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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 6, 2010 15:39:06 GMT
I think it's interesting that the WikiLeaks flap is in the news concurrently with the Chinese government's alarm over Google and its repeated attempts to suppress it. www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a2The beauty of spilling all this information is that it might, just might, make people question what they're told. For instance, the story about the American ambassador to Afghanistan smacks of "See?! Now see what you've done?!"
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Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2010 15:52:41 GMT
Well, there is the other possibility -- all of the secret notes will become even more secret. Maybe that is what Wikileaks actually wanted. I think Assange is actually a CIA operative.
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Post by fumobici on Dec 6, 2010 17:18:15 GMT
Well, there is the other possibility -- all of the secret notes will become even more secret. Maybe that is what Wikileaks actually wanted. I think Assange is actually a CIA operative. That the aim of WikiLeaks is to close the circle of secrecy by limiting the avenues of communication where classified material can be safely shared and thus degrading the ability of the those operating in secrecy to coordinate and communicate effectively is actually explicitly laid out in one of my earlier posts quoting Assange. I'm not seeing how the CIA's ends are served by these releases, but that might simply be a function of my lack of imagination. More general rant to follow ;D
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Post by fumobici on Dec 6, 2010 17:20:51 GMT
Those defending the persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks are really tools of the lowest order. The Iraq War- an enterprise only made possible by exactly the sort of deliberate secret fog WikiLweaks aims to dispel not only lead to literally hundreds of thousands of innocents dying and trillions of dollars being wasted but it can be forcefully argued was the single greatest cause of the coming decline of American- and Western- primacy in the globe. Secrecy broke the treasury and secrecy cost the West any moral high ground it once may have held.
Those are the stakes out there and this is what trusting government without the restraint of an adequately informed public means.
Then there are the secrets held by huge corporate private institutions like banks, pharma, financial and energy firms who run putatively democratic governments like hand puppets. Secrets they rely on to steal money by the trillions from productive working people and to steal entire governments from the will of their citizens. These corporations don't have your's or any country's best interests in mind. They have no moral constraints or compunctions. They will happily rob, poison and defraud you and everyone you know to make the tiniest marginal increase in profit. They will grotesquely twist any government by influence peddling to put their interests before yours or anyone else's and take any steps to insure that they prevail. They will happily destroy any country they operate in if there's a short term profit in the offing.
And all this they can only accomplish in secrecy. Go ahead, cheer on those who are literally destroying the world you inhabit and robbing you, who have hijacked your governments, bought the politicians you vote for, outsourced, caused wars of choice, killed uncounted innocents, downsized and offshored your children's and their children's future.
Go ahead. Tools. Maybe some of the slop from the billionaire's obscene feasting table will fall where you can snap it up before some other servile dog on the floor gets it. If you get to the slop on the floor first I guess you can then call yourself a winner.
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Post by myrt on Dec 6, 2010 20:31:31 GMT
Whoohoo! Ab-so-lu-tely, I agree 100% , Fumobici but you are a great deal more eloquent than I am. I have logged on especially to say this - you made me spontaneously cheer! ;D I totally agree and think we have all/are all complicit in the destruction of our society as we have all been seduced by the crass slogans and soft porn lures of the supposed lifestyle dangled like a carrot in front of our easily dazzled eyes - Go on - you know you want it - because you're worth it......... And you haven't even started on the cynical manipulation of fundamental religious mores and superstitious scaremongering employed by these people, have you?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2010 20:49:14 GMT
Crickey, I just love the way you put things, fumobici! Your way with words is something else. Brave and to the point.
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Post by fumobici on Dec 6, 2010 21:07:51 GMT
And you haven't even started on the cynical manipulation of fundamental religious mores and superstitious scaremongering employed by these people, have you? Yeah. Probably best not to encourage me ;D
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Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2010 21:15:17 GMT
People don't want the truth. Before the second Iraq war, French television showed over and over again how the U.S. was inventing evidence -- some of the WMD photos "from last week" were actually French intelligence photos from 5 years earlier, presented by Colin Powell as recently constructed weapons factories when they were actually old grain warehouses.
The European media kept showing these things, which were available to the entire world, yet the U.S. kept frothing at the mouth and discarding the evidence because they wanted a rumble. And the rumble has still not ended. but we got "freedom fries" and "cheese eating surrender monkeys" out of it.
So, no, I don't really think that getting people excited about any of this crap is useful, because they will be manipulated into drawing the wrong conclusions, as usual. The "common man" is not qualified to decode any of this, while being entirely capable of drawing inaccurate conclusions that he will take to the polling booth.
Wiki media is no more trustworthy than official media. What do we REALLY know about North Korea? What do we REALLY know about Venezuela or Indonesia? Are our opinions valid about those countries? Should we be the ones to make foreign policy about these places? Are people so fucking pretentious that they think they can run the world better than the imperfect people in power, but who have spent their entire lives trying to understand the issues?
Jeez, my degrees are in Political Science and International Relations, and about the only thing I know is that diplomacy requires extreme discretion and that wars are started by ignorant people who think they know it all, just because they got a tiny peek at one bit of information while missing 98% of the rest of it.
Do you want such people to multiply and rule the world?
Wikileaks will reveal about 3% of the fun ha-ha stuff, and 97% of the information has to be slowly and seriously studied because it is not at all secret but requires a lot of work and sweat to understand.
Have you learned a single thing from these "revelations" that you think with totally change foreign policy anywhere? Do you think your quick fix of "secrets" is going to dispense you from any effort to spend years and years of study to understand the underlying factors?
The ambient naïveté about this enrages me because the people in power are thrilled to death about this. They will be distilling their own tidbits about countries they don't like, and it will all serve to distract common citizens from paying attention to what is really going on. Doing something nasty in Bolivia? Just throw a few crumbs about Yemen to the masses and they will all look in the opposite direction!
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Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2010 21:23:18 GMT
There has been a term for this for many years. It is called "rabble rousing." It helps to keep people in power because it diverts the masses.
Have fun.
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Post by fumobici on Dec 7, 2010 0:08:08 GMT
Thank you for the reply. People don't want the truth. Before the second Iraq war, French television showed over and over again how the U.S. was inventing evidence -- some of the WMD photos "from last week" were actually French intelligence photos from 5 years earlier, presented by Colin Powell as recently constructed weapons factories when they were actually old grain warehouses. The European media kept showing these things, which were available to the entire world, yet the U.S. kept frothing at the mouth and discarding the evidence because they wanted a rumble. And the rumble has still not ended. but we got "freedom fries" and "cheese eating surrender monkeys" out of it. Here in the US, the drums of war were beating loudly, loudly enough to drown out the skeptical voices. Anything contradicting the official dog and pony show were as is the norm, if reported at all, relegated to the back pages of the press or to minor independent media with their demographically insignificant readership. Besides, once the US had announced their intention to act unilaterally or to act in concert with those already implacably ideologically onboard for war or the roster of minor states and Third World dictatorships that could be bought off to constitute the so called "coalition of the willing" what was reported internally within foot dragging states like France hardly mattered. If the judgment of the "common man" is deemed unworthy of serious consideration what use is an informed electorate or a free press? This seems in equal measure a trivialization of the democratic process and cynically elitist. Newsflash: the very people who cooked the intel or spun it, or just as bad those who kept silent and allowed the lies from above to drive policy rather than do the right thing are still there in place. The bureaucrats who actually run the American foreign policy and intelligence machineries who failed so miserably are still the ones manning the desks. Do you want such a group of craven ass kissers and incompetents to rule the world? All that need happen is nothing at all. When it really, really mattered they failed in the biggest possible way. Empty desks would have performed better. And how does Wikileaks' leaked material keep anyone from studiously working open sources where the vast majority of good intelligence always is? The outrage is obviously manufactured in any case, these leaks were apparently sourced from a PFC! One would have to be terminally naive to believe that all this stuff wasn't freely available to anyone who had even the lowest level source within the US, which would be anyone but the average US citizen. I don't sense the sort of calculation in these releases that would suggest there is any plan to use Wikileaks as a false flag operation to selectively disseminate pieces of information or deliberate misinformation to accomplish some ad hoc result. To me it looks like exactly what it purports to be, an unedited dump of essentially random diplomatic chatter that a PFC found he had access to and leaked to Assange. There's certainly been no evidence whatever I've seen even remotely suggesting this to be a ruse. Occam's razor I reckon puts a deep if not fatal cut into any shadowy conspiracy theories of this being a planned operation by American bigs.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2010 0:10:07 GMT
The Iraq War- an enterprise only made possible by exactly the sort of deliberate secret fog WikiLeaks aims to dispel not only lead to literally hundreds of thousands of innocents dying The American public was complicit with its government. There is no excuse for those who have supported the war. They are responsible of these innocent deaths just as much as their leaders. It's too easy now to complain to have been lied to. Kerouac wrote:Exactly! I completely agree with Kerouac. NB: I find the attempts to shut down the Wikileaks servers totally absurd.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2010 0:11:38 GMT
Cross posting
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2010 6:23:17 GMT
This does touch on a point of fundamental difference between European and American views of government. In Europe, people believe that the elite should be in charge of certain things. (A much greater effort is now made to recruit people of modest origin into the elite training schools -- before, it was indeed too much of a club that didn't want 'us' as members.)
I think that the United States has retained a respect for the elite in the military, with academies like West Point, but not in politics. Hence the possibility of unqualified actors to become governor in California or former wrestlers as governor in Minnesota.
I kind of prefer people with better credentials in charge.
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Post by myrt on Dec 7, 2010 9:56:10 GMT
I consider myself a European but I do NOT believe the elite should run anything necessarily. Who the hell are they anyway? Those fortunate enough to be born wealthy, empowered both by birth and education and with a lineage traceable for many generations? I don't believe they are imbued with any more appropriate knowledge or credentials than anyone else. There's nothing wrong with wanting the world to be run with more honesty and straightforwardness. And there's nothing sadder than having no hope of ever achieving that.
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Post by spaceneedle on Dec 7, 2010 19:45:09 GMT
FWIW- there were plenty of people in the US who called bullsh*t on the Iraq war. I was one of them and I know many others who protested against it & were harassed as a result. One friend who was (and still is) very active in the anti-war protest movement had her mail intercepted and was placed on the no-fly list. Not everyone in the USA are sheep.
But back to wikileaks... Assange was arrested in London today. I wonder what will happen now?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2010 20:04:58 GMT
I consider myself a European but I do NOT believe the elite should run anything necessarily. Who the hell are they anyway? Those fortunate enough to be born wealthy, empowered both by birth and education and with a lineage traceable for many generations? I don't believe they are imbued with any more appropriate knowledge or credentials than anyone else. There's nothing wrong with wanting the world to be run with more honesty and straightforwardness. And there's nothing sadder than having no hope of ever achieving that. I'm talking about the elite that is created with education. Please do not confuse 'elite' with 'aristocracy' or 'wealthy.' Many of the elite in France began their lives in orphanages or slums. But they fought their way to the top of the class.
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Post by myrt on Dec 7, 2010 20:19:49 GMT
I consider myself a European but I do NOT believe the elite should run anything necessarily. Who the hell are they anyway? Those fortunate enough to be born wealthy, empowered both by birth and education and with a lineage traceable for many generations? I don't believe they are imbued with any more appropriate knowledge or credentials than anyone else. There's nothing wrong with wanting the world to be run with more honesty and straightforwardness. And there's nothing sadder than having no hope of ever achieving that. I'm talking about the elite that is created with education. Please do not confuse 'elite' with 'aristocracy' or 'wealthy.' Many of the elite in France began their lives in orphanages or slums. But they fought their way to the top of the class. I think probably money and birth talk - even in France sadly: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6976985.ece
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Post by Deleted on Dec 7, 2010 20:28:42 GMT
But that article is a year old, and the battle of the rich was lost, thank god. The mention of Eric Zemmour as a reference is a hoot -- every other time he opens his fascist mouth, he gets slapped with a lawsuit for racism, but I'm sure that Rupert Murdoch loves him.
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Post by myrt on Dec 7, 2010 20:48:17 GMT
Don't let's add Rupert Murdoch into the mix! Eek..... ;D But I'm glad the good old republican French are still hanging in there, I am actually a great admirer of France. But it's hard to really completely remove that kind of inbuilt (and inbred) aristocratic superiority though I think - we've never quite managed it in the UK have we? I hope the battle stays lost........
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 8, 2010 1:52:01 GMT
I'm glad you clarified about the elite, Kerouac. Your remarks confused me, as they seemed out of character.
That said, I think people create an aristocracy where none officially exists. I always felt that was the appeal of Ronald and Nancy Reagan -- they looked like "ritzy" people look on soap operas.
But back to Wikileaks. I guess everyone here knows that Visa and Mastercard suspended all payments to Wikileaks, following Paypal's lead. This seems awfully self-serving and wrong on the part of those companies. Assange has been convicted of nothing and investigation is only pending on the business.
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Post by lola on Dec 8, 2010 5:23:19 GMT
curiouser and curiouser
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Post by fumobici on Dec 8, 2010 5:53:27 GMT
The problem with rule by "elites" is that the group even if at first created on merit inevitably becomes inbred and closed by family and social boundaries, so that selections made for positions reserved for the elites have a relatively minuscule talent pool on which to draw so as each generation passes each line becomes increasingly less selected on merit and more so on social connections. Thus the vast majority of theoretically available talent to serve and advance the society is wasted as the positions of power are reserved for people increasingly less objectively qualified in terms of talents. Even those who possess the necessary talent then become morally compromised by the requirements of maintaining the antimeritocratic group and as a result can no longer exercise good judgement as regards the best interests of the larger society they inhabit. This obviously is a recipe for failure and disaster. Without real and constant refreshment of the ruling classes from below, mediocrity, corruption and moral collapse are inevitable. And of course this necessary refreshment seldom occurs because everyone wants their friends, relatives and social peers to succeed. At any cost really. You can gaze back into history and see the same process repeat ad infinitum as societies rise, then inevitably fall.
Meanwhile, Assange sits locked up for questioning and denied access to counsel without charge because of, if his lawyer is to be believed, consensual sex and condom issues. If you wrote this as fiction, nobody would believe it. Or they'd say you were ripping Kafka off.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2010 8:32:42 GMT
That's the whole point of the "elite factories" in France like the ENA (Ecole Nationale de l'Administration) -- to make sure that new generations arrive to push the others out. Or course it isn't a miracle recipe, since a lot of the corrupt find ways to hang on.
One of the best thing that these schools did was to move out of Paris, because a lot of the "monied elite" can only deal with Parisian life, and this completely destabilized them -- not being able to go to social functions with Daddy's business partners, etc. In the old days, some of the students were already corrupt before age 21. Not so easy to do in Strasbourg!
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Post by myrt on Dec 8, 2010 13:20:12 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Dec 8, 2010 14:29:39 GMT
Being much influenced by Hollywood movies, I just wonder if Assange isn't safer in prison temporarily. The roads are so slippery at this time of year! Then again, prison showers can be slippery, too. I would imagine that turning himself in was at least in part for safety reasons. With every camera in the world pointed at him, the people of "the conspiracy" can't try anything.
I guess the movie script is already in development anyway.
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Post by myrt on Dec 8, 2010 15:44:24 GMT
It's terrible to be so cynical but I suspect you are not far from the truth........it might even be a part of his 'plan' - he seems to be several steps ahead of everyone. But who is going to make the film? The corporations and big names aren't exactly covering themselves in glory here - toeing the line and bending to the pressures applied. Is there an independant out there brave enough to tell this story? Or is the ending already written?
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Post by lola on Dec 8, 2010 16:21:56 GMT
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Post by myrt on Dec 8, 2010 18:12:05 GMT
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Post by fumobici on Dec 8, 2010 21:18:02 GMT
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Post by lola on Dec 8, 2010 21:39:56 GMT
Excellent! I, too, could supply a few names.
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