Oh wow! The USA is better then Russia, China and even N. Korea? You guys set yourselves some pretty high standards then...
Weakie leaks has endangered many lives.
Unlike the US which has not just been accused of "endangering lives" without any facts whatsoever to back up the claim. We know for a fact that the US is directly responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the last 10 years only and destabilizing two countries so badly that the death toll runs in the hundreds of thousands. But never mind that, let's return to some more pressing issue, like the size of Assange's ego or whether wikileaks should have released that cable about Batman and Robin in Russia.
This is a fishing expedition for the purpose of a political trial.
There corrected it for you.
And people are railing against specific actions and attitudes of the US government, which now, thanks in large part to Wikileaks, are very well documented reasons as well.
If this were the police state people think the US has become, they wouldn't need subpoenas. The government would have just raided the place.
Yes, let's not pretend the USG doesn't respect the rules of national and international law. I mean it's not like they say f... the law whenever it suits them, it's not like we could accuse them of torture, illegal renditions, pressuring foreign governments into discontinuing criminal investigations against American officials, distorting or plain ignoring international law, unlawful killings of foreign citizens, holding people for years without any regard for any laws whatsoever, illegally spying on American citizens. Oh wait...
Not that surprising. The whole free market/neocon/neo-liberal agenda is an almost exact one on one match with the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy. I can already predict one of the outcomes of such a psychiatric evaluation: a significantly above average percentage of sociopathic tendencies. That's bad enough but most of us have had decades of sociopathic indoctrination in the form of exposure to this political ideology (Americans more so than others) so even people who do not have intrinsic sociopathic tendencies have internalized a lot of those "values" (or rather lack thereof) through socialization and incessant cultural reinforcement.
"Assange is a crook, plain and simple. I agree with your idealism but he's just using the public's emotions and exploiting them for a few million bucks. We used to say "wake up sheeple" but now we have become the lemmings in our blind fervor."
Got any facts to back up that totally baseless claim? Never mind answering that: no you don't.
I have no idea what happened between Assange and the Guardian. All there is is hearsay based on sources from the Guardian itself. Have there been tensions? Of course there've been friggin' tensions! They were sitting on one of the biggest friggin' leaks in the history of friggin' leaking from the most powerful empire on earth!
I for one will base my views of Assange on verifiable facts. Half the system is out to get him at the moment. The media is overflowing with political spin, a fact which anyone who has bothered to follow the story even a little is aware off.
I have seen Assange speak in various videos in which he appears smart, passionate and as a man with a mission. Many of the ideas, ideals, and objectives that people are ascribing to him are simply factually untrue. (Assange never said governments can't have secrets, that secrets are bad by definition, that everything should be leaked irrespective of consequences, etc.).
Would I like to sit around the table with him negotiating the terms of the publishing on of the biggest leaks in history? No idea, I wasn't there. I'm sure in many ways Assange is not the easiest individual to deal with. He wouldn't have gotten Wikileaks where it was if he had been. I have seen no convincing proof whatsoever for the majority the accusations that have been made against him. In fact many of those accusations are verifiably untrue.
I can't back it up but I have the feeling that in fact a big part for the reason why so many people seem to hate Assange's guts is that nobody is used to dealing with a man that is passionate about political ideals he truly believes in anymore. It's been a long time since we had any that got to to this level of public exposure and were as effective at achieving their goals. "If only he were a crook" people seem to be thinking, "then we would know how to pigeon hole him, understand him, be able to interpret his actions". People with strong ideals can be pretty fickle, unpredictable, and are not easily manipulated or shut up because the usual handles (power, greed etc.) aren't very effective against that kind of personality. Because of that they form a huge threat to the status quo. In a way this way of reacting shows how much our idea of "freedom" has become identical with the the liberal ideal of "negative freedom" and the belief that idealists/idealism are dangerous by definition.
...to also start monitoring government employees and contractors for suspicious levels of happiness, a love of cute furry pets and high levels of chrismas card appreciation: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40916433/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/ (Jacob J. Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, suggests that agencies use psychiatrists and sociologists to measure the “relative happiness” of workers or their “despondence and grumpiness” as a way to assess their trustworthiness.")
Cartman: This sucks ass Houston! Kyle: Shut the fuck up Cartman! Stan: OMG they've killed Kenny! Mission Control: M'kay Apollo 13.... Cartman: We're all gonna die you stupid hippies! Kyle: Shut the fuck up Cartman! Cartman: I'm trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I don't need to hear crap from a bunch of hippie freaks living in denial! Screw you guys, I'm going home!
Science is hard. Being unbiased (or more realistically, being aware of possible biases and checking for their influence on your research) is hard. Funding which doesn't include the proper checks and balances to protect scientific independence can make science even harder. And since when does scientific progress rely on seemingly significant results from a single unreproducible experiment?
This information was not made public by Wikileaks. It was made public by the Guardian. After that wikileaks which relies on their newspartners for redactions published the cables. Does the Atlantic piece even mention the Guardian? HELL NO!
This whole story would not even exist if Wikileaks was not involved. If the Guardian had published it from another source there would have been no piece in the Atlantic and no discussion on Slashdot. What this shows is that Wikileaks, while being accused of being irresposible in their release and accused of not being a real news organisation because of it, holds itself to higher standards than a paper like the Guardian. They don't just publish for the sake of newsworthiness but chiefly for the sake of promoting better and more just public and corporate governance.
Everyone is criticizing Wikileaks for not handling the leaks responsibly (mostly completely unsubstantiated government spin to redirect scrutiny from the actual content of the leaks back to Assange and Wikileaks). Now for the interesting fact, who broke this story? Was it Wikileaks? NO! It was the Guardian! (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-mugabe-coup-zimbabwe).
Wikileaks is relying on their media partners for the redacting and contextualization of the cables and they publish them including redactions ONCE ONE OF THEIR MEDIA PARTNERS HAS GONE PUBLIC!
Does the Atlantic piece even mention the Guardian? HELL NO!
What can we conclude from this? That while everyone is agruing that Wikileaks is not a real news organisation because it maintains less strict guidelines on what and how they publish the Guardian can in fact be the one that releases this information to the public and get no flak for it whatsoever! They think it's newsworthy (which it certainly is) and publish without regard for the possible consquences. What this shows is that Wikileaks actually has HIGHER STANDARDS than most news outlets, they don't just publish because something is newsworty and/or will make money, they publish with the explicit goal of improving corporate and public governance around the world.
Furthermore the statement that Assange endorses the view that all information should be freely available all the time is a straw dog. His views on this are well documented and don't even come close to such a statement.
1. If this information had been published by a news outlet without involvement of wikileaks this discussion wouldn't exist.
2. This becomes obvious once you realize this story was not run by Wikileaks it was run by the Guardiann (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-mugabe-coup-zimbabwe). Once it was run by the Guardian the cables involved were released by Wikileaks. Does the Atlantic piece even mention the Guardian let alone alone criticize their reporting? NO!
3. How did Wikileaks choose to handle the redacting process with the cable release? They decided to partner with news organisations and rely on them for redactions. In this case that may have been a mistake because this story actually contradicts one of the leading principles for Wikileaks, that leaks should assist in attaining better governance, be it public or in companies. So Wikileaks actually has a higher standard than a paper like the Guardian which apparently DOES endorse the release of information without heeding the consequences just on the basis that it is newsworthy (which of course it is).
4. This is basically the completely incoherent argument that has been made against Wikileaks over and over in the last months: "Wikileaks is not a news organisation because they do not responsibly handle the information in the leaks like a real press organisation would." This example shows that Wikileaks in fact has a higher standard than most news outlets in what they want to achieve with the information they release: they want it to help in achieving more responsible and just behavior from goverments and companies.
5. Assange doesn't take the view that all information needs to be free. Not that hard to look up his views on that subject but it's of course easier to just repeat the government spin that has been flooding the press since day one of the leaks which has had only one goal: distract people from the actual content of the leaks and redirect the scrutiny to the actions of Wikileaks and Assange.
Guess you haven't watched the Senate Judicial Committee hearing about Wikileaks on c-span. No matter what the speakers views were on wikileaks they all agreed on one thing: that there is massive and rampant overclassification in government circles and that it's a very serious problem, so serious that it's even affecting the Senate role as government overseer because even they often can't get their hands on the information they need.
I guess you have either been locked up in a dark basement for a few months or you just enjoy spouting completely unfounded opinions in opposition to clear and obvious facts. (Or more likely both).
Spying on top UN officials in contravention of international treaties? Pressuring foreign governments into not following proper judicial procedure regarding prosecutions of US intelligence agents involved in illegal renditions and torture on foreign soil? Lying to the world about involvement in a secret war in Yemen which has already claimed hundreds of civilian lives? Just to mention a few?
Furthermore you seem to have a difficult time grasping the concept that advocating personal privacy AND government transparency is not in the least contradictory.
I think this whole situation could easily be solved by changing the name Fox News into Fox Mews. I thinks the meanings of that word(*) quite nicely covers the content:
* mew 1: intr.v.- cry like a cat; "the cat meowed". mew 2: n.- A cage for hawks.
Furthermore your response betrays a widespread and incredibly US centric view:
Unsubtantiated accusations that Wikileaks is putting lives at risk are taken at face value but the thousands upon thousands of civilian victims for which US forces are directly responsible are completely ignored. Well of course they are not Americans so fuck them, right?
The fact that the motivation for the war in Iraq was based on lies is completely ignored.
The fact that the US government is involved in secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen which it has been lying about to everyone is ignored.
The fact that the objectives in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have not been obtained and are unobtainable and yet the lives of US soldiers and the civilian population are being put on the line are ignored.
Human rights violations by the US military and the US government are ignored.
The damage that the process leading to the war in Iraq and the US stance on renditions have done to world public opinion, the international rule of law, and the relationships with traditional allies of the US are, guess what, ignored.
The fact that US foreign policy has done more for creating support in the islamic world for terrorist organizations and islamic fundamentalism than anyone in the islamic world could have achieved is IGNORED.
The fact that the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have so seriously destabilized those regions that the danger to civilians there has increased to unparalelled levels (Iraq is now qualified as the most dangerous place on earth) is ignored.
Your view is so unbelievably skewed it is frightening. And even more frightening is the fact that you are far from alone.
Re:youre on /., a geek or a nerd, and you dont car
on
Today's WikiLeaks News
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· Score: 1
You can call all of them egomaniacs if you want: That's free speech though somewhat lacking in information.
Even if I'd agree with that it changes nothing about the significance of what Wikileaks has done with the war logs or the embassy cables.
Yeah right. All those soldiers the US government has sent out to fight their wars over the last century knew exactly what they were getting involved in. My god what an incredibly simplistic and easy worldview you must have. The whole reason Manning leaked the information to Wikileaks was that he hadn't realised what he had gotten involved in. Thanks in large part to the lies, duplicity and hypocrisy of the responsible politicians and the inane press that believed journalism could be equated to quoting government sources.
There is a lot of research on solitary confinement. A large part of that reseach qualifies it as a form of torture.
As far as I'm concerned Manning is a hero. He found out things that he didn't want any complicity in and thought the public should be aware of and took an incredible risk to follow his conscience in getting it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wow! The USA is better then Russia, China and even N. Korea? You guys set yourselves some pretty high standards then...
Weakie leaks has endangered many lives.
Unlike the US which has not just been accused of "endangering lives" without any facts whatsoever to back up the claim.
We know for a fact that the US is directly responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the last 10 years only and destabilizing two countries so badly that the death toll runs in the hundreds of thousands. But never mind that, let's return to some more pressing issue, like the size of Assange's ego or whether wikileaks should have released that cable about Batman and Robin in Russia.
This is a fishing expedition for the purpose of a political trial.
There corrected it for you.
And people are railing against specific actions and attitudes of the US government, which now, thanks in large part to Wikileaks, are very well documented reasons as well.
If this were the police state people think the US has become, they wouldn't need subpoenas. The government would have just raided the place.
Yes, let's not pretend the USG doesn't respect the rules of national and international law. I mean it's not like they say f... the law whenever it suits them, it's not like we could accuse them of torture, illegal renditions, pressuring foreign governments into discontinuing criminal investigations against American officials, distorting or plain ignoring international law, unlawful killings of foreign citizens, holding people for years without any regard for any laws whatsoever, illegally spying on American citizens.
Oh wait...
Not that surprising. The whole free market/neocon/neo-liberal agenda is an almost exact one on one match with the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy. I can already predict one of the outcomes of such a psychiatric evaluation: a significantly above average percentage of sociopathic tendencies. That's bad enough but most of us have had decades of sociopathic indoctrination in the form of exposure to this political ideology (Americans more so than others) so even people who do not have intrinsic sociopathic tendencies have internalized a lot of those "values" (or rather lack thereof) through socialization and incessant cultural reinforcement.
"Assange is a crook, plain and simple. I agree with your idealism but he's just using the public's emotions and exploiting them for a few million bucks. We used to say "wake up sheeple" but now we have become the lemmings in our blind fervor."
Got any facts to back up that totally baseless claim? Never mind answering that: no you don't.
I have no idea what happened between Assange and the Guardian. All there is is hearsay based on sources from the Guardian itself. Have there been tensions? Of course there've been friggin' tensions! They were sitting on one of the biggest friggin' leaks in the history of friggin' leaking from the most powerful empire on earth!
I for one will base my views of Assange on verifiable facts. Half the system is out to get him at the moment. The media is overflowing with political spin, a fact which anyone who has bothered to follow the story even a little is aware off.
I have seen Assange speak in various videos in which he appears smart, passionate and as a man with a mission. Many of the ideas, ideals, and objectives that people are ascribing to him are simply factually untrue. (Assange never said governments can't have secrets, that secrets are bad by definition, that everything should be leaked irrespective of consequences, etc.).
Would I like to sit around the table with him negotiating the terms of the publishing on of the biggest leaks in history? No idea, I wasn't there. I'm sure in many ways Assange is not the easiest individual to deal with. He wouldn't have gotten Wikileaks where it was if he had been. I have seen no convincing proof whatsoever for the majority the accusations that have been made against him. In fact many of those accusations are verifiably untrue.
I can't back it up but I have the feeling that in fact a big part for the reason why so many people seem to hate Assange's guts is that nobody is used to dealing with a man that is passionate about political ideals he truly believes in anymore. It's been a long time since we had any that got to to this level of public exposure and were as effective at achieving their goals. "If only he were a crook" people seem to be thinking, "then we would know how to pigeon hole him, understand him, be able to interpret his actions". People with strong ideals can be pretty fickle, unpredictable, and are not easily manipulated or shut up because the usual handles (power, greed etc.) aren't very effective against that kind of personality. Because of that they form a huge threat to the status quo. In a way this way of reacting shows how much our idea of "freedom" has become identical with the the liberal ideal of "negative freedom" and the belief that idealists/idealism are dangerous by definition.
...to also start monitoring government employees and contractors for suspicious levels of happiness, a love of cute furry pets and high levels of chrismas card appreciation:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40916433/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/
(Jacob J. Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, suggests that agencies use psychiatrists and sociologists to measure the “relative happiness” of workers or their “despondence and grumpiness” as a way to assess their trustworthiness.")
Apollo 13: Huston ur rocket is doing it wrong.
Mission Control: lulz, kthxbye
Apollo 13: "Houston we have a problem"
Houston: "We're assembling all our top pr consultants. Don't worry we'll have this sorted"
Cartman: This sucks ass Houston!
Kyle: Shut the fuck up Cartman!
Stan: OMG they've killed Kenny!
Mission Control: M'kay Apollo 13....
Cartman: We're all gonna die you stupid hippies!
Kyle: Shut the fuck up Cartman!
Cartman: I'm trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I don't need to hear crap from a bunch of hippie freaks living in denial! Screw you guys, I'm going home!
Lulz!! This is truly a monentous occasion! The appearance of the first LOLspeak grammar nazi!
Science is hard.
Being unbiased (or more realistically, being aware of possible biases and checking for their influence on your research) is hard.
Funding which doesn't include the proper checks and balances to protect scientific independence can make science even harder.
And since when does scientific progress rely on seemingly significant results from a single unreproducible experiment?
Hey! That's the Bush doctrine of scientific progress isn't it?
Double Standards.
This information was not made public by Wikileaks. It was made public by the Guardian. After that wikileaks which relies on their newspartners for redactions published the cables. Does the Atlantic piece even mention the Guardian? HELL NO!
This whole story would not even exist if Wikileaks was not involved. If the Guardian had published it from another source there would have been no piece in the Atlantic and no discussion on Slashdot. What this shows is that Wikileaks, while being accused of being irresposible in their release and accused of not being a real news organisation because of it, holds itself to higher standards than a paper like the Guardian. They don't just publish for the sake of newsworthiness but chiefly for the sake of promoting better and more just public and corporate governance.
Two words: DOUBLE STANDARDS.
Everyone is criticizing Wikileaks for not handling the leaks responsibly (mostly completely unsubstantiated government spin to redirect scrutiny from the actual content of the leaks back to Assange and Wikileaks). Now for the interesting fact, who broke this story? Was it Wikileaks? NO! It was the Guardian! (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-mugabe-coup-zimbabwe).
Wikileaks is relying on their media partners for the redacting and contextualization of the cables and they publish them including redactions ONCE ONE OF THEIR MEDIA PARTNERS HAS GONE PUBLIC!
Does the Atlantic piece even mention the Guardian? HELL NO!
What can we conclude from this? That while everyone is agruing that Wikileaks is not a real news organisation because it maintains less strict guidelines on what and how they publish the Guardian can in fact be the one that releases this information to the public and get no flak for it whatsoever! They think it's newsworthy (which it certainly is) and publish without regard for the possible consquences. What this shows is that Wikileaks actually has HIGHER STANDARDS than most news outlets, they don't just publish because something is newsworty and/or will make money, they publish with the explicit goal of improving corporate and public governance around the world.
Furthermore the statement that Assange endorses the view that all information should be freely available all the time is a straw dog. His views on this are well documented and don't even come close to such a statement.
Two words: DOUBLE STANDARDS.
1. If this information had been published by a news outlet without involvement of wikileaks this discussion wouldn't exist.
2. This becomes obvious once you realize this story was not run by Wikileaks it was run by the Guardiann (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-mugabe-coup-zimbabwe). Once it was run by the Guardian the cables involved were released by Wikileaks. Does the Atlantic piece even mention the Guardian let alone alone criticize their reporting? NO!
3. How did Wikileaks choose to handle the redacting process with the cable release? They decided to partner with news organisations and rely on them for redactions. In this case that may have been a mistake because this story actually contradicts one of the leading principles for Wikileaks, that leaks should assist in attaining better governance, be it public or in companies. So Wikileaks actually has a higher standard than a paper like the Guardian which apparently DOES endorse the release of information without heeding the consequences just on the basis that it is newsworthy (which of course it is).
4. This is basically the completely incoherent argument that has been made against Wikileaks over and over in the last months: "Wikileaks is not a news organisation because they do not responsibly handle the information in the leaks like a real press organisation would." This example shows that Wikileaks in fact has a higher standard than most news outlets in what they want to achieve with the information they release: they want it to help in achieving more responsible and just behavior from goverments and companies.
5. Assange doesn't take the view that all information needs to be free. Not that hard to look up his views on that subject but it's of course easier to just repeat the government spin that has been flooding the press since day one of the leaks which has had only one goal: distract people from the actual content of the leaks and redirect the scrutiny to the actions of Wikileaks and Assange.
Guess you haven't watched the Senate Judicial Committee hearing about Wikileaks on c-span. No matter what the speakers views were on wikileaks they all agreed on one thing: that there is massive and rampant overclassification in government circles and that it's a very serious problem, so serious that it's even affecting the Senate role as government overseer because even they often can't get their hands on the information they need.
I guess you have either been locked up in a dark basement for a few months or you just enjoy spouting completely unfounded opinions in opposition to clear and obvious facts. (Or more likely both).
Spying on top UN officials in contravention of international treaties?
Pressuring foreign governments into not following proper judicial procedure regarding prosecutions of US intelligence agents involved in illegal renditions and torture on foreign soil?
Lying to the world about involvement in a secret war in Yemen which has already claimed hundreds of civilian lives?
Just to mention a few?
Furthermore you seem to have a difficult time grasping the concept that advocating personal privacy AND government transparency is not in the least contradictory.
http://www.heykevinpoulsen.com/
For the new US national sport: Shooting the messenger.
hold the patent on patent trolling.
I think this whole situation could easily be solved by changing the name Fox News into Fox Mews. I thinks the meanings of that word(*) quite nicely covers the content:
*
mew 1: intr.v.- cry like a cat; "the cat meowed".
mew 2: n.- A cage for hawks.
Your theory is severely lacking in facts.
Furthermore your response betrays a widespread and incredibly US centric view:
Unsubtantiated accusations that Wikileaks is putting lives at risk are taken at face value but the thousands upon thousands of civilian victims for which US forces are directly responsible are completely ignored. Well of course they are not Americans so fuck them, right?
The fact that the motivation for the war in Iraq was based on lies is completely ignored.
The fact that the US government is involved in secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen which it has been lying about to everyone is ignored.
The fact that the objectives in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have not been obtained and are unobtainable and yet the lives of US soldiers and the civilian population are being put on the line are ignored.
Human rights violations by the US military and the US government are ignored.
The damage that the process leading to the war in Iraq and the US stance on renditions have done to world public opinion, the international rule of law, and the relationships with traditional allies of the US are, guess what, ignored.
The fact that US foreign policy has done more for creating support in the islamic world for terrorist organizations and islamic fundamentalism than anyone in the islamic world could have achieved is IGNORED.
The fact that the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have so seriously destabilized those regions that the danger to civilians there has increased to unparalelled levels (Iraq is now qualified as the most dangerous place on earth) is ignored.
Your view is so unbelievably skewed it is frightening. And even more frightening is the fact that you are far from alone.
You can call all of them egomaniacs if you want: That's free speech though somewhat lacking in information.
Even if I'd agree with that it changes nothing about the significance of what Wikileaks has done with the war logs or the embassy cables.
Yeah right. All those soldiers the US government has sent out to fight their wars over the last century knew exactly what they were getting involved in. My god what an incredibly simplistic and easy worldview you must have.
The whole reason Manning leaked the information to Wikileaks was that he hadn't realised what he had gotten involved in. Thanks in large part to the lies, duplicity and hypocrisy of the responsible politicians and the inane press that believed journalism could be equated to quoting government sources.
There is a lot of research on solitary confinement. A large part of that reseach qualifies it as a form of torture.
As far as I'm concerned Manning is a hero. He found out things that he didn't want any complicity in and thought the public should be aware of and took an incredible risk to follow his conscience in getting it out.