Tuesday, September 10, 2013

And Here Come The Chicken Farmers

Once you set yourself up as the Arbiter of Transparency, sooner rather than later, you can expect the truest of your own True Believers to rise up and demand to know who* the fuck you think you are for standing between them and the secrets they believe should dumped into the public square:







And it makes perfect sense that the truest of the True Believers should want it all, unredacted and right now.

Because if, as Mr. Greenwald never tires of telling his followers, America is an unremittingly fascist rogue state -- vastly worse than every other nation on Earth and the source of most of what is awful in the modern world -- which routinely pitches its best and brightest into supermax prisons forever for daring standing up to America's unremitting fascism...why in the world would any real hero of civil rights ever pass up a chance to cripple that monster and expose its nefarious agents?

When slogging through the chin-deep offal of life in the material Universe starts to make it impossible to see or smell the differences between right and wrong, a shot of Noble Good versus Odious Evil makes for a fine and necessary pallet-cleanser at 56% purity.

But once purity itself becomes all you care about -- once  it becomes a distillery race to see who can get to 100% -- the chicken farmers are never far behind:
The main Islamist group in Algeria, the GIA, ended up being led by a Mr. Zouabri, a chicken farmer, who killed everyone who disagreed with him. He issued a final communiqué, declaring that the whole of Algerian society should be killed, with the exception of his tiny remaining band of Islamists. They were the only ones who understood the truth.

*thanks for the catch, J.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Jeezus, Droneglass is making the supreme sacrifice - hemorrhaging IQ points in the service of the Empire.

Even his straw men are getting stupider from one post to the next.

Unsalted Sinner said...

I see I'm not the only one who is reminded of "Sneakers". The glibertarian "just burn the whole thing to the ground" attitude is why it's hard to see them as whistleblowers. I'm glad Greenwald has some limits to what he will publish, but that doesn't lessen the danger much as long as he behaves in a careless manner.

The thing I find unacceptable about Manning's and Snowden's leaking is the reckless way they did it. There are times when it is right and necessary to engage in leaking to expose wrongdoing, but when you take it upon yourself to leak classified documents, you take on a heavy responsibility. The minimum requirement should be that you never leak a document you haven't read.

If you simply start handing out gigabytes of secret files, you have no control over what it is you are exposing. For all you know, the information in those files could lead to the deaths of innocent people if it fell into the wrong hands. And even if the people you hand those files over to seem trustworthy to you, they could end up publishing the wrong files through incompetence or accident. Miranda's detention, which revealed that he was traipsing around the world with the files on a hard drive and the encryption key in his pocket, shows just how hopelessly naive he and Greenwald are about protecting these files. As Kevin Drum notes (http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/snowden-disclosures-nsa-bombshell-decryption):

"Recall, for example, Glenn Greenwald’s admission that he “almost lost one of the biggest leaks in national-security history” because Snowden initially insisted on communicating with strong crypto and Greenwald didn’t want to be bothered to install it."

It could have been incredibly easy for some foreign intelligence agency to steal the lot. And that's something Snowden should have thought of before he handed them over. But perhaps he wasn't too bothered about that possibility?

/Rant

urbanmeemaw said...

The DudeBro Twitter Tots' exchange reminds me of a lyric from a song called "The John Birch Society", performed by the Chad Mitchell Trio back in the 60's: "We're only sure of we and thee and we're not sure of thee".

Cinesias said...

Jeezus, Lumpnuts is making the supreme sacrifice - continuing to troll someone for not being one of the Pures™ in service of Saint Glenneth Greenwald, hallowed be his name.

Even his straw men are getting stupider from one post to the next.

Anonymous said...

You boys and girls flunk Civics or something? Or get too wrapped up in Advanced Theater Arts? Let's look again at The Federalist, shall we, where there as plain as can be we find Hamilton noting, "America is an unremittingly fascist rogue state." Ab origine, motherfuckers, ab origine. Don't give this Greenwald shit.

Frank said...

"Because if, as Mr. Greenwald never tires of telling his followers, America is an unremittingly fascist rogue state -- vastly worse than every other nation on Earth and the source of most of what is awful in the modern world -- which routinely pitches its best and brightest into supermax prisons forever for daring standing up to America's unremitting fascism...why in the world would any real hero of civil rights ever pass up a chance to cripple that monster and expose its nefarious agents?"

I think that here you are committing exactly the kind of hyperbole that you accuse GG of destroying his credibility with. I'm not saying you should stop since your hyperbole is one of the things I like about you, but then it is one of the things I like about him too, even if it is a little out of place in an MSM gig.