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Wikileaks about to stir sh!t up again... and Julian Assange - Asshat or Hero? (pg. 14)
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| enydo |
| Nou speaks with such conviction, I can't help but believe everything he says. |
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| d-miurge |
For those who are on Twitter, search the hashtag #imwikileaks. It's really fascinating.
On a related note, Umberto Eco wrote a very interesting paper on a liberal magazine last week:
| quote: | | For the celebrated novelist and intellectual Umberto Eco, the Wikileaks affair or "Cablegate" not only shows up the hypocrisy that governs relations between states, citizens and the press, but also presages a return to more archaic forms of communication. |
His redefinition of a secret is very insightful:
| quote: | | A real secret is an empty secret Secondly, the very notion that any old hacker can delve into the most secret secrets of the most powerful country in the world has dealt a hefty blow to the State Department’s prestige. So the scandal actually hurts the “perpetrators” more than the “victims”. But let’s turn to the more profound significance of what has occurred. Formerly, back in the days of Orwell, every power could be conceived of as a Big Brother watching over its subjects’ every move. The Orwellian prophecy came completely true once the powers that be could monitor every phone call made by the citizen, every hotel he stayed in, every toll road he took and so on and so forth. The citizen became the total victim of the watchful eye of the state. But when it transpires, as it has now, that even the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp, the surveillance ceases to work only one-way and becomes circular. The state has its eye on every citizen, but every citizen, or at least every hacker – the citizens’ self-appointed avenger – can pry into the state’s every secret. How can a power hold up if it can’t even keep its own secrets anymore? It is true, as Georg Simmel once remarked, that a real secret is an empty secret (which can never be unearthed); it is also true that anything known about Berlusconi or Merkel’s character is essentially an empty secret, a secret without a secret, because it’s public domain. But to actually reveal, as WikiLeaks has done, that Hillary Clinton’s secrets were empty secrets amounts to taking away all her power. WikiLeaks didn’t do any harm to Sarkozy or Merkel, but did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama. |
full article |
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| Lira |
| Merci box, D-miurge. By the way, here's Chomsky on... well, I guess you know what he's talking about. |
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| LoveHate |
| I wanna hear viewpoints too. I don't think it's bad, I think we have the right to know but I would also like to hear why we don't want this information out because I'm sure there are some cons to it. |
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| LoveHate |
| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
You are an idiot.
They aren't keeping secrets from you because you are citizen. Do you think everyone in a country will keep quiet and not let some one from a rival country know if the government decides to tell them something?
No.
Secrets are kept for the good of the state and in turn its people. |
You mean like when the Gulf of Tonkin incident didn't really happen and then it started the Vietnam War? That should have been kept secret? |
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| Joss Weatherby |
| quote: | Originally posted by LoveHate
You mean like when the Gulf of Tonkin incident didn't really happen and then it started the Vietnam War? That should have been kept secret? |
No. Quit viewing this in such black and white ways. There are some things that should be exposed, others left out. That is called being responsible and what wikileaks is doing is not responsible. |
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| WhooCares |
| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
No. Quit viewing this in such black and white ways. There are some things that should be exposed, others left out. That is called being responsible and what wikileaks is doing is not responsible. |
and who is in charge of deciding what should be exposed and what shouldn't? |
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| d-miurge |
| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
No. Quit viewing this in such black and white ways. There are some things that should be exposed, others left out. That is called being responsible and what wikileaks is doing is not responsible. |
Can you give us a single thing that must have not been leaked on the cablegate? |
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| aNYthing |
| ing world is definitely going in a hand basket. 2012 HERE WE ING COME! Front row to the Apocalypse! |
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| Meat187 |
| quote: | Originally posted by enydo
Wikileaks is basically doing what a functional media should be. |
I agree with this and find it rather disgusting that there seems to be almost no solidarity from the (German) media. It seems like they don't give a , they are reporting the facts and news, but never make a statement. Now if a similar thing had happened in say China the media would have attacked the government for weeks. Looks like in the western world they measure the value of transparency and freedom of speech with a different scale. |
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| d-miurge |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
I agree with this and find it rather disgusting that there seems to be almost no solidarity from the (German) media. It seems like they don't give a , they are reporting the facts and news, but never make a statement. Now if a similar thing had happened in say China the media would have attacked the government for weeks. Looks like in the western world they measure the value of transparency and freedom of speech with a different scale. |
Even Der Spiegel? |
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