David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden

Here goes...

David Brooks sounds like an intelligent guy, but if you look at his background you see his true colors. Raised in suburban Philadelphia's ultra-wealthy Main Line, he started and has never wavered from an ultra-elite, insider status, leading to today living literally inside the Beltway, the quintessential system man, his status-quo "opinions" on every issue a foregone conclusion.

His intelligence sadly belies his consistent conclusion-first-supporting-argument-second reflexive responses. What else would you expect from someone so ingrained in the establishment -- Yale, Duke, University of Chicago, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. This man may have never said a single word to someone who didn't know where their next meal might come from, drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil with a creme fraiche brulee.

This nation could use discussion of important issues, debate, thoughtful exchange. He delivers rubber stamp answers. We as a nation lose out. While he can't single-handedly deserve credit for our slide into partisan bickering and bureaucracy, he proudly contributes more than his share. And why not, with lucrative speaking fees and book options paving his way.

If you want a pundit to unthinkingly deliver a preconceived notion supporting keeping things the way they are, David Brooks is your man. Sadly, if you want thoughtful consideration of complex issues, he'll stand in the way of whoever would deliver.

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There, how was that? Can I have a job as the knee-jerk conservative guy at the New York Times now?

    > If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably
    > revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

    > He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak
    > like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter.
    > They limit debate a little more.

This goes beyond a simple fear of consequences. It's a pervasive acceptance of the aggressor's malevolence in which the victim ritualistically cowtows in order to appease it.

This is ICD-9 code 995.81 "Battered person syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_person_syndrome :

* The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.

* The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.

* The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

EDIT:

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome "a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors or abusers, sometimes to the point of defending them. [...] One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM

This article about Brooks (written by Greenwald and dating back to 2009) is pretty illuminating.

* David Brooks: our nation’s premier expert warrior http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/brooks_6/

This college dropout did what those at the NSA with PhDs failed to do in their responsibility to ensure that their organisation stayed within the spirit and laws of their mandate.

He did what Brooks failed to do as a journalist, ie. to draw attention to a worrying centralization of absolute power, and abuse of law.

Lets describe Benjamin Franklin, John Rockefeller, Walt Disney as high school dropouts, rather than look at what they achieved.

Real journalists should be ashamed of "pundits" such as Brooks

> This column reads like ... Nixon's Enemies List.

> This is something right out of Nixon's secret tapes ranting about that Daniel Ellsberg fellow.

> Mr. Brooks, this is one of your more bizarre commentaries.

> Brook's article is nothing more than a shallow and poorly thought through character assassination

> What a bizarre column.

> Brooks column is the most awful piece of smear journalism I have ever read.

To be honest, I'm almost surprised the NYT ran it. I've read a lot of his columns, never thought much of them, they just seemed fairly "normal". But this one is truly just bizarre, just bizarre. I really want to know what on earth he was thinking?

It's one thing to be conservative and wish to defend atrocities committed by governments, but it's completely another to do so using the kinds of techniques Brooks employs.

I'd go so far as to say that the NY Times is complicit in the moral wrongs that it spreads propaganda to help cover up.

Here on Hacker News, where most of the top stories, threads and comments are favorable to Edward Snowden, you might have the impression that there's some unspoken “hacker code” just below the surface, encompasing ideals like sharing source, promoting freedom of expression and privacy, understood by anyone whose work closely concerns the internet.

When it comes to the intelligence community, this impression would be sorely mistaken. If you are a regular on hacker news, NSA types already have a stereotype for people like you:

“Remember, folks, IT weenies are the code-clerks of the 21st century” https://twitter.com/20committee/statuses/343812020992372736

After this incident, they'll probably step up efforts to keep people who sympathize with these sorts of values away from classified information. They'll find plenty of other able candidates who don't share these values.

http://qz.com/92509/edward-snowdens-lesson-to-both-businesse...

Isn't the fact that this story has had such strong "legs" a great indication that this act of whistle blowing was justified?

New title: "Betrayer of a Genuine American Hero." And I can think of worse.

This is why you cannot listen to him about when the government behaves badly.

Is PRISM a good idea? Did Edward Snowden do the right thing? Where is the line between unacceptable disclosures (that should be punished severely) and, e.g., the Pentagon Papers. These are complex issues and few people are courageous enough to take a stand on them, especially under their real names. There's just too much uncertainty. I sure as hell don't know what the right answer is, on many of these questions.

But everyone feels entitled to an opinion of whether Julian Assange is "creepy", "arrogant", et cetera.

As a lesser degree of whistleblower, I went through something similar. People make all kinds of speculations about why you did what you did, and they're usually far off the mark. Granted, in my case I made some mistakes along the way. For one example, I probably should not have implored Google to "choke on a taint" at one point (if only because it distracted attention away from the valid message there) even if, on that particular issue, my indignation was justified.

People get into bike-shedding discussions about personalities and possible motivations because it's a lot easier than discussing the underlying and often more complicated issues.

Actually, if you look at the Constitution, it says - "The Congress shall have power...To declare War...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions...To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia"

If the US was going to have a permanent standing army, an intelligence service monitoring its citizens and so forth, why specifically limit appropriations to two years? Why place power in Congress's hands? Why have citizen's militias repelling foreign invasions?

The US has a professional army more akin to Czarist Russia than anything the founder's imagined.

I never really thought that much about Ai Weiwei, but what he just said is right. There's really no fundamental difference between the kinds of monitoring the government of China does and what the US is doing with things like PRISM.