Matt Taibbi

I'm not a big fan of the CIA, but

never a good start to a sentence

Maybe they can do one good thing, though, and get rid if the president who likes to open investigations into his opponents in the manner of dictators.

And open concentration camps along the border et al.

I’m hoping this exercise makes the entire country less trusting of executive power no matter who it is and more demanding of transparency.

I feel like it might have been relevant to mention that the whistleblower’s information appears to be an accurate description of flagrantly unethical/impeachable conduct which the Trump has essentially admitted to in public. But the important thing is clearly the whistleblower’s underlying motivations.

Two things can be true at the same time.

It is also possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons and those reasons are not germane to the outcome.

As a longstanding disbeliever of consequentialist ethics I feel obliged to argue that it is not possible to the right thing for the wrong reasons.

All the Michael Tracey retweeters who think the big story is really about how libs trust the CIA now because we’ve all caught Trump Derangement Syndrome can go shovel it in Mother Russia.

silby, Taibbi and his ilk are trying to make the point that by working for an American intelligence agency, the whistleblowers are automatically incapable of doing the right thing, by similar reasoning

Note this doesn’t apply to people who they like, such as Snowden

I knew we'd hear from the Network

Snowden? a freelancer, not a spook

fwiw I don't necessarily believe in the concept of a "right thing" either I'm just metaethics shitposting as usual

silby, I did not say that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons makes that action ethical by absolving the actor of their bad intentions, but the action can still be objectively the right thing to have done. I could cite some hypothetical correct actions done for unethical motives to make this clearer, but it shouldn't really be necessary, as most people could quickly imagine their own examples.

Snowden? a freelancer, not a spook

the badder they are, the morer I like em

Any day now it’s gonna be “9/11 was good actually”

spectacular logic, silby

liberals have always loved the CIA except for about a dozen years in the '70s and early '80s -- hell, they founded it.

i thought silby was criticizing tombot's defense of the nsa

was he? sorry I got two ballgames on

A pox on both yr houses obvi

as someone who thought obama's anti-whistleblower shit was the worst thing about his administration, i agree with a lot of where taibbi is coming from here. and tbh i still find him worth reading a lot of the time -- he's often wrong, but he's not a complete clown like tracey.

otoh, there are significant differences between the whistleblowers taibbi (rightly) defends and this story. for one thing, at least some of the cases he mentions involve leaking classified information. i don't think a trump phone call qualifies, or half the ppl bob woodward interviewed for his book would be in prison. (and yes, leaking classified info is sometimes the right thing to do, if it demonstrably serves the public interest -- i still think snowden is more or less a hero for what he did.)

and yeah, the column basically falls apart once he makes the jump from defending whistleblowers to "trump is being taken down by the deep state, folks!" based on...very little, other than something a random guy said on CNN and taibbi's own barely concealed belief that america actually kinda sorta deserves donald trump, and any attempt by mainstream politicians to take him down will just be "the elite" protecting their interests, nothing more.

Taibbi has devolved into a replacement level Glenn Greenwald parody account

Which is sad because I very much enjoyed him taking the piss out of Friedman & co on a near-weekly basis. Those were the days

any attempt by mainstream politicians to take him down will just be "the elite" protecting their interests

you just reminded me that Pelosi interrupted herself at a press conference last week to say "I love the Bushes."

“Sure Kissinger is bad, but this Ellsberg guy worked for the war-profiteering RAND corporation, so the important thing to remember and focus on is that l neither side is so pure!”

Snowden got shit for the audience he took his info to, with the guess that official channels would never care! And I don’t defend the guy across the board, but he wasn’t wrong. I mean, emphatically bad at not filing inter-office reports and rolling eyes at what most bureaucrats would see as normal bullshit

Really if he was a hero he’d have worked into promotions for an interminable time and then had his ethics twisted to the point where a real breach of ethics to report was a drone pissing on the wrong side of the road instead of a cross-governmental surveillance racket (boring)

yeah, idk, i think it was important for the american public to know they were being spied on. the creepy thing about that was no one was surprised--we all assumed that was happening anyway. i also think there was some misunderstanding about just what it was he uncovered. i remember an episode of the new girl where one of the characters doesn't want to use a smartphone because his data will be beamed "straight into snowden's pocket," as if snowden was the one spying on people.

I never understand ppl who sneer at Snowden

Yes, some secrets are necessary to governance, but Snowden revealed clear and unambiguous illegality on the part of the NSA that was taking place with zero Congressional oversight. In doing so he essentially chose an uncomfortable exile from his country of birth rather than stay silent and complicit in that illegality. I can't say that was anything but a courageous act that reflected a far higher regard for the US Constitution than those who ordered those criminal acts and sought to keep them a secret.

I wonder what % of the snarkers are at it cause on some level they know they'd have done jack in his position

he's not a complete clown like tracey.

Tracey is so bad that any engagement with he reflects negatively on anyone that even engages with him with any level of credulity. He's a genuine sinkhole

lol @ snowden should have just filed a report, good stuff

I’m sure the senior staff at the NSA would have really had a change of heart after being informed that the entire surveillance apparatus was illegal

being informed that the entire surveillance apparatus was illegal

Their apparatus was not illegal. Congress authorized it and funded it. But using that apparatus to conduct surveillance of US citizens within the USA was clearly and specifically prohibited by Congress. When Bush told NSA to do it anyway and not tell Congress, they all flouted the US Constitution and their oath to uphold it. Suck it.

"Suck it" being directed at Bush and his esteemed political appointees who directed this criminal shit.

how have we gotten this far into the revive without a fred post

Taibbi has become cloddish, not as dangerous as Greenwald appearing on Tucker Carlson.

This post and its comments are my favorite recent dismissals.

so does Tombot manage a team of Snowden-like contractors or nah

he's assassinated more Snowden wannabes than you can imagine

drowned em in a toilet for not being hard enough

hard to find good help around there I heard

Greenwald's been quiet on US politics for a while now which is A Good Thing

that LGM post....fretting over tone is fucking boring imo

I’m a little surprised alfred likes the hippie punchers at LGM so much. they’re ok but you can get similar analysis at any hippie-punching blog

whoops lol you get the point

Lemieux's a sharp analyst from the left with no patience for posturing. He and many of its posters are Warren supporters, but they're also excellent on labor/union history -- areas in which so-called hippies have no interest.

I don't know what "but" is doing there.

One of the topics the site's educated me about is labor's decline and its effect on the Democratic polity and what the party has to do to get it back. This ain't a topic in which Chait and Ezra Klein have much interst -- and, yeah, LGM punches them more often than "hippies."

I like (most of) the graves, the natsec posts by Farley, and Campos’ rants. RIP SEK. Some of Dnexon’s posts are really good too. Lemieux and Loomis can be really one-note, for sure. I wish I found more of interest in Nelson and Nussbaum’s posts. Dave Brockington popping in to bitch about Corbynists is thankfully infrequent.

I like Lemieux and Loomis too but dear god do they have the worst sports takes.

I like (most of) the graves,

Excellent one on Josephus Daniels today! And a couple days ago on Grover Cleveland's evil attorney general (a redundant phrase) Richard Olney.

labor/union history -- areas in which so-called hippies have no interest

I guess I am not a hippie then.

The effect of post-revolutionary USSR under Stalin, the show trials, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on the international labor movement was tragically bad, but the effect of the Cold War and McCarthyism on the USA labor movement was a steady movement from bad to worse. This doesn't even touch on the reactionary suppression of labor organizing in the USA, from before the Haymarket Massacre, up through WWI, then the Chehalis Massacre, right up up to 1934.

US labor history is one of massive beat downs followed by massive co-option. Sad.