Finally, Some More Incoherent Trooferism From Naomi Wolf!

You may remember Naomi Wolf from such crackpot conspiracy theories as “I will assert without evidence that crackdowns on Occupy must be driven by the federal government, because how could such a thing be done by our benevolent local overlords?”  Well, she’s back, with an even better one: Edward Snowden is a stooge for the security state.

Let us turn to the…not evidence.  Arguments?  No…sequences of words that are in some cases empty tautologies that could prove that anyone is guilty of anything (“Snowden can speak in complete sentences!”) and in some cases are too completely irrelevant and/or internally inconsistent to qualify as tautologies.  For example, apparently if you can slut-shame his girlfriend he’s probably working for the NSA:

e) In stories that intelligence services are advancing (I would call the prostitutes-with-the-secret-service such a story), there are great sexy or sex-related mediagenic visuals that keep being dropped in, to keep media focus on the issue. That very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press…really, she happens to pole-dance? Dan Ellsberg’s wife was and is very beautiful and doubtless a good dancer but somehow she took a statelier role as his news story unfolded…

Where are the sex-ay internet pictures of Daniel Ellsburg’s hot wife from 1971, I ask you? And when has the media ever published pictures of attractive women if they did not have the highest level of relevance to a story? I rest my case! Also, I’m afraid pole-dancing is, like the clitoral orgasm, not evolutionarily advantageous.

This point is perhaps the definitive one — it appears merely circular on the surface, only it’s too transparently wrong to actually be tautological:

d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’

I’ll let Scocca handle this one:

This is why our surveillance apparatus operates using secret orders that are secretly overseen by a closed court, whose decisions are classified. This is why the technology and communications companies cooperating with the surveillance program are forbidden to acknowledge that the surveillance program exists. This is why the Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress about what the surveillance program collected. Because they all wanted you to know about it.

I also enjoyed the bit about how Snowden isn’t acting like a whisteblower because he draws attention to itself…unlike Julian Assange.

But, really, the whole Wolf post is a masterpiece — no individual point makes the slightest shred of sense, and whole adds up to even less than the sum of the parts.