Editorial & Opinion
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Sick Of Hearing About Julian Assange & WikiLeaks?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 14, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010So let’s move on then, and talk about OpenLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Bradley Manning, and the future of truth, journalism, and democracy.
Kudos to Time magazine for featuring Julian Assange on their cover with an American flag gagging him. And kudos to their readers for voting Assange person of the year. Not because I think he’s some kind of hero. Hell, I don’t know; under various countries’ laws he’s probably a criminal of some kind or another. In fact, early on, I jokingly suggested that WikiLeaks was a disinformation machine set up by the US government. But if Assange gets thrown under the bus by the British and Swedish legal systems and ends up being “extraordinarily rendered” by US intelligence, the greatest tragedy would not be Assange’s personal demise, it would be if we all forgot about the principle behind what he was doing and returned to pointlessly quibbling about the latest partisan political folly of the week. So I hope conservatives everywhere smolder about Michael Moore’s self-satisfied support of Assange. And I hope liberals have hernias about Sarah Palin suggesting he should be hunted down like Osama Bin Laden. And I hope Vladimir Putin keeps making jabs at our sham democracy with barbs like “So, you know, as they say in the countryside, some people’s cows can moo, but yours should keep quiet“. And I hope women like Sady Doyle keep convicting him without a trial. And I hope pseudonymous misogynist bloggers like “Ferdinand Bardamu” keep dialing up the outrage on the other side by revealing the identities and addresses of the accusers. And I hope the former WikiLeakers who are organizing OpenLeaks keep dissing Assange to get press for their new venture. And I hope bloggers like Gene Lalor keep fretting that Bradley Manning is a homosexual traitor. And I hope that bleeding heart liberal intellectuals in Berkeley erect a statue in his honor. And I hope Daniel Ellsberg keeps pointing out that his experience with the Pentagon Papers was identical to the WikiLeaks debacle. Because in the end, there’s some nebulous hope that by keeping the dialog about the broader issue alive, more people will realize that the real issue is truth, and possessing the integrity to speak it. It may have taken some personally flawed personalities to do it, but the big filthy satchel of lies has been dumped on the ground. Let’s look at the contents before we decide whom to lynch.
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WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Arrested?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 5, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Sunday, December 5th, 2010Maybe in the development of his interpersonal skills, but his character flaws give us an important glimpse into the collective psyche of the entire human race.
I used to jokingly say that I loved the human race, it was just the dirty little specks that make it up that I wasn’t always so crazy about. I think this is something most of us share to some degree; we may be much more particular about whom we allow into our more intimate circle, but “the crowd” is okay enough that we’ll go watch a football game with them, even if we favor opposing teams. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as the whole WikiLeaks drama has unfolded over the last few months. I find myself having some conflicting thoughts, first being gung-ho about the information being leaked, then pondering if Assange has ruined the future of this kind of transparency with his celebrity, and then thinking that perhaps having his face on the organization is the only way it could all work. But when Tea Baggers start calling for the CIA to kill Assange, and party-hopping, self-interested plutocrats like Joe Lieberman intimidate Amazon.com into refusing to host WikiLeaks’ content, I become convinced that regardless of my or anyone else’s personal opinions about Assange as a public figure, he’s playing a crucial role. Apparently Daniel Ellsberg (of the Pentagon Papers fame) agrees, and with much more integrity than I; he actually canceled his Amazon account. We live in an era when an oligarchical corporatocracy runs a government that’s comprised mainly of wealthy team players that put on an exceptional dog and pony show to maintain the illusion that they’re representing a populace they’ve divided straight down the middle with peripheral issues while they midwife the birth of the full-blown corporation state. And that glimpse into the collective psyche I mentioned? It’s first of all very telling that a lot of Wikileaks’ insiders departed as soon as the heat started rising a little. His harshest critics are people in the same field; the founder of Cryptome.org criticizes him in the tech media, while on the Cryptome site they call WikiLeaks “cowardly” for too much redaction of the documents. It smacks a little of the kind of quiet rage you expect amongst young hackers who are jealous of each others’ accomplishments. But it’s even more telling that a government that taps our phones, places bomb conspirators in our places of faith, and demands full body pat-downs when we travel doesn’t want US to know what THEY’RE doing. In the end, I think this is all really about the almost universal assumption that deceit is a fundamental requirement of human interaction and governance. Personally, I don’t think it is. And I think (or at least hope) that whatever happens to WikiLeaks in particular, that this could be the dawn of a new era in journalism and information sharing. Mark Pesce of ABC (the Australian one) takes an interesting look at that idea here, and the Associated Press acknowledges their implication in the leaks in this piece, in which they talk about the cooperation between WikiLeaks and The New York Times, Le Monde in France, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany.
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: Suicide By Spook?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 30, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010Although some aspects of what WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is doing are admirable, given his arrogant and self-aggrandizing approach, one can only wonder how long he will remain free or even alive. No matter how things turn out, I nominate Julian Sands to play him in the movie.
 Rumor has it that there’s a movie in the works, with another Julian starring as Assange |
Earlier today I joked with a friend that if Julian Assange wants to live, he should get in touch with Osama Bin Laden’s people; they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping the US government off their tails. So it was with a certain glee that I read that Sarah Palin went all fuzzy in the head again, demanding we hunt Assange down like Bin Laden. I guess meaning “in a fashion that never leads to his capture”. Assange is often referred to as being in an “undisclosed location”, a place made famous by another narcissistic freak, Dick Cheney. Although in Dick’s case, he had the benefit of a global superpower’s intelligence agencies to undisclose him. Assange’s undisclosed location is England, which I personally wouldn’t refer to as particularly undisclosed. The fact that Interpol is gunning for him doesn’t bode well for his future either. Although some would argue that Assange and the Swedish legal system deserve each other, the fact that the case was brought forth once, dropped, and then brought forth again to coincide with the release of more documents smacks of the kind of spy-novel intrigue one would expect in a situation like this. In an era when White House staff members out our own spies for domestic political revenge, it would be naive to assume for certain that the rape allegations are legit. Unfortunately, in spite of the many possible virtues of what Assange is doing, many – including a co-founder that has run a “purer” version of what WikiLeaks is doing at Cryptome.org – agree that he’s going about it all wrong, letting money and his own celebrity damage the integrity of the information. Even his key tech people left en masse just a couple of months ago. I personally believe that the essence of what Assange is doing is crucial at this point in history; the age of nation states with their legacy of smiling mutual deceit and spy vs. spy charades is approaching its obsolescence. A new world order probably is in the works, and I don’t think we want it defined by the likes of any of the people being exposed in the recent diplomatic cables. I honestly just wonder how long Assange will remain free, or even alive. I hope long enough to take down a few banks. I also think it’s about time someone got to work on the movie; given Julian Assange’s foppish dislikeableness, it could easily be a career-reviving role for Julian Sands.
Indian Microcredit Industry About To Collapse?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 17, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010In spite of the feelgood vibe associated with microfunding for the economically challenged people of the world, no-one’s going to be singing “Tiny Bubbles” if India’s massive microlending industry bubble bursts.
 Even with microlending, there are always strings attached. |
Wow. Just when I had stopped worrying about how the collapse of Ireland’s economy might trigger the broader collapse of the global economy (it turns out Ireland’s economy isn’t dead, it’s just resting ), now I have to worry about the collapse of India’s economy. After watching America’s banking system get gutted by smart rich guys loaning tons of money to people to buy houses they couldn’t afford, SOMEONE should have noticed the potential for the same to happen with the massive microcredit industry in India. The parallels are actually rather remarkable, except the consequences are much more dramatic. This Globe And Mail piece politely refers to how the poorly-regulated microloan industry in India has resorted to “usurious interest rates and coercive means” to operate. Meaning they’ve apparently been operating much like the local loan sharks everyone was happy to see them replace. This has led to suicides by microcredit-bankrupted individuals who are now being urged by Indian legislators to “strategically default”. Which then gives the banks a fright, because they’re exposed to the tune of $4 billion on all of this lending. The tragic thing on the human end of this scenario? The worst of these overextended borrowers who are choosing suicide as a solution may only owe as little as $2,000. Too bad the Gates Foundation and others didn’t speak up sooner about how the microcredit model was so flawed. For a refresher on how this sort of crisis can play out, see the graphic below. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Can’t This Headline Contain The Word [Expletive Deleted]?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 11, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, November 11th, 2010I thought about doing something special for the one-thousandth article on Dissociated Press, then I said f*ck it.
