Posts by Neil Morrison
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Assange is doing a good job of ticking all the cult leader boxes.
I wonder what reception a Tea Partier doing the same to undermine Obama’s diplomacy – because he hasn’t bombed Iran yet – would get.
-
, they'd refuse to publish them, because they are not material of ethical, political and historical significance.
wikileaks can guarantee that all 250,000 cables fall into that category? And who decides what private correspondence is of such ethical, political and historical significance that that privacy should be breached?
were there really 250,000 grotesque injustices that demanded such action?
-
I don't think the comparison is with the US gun lobby rather with the militia cults. Anarcho-libertarian fundamentalism.
-
Assange calls what he's doing "Scientific Journalism". All we need is scientific journalsim to solve all the worlds problems. Just like Scientific Materialism solved all our problems.
Assange is another person who believes that if one has the Correct Information on an issue then there can only be one correct opinion on that issue and every other one must be due to nefarious influences.
-
One of the aspecst of independent journalists such as Pilger that I have a problem with is their consipratorial approach to how people arrive at their political opinions. That's the - "people have a different opinion to me on Afghanistan/Israel etc because the don'lt know the full story and they don't know the full story because of the capitalist media and the Lobby etc" theory.
I wonder if Jon Stephenson believes that NZers would not support the "illegal, immoral, and intractable conflict" if they were given the full story - ie the version of the full story he believes in. It sounds like he has that sort of theory about the relaltionship between journalism and public opinion.
I don't think things (ie the human mind) work that way and I think that view has potentially troublesum consequences.
-
Hard News: Spinning and soldiering, in reply to Ross Mason,
Someone who asks questions and interpretes the multiple realities...
which could just as well describe Michael Laws. Not that I would mind if he called himself an independent journalist, that would not make up for being a complete dick.
I suppose I'm really aiming at the crusading journalists such as Pilger who for me are much more like political activists.
Jon Stephenson has some quite firm views on the politics of the Middle East, Israel and the US. Some of what he writes I would call journalism and some I would class as activism. Maybe that's just a measure of how much I agree or disagree and perhaps that's the defining factor for most people as well.
-
"independent journalist", how does that differ from "political activist"?
-
I think the Obama administration has done more for democracy and human rights than Assange will ever achieve.
Having Obama as president and Assange a rather strange self-promoter is a division of labour in complete agreement with their skills, intelligence and morals.
-
So if a government really wants/needs to keep a secret it still can, factoring in the cost (in terms of risk) of sharing that information with additional nodes.
what made the scale of this leak possible was the response of the US govt to criticism over 9/11 that govt agencies did not share information. So information was centralised and digitised.
I doubt this is going to make govts more open. The Obama admin will just tighten security. And given that no one appears to believe this is anything more than high level gossip with no real news then I'd say they would be perfecty justified in doing that. What have we gained apart from making diplomats susipcious that everything they say might be taken out of context and made public.
-
I'm not sure the Obama admin is all that concerned about the leaks, they generally show them in good light and the govts of North Korea and Iran in a poor light but other people might be worried -