> makes your position suspect

To offer another analogy: If I work at a company which makes their money off pop up ads and I think that's unethical, so I pitch management on alternative revenue streams, then is my position suspect because I'm taking my paycheck from a shady ad tech company?

I think the analogy of preaching vegetarianism while eating meat is somewhere between preaching no-interventionalism while living in the country you were born in, and preaching non-interventionalism while personally bombing people on the other side of the world.

Yes, agreed. I tried to argue this point below, but I think your analogy is more apt and the difference comes across clearer. Thanks.

Socrates has his logic, I grant you. Socrates died shortly thereafter. Snowden, on the other hand, is still relatively free to shape the public debate and further the fight for Freedom. Who is wiser, who is more strategic? I'm not dissing Socrates here, for what it's worth: I only mean that there is no contract we sign with strict logical adherence when born into an unjust society.

I'm also not sure I agree that living in a country means you morally take responsibility for all its ills. I would characterize the responsibility for ills to be those that one is aware of and accepts because of the perceived personal benefit. The point of political opposition is to reject the current order of society.

I'm not sure who's more strategic, but here we are talking about Socrates 2500 years after he drank hemlock ;)

> I'm also not sure I agree that living in a country means you morally take responsibility for all its ills.

You're attacking a strawman here, that's a very strong position. I just said it hurts his credibility and my analogy was that eating meat while preaching vegetarianism is suspect.

I guess that's where we diverge. I don't see working against, in this example, imperialism while living in an imperialistic state to be akin to preaching vegetarianism while eating meat. You don't have the same choice you do with meat, to simultaneously (1) live in a free society (2) work against imperialism.

Eating meat, in my "strawman" is acceptance, or rationalization, of the evil once one is aware.