Collating a bunch of content you didn't create (say, the kind of stuff people send in to Post Secret, as an example) doesn't make you an author any more than there is an "author" of the Yellow Pages.
Granted, these guys didn't merely collate a bunch of crap and slam it together in a coffee table book. Having not read the book, but only some of the excerpts, it appears that they wrote about going out and doing this innocuous crap. I guess that's a little better, but still . . . meh.
The government, of course, hides behind the claim that "we're primarily concerned with the safety of our troops and of civilians" while refusing to accept the offer to help redact information. If the safety of those people was such a concern to them, they would take any opportunity to redact those names given, even if it comes at some sacrifice to their principals (aiding Wikileaks in redaction).
Why should the Pentagon help with the redaction? I seriously cannot understand this attitude - that's like blaming me for being robbed when a criminal holds a gun on my while another holds a knife to my wife's throat to force me to give up the combination to my safe.
The Pentagon should help with the redaction, because they're the ones claiming that the information puts people at risk. If they're so concerned, they should do what they can to protect those people, instead of having a stubborn pissing contest where they either get everything they want or SOMEONE ELSE pays the price. It only further illustrates that the safety of those people is absolutely no concern of theirs (if it's even a concern at all and not just fabricated). It's a pawn in their waged war against Wikileaks.
They're just using it as a flimsy piece of their argument, the same way people throw "but we have to protect against terrorists!" at you every time they want to take away more of your liberty and spend more of your money.
While I clearly have concern over the safety of persons who may be innocent, it's also vital to note that Assange does not (presumably) work for the government in any way. If they don't want information to be leaked, they should protect their information in the first place.
I bet you blame rape victims for being provocatively dressed and believe they 'actually wanted it' too.
I'm not going to waste time on your lame "win debate by accusing the other person of some form of racism or sexism" school of discussion.
It's probably a poor analogy, but it's more like you instructing your children never to drink under age. Then one of your kids calls you from a party and says that they had a bunch of drinks and can't get home, because they're too drunk to drive. Instead of saying "I'm angry, but I care about my child's safety, so I'm going to go pick them up and drive them home and we'll figure the rest out tomorrow", the parent says "I TOLD YOU NOT TO DRINK!" and hanging up.
Rather than shelving your anger to address the more immediate safety, you dig in your heels and stand on your supposed principals and those things you supposedly care so much about to begin with be damned.
My thoughts, too. I'm ugly as fuck and I've had more than that.
Then again, I guess it's all relative. I was with a girl who had been with about five dozen people before we met and she consider 30-50 to be totally normal for a girl by about the age of 30 (and to be fair, it might not be that far off since women obviously have a lot less resistance than men in hooking up).
Of course, people are afraid of seeming out of the normal range, so women deflate the number of their partners so they sound less slutty and men increase their numbers so they seem more impressive.
Maybe I'm just being a douche, too, but taking a bunch of postcards people send in to you and reproducing them in something with a couple covers and an ISBN doesn't really qualify someone as an "author" in my mind. Same with these guys.
Sorry, but I have to outright dismiss your entire post as a bunch of biased bullshit. Newsflash, the fact that you have a different opinion than most sane people doesn't make those who have a different view from yours "liberal" or "left" (I'm a libertarian who thinks you are all fucking idiots on both sides of the aisle). And as someone who appreciates my country, I don't condone murder and I certainly don't condone government cover-ups.
The fact that people are not horrified by such clear violations or *AT LEAST* the coverup (what's to cover up if they did nothing wrong?) does make people stupid and lazy.
You don't mow people down with an air-mounted chain-gun for "being somewhere they shouldn't be". You mow them down, if they're a threat. A few people (including international journalists) standing around on a street, chatting, talking on a cell, and not threatening anyone, waving any weapons around, or in any other way making threatening gestures or actions are not a threat.
Two little children leaning halfway out of a mini-van that you DIRECTLY OPEN FIRE ON are not a threat.
A half dead man crawling to safety on his belly after you opened fire on him IS NOT A THREAT.
Several men arriving to rescue you by putting you in the back of a vehicle to go get you medical attention and also not waving any weapons around IS NOT A THREAT.
In the video, we opened fire on people who posed no immediate threat whatsoever. Then we waited for their rescuers to come pick them up and treat them. AND WE KILLED THEM.
You know who else does that? Terrorists. They blow up a deli in Israel and then they have a second set of bombs rigged to detonate a short time later -- just enough time to allow emergency responders to come and put themselves in harms way rescuing the first victims. And then the bombs go off and murder them, too.
Then, take into consideration the great effort the government took to spread false information about this and hide what really happened. They flat out lied about what occurred there, to make it seem like they were in a life or death battle.
And this is merely one documented instance that has been widely spread. There have been other lesser known instances and they few are likely representative of many more abhorrent violations.
There is absolutely nothing the American population would ever rally and take up arms against. We could be invaded by a foreign power tomorrow morning, Red Dawn style, and as long as they weren't killing and raping civilians, we'd roll over and go back to watching cable television (though if they disconnected our cable television, we might get out and fight them).
I'm not even talking about that, though. I'm talking about even just the angry outcry and dissent in media outlets and every day citizens across the nation? They don't have to grab a rifle and head for DC, but we're not even mustering up half the energy and anger we exhibit when we feel there's something shady going on with the American Idol phone voting.
Re:He would be right at home on slashdot
on
The Great Typo Hunt
·
· Score: 1
I didn't really count that as part of the benefit, since I have a general distaste for "random guy starts up popular blogspot page and turns it into a book!" stuff. Imagine how much that must piss off a real author with something they're having a hard time publishing? Damn.
Excessive abuse of grammar is frustrating and it can be enjoyable on occasion to correct it, but something about these guys just make me view them as douches. I'm not surprised that it was featured on NPR, of all places.
Of all the things to obsess over and waste your time "contributing" to in this world, correcting government signs is going to be it? Really?!
Re:He would be right at home on slashdot
on
The Great Typo Hunt
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I know there's a certain degree of that, but that video exposed something that any sane population should have found so profoundly rattling that they couldn't sleep at night. It should have been like waking up one morning to find out aliens have landed. Instead, a lot of people don't even know the video exists and it was a flash in the pan news-wise, stuffed between things like Lohan's county jail time and vuvazelas.
People came home from Vietnam to shouts of "baby killer!" and here we have actual footage of us opening fire directly on identifiable children in the front seat of a mini-van (among other things) and the reaction is a yawn among one chunk and "yeah, bomb that shithole into a parking lot! yeehaaaaaw!" among another.
When I saw the video and waited for something -- anything -- to happen as a response to it, the increasing distance from it grew and made me feel it was all even more surreal. People seem to have given more time, attention, and anger to *this* incident with Wikileaks than the former one. Truly blows my mind. I thought that my fellow countrymen had SOME threshold where the "hey, it's a bunch of brown people over THERE" part was broken down and irrelevant.
Nobody would object to the government suddenly caring about it, but everyone should object to the insincere concern that only applies when serving their own domestic anti-press purposes, but isn't extended to the real world beyond that.
And if if was sincere, then they would obviously have been willing to assist Wikileaks in their request to help them redact names that the government wanted to strip. It illustrates as much as anything else how insincere it is. We care about human life, but only if we get our way across the board.
That's a flimsy excuse, too. They must have a list of the people they're concerned with protecting. How hard is it to programmatically apply that to a copy of the documents and send the results back? They can't find a small handful of people out of the 1.5million in the Armed forces to task with this? Or they're concerned with people's lives, but not enough to bother spending some resources protecting them?
It's clear that they're responding to this the same way we reportedly respond to hostage incidents. We don't negotiate and we'd rather you kill everyone than compromise with you in any regard. Sensible in real hostage crises. Not so much in a journalistic release.
Remember that study that was done a few years ago where highschool students across the country were asked questions like "do you think freedom of speech should be limited?" and "does the press have too much freedom of the press?". An overwhelming number of students (the future of the country, yadda yadda yadda) stated things siding with restricting freedom of the press and limiting free speech.
This country has no sense of the liberties they are supposed to value. It only knows platitudes and threats. That's why the market for yellow ribbon stickers on the back of SUVs is booming and criticizing anything that the government or military says or does is responded with some variation on "you want the terrorists to win?!" or "this is America! Love it or leave it!".
One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.
Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.
This is not the same study, but has similarly sad results:
The First Amendment Center has conducted the annual survey since 1997. This year’s survey, being released to mark both annual Constitution Day (Sept. 17) activities and the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, also found:
* Just 56% believe that the freedom to worship as one chooses extends to all religious groups, regardless of how extreme — down 16 points from 72% in 2000.
* 58% of Americans would prevent protests during a funeral procession, even on public streets and sidewalks; and 74% would prevent public school students from wearing a T-shirt with a slogan that might offend others.
* 34% (lowest since the survey first was done in 1997) think the press “has too much freedom,” but 60% of Americans disagree with the statement that the press tries to report the news without bias, and 62% believe the making up of stories is a widespread problem in the news media — down only slightly from 2006.
* 25% said “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” well below the 49% recorded in the 2002 survey that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, but up from 18% in 2006.
The president needs some sort of an internet killswitch, so they can shut everything down in emergencies like this, before data has a chance to propagate. Hmm...
Of course - they're not interested in protecting people. They're interested in discrediting the facilitator of the information. The government would love nothing more than to see someone killed so that they can then point at Wikileaks and say "SEE! THEY CAUSED THIS! Sure, we failed to protect our information in the first place. Then we failed to humble ourselves enough to say we'd rather help Wikileaks redact names than just be stubborn and say it has to be all or nothing. Then we made a huge deal about the data itself for weeks on end. But WIKILEAKS DID THIS! SEE!?".
How long until Assange dies in a tragic airplane accident, when his plane slams into the side of a mountain on a clear day, somewhere?
Don't be an idiot. Assange only came out as a personality behind Wikileaks when he really had to start doing so. His hand was forced. As I said in another discussion on Slashdot about this in the past week -- if I was documenting the government's atrocities and they were after me and I feared for my freedom and safety and didn't want to be disappeared and vanished from the face of the earth, I would get out there and become the biggest fucking attention whore I could for the obvious reason.
Sensationalizing the "collateral murder" footage? Sensationalizing? It's inherently fucking sensationalized in its nature. Water is already wet, to begin with.
It's my understanding that Wikileaks makes attempts to redact what they're able to protect the supposed innocent wherever possible, as a policy. It seems likely that they would indeed have reached out to the Pentagon to assist in redacting the names before publishing it just as they had claimed. The government, of course, hides behind the claim that "we're primarily concerned with the safety of our troops and of civilians" while refusing to accept the offer to help redact information. If the safety of those people was such a concern to them, they would take any opportunity to redact those names given, even if it comes at some sacrifice to their principals (aiding Wikileaks in redaction). They'd rather cut off someone else's nose to spite their face.
While I clearly have concern over the safety of persons who may be innocent, it's also vital to note that Assange does not (presumably) work for the government in any way. If they don't want information to be leaked, they should protect their information in the first place. I don't see how Assange is obligated to protect their data for them, other than to redact personally identifiable information where possible simply out of human decency.
Slashdot Mirror
Collating a bunch of content you didn't create (say, the kind of stuff people send in to Post Secret, as an example) doesn't make you an author any more than there is an "author" of the Yellow Pages.
Granted, these guys didn't merely collate a bunch of crap and slam it together in a coffee table book. Having not read the book, but only some of the excerpts, it appears that they wrote about going out and doing this innocuous crap. I guess that's a little better, but still . . . meh.
Why should the Pentagon help with the redaction? I seriously cannot understand this attitude - that's like blaming me for being robbed when a criminal holds a gun on my while another holds a knife to my wife's throat to force me to give up the combination to my safe.
The Pentagon should help with the redaction, because they're the ones claiming that the information puts people at risk. If they're so concerned, they should do what they can to protect those people, instead of having a stubborn pissing contest where they either get everything they want or SOMEONE ELSE pays the price. It only further illustrates that the safety of those people is absolutely no concern of theirs (if it's even a concern at all and not just fabricated). It's a pawn in their waged war against Wikileaks.
They're just using it as a flimsy piece of their argument, the same way people throw "but we have to protect against terrorists!" at you every time they want to take away more of your liberty and spend more of your money.
I bet you blame rape victims for being provocatively dressed and believe they 'actually wanted it' too.
I'm not going to waste time on your lame "win debate by accusing the other person of some form of racism or sexism" school of discussion.
It's probably a poor analogy, but it's more like you instructing your children never to drink under age. Then one of your kids calls you from a party and says that they had a bunch of drinks and can't get home, because they're too drunk to drive. Instead of saying "I'm angry, but I care about my child's safety, so I'm going to go pick them up and drive them home and we'll figure the rest out tomorrow", the parent says "I TOLD YOU NOT TO DRINK!" and hanging up.
Rather than shelving your anger to address the more immediate safety, you dig in your heels and stand on your supposed principals and those things you supposedly care so much about to begin with be damned.
Yes, you and I may feel that way, but we're jaded adults and not little kids.
I use my Palm.
My thoughts, too. I'm ugly as fuck and I've had more than that.
Then again, I guess it's all relative. I was with a girl who had been with about five dozen people before we met and she consider 30-50 to be totally normal for a girl by about the age of 30 (and to be fair, it might not be that far off since women obviously have a lot less resistance than men in hooking up).
Of course, people are afraid of seeming out of the normal range, so women deflate the number of their partners so they sound less slutty and men increase their numbers so they seem more impressive.
Not financially, he isn't.
Excessive dehydrating heat can be a real saunafabitch.
Stretching, I know.
Maybe I'm just being a douche, too, but taking a bunch of postcards people send in to you and reproducing them in something with a couple covers and an ISBN doesn't really qualify someone as an "author" in my mind. Same with these guys.
Sorry, but I have to outright dismiss your entire post as a bunch of biased bullshit. Newsflash, the fact that you have a different opinion than most sane people doesn't make those who have a different view from yours "liberal" or "left" (I'm a libertarian who thinks you are all fucking idiots on both sides of the aisle). And as someone who appreciates my country, I don't condone murder and I certainly don't condone government cover-ups.
The fact that people are not horrified by such clear violations or *AT LEAST* the coverup (what's to cover up if they did nothing wrong?) does make people stupid and lazy.
Go spread your "dittos" around somewhere else.
You are profoundly stupid.
You don't mow people down with an air-mounted chain-gun for "being somewhere they shouldn't be". You mow them down, if they're a threat. A few people (including international journalists) standing around on a street, chatting, talking on a cell, and not threatening anyone, waving any weapons around, or in any other way making threatening gestures or actions are not a threat.
Two little children leaning halfway out of a mini-van that you DIRECTLY OPEN FIRE ON are not a threat.
A half dead man crawling to safety on his belly after you opened fire on him IS NOT A THREAT.
Several men arriving to rescue you by putting you in the back of a vehicle to go get you medical attention and also not waving any weapons around IS NOT A THREAT.
In the video, we opened fire on people who posed no immediate threat whatsoever. Then we waited for their rescuers to come pick them up and treat them. AND WE KILLED THEM.
You know who else does that? Terrorists. They blow up a deli in Israel and then they have a second set of bombs rigged to detonate a short time later -- just enough time to allow emergency responders to come and put themselves in harms way rescuing the first victims. And then the bombs go off and murder them, too.
Then, take into consideration the great effort the government took to spread false information about this and hide what really happened. They flat out lied about what occurred there, to make it seem like they were in a life or death battle.
And this is merely one documented instance that has been widely spread. There have been other lesser known instances and they few are likely representative of many more abhorrent violations.
The action was entirely indefensible.
There is absolutely nothing the American population would ever rally and take up arms against. We could be invaded by a foreign power tomorrow morning, Red Dawn style, and as long as they weren't killing and raping civilians, we'd roll over and go back to watching cable television (though if they disconnected our cable television, we might get out and fight them).
I'm not even talking about that, though. I'm talking about even just the angry outcry and dissent in media outlets and every day citizens across the nation? They don't have to grab a rifle and head for DC, but we're not even mustering up half the energy and anger we exhibit when we feel there's something shady going on with the American Idol phone voting.
I bow to your superior grammar Nazism.
I didn't really count that as part of the benefit, since I have a general distaste for "random guy starts up popular blogspot page and turns it into a book!" stuff. Imagine how much that must piss off a real author with something they're having a hard time publishing? Damn.
Excessive abuse of grammar is frustrating and it can be enjoyable on occasion to correct it, but something about these guys just make me view them as douches. I'm not surprised that it was featured on NPR, of all places.
Of all the things to obsess over and waste your time "contributing" to in this world, correcting government signs is going to be it? Really?!
Let me correct that for you.
Another grammar Nazi.
I know there's a certain degree of that, but that video exposed something that any sane population should have found so profoundly rattling that they couldn't sleep at night. It should have been like waking up one morning to find out aliens have landed. Instead, a lot of people don't even know the video exists and it was a flash in the pan news-wise, stuffed between things like Lohan's county jail time and vuvazelas.
People came home from Vietnam to shouts of "baby killer!" and here we have actual footage of us opening fire directly on identifiable children in the front seat of a mini-van (among other things) and the reaction is a yawn among one chunk and "yeah, bomb that shithole into a parking lot! yeehaaaaaw!" among another.
When I saw the video and waited for something -- anything -- to happen as a response to it, the increasing distance from it grew and made me feel it was all even more surreal. People seem to have given more time, attention, and anger to *this* incident with Wikileaks than the former one. Truly blows my mind. I thought that my fellow countrymen had SOME threshold where the "hey, it's a bunch of brown people over THERE" part was broken down and irrelevant.
I'm sure they could engage the pentagon to create an extremely lethal weapon based around these pieces of ammunition.
Nobody would object to the government suddenly caring about it, but everyone should object to the insincere concern that only applies when serving their own domestic anti-press purposes, but isn't extended to the real world beyond that.
And if if was sincere, then they would obviously have been willing to assist Wikileaks in their request to help them redact names that the government wanted to strip. It illustrates as much as anything else how insincere it is. We care about human life, but only if we get our way across the board.
That's a flimsy excuse, too. They must have a list of the people they're concerned with protecting. How hard is it to programmatically apply that to a copy of the documents and send the results back? They can't find a small handful of people out of the 1.5million in the Armed forces to task with this? Or they're concerned with people's lives, but not enough to bother spending some resources protecting them?
It's clear that they're responding to this the same way we reportedly respond to hostage incidents. We don't negotiate and we'd rather you kill everyone than compromise with you in any regard. Sensible in real hostage crises. Not so much in a journalistic release.
I can answer this for you.
"NO."
Remember that study that was done a few years ago where highschool students across the country were asked questions like "do you think freedom of speech should be limited?" and "does the press have too much freedom of the press?". An overwhelming number of students (the future of the country, yadda yadda yadda) stated things siding with restricting freedom of the press and limiting free speech.
This country has no sense of the liberties they are supposed to value. It only knows platitudes and threats. That's why the market for yellow ribbon stickers on the back of SUVs is booming and criticizing anything that the government or military says or does is responded with some variation on "you want the terrorists to win?!" or "this is America! Love it or leave it!".
source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6888837/
source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-01-30-students-press_x.htm
One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.
Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.
This is not the same study, but has similarly sad results:
source: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=19031
The First Amendment Center has conducted the annual survey since 1997. This year’s survey, being released to mark both annual Constitution Day (Sept. 17) activities and the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, also found:
* Just 56% believe that the freedom to worship as one chooses extends to all religious groups, regardless of how extreme — down 16 points from 72% in 2000.
* 58% of Americans would prevent protests during a funeral procession, even on public streets and sidewalks; and 74% would prevent public school students from wearing a T-shirt with a slogan that might offend others.
* 34% (lowest since the survey first was done in 1997) think the press “has too much freedom,” but 60% of Americans disagree with the statement that the press tries to report the news without bias, and 62% believe the making up of stories is a widespread problem in the news media — down only slightly from 2006.
* 25% said “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees,” well below the 49% recorded in the 2002 survey that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, but up from 18% in 2006.
The president needs some sort of an internet killswitch, so they can shut everything down in emergencies like this, before data has a chance to propagate. Hmm...
Of course - they're not interested in protecting people. They're interested in discrediting the facilitator of the information. The government would love nothing more than to see someone killed so that they can then point at Wikileaks and say "SEE! THEY CAUSED THIS! Sure, we failed to protect our information in the first place. Then we failed to humble ourselves enough to say we'd rather help Wikileaks redact names than just be stubborn and say it has to be all or nothing. Then we made a huge deal about the data itself for weeks on end. But WIKILEAKS DID THIS! SEE!?".
How long until Assange dies in a tragic airplane accident, when his plane slams into the side of a mountain on a clear day, somewhere?
Don't be an idiot. Assange only came out as a personality behind Wikileaks when he really had to start doing so. His hand was forced. As I said in another discussion on Slashdot about this in the past week -- if I was documenting the government's atrocities and they were after me and I feared for my freedom and safety and didn't want to be disappeared and vanished from the face of the earth, I would get out there and become the biggest fucking attention whore I could for the obvious reason.
That is utterly ridiculous.
Sensationalizing the "collateral murder" footage? Sensationalizing? It's inherently fucking sensationalized in its nature. Water is already wet, to begin with.
It's my understanding that Wikileaks makes attempts to redact what they're able to protect the supposed innocent wherever possible, as a policy. It seems likely that they would indeed have reached out to the Pentagon to assist in redacting the names before publishing it just as they had claimed. The government, of course, hides behind the claim that "we're primarily concerned with the safety of our troops and of civilians" while refusing to accept the offer to help redact information. If the safety of those people was such a concern to them, they would take any opportunity to redact those names given, even if it comes at some sacrifice to their principals (aiding Wikileaks in redaction). They'd rather cut off someone else's nose to spite their face.
While I clearly have concern over the safety of persons who may be innocent, it's also vital to note that Assange does not (presumably) work for the government in any way. If they don't want information to be leaked, they should protect their information in the first place. I don't see how Assange is obligated to protect their data for them, other than to redact personally identifiable information where possible simply out of human decency.