Bill Maher decides to permanently entrench himself on the wrong side of history

[SR4]

also should state now that Maher always has been, is, and will be a fucking moron.

[lumpenprol]

Am curious about this, I don't think the clip warrants the "permanently entrench himself on the wrong side of history" hyperbole - he just seems like any other rich, comfortable talk show host on autopilot who lazily splits any topic down the middle in order to appear like the voice of reason.

That said, up until now I've been nothing but impressed by both Snowden and to a lesser extent, Greenwald. In this sense I agree wholly with John and A/D. Snowden *is* a hero, as is Greenwald by extension, I suppose. It's a bit missing the point, I think, to say either guy is arrogant, or self-aggrandizing, or what have you - I would argue that it's often people with inflated egos who are willing to take the rather foolish step of sticking their necks out. In the past it might have been Jesus or Joan of Arc having hallucinations of divine right in order to give them strength; in the absence of that a big healthy whopper of an ego will do nicely. Just look at Julian Assange (who, I think, is a much more ambiguous kind of character).

That said, I have no idea who Pierre Omidyar is. Google finger is itchy...

[SR4]

dis: fair enough, but I think Greenwald has been one of very, very few journalists that have actually stuck to the importance of the topic and the leak itself, rather than join with all the other talking heads calling for Snowden's arrest.

 

 

If there is a hero here, its Snowden.

 

edit: what Lumpy said

[Guest disparaissant]

also should state now that Maher always has been, is, and will be a fucking moron.

cosigned.

dis: fair enough, but I think Greenwald has been one of very, very few journalists that have actually stuck to the importance of the topic and the leak itself, rather than join with all the other talking heads calling for Snowden's arrest.

 

 

If there is a hero here, its Snowden.

i think that says a lot more bad stuff about journalism than it does good stuff about greenwald.

 

and snowden is aight. i mean, i think his politics are fucking stupid, but he definitely did the right thing.

[lumpenprol]

so...why is eBay dude evil?

[Guest disparaissant]

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidyar/

that's a pretty good summation of everything that's wrong with pierre omidyar's ideas.

[Guest zaphod]

greenwald is a legend. maher has always been kind of an idiot. i'm not surprised.

 

oh lumpenprol already made my point for me. yep, what he said.

[Guest disparaissant]

i think it's worth also noting that omidyar is the majority shareholder of paypal - the same paypal that blacklisted donations to wikileaks. this is absolutely not about ideals, it's about profits.

 

furthermore, how many pages of snowden's documents have been released so far? afaik it's barely been 500 pages. and no one knows how many documents there actually are floating around out there. the most conservative estimates say 50,000, the NSA claims it could be as many as 500,000, and there are other sources saying it's closer to two million. at this rate, it will be at least 42 years before snowden's files have all seen the light of day, and it could very well be 1500 years! this is not the right way to go about this, period.

[lumpenprol]

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidyar/

that's a pretty good summation of everything that's wrong with pierre omidyar's ideas.

I'm having trouble getting through this. It starts off with insinuation and ad hominem, and its first target out of the gate is: micro-lending. Isn't attacking micro-lending kind of like attacking Mother Theresa? I must be missing something...will bravely try to read further...

 

Edit: and are you now attacking Snowden and Greenwald for *not leaking enough*? You are tough to please...

 

re: the Paypal thing, that is genuinely interesting...

[Guest disparaissant]

it's admittedly not a very good article but it hits on a lot of the salient points.

 

the thing about micro-lending is that the best that can be said about it is that it does nothing. groups like the grameen bank are all well and good but the actual impact that they have is minimal at best. it's warm-fuzzies.

 

the problem isn't just with micro-lending, it's with the particular brand of micro-lending that the omidyar network invested in. rather than the grameen bank style, community-based collective-responsibility idea that was prevalent before, it was a much more traditional form of money-lending, with bill collectors, high interest rates, and predatory practices. and it ended up with a bunch of people killing themselves because they were so deep in the hole.

 

oh, and don't even get me started on mother theresa...

 

i don't know why people in this thread have gotten the idea that i'm against the leaks. i was just talking about how greenwald isn't any better than maher on the metric of "decent human being," nothing more.

[awepittance]

disparasissant, i respect whatever reasons you have for believing what you've said here, i just think you really don't know what you're talking about and have based much of it on recent opinion pieces of Greenwald's entire career, without actually knowing much about his career nor having followed it much at all or for very long. I'm not thrilled that this Pierre guy sat on the board of Ebay during the Wikileaks blockade, but I've seen the fruits of Glenn's labors over the years and the damage it has caused to the national security state, and it's more than any single individual in a shorter period of time than I've ever witnessed since being into politics. It's sad to me that you latch onto the things you're saying to call it 'fucking stupid' to see Greenwald's or Snowden's sacrifices for the heroic acts that they are.

Maher defends the Obama presidency at every turn and donates 1 million dollars to it, so of course by default Greenwald comes out as the morally superior individual. At this point I don't even see how that's arguable, but maybe I'm just too convicted on making a very clear line between what I see as blatantly wrong vs right

edit: and the final thing I will say is attacking someone by mentioning the arm that feeds and not the content of what that individual does or says is a cheap move and one of the most classic ad hominem attacks in the book. People go there all the time with my sister daily and it's usually a sign of weakness, that they can't actually intelligently disagree with the *content* of what she's saying vs attacking who she works for as some kind of illusory argument win.

[lumpenprol]

Ok, got to the good stuff. I had to read through a bunch of garbage just to get to a few good quotes, though.

 

Here I'll save the rest of you guys the trouble:

 

 

 

"More than 200 poor, debt-ridden residents of Andhra Pradesh killed themselves in late 2010, according to media reports compiled by the government of the south Indian state. The state blamed microfinance companies - which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor - for fueling a frenzy of overindebtedness and then pressuring borrowers so relentlessly that some took their own lives.

"The companies, including market leader SKS Microfinance, denied it.

"However, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, independent researchers and videotaped testimony from the families of the dead, show top SKS officials had information implicating company employees in some of the suicides."

 

Still, I can't trust the article because of the way it's written. I'm sure there have been microfinance successes...I mean it first came on my radar regarding the success it was having with poor women in particular, in places like Bangladesh. I suppose that was all lies?

[delet...]

Maher always has been, is, and will be a fucking moron.

[awepittance]

no

what i am saying is that if greenwald really were the "hero" that ehrlichman says he is, he would have dumped the info and moved on with his career, instead of teaming up with another noted neoliberal capitalist opportunist to release the leaks for profit. that's not heroic, it's despicable.

this is just absurd. First of all look at a different organization, Wikileaks who did a massive dump of leaks onto the internet. How long did the press talk about each one of those leaks in a serious manner? I'd say for each dump the press focused on the content of the leaks specifically for about a week tops. So we have maybe 3 or 4 really big leaks Wikileaks pushed out there in a period of 2-3 years. Awesome, great work involved, have nothing but good things to say about what they accomplished. On the other hand, how long has the press been talking about each NSA leak story that Greenwald trickles out at a regular pace? We're going on almost a year since he started working with Snowden, and besides a few major lulls like the gov shutdown and 'obamacare' launching, the NSA revelations being talked about in the mainstream press has been virutually nonstop. This is done strategically by design. Greenwald has seen the journalism game long enough to know that a massive leak with everything in it wouldn't last very long in the press, this has taken things to a whole new level. He claims he still has the majority of the documents to release yet, and if this is true the amount of pressure he'll continue to put on the national security state will reach unforeseen levels, not like we've seen since the Nixon era. Call me optimistic, but it's one of the only positive things I see in the future of America right now.

 

 

[Guest disparaissant]

disparasissant, i respect whatever reasons you have for believing what you've said here, except no i don't

okay gotcha.

 

it's not a fucking "ad hominem" to question someone's motives. it's not an ad hominem to think that they are taking advantage of a situation for their own personal gain. so there's that.

 

i'm just constantly in awe that all you greenwald fanboys don't bat an eye at him teaming up with someone as slimy (and contradictory to his stated ideals) as pierre omidyar.

 

https://twitter.com/pierre/status/2666071620

[delet...]

Also, greenwald is fucking cool, a much needed erudite and educated voice in the fight to tear back the veil behind which the oppressors hide. The hate speech against him comes as a surprise, but well, there you go, some people live to entertain by their digression from reason.

[awepittance]

i have plenty of criticism about Pierre's past and actions, but what I don't know is that it will somehow amount to a decrease in the quality of Glenn's work, there is no evidence to suggest that. I've seen his work, I've seen what he's accomplished and that's all I need for now.

[goDel]

Not sure why Maher had to stick his Snowden-Ron Paul comparison. I get that whiff of " hey look at me being edgy funny with a point no one else could think! *blows own junk*". Although annoying, I don't see why that should warrant the "permanently entrench on wrong side of history". But that's just Awe using hyperbole to draw some people out of the woods.

 

Good luck with that, disp. I kinda agree on the Paypal dude being sketchy. But hey, you're discussing with the "Greenwald being permanently entrenched on the right side of history" hyperbole police quad. (Disclaimer: this was a hyperbole. Bite at free will)

[delet...]

Not sure why Maher had to stick his Snowden-Ron Paul comparison.

 

He had to stick with it because he's a phoney left wing comedian. He is there for partisan talking points, jabs and jibes. When obama came to power and either continued or ramped up the bush era policy directions, maher swiched from anti-government moanmeister to pro administration apologist. It's all part of the partisan noise machine that never strays from it's objectives to misdirect and obfuscate, which is allowed to happen on american TV because it only ever attacks surface issues and doesn't get it's teeth into systemic failure.

[Guest zaphod]

i don't see the issue with greenwald using omidyar as a financial tentpole to hold up an actual, independent news source. first look has a lot of promise. i'm amazed you guys are this cynical about it, considering how often i see complaints about how limited news coverage is on both sides of the political divide. the only real concern i have is how the for profit side of this venture is going to generate money. that and what the content will be, since i don't think a new media site can run on the strength of the reporters alone.

[goDel]

Kinda. I believe he's first and foremost making jokes at any party's extent, just to serve his own ego/pockets. So, instead of being there for partisan talking points, I see him blowing his own junk on prime time TV (i dont even know at what time his show airs, but it sounded neat). I mean, the amount of times he fucks up interviews because he constantly need to tell puns or his all-important opinion. He basically invites people with a story to come sit with him to listen to what Maher thinks about their story, instead of those people telling their story...

 

So, Maher is a bit of a dick. Who does occasionally score a good point, I believe.

 

 

And to offer some extra edge to the current discussion ( and blow my own junk maher-style) I believe the journalists of the Guardian and the other papers investigating the Snowden files are completely underappreciated when talking head Greenwald gets all the credit. He may show his head lots on us tv shows, but that doesn't mean he's the motor behind the snowden coverage, i believe. Big respect for the people at the Guardian. I'm not sure why Greenwald had to sell his soul to the devil. It feels like a money/power move. But we've discussed this before, I think.

 

( hey look, i just put down my tefal ultraglide coat)

How can news be truly independent if there's that kind of money involved? Why not start with a kickstarter?

[Dale]

no

what i am saying is that if greenwald really were the "hero" that ehrlichman says he is, he would have dumped the info and moved on with his career, instead of teaming up with another noted neoliberal capitalist opportunist to release the leaks for profit. that's not heroic, it's despicable.

 

i'm glad the info is getting out there, don't get me wrong. i just think that greenwald is a fink and omidyar is just straight up evil.

 

where is your evidence that greenwald is 'neoliberal'?

Also - who wouldn't take up a huge media venture offer, fully financed by a single source, which could potentially create the most interesting journalistic/whistleblower outlet on the net? Only a fool would turn that down. I'd love to see something beat the Guardian in terms of interesting scoops.

 

As far as I can tell, Greenwald has maintained a high degree of sincerity and passion for the cause of transparency.

[goDel]

 

 

 

 

who wouldn't take up a huge media venture offer, fully financed by a single source

 

Not sure if sarcastic....fully financed by a single source is not really a guarantee for success, isn't it? Or rather, potentially the complete opposite. And another question is why would one need that boat load of money anyways, if it can be done with very little money?

edit: editing quotes sicks ballz

[goDel]

and it sucks balls too

 

aenywaezzz

[Dale]

as far as i know, the agreement that's been setup is that Greenwald has the role of editor. So far, Greenwald has been a pretty successful journalist (even prior to 2013, he was doing writing interesting things and had a lot of supporters).