Withholding stars until you bring back the original tags. This is a political film and it needs political tags.

You need to get with it, Cena.

The Bern is over, feel the Nicolas Raaaaaage!

It's not over. Even if he loses, he created change, and pushed Hillary more to the left, even though she's still a tool of big banks, just like all the tools who voted for her and said Bernie couldn't do it.

Can't hear you, Nicolas Cage is smiling in my soul as I use this bowl of boiling Ocean Spray Cranapple to steam my lingum.

What's a Hillary? Is that like a pillory that sits above sea level?

What were the tags? "Limited hangout"? "Learned helplessness"?

The tags are the same as they were, Cena be trollin'. All I demand for my political involvement is the Nicolas Cage tag.

Is "learned helplessness" a tag?

Withholding stars until Shailene Woodley has my baby.

Probably not. I'd say we should make "learned helplessness" a tag, but then again, what can we as individuals possibly do to change that?

"Learned helplessness" sounds like the opposite of "Nicolas Cage."

...

Though the word "cage" is involved.

These issues are complex.

Well, too complex for us of course, but hopefully some Hollywood millionaires will be kind enough to tell us what to do next.

I am so distraught that I never got Atlas Shrugged 3 that I am willing to give this movie a chance to fill that place, but only because of Nicolas Cage.

Besides, we all know the script will be line item edited by the Pentagon to be shittier than it would have already been.

Oh, of course, that goes without saying. A hard-hitting, subversive motion picture WITHOUT DoD and CIA meddling in order to make the film best serve the power elite's current agendas? Perish the thought.

Hopefully this film includes a lot of hand-wringing about terrorism, or better yet, ends with Chris Kyle shooting Edward Snowden in the nuts.

Chris Kyle killing him would be like Michael Bay making up new characters to do historic things done by real people in Pearl Harbor.

Various NSA people and CIA folks have already said they want to murder him. There is no point retconning their bloodlust, just use one of them.

What are the odds this movie has a magic wormhole generating spark plug? I really need Nicolas Cage to have that in this movie, and stare at it maniacally as it sparks and generates pure raw liberty.

Of course they've said they want to murder him. If there's one thing that CIA-folks who want to murder someone do, it's tell the entire world they want to murder that someone (and then not do it).

This is why we need Chris Kyle to come in and shoot Snowden in the nuts. We can't have our hero evade a global manhunt and live like a rockstar in Russia, with his nerdily handsome face gracing magazine covers the world over. That plot makes no sense! What we need is for our hero to get treated the same way as any other whistleblower; the scandal gets buried (Chelsea Manning, for example) and the traitor gets quietly eliminated. Preferably by Chris Kyle.

But Chris Kyle is dead, how do they... OH! OH OH OH!!! What if Nicolas Cage is a vampire and has sired Chris Kyle into a super undead vampire "snyper(TM)", like the police girl from Van Helsing!?

Oh wow, I fucking love this movie already!

It makes about as much sense as anything since the PNAC, so... sure! Go for it! Vampire Nicholas Cage and Vampire-Baby Chris Kyle; I'm sold, make it happen.

Oh yeah, that's the name, C. Manning.

It looks like the entire film has been Enhanced.

Oliver Stone's : Interview With the Empire!

THANKS FOR THE SPOILER, MEME

Well, vampires or not, I'm going to withhold stars until we see David Lynch's "Sibel", or maybe Wes Anderson's "Casolaro".

Yeah, I really thought Stone would do a better job than what appears to be an extended edition of CSI. "Here", sez snowden, "Just press the enhance button and you can see my girlfriend's nipples."

It's such a great story, I hope the movie is less treacly than the trailer.

It'd be nice, since that was the last watchable thing Stone did, but I think that Oliver Stone has since been buried under mountains of cocaine, quick-edits, and self-importance.

People don't need to know more about this. People need to do more about this.

I hate to agree with the cynics, but the Snowden leaks have produced absolutely nothing in the way of benefits so far. The leaks simply confirmed things that most people already knew, resulting in no policy changes, no criminal charges, no effective opposition. Instead, all they've done is make the reality of Big Brother a meme - conditioning the masses to glumly accept what Hollywood has spent the last couple decades telling us would come - while making people like Greenwald and Snowden very rich and very famous.

It must be nice to have a mainstream Hollywood movie made about you. Maybe Snowden can watch it with his stripper girlfriend, while the rest of us learn that this is just the way things are now.

Oh, it has had more effect than most such efforts. Perhaps the most important one being the acceleration of the adoption of widespread encryption. You forget that before Snowden, Hopey was running around castigating the Chinese for a good many intrusions that likely originated domestically.

It does underscore the limits to such actions. Expecting actual changes to the agencies is wishful thinking. That's never gonna happen. How could it? It's not like there is real civilian oversight of these agencies to begin with. Hell, the principle targets of malicious use of the data _are_ the civilian authorities. Read up on that old tranny J. Edgar Hoover for how that works.

So you concede that nothing tangible happened, but - what? The Snowden leaks were some kind of "moral" victory? Because ONLY NOW are we thinking about encryption - notwithstanding the fact that encryption had been the default since Internet day one, and weakening encryption has, and continues to be, the modus operandi of everyone from the alphabet-soupers to Al Gore to Mark Zuckerburg? Or that, thanks to players like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, that is a battle which has already been lost?

Homer, it's clear that people need to know more about this.

:D

FTFY:
It's always bothered me that Snowden /judgemental rant.

well, what acts of fortitude would you have done, had you been in his position, you fucking asshat?

Goodness gracious, Cog. He's not Jesus Christ, you know? He should be rotting in a dog cage with that wacky tranny version of EvilHomer? ( I don't even remember his name offhand, which tells you something right there ).

He played the game better than anyone before him, and he's still free, as much as you can be while being hunted by every 3 letter agency in the book. Russia was definitely not part of the plan, but all other doors were closed so there he be.

Chelsea Manning, I mentioned her above. And funnily enough, I was actually going to suggest the same thing! To wit: Get some info that might actually be incriminating. Dump the info, all of it, and don't hide your stuff behind a million-dollar paywall. Then get locked in a dog cage and ignored by the media - except, of course when they want to do some soft news piece about transexuals in the military, because being a transexual is what is important to know about Chelsea Manning, not why she is rotting in a dog cage.

Anyway, I think we need a "strategy of tension" tag now, too.

I'm allowed one Crazy Card, and I'm playing it on Snowden.

I won't question your Crazy Cards!

I don't see how what the NSA did is changed by the whistleblower's degree of personal martyrdom.

(Snowden looks up from his computer, enthused and inspired.)

SNOWDEN (gleeful)
I know... WE'LL PUT ON A SHOW!

scrubmuffin

Do you think Snowden's comments about leaving it to others to decide what to leak are disingenuous in some way?

I'll go with you on Greenwald. He's committed some fairly shitty journalism sins.

Also because this looks like Netforce.