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Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.
TaoPhoenix:
Why don't they follow the plot of a third rate tv movie and give a hundred grand to a sniper team and pick him off?
-TaoPhoenix (July 06, 2013, 11:03 AM)
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There's a reason why those are third rate tv movies.
-wraith808 (July 06, 2013, 01:32 PM)
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Maybe, but I get the feeling that it would play out like that if it were a Russian whistle-blower. Just look at Alexander Solzhenitsyn's remarks about the bad old Gulag days. One tiny comment could get you "disappeared".
Instead it looks like we're tip-toeing all around this.
Tinman57:
It just don't seem right that the government can prosecute someone for reporting a crime. They just give it a different name, aka; Whistleblower, and then go about business as usual. Of course the government will argue that it's not his place to decide what's legal and illegal, to leave that up to the "professionals", ie; lawyers. Personally, I think they should pin a medal on his chest and call him a patriot.
40hz:
Instead it looks like we're tip-toeing all around this.
-TaoPhoenix (July 06, 2013, 06:08 PM)
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This.
40hz:
It just don't seem right that the government can prosecute someone for reporting a crime. They just give it a different name, aka; Whistleblower, and then go about business as usual. Of course the government will argue that it's not his place to decide what's legal and illegal, to leave that up to the "professionals", ie; lawyers.
-Tinman57 (July 06, 2013, 08:54 PM)
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Robert Anton Wilson summed it up this way: it's magic!
If magic is the ability to bend reality in accordance with will, then "law" is the ultimate form of magic. In 1924, about a half million hitherto harmless heroin addicts became federal criminals overnight due to an Act of Congress. In 1937, the same thing happened to a few million inoffensive marijuana smokers. How? Magic!
As Wilson pointed out, the people that make the laws are wizards and sorcerers in the truest sense of the word. Their view of reality and truth overrides any which opposes theirs.
And shold you think for one second that your view of reality is every bit as valid and real as theirs, Wilson proposed this experiment: Walk away from a police officer after you've been given a "stop order." You'll be amazed just how quickly and decisively that cop's reality overrides and becomes your reality.
And that, Mr. Potter, is real magic.
wraith808:
Instead it looks like we're tip-toeing all around this.
-TaoPhoenix (July 06, 2013, 06:08 PM)
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This.
-40hz (July 07, 2013, 06:31 AM)
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You know as well as I do, the thing about it is that it's playing out publicly. If relations between Moscow and the US were better in that regards, i.e. there hadn't been so many dust ups between them with the US pulling the superiority card on a former Superpower, then this might have been a lot different.
But the thing about it is that they're willing to be implicitly complicit, but not explicitly. Thus the fiction of the non-sovereign nature of the terminal. The fiction of the asylum request (they would have taken him... don't get me wrong. But they built in a poison pill for a reason).
And so the US is playing their position from a point that they usually play it from- strength. And they're getting played.
Despite all the international "outrage," it seems the game plan that gets everyone off the hook is to make it impossible for him to be granted asylum anywhere.
-40hz (July 06, 2013, 12:13 PM)
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But they're doing the exact opposite. Their attempts to block asylum are making his case for asylum stronger, while making the US appear weaker. There are only a few places where appropriate pressure couldn't be taken to get Snowden in custody. Hong Kong was one (China could direct from behind the scenes and not tacitly get involved) and Russia is another. And with China muscling into the area, dueling with the US, which has an ugly covert history there, this is becoming more of a headache to the US, highlighting the decline of it's 'soft influence' in the area. From the ridiculous threats of withdrawing aid to the circus with the Bolivian president, the US is playing not just the wrong cards, but the wrong hand. And their 'allies' and 'partners' are enjoying the show. The Big Stick ideology isn't playing out so well anymore, especially when the US is already taxed, and cracks are beginning to show...
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