Considering how disgustingly subservient all of Europe has been to bend over backwards to the US (e.g. forcing the landing of a presidential plane because someone suspected it was carrying Snowden) you can't really blame him. Russia is the only country in the region that doesn't care whether the US wants him or not (and would even refuse to co-operate simply to flip them off).
Heck, I'd love to see him be granted asylum somewhere else but all of Europe would drop him like a hot potato the second the US told them to hand him over.
[1] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-source-nsa-leaker-snowdens...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/02/ecuador-rafael-...
> He only had to take asylum in Russia because the US revoked his passport and prevented him from going anywhere else.
That implies that it's the fault of the US government that he is currently in Russia (I think it also forwards the misconception that Snowden was in Russia when his passport was revoked). He didn't have to flee to Hong Kong to begin with. When the US government requested extradition and revoked his passport in order to keep him inside Hong Kong, he fled using what turned out to be an invalid travel document. Snowden has ended up in purely out of his own actions. The US isn't preventing him from traveling - he can walk down to the embassy at any time he wants and get a plane ticket home.
US English must have diverged quite a lot from UK English if 'home' now means 'prison'.
Indeed -- the decision on Snowden came around the same time Obama was getting ready to invade Syria.
Putin is a de-facto old-school dictator, but on this he did everything right. I wish he'd completed the job by sneaking Snowden to Ecuador via submarine, but I can understand why he didn't -- he can play that card next time he desperately needs a propaganda boost.
It was interesting to see how suddenly our media (in Germany) stopped their sympathetic reporting on the Syrian rebels and how desperately they need our support (i.e. at least give them some guns) when ISIS began making headlines.
I remember thinking that supporting the rebels in Syria (though it viscerally felt like the "right thing" to do) was probably the worse bad choice to make even before Russia & al heavily spoke against it. It's easy to forget that both the direct intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the less direct support of the rebellions during the "Arab Spring" resulted in very unstable situations and a very disconcerting shift towards Islamist extremism in those regions.
Hanlon's razor kills conspiracies.
Snowden probably doesn't like the Russian government, but he was stuck in a Russian airport with a revoked passport. Even if he had free choice, Russia is one of the few countries willing and able to withstand US pressure to extradite him. Being on trial in the US isn't an option for him because what he did may have been just, but was striclty illegal.
Russian-US relations were at a low and Russia generally likes sending little fuck-yous. Granting Snowden asylum is also good PR for Russia because they appear strong against perceived US injustice.
For both sides the choices appear completely rational without implying any foul play or hidden relations.
Crimea is a very strategic area to get hold of which NATO wants to break into Russia through color revolutions ETC just because Putin refused to be US dog. When Ukraine democratic government was forcefully overthrown by a US-backed Nazi military coup what choice Russia had? Just imagine how US would respond if China or Russia back coup takes place in Mexico or Canada? Why pivot to Asia, why redrawing Middle East, dividing Iraq into three small states? Supporting rebels against Serian government while helping Saudi dictatership to kill Yemen civilions just to suppress another rebels. All sugarcoded IN the name of democracy and freedom? which even US is failing to provide to its citizens.
We're listening about China aggression, Russian aggression, while US is at war in almost the whole world directly or through proxies.
US has accumulated enough bad karma to insure its decline, those who don't remember history are bound to repeat it. This war game and greed for hegemony by bullet at all cost has happened countless times in the past and has always resulted in complete destruction of empires and civilizations sooner or later.
But public is sleeping as always, only with a vein optimism that "this won't happen to us, we're unique in the human history!" You're not unique, you're just a spec of dust in the cosmos which has eternal law of upholding justice. It's just that it comes at the right time when the bucket is full.
Wait, wait, wait. When did this happen? Because I think I might've missed something.
Next time, buy some room for your outraged response with a couple sentences of explanation.
> While many of Globalresearch's articles discuss legitimate humanitarian or environmental concerns, the site has a strong undercurrent of reality warping throughout its pages, especially in relation to taking its news from sources such as Russia Today RT[2] and Press TV.[3] Its view of science, the economy and geopolitics seems to be broadly conspiracist.
> Whenever someone makes a remarkable claim and cites Globalresearch, they are almost certainly wrong.
I agree about the low quality of blumkvist's reply.
Yanukovych was democratically elected and overthrown by popular protests (backed by the EU / US?).
The ignorance here is mindblowing. Russians live in a perpetual conspiracy theory it seems. Autocratic states are known for their information control and propaganda it seems even when historically controlled media has been highly inaccurate, yet somehow the populace keeps buying into statements from state controlled media. I guess the state knows how to deliver information by exploiting both ignorance and patriotism. Two things Russia has high supplies of.
0]: http://www.globalresearch.ca/jfk-and-the-unspeakable-why-he-...
That's not to say the initial act has no value. It most certainly has. But everything he says afterward I just don't value at all.
I don't think you should desert to the enemy if you're trying to fix your battalion.
Do you remember what happened with Chelsea Manning? Because that is what the GP is referring to. When you get put in military prison, they basically get to do whatever they want to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence
I'm not sure how that is an improvement.
> It's like exposing corruption in the police department and then only hanging out at the mafia's restaurant. How am I supposed at look at that guy now?
The whole point of staying in Russia is that he can't leave because the US made sure his travel documents were revoked, and Russia is unlikely to extradite him under political pressure from the US. If it was Snowdens goal to pass on information to Russia, he wouldn't have made such a big fuss about releasing that info to the media. So it's actually more like exposing corruption in the police department, and then seeking refuge from the wrath of those corrupt police, and the only safe place you can find is the maffia's restaurant.
Complaining about downvotes is only going to earn you more of them.
Downvoting because a post is rude or factually inaccurate is fine though.
Even dead posts can be read if you have showdead on.
Disagreement is a perfectly valid reason for downvoting someone.
How would you feel if people shut you out of a discussion because they disagreed with you?
If someone says something you disagree with, debate them. If they say something factually incorrect, correct them. They may even thank you for it. And guess what, they may end up changing your mind, or correcting a mistake on your part.
Actively seeking to censor somebody for having a different perspective on something is frankly abhorant.
I find it ironic that this kind of behaviour is being encouraged in this thread of all. Snowden's actions will prove to be a giant waste of effort if your kind get their way.
And as somebody that was born in Eastern Europe in a (now) ex-communist country, I must say that censorship (as used in your comment) is not incompatible with free speech. In fact it is required for people to have ways to filter out noise - you're still free to speak your mind regardless, therefore using that term doesn't win you any favors from my point of view ;-)
Also, the comment being down-voted above is really noise. It doesn't add anything interesting to the conversation. If it would have been an interesting point of view, then I would have agreed that downvoting is bad, but noise is precisely what downvoting is for.
I'm shutting people out of discussing with me like all the time.
Also, the comment being down-voted above is really noise.
The downvoted comment was this:
I can't say I see him as a villain, but definitely not a hero. I hold back my judgement, because we are just too far away to know what's going on. He did expose some pretty bad practices to the general public, but asylum in Russia afterwards? Are you kidding me? That just looks super fishy to anyone with at least an ounce of critical thought in his brain. Especially in the context of the Crimea debacle.
Now back to the point, the opinion that Snowmen is guilty of treason is held by a majority. And to me that doesn't make sense, because I personally want to live under the rule of law and in such a nation nobody should be above that law, not a secret service, not the president, nobody. That the US government is capable of illegally spying on their own citizens, using the taxes of those citizens to do it, well I want to know about it. That Germany is spying on their own citizens in cooperation with the US, I want to know that as well. I also happen to believe that my right to privacy should be above your right for security and if that ain't gonna happen, then at the very least I want to know where my taxes are going. And last but not least, we happen to live in a society in which the mass-media is constantly failing us and our rights are being constantly eroded. Therefore I consider Snowden to be a hero, because regardless of his motivations, his actions were the right thing to do.
And I could go on with lots of reasons for why I believe the above, but I'm tired of doing that for everybody that regurgitates a mainstream opinion without at least making an effort to explain why. Hence I believe that the comment in question is noise.
Downvotes are nothing more than another kind of participation in the discussion and should be treated as such.
I have to do that enough that I'm thinking I might just write a bookmarklet to automate the process.
Downvotes are nothing more than another kind of participation in the discussion and should be treated as such.
I may be misunderstanding you, or missing something obvious, but I just highlight faded comments with my mouse (or finger if on mobile), works well.
It's similar to the reason text posts are faded by default - to make those posts more annoying to read the longer they are, in order to discourage using them as personal blog posts.
If you don't particularly want your hand held like that and are capable of reading more than a paragraph at a time without suffering mental exhaustion or ennui, you may well find these practices to be condescending and passive-aggressive.
I have a userscript that I use to unfade everything[0] and have showdead on and I find that neither has negatively affected my experience much. Although of course everyone's mileage may vary.
PS. Nice, ad hominem. You want to be taken seriously? I can't tell.
That said, I did downvote blumkvist, firstly because he stated his opinion without really providing any reason for having it other than "oh we don't really know what's going on" (this is annoying, but everyone does it sometimes and it isn't such a big deal). But secondly and much more importantly, even after being asked to follow up on his assertion and have a discussion, he chose to continue on his anti-HN rant.
(And seriously, why is going to Russia "super fishy" when you've got US Congressmen suggesting on national fucking television that the CIA ought to assassinate you? And why do those Congressmen get a pass for saying it? They disgraced their office in doing so. Still like an answer for this, blumkvist.)
Well... I don't care what you say, downvoting based on opinion is perfectly valid and I will continue to do so as I see fit. Especially when the opinion is based on assumptions that I believe has been proven false many times in the past and rehashing the debate on HN turns into a multi-page endless arguing.... kind like this is turning into.
So your opinion on downvoting is different from mine, where does that leave us?
Maybe PG and co. need to add an option in the settings to switch off the censorship for those who don't want it.
> That just looks super fishy to anyone with at least an ounce of critical thought in his brain.
You are claiming that people who disagree with you don't have "at least an ounce of critical thought" in their brain. It's a stone's throw from name-calling. How is this intelligent discourse?
He did expose some pretty bad practices to the general public, but asylum in Russia afterwards? Are you kidding me? That just looks super fishy to anyone with at least an ounce of critical thought in his brain. Especially in the context of the Crimea debacle.