The cynical gullibility of Greenwaldism

This is a brilliant piece about Putin’s western apologists, as his unprovoked imperialist war founders:

But how about the people who buy it, repeat it, and create their own variations on its themes? What could possibly account for all these contradictory and absurd positions, which have been uttered at different times by the same people? All these sentiments are all the product of a single proposition: the Western democracies are always wrong, both morally and practically. When the West struggles and fails, it’s because of its decadence and senility, a sign of its imminent collapse, when it prevails, it’s because of its dastardly wiles and the limitlessness of its ill-gotten resources. Russia’s appeal in the West, which crosses the traditional boundaries of right and left, is irresistible for those who believe the worst crime imaginable is Western hypocrisy. Since this hypocrisy is the only unforgivable sin, Russia’s crude and cynical exercise of power, it’s barely plausible justifications for its actions, its overt gangsterism at home and abroad, is seen as a virtue.

[…]

The cynical pose, which flatters itself on being always undeceived, is in practice highly gullible and distinguishable from naivety only in the sour churlishness of its affect. These attitudes should be expected in the nether regions of the press and intelligentsia, where people make their livings writing semi-pornographic conspiracy literature and closely identify with the mob. But these stances have infected the broader intellectual climate as well. The whole pamphlet literature of the demi-monde provides a new language that sounds provocative and fresh compared to the stale banalities of bien-pensant humanitarian liberalism. It is tempting material for those who treat both life and politics as an irresponsible flight from one pose to another. Even among the putatively more serious, there’s just the simple need to find some take that appears oppositional and critical. The bohemian provocateur can at least always just disown every past statement as a lark, not something to be taken entirely seriously, but the academic has to puff themselves up and insist on their actual correctness in the face of refuting facts.

The same mindset that leads you to advance a bunch of mutually contradictory and individually idiotic defenses of Vladimir Putin can lead you to argue in public that a bunch of ultra-reactionary Patrick Bateman clones funded by Peter Thiel are the real hope for progressive politics in the U.S. But get the right audience with Thiel’s money and you can afford to constantly be made to look ridiculous.