It all sounds good at first glance. And then one notices the source: Scientists? No. A public employees labour Union. And where do they spend their political funds? Opposing the incumbent party. It all boils down to the people with the political agenda having the loudest voices.
So you're willing to ignore the Conservative anti-science movement because you're rabidly anti-union? Wow, you sure have a lot to teach us about politics!
Conservatives don't want the truth to be heard, they'll gag scientists, mod down slashdotters, whatever; the important thing is to keep people in the dark so their scams can keep going unchallenged.
Guy gets famous, women from his past come forward and accuse him of rape etc. Do YOU understand the sequence?
I understand that you do not have the facts right (not women from before he was famous). And I see that you contradict me with bullshit supposition you made up... eat all the shit you want, but don't come vomit up at me in slashdot: STFU and get informed instead of spreading your ignorance.
If Canadians were aware that their government was anti-science then it wouldn't be newsworthy that a science union put up a website raising awareness about the way the Canadian government is treating scientists.
I'm a Canadian and I didn't know - now I do.
I knew. I think it's newsworthy. Your ignorance doesn't mean something isn't widely known, it just means you're ignorant.
In the case of the mandatory long form census, do I think it is worth threatening my fellow citizen with jail time and fines for not filling in a form on how many hours of unpaid housework they did? Absolutely not. Yet apparently many 'scientists' think they should. Apparently it is 'scientific' that government use force against its citizens to collect data for scientists to use. It would not be mandatory otherwise.
The fact that they see this whole process as 'scientific' and cannot be questioned is really quite absurd.
You know what's absurd? That you don't know what "scientific" means. "Scientific inquiry is generally intended to be as objective as possible, to reduce biased interpretations of results. " If everyone is threatened with jail time if they don't fill out the form, then you don't have a self-selecting group of people willing to fill out the form.
It really is like religion.
Oh FUCK no! Religion doesn't fly planes, religion didn't cure polio: There's your goddamn problem, you're too fucking stupid to understand the difference between reality and fiction, you think science and religion are the same.
I'd call out this article for more than nit picking. Aside from your point where he conflates evolution, TFA is rife with sweepingly broad statements. Just because some bacteria secrete serotonin doesn't mean that they can make people happy.
Right, it's because some bacteria excrete ethanol that they make people happy.
Because the US particularly cares whether Assange lives in Sweden?
"to gain the freedom of speech protection offered by Swedish laws" right off the fucking summary, top of this very page, you have no excuse.
If the Swedish government is in the US's pocket like plenty of people seem to believe, you'd think that they would strongly favor Assange living there (all the better to trump up fake rape charges, of course.)
"media reports of rape and molestation accusations against Assange at the end of August, two days after he had applied for a residence permit." That one is from the fucking article, so you almost have an excuse not to understand the sequence of event. Almost.
Alternatively, you could go with the more mundane but rational-seeming explanation, which is that Sweden doesn't want Assange because he draws a lot of attention to himself and gets complaints from the local women.
Yes, that's why they sullied his name just days after he applied for legal protection above and beyond what Australia has to offer him. They get him a lot of attention and then he doesn't get protection because of all the attention: Ta-daaa!
WikiLeaks does not speak about upcoming releases dates, indeed, with very rare exceptions we do not communicate any specific information about upcoming releases
The motive isn't "state-funded propaganda", it is a bit more subtle than that.
Yes, that's the one!
The Act never defines nor uses the word "propaganda". The result of the amendments to the Act means that the US taxpayer is not permitted to know how the Voice Of America (and its successor agencies) operate or what their programming content was, as was noted in 1967 by the Stanton Commission report noted above. The act insulates the American public from government-sponsored information and broadcasting directed at audiences beyond America's borders, the only industrialized democracy to do this
You're right, "government-sponsored information and broadcasting" is more subtle than "propaganda".
I skipped ahead to see what they were on about, they act like taking the kid from the sidewalk to the ambulance on the other side of the street divider is "taking him closer to the Israeli post" and that means they aren't afraid of getting shot... because the bullet wouldn't get all the way across the street??? The fuck kind of logic is that? I watched a bit more of the same kind of reasoning and gave up.
Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.
Defending tens of thousands of real casualties by ranting about the mere possibility that someone might die, can't really rule it out, at some point it could happen, maybe; that proves beyond a doubt that you are a soulless moron. Don't talk about morality: you have none.
AIUI, those documents contain the names of people in Afghanistan who are giving information to the US. Publishing the documents without redacting the names tells the Taliban exactly who to kill. Does that answer your question?
Publishing the names without redacting them WOULD HAVE told the Taliban who to kill. But they DID REDACT AS MANY NAMES AS THEY COULD.
Sorry we didn't redact your name and they killed you. We did the best we could...
That has never happened, but there has been tens of thousands of deaths recently. You should learn to tell the difference between "a person or two could die maybe at some point possibly" and real people who really died by the tens of thousands.
there is a third option: getting those documents, keeping your mouth shut while you do any editing you want to do, then announcing them to the world.
If you do that they get to say you did secret things to the documents and are untrustworthy. They get to know by their spying that you have them and move with their countermeasures without the world knowing there is something that could motivate them to do so, etc.
Look, once you decide to expose the emperor's nakedness, you're gonna get flack no matter what you do; so maximum openness is their choice for optimal behavior, and I agree. You're allowed to feel differently, of course.
Even you are implicitly admitting they did not succeed in redacting them all, and as a consequence, Wikileaks told the Taliban who to kill.
Who to kill? Really? No: not really. Not in reality, but only in the FUD of the pentagon, so you won't pay attention to the thousands and thousands of real people they really killed, so they can keep killing more with your consent and unwavering, unquestioning support.
the funny thing is, it used to be the opposite - not so long ago, it was the soviets who's intricate schemes and manipulations made the CIA look like a bunch of jocks that couldn't do anything without a sniper rifle... or at least that's my impression from 30-th hand accounts of things that happened long before i was born.
Well, it all depends on the quality of the agents and leaders in place at any given time; it's not a permanent quality, it's more like seasons, changing in cycles. There's a rise to sophistication, then a decadence, a dark time, a renaissance...
I'd like to point out that the ambiguous "glow in the dark" quality mentioned here refers to the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a protein which exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to blue light. This isn't the good kind of glow in the dark where it produces its own light, it's the inferior "black light makes it glow" variety.
The US has long become more sophisticated than that. They understand that if you create a martyr, you could still be hearing about it two thousand years later.
Wait a fucking minute... are we getting blamed for that now, too??
You take that description as "blame"? The bias and prejudice is all yours.
watch the videos and make their own judgments on people. It may not line up with yours, but that doesn't mean they're a sheep.
Take this for example from Assange: "This is likely to cause a huge backlash against Moneybookers. Craven behaviour in relation to the US government is unlikely to be seen sympathetically." Textbook egotistical. A company decided to stop doing business with WikiLeaks because of the actions the organization took. Assange believes he's so important that everyone else will jump away from Moneybookers because they won't deal with WikiLeaks.
There's nothing egotistical about stating that people won't like knowing that their money can be withheld from them because a country away from where they have their money doesn't like them. Your examples show me that you are rationalizing your prejudice and seeing what you want to see, not that you are making your own judgment.
There is more to the thing with Amnesty International then what you make it out to be, too. And why aren't they being reported on? Is it because the media is an arm of the military-industrial-congress complex, or because Assange is egotistical? Why aren't the other pictures of Abu Grahib shown inthe media, is it because the rape of a teenage boy isn't horrible enough to report on, or because the media agreed not to tell the world what really happened there?
when he starts picking on nations known to remove people who offend them. He picks on a target that cannot afford to take him down. While the US has its flaws it is far far from being the worst of the lot when it comes to the strong countries of this world. The difference is that most of the others would have no fear of dealing with him.
The wikileaks people are not picking exclusively on the U.S.A., and they have an acute sense of the kind of security is required when people do what they do (piss off powerful people). I don't know if there's polonium heading for his shin or PCBs headed for his soup, but this won't stop at false rape charges and blacklisting their funding.
What did they edit out of the video that was wrong to take out?
The unedited video shows that at least one man in the group that got murdered was armed with an assualt rifle. No guns are visible in the edited version.
Ah, now THAT is interesting; do you know when in the video I can go look for that?
Slashdot Mirror
It all sounds good at first glance.
And then one notices the source:
Scientists? No.
A public employees labour Union.
And where do they spend their political funds?
Opposing the incumbent party.
It all boils down to the people with the political agenda having the loudest voices.
So you're willing to ignore the Conservative anti-science movement because you're rabidly anti-union? Wow, you sure have a lot to teach us about politics!
Why is that a Troll?
Conservatives don't want the truth to be heard, they'll gag scientists, mod down slashdotters, whatever; the important thing is to keep people in the dark so their scams can keep going unchallenged.
Saying "war is bad" is like saying "guns are bad."
No, saying "murder is bad" is like saying "war is bad".
Saying "canons are bad" would be like saying "guns are bad".
war is bad, and you're a piece of shit for disagreeing, for replying with a broken metaphor, for pulling a godwin...
Guy gets famous, women from his past come forward and accuse him of rape etc. Do YOU understand the sequence?
I understand that you do not have the facts right (not women from before he was famous). And I see that you contradict me with bullshit supposition you made up... eat all the shit you want, but don't come vomit up at me in slashdot: STFU and get informed instead of spreading your ignorance.
If Canadians were aware that their government was anti-science then it wouldn't be newsworthy that a science union put up a website raising awareness about the way the Canadian government is treating scientists.
I'm a Canadian and I didn't know - now I do.
I knew. I think it's newsworthy. Your ignorance doesn't mean something isn't widely known, it just means you're ignorant.
In the case of the mandatory long form census, do I think it is worth threatening my fellow citizen with jail time and fines for not filling in a form on how many hours of unpaid housework they did?
Absolutely not. Yet apparently many 'scientists' think they should.
Apparently it is 'scientific' that government use force against its citizens to collect data for scientists to use. It would not be mandatory otherwise.
The fact that they see this whole process as 'scientific' and cannot be questioned is really quite absurd.
You know what's absurd? That you don't know what "scientific" means.
"Scientific inquiry is generally intended to be as objective as possible, to reduce biased interpretations of results. "
If everyone is threatened with jail time if they don't fill out the form, then you don't have a self-selecting group of people willing to fill out the form.
It really is like religion.
Oh FUCK no! Religion doesn't fly planes, religion didn't cure polio: There's your goddamn problem, you're too fucking stupid to understand the difference between reality and fiction, you think science and religion are the same.
I'd call out this article for more than nit picking. Aside from your point where he conflates evolution, TFA is rife with sweepingly broad statements. Just because some bacteria secrete serotonin doesn't mean that they can make people happy.
Right, it's because some bacteria excrete ethanol that they make people happy.
if the US really could control every other nation on the planet like people on slashdot think
You say the USA is a boogieman, and you prove it with a strawman. *sigh*
So far he has been safe in Australia where he has the advantage of citizenship.
Australia is in a competition with Canada for "best lapdog of the USA", he's as safe there as a peaceful protester at a G20 summit.
Because the US particularly cares whether Assange lives in Sweden?
"to gain the freedom of speech protection offered by Swedish laws" right off the fucking summary, top of this very page, you have no excuse.
If the Swedish government is in the US's pocket like plenty of people seem to believe, you'd think that they would strongly favor Assange living there (all the better to trump up fake rape charges, of course.)
"media reports of rape and molestation accusations against Assange at the end of August, two days after he had applied for a residence permit."
That one is from the fucking article, so you almost have an excuse not to understand the sequence of event. Almost.
Alternatively, you could go with the more mundane but rational-seeming explanation, which is that Sweden doesn't want Assange because he draws a lot of attention to himself and gets complaints from the local women.
Yes, that's why they sullied his name just days after he applied for legal protection above and beyond what Australia has to offer him. They get him a lot of attention and then he doesn't get protection because of all the attention: Ta-daaa!
Assange instead chose to use the information as a weapon to advance his personal views about the wars.
War is bad. THIS SHOULDN'T BE CONTROVERSIAL, fuck.
In so doing, the wikileaks concept has lost much of its credibility with a large part of the public
Yes, the warmongers, and those receptive to the propaganda of the warmongers.
WikiLeaks does not speak about upcoming releases dates, indeed, with very rare exceptions we do not communicate any specific information about upcoming releases
Julian Assange
Editor-in-chief
http://rixstep.com/1/1/20101018,00.shtml
I think you're referring to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith-Mundt_Act
The motive isn't "state-funded propaganda", it is a bit more subtle than that.
Yes, that's the one!
The Act never defines nor uses the word "propaganda". The result of the amendments to the Act means that the US taxpayer is not permitted to know how the Voice Of America (and its successor agencies) operate or what their programming content was, as was noted in 1967 by the Stanton Commission report noted above. The act insulates the American public from government-sponsored information and broadcasting directed at audiences beyond America's borders, the only industrialized democracy to do this
You're right, "government-sponsored information and broadcasting" is more subtle than "propaganda".
What about all the "news" stations that showed what Pallywood serves up?
Pallywood
I skipped ahead to see what they were on about, they act like taking the kid from the sidewalk to the ambulance on the other side of the street divider is "taking him closer to the Israeli post" and that means they aren't afraid of getting shot... because the bullet wouldn't get all the way across the street??? The fuck kind of logic is that? I watched a bit more of the same kind of reasoning and gave up.
Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.
Defending tens of thousands of real casualties by ranting about the mere possibility that someone might die, can't really rule it out, at some point it could happen, maybe; that proves beyond a doubt that you are a soulless moron. Don't talk about morality: you have none.
AIUI, those documents contain the names of people in Afghanistan who are giving information to the US. Publishing the documents without redacting the names tells the Taliban exactly who to kill. Does that answer your question?
Publishing the names without redacting them WOULD HAVE told the Taliban who to kill. But they DID REDACT AS MANY NAMES AS THEY COULD.
Sorry we didn't redact your name and they killed you. We did the best we could...
That has never happened, but there has been tens of thousands of deaths recently. You should learn to tell the difference between "a person or two could die maybe at some point possibly" and real people who really died by the tens of thousands.
voters are stupid and must be told how to vote. At least I think that's what they believe
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Edward Bernays
Propaganda (1928), p. 37
there is a third option: getting those documents, keeping your mouth shut while you do any editing you want to do, then announcing them to the world.
If you do that they get to say you did secret things to the documents and are untrustworthy. They get to know by their spying that you have them and move with their countermeasures without the world knowing there is something that could motivate them to do so, etc.
Look, once you decide to expose the emperor's nakedness, you're gonna get flack no matter what you do; so maximum openness is their choice for optimal behavior, and I agree. You're allowed to feel differently, of course.
"AS MANY NAMES AS THEY COULD."
Even you are implicitly admitting they did not succeed in redacting them all, and as a consequence, Wikileaks told the Taliban who to kill.
Who to kill? Really? No: not really. Not in reality, but only in the FUD of the pentagon, so you won't pay attention to the thousands and thousands of real people they really killed, so they can keep killing more with your consent and unwavering, unquestioning support.
the funny thing is, it used to be the opposite - not so long ago, it was the soviets who's intricate schemes and manipulations made the CIA look like a bunch of jocks that couldn't do anything without a sniper rifle... or at least that's my impression from 30-th hand accounts of things that happened long before i was born.
Well, it all depends on the quality of the agents and leaders in place at any given time; it's not a permanent quality, it's more like seasons, changing in cycles. There's a rise to sophistication, then a decadence, a dark time, a renaissance...
I'd like to point out that the ambiguous "glow in the dark" quality mentioned here refers to the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a protein which exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to blue light. This isn't the good kind of glow in the dark where it produces its own light, it's the inferior "black light makes it glow" variety.
Wait a fucking minute... are we getting blamed for that now, too??
You take that description as "blame"? The bias and prejudice is all yours.
watch the videos and make their own judgments on people. It may not line up with yours, but that doesn't mean they're a sheep.
Take this for example from Assange: "This is likely to cause a huge backlash against Moneybookers. Craven behaviour in relation to the US government is unlikely to be seen sympathetically." Textbook egotistical. A company decided to stop doing business with WikiLeaks because of the actions the organization took. Assange believes he's so important that everyone else will jump away from Moneybookers because they won't deal with WikiLeaks.
There's nothing egotistical about stating that people won't like knowing that their money can be withheld from them because a country away from where they have their money doesn't like them.
Your examples show me that you are rationalizing your prejudice and seeing what you want to see, not that you are making your own judgment.
There is more to the thing with Amnesty International then what you make it out to be, too. And why aren't they being reported on? Is it because the media is an arm of the military-industrial-congress complex, or because Assange is egotistical? Why aren't the other pictures of Abu Grahib shown inthe media, is it because the rape of a teenage boy isn't horrible enough to report on, or because the media agreed not to tell the world what really happened there?
when he starts picking on nations known to remove people who offend them. He picks on a target that cannot afford to take him down. While the US has its flaws it is far far from being the worst of the lot when it comes to the strong countries of this world. The difference is that most of the others would have no fear of dealing with him.
The wikileaks people are not picking exclusively on the U.S.A., and they have an acute sense of the kind of security is required when people do what they do (piss off powerful people). I don't know if there's polonium heading for his shin or PCBs headed for his soup, but this won't stop at false rape charges and blacklisting their funding.
What did they edit out of the video that was wrong to take out?
The unedited video shows that at least one man in the group that got murdered was armed with an assualt rifle. No guns are visible in the edited version.
Ah, now THAT is interesting; do you know when in the video I can go look for that?