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I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time to skim it. But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) ha

I don't want to get into a detailed analysis of the piece -- I only had time to skim it. But am I to understand that I (and the rest of the American people) have paid tens of billions of dollars, had multiple elections, politically demonstrated and pleaded to Congressmen, to have a State Department that Assange doesn't feel should keep secrets, so he dumps the embassy cables? If a single actor can take it on himself to do all of that, then why am I wasting my time choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be? Seems like I should just take it on myself -- after careful analysis of course -- that Assange is a danger to my representative form of government and I should go shoot him (I mean this completely rhetorically, by the way. I in no way support violence against anybody) The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will. Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract. I just can't see how this plays out very well.

gvb 16y ago
Yes. See also comment 32 by "Incomitatus": 2. Assange believes that what he calls ‘conspiracy’ is bad, that authority is bad. He regards these things as inherently ‘unjust’. He may not say it, or maybe the analyst who wrote this piece didn’t feel the need to draw it out, but his position logically requires him to regard the State as inherently unjust and evil. If he doesn’t, it can only be because he misapprehends the fundamental nature of the State. In short, Assange is an Anarchist, whether he realises it or not, and his agenda can be countered by every argument ever made for the value of the State as an institution.
- troutwine 16y ago
  To my mind, the most interesting, basic questions raised by the Wikileaks sensation are these: To what extent may a good and proper government of the People keep secrets from its People and to what extent may it not? Secondly, if the State deems knowledge inappropriate for dissemination to the People how then are citizens empowered to change the State? I don't have an answer for either of these questions. To have no secrets it desirable, but I do not see how this would not lead to pure Anarchy (in the political sense); hardly desirable in which malevolent actors are a part of the political process. Swing around to the other extreme and we've dropped ourselves into a Totalitarian Democracy.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    "To what extent may a good and proper government of the People keep secrets from its People" The government may keep secrets to the extent that doing so does not erode its net good and properness. There can definitely be such a thing as too much transparency, which Jeffrey Rosen makes a good argument against in his book The Unwanted Gaze. But with Obama personally going out of his way to block scientific research from taking place I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet.[1] [1] C.f. the controversy around Obama nominating Michele Leonhart for DEA administrator even after she defied a judicial recommendation to let UMass Amherst grow marijuana for MAPS research.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - troutwine 16y ago
      > The government may keep secrets to the extent that doing so does not erode its net good and properness. This seems tautological. Can you elaborate, please?
      - jerf 16y ago
        Words have changed over the past couple hundred years. It probably wasn't tautological then, though I wouldn't care to try to translate it to modern terms as I am not familiar enough with Jefferson's thought to have more than a sketchy clue from reading other works of the time.
        troutwine 16y ago
        I understand the words and intent well enough, but taken out of context the statement would have been deemed slim pickings even 240 years ago. What acts must a government and people do, etc. are not even hinted at. I can guess at Alex's intent--assume he's read similar things to me, has a roughly similar education and so forth--but the ambiguity impedes a well founded conversation.
      - Alex3917 16y ago
- alexqgb 16y ago
  Wait, what? Assange believes 'authority is bad'? Where are you getting that? Surly not from what he actually says; "The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance." For an anarchist, he seems pretty unclear on the concept.
chaostheory 16y ago
"Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed." The question is "does our government listen to its people anymore, regardless of elections"? The bank bailouts were opposed by the majority of the population crossing party lines. I wouldn't be surprised if the new TSA procedures are equally as hated. I can go on about other subjects such as FISA, ACTA, torture, Iraq & Afghanistan occupation. Are we now living in a more subtle version of Singapore or China?
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Why the generalizing? The question you pose is not something that you can prove one way or another. It's up to each citizen to make that decision for themselves. As broken as it all is, a minority of people can't rise up and take away the consent of the governed by the majority, no matter how good their logic or noble their cause. It doesn't work like that. It's not a mathematical proof. Systems of people are not like system of network nodes. Yes, there are similarities, but there are very important differences too. Europe already went down this road in the prelude to WWI. It didn't work out so well. I'm not opposed to going over all of this again, but these things have already been discussed and argued by people far wiser than us. If I understand what folks are saying, it's not like Assange has come up with some unique insight that somehow is going to make things better. This is just anarchism by another name.
  - chaostheory 16y ago
    I wasn't that general. I did cite at least two cases where the majority of the governed wanted something other than what our government has provided us. Besides I don't see this toppling our representative democracy. If anything it'll just help keep our representatives a bit more honest and a bit more cautious. My point is that many people already see the social contract as broken.
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      I screwed that up, so let me restate: why are you making a general assessment of the state of the social contract and then taking action which effects me because of your analysis? I happen to agree with you that things suck. But I disagree with leaks of State Dept and tactical military intelligence. Others think things are great but don't mind the leaks. Still others are apathetic and encourage the leaks. Out of a dozen people, you'll find a dozen different opinions. We all -- each citizen -- have a unique relationship with our government. Who are you or anybody else to make a decision like that that effects billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives? I didn't elect Assange. He doesn't represent me. And I have no recourse to remove him from his post if I feel he is acting maliciously or incompetently. You see, it's not enough to make the argument that things suck so much that anything would be better. It doesn't work that way. That's just waving your arms around in anger and exasperation. I also believe we need to get rid of 99.99% of the secrecy we have. But there is still a role for government and secrecy. Some random person doesn't have the right to "fix" what he thinks is broken -- because if he can do that, then we all can. And at that point we might as well just go out in the streets with guns to get our way. This is insanity. Well thought-out, for a good cause, well-intentioned, but fundamentally broken. This is like the dozenth time groups of people have been down this road. It doesn't end well -- even if the state is "fixed". It's critically important to separate your opinion of the state of things from the reasons and rules that each individual can take to make a difference. Take the Declaration of Independence. In it, Jefferson doesn't make the case that monarchical rule is broken and therefore we must act militarily -- far from it. He respects the previous state of things but then makes a detailed argument as to how the king broke the social contract with the colonies, thereby releasing governance of the states back to the "natural legislature" of the people. It's a very long list of things we did to try to make things work and how they didn't work out. If you want a revolution, that's the place to go to start understanding what arguments work and what arguments don't work. Move from there to "Letters from a Birmingham Jail". But don't go down the Marx route where you do this huge amount of clever reasoning and then wreak havoc on the rest of us because of what you've proven. That's not so good.
randallsquared 16y ago
Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. They mostly continue due to the apathy of the governed, I'd say. The 40-something percent of voters who vote for the loser in various elections are explicitly registering their dissent from being governed by the people they didn't vote for. I'd say that those people certainly are wasting their time 'choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be', and from the steadily heightening vitriol in day-to-day politics, I think that's becoming clearer and clearer to everyday voters in the US. This, too, seems to be due in part to the fragmentation of sources from which people get political news; the genteel framing of debating with fellow citizens is breaking down with access to more varied and less controlled information.
- TheCondor 16y ago
  It's also an overly simple view of things. The 40% that vote for the loser aren't expressing dissent, only a much smaller percentage of them are expressing dissent. It's not a binary problem. That simplifies everything way too much. The candidates are too similar for it to be dissent. You have to go to the fringe topics to really make them disagree in the first place, you have to bring up abortion or which stem cell lines the federal dollars go to, or gay marriage or crap like that to even get them to start to disagree. Politics is competitive, the best politicians will hire the best analysts to study the polls of the masses and come up with platforms that appeal to the broadest set of people possible so that they can win the election. Likewise, the elections will continue to be "close" because of that.
- jerf 16y ago
  In a very LessWrong sort of way, you might find if you really think about it that the "apathy" of the governed is frequently quite rational. If you are a middle-of-the-road voter and really don't particularly care one way or the other which person gets elected or which proposals pass, why vote? If things are going fairly well, why vote? Arguably they're doing us a favor by not casting an essentially random vote. In the past couple of elections there's been a lot more participation, broadly from the Left in 2008 and broadly from the Right in 2010. Because not caring has become a lot less rational. Humans aren't rational by any stretch of the imagination but groups of humans are frequently far more rational than supposed, if you take the time to figure out their real incentives and not just the immediately obvious ones, or the ones being loudly claimed. (And yes, I agree there are truly apathetic individuals. But most people read "apathy" as simply a variant of "lazy" and I don't think that's necessarily as true as it pleases some people to believe.)
Detrus 16y ago
You can make up your own bullshit or choose from the variety of available flavors. Big businesses act without consent of the governed as the norm, breaking the social contract. Assange is just new to the party so he gets a disproportionate amount of attention. So pick your flavor.
kbatten 16y ago
Money already speaks volumes in elections so I would rather have a human being actually show they can have an effect beyond that. Not to sound like a paranoid, but how can the government follow the consent of the governed when those in power do not live like those they govern?
kbatten 16y ago
Money already speaks volumes in elections so I would rather have a human being actually show they can have an effect beyond that. Not to sound like a paranoid, but how can the government follow the consent of the governed when those in power do not live like those they govern?
andreyf 16y ago
You're responding to a summary of a summary of Assanage's essay with a rhetorical (did you mean hypothetical?) suggestion of killing him? I don't think this is the kind of writing I expect on Hacker News...
- firemanx 16y ago
  The point wasn't that he wanted to kill him, I think, but rather that if Assange's own views don't respect rule of law and governance, the resulting outcome of those kinds of beliefs is vigilante justice. Essentially pointing out the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" point in all of this.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - andreyf 16y ago
    But vigilante justice is homicide, and what Julian is doing is equivalent, how? You could call him an anarchist nerd publishing whatever low-level diplomatic snippets fall through the cracks, but surely, the things that are truly classified won't fall through the cracks to the likes of him. This is the internet: you can publish content anonymously without extraordinary effort. Assanage simply provides a microphone. If he'd been a little less paranoid, he'd have made an amazing journalist.
- defen 16y ago
  I think his point was that, through his actions of attacking the fundamental values of society, Assange has declared himself an outlaw - in the original Anglo-Saxon sense of the word
eof 16y ago
>The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will. Well it goes both ways. The government is constantly imposing its will on me in ways I resent. Assange also feels this way and notices that the ability of the government to impose its will rests on conspiracy. Your 'argument' is impenetrable because whether or not the organization is inherently just (and shouldn't be messed with) or unjust (and should be messed with) you are fully invested in your paradigm and seem unwilling to give it up regardless. From the standpoint that the US govt is all democracy and stars and stripes, of course Assange is 'bad.' But that doesn't appear to be the reality of the situation.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. OK, it's a tired point, but maybe relevant here: the USA is not a democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic, a few bits of which are managed democratically. Just as the myth about Columbus being smart enough to ignore the popular notion that the world is flat, the bold experiment that is America was not Democracy: that's been around for thousands of years, since the Greeks at least. Heck, pirate ships were governed democratically. No, the bold new idea embodied in America was that of a limited constitutional republic. Our contract with the government is now thoroughly broken, because it no longer views itself as being one of limited, enumerated powers. As you say elsewhere regarding Jefferson and the Declaration, we have an obligation to show that the contract has already been violated. But as far as I can see, this is obvious enough to be a mere formality.
zmmmmm 16y ago
> Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed Can people consent to things they don't know about? Isn't transparency a pre-requesite for the kind of democracy you describe?
DanI-S 16y ago
If a single actor can disrupt the system that much by releasing some information casually available to some 3m US military personnel, the system is broken.
joe_the_user 16y ago
"If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract." Who you gonna blame? The one who gave you the illusion or the one who took it away? ... wait, don't answer that...
- mkramlich 16y ago
  ie. like Morpheus, Assange is at least offering us more of a choice. Between the blue pill, which is what some want you to believe, or the red pill, which is documented evidence of the real. So to the folks who hawk the blue pill, and who profit from having the masses continue to believe in the illusion they're promoting, Assange is a terrorist. To those who'd rather know the Truth -- to see the world as it actually is -- you'd rather take the red pill. And therefore to those people, he would be a hero. Terrorist or hero. Same man, same actions. (Note: Sarah Palin, the dipshit-diva of the right-wing has lately literally been calling Assange a terrorist. And she's the not only one. So my hero-or-terrorist model above is not an exaggeration. It's already happening.)
grandalf 16y ago
I'd argue that the American people don't actually have any say over the organizations that keep secrets... they've taken on a life of their own. Evidence? That much of the information revealed about Iraq/Afghanistan was suppressed for propaganda reasons -- the government didn't want the American people to know that the taliban has certain weapons, that the simple good/evil story is complicated by ISI involvement, that the US knowingly handed detainees over to the Iraqi regime for very likely torture, etc. Any voter who supported the pretense of the war would surely want to know the truth about how the war is going before deciding whether to continue supporting it! The propaganda agencies suppressed certain info in order to tell a particular story back home. The truth can work in favor of the war or against it. There were some aspects that worked in favor of it, but in my opinion the reason Wikileaks is a good thing is b/c it helps deprive our leaders of the ability to deceive us.
JulianMorrison 16y ago
> my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state You think being lied to is a good thing? Assange's trick forces governments to pick one of: being called to account, stifling themselves with secrecy, or not being evil. Where evil is roughly defined as: doing things you would rather the voting public didn't know. You seem to be ignoring that third choice, but Assange is not. That's his aim.

gvb 16y ago

Yes. See also comment 32 by "Incomitatus": 2. Assange believes that what he calls ‘conspiracy’ is bad, that authority is bad. He regards these things as inherently ‘unjust’. He may not say it, or maybe the analyst who wrote this piece didn’t feel the need to draw it out, but his position logically requires him to regard the State as inherently unjust and evil. If he doesn’t, it can only be because he misapprehends the fundamental nature of the State. In short, Assange is an Anarchist, whether he realises it or not, and his agenda can be countered by every argument ever made for the value of the State as an institution.

troutwine 16y ago
To my mind, the most interesting, basic questions raised by the Wikileaks sensation are these: To what extent may a good and proper government of the People keep secrets from its People and to what extent may it not? Secondly, if the State deems knowledge inappropriate for dissemination to the People how then are citizens empowered to change the State? I don't have an answer for either of these questions. To have no secrets it desirable, but I do not see how this would not lead to pure Anarchy (in the political sense); hardly desirable in which malevolent actors are a part of the political process. Swing around to the other extreme and we've dropped ourselves into a Totalitarian Democracy.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  "To what extent may a good and proper government of the People keep secrets from its People" The government may keep secrets to the extent that doing so does not erode its net good and properness. There can definitely be such a thing as too much transparency, which Jeffrey Rosen makes a good argument against in his book The Unwanted Gaze. But with Obama personally going out of his way to block scientific research from taking place I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet.[1] [1] C.f. the controversy around Obama nominating Michele Leonhart for DEA administrator even after she defied a judicial recommendation to let UMass Amherst grow marijuana for MAPS research.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - troutwine 16y ago
    > The government may keep secrets to the extent that doing so does not erode its net good and properness. This seems tautological. Can you elaborate, please?
    - jerf 16y ago
      Words have changed over the past couple hundred years. It probably wasn't tautological then, though I wouldn't care to try to translate it to modern terms as I am not familiar enough with Jefferson's thought to have more than a sketchy clue from reading other works of the time.
      - troutwine 16y ago
        I understand the words and intent well enough, but taken out of context the statement would have been deemed slim pickings even 240 years ago. What acts must a government and people do, etc. are not even hinted at. I can guess at Alex's intent--assume he's read similar things to me, has a roughly similar education and so forth--but the ambiguity impedes a well founded conversation.
    - Alex3917 16y ago
alexqgb 16y ago
Wait, what? Assange believes 'authority is bad'? Where are you getting that? Surly not from what he actually says; "The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance." For an anarchist, he seems pretty unclear on the concept.

chaostheory 16y ago

"Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed." The question is "does our government listen to its people anymore, regardless of elections"? The bank bailouts were opposed by the majority of the population crossing party lines. I wouldn't be surprised if the new TSA procedures are equally as hated. I can go on about other subjects such as FISA, ACTA, torture, Iraq & Afghanistan occupation. Are we now living in a more subtle version of Singapore or China?

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Why the generalizing? The question you pose is not something that you can prove one way or another. It's up to each citizen to make that decision for themselves. As broken as it all is, a minority of people can't rise up and take away the consent of the governed by the majority, no matter how good their logic or noble their cause. It doesn't work like that. It's not a mathematical proof. Systems of people are not like system of network nodes. Yes, there are similarities, but there are very important differences too. Europe already went down this road in the prelude to WWI. It didn't work out so well. I'm not opposed to going over all of this again, but these things have already been discussed and argued by people far wiser than us. If I understand what folks are saying, it's not like Assange has come up with some unique insight that somehow is going to make things better. This is just anarchism by another name.
- chaostheory 16y ago
  I wasn't that general. I did cite at least two cases where the majority of the governed wanted something other than what our government has provided us. Besides I don't see this toppling our representative democracy. If anything it'll just help keep our representatives a bit more honest and a bit more cautious. My point is that many people already see the social contract as broken.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    I screwed that up, so let me restate: why are you making a general assessment of the state of the social contract and then taking action which effects me because of your analysis? I happen to agree with you that things suck. But I disagree with leaks of State Dept and tactical military intelligence. Others think things are great but don't mind the leaks. Still others are apathetic and encourage the leaks. Out of a dozen people, you'll find a dozen different opinions. We all -- each citizen -- have a unique relationship with our government. Who are you or anybody else to make a decision like that that effects billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives? I didn't elect Assange. He doesn't represent me. And I have no recourse to remove him from his post if I feel he is acting maliciously or incompetently. You see, it's not enough to make the argument that things suck so much that anything would be better. It doesn't work that way. That's just waving your arms around in anger and exasperation. I also believe we need to get rid of 99.99% of the secrecy we have. But there is still a role for government and secrecy. Some random person doesn't have the right to "fix" what he thinks is broken -- because if he can do that, then we all can. And at that point we might as well just go out in the streets with guns to get our way. This is insanity. Well thought-out, for a good cause, well-intentioned, but fundamentally broken. This is like the dozenth time groups of people have been down this road. It doesn't end well -- even if the state is "fixed". It's critically important to separate your opinion of the state of things from the reasons and rules that each individual can take to make a difference. Take the Declaration of Independence. In it, Jefferson doesn't make the case that monarchical rule is broken and therefore we must act militarily -- far from it. He respects the previous state of things but then makes a detailed argument as to how the king broke the social contract with the colonies, thereby releasing governance of the states back to the "natural legislature" of the people. It's a very long list of things we did to try to make things work and how they didn't work out. If you want a revolution, that's the place to go to start understanding what arguments work and what arguments don't work. Move from there to "Letters from a Birmingham Jail". But don't go down the Marx route where you do this huge amount of clever reasoning and then wreak havoc on the rest of us because of what you've proven. That's not so good.

randallsquared 16y ago

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. They mostly continue due to the apathy of the governed, I'd say. The 40-something percent of voters who vote for the loser in various elections are explicitly registering their dissent from being governed by the people they didn't vote for. I'd say that those people certainly are wasting their time 'choosing who to vote for, paying taxes, and debating with my fellow citizens what the correct policy on "X" might be', and from the steadily heightening vitriol in day-to-day politics, I think that's becoming clearer and clearer to everyday voters in the US. This, too, seems to be due in part to the fragmentation of sources from which people get political news; the genteel framing of debating with fellow citizens is breaking down with access to more varied and less controlled information.

TheCondor 16y ago
It's also an overly simple view of things. The 40% that vote for the loser aren't expressing dissent, only a much smaller percentage of them are expressing dissent. It's not a binary problem. That simplifies everything way too much. The candidates are too similar for it to be dissent. You have to go to the fringe topics to really make them disagree in the first place, you have to bring up abortion or which stem cell lines the federal dollars go to, or gay marriage or crap like that to even get them to start to disagree. Politics is competitive, the best politicians will hire the best analysts to study the polls of the masses and come up with platforms that appeal to the broadest set of people possible so that they can win the election. Likewise, the elections will continue to be "close" because of that.
jerf 16y ago
In a very LessWrong sort of way, you might find if you really think about it that the "apathy" of the governed is frequently quite rational. If you are a middle-of-the-road voter and really don't particularly care one way or the other which person gets elected or which proposals pass, why vote? If things are going fairly well, why vote? Arguably they're doing us a favor by not casting an essentially random vote. In the past couple of elections there's been a lot more participation, broadly from the Left in 2008 and broadly from the Right in 2010. Because not caring has become a lot less rational. Humans aren't rational by any stretch of the imagination but groups of humans are frequently far more rational than supposed, if you take the time to figure out their real incentives and not just the immediately obvious ones, or the ones being loudly claimed. (And yes, I agree there are truly apathetic individuals. But most people read "apathy" as simply a variant of "lazy" and I don't think that's necessarily as true as it pleases some people to believe.)

Detrus 16y ago

You can make up your own bullshit or choose from the variety of available flavors. Big businesses act without consent of the governed as the norm, breaking the social contract. Assange is just new to the party so he gets a disproportionate amount of attention. So pick your flavor.

kbatten 16y ago

Money already speaks volumes in elections so I would rather have a human being actually show they can have an effect beyond that. Not to sound like a paranoid, but how can the government follow the consent of the governed when those in power do not live like those they govern?

kbatten 16y ago

andreyf 16y ago

You're responding to a summary of a summary of Assanage's essay with a rhetorical (did you mean hypothetical?) suggestion of killing him? I don't think this is the kind of writing I expect on Hacker News...

firemanx 16y ago
The point wasn't that he wanted to kill him, I think, but rather that if Assange's own views don't respect rule of law and governance, the resulting outcome of those kinds of beliefs is vigilante justice. Essentially pointing out the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" point in all of this.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- andreyf 16y ago
  But vigilante justice is homicide, and what Julian is doing is equivalent, how? You could call him an anarchist nerd publishing whatever low-level diplomatic snippets fall through the cracks, but surely, the things that are truly classified won't fall through the cracks to the likes of him. This is the internet: you can publish content anonymously without extraordinary effort. Assanage simply provides a microphone. If he'd been a little less paranoid, he'd have made an amazing journalist.
defen 16y ago
I think his point was that, through his actions of attacking the fundamental values of society, Assange has declared himself an outlaw - in the original Anglo-Saxon sense of the word

eof 16y ago

>The problem here is believing your own bullshit, as they say on the streets. Or put nicer, coming up with a line of reasoning that you (and perhaps others) deem to be the "correct" one, and then imposing it on the rest of us against our will. Well it goes both ways. The government is constantly imposing its will on me in ways I resent. Assange also feels this way and notices that the ability of the government to impose its will rests on conspiracy. Your 'argument' is impenetrable because whether or not the organization is inherently just (and shouldn't be messed with) or unjust (and should be messed with) you are fully invested in your paradigm and seem unwilling to give it up regardless. From the standpoint that the US govt is all democracy and stars and stripes, of course Assange is 'bad.' But that doesn't appear to be the reality of the situation.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed. OK, it's a tired point, but maybe relevant here: the USA is not a democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic, a few bits of which are managed democratically. Just as the myth about Columbus being smart enough to ignore the popular notion that the world is flat, the bold experiment that is America was not Democracy: that's been around for thousands of years, since the Greeks at least. Heck, pirate ships were governed democratically. No, the bold new idea embodied in America was that of a limited constitutional republic. Our contract with the government is now thoroughly broken, because it no longer views itself as being one of limited, enumerated powers. As you say elsewhere regarding Jefferson and the Declaration, we have an obligation to show that the contract has already been violated. But as far as I can see, this is obvious enough to be a mere formality.

zmmmmm 16y ago

> Democracies don't work by doing the right or correct thing. They work by the consent of the governed Can people consent to things they don't know about? Isn't transparency a pre-requesite for the kind of democracy you describe?

DanI-S 16y ago

If a single actor can disrupt the system that much by releasing some information casually available to some 3m US military personnel, the system is broken.

joe_the_user 16y ago

"If Assange takes away my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state, then he's effectively attacking the social contract." Who you gonna blame? The one who gave you the illusion or the one who took it away? ... wait, don't answer that...

mkramlich 16y ago
ie. like Morpheus, Assange is at least offering us more of a choice. Between the blue pill, which is what some want you to believe, or the red pill, which is documented evidence of the real. So to the folks who hawk the blue pill, and who profit from having the masses continue to believe in the illusion they're promoting, Assange is a terrorist. To those who'd rather know the Truth -- to see the world as it actually is -- you'd rather take the red pill. And therefore to those people, he would be a hero. Terrorist or hero. Same man, same actions. (Note: Sarah Palin, the dipshit-diva of the right-wing has lately literally been calling Assange a terrorist. And she's the not only one. So my hero-or-terrorist model above is not an exaggeration. It's already happening.)

grandalf 16y ago

I'd argue that the American people don't actually have any say over the organizations that keep secrets... they've taken on a life of their own. Evidence? That much of the information revealed about Iraq/Afghanistan was suppressed for propaganda reasons -- the government didn't want the American people to know that the taliban has certain weapons, that the simple good/evil story is complicated by ISI involvement, that the US knowingly handed detainees over to the Iraqi regime for very likely torture, etc. Any voter who supported the pretense of the war would surely want to know the truth about how the war is going before deciding whether to continue supporting it! The propaganda agencies suppressed certain info in order to tell a particular story back home. The truth can work in favor of the war or against it. There were some aspects that worked in favor of it, but in my opinion the reason Wikileaks is a good thing is b/c it helps deprive our leaders of the ability to deceive us.

JulianMorrison 16y ago

> my illusion of having some say in the governing of my state You think being lied to is a good thing? Assange's trick forces governments to pick one of: being called to account, stifling themselves with secrecy, or not being evil. Where evil is roughly defined as: doing things you would rather the voting public didn't know. You seem to be ignoring that third choice, but Assange is not. That's his aim.