You must log in or register to comment.
Liberals who never pretended to be leftist are being called traitors by liberals who do pretend to be leftists. This BS been going on since the Obama years.
Since Obama?
I think you know it's been going on much longer than that, probably over 110 yearsWell sure. My point was in reference to attacks on Greenwald & Taibbi specifically.
Her new book is great, it helped me to organize my own thoughts about politics in the COVID years, which I was really struggling to do
supports authoritarian Russia
The Left critique calls for freedom of movement for people as well as capital;
the paragraph where I stopped reading this shit
Eoin Higgins who this article quotes as a source is a bellingcat writer and fed
The Left critique calls for freedom of movement for people as well as capital
wtf is this shit? no thanks, "globalization" (imperialism) sucks no matter how pretty you try to dress it rhetorically
i agree
<(but what if PEOPLE decide to bring their capital though)if i could go back in time i'd hunt down the people who normalized companies having the same rights as people
I once got a ledditor who thought capital flight laws meant that rich people wouldn't be allowed to travel
None of these people were leftists, they were liberals or "average" people molded by social environments.
To quote a post that I once stole from here from a poster I've now forgotten the origin of:
Liberals entire thing is "uphold the status quo". This is the position of pretty much every single politically illiterate liberal who really doesn't understand what any ideology actually is. They change their shape in order to fit themselves into whatever the existing social paradigm is.
This is why LGBT people got absolutely nowhere with liberals until they literally bullied them with riots and pride parades saying a big visible fuck you to everyone that ever tried to make them invisible. They could not be asked to change they had to be bullied and forced. Once the social paradigm is changed they then accept it.
This is why anger and cancelling on twitter became a thing. It bullied liberals into new social paradigms.
This is why it works for dirtbag leftists.
And this is why they picked up guns and shot at whoever the nazis told them to shoot at. Not because they were true believers. But because mussolini or hitler and every other fascist simply bullies them into a new social paradigm... and once the paradigm is changed they accept it.
Liberals are absorbomorphs. Their ideology is absorbomorphism.
These "leftists" were people placed into left social circles whose environment was surrounded by so much left that their absorbomorphism molded itself into a leftist.
When their social environments no longer forced them into this shape, they change shape.
They are unlike the depressed leftists cursed by Marx to a life of misery who can never give up their leftism. They change their shape continuously.
Max Blumenthal, well-known far-right conspiracy theorist
the article's biggest hit against him is "supporting aUtHoRiTaRiAn Russia", it doesn't even bring up vaccines
just trash
Taibbi specifically is under attack right now for exposing the mis- dis- mal-information discourse—and the governmental & non-governmental institutions that have sprouted from it—to be just parts of the larger propaganda machine of the coalition of the Democrats and the Never Trumpers. He’s an existential threat to them maintaining control of corporate social media discourse and gaining control of fediverse discourse.
Edit to add: In case anyone thinks I’m being hyperbolic in bringing up potential fediverse censorship, I’ve got a PDF for you from the Atlantic Council: Collective Security in a Federated World
I dunno, I’ve heard about his history (sexpt in Russia, Twitter files bs, the BLM chapo episode) and he seems like a dipshit who happens to sometimes be right. I’m tired of media personalities. All of them.
He (and Greenwald) are solid journalists, but they’re also libs. Importantly, they’re not partisan hacks, which is why they get attacked by whichever party happens to be in power at any given moment.
Importantly, they’re not partisan hacks
Idk I've seen a lot from Greenwald where he is specifically against the left. They seem very "partisan"
I think “partisan” in this context means not genuflecting to either Republicans or Democrats.
👆 He’s a civil libertarian who, on a fuzzy, intuitive level, tries to fight for the “little guy” over those in power regardless of the party in power, but without having a coherent class consciousness.
He is a, age of consent type, libertarian so ultimately he will oppose the left. On issues if free speech and government spying he may be an occasional ally, but nothing more.
Well what does that matter? Both parties are servile bootlickers of capital who think leftists should be removed from society, one party just thinks it should be done through executions
The first thing I see when I look up Taibbi is some article where he's handwringing about people 'being unwilling to explore different points of view post Trump' (lmao), and Greggy G's twitter feed has his most recent tweet where he dumps on some journo for following the state department line vis a vis Israel (cool), and 2 tweets back from that where he seems to be going after a judge Lula appointed because a podcaster (who defended the existence of a Brazilian Nazi party, invited on stereotypical gamers, and generally seemed to be 'problematic') thought the judge was shit (absolutely not cool)
Being 'non partisan' in this shithole hardly matters when both parties serve the same interests anyway.
Being non-partisan isn’t a panacea to be sure. All it means is the potential to speak truth to power regardless of which party is in power, though it hardly guarantees it. And you’re right that, because he’s a liberal, his analysis is still going to be captured by liberal ideology. But his actual facts at least are generally fact-based.
There are virtually no old-school investigative journalists/muckrakers who are actual leftists, so I have to take it where I can get it. Investigative journalism is slow & expensive, and corporate media 1) has become much more party-stratified over time, ever since cable news became a thing, and 2) they have mostly abandoned investigative journalism for budgetary reasons, because online ads don’t bring in much. Leftists have to run on shoestring budgets, so it’s no surprise that there isn’t much leftist investigative journalism to be found. All I can think of off the top of my head are Aaron Maté and Ben Norton, and I’m not sure to what extent they’d claim to be explicitly leftist.
That's somewhat fair, though I'd still steer clear of Greenwald or at least be highly critical of anything he throws out, he still tends to be a hack when it comes to leftists (going back to the Lula appointed judge thing).
Leftists have to run on shoestring budgets, so it’s no surprise that there isn’t much leftist investigative journalism to be found
Well yes, that and corporate media not wanting to give a platform to actual leftists for obvious reasons. You might have some luck with PSL published items like Liberation News, though as noted it's very rarely investigative journalism and mostly just analysis of existing conflict and articles.
I'd still steer clear of Greenwald
He’s fallen off my map ever since he switched to his TV format; who has the time? He’s not really doing investigative reporting anymore.
You might have some luck with PSL
The bulk of what I read/hear/watch are leftist analyses. Fortunately there are many (several of which I pay)!
It's embarrassing that we have people on this site defending these shitheads as "solid journalists" and not immediately getting dunked on.
the sexpat stuff was based on satirical articles and has been debunked by talking with the people involved
but I agree he's a dipshit on the other stuff alone
Pretty sure there are photos in some cases. eXile, as far as I can tell, was a shitty paper run by shitty people.
So "misinformation" is just incorrect information being spread. "disinformation" is deliberately spreading wrong information with the intent to deceive.
"malinformation" is correct information that goes against the US government line. So educating people on the context of a historical event or geopolitics, but doing so in a way the US government doesn't approve of, is "malinformation." They're literally trying to reframe educating people as a potential crime. It's some fucked up shit.
And that other guy is talking about US politics where they accused "malinformation" of being one of the main reasons Clinton lost (i.e. people were informed that she is a horrific ghoul of a politician responsible for the destruction of Libya and that made people not want to vote for her.) They of course blamed this on "the Russians" as they do, because the US ruling class doesn't want their citizens to live in reality.
i have honestly never seen anyone use the word malinformation before today but i appreciate your explanation. Very strange that the other person was refusing to explain wtf they were talking about, normally people are eager to explain things they care about.
I think they may have been hung up on the word "discourse" there and assumed that you were up to speed with the terms, but not the conversation about them.
Though I really don't get their "big ball of wax" comment, it really isn't hard to say "the US government tries to manipulate people at home and abroad through manipulation of information and language."
Where have you been since Clinton lost the election? One place to start might be the Disinformation Governance Board.
Are you talking about people blaming russia for clinton's loss and election interference? Phrasing this stuff as "the mis- dis- mal-information discourse" makes it sound like there are a bunch of people arguing about the definitions of those things on twitter.
Your post comes across as needlessly hostile here. Instead of calling me ignorant and dropping a wikipedia link for a thing that existed for 4 months try explaining yourself.
I’m sorry but I don’t know how to summarize this long, winding current in American socio-media-politics of the last six years in a Lemmy comment. It’s just too big a ball of wax, and I’m not up for it.
And so you thought "the mis- dis- mal-information discourse" would be the way people would understand what you're talking about and what it is Taibbi has exposed?
The people who are familiar with it will, and the people who aren’t obviously won’t. Same as in town. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, browbeat me into being your personal thing-explainer?
I mean you're on a public message board and you clearly have A Thing you care about, so maybe in the interest of promoting that Thing you should explain it?
I’ve brought them up before in posts & messages on hexbear and lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml and Mastodon, and I’m sure I will again.
I think it matters because the push to control social media has expanded to include all of the imperial West, and they are aware of the fediverse and are going to come for us:
Atlantic Council report: Scaling Trust on the Web: Annex 5: Collective Security in a Federated World (PDF)
The examples given at the start are Matt Taibbi (Walmart Hunter S. Thompson), a bunch of comedians, Naomi Wolf (advisor to the Clinton admin), and the hosts of Red Scare.
The only ones out of those who claimed to be leftists were the Red Scare podcast, but from the times I listened they mainly complained about cigarettes or discussed which things are the most "cucked." I never got any leftist vibes at all other than sometimes they'd drop a name like Gramsci or Donna Haraway.
The only real thing I'm getting from this article is liberal media figures sometimes figure out they can make more money hanging out with Peter Thiel if they start saying slurs more often. They just gotta start claiming they were canceled by leftist wokes and then bam they're eating oysters at a fancy upper west side party with some rich guy who owns an app that predicts how white a person is based on nostril shape
God damn it, Ana. I dismissed people who said she would do "why I left the left" type of content and here she is more or less doing that about mythical crime waves.
There’s a point here in that the alt-right will sometimes call for very narrow elements of social-democratic political economy (at least when no one has to break out the state checkbook for it), and that can lead disaffected leftists astray. But the article is also doing a disservice by not acknowledging that part of that shift happens because the alt-right sprinkles a few nuggets of truth in the otherwise shit sandwich. Yes, corporate charters waxing poetically about diversity policies is a smokescreen for capital. Yes, the Democrats are going to bat for institutions like the CIA and legacy media.
There’s a problem in political thinking where the other side must be wrong about everything all the time as that’s what makes them wrong, and vice versa for our side. In reality, any side can make truthful observations, but still be wrong in the goals. It’s the old flaw prevalent among the Western left where ideas are the things from which politics spring from, and not that the process is where politics happens.
I remember liberals getting caught completely off guard around 2015 when altright types started saying outright racist things without shying away. Liberals had gotten too used to Glenn Beck trying to do wacky chalkboard stuff, or Ben O'Reilly being a curmudgeon. Now here comes these younger internet goofballs who don't shy away from being called racist. Their protocols stopped working, plus alt-right types were saying a semblance of correct things by criticizing capital. Really poor unstructured and racist criticisms, but sometimes with a co-opted leftist message like fascists always do.
You're right, liberals had no choice but to dismiss everything neo-fascists were saying.
Ben O'Reilly
somehow calling him Ben makes him seem so much less evil than Bill
It's easy to remember since he and
are basically the same guyLooking back I think I had Ben Reilly on my brain. Spiderman's clone.
The other difference is those prior conservatives still cared about having a seat at the respectable institutions. The alt right not only didn’t care about those institutions, they actively despised them, so there was no concern about not getting in the club.
Honestly, I feel quite despairist at the state of the U.S left... on the other hand, the rest of the international left should be doing fine...
ok so what I'm reading is that you're one of those people who moved to the right and instead of accepting this about yourself you've decided the entirety of society changed instead
social and technological progress will stop if we don't get to make jokes about trans people
probably one of the dumber things I've ever read
moore's law but with a projected decrease in transhobia meaning the end of semiconductor improvement
I've been left-leaning moderate my whole life.
Explains why this post is such dogshit that says nothing.
I’ve been reading Greenwald and Taibbi for ~17 and ~22 years respectively, and in that time they have remained stalwart civil libertarian liberals, which is where I was 20 years ago, having since moved radically
Nonetheless, I still pay attention to them for their excellent, reliable journalism.LMAO
There are better journalists working that don't have the reactionary baggage those two have. They're just broken clocks at this point.
I think they’re decent fact digger-uppers, but yes ultimately they’re libs and therefore sometimes have reactionary takes. I know that going in and ignore their shittier takes.
Yeah it's the same way I generally view Mercoius, even if he isn't as reliable.
Max Blumenthal has got some dumb COVID-19 takes, but he still does some great muckraking, and muckraking is hard to come by these days.
