Michael Grunwald and the Assange Precedent Problem | Hacker News Reader

Michael Grunwald and the Assange Precedent Problem

newyorker.com

37 pointswikiburner12 comments

On the same day the New York Times labels Djamila Bouhired a "terrorist wife" in their obituary for Jacques Verges, one of the most influential and intellectual lawyers in French history.

The medias enthusiasm to coddle up to the government and military is a dangerous development.

Grunwald's bio from Time. - "Michael Grunwald is TIME's senior national correspondent. Before coming to TIME, he spent nearly a decade at the Washington Post, where he served as a congressional correspondent, New York bureau chief, essayist and national investigative reporter. Grunwald has also written for the Boston Globe, The New Republic and Slate among many other publications, and is the recipient of the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting and the Society of Environmental Journalists award for in-depth reporting. Raised in Greenvale, N.Y., Grunwald holds a B.A. from Harvard College. He lives in Miami."

This guy belongs on Drudge or Fox, or better yet, AM radio.

Hardly. He belongs on MSNBC or The Huffington Post. He's a very far left guy, and since Obama has come into office, Grunwald now describes himself as an unabashed "statist".

It honestly shocks me that people as smart as HNers can't see that Fox News and MSNBC are two sides of the same ridiculous coin.

I have noticed that in many countries, the big 'left wing' newspaper and the big 'right wing' newspaper is owned by the same company.

One of the things that repeatedly bothers me about this entire situation is the continuous use of the words "foreign" and "foreigner", from all camps discussing this.

Since when did it become acceptable to be so outright xenophobic? I mean, it's tantamount to the way that "Ausländer" ended up being used.

This "us and them" balkanisation of the entire American mindset is dangerous. It is wrong to think of America as "all of the world that matters", and everything outside of America as simply "foreign", and therefore unimportant and to be treated as America sees fit.

Xenophobia seems like a deeply seated part of the American culture. We started out in an 'us versus them' scenario against our british rulers, then went on to subjugate and oppress various minority cultures that were supposed to be welcomed here. Not to mention the natives who lived on this continent in the first place...

I suspect that many countries have 'us vs them' struggles in their past. Surely the US is not unique in this regard?

And the US is not unique in its xenophobia either.

Sure, but we have them right now, not just in our past, which is the real problem. Look at Arizona's behavior towards minorities, for example, or stop-and-frisk in NY, or the severe disadvantages African American children grow up under in places like Oakland.

Xenophobia is still a very real part of american culture, just like sexism - even if things are better than they were a hundred years ago. It's a long, difficult uphill climb.

I would disagree with your comments in that they paint current culture with brush from multiple centuries ago. Not that more recent xenophobia examples don't/can't exist but I wouldn't give them the primary effect. Especially for moderns mostly descended from folks who immigrated a century or so ago, long after all that stuff happened. And in modern culture the average poorly educated fool can barely tell the difference between Columbus and the Pilgrims.

My suggestion is its more likely to be stereotypical modern american rebellion. Give them freedom of religion, they rebel by becoming hard core fundamentalists. Give them economic opportunity and freedom and they rebel by turning themselves into cubical drones enslaved to bank loans. Give them free libraries and schools and they rebel by embracing ignorance as a chosen lifestyle. Give them freedom of the press from govt interference and at least some rebellious throwbacks will demand drone strikes against anyone opposed to oppressive programs.

Its a pretty effective stereotype. If you give an American something like XYZ, then you can pretty well assume dominant cultural desire will be for the opposite ABC as their natural first response. Logically weird, but observation proves it to be true in most cases.

You can mostly blame our leaders and media for this. And the crappy working class economy, large number of immigrants and globalization for the rest.

Xenophobia is the ugly side of strong ties. Any group that is closely knit will become outright xenophobic towards "Outsiders". It's how Oxytocin[1] works.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin

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