“He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”Dealing With Assange and the WikiLeaks Secrets
Julian often behaved as though he had been raised by wolves rather than by other human beings. Whenever I cooked, the food would not, for instance, end up being shared equally between us.Julian Assange: Roommate from Hell
like a bossposted by lemuring at 1:04 PM on March 22, 2011 [1 favorite]
PERTH, AUSTRALIA–First, the Right accused WikiLeaks of endangering US soldiers and Afghan informers. Then after “Cablegate” the neocons conceded to the lack of evidence and switched to the opposite tactic: insisting there was nothing exciting at all about Julian Assange’s leaks. Spectator editorials appeared, claiming we already knew Sarkozy was a narcissist and Berlusconi was a womaniser. This didn’t work either. The cables had a lot of new information about DynCorp bribing Afghan police with “dancing boys” and Mubarak telling the US to install a “fair dictator” in Iraq.posted by clarknova at 12:40 AM on March 23, 2011
Now a much easier way to discredit WikiLeaks has emerged: attacking Assange as a human being. It’s easy because there’s no need to touch any wider political issues. It’s damaging because (regardless of how right he is) Assange still needs technicians to work for him and a well-timed mutiny could hurt his organisation more than any external pressure. Worse, the man probably is a dickhead. He’s a brave dickhead, a talented dickhead, a necessary dickhead. He has a better chance of crippling the war effort than any of his competitors. But none of that makes him easy to work with. And WikiLeaks doesn’t just need volunteers, but extremely skilled ones who can maintain large servers and keep them running after all sorts of cyber attacks. (more…)
The Daily Show is ambivalent towards WL, because if WL exposures push the media into doing its job, investigating and exposing widescale corruption, instead of being another corrupted wing of government, then the Daily Show would largely be put out of business.I think it's the same thing that a lot of supposedly liberal members of the establishment worry about with Assange. Read Bruce Sterling's article about Assange, which I think encapsulates it. They realize they are the beneficiaries of all this stuff and don't really know if they want it to go away, and they don't like actually looking at what's going on in their names. I don't really think it's a question of the Daily Show running out of material.
Colbert doesn't like the guy, flat out. He asked him some pretty hard ass questions, when he was on there and I got the strong feeling that he was pro-troops in Iraq after the visit. Asked about the privacy rights of the pilots, called him out on the edited nature of the video. Not the normal "I pretend to be against this but I'm really for it" dumb questions that point out how dumb the right wing noise machine is.Yawn. You're doing what conservative idiots do when they assume Colbert agrees with them because he says the things they thing. We have no way of knowing what Colbert actually thinks, stop pretending you do.
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Fun fact: if you play Radiohead's Bloom and this video, it seems fitting until the song gets noisy.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:51 AM on March 22, 2011 [1 favorite]