non-smug dem politics sites

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