What, nobody bringing up Wikileaks?

Where’s SK when you need him?

Anyway… transparency is good for democracy, but not striking out names on sources who are now very possibly in mortal danger is despicable, and the risk is that this will just lead to more secrecy and attempts to control the internet.

And all the news sources on my part of the globe is focusing on is that somebody referred to Vladimir Putin as Batman.

Reuters article.

I am unimpressed by what I’ve heard about the leaks up to now. Its pretty much stuff we already knew, just frequently said in unflattering manners. If anything interesting pops out, it’ll be fun. It isn’t starting well though.

In other news, they have started shutting down torrent websites. I guess that is semi related. Actually it’s only related because I saw the articles on the same day.

It’s nice to see US Homeland Security shutting down torrent sites. I thought Homeland Security was worried about terrorists, not kids downloading music and movies. Of course the torrent sites just moved their domain names to .info, which the US doesn’t have jurisdiction over, so they accomplished absolutely nothing…which is pretty much par for the course. What a fucking joke.

I seriously doubt it will damage us…I mean, everyone already hates the US, anyway. I’ve looked over the files in the site, and I’m really not surprised at all from what I’ve read. :stuck_out_tongue:

imo, the only documents which which carry notable weight are, as usual, those related to Iran and the Middle East, as well as israel (no wonder) from what I’ve read so far. the rest is extremely embarrassing at most, but mainly gossip. Also, the world apparently sees our foreign minister Westerwelle as a big joke- which we do, too, but hoped the rest of the world wouldn’t notice. :x a pity. Not to mention there’s a tiny uproar in Germany now because they’re trying to find out who the “mole” is- namely an FDP party member who apparently sent tons of detailed evaluations of our own politicians and reports and assessments of internal affairs over to America. Fun. :smiley: So ultimately, we don’t really care about the whole thing except for the parts which concern us. I like my egocentric country.

Yeah, it’s been fairly pedestrian so far. Everyone is making a huge deal out of it but I haven’t seen anything that really sounds surprising.

The cables also stated how people thought Merkel was uncreative and boring.

With a name like Wikileaks, it has to be gay.

…calling her “Teflon Merkel” at that. :smiley: But nobody really cared about that, she’s been called far worse.

I don’t really get who thinks laws will work on the internet. I mean, the concept of Law on the whole is pretty much a sad joke (O WATS THAT ALMOST 40% OF MURDERS AND OVER 50% OF RAPES HERE ARE UNSOLVED?!?!? GOOD JOB ON YOUR SUPPOSED MONOPOLY OF VIOLENCE, THE STATE!!!), but trying to have laws on the internet is just, like, drug-prohibition level of stupidly, pointlessly unenforceable.I mean, at least real-life laws are kinda almost possible to enforce in a mostly-useless-after-the-fact kind of way, but you’re not really going to shut torrents or wikileaks down.

I too have been really unimpressed with these leak things so far. But this stuff is great; I love reading the private thoughts of our ambassadors regarding foreign leaders. Most of it is hilarious.

My favorite cable is the series of blunt questions Hillary Clinton had about the mental stability of Christina de Kirchner of Argentina.

Have any of you ever had a job? 99.9% of all inner-office memos are completely boring admin-related stuff. But there’s always that .1% of insanity that manage to slip through…

The stuff regarding China’s views of North Korea has been nothing short of fascinating.

To be honest, to anyone familiar with Christina’s speeches and snappy reactionary bullshit, those questions seem perfectly reasonable. Shit, we all asked that BEFORE her husband died, let alone now.

I find it hard to believe this crap happens when the morals and ethics of these days claim that truth and justice is the way to go and then I’m spat in the face in the name of ‘international stability’ when someone tries to make a difference.

I’m suddenly having flashbacks to the Misanthrope.

Give us some quotes or shut up.

What nobody seems to address is that if Julian Assange hates the United States and is such a terrorist as Republican politicians are claiming he is, why didn’t he just auction the documents to Al-Queda or any other extremist group? There are always going to be people trying to get access to classified U.S. documents, even ones as mundane as these.

Just in case you missed SNL last night (I wouldn’t have been watching it either if I hadn’t been bored out of my skull):http://www.mediaite.com/tv/snls-julian-assange-to-the-u-s-you-got-me-wheres-osama/