I Missed the Memo Telling the Left That We Now Support the Widespread Invasion of Privacy
Yglesias completely owned Greenwald here:
Yes, they have pulled off a very impressive invasion of a very large number of people's privacy all in pursuit of a really bad cause! https://t.co/WvVXTTvylR
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 27, 2016
In those 3 weeks, @WikiLeaks has published over 33,000 docs from Podesta's emails. Not a single one has been shown to be inauthentic.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 27, 2016
While the libertarian useful idiot for Vladimir Putin Glenn Greenwald is not a leftist by any reasonable definition, most of his fans certainly consider themselves to be on the left. And those who believe that such major revelations as John Podesta’s musing on risotto and that Bill Clinton committed the crime of the century by trying to help a friend who had cancer are a sign of the corrupt nature of $$Killery certainly conceive of themselves as leftists.
I don’t know, I guess that maybe I think the left shouldn’t be falling behind an organization run by a guy who won’t stand trial for his rape charges that engages in massive privacy invasions. I mean, that’s pretty disgusting behavior. But then after being officially run out of the left for not leaving a faculty dinner to immediately engage in an hours-long Twitter defense of the greatest martyr in known human history, Matt Bruenig, on the direct orders of Corey Robin and Connor Kilpatrick, what does this Hillary Hack who happens to believe that workers need to right to collective bargaining and women should have reproductive rights so maybe we shouldn’t help elect a fascist know about being a leftist? Maybe Naomi Klein will be run out of the left too for getting after Greenwald for covering all of this with such glee.
And hey, let’s start a pool to predict when Greenwald shows up in comments to call me a LIAR and other varieties of his classic all-caps insults!
It does seem a bit odd that Greenwald is an absolutist on the U.S. government not getting access to our private correspondence, but he thinks it’s terrific when the Russian government does, and releases it to the world. I’m not quite getting that.
I’m not sure where I first saw it, but the best summary of Greenwald is that he’s so against U.S. government failings (real and imagined) that anything anti-U.S. government is laudable.
It’s kind of a Cleek’s Law of U.S. foreign policy.
I assume he’s still pretending that it’s not the Russian government, and that anyone who thinks it is is a McCarthyite stirring up a “new Red Scare”
Pretty much, yes.
Silly Manny, once a country is established as something, it never changes. Russia is clearly still the vanguard of the proletariat!In an unrelated note, I'll be taking a quick vacation to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a stop in Trebizond on my way through the Black Sea to Constantinople.The generous way to read it is that Greenwald thinks it’s terrific to obtain private correspondence from people whose actions are newsworthy to the populace but not from ‘jes folks like us. The less charitable way is that it’s terrific to obtain private correspondence from people Greenwald doesn’t like.
If the US government hacked Greenwald’s email and released it to the public, how do we think he’d react? Greenwald is at least a public figure as most of the people in the Podesta emails.
Hell, even if Assange had done it he’d be losing his fucking mind.
Nobody is more indignant about being stolen from than a thief.
By that logic, the mainstream media should have published the stolen photos of celebrities (aka the Fappening), because hey, public interest, amirite?
Jackass.
I’ve heard him say that it’s equally problematic that the Russians hacked this as if the NSA had done it but it’s nonetheless newsworthy.
Morocco promising to give Bill Clinton a $1M of they would meet with him for 5 minutes. CGI Donors giving millions to both the Clinton Foundation and to Bill b Clinton personally. In exchange for what? Even Hill’s own aides thought it was shady and would lead to character perceptions.
Good catch. It’s called hypocrisy. Ditto Greenwald’s ability to ignore Russia’s treatment of LGBTs while pretending that Russia is a beacon of human rights.
This election is certainly causing me to take a new look at the old saying that politics is like a circle, with the extremes meeting up so you can’t really tell them apart. But where we once had Nazis and Stalinists, we now have glibertarians and Berniebros. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
If you look at Michael Tracey’s stuff, we can see that it’s actually Berniebros and Trumpists, too.
Tracey was a Paulite first.
This is some fine fine trolling, Erik. Hope you catch a big one!
(You might have found an opportunity to mention Freddie, though. He might feel left out)
Not a single one has been shown to be inauthentic.
Has a single one been shown to be significant?
Seriously, one of the reasons that journalists selectively publish leaked (let alone stolen) documents is not just to protect privacy, but so that things of significance aren’t washed away in a flood of trivia (like risotto recipes and the shocking revelation that people in organizations sometimes greatly dislike nominal allies).
Yes.
ETA: thankfully, the wingnuts in my social media circles have been so despondent that they haven’t much bothered with posting all the TROUBLING QUESTIONS raised by the Wikileaks emails.
Nah, he prefers to delegate that out these days. He’ll make some baiting comment daring his followers to go after you here and on Twitter without explicitly saying so.
Speaking of Kilpatrick, he actually had a piece in Jacobin today that confirms your perception of him. It’s still good to see it, because I was wondering what exactly he does at Jacobin – he seems to just be on Twitter all day whining about liberals.
That third-to-last paragraph, mercy. “Why didn’t ya get rid of Those People, huh? Huh?”
I was with Kilpatrick about up to here:
I assume the rest is not worth reading?
Yes, they’re the most accurate, infallible leaks ever, and oh what’s this?
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/774023424498892800
.goy. Nice. Booga-booga Jewish people!
Now, perhaps an OCR error. Probably an OCR error. (Though I bet one allowed to slip through because: booga-booga Jewish people.) But when you’re hyping the lily-white ethics of the enterprise, and something like this has already been noted, you may look like a jackass. Maybe sort of.
It’s an email. How would there be OCR going on? (Even ignoring the “.goy,” the wikileaks tweet is fucking idiotic)
Let’s see all of Glenn’s emails. It’s in the public interest to know whether he’s been corresponding with any Russian government figures, and if he knows of any great recipes.
Are the two minutes of hate over, or has it been expanded to continue until the actual election?
I’m sure Greenwald and Assange would have no objections to third parties publishing their private emails. After all, they are public figures, and any evidence that they are driven as much by personal vendettas and petty self interest as they are by core moral principles would be in the public interest too, yes?