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> The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper This is the bit that has me the most mystified...none of the released cables reve

> The State Department doesn't know anything you can't learn in the newspaper This is the bit that has me the most mystified...none of the released cables reveals anything particularly surprising (or at least not surprising to anybody who pays even minimal attention to world news)...yet the media is acting like these are huge revelations and it leaves me confused -- is the media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?

tptacek 16y ago
To the media, each Wikileaks dump is just another lump of fuel for the attention-gathering machine. Everyone knows this, including Assange, who acknowledges it openly. One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be disadvantaged in this climate; it might, perish the thought!, be boring. Where would we find the persecuted elfin protoganist? What about the sex? The gossip? To whom would we sell the movie rights about a policy process story?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be disadvantaged in this climate; This one is pretty real. For one we now have official confirmation that the Netherlands hosts a foreign countries nuclear weapons inspite of numerous politicians being on the record to the contrary and for that alone I thank Julian Assange. I'm pretty sure that there are lots of other bits and pieces that are relevant to various parties. One thing this all shows is that you really can't trust governments with any collection of data and that's another useful thing to know with direct application to everyday life.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    To the best of my knowledge the Dutch government, like the Belgian, never confirmed nor denied that US nuclear warheads were stored on Dutch resp. Belgian soil. Everybody knew for at least 25 years that they were there, and nobody was even coy about it - just that there was no 'official' confirmation. So it's not a new fact at all.
mcknz 16y ago
What is fantastic and new is that these obvious things are documented and published, by people who are in a unique position to verify them. We all know North Korea is nuts, but it's news when their BFF China calls it a spoiled child. Then China is forced to publicly acknowledge their desire for Korean unification.
- tptacek 16y ago
  China hasn't publicly acknowledged a desire for unification. We know the same thing now as we knew 3 years ago: that there are elements in Chinese officialdom that would like an end to the horrorshow that is the DPRK, and that the military still views the DPRK as a vital buffer against the west.
  - mcknz 16y ago
    erp -- thought I read that somewhere, but that indeed would be a bit much to expect. I love all the stuff about Afghanistan, the VP with $50MM in walking around money. There's abstract corruption, but the detail is what really stirs the pot.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      There are five thousand results on Google News for 2009 on [karzai corruption] alone. Come on. This isn't "abstract vs. concrete"; it's "information vs. narrative". Narrative is addictive. We lap it up. That's why the press runs it. That's the vulnerability WL takes advantage of (for better or worse).
  - elblanco 16y ago
    Right. In the great rock-paper-scissors game of ideology-nationalism-money, money wins every time. South Korea is a much better trading partner than the black hole in the ground that is North Korea. A hole in which China has dumped billions of dollars with pretty much no return outside of fulfilling a desire for a cold-war style buffer zone. Plus the bonus of South Korea not really being a threat to China anymore (you could debate they weren't ever a threat and the end to the Korean war was a big misunderstanding but that's a different debate).
brudgers 16y ago
>"is the media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?" The media is doing what it usually does. It is reporting on the easiest things. Wikileaks is a bonanza because it contains thousands of documents which can be summarized with trivial analysis and hyperbolic rhetoric. All packaged in conformance with the no-gel foot orthotics fear mongering journalistic favored by the US main stream media. I.e. Wikileaks can be used to signify pre-existing narratives.
lkozma 16y ago
I disagree somewhat, there is revelation in these cables. There is a huge difference between "I know x is true" and "I know that you know that I know ...". To use an example from Pinker's talk on language, in a dictatorship everyone knows the regime is bad, yet the value of public demonstrations is that you find out that others also know it and then you know that they know that ..., which is exactly why gatherings of people are usually controlled in a dictatorship.

tptacek 16y ago

To the media, each Wikileaks dump is just another lump of fuel for the attention-gathering machine. Everyone knows this, including Assange, who acknowledges it openly. One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be disadvantaged in this climate; it might, perish the thought!, be boring. Where would we find the persecuted elfin protoganist? What about the sex? The gossip? To whom would we sell the movie rights about a policy process story?

jacquesm 16y ago
> One wonders whether a real impactful whistleblowing leak might be disadvantaged in this climate; This one is pretty real. For one we now have official confirmation that the Netherlands hosts a foreign countries nuclear weapons inspite of numerous politicians being on the record to the contrary and for that alone I thank Julian Assange. I'm pretty sure that there are lots of other bits and pieces that are relevant to various parties. One thing this all shows is that you really can't trust governments with any collection of data and that's another useful thing to know with direct application to everyday life.
- roel_v 16y ago
  To the best of my knowledge the Dutch government, like the Belgian, never confirmed nor denied that US nuclear warheads were stored on Dutch resp. Belgian soil. Everybody knew for at least 25 years that they were there, and nobody was even coy about it - just that there was no 'official' confirmation. So it's not a new fact at all.

mcknz 16y ago

What is fantastic and new is that these obvious things are documented and published, by people who are in a unique position to verify them. We all know North Korea is nuts, but it's news when their BFF China calls it a spoiled child. Then China is forced to publicly acknowledge their desire for Korean unification.

tptacek 16y ago
China hasn't publicly acknowledged a desire for unification. We know the same thing now as we knew 3 years ago: that there are elements in Chinese officialdom that would like an end to the horrorshow that is the DPRK, and that the military still views the DPRK as a vital buffer against the west.
- mcknz 16y ago
  erp -- thought I read that somewhere, but that indeed would be a bit much to expect. I love all the stuff about Afghanistan, the VP with $50MM in walking around money. There's abstract corruption, but the detail is what really stirs the pot.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    There are five thousand results on Google News for 2009 on [karzai corruption] alone. Come on. This isn't "abstract vs. concrete"; it's "information vs. narrative". Narrative is addictive. We lap it up. That's why the press runs it. That's the vulnerability WL takes advantage of (for better or worse).
- elblanco 16y ago
  Right. In the great rock-paper-scissors game of ideology-nationalism-money, money wins every time. South Korea is a much better trading partner than the black hole in the ground that is North Korea. A hole in which China has dumped billions of dollars with pretty much no return outside of fulfilling a desire for a cold-war style buffer zone. Plus the bonus of South Korea not really being a threat to China anymore (you could debate they weren't ever a threat and the end to the Korean war was a big misunderstanding but that's a different debate).

brudgers 16y ago

>"is the media reporting that wikileaks is leaking these completely obvious things? or are they reporting about these fantastic new completely obvious things?" The media is doing what it usually does. It is reporting on the easiest things. Wikileaks is a bonanza because it contains thousands of documents which can be summarized with trivial analysis and hyperbolic rhetoric. All packaged in conformance with the no-gel foot orthotics fear mongering journalistic favored by the US main stream media. I.e. Wikileaks can be used to signify pre-existing narratives.

lkozma 16y ago

I disagree somewhat, there is revelation in these cables. There is a huge difference between "I know x is true" and "I know that you know that I know ...". To use an example from Pinker's talk on language, in a dictatorship everyone knows the regime is bad, yet the value of public demonstrations is that you find out that others also know it and then you know that they know that ..., which is exactly why gatherings of people are usually controlled in a dictatorship.