Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Would require a hell of a lot of eroding before National and Labour got sufficiently close to make a grand coalition a possibility. For all the little bits they agree on, they also disagree fairly loudly on some quite fundamental issues.
I'd say the opposite was true - they broadly agree on 95% of all political issues, and the points where they disagree are greatly exaggerated, not because of the strength of their convictions but as exercises in marketing and fundraising.
The real enmity between National and Labour, and the thing that makes a grand coalition impossible is the personal ambition of the politicians in each party. All of them want to be in government and run the country but you can't have two PMs, two Finance Ministers, two Justice Ministers etc. Almost all the inter-party enmity between Labour and National stems from this dynamic. -
I'd never heard of the Summer Sounds Symposium. I see that it describes itself as 'the most stimulating intellectual event on the year's calendar' and that the master of ceremonies is Herald columnist Jim Hopkins.
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Do not calle up that wych ye cannot put downe
H P Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror.
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just because you haven’t heard of something, does not mean no one has.
A comparative google trends search for wikileaks and cryptome returns the result ‘cryptome does not have enough search volume for ranking’.
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I came to this site expecting enlightening analysis . . .
Twatcock! ROFFLNUI.
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So how do we decide which things the government can keep secret? I think many people are just very very leery of letting Assange be the person that makes that decision, given it's basically the antithesis of the rule of law.
I think this fails to understand what he's trying to achieve. He's not trying to bring about utopia, or prevent any government secrecy at all - he's making it harder for governments to operate in secrecy as a matter of routine.
His thesis is that instead of serving the public political elites serve themselves and various powerful interests. To accomplish this they make the day to day functions of government secret from the public. But to function effectively they need to share information with each other, and the existence of Wikileaks means distributing information always risks compromising secrecy.
(Assange is trained as a computer scientist and his way of explaining this model is that he takes acyclic graphs of directed information and weights the edges).
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.
But Wikileaks makes it harder for an entire elite political class to operate in secrecy. That's not building a new world, or overturning the rule of law, or allowing Assange to decide what is secret and what is known, it's trying to make the currently existing system function the way it's supposed to. -
Or compare him to Woodward and Bernstein, who released secret US documents, hugely embarrassed very powerful people and weren't accused of rape.
That you have to go back in time forty years to find a counterfactual is significant in of itself. If you look at more recent very high-profile whistle-blowers like Scott Ritter and Joe Wilson you find them exposed to a similar style of smears and character assasination as Assange.
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After the pentagon has said that wikileaks must be stopped, and republicans have called it a terrorist organization, I think you may want to consider the possibility that the CIA is in fact one of the simple explanations.
Yeah. The sequence of events is pretty clear. Assange embarrases the most powerful people in the world, immediately afterwards Interpol puts him on their global most wanted list. Now compare him to, say, Roman Polanski, who confessed to the anal rape of a minor and was allowed to travel around Europe for forty years without harrasement.
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The existence of the US National Security State isn’t a ‘conspiracy theory’. It’s beyond dispute that (a) this is the most powerful group of people in the world and (b) it routinely kidnaps, tortures and murders people it considers its enemy and (c) it coerces foreign governments to do its bidding.
Is Assange its victim? I have no idea. But it’s certainly not an unreasonable suggestion to throw out there and falls far short of being a conspiracy theory or ‘rape denial’.
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An intelligence analyst of my aquaintance told me, wistfully, that the leaked US cables are a thousand times more engaging than anything that comes through the MFAT wire.