If you missed it, here's a good discussion from Kat Missouri about Snowden in the military.
There is so much new -- and long -- material on this blog from this person supposedly from Missouri, who has a blog with a UK address -- that I have to wonder if this is a persona that is covering up a group of people.
But then, I write a lot of long blogs, too, and there is only one of me, and I just type fast.
Kat Missouri asks the right hard questions about Snowden. What's this discharge all about? From knowledge of how the military works (which she won't explain where she got, either from family or direct experience or "the Internet"), she points out that someone who gets an administrative discharge may have had more wrong with them than just two broken legs.
It's hard to get two broken legs just like that, when it seems it was just basic training, not yet jumping out of airplanes.
What I continue to wonder about is the issue of epilepsy. Every case of epilepsy I have ever seen or read about started in childhood and was recognized in childhood -- and a few cases in much older people.
That someone could manifest epilepsy suddenly at the age of 20 doesn't make sense to me. Kat answers this by saying that it can manifest "at any age" but that's not what any of the fact websites say at all. They say "most in childhood" or "old age" not "any age". I'm not a doctor, and neither is she. So I await clarity on that issue, but it's a red flag to me. How can you get in the army with epilepsy, even if controlled by drugs? Obviously, stress of basic training can exacerbate things like this.
For an example of how journalists *don't* ask the basic questions that this blogger Kat Missouri does (and I do), see the excerpt on "the Improbably Soldier" from Luke Harding. (I'm still reading his e-book now and I'm very disappointed so far.) He just strings together news clippings, and with a sympathetic, enthusiastic spin which is super annoying.
He never asks the obvious. He never digs. Isn't he supposed to be an investigative journalist?!
The law-enforcers investigating Snowden's case likely have all the information about what ailments he had, and what kind of discharge he really left with. But they've never leaked it, as far as we know. We only have the bare outlines from spokespeople who just give the basics.
Kat doesn't seem to have read Harding or some other sources that have a simple explanation for his illness in high school which is very common: mono (I guess the British call this "glandular disease"). I'd have to do more research to understand how Harding and others came to make this assumption -- maybe it was "out there." Or maybe it was just a reasonable conclusion. Mononucleosis is common, and can take a teenager out of school for weeks -- months. It's infectious, so they have to be kept at home. They are tired and listless and basically just have to let it run its course. He didn't like the school system -- which had turned its "spiked back on me" and he got his GED -- which is easy enough to get although I have to wonder when he got it. (In New York State, he could not have gotten it at age 16, they would make him go to 18).
Of course, you can enter college at any time to take an individual course. I did that at 16 and so did my kids in our state, but other states might have other rules. So he simultaneously could have been going to HS or getting his GED, which is a joke in most cases (show up for a few weeks of courses, write the exam if you are sentient, pass). Meanwhile, he was taking a few college courses and then just sort of drifted along, topping off his resume to make it look more coherent than it was.
What's amazing is how easily Harding is fooled into thinking Snowden is a genius. IT skills do not represent genius. If anything, they can represent simply the ability to do a lot of rote learning and boring, mundane, repetitive tasks particularly well. "Genius" is not the word to use about someone who can code or run systems. They might be geniuses if they have particularly good ideas or solutions or inventions. But they could also just merely seem smart because they've learned a set of rote routines that others haven't. I really think people are scared too much by IT and don't realize how a lot of it is just a lot of money business that anyone can learn if they sit down and apply themselves. Like anything -- piano, tax preparation, gardening -- you can have a knack for it or not, and that might help, or not. But it's amazing how the entire population is growing more "genius" like in their ability to run computers.
Example: the other day I was in the lobby and two maintenance men in my building were chatting. They are the kind of people that "professional" society might look down on as "working class" and as "minorities." I knew them and knew them to be quite capable. These men who might seem like only capable of taking out the garbage and sweeping snow were having a sophisticated conversation. Which operating system was installed on the phone? Which app had which capacity? Which settings should be applied for privacy under "device access" for Facebook? What was the better router to have at home, and was Netflix a good option or perhaps Google Play? The point is, people buy gadgets, and by hook or by crook, they learn to use them on their own. Without geeks. They aren't that hard. They get sophisticated in comparing them, using them, trouble-shooting them. They aren't stupid. They have the sort of conversations that the geeks had 15 years ago and thought they were terribly "genius". No one knew what an app was or an IOS back then if they weren't a geek; no one messed about with routers on their own; now they do, even if they sweep snow and unclog sinks for a living.
You can't stop this, although of course geeks like to go on fetishizing their knowledge and imagining they continue to be the sole owners of it, even with their goofy "information wants to be free" sectarian notions they mainly apply to other people's intellectual property.
The rote learning that maladjusted young men acquire as "lore" on the Internet -- they pick it up, they repeat it, they hack at things until they get it running -- this isn't really "knowledge". It's very piece meal and incomplete along with their own immature development which often seems to arrest at the stage where they should have learned empathy and didn't. Eventually, this will get integrated better. It's not now.
As someone I know put it very well about a certain number of these people, "they're the intersection of libertarianism and Asperger's." The Asperger's patient with his love of both soothing repetitious routines and with his ability to obsess about one line of work for hours on end is perfect for IT work. But no one has ever said Snowden had Asperger's. Just narcissistic tendencies.
Harding seems to have failed to grasp that someone who stole the test and passed it them "with flying colours" isn't bright, but devious. That doesn't make him a genius, if that's how he got the genius' job.
As for the claim that Snowden is "a Republican," that's just ignorance of American politics. Ron Paul libertarians could barely be called Republicans these days -- there isn't a single feature of Republicanism in its conservative history that Snowden would share. He's a technolibertarian -- except when he's a technocommunist or a technoanarchist.
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