dagblog - Comments for "How Glenn Greenwald Became Glenn Greenwald"

This is why I don't like

ocean-kat — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 06:55:53 +0000

This is why I don't like driftglass. I can get a good laugh at an insult and when driftglass gets on a roll he tears people apart. He's a great writer and absolutely brilliant at it. But that's all he does and it got old fast. There's no analysis. I never learn anything. Hitchens can be very insulting and his insulting quips are very clever and funny. Occasionally he can go over board but most of his talks are really good arguments to support his views. Even Buckley got annoyed at times and could lash out but the vast majority of the time he was making arguments to defend his views. Sam Harris never loses his cool. He always tries to respond to the arguments others make, never any obfuscation or avoidance, with good arguments of his own. Agree or disagree, I want mostly good analysis and good arguments on what ever topic we're discussing. That's what I try to do. I can get annoyed and insult but I'd like to think that most of my comment is a good argument or analysis despite the occasional insult.

5 years later China has

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 05:17:21 +0000

In reply to I'm less talking about

5 years later China has facial recognition on everyone (w a million detained Uighurs?) and Indians are doing identity implants. For some reason we can't do police video, but for citizens, sure...

P.S. Compare real

artappraiser — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 05:06:20 +0000

In reply to They are both lawyers. It's

P.S. Compare real intellectuals who were not lawyers, like say William F. Buckley on the right and Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the left. Or really, any of the historians or even professional intel people that appear as commentators on cable tv news. Yes, they all have their slant but basically they don't do lawyer style advocacy, they do analysis and discuss analysis and are open to input. The lawyers nearly all just always stand out as practicing advocacy, unless they are asked to analyze the legal work of another and like to do that sort of thing, it's only then they seem to take the advocacy cap off.

Edit to add: it is interesting that the early blogosphere was very much along the advocacy model, where a bunch of fans would follow the spin of some guy or gal very good at spinning their preferred point of view. Everyone who wanted to got their 15 minutes of spinmeister fame and often loved to slag insults at the "jerk" on the other side of the spectrum and the peanut gallery would cheer them on. Frat boys style, i.e.., Drezner is a bleeping jerk pissant., Palast blows smoke out his ass, Drum is a idiot, Billmon is a genius.... Greenwald was right there in those days, was part of that, hasn't changed that much.

They are both lawyers. It's

artappraiser — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 04:27:36 +0000

In reply to Does the whole world hate

They are both lawyers. It's just the ultimate usage of the adversarial/advocate system they are trained in. For the system to work, the truth is supposed to be somewhere inbetween the two narratives, both of which are spin. But instead, and unfortunately, mho, outside a jury room with a judge instructing them, most people make that a horse race and pick either Clarence Darrow or William Jennings Bryan as their favorite to root for, bet on and support.

The British press basically follows the adversarial system, and therefore so did we until the mid 20th century, with a tradition of preaching and spinning according to political ideology and rooting for one side's spin or the other. Then we tried to do this new thing called professionalism journalism, where the journalists act as jury rather than advocate pundits. That lasted until Ted Turner left cable TV news. Ratings showed people seem to want their pundits and their spin and their wrestling match as much as they claimed they liked Walter Cronkite or the Beeb or NPR.

And truth be told, we are all complicit, as we all like to rate political debates as to "won" or "lost". The insulting and name calling just amps up the game.

After reading this, it confirms for me why Greenwald is extra irritating. Seems like it's not really his base nature, he has to amp up his nervous system to be the vicious debater with passionate belief, with the perfect curt dismissals of the other guy. You can see the stress, this is why he is extra disturbing, and he takes a long time to unwind from doing it and has difficulty shutting it off. I.E. has to wean himself off twitter.

Does the whole world hate

ocean-kat — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 02:47:19 +0000

In reply to I don't know, to stick to

Doesn't it depend on what your principles are? Does the whole world hate Greenwald because of his principles and his persistence in sticking to them or because he's a nasty prick who constantly insults people? Is it his principles that piss off people he debates or that he's willing to misquote, quote out of context, and out right lie about his opponent because winning seems to be his primary goal? It's hard to separate them. it seems to me winning at any cost is his highest principle and degrading those he debates is a close second. So I suppose people do hate him for his principles but sticking to them doesn't seem like a noble stance to me.

eta: I've been thinking about this recently in regards to Ben Shapiro who portrays himself as an intellectual and a rationalist. Greenwald and Shapiro while as far apart in political and cultural views are essentially the same in manner. After watching a dozen of so Shapiro videos I noted he spends a lot of time insulting liberals and those insults are what gets him the most applause. Do people like him because of the intellectual rigor of his arguments or because he's sticking it to the left? Do people on the left hate him because he destroys their positions with rationality and his superior intellect, as he claims, or because he's constantly insulting them?

I don't know, to stick to

Aaron Carine — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 01:39:59 +0000

In reply to This from the article

I don't know, to stick to your principles even if the whole world hates you for it sounds like a noble stance to me.

"If there was real NSA

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 17:32:50 +0000

In reply to Congress should set clear

"If there was real NSA malfeasance, Congress would jump into action and investigate the administration from top to bottom." - sure, like they did after the Wall Street meltdown and the mortgage theft "robosigning" crisis and the rigging of the LIBOR rates and....

Congress should set clear

NCD — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 16:30:16 +0000

In reply to I'm less talking about

Congress should set clear reasonable rules for the NSA.

And Congress should re-do with precision the law about tax free 'social welfare' tax eligibility.

Big corporations write the laws for their bought and owned shills in Congress, and big corporations don't give a crap about the NSA or reducing chicanery at election time.

So the fat cat lobbyists aren't going to spend an iota of time or money pushing Congress to do anything on this. The people would have to do it.

The American voter. They don't trust government, so they let the fat cats that do trust it own it. They vote in the GOP who pledge to make government even less responsive to anyone but the rich.

US voters, too dumb to not elect pol's backed by big money and big BS. America did, of course, re-elect George W. Bush, Republican liar and War President.

In the meantime, there are not indictments coming down at light speed from metadata. If there was real NSA malfeasance, Congress would jump into action and investigate the administration from top to bottom. In the meantime there are a hundred other issues more important to the health, welfare, and future of the people in this country than a bunch of hard drives drown in terabytes of data in Utah.

I'm less talking about

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 12:15:58 +0000

In reply to Seriously this time, they

I'm less talking about workers tracking than I am about technology tracking and spitting out info and indictments and apprehension orders at light speed. Workers are deathly slow compared to a speech-to-text algorithm searching for a set of dangerous keywords in different languages and then triggering a content analysis to see if the speech rises above a certain level of threat.

In terms of network speeds, disk speeds, cloud computing, more power-efficient processors, the shift to GPU & co-processor, improved analytics, etc., it's just a matter of (short) time. Below is the push to exascale by end of decade. That's an exponential scale on the left, and as long as we exclude video and use character recognition for most images and docs, most people's yearly useful digital trails can probably be stuffed in 100Gigabytes max. Maybe 10 Gigabytes if it's just compressed location data, emails, blog posts, and digitized voice data.

As for storage, the recent breakthroughs in 3D chips and HAMR storage (the latter better for write once, read many - like someone's history - means it's likely there can be a 60Terabyte disk in 3 years which would cover say 6000 people, so say 60,000 disks to handle everyone in the US if 100GB/person - 6000 disks if you low-ball with 10GB/person. That's getting few enough to put in a few racks managed by some fast search processor with next generation I/O tech. The newer SSD drivers are much much faster for read-write, but still too expensive for such a scaled application. Maybe by year 2020?

From the last graph (all of these from The Register) you can see improvements in transfer time of data around the world just from one vendor's solution.

These are just some of the technologies pulling together to make what we've got written in this legislation (and the absurd ways the executive branch is interpreting it - even Sensebrenner is outraged, ironically or sadly) very scary indeed much faster than many people would assume. (no, your home computer isn't improving that quickly)

I'm still waiting for the sewage monitors that will tell who's home when and whether they're awake (though the thermal pattern you give off from your house is technically not protected either, so may be a simpler method to differentiate adults from kids and maybe use different volume of methane emissions to tell who's who in Beaver's house. By the way, all that falls under machine-2-machine or smarthomes, the technology that's been supposed to make us all happier in our residential nirvana, but like many a tech, can and likely will be used against us. Actually, all of this makes the mistake of assuming the NSA doesn't have early releases of all this tech paying above-commodity prices, so that this could be their actual capability now. (they had optical disks long before CDs became commoditized). N-Joy

[oops - from 2 years ago, IBM was already doing something like this, but the scale I'm talking about is much more capacity for fewer devices and less energy consumption:

A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM’s Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte “drive”—that’s 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

A 120 petabyte drive could hold 24 billion typical five-megabyte MP3 files or comfortably swallow 60 copies of the biggest backup of the Web, the 150 billion pages that make up the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine.

Seriously this time, they

ocean-kat — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 08:44:23 +0000

In reply to Oh shit, you got me - I read

Seriously this time, they can't track everybody. They can and they do collect information about everybody. They have their programs to extract information from a data base that includes everybody. But they can't track everybody. There's just not enough workers to track everybody. The programs are used to chose the perhaps 1% or maybe only .1% they will track.

So who is going to be in that .1%? Some will probably be terrorists. Historically though, not just 50 or 100 years ago but even in the last decade, who did they track? Who did they chose to take a closer look at? Often its been those who stir things up and challenge the status quo. Its been the environmentalist groups, the civil rights groups, the antiwar and peace groups. See what they have in common? They're all progressives working for change.