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One thing this article doesn't take into account is that the movie the author undoubtedly watched before writing this was full of inaccuracies, and had the purp

• omginternets 10y ago
  >don't make an article about how the opposing stance is only held by the weak minded. What if you really think that's the case? Screw it, I'll say it. I think anyone who condemns Snowden is intellectually lazy or has vested interests in NSA surveillance. I have yet to see a single cogent rebuttal of Snowden's moral case.
  • watwatwatwat 10y ago
    I condemn Snowden. Prove that I'm intellectually lazy.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • throwawaymaroon 10y ago
      ...this is an intellectually lazy approach?
    • jacalata 10y ago
      Well, you didn't bother to give any reasoning....
      • hood_syntax 10y ago
        Obviously it's just low-hanging fruit /s
        • Practicality 10y ago
          Perhaps HN has cultured the evolution of a different type of troll.
    • omginternets 10y ago
      >Prove that I'm intellectually lazy. Snowden has a well-argued moral case for what he did. He demonstrably tried to minimize harm and maximize the positive impact of his disclosures. You give literally no reason for your condemnation (though in all fairness, your comment is likely to be rhetorical). More to the point, you will likely argue that he broke laws and cite some unspecified damage to the intelligence community that can neither be qualified nor quantified. Importantly, you will likely do this -- as every condemning voice has -- without offering a cogent rebuttal to Snowden's case. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, you will fail to address the the clear and present danger of allowing a government to perform dragnet surveillance on its citizens without suspecting them of criminal activity. If that's not intellectual laziness, then I honestly don't know what is. If that's not going to be your line of argumentation, then congratulations! You are literally the first person I have encountered who condemns Snowden without being intellectually lazy or dishonest. I'll believe it when I see it. (I feel compelled to mention, once more, that I mean no disrespect. I think your comment is rhetorical in nature, so I beg of you not to take anything personally.)
      • dllthomas 10y ago
        > Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, you will fail to address the the clear and present danger of allowing a government to perform dragnet surveillance on its citizens without suspecting them of criminal activity. Dragnet surveillance that is being abused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT "Most incidents are self-reported", which says to me that they do not have effective monitoring - there are doubtless abuses that have gone undetected.
      • tzs 10y ago
        https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/52k179/edward_snowden_why_barack_obama_should_grant_me_a/d7kv7z7 https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/52k179/edward_sno...
        • omginternets 10y ago
          Interesting. I'll mull this over. Thank you.
    • RodericDay 10y ago
      How come proven collateral damage such as innocent deaths caused by US military interventionism is widely considered reasonable and acceptable. So, tenuous upside/blatant downside = no outrage. But the unproven collateral damage of Snowden's leaks, which had the giant upside of revealing democracy-chilling surveillance techniques, leads to mass reaction from the government. So, undeniable upside/debatable downside = Enemy of the State, threats to nations that offer him asylum. How does this arithmetic work out for anyone?
      • saynsedit 10y ago
        Yeah, Americans sleep when they hear 90% of drone attack deaths are civilians: https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/ https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-comp... But they are wide awake and outraged when Snowden's ostensible act of espionage has caused an enormous amount of public good and technological innovation. It's not really the American's fault. We hear few of their real voices. It's the media that speaks the loudest.
        • fixermark 10y ago
          Don't sell Americans short on their ability to withold empathy for non-Americans though. They know that the men who stole control of four planes on 9/11 were civilians too, and they still generally trust that their government is ID'ing threats to national security correctly. Whether the government is actually doing that (and whether---even if it were---that's sufficient for completely extrajudicial killing that would be called "waging warfare" in any other context) may not be things an average American is asking before going to sleep at night.
        • Practicality 10y ago
          Who are these generic Americans that think that Snowden should be condemned? Everyone American I know is very grateful for what he did. And I know quite a few. I've only ever heard official policy statements condemning him. I am not even really sure those stating such policy agree with what they are saying (at a personal level).
    • coldtea 10y ago
      >I condemn Snowden. Prove that I'm intellectually lazy. You haven't even bothered to provide an argument to justify your condemnation. Case closed.
    • Practicality 10y ago
      You didn't bother with an actual argument and instead tried to force others to do the cognitive work to prove you wrong. This is intellectually lazy.
  • Sneakos 10y ago
    You could waste time insulting them, or you could provide a case as to why you are right. What purpose does it serve to call them lazy?
    • omginternets 10y ago
      That wasn't really my point, though I can see how I may have been unclear/provocative. In any case, I think the article we're commenting upon makes the case better than I could. Opinions to to the contrary (from what I've seen) tout the damage (unquantified and unqualified) that was done to the intelligence community and gloss over the obvious wrongdoing on the part of the government. Further, I have yet to see a single article that both condemns Snowden while directly arguing against his moral case for whistleblowing. But again, none of this was my point. My point is rather that I see no reason why such an opinion should invalidate or detract from a movie/article/whatever. I interpreted the parent comment as saying "if you accuse anyone of intellectual laziness, that detracts from your work". I find this view problematic, especially when there's ample evidence of intellectual laziness: condemnation without addressing a well-argued moral case.
    • freehunter 10y ago
      There are some things it's not worth arguing because the facts have already been well presented and at this point anyone arguing to the contrary has deliberately chosen to ignore those facts. Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. Climate change is not real. Jet fuel can't melt steel beams. JFK was killed by a magic bullet. The Holocaust never happened. Snowden is a terrorist and a treasonous traitor. Does anyone really still have the time or energy to argue with a birther? Or a Holocaust denier? There's no evidence supporting their point of view, so why is it up to me to have to prove them wrong? Every reasonable person already accepts that what the NSA was doing is wrong. You can't hold the simultaneous opinions that Snowden was a traitor who should be punished and that the NSA was wrong for conducting illegal wiretaps. I would actually argue that it's not wasting time to insult them, it's wasting time arguing with them. If you try to prove them wrong, they're going to engage you in their nonsense, because their mind is already made up. If you insult them, they're more likely to just leave you alone. But no matter what, you're not going to change their minds.
  • slowmovintarget 10y ago
    There's a difference in saying you have that opinion, and asserting that opinion is objectively true as in the article. While I disagree with the "anyone" part, I do believe that condemnation of Snowden comes most often from ignorance. The more I learned of the leaks in particular, and Snowden's reasoning on the information, the more I came to view his actions as necessary for a free society.
    • omginternets 10y ago
      Indeed, the "anyone" was hyperbolic and misguided on my part. It should read "I have yet to see a condemnation of Snowden that was not intellectually lazy or misinformed".
  • JohnStrange 10y ago
    Nah, some people just think that the crimes Snowden committed, like violation of NDAs etc., outweigh his moral duty to publish the misdeeds of various NSA programs. I'm not one of them but that's still a logical and consistent point of view anyone can have. Some people also value honor higher than not lying, and vice versa, or keeping a promise given to a friend higher than life&death. Values are tricky and there are no easy solutions.
  • rhino369 10y ago
    I think anyone who is unable to understand the arguments of his opponents is probably the intellectually lazy one.
  • nikdaheratik 10y ago
    I think there's a big leap between saying Snowden should get a pass and saying he should get a medal. WTH kind of message does this send to other "would be Snowdens" who turn out to leak data that is important to national security and cause people, both civilians and US soldiers, to get killed. One person may not have the whole picture or understand everything they need to know to weigh the costs. IMO, Snowden didn't know everything he needed to prove what he was doing was the right course at the time. He just got help from the fact that the government is too secret for its own good and that we are in a relatively peaceful time and don't have many existential threats.
• Practicality 10y ago
  Don't use strawman arguments? That would silence 90% of the arguments on the internet! (Honestly, I am seeing a general trend toward better arguing and less fallacious logic as time goes on, but you are absolutely right, the argument should not be based on a basic logical fallacy)
  • webkike 10y ago
    You're confusing the straw man fallacy with an ad hominem attack.
    • Practicality 10y ago
      Yes, I considered that. Saying a person who has the opposing view is weak-minded is a little bit of both, I think.
    • berntb 10y ago
      The GP is (humorously) claiming to make almost exclusively non serious arguments on the internet, so it would obviously be inconsistent for him/her to use the correct term. (I thought it was funny, but both I and the GP should probably be voted down to keep whimsical humour like this off HN. The GP will probably argue I should be upvoted for suggesting a downvote of whimsical humor.)
      • Practicality 10y ago
        I upvote whimsical humor because it represents the true reality.
• austincheney 10y ago
  I think its time we all revisit "Born On The Fourth of July". Stone's bore of a movie in search of a plot. What it lacks in direction and basic story-telling it makes up for in emotion and political bias. I lost braincells watching this foolishness and it is enough to convince me to ignore all other politically sensitive Stone movies. Stone should go back to doing movies like "Conan the Barbarian", which is a classic.
  • saynsedit 10y ago
    Wow. I wouldn't unilaterally condemn all of Oliver Stone's movies. Salvador was amazing, as was JFK.
• ievahanordah 10y ago
  That is my least favorite argument.
• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  You have to be either weak-minded or very selective about reading up on these things to not think he did some good that's reported in the article. Here's a few: 1. They kept promising it was just metadata they were collecting. Alexander got specific on all extra services they weren't collecting on. This was lies. 2. Another lies under oath to Congress about same thing. 3. They said it was just selective stuff to find terrorists. Snowden leaks revealed vast majority of this spying was on Europe, South America, and Asia with stuff like Dell PowerEdge servers terrorists probably aren't using. ;) 4. Americans assumed it was us and our allies versus the terrorist again with these tools for that. Instead, we find they were doing stuff like spying on Beligian industry taking down their telecoms in the process. Stuff like that, done in secret by groups with immunity, could really bite Americans in the ass as a whole and should be up for national, policy debate. 5. The NSA has been pushing INFOSEC recommendations to military, defense contractors, federal government, and rest of us for years. I pointed out most of it was EAL4+ or less, meaning it definitely get hacked by enemies. They knew this. Incompetence or evil (SIGINT)? Snowden leaks indicate it was them leaving backdoors in for themselves that our enemies might use against us as well. Did in a few cases I believe. 6. Similar to 5, they were believed to be helping us improve our security standards and cyberspace readiness. Instead, BULLRUN program aimed to subvert that as much as possible in ways that would damage us. The combo of 5 and 6 makes the NSA the 2nd greatest threat to American INFOSEC of them all right after American capitalism insistence on treating INFOSEC like a liability. 7. Prior to leaks, Alexander and others always explained they only collected on Americans when they had a court order. Nobody explained that FISA warrants are for "targeting criteria" run against all the data of all Americans they're already intercepting. On top of a court that virtually never rejects anything and doesn't imprison offenders. So, these are 7 quick revelations from the leaks that should result in resistance from Americans, some job openings in government, and prosecution of specific individuals for actual crimes. Internal channels always squashed information like this since the problems were driven from top down by people who lie to Americans and Congress. US government also kept saying judicial system couldn't participate at all. Leaking to public is all that's left in such a situation. He certainly could've filtered the leaks themselves a bit but the domestic stuff would have to come out pretty much in full to back his assertions.
  • rhino369 10y ago