Sorry Stumbler.... Was a slow night for me..... Will try to do better tomorrow.

 

A Worthy tradition

Lets shoot the messenger ?

 

What's to say....the US government want to close down wikileaks because they keep embarrassing them with the knowledge that the most powerful nation on the planet can't stop their secret info from being leaked to the peasants that put them in power.

If they can't close down wikileaks then they'll do their darndest to to blacken Assange's name.

What's to discuss, ever since Assange was a kid he's always fought the good fight to make governments more transparent and servants of the people.....and the governments have always believed that the opposite is what makes the world a better place.

 

He's doing plenty of that himself. You'll notice his lawyer has never denied the charges against him, only the origination of the dispute.

It would be far from an original story. A man who is shot into fame and popularity becomes arrogant/entitled and oversteps his bounds. Shocking.

 

What a great rockstar life he's living, not being able to sleep in the same place for more than 2 days in a row, the fear of death threats against him, knowing that if the US gets their way he'll be tried for treason.

 

Oh...well, I guess if nobody has said any of those things, then WikiLeaks must not be a problem and there's no reason to arrest Assange or shut down the site. Thanks for clarifying that, Dante.

 

If a soldier or a government contractor leaks classified information, people scream "traitor".

If a journalist leaks classified information, people scream "freedom of the press".

Sorry, but, I still don't think that Mr. Assange is in the right and deserves to be punished.

 

Clever girl.

It only took you one read of the authors article to adopt his innate ability of pretending the points you do not wish to discuss, do not exist. Clever, clever girl. :rose:

 

The fact is, Dante, that those claims have been made constantly by the punditocracy ever since the WikiLeaks story first broke. They're still being made today. You're denial of it has no merit.

Case in point: Nobody has said that people have died as a result of the leaks, but lots of people have said that the leaks WILL jeopardize lives. But that's exactly the point -- they haven't, and there's no evidence that they have.

 

Actually what I'm wondering now is if any government or anyone else for that matter can keep what they thought was secret information being leaked. Plus it now looks like even if they could take WikiLeaks down there about 10 others willing to take its place.

And I'm beginning to wonder if all that's all they can do and even that isn't working. I'm thinking its going to be really hard to come up with something where Assange and WikiLeaks broke the laws in the US but the New York Times and all the other major news outlets didn't break the law by releasing the same information.

I'm still trying to keep an open mind and trying to remember this in some ways is kind of scary to me because its so different so I would naturally tend to condemn the messenger and have to be on guard for that.

But there's also still some aspects of what he's done and how that does lead me to question what his real motivations might be. And it could be very well like you and others say. Assange is actually an advocate for governmental transparency which is something I normally support.

I've just never seen anything this big.

 

It was never of any interest to me to deny everything he said Kimi, only that he was purposefully attacking the very small things, and leaving the very large ones alone.

So in your opening sentence, you agree that he lied in his statement when he made it sound as though the opposition was saying people had died as a result of wikileaks? I thought you were disagreeing with me? But perhaps you see now why I might disagree with someone making up points with which to argue?

I have no interest in arguing over whether anyone will die because of what they leak, my guess on the matter is as good as yours. My problem with the article was that he was avoiding what his opposition actually says, attacking what they seldom or never say, and acting as though he had trumped them. And you, in posting it, seemed to have believed him.

 

You seem to be hiding behind a rhetorical quibble. If someone says that people are going to die as a result of leaked information, but cannot point to an instance where it actually happened, it might be fair to say that he or she is resorting to scare tactics. That was the author's point, and it's a fair one, in my opinion.

 

Its really frustrating to me the way these cables drip out and makes me wonder if news organizations are just cheery picking some of the ones they want for what ever reason and burying the rest of them.

Anyway here's all I've found looking for the latest and the last date on it is December 10th. Even then its more of a slide show than reporting. But sadly its the best I've come up with this morning.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/10/wikileaks-cables-for-dec-_1_n_795243.html#s204640

 

Seem to be?!?? That's the core of his entire methodology! Try asking one of his many personas a straight question & good luck.

 

I'm still wrapping my brain around it, honestly. ~scratches head~ It's a tough call for me so far - very difficult to draw clear lines on this one.

There are very powerful moral and ethical questions being brought up that we just haven't prepared ourselves to answer. I'm not nearly as interested in the machinations of his personal life, his potential extradition and/or prosecution - that stuff strikes me as gossipy and comparatively unimportant.

 

Take a look. In my world there is little shit and big shit to worry about and this would fall into the latter category not representing an immanent threat, but frightening to me at least in the thinking and past experience it represents.

Here's congressman Allan West of Florida

http://www.dailykos.com/

And yes I agree we have to consider the sources. Two sources actually the one reporting what was said and the one saying it. Neither of them being particularly credible.

But still the thought of censoring the media to me makes WikiLeaks by far the lesser of those two dangers.

 

Tell me about it Old Tool I'm the one who had to running frightened and confused to you and not a damn thing has changed about in fact I think its getting worse.

For one thing if you tried to look at all the different sources who claim to be reporting on the alleged 250,000 memos you might be able to look one up on each of the 250,000 sites.

And spin doctoring I think I can handle and weigh in most instance, but this is not like any spin doctoring I've ever seen as far as the number of people trying spin their agenda and the desperation they seem to display.

Its not spin doctoring. Its more like Whirling Dervishes.

 

That would be alarming - but I think we're a long ways off from anything like that happening, in fact I think this may be the tipping point from which that kind of wholesale censorship becomes impossible.

As citizens, we've relegated the duty of being informed to "the media", but in fact there is nothing (or very little) from "the media" that we don't have access to - as we are seeing - it's just that we haven't availed ourselves of the opportunity.

I had a discussion with a professor of journalism a couple of years back about whether bloggers who 'break' stories based on obscure information already in the public domain were journalists - and if the professon of journalism itself was being rendered moot. He seemed to think that the internet was creating a more free press than the one we've enjoyed for the past 200 years or so.

 

You're actually absolutely right about that and my real alarm actually amounts to; Oh yeah that's how stuff like that gets started and of course the most glaring example is always the Nazis taking over the press.

But of course if I was not already so busy those would be fighting words to me. And I might even have an equal chance of influencing the congressman as I do here.

It remains a constant source of awe to me. It still amazes me how you can take an issue, almost anything really, and just keep following and following all the related links until its like a full dissection.

Seems like an intelligent professor to me because the internet is eroding both the good and the bad about the media and the way we inform ourselves.

On the bad side journalists and news outlets are supposed to at least go through the motions of being fair, objective, and accurate. Blooggers by in large have no such standards and you can read anything on the internet but it does not make it true. On the other hand look at the minute dissections I've mentioned on every topic and event in the world and these same bloggers and sites are actually resources of information for the mainstream media.

But the one effect of the bloggers and the internet on what we've considered our free press for the past 200 years is that the bloggers keep them honest and actually force them to sometimes cover stories they might have avoided otherwise just because its made such a splash on the internet and/or bloggersphere. That's been a big advance to me and looks like that will continue.

There's never been anything like this internet though so I don't think anyone really knows what effect it will ultimately have on what we call the mainstream media but I strongly suspect it will be to push it to extinction.

 

Just to update the idea of following the hysteria the quote I posted from the Daily Kos just went straight to the front Page of the Huffington Post.

Because some congressman no one ever heard of so much as mentioned censorship.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/