and his exposure of corruption in Brazil. He also makes good points about the moral evil of the Bush/Cheney administrations and Obama's continuation of the war on terror.
But on the other hand it feels like he spends a lot of time attacking strawmen just for the sake of being contrarian.
Saying that journalists are authoritarians who want to protect the secrets of the powerful [1] and control access to platforms [2] has a tiny grain of truth in it but is mainly a massive oversimplification that paints a group of thousands of professionals who have a myriad of varying incentives with an incredibly broad brush. He seems to be incapable of nuance in his critique of the journalistic profession, and that renders his message mostly inaudible to me because it feels like it's coming from some form of resentment rather than reasoned arguments.
[1] "Journalists view the dissemination of information about what powerful people are doing in the dark not as their principal function and purpose—which is what it ought to be if we had a healthy media—but as something to be denounced and condemned."
[2] "[Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general] began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others.
It isn't that journalist see social media as a threat but so do the politicians they report on. Prior to the rise of social media, this should not be simply considered Facebook, Twitter, and like, but all the internet as a whole, we relied on the idea that the press, print, radio, and televised, told us the truth.
However the internet showed this was never true. Yes elements of the media did report the truth but they also produced some stories that were outright fabrications or purposefully did not include information that did not support the narrative; three very big stories that fall under this are the GM pickup fires which were assisted in catching fire, that chemical and biological weapons were widespread in Iraq, and of course Dan Rather's fake National Guard document.
Both the media and the political class help each other. One does it to gain favor and the other does it control the message. The internet took the ability to control the message, the narrative, away from the established media and politicians. It put it back into the hands of everyone.
So Greenwald's assertion is true in many ways. A return to where politicians used the media to control the message is a return to a system which allowed the Iraq war to come to fruition. The claim he makes that the press holds the office of the Presidency to different standards based on the party that controls it is easily provable as well. We never saw a level of press persecution before that occurred under Obama yet all of Trump's rambling diatribe was considered worse? On what planet?
Hell this site is guilty of the same as well. We have people here cheering on the FBI, likely the same that screamed when the same agencies trampled on people they liked. This is the society the old media and politicians gave us, putting us at each others throats and taught to revel in it
I mostly agree with you. I just want to point out that the reason Trump was held to a different standard than previous presidents is simply that he lied so much from the start. Journalists from "mainstream media" rightly perceived him as a threat because when called out on his lies he overtly attacked them and encouraged violence against them (arguably resulting in casualties in the Capital Gazette shooting).
I think it's clear enough that he's talking about specific journalists in specific enumerated publications and not literally all journalists everywhere. He is, after all, one himself.
I'm not convinced that's true. He didn't refer to any specific institutions or subsets of journalists in the quotes I included. Even assuming that he meant to, the examples he cites are CNN, NBC, NYT and WaPo. He also accused editors at The Intercept of censoring him over Hunter Biden stories. That's already a very large group of people to generalize.
He clearly views himself and a handful of others as outsiders, in a crusade against a journalistic profession that he views has wholly corrupted by corporate interests.
> That's already a very large group of people to generalize.
On the other hand, it's not that large a number of entities. And the people who work there are constrained by their employers in particular ways, and choose to remain. Here's the article Greenwald quit The Intercept over:
To the best of my knowledge nothing in it is untruthful. The Intercept demonstrably wouldn't publish it. Which of the other institutions listed do you expect would have? Is there an instance of any of them publishing anything substantively equivalent before the election?
He quotes the NYT there in several places but the articles the quotes are from are minimizing the story and even then the authors became the targets of attack for even discussing it.
There are many conservative and international reporting outlets, so where’s the Hunter Biden story already? Is Tucker Carlson secretly owned by the Bidens? What happened to his secret laptop files?
It looks like Glenn Greenwald’s business partners choose not to bet recklessly with the credibility of the publication, and in retrospect they may have choose wisely. The story was entirely under the control of Tucker Carlson and friends, and so would have been The Intercept’s brand credibility. The Intercept is far more vulnerable to missteps than Fox.
First Tucker Carlson kind of lost the files, and now he won’t show anyone the secret computer files because he thinks Hunter Biden is down on his luck, and Mr Carlson just feels so sad about it.
If you read it as a systemic commentary rather than an individual commentary it makes more sense. Journalists as a system might have a behavior that most journalists done engage in. Nobody consciously thinks “let’s be authoritarian” but they create systems and structures that lead that way anyways. The same way any attack of “group X is Y” could be read as a massive oversimplification painting a huge diverse group with a broad brush. The individuals can create and enable a system of Y entirely unconsciously.
And yeah he totally lacks nuance, but at this point I can’t really care. I’m personally sick of unnuanced comments from “our” side benefitting from reading between the lines while near identical comments from Others with an equal lack of nuance get attacked for it. It would be great if we all were nuanced, but that appears impossible so reading things you disagree with charitably is just a necessity now. This comes to mind https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-things
What bothers me are the hundreds or even thousands of journalists that spout corporate lines, propaganda, and outright lies everyday, and not much is said about them, but with principled journalists like Greenwald, you get these nitpicky judgemental critiques that seem aimed at deriding them.
Yes, Greenwald is not perfect, but he is more objective, honest, and brave than the great majority of journalists out there. It has the flavor of an inorganic smear campaign that has been absorbed repeatedly and unconsciously across social media. It's a common pattern for a post about an anti-establishemt figure to have some positive comments about them, but then some critique inevitably bubbles to the top of thread every time.
You need more hands! I have one telling me that the problem is not all the journos going along to get along so much as the very few companies in charge of the media. And another telling me that those journos have agency thus culpability. And yet another arm reaching for the popcorn and wondering how long this thread can last.
"I'll give you just one example, which is press freedom. Under Obama, as I'm sure you know, the Espionage Act of 1917--one of the most pernicious laws we have on our books;
it was enacted under Woodrow Wilson, and it was designed to criminalize dissent from U.S. participation in World War I--was invoked against whistleblowers and sources, like
Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and a dozen others, more under Obama than every other prior president combined. It ended up being three times more prosecutions under
the Espionage Act for our sources as journalists than all previous presidents, including Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever you want to pick. And the press said almost
nothing."
I'd like to know what exactly is so "insane" about pointing this out.
Glenn Greenwald has always been actually on the left, unlike the milk-toast "leftism" (or really "centrism" or rightism) of outlets like the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, etc..
This is what bothers people, and they can't take people actually on the left pointing out what hypocrites and right-wingers many liberals are.
This is why Glenn Greenwald gets censored, but I'm pleased to see that he still has the balls to speak truth to power.
What’s worse, the last couple years have developed a full on meme of enlIGhTeNed CEnTrisM as an easy dismissal. You call out any hypocrisy and the knee jerk response is “how could you even begin to think both sides are the same, that’s so idiotic” without really caring that pointing out hypocrisy is not saying everyone’s the same. Reaching the level of meme, you don’t even have to think about what you’re responding to! What’s sadly hilarious is that you see the same meme... on both sides.
There’s a ton I disagree with Greenwood about. But there’s also a lot I agree with. To dismiss him fully because of what I consider his bad ideas would be to also miss out on a lot of good insights.
> I'd like to know what exactly is so "insane" about pointing this out.
Well, it’s both false on some points and misleading in much of the rest, in service of a false narrative, like much of Greenwald’s monomaniacal campaign to drive a wedge between the Left and the Democratic establishment [0]; the Espionage Act was not passed primarily to criminalize dissent, and the aspects that were arguably intended for that purpose and definitely misused for it have been largely neutralized by subsequent court decisions narrowing their applicability on Constitutional grounds (as, also, have other aspects of the law that address what is more commonly understood as spying), and were not, in any case, the provisions of the law under which prosecutions were carried out under the Obama Administration.
Now, that's not necessarily insane, if, for one example of a scenario in which it would be perfectly rational, Geenwald’s goal is to advance the interests of common opponents of both the Left and the Democratic Establishment
[0] I have no problem with driving a wedge between the Left and the Center-Right Democratic establishment based on the truth, as a Left-leaning pragmatist I recognize that's the only way to get any drive for progress on Left issues. Doing it based on lies and distortion doesn't create pressure for progress, just division and distraction.
Next time you might want to back up your claims with some actual quotes. Greenwald's assertions about the misuse of the Espionage Act are well documented, cf. causa Assange to just name the latest example, so it would be helpful if you could provide some evidence on why he's wrong.
Also his point about Obama having used the Act more than any other president is simple fact.
> Glenn Greenwald has always been actually on the left
Over the last couple of years, he has consistently supported Trump, down to echoing Parler administrators' easily disproven talking points that none of their users were involved in the Capitol riots.
It's entirely consistent with his earlier positions that Greenwald opposed Obama/Clinton-era drone warfare, but from his writings, you'd have a difficult time learning how much drone strikes have expanded under Trump.
And finally, since 2016, Greenwald (as well as Assange and Snowden) have essentially turned into full blown instruments of Putinist propaganda (In Greenwald's case including the denial that Russia engaged in Novichok attacks against critics). This is neither a "leftist" nor an "anti-war" position, he simply favors a different bunch of war mongers.
They didn't address any of the very specific and long form claims that he made in his article about his exit. Seems like long winded ad hominem attack against him.
> I'll give you just one example, which is press freedom. Under Obama, as I'm sure you know, the Espionage Act of 1917—one of the most pernicious laws we have on our books; it was enacted under Woodrow Wilson, and it was designed to criminalize dissent from U.S. participation in World War I—was invoked against whistleblowers and sources, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and a dozen others, more under Obama than every other prior president combined. It ended up being three times more prosecutions under the Espionage Act for our sources as journalists than all previous presidents, including Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever you want to pick. And the press said almost nothing.
That's fairly meaningless without a comparison of the number of people for whom it could have been applied under Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever.
Was it applied more under Obama than, say, Eisenhower because Obama applied it to cases that Eisenhower would not have applied it to if they had occurred during his administration?
Or were there more people leaking classified information during Obama's time in office than there were during Eisenhower's and that explains why it was applied more under Obama.
Whether you agree with the government response to covid or not, I think it’s fair to say it was authoritarian. Journalists generally took the position that more rules and restrictions were necessary and often applauded the strongest government responses from other countries. For that reason alone, it would seem there is an authoritarian bend.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadI'd be happy to see more reporting on other topics mixed in with the media contrarianism. It's an important point and I agree with it but he becomes the thing he criticizes at a certain point.
For all the shit you know, there's more out there that even's worse, and there's another load of shit that's classified that you'll never know.
When I was attached to a Naval special operations unit as their quartermaster and small boat coxswain, I had a top secret clearance and I had access to Intellipedia. I made the mistake of just sitting down after watch and reading. And reading. And reading more. I quickly came to the realization that its a good thing I don't have Superman's powers. The amount of people that not only deserve to be dead, but need to be dead is enormous.
The US has the death penalty. How do you know the GP isn't advocating for them to be tried and sentenced for actions carrying that penalty, such as murder or treason?
We need to stop that. We need to stop it everywhere. Trying to excuse it is just buying into the frame that your enemies are existential threats and not just your neighbors.
Please stop.
Actually, I got in touch with an old hacker friend from the AOL days over classified chat (basically IRC). He had gone Army, but we were able to meet up on secret chat and shoot the shit. Good times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I happen to agree with Glenn on most things, in fact I think most people do. Probably <10% of the US is on Twitter regularly. Everyone off Twitter thinks the world has lost their minds.
But it's a single argument, reused over and over, to do more than simply criticize the actions of an administration - rather, to construct a grand conspiracy about how modern Democrats and progressives are secretly authoritarians. Nothing Greenwald writes these days goes beyond this tired trope. (Which, I suppose, would make perfect sense to anyone who has similarly bought into this conspiracy.)
Can you explain where the idea that there is a conspiracy, or a secret comes from?
I don’t see Greenwald or the other repeaters of this ‘tired’ argument actually claiming there is a conspiracy.
The argument seems to be that people who say they are liberals are behaving like authoritarians when you actually look at their actions, rather than their words.
I don’t see why a conspiracy is needed for that to be true.
And to be fair, the Democratic Party, while mostly still tethered to consensus reality, would be a center-right party in pretty much every country in Europe.
However...
It’s unclear what these two points have to do with either the original piece or my comment to which you replied.
Can you relate them in some way?
How do they shed light on the idea that Greenwald is not claiming there is a conspiracy?
I'm sure he'd still be as upset by the survellience, but he'd probably cut them more slack if he liked their policies more.
Also, it's naive to expect the Dems to be better on survellience when we have years of evidence that this is not the case.
Can you explain where the idea that there is a conspiracy, or a secret comes from?
In that time, the ratcheting up of survellience has only gone one way regardless of who's in power.
I believe that Greenwald sees things similarly.
I’m just still not sure what your comments have to do with the one of mine that you replied to.
Does this have anything to do with the idea that there is a conspiracy behind the ratcheting up of surveillance?
> everyone else is loosing their minds and ushering an authoritarian pseudo-communist state in the United States. Glenn sees it, and is trying desperately to warn us.
This is conspiratorial thinking. The whole "wake up, sheeple" mode of political argument is based in the paranoid belief that clandestine groups and powerful actors have a certain degree of control and agency over the world, and that there are those in possession of awareness or knowledge who can "reveal" the truth to the masses.
Rather than making more political-sounding quips, and in the interest of providing something more substantial to this forum, I will recommend a web series called "This is Not a Conspiracy Theory," which is a great overview of the history of conspiracy theories through to the modern day, and how the best conspiracy theories are often rooted in the kinds of facts, uncertainty, and paranoia that resonate with the zeitgeist of their respective eras.
http://www.thisisnotaconspiracytheory.com/series
Except nothing in the quote says anything about clandestine actors.
You are adding that.
Also nothing about warning people has anything to do with paranoia or ‘wake up sheeple’.
Again you are adding something out of whole cloth that simply isn’t present in what he is saying.
There is nothing ‘paranoid’ about saying that a liberal democracy can become authoritarian if it adopts certain priorities and practices, or warning of this when those practices are being adopted.
Commenting on an observable trend is not the same as claiming that there is a conspiracy behind it.
On the other hand, dismissing ideas as ‘conspiracy theories’ can be a way of simply discrediting one’s political opponents, so we need to be careful not to do it casually.
what do you mean by that. From my perspective, Gleen Greenwald has remained consistent with his views, the news media just went entirely insane.
Notice that it's "Glenn Greenwald has gone crazy" and not any substantive refutation of anything he said.
I follow him on twitter too. I don't see what's wrong with him. Some people complain he isn't "balanced" i.e. 9/10 of his criticisms are aimed at comparatively "good guys" i.e. liberals, while he rarely talks about conservatives. But I think that's perfectly fine, his niche is feeling a void left by hyper-partisan mainstream media- not everybody have to be expert on everything.
Now he whines abstractly about vaguely libertarian ideas and complains about democrats and establishment journalists almost exclusively. He used to be a serious foreign policy wonk!
Is this something he said in the interview or on Twitter? Do you have a particular quote?
I started reading him when he was on Salon back in the Bush years (remember when Democrats believed Dominion had hacked the voting machines?) and he's been super consistent in his views, at least from my perspective.
Someone like Greenwald will always end up in trouble, because he appears to have principles that don't match neatly to either Team A or B, with the result that everyone ends up hating him.
But post-Snowden, he took a hard partisan turn. He'd enter regular tiresome disagreements where really the only argument was over who was being more hyperbolic or hypocritical. And he... ignore stuff you're really expect he'd care about. He spent years flogging the media for overemphasis of Russian interference because it was a "crazy conspiracy theory" but I swear he never once said a peep about Q. Really, if you knew nothing about the guy's history and just read his 2016-20 writing, you'd just figure he was an oddbally high brow Trump fan.
And very notably: this was true ONLY in his writing about US policy. His Brazil stuff was widely regarded (by others -- I don't speak Portuguese nor am I an expert on Brazilian politics) as just as good (and acerbic) as his earlier work about the Bush administration.
Maybe it's just branding. Maybe he figured he'd do better career-wise selling his work into a right wing market than he would continuing to criticize everyone. But... that doesn't sound right to me, because he's not exploiting typical right wing audiences nor using right wing platforms to do it.
Something happened to Greenwald c. 2013-14
Could it be that he is correct and you are unable to process the fact that Obama was in fact absolutely terrible for whisteblowers and journalists?
Btw, just look at the statistics.
Whereas when he writes about the US, he argues from a detached accelerationist perspective that letting it all burn down is good because it gets rid of the security state he so detests (and not, I might add, without reason). But this detachment in this case does not do his writing any favors, because it both glosses over the very real harm being done by this burning down, and takes a massively over-optimistic view of accelerationism as a strategy.
This isn't to say he's not right about some things, but this interview is 20% paranoid delusion.
Honestly, I would be really interested.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Free-speech liberalism are at odds with the political establishment. The liberal camp has been decimated recently with the rise of both the authoritarian right/left.
From my perspective, what is happening in the US right now is somewhat similar to what happened in the Latin American countries in the 60s and 70s.
I'm very happy I discovered https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news It gives me access to articles written about the same subject from both perspectives. What I think it super interesting is how journalists omit certain facts to further their point of view.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's the headline quotation right there and I gotta say it does not make a lick of sense to me. Journalists didn't drive this at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
Obviously true and uncontroversial.
"Some media outlets pursue political agendas from the top down"
Seemingly true in a few places
"Journalists are authoritarians"
Meaningless blanket generalization and definitely false.
You're just parsing it uncharitably. Saying journalists are authoritarians is like saying turtles are slow. The fact that you can find the occasional turtle with a rocket sled and is thereby not slow doesn't really disprove the general principle.
The context also indicates that he's referring to journalists at specific enumerated publications, in which case it might reasonably refer to the entirety of them if the structure of those institutions is pushing out anyone who isn't.
If you want to blame "journalists" or "the media" then blame Greenwald too because he's one of them. Otherwise you have to acknowledge there was wide range of public and professional opinion. And that social media orgs have all done what they felt they had to do to protect their businesses bottom lines.
Greenwald left The Intercept because his editors had the audacity to ask for edits. That's like living in a Gestapo prison as far as he's concerned. So his absolutely paranoid belief that journalistic authoritarianism is directly to blame for private companies taking action to hide incitement to armed revolution is just far-fetched to me.
Another one is: journalists don't like their outlets getting outperformed by some "whackos/conservatives" on facebook, they go directly after facebook and demand that they downgrade those channels and promote theirs. They demand fact checking routines which are then in part outsourced to outlets that share their values.
Advertisers love controversy if they think it will help them sell stuff and don't like it if they think it will alienate their customers, it depends on who the companies cater too.
I think you (and Greenwald) are giving journalists too much credit. They generally write what they think their readers want, advertisers react based on what they think is best for their bottom line.
> Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump The temporary deplatforming of Donald Trump is the perfect distillation of Big Tech’s attempt to pantomime principles.
It also sounds like he thinks that illiberal millennials graduated, got jobs as journalists and editors, and now are happy to parrot propaganda from government authorities rather than investigate and report on accounts from whistleblowers.
https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/trump-capitol-facebook-t...
I can't see how a serious writer would want to be a journalist now anyway, and Greenwald seems to recognize that there is no "back" to go to. What forward looks like for writers is much more interesting.
It's honestly too much despite having a strong opinion on the matter.
Is there a reason you're painting his critics as so simple-minded? I've seen a lot of seemingly reasonable criticism of him.
But there were a lot of comments in this thread that were literally just saying "Greenwald is losing his mind". No argument, just that.
>> The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was to say mean things about them in tweets. Those aren't assaults on press freedom.
It's hard for me to imagine him not understanding why consistently denouncing the legitimacy of print media in an era of conspiracy theory (especially post pizza-gate) may matter.
>> [Facebook and Twitter] had to start censoring…because journalists at CNN and NBC and The New York Times demanded they do so.
I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
>> [Seems to be arguing that millenials care about free speech less because they are coddled]
I'm not even gonna touch that one.
>> They began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others. That's just unfortunately the modern-day mentality of the journalist.
If he hadn't slipped the word authoritarian in there, I think this might be the most interesting point of the piece. I think a lot of people, including journalists, scientific journals, textbooks, wikipedia, even HN believe in rating/filtering information on its quality (is it true?, is it divisive?, does it have an agenda?). In fact, the filtering/amplifying of information is the primary job of such platforms.
As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform. We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses. Based on the results of the great experiment (Qanon, Trump presidency, "stop the steal", capitol riots) people want to pull back to the tried-and-true pre-web-2.0 journalism (i.e. gatekeepers).
This is where a good-faith exploration would really be interesting.
>> [Seems to insinuate that the NYT doesn't believe in whistleblowers like Snowden.]
I hope that's not true.
What's the alternative? Traditional media gets a pass for everything wrong they do because pizzagate?
> I feel like making any of these arguments without mentioning the capitol riots is somewhat a bad-faith narrative.
Not when they've been calling for it since long before the riot. (I'm not sure when it became riots. Was there a second one?)
> As far as I can tell, pre-internet conspiracy-theorists and demagogues never had a guaranteed platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
And lest we not forget state-sponsored media.
> We tried a great experiment letting anybody say anything with amplification of the masses.
The experiment we tried was a Facebook algorithm designed to increase "engagement" by promoting controversy. That was a Bad Idea.
Maybe time to smash them up instead of appointing them arbiters of the discourse.
It's worth noting that the invention of the printing press caused massive social change in Europe, and was not looked upon very kindly at the time by many.
I think the internet analogy writes itself, and I hope that we maintain the ability of humans to converse about what interests them regardless of how crazy they are.
Just remember kids, words are not actions. I can say that I'm gonna burn Y-combinator down (I don't even know where it is, to be honest) but that is not the same as actually burning down their buildings. I worry that we're conflating these two things too much in terms of what we see on the Internet.
And to be fair, the major driver of the craziness of the Republican party is TV and talk radio, not social media.
But on the other hand it feels like he spends a lot of time attacking strawmen just for the sake of being contrarian. Saying that journalists are authoritarians who want to protect the secrets of the powerful [1] and control access to platforms [2] has a tiny grain of truth in it but is mainly a massive oversimplification that paints a group of thousands of professionals who have a myriad of varying incentives with an incredibly broad brush. He seems to be incapable of nuance in his critique of the journalistic profession, and that renders his message mostly inaudible to me because it feels like it's coming from some form of resentment rather than reasoned arguments.
[1] "Journalists view the dissemination of information about what powerful people are doing in the dark not as their principal function and purpose—which is what it ought to be if we had a healthy media—but as something to be denounced and condemned."
[2] "[Facebook and Google and Twitter, and Silicon Valley in general] began to censor because journalists demanded they do so, in part because journalists are authoritarians who believe that the modes of information [should be] regulated by them and by others.
However the internet showed this was never true. Yes elements of the media did report the truth but they also produced some stories that were outright fabrications or purposefully did not include information that did not support the narrative; three very big stories that fall under this are the GM pickup fires which were assisted in catching fire, that chemical and biological weapons were widespread in Iraq, and of course Dan Rather's fake National Guard document.
Both the media and the political class help each other. One does it to gain favor and the other does it control the message. The internet took the ability to control the message, the narrative, away from the established media and politicians. It put it back into the hands of everyone.
So Greenwald's assertion is true in many ways. A return to where politicians used the media to control the message is a return to a system which allowed the Iraq war to come to fruition. The claim he makes that the press holds the office of the Presidency to different standards based on the party that controls it is easily provable as well. We never saw a level of press persecution before that occurred under Obama yet all of Trump's rambling diatribe was considered worse? On what planet?
Hell this site is guilty of the same as well. We have people here cheering on the FBI, likely the same that screamed when the same agencies trampled on people they liked. This is the society the old media and politicians gave us, putting us at each others throats and taught to revel in it
He clearly views himself and a handful of others as outsiders, in a crusade against a journalistic profession that he views has wholly corrupted by corporate interests.
On the other hand, it's not that large a number of entities. And the people who work there are constrained by their employers in particular ways, and choose to remain. Here's the article Greenwald quit The Intercept over:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-b...
To the best of my knowledge nothing in it is untruthful. The Intercept demonstrably wouldn't publish it. Which of the other institutions listed do you expect would have? Is there an instance of any of them publishing anything substantively equivalent before the election?
He quotes the NYT there in several places but the articles the quotes are from are minimizing the story and even then the authors became the targets of attack for even discussing it.
It looks like Glenn Greenwald’s business partners choose not to bet recklessly with the credibility of the publication, and in retrospect they may have choose wisely. The story was entirely under the control of Tucker Carlson and friends, and so would have been The Intercept’s brand credibility. The Intercept is far more vulnerable to missteps than Fox.
First Tucker Carlson kind of lost the files, and now he won’t show anyone the secret computer files because he thinks Hunter Biden is down on his luck, and Mr Carlson just feels so sad about it.
And yeah he totally lacks nuance, but at this point I can’t really care. I’m personally sick of unnuanced comments from “our” side benefitting from reading between the lines while near identical comments from Others with an equal lack of nuance get attacked for it. It would be great if we all were nuanced, but that appears impossible so reading things you disagree with charitably is just a necessity now. This comes to mind https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-things
Yes, Greenwald is not perfect, but he is more objective, honest, and brave than the great majority of journalists out there. It has the flavor of an inorganic smear campaign that has been absorbed repeatedly and unconsciously across social media. It's a common pattern for a post about an anti-establishemt figure to have some positive comments about them, but then some critique inevitably bubbles to the top of thread every time.
I'd like to know what exactly is so "insane" about pointing this out.
Glenn Greenwald has always been actually on the left, unlike the milk-toast "leftism" (or really "centrism" or rightism) of outlets like the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, etc..
This is what bothers people, and they can't take people actually on the left pointing out what hypocrites and right-wingers many liberals are.
This is why Glenn Greenwald gets censored, but I'm pleased to see that he still has the balls to speak truth to power.
There’s a ton I disagree with Greenwood about. But there’s also a lot I agree with. To dismiss him fully because of what I consider his bad ideas would be to also miss out on a lot of good insights.
Well, it’s both false on some points and misleading in much of the rest, in service of a false narrative, like much of Greenwald’s monomaniacal campaign to drive a wedge between the Left and the Democratic establishment [0]; the Espionage Act was not passed primarily to criminalize dissent, and the aspects that were arguably intended for that purpose and definitely misused for it have been largely neutralized by subsequent court decisions narrowing their applicability on Constitutional grounds (as, also, have other aspects of the law that address what is more commonly understood as spying), and were not, in any case, the provisions of the law under which prosecutions were carried out under the Obama Administration.
Now, that's not necessarily insane, if, for one example of a scenario in which it would be perfectly rational, Geenwald’s goal is to advance the interests of common opponents of both the Left and the Democratic Establishment
[0] I have no problem with driving a wedge between the Left and the Center-Right Democratic establishment based on the truth, as a Left-leaning pragmatist I recognize that's the only way to get any drive for progress on Left issues. Doing it based on lies and distortion doesn't create pressure for progress, just division and distraction.
Also his point about Obama having used the Act more than any other president is simple fact.
Over the last couple of years, he has consistently supported Trump, down to echoing Parler administrators' easily disproven talking points that none of their users were involved in the Capitol riots.
It's entirely consistent with his earlier positions that Greenwald opposed Obama/Clinton-era drone warfare, but from his writings, you'd have a difficult time learning how much drone strikes have expanded under Trump.
And finally, since 2016, Greenwald (as well as Assange and Snowden) have essentially turned into full blown instruments of Putinist propaganda (In Greenwald's case including the denial that Russia engaged in Novichok attacks against critics). This is neither a "leftist" nor an "anti-war" position, he simply favors a different bunch of war mongers.
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...
That's fairly meaningless without a comparison of the number of people for whom it could have been applied under Nixon or Eisenhower or whoever.
Was it applied more under Obama than, say, Eisenhower because Obama applied it to cases that Eisenhower would not have applied it to if they had occurred during his administration?
Or were there more people leaking classified information during Obama's time in office than there were during Eisenhower's and that explains why it was applied more under Obama.