I have some comments on this which I wanted to make when I read Greenwald's
post. For years, I have thought that the censorship of unpleasant words is a
mistake. Several years ago, we had a debate about the subject on this list.
I think that the word in question was, "retarded". For decades, it was a
perfectly respectable word, used to describe people with limited
intellectdual functioning. Then, it began also being used as an insult.
That was when it became a forbidden word. To me, that seems insane. Now,
apparently, it can't even be used ironically. So now, instead of using one
word to simply and easily describe a person with a specific disability, we
have to substitute a complicated phrase. I remember when people began
attempting to use complicated phrases in order to avoid using the word,
"blind". Somehow, that didn't stick, even though people do use blindness as
an insult as, "Even a blind person could see that!". And on Democracy Now,
each time they quote a racist statement or describe something racist that
the police say, they substitute, "the N word" for the actual word. It's like
if you actually pronounce the word, it means that you are demonstrating your
hatred for black people, even though you're just reporting something that
someone else said. And if I hear one more person talk about how college
students need safe spaces, I'll vomit. At the same time that our thoughts
are being controlled and our speeched censored, our society is becoming more
and more predatory. I heard two podcasts this morning, both describing
economic entrapment of everyday people and dozens of books about it are
appearing on BARD.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 3:08 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The War on Privacy
The War on Privacy
Five years ago, official abuses of secrecy were the scandal. Today, the
scandal is you
Matt Taibbi
Feb 8
My colleague Glenn Greenwald hit the nail on the head this weekend when he
wrote about "tattletale journalism," in which media reporters for the
largest companies spend their time attacking speech, instead of defending
it. The miserable trend just reached its apex when Taylor Lorenz - a dunce
of historic proportions unleashed on the world by the New York Times -
attended an invitation-only Clubhouse chat and not only reported that
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreesson used the word "retarded" in a
discussion about the GameStop uprising, but published the names and faces of
those who were guilty of being present and silent during the commission of
this heinous crime:
Lorenz was wrong on three counts. One, Andreesson never said the word. Two,
the person who did say the word was merely relaying that the Reddit users
betting on GameStop "call themselves the 'retard revolution.'" Lorenz was
confusing reporting on speech with actually speaking, the same error that's
led to crackdowns on videographers like Jon Farina and Ford Fischer,
punished for shooting raw footage of people saying and doing supposedly
objectionable things (a story mostly uncovered by these same media priests).
Thirdly, WTF???? Private utterance of the word "retarded" is news? As
Greenwald points out, this would be joke behavior coming from a middle
school hall monitor. Such deviance-hunts however are now a central concern
of media reporters like Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy of CNN, Ben Collins
and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC, and Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel, and
Lorenz at the Times. Somebody, somewhere, is saying or thinking a bad thing,
and this crew seeks the rot out, with the aim of publicly shaming those
individuals.
The subtext isn't hard to decipher. These people believe bad-think, left
unaddressed, results in Donald Trump being elected. Therefore, as Chen and
Roose put it in a chat last week, it's "problematic" to countenance
platforms that allow large numbers of people to assemble in non-monitored,
"shadow" social networks, where they can spread "misinformation" and wreak,
potentially, a "ton of havoc." Countless stories have been written on the
theme of what speech should be "allowed," as if they are the ones who should
be doing the allowing.
This is how we've traveled in just two and a half years from banning Alex
Jones to calling for crackdowns on all unmonitored or less-monitored spaces,
from podcasts to the aforementioned Clubhouse to encrypted platforms like
Signal and Telegram to Parler, even to Substack, which ludicrously is
beginning to come under fire as a purveyor of unapproved thought.
Let's stipulate, for a moment, that these people are right, that private
spaces breed fascism and bigotry, because as William Blake wrote, we should
"expect poison from standing water," making transparency the ultimate public
virtue. Let's agree that all private spaces must have their windows thrown
open, so that New York Times reporters can sit watching for transgressions.
I disagree with this creeptastic point of view, but let's admit it, for sake
of argument.
How do we square that belief with the attitude of these "reporters" toward
Wikileaks, or Edward Snowden, or the secret budgets of the intelligence
services, or our global network of secret prisons, or our regime of secret
National Security Letter subpoenas, or any of a dozen other areas where
official or corporate secrecy has expanded? While self-styled heroes of
anti-fascism at places like the New York Times have been outing the likes of
"Jules," "Fab," and "Chloe" for the crime of listening to the word "retard,"
the exercise of actual political power has more and more become a black box,
and nobody in these newsrooms seems to care.
These culture warriors are collectively making a clear statement: Personal
privacy is dangerous, official secrecy is not. They seek total transparency
when it comes to our personal beliefs and opinions, and oppose it for
governments or tech monopolies.
Roughly five years ago, when we first started to see the outlines of a new
union between ostensibly left-wing intellectuals with corporate-funded
neoliberal politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties, the
arrangement seemed to make little sense. At most, the decision by
politicians like Hillary Clinton to adopt the language of campus
intersectionality in campaign rhetoric seemed like a temporary cynical
gambit, a handy little bullshit-cloud for use in discrediting a populist
challenge in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign, whose army of "Bros"
were said to lack solutions to America's "real" problems:
Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton
We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges. We need solutions and
real plans for all of them. #DemDebate March 7th 2016
913 Retweets1,390 Likes
Years later, it's obvious the partnership was about more than denouncing
political opponents as racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, or (in the
case of Jeremy Corbyn) anti-Semites. The new #Resistance politics marries
aggressive interventionist foreign policy and secret government with a
strain of pseudo-leftist thinking that despises privacy of any kind, as a
hidey-hole for bigotry, sexual violence, and "sedition."
It's a perfect cover story for propagandizing the expansion of the
surveillance state. We now take it as a given that we're surrounded at all
times by white supremacy and patriarchal oppression, which curiously exists
everywhere but inside the CIA, NSA, FBI, the banking sector, etc. This
belief system has given us a press corps that's averted its eyes from
institutional secrecy, becoming instead the tattletale army Greenwald
describes, obsessed with the sins of private human interaction, a Junior
Anti-Sex League brought to life.
Not long ago, liberal America was mortified by the revelations first of
Wikileaks, then of Snowden. A Pew survey in 2015 showed that 40 percent of
the country was "somewhat" or "very" concerned that their private
communications had been violated. A third of Americans reported changing
their phone and Internet habits, and studies showed significant drops in
searches for terms like "al-Qaeda," "car bomb," "Taliban," "dirty bomb," and
even "pandemic," as people worried they would attract investigative
attention.
There was initially a rush of public support for Snowden, just as there had
been for Chelsea Manning and even Julian Assange after Wikileaks not only
disclosed war crimes in Iraq, but began leaking horrifying information about
the behaviors of some of the world's biggest companies - the dumping of
toxic waste by Trafigura, broad tax avoidance by Barclays and others,
massive fraud in the Icelandic banking sector during the financial collapse,
etc. The people who brought the Snowden story to light, i.e. Greenwald and
documentarian Laura Poitras, were granted the highest societal honors, with
a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar. We even for a time saw momentum behind
bipartisan efforts to defund the national information police at the NSA.
What a difference a few years makes! In the wake of Trump's election, the
Podesta leak, the Russian interference story, Assange's never-adjudicated
sexual assault case, and other headlines, public sentiment reversed.
Suddenly leakers are villains, and even genuine documents full of true
information are regularly christened "misinformation," if they have the
wrong political impact.
Civil liberties are now widely understood to be a canard, protecting racists
and disinformation agents, and high priests of journalism, like Columbia
Journalism School Dean Steve Coll, are clear that free speech has been
"weaponized," especially in the form of information that passes between
individuals without the benefit of the media's contextualizing efforts. As
Greenwald notes, Coll went on TV to fret that "our facts, our principles,
our scientific method" cannot compete with Facebook's unacceptably dangerous
mission to "connect everybody in the world."
Both Snowden and Assange are now denounced as foreign (and probably Russian)
agents, and efforts to let us know what might be going on under the hood of
governments, banks, and political parties are decried as foreign
interference, designed to destablize the country. The Intercept, founded to
publicize the Snowden material and challenge officialdom, is often seen on
the front lines in the campaign against free speech, and it's also now
forced out both Poitras and Greenwald, who's regularly pilloried by
mainstream commentators as a Trump-lover, misogynist, and agent of Vladimir
Putin.
We've seen something like this pattern before. Seymour Hersh won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for exposing war crimes at the Vietnamese hamlet of
My Lai. Four years later, when he broke arguably a bigger story about a
"massive, illegal CIA domestic intelligence operation," the reaction of many
colleagues was to say he'd overreached. The Columbia Journalism Review
printed a piece by Senator J. William Fullbright saying, "I have come to
feel of late that these are not the kind of truths we most need now."
Americans, said Fulbright, needed "stability and confidence" after the Nixon
years, and the media needed to exercise "voluntary restraint." Collectively,
the press decided not to pick up that story.
Stories about the expansion of official secrecy during the Trump years
similarly did not interest mainstream news organizations much. We stopped
worrying about the illegal use of counterintelligence evidence in domestic
criminal cases, were uninterested in government assertions that American
citizens do not have the right to know if they've been targeted for "lethal
action" (I was one of just two reporters in the courtroom for a related
lawsuit, in which the plaintiff was not even entitled to know what federal
agency the government's lawyer represented), and magically lost our
animosity for Trump Attorney General William Barr, when his Justice
Department refused to allow Twitter or any other company to reveal how many
secret FISA orders they'd received.
Instead, our fears are more usefully directed now, toward other members of
the general public. We've been trained to think of once cherished private
spaces as breeding-grounds for bigotry and incitement. Marriage is a haven
for sexual violence. Parents are transphobes. "Relatives" are biological
trivia, as exemplified by the story of the Massachusetts teen who turned in
her parents for attending the Capitol riot, triggering an outpouring of
affection from Tweeters desperate to step into the role of her "real"
family.
Rights to assembly are suspect, because open doors invite malefactors in, as
Jimmy Kimmel noted recently when he suggested (without any evidence) that
"Russian disruptors" were among those betting up GameStop. We can't even
permit certain individuals or groups to continue communicating just because
they have large, enthusiastic audiences willing to support such
relationships, as those free assemblies might lack the aristocratic
refinement to ensure adherence to what Coll calls "our principles."
Thus this new generation of media cops exults in the firing of people like
New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, campaigns to get Spotify to renounce
the likes of Joe Rogan, and begs corporate daddies at Comcast and Charter
Spectrum to pull commercial competitors like Fox off the airwaves. The press
is supposed to challenge power, but the current iteration has decided
instead to be a most aggressive agent of it. And they're just getting
started.