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Edward Snowden and the Death of Nuance
Trailrunner7 writes "As the noise and drama surrounding the NSA surveillance leaks and its central character, Edward Snowden, have continued to grow in the last few months, many people and organizations involved in the story have taken great pains to line up on either side of the traitor/hero line regarding Snowden's actions. While the story has continued to evolve and become increasingly complex, the opinions and rhetoric on either side has only grown more strident and inflexible, leaving no room for nuanced opinions or the possibility that Snowden perhaps is neither a traitor nor a hero but something else entirely."
How have people not noticed that we live in a society where EVERYTHING is a false dilemma. EVERY debate we have politically is a false choice.
The biggest one is this constant claptrap of socialism vs. capitalism. If you think that we should have a national health system immediately you have a backwards yokel yelling about socialism. The U.S. isn't pure capitalistic and never has.
Every debate is derailed because there is someone that can't think in a shade of gray. If you want to do something that a business doesn't like then you are anti-business. Conversely if you want to help a business then you're a capitalistic pig.
We really HAVE to get past this if our society is going to move forward. The answers are almost never at the ends of the spectrum.
I can't say I've seen a non-editorial account in the Guardian or the Washington post that paints Snowden as a hero. Certainly not to the same extent that the NSA and GCHQ paint the very acknowledement of the documents' existence as treason. One side is stating cold, dry, unpleasant facts, while the other is engaged in a bunch of red-faced howling about traitors and national security.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Not true, and not really relevant...
Any traitor is seen from the point of view of the "victim" if the "victim" ends up winning....
A "traitor" is somebody who breaks the trust of whomever has trusted him(or her) in order to give power to "another" entity...
But s/he can do this for gain (bad traitor) or "the greater good as s/he sees it" (good traitor, if his part wins ...)
And a "good traitor" might "go public" or not depending on the situation...
I doubt very much that ES wanted to help any of the "currently declared enemies of the US".... ... probably because he absolutely knows that ES is not a traitor...
So if General Alexanders would accuse him of being a "misguided useful idiot" he might have a point, accusing him of being a "traitor" is just a way of labeling him and doing character assassination
This still does not necessarily makes him an hero, .... or not ...
Edward Snowden is not "central" to this debate (if you can call it that). The illegal acts of the NSA are central to the debate - Snowden is just a messenger. Only propaganda spin-meisters want to make the debate about "characters", mainly because it is completely irrelevant. No thanks for trying, Trailrunner7.
Yes and no. Maybe the notion of hero/traitor is just a social construct based on some sort of nationalistic fantasy into which we are indoctrinated from a young age. People's behavior and motivations tend to be a lot more complicated, but we want to be able to comfortably categorize a cultural figure into one role or the other.
I get this every time I hear someone refer to anyone who served in the military as a "hero". Now, I know guys who served in the military because the choice was either that or jail and they did the absolute minimum, during peacetime, and got an honorable discharge by the skin of his teeth. But a radio talk show host would invariably call him a "hero" and say he's "making sacrifices to protect the rest of us", when in fact the guy was nothing but self-serving and spent his entire enlistment period getting drunk in base towns either stateside or in Seoul.
And of course, if someone is a member of the opposing political persuasion, they will invariably be referred to as a traitor.
I think it has something to do with our desire to see clear lines in life. If our viewpoints are challenged, even political viewpoints, our amygdala sends messages to the brain that our very life is in danger. This, of course, leads to some very unpleasant holiday dinners with relatives.
I think a great deal of this is by design. A divided society is one that's a lot easier to manage during crisis, and I think the people who rule our society prefer it that way. This great "divided nation" stuff tends to ignore that the agenda of people at the time stays the same no matter who is in power, while the rest of us are fighting over trivialities, as if our society was nothing but Packers vs Bears.
Every bit of our news media is now party to promoting this "us vs them" mentality. And make no mistake, the corporations running those media are led by people who would deem themselves our rulers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The article to which this piece points is an opinion piece. The author points out that Snowden's "latest revelations" may compromise current field operations and/or operatives.
The central problem with that claim is that SNOWDEN HAS MADE NO NEW REVELATIONS. *All* of the revelations from "Snowden" are actually revelations made by one or more of the journalists to whom Snowden gave copies of his stolen documents. All of them. Snowden himself has refused to reveal ANYTHING that THEY have not already published, on the grounds that he considers himself to be unqualified to properly strike the balance between preserving national security and revealing information that is clearly in the public interest. Instead, he has left it ENTIRELY up to the journalists to whom he gave the information to make those decisions.
But don't take my word for it. Listen to the man himself.
Check out my novel.
Ridiculous. Nuance and compromise are just fine. The problem here is extremism.
Organisations like the NSA and their supporters are extremists. It is extremist to suggest that every phone call, email, web page connection and Facebook Like should be monitored and recorded by a security agency. Extremist.
A reasonable person would suggest some communications traffic me monitored. A hardliner would demand that more traffic be monitored. But only an extremist would call for absolutely all traffic to be monitored. I'm not sure what you would call someone who actually goes about doing so.
We're supposed to put aside the dystopian scale of NSA surveillance, and sit down to debate "both sides" of this? There is no "both sides" here. We have a one group of dangerous megalomaniacs who want to monitor all communications traffic on planet earth and -- the rest of us.
Naunce is fine. What the NSA is doing is wrong; wrong enough to blow all nuances right out of the water. You may as well asked people to be nuanced about a man building a hydrogen-bomb in his shed.
May the Maths Be with you!
I disagree. A large part of the debate is about Snowden's conduct;
Only when "propaganda spin-meisters" are crowing away to all who will still listen. It is not a debate when discourse limited and narrowed to concentrate on the messenger rather than the much more important message. It is a well known propaganda technique for deflecting and distracting from the real issue at hand - i.e. the illegal acts of the NSA and the incompetence/malice of the politicians who give them free reign.
I'll just point out that Snowden did NOT damage the U.S. reputation in any way. Getting caught for your actions, getting caught committing a crime, the loss of reputation is not due to the one who catches but for the one committing the actions.
The behavior of the US damaged it's reputation.
Be careful here. We must distinguish the difference between "extreme" and "principled."
Snowden's initial leak showed violations of the law and the constitution. If that was his only leak, lots more people would call him a whistleblower. But other leaks by Snowden show perfectly good, legal, constitutional countintelligence programs. It is perfectly valid to say he is a whistleblower for one leak but a traitor for the other. THAT ISN'T NUANCE.
Nuance is "a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound." If one leak was completely black, and another completely white, we should not mix them together and call the result gray and nuanced. If someone murders person A then saves person B, we don't compromise and call it manslaughter. We say they are guilty on one count, and not guilty on another. We need to look at Snowden this way.
Do we have a lack of nuance, or a lack of principles?
In the US, we have a constitution that lays down the basic theoretical philosophical principles of government. People who react loudly when the government violates those rules are principled. Principled means "acting in accordance with morality and showing recognition of right and wrong based on a given set of rules." Principled is not the same as extreme. Being principled is a good thing. If you are outraged by what the NSA did, do not let someone label you as "extreme" in order to bargain you away from your beliefs.
But we have people in this nation who want to be able to get away with this stuff, while still claiming to follow the rules. They want the issue to look "nuanced," so that there is wiggle room to violate the principles. Do not let the "nuanced" view turn into a slippery slope that the government uses to skirt the law and erode the constitution.
From the article:
Saying that there may be some middle ground or grey area is seen as a sign of weakness, of moving off the party line.
That is true. People need to be able to change their opinions, or not forced down an extreme side. That tendency is why we have these two ridiculous parties in America. People follow banners more strongly than they follow principles. But Snowden's leaks are not about party. It isn't flip-flopping to say leak A is one thing and leak B is another. These leaks are about our principles. This is not the time to back down. Back down on gray things like immigration, healthcare, spending, and tax codes. But for this one, follow the principles.
Now I am not so strident and inflexible in my views as to say that they were a "bad" generation, but the whole "Greatest Generation" thing is a little overblown.
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