It's telling that those who make the most noise about liberty in this day and age are so utterly clueless about the subject...
Case in point - Edward Snowden. Yes, it was very brave of him to reveal the total information orgy the NSA was engaging in. Yes, it was a principled stand against a creeping surveillance culture that cares more about control than security. No, it does not make him a good person or even necessarily a very clever one.
That's the conclusion I've finally come to on the whole Snowden thing - he's a fucking moron. Idealistic yes but absolutely clueless as to the ugly workings of the world. Surprising, considering he used to work for a three letter agency...
Because being a spook, or at least one of their support techs, should have clued him in that Russia might not be the best place to seek asylum if personal freedom is high on your list of priorities. Putin is one of the last dictators to do it with style but he's still a dictator and Russians face a level of oppression and invasive surveillance that Americans can't - and won't - imagine.
Yeah, all you shmucks know Pussy Riot. How about Roman Dobrokhotov? The late Anna Politkovskaya? The gloriously mad Edward Limonov? These people have dealt with real oppression, real imprisonment, real violence - murder, in the case of Politivskaya - all for daring to say that life under Putin is kinda unpleasant.
Then Edward Snowden pops up in their country, praising their blood enemy's commitment to human rights. What a sooka! Look, either Snowden is shamelessly grabbing at an alliance with a rival superpower to protect his own hide or he's adopted the Greenwald Consensus that America is in the grips of super-fascism. And I don't really think it's the former, since he went and exposed himself in that interview with Ol' Koch-Sucking Camel Face.
And none of you smug, bourgeois loafers will call him on it because this sort of dumb - libertarian dumb - is the new normal. The only thing that differentiates it from the old neocon dumb - where we just assumed the entire Middle East wanted to be converted into white-collar suburbs - is the false piety. When it used to show up at all, it was all this guff about spreading the twin goods of democracy and capitalism. Now it's some nebulous concept of "freedom" that no one's too clear on but is heartily promoted by corporate bagmen and GOP dirty tricksters.
Like Bruce Fein, lawyer to Papa Snowden and a Reaganite turned libertarian. He even did a tour with Greenwald, some College Libertarian Hoedown, funded by everyone's favorite pair of vampires. I remember college libertarians - they are, without fail, comfortable white guys primarily concerned with weed, video games, and not having to do anything for anyone. Ever. They oppose welfare and war for the exact same reason - they don't want to be called upon to make any personal sacrifice for whatever reason. Thanks to Fein, Greenwald, and the Paul clan, these degenerate lackwits have been able to dress up their pathological self-absorption in fancy freedom talk.
Which brings us back to Edward Snowden. Whatever credibility he had from exposing the US surveillance superstate is safely shot, now that he's sold out to the Kremlin. Who are paying him to set up a brand new PRISM for the Putin regime. All he managed was to encourage anti-government sentiment in America, where such sentiments only ever serve the interest of Wall Street, Oil companies, and all the other oligarchs who really run things. Snowden, Greenwald, those Ron Paul potheads - all of 'em, just tools of the modern robber barons looking to keep Obama from raising their taxes.
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