[ExI] the ambiguously evil british have leaked julian assange's address

Thu Dec 16 01:43:38 UTC 2010

> Ignoring the whole rape thing, which sounds bogus to me, Julian is still
an ambiguously good guy and a bad guy simultaneously.<

As are most people. I cringe whenever I hear the man referred to as a hero.
I cringe, I guess, whenever I hear anyone referred to as one. It's so Song
of Roland/Epic of Gilgamesh. Most of the men and women I admire in history
have turned out to be unremitting bastards upon close examination of their
personal lives. Even Einstein was a infamous womanizer, with a
long-suffering wife.

That's why I enjoy biographies ever so much. Geniuses and notable persons
operating with the same emotional baggage and with the same mix of pure and
impure motivation as the rest of us. The only person I admire whose life
turned out to be as near flawless as his work was Marcel Duchamp. And of
course, most people have either never have heard of him or if they have,
assume he was fraudulent cross-dressing trickster who destroyed the world
of aesthetic art.

Darren

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 8:57 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
> ... On Behalf Of Ryan Rawson
> Subject: Re: [ExI] the ambiguously evil british have leaked julian
> assange's
> address
>
> >...Kind of different, one is court documents regarding a private
> individual, the other is bureaucratic documents about government
> officials.   I think it's possible to believe in governmental transparency
> and privacy rights for individuals without being hypocritical...
>
>
> Ja, but of course there is that ambiguous intersection between individual's
> privacy rights and government transparency, with this being a perfect
> example.  In most cases in the US, criminal court proceedings are
> considered
> public domain.  But generally no one digs thru court records to find
> anything specific.  On the other hand in this wonderful age of government
> transparency, anyone could go find anyone else's court records and leak
> them
> to Wikileaks.
>
> I can see so many ironic results.  Suppose Wikileaks wants to out some
> government scoundrel, so the scoundrel gets a 100 page document that she
> wrote, changes a few names in order to implicate someone else she doesn't
> like, then somewhere inserts the sentence "Julian Assange's address is
> {yakkity yak and bla bla}" then leaks the document anonymously to
> Wikileaks.
> The staff at Wikileaks can't read everything, but this looks good, so they
> post it.  A thousand people each read a piece here and a piece there,
> someone eventually discovers the sentence, and Julian outs himself
> inadvertently.
>
> This is a wildly complicated issue.  I have seen oversimplifications to
> good
> or bad, seen it everywhere, even on this list.  Ignoring the whole rape
> thing, which sounds bogus to me, Julian is still an ambiguously good guy
> and
> a bad guy simultaneously.
>
> Perhaps Damien or one of the other SF hipsters can identify a story that I
> read a looooong time ago, over 30 yrs I think, where Asimov deals with this
> exact issue.  A scientist discovers some wonderful algorithm which allows
> him to regressively calculate quantum states to figure out exactly what
> happened at any given place at any time past.  He shows it to a colleague
> who shows it to someone else, but government goons find out and chase and
> catch one of them, who warns the other two, who flee in terror, and each
> tell someone else.  By the time the chase scene is over, the evil
> government
> goons have rounded up about 30 guys and have them all in custody.  Last
> scene, the head evil goon says something like "We have all of you now, but
> we have plenty of reason to think the secret has not been fully contained.
> So there is no point in killing you.  You are all free to go.  From now on,
> no one has any privacy, present or past.  There are no secrets anywhere
> ever
> again.  Welcome to your new world gentlemen, and may you all rot in hell."
>
> Damien, ever heard of it?
>
> spike
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 3:30 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> >
> > "...WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tried to hide his bail address
> > from the public in an astonishing move for the man responsible for
> > leaking thousands of diplomatic secrets..."
> >
> > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1338832/WikiLeaks-Julian-Assan
> > ge-ask
> > ed-judge-bail-address-secret.html
> >
> > Wait a minute, this isn't a good thing.  It is only good when the
> > privacy of the bad guy is violated.  When the good guy's privacy is
> > subjected to involuntary transparency, then is a bad thing, ja?  When
> > the guy who de-closeted the bad guy is himself thrown out of the
> > closet, then we need to determine who is the good guy and who is the
> > bad guy, in order to decide if privacy is a good thing or a bad thing.
> >
> > Who is evil in this case, the British judge or Assange?  What if some
> > bastard had leaked Julian's address to Wikileaks, and Julian didn't
> > notice it was in there, mixed with a ream of other text, so he
> > accidentally outed himself against his own will?  Then is he good or
> > bad?  This determines if he deserves his privacy or needs the
> disinfectant
> of sunlight.
> >
> > Of course we don't know if the address is real or a clever
> > diversionary tactic.
> >
> > Oh this is fun.  {8^D
> >
> > spike
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> >
>
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-- 
"In the end that's all we have: our memories - electrochemical impulses
stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge." -
Remembrance of the Daleks
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