Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Wikileaks intermission

A few things.

First, the "cyberattacks" on companies and organizations that have done shitty things in regards to Wikileaks--Paypal, Mastercard, etc. I just want to say that these are wonderful and make me giddy. Boycotts are nice and all, if you can do it, but fucking taking that shit down, even briefly, is just delightful.

This CNN article talks about that briefly (and ineptly), and then goes on to some interesting quotes from goofy Kevin Rudd:
"I have been pretty consistent about where the core responsibility lies in this entire matter and that lies with the release of an unauthorized nature of this material by U.S. personnel," Rudd told Reuters.

"Mr. Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorized release of 250,000 documents from the U.S. diplomatic communications network," Rudd told the agency. "The Americans are responsible for that."
Which, you know, politicians say what they will say and they have reasons for what they say, but this cracks me up. Things seem to be going nicely. P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the U.S. of A.'s State Department, responded:
Foreign Minister Rudd is correct, in that the first responsibility rests with us. Someone in the U.S. government leaked these documents. That said, what Julian Assange is doing harms not just our interests, but has placed real lives at risk.
This I like because of that word real. Crowley is being pretty clear here, in his obtuse way. The lives that Wikileaks could possibly, kinda, sorta, maybe, be seen, if you squint, to potentially be placing at risk are real. The lives that the US government is definitively bringing to an end are, by contrast, fake.

Then there's this, from Joe Lieberman*:
“I certainly believe that WikiLleaks has violated the Espionage Act, but then what about the news organizations — including The Times — that accepted it and distributed it?” Mr. Lieberman said, adding: “To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”
With all of this, I have to wonder how much of it is theater, and how much of it is actually the system eating itself. I'm having trouble thinking of a third option for what it could be.

At this point, I'm thinking I'm going to take a wikibreak. Barring any really startling developments I'm gonna write about other things until at least Friday.

*Quoted from the same article, by the way, that quotes Eric Holder using the word "misimpression," which I'm sure won't get the same response as Palin's "refudiate." And, OK, maybe there's an argument that "misimpression" can be considered a real word, but only in terms of weaselly politspeak. "Refudiate" at least has the advantage of being a) a funny play on an overused term, b) immediately clear, and c) not from the Handbook of Corporate Dehumanization in Language.

3 comments:

Soj said...

all i can say is amen

Randal Graves said...

Re: real vs. fake. I must refudiate your misimpression. Since it's on the internets, did you ever think that perhaps Mr. Crowley (heh) is concerned for everyone's The Sims account?

Ethan said...

"What Wikileaks is doing has distracted me at a crucial moment, and hitting B instead of A has caused Mario to fall down a pit. Real Mario lives are being lost, and everyone knows there is only one 1UP on this level."