Malcolm Gladwell can suck my big hairy balls.
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He repackages and renames concepts everyone already knows, and pretends he came up with them, often butchering them in the process. Glad I could help.
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While I agree that Snowden is poor excuse of a whistleblower, it’s not for the reasons Gladwell uses. Oliver Stone had to lay on several layers of utter fiction in order to make him seem mildly heroic.
He should’a been an economist!
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Citation needed. Ellsworth and many others (including me) disagree with you. The linked EFF article makes a good case if you read it.
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Excuse me! The Just So Stories were written by someone who was a literary genius - even if many of his ideas are considered imperialist nowadays - and I don’t think they have ever been out of print. If Gladwell is still being read 114 years after publication, well, I won’t be there to be surprised - but in principle I would be.
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Malcolm Gladwell is like partying too much, your own fiction, and overbearing political righteousness: something to fall in love with during your first year or two in college and then grow out of as you realize the world is more complicated than that.
Don’t forget broken-windows policing.
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I want this to be a euphemism but can’t quite decide what it ought to represent.
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Perhaps I’m taking a joke seriously here, but “Just So Stories” as used here are a slight on the persons who present without nuance a shabbily constructed narrative and expect it to be taken as objective fact (and sadly they often are, for entrenched examples of this beyond media wankers see the sham field of Evo-Psych), it is not in any way a criticism of the works of Kipling 
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Don’t worry; roughly four thousand years worth of philosophers have had the same problem, so you are in good company. They have explored a considerable variety of options, though, some of which would definitely make ‘ontological reassignment’ a very, very, euphemistic expression.
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Probably, but the fact that you perceived it suggests not.
Almost certain you’re blaming a buoy for the Great Atlantic Shinola Current, generated when the first Briton to travel without an ice bridge declared ‘By Ursa, at least I’m not awash in the Mediterranean anymore,’ heralding ages of walking, fishing and sorting moss and ice for restroom use. Bidet ahoy! Soap north-nor’east 3 leagues!
20-tabber TFA appreciated! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/whistleblowers-dont-need-elite-credentials-help-protect-us-government-overreach Links to House Permanent Committee on Intelligence follow disdain for p{Senate # NY Review of Books}…
Saying he’s a Challah with shredded coconut and goji berry aspic and garnish seems a little chummy, how about just like seeing UnderArmor with the Cruciferous AF theme? Which is to say I disagree vehemently that he reaches conclusions in the manner of writing the front page Recommendation (and wish to send up flares if that is the readers’ exact case.) Procedural oversight is being called out (i.e. the NSA’s duty to recreate a Democracy-free informatic condition) and marked up in the manner of having the original Xerox Repair Division come out during 3 days of flash media mirroring and ask loudly ‘is there something wrong here?’ No; yes but bring your great-grandkids.
ff>Ontological reassignment.
From ‘eidetic, keep away from food’ past ‘fluid unclarity’ to ‘plenitude’ or ‘factitious dasein?’
(Picturing ‘leaky leviathan’ here. Also movie titles that retain colon as a written component)
[sorry, pls. fix Amazon link and/or its self-reference?] http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=60550431
http://www.mypapercraft.net/zettai-boei-leviathan-papercraft/5679/
https://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-Last-Defense-Brittney-Karbowski/dp/B00OWHZ94Y
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Mr. Pincus’s main criticism seems to be:
A real whistleblower would have selected the documents to be published, made certain that they didn’t harm security and remained in the country to face the consequences of his actions.
Let’s go through that assertion by assertion.
A real whistleblower would have selected the documents to be published…
Snowden isn’t a storyteller. He’s an analyst. He doesn’t know what pieces he needs to make the story understandable to the public. And he couldn’t hold a back-and-forth conversation with a reporter to determine that, because he certainly would have gotten caught. So, he took everything relevant to the allegations that he was making, and let someone who he deemed to be trustworthy who was a storyteller make the decision about what should be published. And such decisions were, indeed, made: as of 2013, only 1% of the leaked documents have been published.
A real whistleblower would have […] made certain that [the documents] didn’t harm security…
Well, let’s see how much the leak has affected national security…
Well, that was informative.
Oh, well, surely “harm” is an objective word that can’t be used to twist the narrative so that he couldn’t have released anything without “harming security”…
Snowden, defending himself during an exclusive NBC News interview with Brian Williams, said that the government had never shown “a single individual who’s been harmed in any way” by his disclosures.
But Michael McFaul, who left the ambassadorship earlier this year to teach at Stanford University, said that the revelations had damaged American diplomatic relationships with friendly countries who were upset by National Security Agency surveillance.
“That’s damage to the United States,” McFaul said. “If you’re a patriot, you don’t want to damage our relationships with our allies.”
And, finally…
A real whistleblower would have […] remained in the country to face the consequences of his actions.
When the Espionage Act forbids defendants from using “public interest” or “no harm done” as defenses, why should he return? His conviction is pretty much guaranteed; why should he be forced to choose imprisonment over exile? Why do his actions after the leak make him a “bad” whistleblower?
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Pincus is a tool of the intelligence community (and I mean that in the most negative of senses). He’s bought and sold establishment and would say anything that the government wanted. Sorry, I believe Ellsworth and other folks over him.
@nimelennar covered the rest.
When they allow Snowden to make an actual defense in a public court that allows a jury to decide if he’s guilty or not based on whether he did public service, he’ll face a court. He’s spoken about this at length. The Espionage Act doesn’t allow for that. He’d wind up in a cell next to Manning even if a jury decided he’d done the country a service. As even people in the current administration have noted, Snowden exposed actual illegalities. (If you want a list, read the EFF piece.) Snowden is a hero.
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There’s a reason I didn’t capitalize it: in 114 years, the idea has evolved into a more general concept.
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I know;I just used it as a hook to compare the likely duration of Gladwell’s fame with Kipling’s. The joke in Kipling’s title is that the stories are supposed to satisfy children, but the adults who read them know that they are not true.
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