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.
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 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.
Is this something he said in the interview or on Twitter? Do you have a particular quote?
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.