HN user
Always nice when a newly registered account pops up talking of shills and Citizenfour.
A habit of yours, I see. For all you know, I'm a pink pony who devours dickbutts and pukes rainbows; deal with it.
Now go back to the original text, which you can find here[1], and see if you can bring yourself to talk about the content. You can do it; we believe in you.
> These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.
Is it really like this in American universities these days? I'm stunned.
Please remain stunned. Yes, there are actually teachers out there who care about how their students/audiences feel and experience as a result of choices made in the syllabus.
Please remain stunned for confusing, intentionally, a trigger warning with book burning.
Your criticisms:
1. William McNeilly is an inexperienced trainee,
2. William McNeilly is not preceded by other whistleblowers from the same field,
3. William McNeilly is a whistleblower who intended to blow the whistle,
4. William McNeilly does not have good writing skills,
5. William McNeilly cannot prove that the world will end.
You need to carefully investigate your own motivations behind these criticisms.
According to this logic, the only legitimate whistleblowers are those who have been in their industry for 15+ years, have the writing skills of a well-versed journalist, and have blown the whistle after a series of other whistleblowers (with the above qualifications, of course) from the same industry.
This is piss poor (or convenient, your choice) criteria to dismiss whistleblower revelations. It is however an excellent way of reframing the issue by focusing on the whistleblower rather than the issue itself, effectively avoiding the debate on the revelations and their implications.
My advice is that you watch Citizenfour, in which a lengthy scene describes whistleblowers' and journalists' valid anxieties and experience with shills, commentators, and the public, all of whom are more interested, for a multiplicity of reasons, in delegitimizing a whistleblower's persona rather than the content of the leaks s/he provided.