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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Bro, by definition you’re not gonna get “evidence” of top secret programs and sources that were compromised. It just doesn’t even make sense to think you would.

    If you look at the things that were happening overseas in the immediate aftermath of those releases, You’ll see what I’m talking about. As much as I’d love to spend a bunch of time digging up all that information again, as you can tell by the voting patterns here, people are clearly not interested in the facts or intelligent discourse so I’m not going to waste my time. You can easily look up the articles about how we and our allies were scrambling to recall people, and how people didn’t come home. You can dig up plenty of information from a whole host of analysts and security related personnel who aren’t affiliated with the government who can verify the carelessness of his disclosures and how they did more harm than good.

    Yes, Patriot act was an absolute travesty and shouldn’t exist. Yes, the domestic programs Snowden exposed were illegal and needed to be stopped, but they also were widely misunderstood in their scope and danger to US citizens… In fact, they still exist to this day in more or less the same capacity for that reason.

    No, he didn’t do it the right way, and I wish he had because he could have actually done good things instead of just serving his country’s enemies. The things he exposed in the US were pretty trivial, in the grand scheme of things, and were widely misunderstood. He could have shut those domestic programs down without compromising the foreign intelligence sources, but he chose not to. He was irresponsible, and flat out was not a good guy.


  • That’s because they were spies. Spies aren’t typically talked about. SOME of the programs he detailed in those releases were within the scope of what he was trying to expose, but many were not. He dumped THOUSANDS of documents related to humint sources that absolutely got people killed, burned other active contacts / projects and cost years worth of work. There was a huge shuffle of personnel after those leaks as intelligence agencies TRIED to get their people out, but there were a great number who couldn’t get out. Andrew Bustamante speaks about this, at some length, to just name the most well known talking head.

    The majority of what he exposed had nothing to do with domestic surveillance programs, and the way he exposed that information was WILDLY irresponsible.

    Yes, the illegal surveillance he exposed was a big deal, but again, was done in a really shitty way that compromised active investigations. He neglected to do anything through proper channels, and instead betrayed his country rather than try to fix the problems through whistle blower channels where he would have actually had legal and tangible protections. Dude was an actual shit bag and a Russian asset.















  • Oh delightful… I’m down voted for a reasoned and valid contribution to the conversation. AGAIN. How much I love Lemmy… The best part of Reddiquette was always the insistence on downvotes not being a “disagree” button. Do better, Lemmings, or the conversation here will suck when nobody wants to comment on anything anymore.

    … ANYWAY…

    I don’t know that I can agree with the part about being a MAGA sympathizer. His constant discussion of acceptance, understanding, and love all make me say that. I’ve never heard him espouse authorization leanings and I think it tends to be more related to him having a tendency to avoid confrontation and try to keep things from greeting adversarial. That being said, I feel like it’s often allowed him to become a useful idiot for people like Kushner and Stone. You’re right about the questions he tends to ask, and I was actually impressed with the pushback against Sam. I personally attributed it to him having a more comfortable relationship with Sam. The issue I see as more problematic is that he is far too often willing to push back on a stance, but not on obvious falsehoods.


  • I feel like Lex tends to sit in the “Enlightened Centrist” bucket more than he sits in the MAGA bucket. In an effort to better understand subjects and maintain an open perspective he often is too willing to accept the things people say on his show, and fails to push back at all and instead allowing them to speak to reveal their “truth”; even when that truth may be a total lie, as in previous Elon Interviews or the one he did with Oliver Stone.

    He has a definite naievity to him, as he readily admits he’s often willing to assume the best of a scenario in spite of what others what probably call the foolishness of doing so