Well, over December, Wikileaks released the diplomatic cables of the US State Department. There have been a lot of revelations but I don't think any of those are as alarming as the responses on every side of the issue. Firstly, we have the US Government's stance: find a means to silence and murder Assange. A sad day for the first ammendment which regardless of nationality is meant to restrict the US Government from violating peoples rights. Then we get the Infowarriors response which is dangerously paranoid, that Assange is an agent of the New World Order, based entirely on ad hoc fallacies it seems.
Yet worse is the response Anonymous has given, they have decided to fight censorship with hypocrisy. Essentially a DDOS attack is a method of censorship. In fact, the first DDOS attacks were made against Wikileaks old host and at 10GBits a second as it states in the Wikileaks twitter it started censoring Amazon and EasyDNS's other customers. Sadly, there has been an irrational backlash against that as well where Amazon and EasyDNS both got accused of censorship when in reality their actions brought many other customers out of the dark. As for Paypal, they get tied up in red tape the minute Wikileaks is arbitrarily deemed a terrorist group - and they might have done us a favor because donating through an American financial service actually can have donors easily tracked. Though, I do believe Visa corporation could have handled things better, it is already illegal to fund whatever the US Govt deems as a terrorist organization and tracking those funds is done at Visas expense.
I think it is all a perfect example of irrational doctrines of morality in our culture. Every response seems to try and solve this with mindless sacrifices. To fight Assange, they sacrifice the constitution. To fight the US Government, they sacrifice the principles with DDOS attacks. To fight the corporations, they mindless target Amazon and EasyDNS which are quite innocent and were merely protecting their other customers free speech in doing it.
On top of that there are a massive amount of contradictory articles about Julian Assange. Wikipedia for a long time stated that Assange's mother was on the run for a cult, now it states that she was an entertainer. There have been many fallacies about Julian Assange and in fact he calls himself a journalist. He has been called many things but really from my knowledge of Wikileaks prior to this incident he was nothing more than a system administrator. There have been many unsourced claims about his own background.
Even more mysteriously despite his past involvement with open source in the 90s proving he is a Linux guru of roughly fifteen years now, the so-called OkCupid dating profile that was found that belonged to Assange had a very low score on a Linux aptitude test, yet the profile said it was created in 2007 long before the incident or any fame on his part. It stands to reason that OkCupid played silly buggers with the database for this to appear this way just to get free advertising from all the press articles linking to it.
Anyway, even for a logician like myself, this is quite a baffling case of hearsay and lies. The truth about Assange? I wonder if anyone has thought, "what if he is just a man?"
The only bright side I can see for this is that Julian Assange stated before cablegate in a Forbes interview that he is a supporter of American Libertarianism much like myself. Yet, his greatest supporters come from the left and the best thing I can see coming out of this is Assange reasserting his libertarianism. That would be a great mind opening event for the left, who I believe actually remain the most oblivious to a New World Order of paternalistic Statism and are actually its greatest sponsor. So that is the bright side I see coming, the left realizing even their heroes don't like their ideas.
Share / Save
