mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote at 07/16/2013 08:30 AM:
What does "agenda-driven" add to your point? It seems to me if you
substitute "purposeless" it would be more damning.
It's an indicator that I think he purposefully sought the BAH job just so that
he could gain access to evidence of PRISM, and just so that he could then quit
the job and leak the evidence. I use the term merely for emphasis, to make an
assertion that he intended to find and leak this data all along. I assert he
never had any intention of fulfilling any duty to BAH or its contractors.
I couldn't use "purposeless". Nobody I've ever known is ever purposeless. But
most people are driven by a dynamic complex of competing agendas, including the
kinds of conflict Steve asks about in his honor/oath question. Snowden, like
O'Keefe, _seems_ to me to be absent any interesting complex of agendas. I will
be happy if/when I learn of his other agendas.
I still don't have the context you two seem to have on this... I just
didn't follow the myriad announcements and interviews as they rolled out
and going through them after the fact has some specific charms
(according to Clemens who professed to read the newspaper two weeks
late) but I haven't gotten down to it yet.
Disclaimer aside, I still don't hear Snowden as being *that*
pre-meditated. He *may* in his self-aggrandizement suggest he was, but
I'm hearing something else...
I hear your (Glen's) behaviourist bent (especially when confronted with
my idealist one), and defer to it partway. I think Ideals (honor, oath)
are very *real* if only in the minds of those who idealize them. Those
two things mean something very specific and strong to me and they are
where "the buck stops" for me in some situations. While I may be very
pragmatic about the fine grain organization of my priorities, I am not
particularly pragmatic at all when it comes to the large grain stuff,
and I would submit to you as Exhibit A, One Glen Ropella who can't (by
his own declaration) seem to get through Social Ettiquete 101 in the
OldSkool of hard knocking around. What is that about? It is
certainly not (or not obvious to me) about careful evaluation of
consequence trees... It looks a lot like the adherence to an ideal
(and/or aspect of self-image?). My rear-view mirror is littered with
the wreckage of where my "Ideals" (which you contend don't exist?)
defined my actions, running over "pragmatism" (another ideal?) over and
over.
You could say that I never broke my oath (except in that one unfortunate
faux pas in the hot tub) because I knew the (external) consequences and
chose to avoid them by avoiding taking that fork in the path. I grant
you that I did evaluate the (internal) consequences. "Who would I be,
if I broke this oath?" was at least as important as "what would they do
to me if I broke this oath?" of course I didn't want to be charged with
felony treason nor did I want to see the global balance of superpower
get tweaked off it's precessing axes, nor see some upstart (think Kim
Jong) get any tiny advantage. But first and foremost, I didn't want to
step off the side of that slippery slope of thinking that I could say
one thing and do another on a whim.
Perhaps I project too much, but I have a hard time NOT imagining Snowden
thinking the same thing "who would I be if I did not take this one
trivial almost non-fact from below the table and put it above the
table?" From what little I know about it all, I suspect *I* would NOT
have spoken up, the truth he exposed feels a bit too trivial to be worth
the consequences (external and internal) but he and I are clearly very
different people.
Do you deny that people (egos) operate strongly on maintaining the
integrity of their feedback loop of their self-image? Some people do
this by soliciting reinforcing feedback from others. Some do it by
talking out loud to themselves a lot (like I do here, pretending I'm
talking to the rest of you). And some do it by picking an idealized
spot (or set of spots) on the idealism horizon and keeping their compass
trained on them as they navigate the heavy weather of modern life. Or
all three?
I don't mean this as argumentative as much as provocative... I find
your (Glen) view of human nature very interesting and it often helps to
fill out some of the holes in my own, and sometimes even shifts my own a
little. And I'm finding Marcus' counterpoint equally useful here.
- Steve
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