non-smug dem politics sites

list them here.

ezra klein
538
dailyhowler

... starting to be at a loss after this. washingmonthly, digby, talkingpointsmemo, atrios - they all make my skin fucking crawl these days, just so full of self-congratulatory, put-downy bullshit. i don't recall them always being this way, but maybe they were?

yglesias? thinkprogress? krugmans blog is OK. ackerman?

a couple of the TNR blogs are good--chait is OK on anything besides israel and marty peretz. cohen for healthcare.

does glenn greenwald count as smug? hes kind of shrill and very self-righteous but he keeps me honest re: my obama standom.

kevin drum is good but might be 'smug.'

brad delong isnt 'liberal' per se but democratic-ish.

drum is ok but has become utterly unremarkable to me - he covers everything like two days after it's happened and says pretty much the same things as everyone else, just "nicer". he's like the bob herbert of the dem blog world.

greenwald is in a class of his own - he's beyond smug, every post is in some kind of righteous fury mode. i imagine him ordering a suboptimal cappucino: "That these so-called baristas can hand me this dishwater with smiles on their faces is simply astonishing. They have had every chance to make my coffee correctly, and at every turn have chosen not to. UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out that better coffee can be had two blocks away, at Venetia. These readers miss the point, which is not that good coffee may be had at some other establishment, but that this coffee, in this establishment is presented as good yet is clearly, to anyone who bothers paying even cursory attention, not."

i will check out the others you mention

loool

yeah the greenwald moment a week ago when he decided that all these rahm profiles were obamas secret way of apologizing to the DC establishment for not being centrist was... interesting

greg sargent

yglesias is appealingly wonky in the ezra klein-y way but can be kind of irritating.

ackerman is great about nat'l security/defense, but sometimes he writes about 90s hardcore and i want to delete his blog from the internet.

political(ish) blogz currently in my bookmark bar:
tpm
gawker
yglesias
ezra klein
538
ta-nehisi-coates
wonkete

memeorandum is pretty unsmug cause u know its a computer

yeah i wasnt sure if i should mention tnc's blawg which i dig but is only like 40% politics (30% race, 10% personal, 10% world of warcraft, 10% dallas cowboys)

klein is a little bit too stuck inside conventional wisdom for me a lot of the time tbh, even though i like him because he tries to play it straight insted of fawn and preen. as an example, a recent column of his looked at how to control health care costs. he makes a big distinction between this and spending, though the two are quite inter-related, of course (if i spend money on the big vat of mayonnaise at wal-mart, it will cost less than if i spend money on two jars that are each half the size).

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/modest_far-reaching_cost_contr.html

Cutting health-care costs is hard. And it needs to be distinguished from simply capping spending. When liberals say that single-payer will save a bazillion dollars, or conservatives point to Paul Ryan's plan and say that will save a bazillion dollars, they're talking about capping spending. Liberals do it on the provider side, saying that government will only pay so much for medical services people need, and the system will just have to adjust. Conservatives do it on the consumer side, saying that government will only give individuals so much for the coverage they need, and if that proves insufficient, then tough.

ezra certainly sounds like he's bought into the idea that single-payer or nationalized healthcare is mainly characterized by "rationing". which is a shame, because it makes me sort of not trust him about the other stuff.

really? i dont get that from the excerpt you quoted?

pretty sure klein has many times stated his preference for single payer - in the case of that post i think he was just referring to some of the sky high saving estimates one sees bandied abt from time to time to make a particular point

ackerman is great about nat'l security/defense, but sometimes he writes about 90s hardcore and i want to delete his blog from the internet.

― max, Wednesday, 10 March 2010 13:39 (11 minutes ago)

the fuck, man?? this is awesome. i'm not a hardcore dude at all, i'm just impressed. like, whenever the 3rd in command for policy under mccrystal lets go a press release with the words "strength of our institutions" in it, yup, here's a youtube of someone shouting INSTITUTIONAL STRENGTH!!!

klein and yglesias' taste in music is way way way worse

loool @ greenwald's cappuccino btw

ackerman needs to get off fire dog lake asap, place is an offense to humanity and good taste

and yes if theres a piece of advice i would give dork political bloggers its 'dont post abt music'

haha i think its embarrassment abt being a recovering NJ hardcore kid myself

its not that hes clueless, its just... dont talk about that shit man im trying to forget that i spent hours writing minor threat lyrics on my converse all-stars

aww

digby, talkingpointsmemo, atrios - they all make my skin fucking crawl these days, just so full of self-congratulatory, put-downy bullshit. i don't recall them always being this way, but maybe they were?

.........

greenwald is in a class of his own - he's beyond smug, every post is in some kind of righteous fury mode.

I'm not sure what you guys want – grace and class? Anytime you inveigh against hypocrisy, you risk looking smug. Deal with it.

When I find Greenwald's tone too shrill, I simply don't read him that day. On just about ever issue since 2005 he's been right, and blessedly devoid of hero and power worship.

greenwald is kinda funny in that hes generally right abt issues, but clueless regarding ~reality~ - hes 100% self-righteously pissed-off and his pieces are way too long - hes at his best when writing abt the law, but he prefers to bitch abt cable news dudes - almost never read him anymore

is greenwald gay? sullivan said he lives in brazil cos his partner is HIV positive, is that even true?

i feel like i'm asking if the popular girl got a nosejob or not...

"Reality" = not picking on cable news dudes.

Yes, Greenwald is gay and lives in Brazil.

u r fired as my post summarizer

lol i had no idea greenwald lived in brazil, does he ever talk abt that

u can almost hear the samba when u read his posts

hey greewald why dont u complain abt 'brazil' then, fuckin trader

Unless something's changed since 2006:

A recent and now-widespread claim is that I don't live in the United States, but in Brazil. I'm an expatriate. My book should be called "How Would an Expatriate Act"?

Other than a 9 month period after college when I lived in Europe, I've lived in the United States my entire life. My partner is Brazilian and is a citizen of Brazil.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/response-to-right-wing-personal.html

I'm reminded of some of the posts on the Tim Russert RIP thread. It's worth mentioning how many of these Washington correspondents have Bloody Marys at Cokie and Liz Cheney's on Sundays. If Digby and Greenwald have a theme around which their righteousness coheres, it's the grisly relationship between social intimacy and public policy, and how disastrous it's been for the US in the last nine years.

and it's worth something that Greenwald's columns are circulated around the White House by staffers.

just cause something is bad doesnt mean one should have an aneurysm in print over it, i personally relate to a more measured tone is all and would hate to see how glen greewald reacts when someone eats all his favorite cereal

What's measured – taking you to the back and sucking your dick?

http://www.rdogs.de/Blue2.jpg

the back of brazil

I'd just like to thank everybody who's ever spoken to me in a measured tone

no no of course greenwald's (almost) always right, and inbetween the righteous blowharding it's possible to learn lots of interesting stuff, but his problem is the same as with chomsky, that other guy who's always right - he appears to believe the world is divided into three groups: evil machinators who are intent on destroying the universe; imbeciles whose intellectual sloth makes them complicit; and them

just on a stylistic level--its difficult to read 10 800-wd screeds a week, even if i agree with all of them

he appears to believe the world is divided into three groups: evil machinators who are intent on destroying the universe; imbeciles whose intellectual sloth makes them complicit; and them

Well, again, what's "reality" – what the Rahm claque says it is? A scold isn't supposed to be nice. Since we have no reason to trust politicians, even the ones we voted for, why give them the benefit of the doubt (and, to be fair, in the first few months of Obama's term Greenwald said "wait and see" many times).

really dont think i should be forced to choose between greenwald and rahm re reality, theyre both so appealing

greenwald is harsh but fair to obama and the administration.

but hes also always 100% convinced of his correctness, which, regardless of whether or not its true, is grating--when he waded into the health-care debate defending jane hamsher he was like super irritating and not convincing

i like my bloggers to have a little bit of self-doubt which is why ackerman and klein and tnc are appealing. yglesias can have a little bit of the "im always right" feeling.

Just imagine them in a bar arguing about the tab.

kind of a funny side effect of greenwaldian tendencies on the left is that republicans are more powerful than democrats - it took like 6 years for the right to start hating bush and he was the biggest fuck up ever - now just to be clear im not at all telling greenwald et al to get in line and fight the war - i believe people should follow their hearts - but it is an interesting structural phenomenon in our political setup that the left is much more willing to eat its own

yeah don't think Greenwald fits into the non smug category

I'm sometimes glad for the banalities that TPM and Drudge turn into stories. Today's example: John Roberts' comments, which will dominate the cable talk shows this morning and get health care out of the pundits' heads for twenty-four hours.

btw if "smug" in this context means: "I know I'm right because here are the facts," how is that annoying?

wait, TNC blogs about WoW???????

woah i hadn't seen that--what a dildo

lol

btw if "smug" in this context means: "I know I'm right because here are the facts," how is that annoying?

― The Magnificent Colin Firth (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:13 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really man

but hes also always 100% convinced of his correctness, which, regardless of whether or not its true, is grating

Alfred, here you go

and w/o TPM's taste for banalities, gonzales would have been AG until january of this year.

xps

Dan: yes, he really does and now I am just trying to remember if he likes the Cure or not.

I'm not going to date Greenwald, so he can be as grating as he wants.

wait, TNC blogs about WoW???????

― we call him black Nev coz he's black & his names Neville (HI DERE), Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:13 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

less than he used to but it still comes up a lot

not that anyone cares but my dildo comment was directed toward John Roberts

i'm sure people care about where you direct your dildo (comment)

Need Roberts-dildo gif soon.

Ah, Google

Here’s an interesting factoid: it was illegal to buy and sell vibrators in Texas and Virginia until 2008. Texas made them legal right in time for Valentine’s Day though. I would in fact love to see John Roberts and Samuel Alito come down on vibrators. CNN Money win! Anyway, Mississippi, Alabama and (questionably) Virginia still have the same law (Haha Virginia, I screwed you!). My research indicates that these laws are in fact enforced, though not if you’re just traveling with a vibrator. The authorities in these states might go that extra mile to humiliate you though. My favorite comment about the former Texas vibrator law: “That aint jus stoopid. That is dawn rite retarded.”

hee hee

It's sort of wrong that I am eagerly awaiting the point when our elected officials start dueling each other, right

or rather, elected/appointed

dildos at ten paces.

iirc the one time he was mentioned on an election thread he got torn to bits but i like michael tomasky a lot. probably a pretty big overlap with ezra.

i get kind of a whiff of the village with tomasky as well - he has some good stuff sometimes but i hardly ever learn anything new. his pointless, paragraph-long posts on guardian.co.uk don't help i guess

i guess i'm wondering if these sorts of sites have changed tone in the last two or three years. i used to think of digby as being interesting and reasonable and well-considered.

used to love obsidian wings but hilzoy quit and it's not as good

Tracer, you're baffling. What's "interesting, reasonable, and well-considered to you"? Digby is twice as didactic as Greenwald but just as informative. Is the truth not "interesting" or "well-considered"?

From yesterday:

I don't want to write about Eric Massa but I guess I have to. I've met the guy a couple of times and admired his strong position on DADT and the wars in raq and Afghanistan. I assumed his opposition to health care reform (for not being liberal enough) was a way to thread the needle in his conservative district. I'm not sure how well that works, but I probably prefer it to having "no" voters use conservative talking points. I actually assumed he was one who might be persuaded to change his vote in the final days.

But that's all I know except for the fact that he was from a military family, as I am, served in the Navy for decades and seemed to be something of an eccentric iconoclast.

Now he's in the public eye having a very messy, very personal meltdown. In fact, his actions seem to me to be the work of a very troubled man who is in a lot of emotional pain. I certainly don't endorse his behavior if it's true. But I do have sympathy for someone who has to endure such a personal journey in front of the entire world, especially as he hasn't, as so many do, allowed his own confusion and self-loathing to deny others the equality they deserve.

So, I'll leave it to others to excoriate him for his erratic and self-destructive behavior. I just don't have the stomach for it. Howie Klein wrote a moving essay on this today that you might want to read. No excuses. But understanding.

Is that not reasonable and well-considered?

enh, i like reading greenwald for a little fire, tbh. i don't keep up with this nonsense nearly as much as you nerds, so if i do take the time to read a blogger, i may as well get my money's worth

haha leave it to greenwald to spend four paragraphs explaining why he's not writing about the thing he's, uh, actually writing about after all

the three sites i listed at the top are good examples of what i like, alfred - entertaining, informative, interesting - "the truth" is pointless if it's delivered with clubby eye-rolling, and possibly even less than pointless

(from a certain point of view the dailyhowler is chockablock with eyerolling, but it's not clubby, it's not tribal)

part of what pisses me off about greenwald is that he's such an unbelievably meticulous writer, capable of instantly vaporizing any subject he trains his gaze upon, but his blog is weirdly OCD - he will literally write about whatever the thing du jour is - i wish he'd focus more in a long-term sense

he used to write mostly abt constitutional law and it was awesome

haha leave it to greenwald to spend four paragraphs explaining why he's not writing about the thing he's, uh, actually writing about after all

that was Digby I quoted (my fault for not citing her).

TNC's posts about WoW and his totally evil Dallas Cowboys fandom are very endearing.

In the same entry, Greenwald observes that he has been openly gay for 20 years and that, while he has lived in the United States all his life, he divides his time between New York City and Brazil, the country of citizenship of his Brazilian male partner:

Revealingly, American law prevents the recognition of our relationship as a ground for him to live in the United States, while Brazilian law recognizes same-sex relationships for visa and immigration purposes. As a result, for the past year [2006], I have spent substantial time in Brazil while also having a residence in New York. Spending substantial time in another country does not make one an 'expatriate.' And even those American citizens who do give up American residence and live abroad retain full rights of citizenship, including voting rights. But I have not done so.

According to Ken Silverstein's interview with Greenwald published in Harper's Magazine on February 22, 2008, conducted by telephone while Greenwald was in Brazil, he lives there "much of the time."[18] On July 22, 2008, when Greenwald participated in a debate with Cass Sunstein, an adviser to then Senator Barack Obama, moderated by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, their exchange was also conducted by telephone from Brazil.[19]

In a May, 2008 interview, Greenwald explained that "even though Brazil has the largest Catholic population of any country in the world" and "was a military dictatorship until 1985": "I’m able to obtain from the Brazilian government a permanent visa because my Brazilian partner’s government recognizes our relationship for immigration purposes, while the government of my supposedly 'free,' liberty-loving country enacted a law explicitly barring such recognition."[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald

greenwald is the greatest -- he's a bit apocalyptic but i don't care

i guess i don't really see how daily hower is more/less smug than greenwald

kind of shrill and very self-righteous

I call dibs on screen name

greenwald tweet holla @ j sarge today

http://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/10369114520

marvelous!

damn sarge is making big friends on twitter recently

haha yeah -- this one was slightly less of an adrenaline rush than jose canseco's murder & torture threat

i bought this for $4 on amazon

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5169rbmeK4L._SL500_.jpg

it's nice to know & also lol that greenwald bolds and italicizes seemingly at random even in his books

Great, off-beat political blogs are my favorite time-waster.

The good folks at Balloon Juice aren't smug, but they're not wonky like Ezra Klein or Nate Silver. Entertaining, lots of links, good comments section (with occasional visits from a Ned R known round these parts).

Al Giordano (The Field, at The Narcosphere) is a community activist, a true socialist. He predicted the rise of Obama before just about anyone else. He's a big-picture guy, constantly returns to the need for left-wing politics to arise from the people. Very successful at tweaking Greenwald and FDL and other proponents of what he calls "poutrage". BooMan at Booman Tribune has a similar take from an American perspective.

Roy Edroso at alicublog is a peerless purveyor of mockery and nut-picking. He has a column at Village Voice but recently announced he's leaving. Writes like a dream. Might be too smug for you.

Andrew Sprung at Xpostfactoid is fairly new to me, Andrew Sullivan links to him from time to time. Gets few comments (low traffic?), but what I've read is very worthwhile. His post "The Making of a Great President" is the best morning-after-HCR summary I found, more intelligent analysis than gloating.

And of course, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a giant among men.

how exactly is TPM smug?

second the love for balloon juice and alicublog, pandagon and lawyersgunsandmoney are worth an occasional look.

(with occasional visits from a Ned R known round these parts)

Never heard of him. More seriously, thanks for the mention!

Thanks Plasmon!

ezra & grennwald are throwing down on twitter atm

ezraklein @ggreenwald I am honestly surprised to see you call "purposefully misleading" beyond the pale. You've read your blog, right?

ezraklein @ggreenwald "the painfully absurd propagandistic attempt by the administration and its most loyal cheerleaders" is still on your front page.
3 minutes ago via web in reply to ggreenwald

this is the gif i was looking for

http://i26.tinypic.com/2hxx734.jpg

what are squabbling about?

whether it's ok for ezra klein to call jane hamsher a liar, or something

glenn is bored, i think

he had been sending shots at ezra for the better part of the week -- this was kind of inevitable

great gif

yeah that one's gonna have to go into the rotation

does anyone read tom socca's blog at slate? he is killin it

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/default.aspx

todays:

That was a confusing not-quite-attack the world went through on Friday, wasn't it? Al Qaeda is trying to blow up UPS now? Or synagogues in Chicago? Ten years after they blew up the USS Cole, have we just not done anything about the Yemenis? Is this why there were so many cops on the subway?

And so for the reader trying to make sense of the latest round of Our War on Terror, or Terror's War on Us, the New York Times offered the following bit of incisive contextual analysis wrapping around Saturday's front page jump:

News of the terrorist plot came as Mr. Obama was barreling into the last four days of campaigning before midterm elections on Tuesday, and White House officials appeared determined to project the appearance of a commander in chief who was on top of the developments.

News of the terrorist plot came as the midterm elections were approaching. News of the terrorist plot also came as the Texas Rangers were trying to figure out how to rally from two games down in the World Series. It came as a cold front was driving down temperatures through the New York region, displacing unseasonably warm weather. Context!

The New York Times will not let a mere international bombing plot distract it from the all-important duty of speculating about how the news of the event positioned the political class with respect to political positioning. Officials appeared determined to project an appearance! OK, let's rewind that once more and play it back in slow motion, looking for a single verifiable, objectively existing fact:

officials appeared determined to project the appearance

Yes? No. This is the sound of a reporter (or an editor) flapping a finger up and down across his or her own lips and transcribing the blapping sound. As in its gloss on the Chilean mine rescue, the Times could not accept that the president of the country was somehow, if you will, as it were, simply busy running the country.

(Also, yes, some jets were scrambled, but the use of "commander in chief" here, apparently to mean "leader dealing with life-and-death matters," is a witlessly fascistophillic and grating cliche. The president is the president. The job includes commanding the armed forces. But a crisis does not transform the president from a civilian into a generalissimo. Cut it out.)

washingmonthly, digby, talkingpointsmemo, atrios - they all make my skin fucking crawl these days, just so full of self-congratulatory, put-downy bullshit.

check back on wednesday morning.

i have not beeing reading that blog but the post above sounds like it's the result of an algorithm designed to create articles i enjoy reading

GG on colbert tonight

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/02/in_which_i_advocate_for_union.html

lol what an idiot

http://lhote.blogspot.com/
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/

^

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/

i've come back around to Kevin Drum a bit

i take freddie de boer back, dude is smart but gooooddd is he resentful

also basically done with ioz at this point

zunguzungu is great though

i am fully down with freddie de boer but he seems like a whiny bitch tbh

i know it's a common occurrence for people on the left to be called that but i am sorry it's true

yeah he is just butthurt about stuff 24/7, like greenwald but even worse

it's funny i have been reading him for a while and thought he was an older cranky professor until he recently revealed his age.

i want to put naked capitalism on this list but its really smug. and also really poorly written. the stuff by guest writers is the best.

all people who write from a finance background, no matter what the opinion, have this cold raging asshole fury thing going on. every single one.

today in freddie deboer: 1200 unbelievably butthurt words about some mediocre joke on tumblr

i liked his long post on the "resentment machine"--not to say it couldn't use some qualifications, but honestly im a fan in general of jeremiads.

oh my GOD would it be possible for Freddie de boer to write just one thing that isn't about himself

Revealingly,

yeah i like that dude's blog but he doesn't hide his self-obsession very well.

i havent read the TNI piece this is referring to but i dont like TNI so good job freddie

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2012/03/oh-boy.html

this is now the thread where i document my love-hate relationship w/ freddie de boer

Whatever the case, it shouldn't surprise you to know that for most college graduates, these flirtations are temporary. The rewards that the grinding lifestyle of American "success" offers are just too tempting. I wonder again: how many of those protesting now will be paid in full members of the system they protest, in five years? In ten? Only time will tell. But the odds are high that many of them will slump into that life. It might please you to think of the hippie-to-yuppie movement as some sort of unique failing of the Boomers, but it is a recurring cycle.

there is no economic principle that ensures that well-paying white collar jobs will always come back simply because we live in a country called 'america'. there are some pretty good reasons - technological productivity gains and a global labor force - why today is different from the 70s.

I mean I agree w/ the general idea 'let's have some perspective w/r/t the misery of college-educated folx vs. rest of country' - but looking at the wage gap between college-educated non-college educated ignores the fact that jobs like firefighter now go to people w/ a college education. that doesn't make college a better investment for your average american, it just makes economoic opportunities w/o a degree increasingly bleak.

that doesn't make college a better investment for your average american, it just makes economoic opportunities w/o a degree increasingly bleak.

otm

it's 'a good investment' in the same way that someone who is seriously ill and without health insurance should 'invest in going to a doctor'.

yeah im not really interested in the content of any of this stuff so much as i am in the social positioning of TNI and FDB in the academic liberal blogosphere

this is one of my favorite politics blogs -- its not really "dem" though b/c the dude is british

http://potlatch.typepad.com/

I'm sympathetic w/ the 'lol tni' pov he is just approaching this from the wrong angle

freddie is infuriating as always but this is a fantastic list of bloggas

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-list.html

I'm assuming he means Daniel Larison, right?

greenwald is in a class of his own - he's beyond smug, every post is in some kind of righteous fury mode. i imagine him ordering a suboptimal cappucino: "That these so-called baristas can hand me this dishwater with smiles on their faces is simply astonishing. They have had every chance to make my coffee correctly, and at every turn have chosen not to. UPDATE: Several readers have pointed out that better coffee can be had two blocks away, at Venetia. These readers miss the point, which is not that good coffee may be had at some other establishment, but that this coffee, in this establishment is presented as good yet is clearly, to anyone who bothers paying even cursory attention, not."

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, March 10, 2010 1:33 PM (2 years ago)

i love GG but this is still one of my favorite ilx posts of all time.

haha

My personal hero.

i was legit surprised at that list when i saw it.

lol @ "cursory"

David Brooks. Just kidding, fuck that dude.

welp freddie is back to being impossible

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2012/10/critical-practice-doesnt-feel-good.html

larison has his moments but he really puts me to sleep a lot of the time. how many times can he quote some other guy calling romney a moderate and then spend four long paragraphs explaining why that's wrong?

gahhhhh

I bring this up in regards to Glenn Greenwald's thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty. Based on his Twitter feed, it seems he has caused a conflagration for daring to criticize the movie. The typical, and typically cheap, response is that he has no right to judge the movie without having seen it. Which would be true, were he commenting on its quality or its perspective. Instead Greenwald has a very basic point, one that is being roundly ignored: a film that has repeatedly and proudly been sold as "documentary" and "journalistic" contains a lie of profound importance. The movie, by all accounts, shows torture as being an indispensable part of the capture of bin Laden, an idea that has been roundly debunked and specifically denied by many people on the inside of the government. (Adam Serwer, with typical thoroughness and fairness, has the run-down.) To say that your movie is "a hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic," as the writer of the film did, when your movie depicts the use of torture as essential to captuing bin Laden is to tell a lie. And in a country of vitriolic anti-Muslim hatred, a dangerous lie. Whether you've seen the film or not.

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2012/12/bad-faith-and-zerodark-thirty.html

you disagree with that?

block quote otm

glenn greenwald as well

yknow freddie de boer is kind of insufferable

This post seems pretty sufferable though.

You can't say it's "true" that greenwald has no right to make aesthetic judgments about a film he hasn't seen and then turn around and say he's totally allowed to make political judgments about its content

he claims that "by all accounts" the movie shows torture as an indispensable tool and then later in the post refers to a piece -- by someone who, unlike serwer and greenwald, has seen the movie -- that argues the opposite

close reading HAS TO BE at the heart of criticizing (in a broad sense) the politics of a given text

i think that's true. i was grossed out by the trailer for this movie though, depicting as it does a targeted assassination as a "heroic" mission. greenwald should have watched the film first, but i have no problem believing that the film, like 24, glorifies torture. but he should have watched the film before condemning it for this.

i guess. i still <3 greenwald and h8 torture. but you made a good point and i probably shouldn't have 'leapt' to his defense that quickly.

weird stuff going on at lhote

freddie kind of getting owned imo, or maybe i find him so insufferable at this point that i cant be charitable

idk what you ever saw in that dude! just writes like some undergrad w/ a blog

live by the smug leftism, die by the smug leftism

haha i dont know either iatee

i feel like i discovered him when he was riffing on something i agreed with and i figured thats what it would be like forever now hes my #1 hateread

haha im the same as max. now when he pops up in my rss feed and i see a post that goes down past the bottom of my computer screen i just back away. can't do it.

You can't say it's "true" that greenwald has no right to make aesthetic judgments about a film he hasn't seen

He was making a journalistic judgment about a widely reported element of the narrative (in responswe to filmmakers' claims of "almost journalistic" intent; he's not a critic. I wish he had refrained until he'd seen the film (which he subsequently has), cuz the O-bot supermajority in film criticism has now boiled the case vs ZDT down to "GG didn't see the film."

i wonder if radical greenwald leftism requires the writer to be a total asshole or if it's just incidental and someone else could do a better job covering similar ideological ground

it's too bad GG has become the flashpoint for a debate on the incommensurability of aesthetics and politics--which I would want to see as necessary and productive for both--because his sledgehammer approach makes him an easy target to take down.

sorta the way being a Zionist is incidental to being a total asshole

oo, hot zinger there dr morbius!

ryan otm

that kenny piece you linked to on twitter is good

what is ryan's twitter?

^

would fav

@rawhit3

that's you, right? not some other texan basketball fan cinephile ryan

haha no i think there's only one of us

are there any other bloggers covering the exact issues GG is and doing a better job? serious q.

I've been reading him since 2006 and am bored with his style and approach. Charles Pierce is my guy these days; he writes so goddamn much though, at times two or three three-hundred word posts a day.

if you're worn out by GG, another guy who writes too much might not be the right trade

the GG posts that wear me out are the ones where he just complains about the stupidity of cable news -- i can watch the daily show for that.

yeah i stopped reading him regularly a while ago for that reason. he's obv still vital to the discussion on a lot of issues

Pierce is closer to James Wolcott's style, of which I never tire.

i like GG most when he surprises me -- the ZDT stuff is at least an interesting change of pace for him. he had a good post a while back on who the worst civil-liberties president was, too.

i sort of want him to weigh in on the gun control debate, has he yet?

He will when he learns the Obama administration armed schoolyard killers with drones.

freddie is finally getting interesting!

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2013/02/getting-epistolary.html

lol

what a Hero. finally someone unafraid of blackness

Freddie said...
I have a black acquaintance who deeply opposes all forms of race-based affirmative action, Q. When he says that affirmative action should be ended, what is my duty? What would your duty be in the same situation? What is our duty to the black people who feel the opposite way?

new low for freddie today

its not "dem," insofar as its a UK blog, but will davies' potlach is great http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/

ilx

lol

oh fuck you fdb

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/04/12/the-truth-is-good-enough-again/

has the needle swung back on non-smug dem politics sites?

it started years ago obvs (this was an early example) but the backlash against all the sites named by max in the first post in this thread (ezra, yglesias, nate silver, krugman) now feels in full force. are they victims of their own success, or is this some broader political drift? was the creation of vox as frankenstein clickbait wonkblog monster the turning point, churning out wikipedia-citing low-quality ezra & matt clones with daily Hilarious blunders? did these guys only seem like a breath of fresh air during the immediate aftermath of peak-smug era under GWB?

do ppl favour the left aggro-smug style of writers like sean mcelwee, adam johnson now? i personally hate their headlines & tweets, but they're still worth reading. freddie deboer isn't really a journo and doesn't seem to cover politics per se so much as twitter leftists and social justice on elite campuses, but i feel like we're all unified in hatred of him

or maybe this was all just the dem primary driving everyone crazy

i think of yglesias, ezra, silver, etc techno-liberal bloggers, as distinct from freddie deboer who i think of as more in jacobin, corey robin new [new?] left style - kinda where they are now is where a lot of these technolibs were before they all broke through -- mostly posting on private blogs, getting published here + there. i find them all pretty intolerable (nate silver is an exception - his crew i find are v good esp when they stick to what they're good at) but i prefer the technolibs to the neo-marxists. sometimes i read a jacobin article and i'm just like i cannot believe you are saying this, is this even for real or just an elaborate trolling?

counterpunch types the least tolerable of them all. intercept smug as fuck but does publish good stuff and has a broader / deeper interest than a lot of these US/West focused writers.

JACOBIN IS THE WORST

lol that tracer hand greenwald parody at the top is still straight fire 100%

interesting how "dem" in thread title now means "not republican" in the discussion

what would a Dem politics site burrow into, since they don't believe in anything?

dem is the title obv always was a loose term for the left from the get-go cf the greenwald discussion up-page and the fact that even moderate-lib writers like nate silver are not dnc apparatchiks but congratulations on getting the same post you've made over a thousand times over the last decade onto yet another thread big thumbs up dipshit

lol

move to a MOVE fire

come call me names IRL, boychick, you'll depart to campaign door-to-door for Jill Stein.

ezra klein's old wonkblog is still going at washingtonpost, and puts out interesting stuff! no star power, not too many of these mayfly 'explainers'

hey, they have a weekly Larry Summers op-ed, that's some starpower

i managed to not know that

i think the thing that has hurt the sites listed upthread a lot is being wrong on trump. being that wrong on something that important is going to hurt credibility hard.

i was wrong on trump, too so i guess i don't really mind that

idk like, last repub primary ever freakshow candidate had a couple weeks at the top of the polls before it reluctantly coalesced on romney. you would have seemed like such a fool predicting HERMAIN CAIN WILL WIN THIS. and it just seemed like trump was that again until he held his lead for so long it was obvious something was up

i was wrong on trump, too so i guess i don't really mind that

― de l'asshole (flopson)

everybody who wasn't a paranoid loon was wrong on trump, but for instance fivethirtyeight's schtick was based on their prognostications being based on EMPIRICAL DATA, so i think it hurts them more than it would your random "making shit up off the top of their head" prediction.

pretty much any leftist who writes harangues about liberals which appears to be an inexhaustible source of smugness online

crooked timber comments are so bad

corey robin is a buffoon: http://crookedtimber.org/2016/07/21/check-your-amnesia-dude-on-the-vox-generation-of-punditry/

He forgets to justify his comparison between presidential candidates bluffing the use of nuclear weapons, and the US Armed Forces historical posture towards nuclear weapons usage, with a presidential candidate threatening to renege on a treaty. If that comparison can be used without explanation you could use it for anything, anytime anyone points out that something in the modern world is frightening them.

Also since our current era hasn't led up to WW3 yet then it's silly to compare it to the era that led up to WW1
just ahistorical really, you poor kids

or like one comment points out, corey fundamentally misunderstands trump's critique. trump doesn't think the US is the wrong messenger for human rights bc of guantanamo bay and the NSA. he thinks the US is the wrong messenger bc we tolerate too much civil dissent and protesting. this is a severe failing as he ends up giving apologetics for a perspective that undermines robin's supposed essential principles.

been seriously creeped out/annoyed by the spectacle of certain "left" writers trying to look daring and insightful by trying to find ways to agree w/ donald trump, or praise him for saying things that, if taken out of context and stretched about, sound vaguely like things they might agree with

Yes, v much that. Also often same people trying to minimize concern about him by superficial comparison to other politicians and simply overlooking some of the worst things Trump has said.

Complacency -- so bold and iconoclastic.

most of the comments on that post are even stupider than the original post. i don't know why so many "radicals" are inclined to sneer at ppl who are quite rightly afraid of the possibility of someone as evil and empty-headed as donald trump becoming president, to the point where they're ready to find positive things lurking in trump's speeches (if you ignore all the racism and misogyny and lying), but i find it genuinely appalling and despicable, to the point where i doubt i'll ever take any of these writers seriously again

crooked timber comments are so bad

― Mordy, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 10:05 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

like what is robin even trying to accomplish by arguing that reagan in 1980 was just as bad as trump today? i hold no brief for reagan but reagan's cold war belligerence was not remotely in the same category as trump's most deranged proposals.

The only thing I agree with Donald Trump on is that is daughter is hot.

https://www.facebook.com/doug.henwood/posts/10153760830506475?pnref=story

one thing that gives me comfort is that if trump wins all these smug shitheads will suffer like the rest of us

The only thing I agree with Donald Trump on is that is daughter is hot.

― frogbs

like, sarah silverman hot or some lesser variety?

Henwood = awesome

Dan Savage, now there's a Clinton-cheerleading smug shithead

drudge sirens

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/08/18/thats-my-time/

Henwood = awesome

― The Hon. J. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Dr Morbius), Sunday, July 24, 2016 4:10 AM (3 weeks ago)

doug henwood is an idiot who actually tried to make "whitewater" a thing again in his stupid anti-hillary article from harper's a while back

wow

He's definitely not an idiot.

link? not that i don't trust ya

"wow"

I just always wanted to have guts and tell the truth, and I did my best at both. I can live with that.

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/stop-hillary-2/

gimme the page, dude, i read that 20 months ago, and life is short (esp mine)

y'know, don't. I absolutely don't give a shit, all real estate is a cesspool, fuck private property.

if you can bear to get through henwood's summary of what happened, he basically says that hillary clinton didn't do anything wrong, and then blames her for being "secretive" about it

And then there were the scandals, many of them Hillary’s. The most famous was Whitewater, a word it pains me to type. Democrats love to say that there was nothing to that scandal. While it was certainly not the diabolical conspiracy Republicans made it out to be during the fevered days of the Clinton impeachment, it was not nothing. ...

But the Clintons, of course, were also investors in McDougal’s schemes. The fact that they appear to have lost money on Whitewater, and were never convicted of any criminal behavior in connection with the scandal, hardly excuses this farcical round-robin of ethical conflicts. Yet Whitewater itself is of far less interest than how Hillary handled it: with lies, half-truths, and secrecy.

http://harpers.org/archive/2014/10/stop-hillary-2/7/

What an outrage, that cur Henwood.

You can hear the Clintons' presentational gears grinding like Meryl Streep's in midperformance, always.

Bill's a better actor than RoboStreep, give him that

I don't think "ethical conflicts" = "didn't do anything wrong"

I have next to no memory of the entire Whitewater affair! i have exit velocity, launch angle and other recent baseball metrics to store in this noggin, not to mention Robin Wood's critique of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as a queer text.

Bubba's hyperventilating at BLM was more like Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night

i read LGM every day but i could do without ever reading them on anything except current electoral politics and labor history ever again

case in point: erik loomis's occasional posts about a famous writer he's never read, but has opinions about:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/11/erik-visits-american-grave-part-360