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My response was arbitrary.
People have been denigrating NPR here for a minute and it needed some pushback.
Also, not really an 
/ 
comparison.
Some of you should put together a news broadcast.
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Hidden Brain is a treasure.
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for ref onlY
Elon changed NPR to being listed as “Government Funded” even though less than 1% of its budget comes from the federal government. I guess it is a step up from state sponsored.
So will Tesla be similarly labeled? I am guessing no
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https://twitter.com/ScottNover/status/1645516967221116929
This guy somehow makes the guys from Succession seem like grounded witty types.
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Back in the day there was a guy actually named Harold Balls in our company directory. I feel like that would be funnier.
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Richard Boehner led the team that acquired my little company which had been a business accelerator within a big company. New company sued the old company afterwards and Richard was fired and referred to as “Dick Boner”.
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Elon has nobody he can trust around him to tell him the truth.
Well, not anymore
I once worked simultaneously with a Richard Wood and a Richard Steel.
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I’ll just do one round of replies to limit the derail.
Well it was this bit:
I think Greenwald has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40,000 subscribers. What you’re saying is that you think it is extremely unlikely that there are really 40,000 people on the planet willing to pay 5 bucks a month to read Greenwald’s ravings - even though there are many more than that number buying Jordan Peterson books, or subscribed to flat-Earth discussion groups for that matter - and that instead the likely explanation is that Russia is paying him, except that the method they are choosing to do it is to get 40,000 different, mostly American credit cards and pay Substack subscriptions with them. If you can’t see what is implausible about this, I can’t help you.
Apply Occam’s Razor. The problem with the theory is that the entirety of what it “explains” is stuff that is very obviously what the various actors would do anyway (Russia wanting Trump elected, corruption from Trump, beliefs like “other countries are ripping America off, we’re getting a Terrible Deal” which is a ubiquitous feature of Trumpism in general). And that when confronted with the fact that there is a whole universe more stuff which Trump could obviously have helped with and didn’t, proponents just shrug and handwave this away.
Yeah. The Trump campaign was staffed by criminals and financed by Russia because they wanted him to win. Half of Russiagate is just conflation of this idea with the idea that Trump was actually controlled by Putin. The guys you mentioned got jettisoned by Trump the second they became inconvenient. Why is Russia not just another of the zillion Trump hangers-on who thought they were going to get something out of it and almost universally didn’t?
Really? Like that story was a classic example of Russiagate being bullshit.
Then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien said Trump himself had not been briefed on the matter because the intelligence reports “have not been verified.” U.S. military commanders at the time also said the raw intelligence did not lead them to change their force protection posture in Afghanistan… Defense officials and military commanders repeatedly said that the reports of bounties had not been corroborated by defense intelligence agencies and that they were not convinced the reports were credible. They also said they didn’t believe any bounties resulted in U.S. military deaths.
Maybe have a think about where this story came from? It’s pretty obvious that much of the senior intelligence community (correctly) considered Trump to be a national security risk. How much of the “pattern” you’re talking about was selectively-leaked dubious information designed to weaponize the Putin issue against Trump? With the entire media apparatus hell-bent on getting to the bottom of this story and the intelligence community leaking like a sieve, how come when you search your memory for Trump kowtowing to Putin, what you come up with is bogus stories? Again, compare this invented water-carrying for Putin with the speech about the very real Khashoggi killing. The pattern is Trump kowtowing to dictators in general, not Putin in particular.
In general I think it’s very naive to look at the US intelligence community as a neutral player in this affair instead of an actor with an interest in shaping public opinion.
I think the experience of going from a liberal media darling to an outcast broke his brain and he’s become a little Greenwald-esque in the way all roads lead back to more reporting on the malfeasance of the liberal media. Like in the Twitter Files he was mixing actually totally insane opinion-manipulation (Hamilton 68) with stuff like the discussions over the Hunter laptop, which read to me like very reasonable efforts to navigate a thorny issue in good faith. But Taibbi presented them both as nefarious scheming. I think he’s driven to do this by his own bitterness at the way he was treated over Russiagate, which is understandable but also doesn’t make for clear-eyed reporting. The American media has always sucked, it’s a fact of life. I also think there’s an element of Twitter Brain in that he is making the common mistake of thinking Twitter discourse is representative of public opinion broadly.
How do you know Greenwald still has 40k subscribers? This says 20-40k but it’s 2 years old. Also Glenn is the sole source of these numbers, right?
Glenn says in that article that he only puts 10% of his stuff behind the paywall. So it’s not just 40k (assuming) who want to read his stuff, it’s 40k who basically want to support him, more like a patreon.
And who says it has to be mostly American credit cards? Is anyone checking to make sure half of them aren’t coming from Russia?
And sure ok 95% is probably unrealistic. It’s not like I was saying that in dead seriousness.
But I still think Substack offers an interesting vector for Russia, or the Saudis, or whoever, to launder influence payments. And they could do it without ever explicitly making a deal with the person they want to influence, which lets that person maintain plausible deniability, even though they may have an idea of what’s going on.
Weirdly, Greenwald doesn’t show up at all on the Substack Politics leaderboard: Saved | Substack Maybe he asked to be removed? He couldn’t be in any other category.
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That’s “indefensible?” You think the Hunter Biden laptop suppression story is not as newsworthy as the insane and blockbuster Hamilton 68 story? I agree that Hamilton 68 is a much better story but exposing the deep relationship between US government agencies, political campaigns, and social media is also a legitimate story. You not being interested in that story doesn’t make Taibbi illegitimate.
The Hunter Biden story writ large (5,000 former intelligence officials say probably a Russian op!) is not interchangeable with the stuff in the Twitter files. I did not see any evidence of inappropriate covering up of the laptop story from Twitter.
Of course I don’t object to discussion of how Twitter handled the laptop story and their relation to the FBI etc, but when I read through the thread about the laptop story, what I saw was honest discussion about what their policy should be, interspersed with shit like this:
“They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.
Oh, cool. So we get screenshots of emails between Twitter execs which looks to me like totally fair discussion, but then anonymous interjections from “some guy” about how #actually everyone thought this was bullshit. This is supposed to be a document expose, but the way it is characterised relies on an anonymous source who is not documented. I saw way too much of this sort of thing from Taibbi during Twitter Files and it struck me as just being what he wanted to believe about what had happened.
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This hits the nail on the head for me as why I think Tabbibi oversold most of the Twitter files. He had full access to Twitter’s documents which should have told pretty much the whole story as to what Twitter did and all the internal and external discussions for why they did it - yet to juice his stories, he goes to anonymous sources (who likely were not even been involved in the incident - note that he only describes them as former employee(s) - if it were someone involved in the issue, I presume he would have noted that) who just offer unsubstantiated opinion.
Yeah and for the Hamilton 68 thing he does have Twitter higher-ups being like “uhhhh this thing seems like complete bullshit do you think we should tell people?”.