Eric Holder and Robert Gates are beaming with smiles of joy now that Assange has been formally arrested for alleged sex crimes in Sweden, mainly because they hope that once he's in Swedish custody they will be able to extradite him and try him stateside as a...a...I don't know, whatever a foreign national who hosts leaked documents on his website is.
Though I'm sure a long rape sentence in Sweden would work in a pinch.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
The hipster brain parasite has gone feral--it's time to put that hipster down
On Saturday, I watched some hairy Seattle hipsters knock over a garbage can. When the middle-aged owners of the Guitar Store tried to convince them to push the can upright, the rabies that had apparently addled their cool urban brains went into full infected pit bull mode. Next thing you know, these four hairy agents of gentrification were pummeling two men at least twice their age to the ground, shouting crude threats and basically behaving like extras in the Road Warrior. I don't know if it's the economy, the growing seediness of Seattle in general, or if the same virus that makes people listen to the Dirty Projectors, wear skinny jeans and slurp Pabst has gone malignant. I sincerely hope that the police take some time out of their busy schedules shooting indigenous wood carvers and beating black teenage girls to knock some everliving shit out of these droogs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpuNE1cX03c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpuNE1cX03c
The Cowardice of the Mainstream Press
The noose is closing on Julian Assange. His fucked with the superpower horse, and now he's going to get the dong end of it. This is of course perfectly well expected. Anytime you arbitrarily dump a load of sensitive State Department data on the streets, you should probably expect a little comeuppance (rape accusations one day, the full wrath of the United States and its allies the next). This is all good and well. As any superpower knows, you might not be able to kill an idea, but you can definitely kill its most annoying and visible exponent. Sometimes you need to throw fresh flesh on the cross to keep the other would-be messiahs at bay. (note to the easily offended: this analogy is not intended to elevate Assange to the level of Christ, but rather designed to reduce Christ's glory)
All that said, the hypocrisy and general cowardice of the mainstream press has been staggering. Look at any major newspaper in the country, and you'll see two things: 1)a huge trove of news stories drawn from the copious hoard of leaked cables, and 2)a self-congratulatory editorial staff either condemning the leak and its imminent and apparently catastrophic effects on the US's FY2011 business plan, or outright dismissive of it--"hey, even though we've sold headline after headline of this non-news Assange leaked, none of this has been helpful at all." You have to dig around in the national magazine/left-wing blog/weeklies circuit (The Atlantic, the Nation, Counterpunch, the Stranger, etc.) to find anything like a defense.
Quite frankly, publications like the NY Times, the New Yorker, Seattle Times, etc. (and just about every daily paper in the country) should be ashamed of themselves. Some guy--albeit a guy with a penchant for conspiracy theories, a freshman-level political philosophy and alleged rapist tendencies--hands them a veritable treasure trove of top-shelf dirt, they gobble it up like a starved cabal of skeksis, and does he get a thank you or even a middling defense? Aside from a limp day-two editorial in the NY Times, the opinion mongers have been quick to distance themselves from their own reporting and offer up Assange for ridicule or contempt.
I'm sorry guys, but you can't get away with that. If someone serves you a free and delicious prime rib dinner, and you eat it, you can't retroactively call it crap and demand a refund. Well you can, but you'd be a pretty shitty dinner guest. You can't run story after story, call it news, but then turn around and say it's "not really news" because you're scared of the wrath of Uncle Sam, who you know is about to serve up a shit sandwich to the original publisher of the materials you have so graciously culled. You got what you wanted and now you're throwing away your source. It's the like "The Insider" if "The Insider" was the worst movie ever.
You know trying Assange on terrorism or espionage charges will have a chilling effect on other would-be whistle blowers and the First Amendment. But you're too cowardly to take a real stand, playing the role of the official newspapers of power, trumpeting the capture of Assange with the same zeal you unquestioningly parroted the official Iraq line in 2003 (yeah, I still remember that NY Times). It doesn't matter how useful the leaked intelligence is. What matters is that you used it, you fucking used it. It doesn't have to be the Pentagon Papers to be protected speech, though it must be said that the Pentagon Papers are really no different than what we've been offered here (wow, corrupt unstable government, popular insurgency, unreliable allies, futile endless war sold to the public as a winnable crusade for justice? Is that Vietnam or Afghanistan we're talking about?).
Assange simply provided a platform for publishing a leak. If he is arrested, your editorial staff should be arrested too, because you're doing the same he did only with the veneer of respectability.What a pathetic performance. You should bow your heads in shame.
All that said, the hypocrisy and general cowardice of the mainstream press has been staggering. Look at any major newspaper in the country, and you'll see two things: 1)a huge trove of news stories drawn from the copious hoard of leaked cables, and 2)a self-congratulatory editorial staff either condemning the leak and its imminent and apparently catastrophic effects on the US's FY2011 business plan, or outright dismissive of it--"hey, even though we've sold headline after headline of this non-news Assange leaked, none of this has been helpful at all." You have to dig around in the national magazine/left-wing blog/weeklies circuit (The Atlantic, the Nation, Counterpunch, the Stranger, etc.) to find anything like a defense.
Quite frankly, publications like the NY Times, the New Yorker, Seattle Times, etc. (and just about every daily paper in the country) should be ashamed of themselves. Some guy--albeit a guy with a penchant for conspiracy theories, a freshman-level political philosophy and alleged rapist tendencies--hands them a veritable treasure trove of top-shelf dirt, they gobble it up like a starved cabal of skeksis, and does he get a thank you or even a middling defense? Aside from a limp day-two editorial in the NY Times, the opinion mongers have been quick to distance themselves from their own reporting and offer up Assange for ridicule or contempt.
I'm sorry guys, but you can't get away with that. If someone serves you a free and delicious prime rib dinner, and you eat it, you can't retroactively call it crap and demand a refund. Well you can, but you'd be a pretty shitty dinner guest. You can't run story after story, call it news, but then turn around and say it's "not really news" because you're scared of the wrath of Uncle Sam, who you know is about to serve up a shit sandwich to the original publisher of the materials you have so graciously culled. You got what you wanted and now you're throwing away your source. It's the like "The Insider" if "The Insider" was the worst movie ever.
You know trying Assange on terrorism or espionage charges will have a chilling effect on other would-be whistle blowers and the First Amendment. But you're too cowardly to take a real stand, playing the role of the official newspapers of power, trumpeting the capture of Assange with the same zeal you unquestioningly parroted the official Iraq line in 2003 (yeah, I still remember that NY Times). It doesn't matter how useful the leaked intelligence is. What matters is that you used it, you fucking used it. It doesn't have to be the Pentagon Papers to be protected speech, though it must be said that the Pentagon Papers are really no different than what we've been offered here (wow, corrupt unstable government, popular insurgency, unreliable allies, futile endless war sold to the public as a winnable crusade for justice? Is that Vietnam or Afghanistan we're talking about?).
Assange simply provided a platform for publishing a leak. If he is arrested, your editorial staff should be arrested too, because you're doing the same he did only with the veneer of respectability.What a pathetic performance. You should bow your heads in shame.
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