the idiotic attacks on Snowden show exactly how petty and pathetic those folks are

[struggle4progress]

121. IMO it can be explained by a politically naive, and intellectually lazy, replacement mechanism

Opposition to the Iraq war is replaced by a surrogate: support for Assange. And that surrogate is then replaced by another surrogate: we must accept Assange's claim that the Swedish rape prosecution is politically motivated. And then that surrogate is replaced by yet another surrogate: we must accept that Assange's Swedish accusers are CIA agents and that Assange himself is in danger of being carted from Sweden to Guantanamo, where he will be tortured and extrajudicially executed. The original inclinations have vanished inexplicably behind a chain of replacements

Or opposition to the Iraq war is replaced by a surrogate: support for Manning. And that surrogate is then replaced by another surrogate: we must accept Manning's claim to suffer from some psycho-medical condition such as gender dysphoria. And then that surrogate is replaced by yet another surrogate: we must call Manning "Chelsea" lest we offend the soldier. Of course, the claim, that Manning suffers from gender dysphoria, is a medical question, raised by the defense as partial excuse for the soldier's behavior, and it cannot be resolved by casual internet posters; moreover, when the defense itself first raised the claim, numerous posters here and elsewhere on the internet, assumed it was an attempt by the prosecution to slander Manning and attacked it as such, until they realized it was a defense claim, at which point the same posters embraced it. And, of course, there is no chance that anyone, posting on the internet, can hurt Manning's feelings by posting, since Manning in Leavenworth apparently has no access to the internet. Again, the original inclinations have vanished inexplicably behind a chain of replacements

Or opposition to the FISA court is replaced by a surrogate: support for Snowden. And then that support for Snowden is replaced by another surrogate: the insistence that any effort to discover much about the actual Snowden story is merely an authoritarian cover-up. The real story might actually be quite complicated: Snowden might, for example, be a rightwing "Kaczynski-ish" ideologue, with genuine patriotic feelings and more than a touch of grandiose thinking, who was upset by some combination of what he learned and his inability to get more experienced people to take him very seriously, who then in a fit of irritation, and by stealth and deceit, downloaded well over a million documents and handed the information along to other ideologues and foreign governments. Ultimately, the possibility of any complicated human story, with detail and nuance, vanishes behind layers of noise designed to protect the bizarre chain of replacements

IMO we see the same mechanism at work in the recent Clapper threads