thelastpsychiatrist.com - 5 Things You Need To Understand About Wikileaks Before You Celebrate. Adnotated.

this is wikileaks

1. Wikileaks has made the MSM even more powerful.

The most astonishing thing in those cablesⁱ appears to be that humans often hide their true feelings; that, and the fact that we have nuclear weapons in the Netherlands. (Now it makes sense why so many Dutch donate to my site.)

The thing to observe, however, is that I know those things not because I read Wikileaks, but because I read the NYT. Wikileaks didn't make anything public, in the exact same way as releasing all the clinical trial data didn't make anything public. There's too much information, we have no strategy for approaching it, and what if we read something that violates our prejudices?ⁱⁱ

Fortunately, the MSM knows what you'll want to hear.ⁱⁱⁱ

This isn't a trivial point. When the MSM reports on what Wikileaks says, we might be skeptical of the MSM but Wikileaks becomes the authority^iv. If Wikileaks/MSNBC says "Russia Says UK Interfered," then it is a fact that the UK interfered, that's the starting point.^v But perhaps Russia is wrong or lying; and who knows if Wikileaks isn't lying? I'm supposed to trust Assange -- why? Blondes are more honest? (NOT MY FORENSIC EXPERIENCE.)

And once it's out, you can't unlearn it. Pakistani The News ran a story saying Wikileaked documents reveal the Indian government was covertly supplying Islamist militants in Pakistan and committing atrocities in Kashmir. Whether any of this is true or not I have no idea; but it's not true that it came from Wikileaks. "Well, ok, maybe that didn't come from Wikileaks, but it's still true."

2. This statement is factually false: "Assange wants to expose the lies and corruption of the U.S. government; and the byproduct will be that diplomacy will be much more difficult."

He's not doing it to uncover the lies and corruption of the of the U.S. Government -- that's the byproduct. That this will force institutions and departments to wall off and not communicate with one another -- that's the primary goal.^vi That's why Assange doesn't care whether the cables are salacious or revealing, only that there be a lot of them, leaked slowly over time -- to make people too nervous to work. His goal isn't to tell you what's in the truck but to stop trucking. If people know their secrets might be leaked, they'll be reluctant to put their secrets in a truck. Eventually, they will simply stop trucking. When they stop trucking, they go out of business.

Will it work? I doubt it^vii: individual human beings (today) assume they are able to control when and how other people perceive them, which is why even though everyone has cell phone cameras I still see people picking their nose, stealing, beating suspects and masturbating in public.

Even if government employees have the discipline to refrain from using their work computer for personal use (remember Deutch?)^viii they still frequently use their personal computer/email for "light" work ("I'm leaving for Kabul next week, so make sure Jessica doesn't cheat on me.") Bonus: now Google (aka WikiCache) has that information.

3. Wikileaks hasn't made leaking documents easier, it's made leaking documents popular.^ix

There's always been a market for leaked documents -- provided they are worth the risk. But what Assange has done with Wikileaks, complete with a logo and website and a famous frontman, is brand the illegality.^x Only the dedicated whistleblower will risk prison over an anonymous leak. But how cool is it going to be for a budding narcissist to be a pseudo-anyonymous leak to Wikileaks? What gets leaked becomes much less important than being a leaker.

You think a hipster is going to leak to the NYT? They're closer to the government than their readers, dude. That would be like leaking your senator's emails to your congressman. How you gonna get laid doing that?

The problem is actually Assange, not Wikileaks. It's evident to me that he wanted to become famous, or martyred.^xi This is a man who clings to secrecy so desperately that he has a myriad of cell phones at multiple undisclosed safehouses that he uses right after he gives an interview on CNN.

But by making himself and his site as important a news story as the content of the cables, it inspires others to do the same. Doing what you believe in is never as compelling as doing what's going to get you popular.^xii

Already the WikiClones are gearing up, and so it will be a matter of personal branding whether you leak your headshot to CNN via Leftyleaks or Rightyleaks.^xiii And the more such sites pop up, the less anyone will believe anything they "leak,"^xiv but who cares? Will anyone believe anything about America that comes from IndonesiaLeaks? Won't matter. These become opportunities to offer your own opinions. No one argues about primary sources anymore, we argue the spin about primary sources. Quoting Baudrillard: "Once the sign replaces reality, you're not going to need Wikileaks."^xv

4. The answer to this question: Why is Assange/Wikileaks so popular?

Wikileaks is a symptom of a time looking for an antihero, someone outside the game with enough power to smash the establishment.

You don't care about the exposed secrets; you just want to see the smashing.

That's what forms the basis of our political beliefs: hate.^xvi I could at least listen to communism^xvii if it was truly about equally distributing the bananas. But is seems much more about hating people with the bananas. A social policy based on hate and resentment is going to get you blood in the streets and then an emperor. A short one.

Most of the desire to see Assange succeed is based on our own impotence. You can't effect any meaningful change in the system, let alone in your own life -- and yes, that order is correct -- and so you're hoping someone else punishes the system for being bigger than you.^xviii But meaningful change is done either incrementally, or in revolutions, and I am certain no one has the enthusiasm to riot.^xix At all. You can't muster up civil disobedience^xx, let alone civil unrest. So you hope Assange has the balls to do it. NB: sex charges.

It was the same with Obama. People expected of him, what? To radically alter the United States?^xxi He's an entirely competent President, he's doing a reasonable job even as I disagree with almost everything he is and does, but it was obvious to me and it should have been to everyone else that he wasn't Change, but More Of The Same And Less Of Everything.^xxii

Things would have been different (NB: not necessarily better) under McCain for the simple reason that Obama didn't have the technical skills necessary^xxiii to effect a vision that was nebulous to begin with. (Historically, the phrase "surrounds himself with really smart people" is followed in two years by "has lost his vision and is in danger of having a failed presidency.") And when you're unsure on a ship you walk very slowly on the quarterdeck, and soon you don't care so much where it goes as long as you don't get blamed for sinking it. McCain knew how to navigate a ship.^xxiv Again, I respect that you might not have wanted him as your captain; but the choice was between McCain's slow course to the Islands, or floating around in the Sargasso Sea for four years. America voted: lower the sails. So: Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, secrecy, extension of the tax cuts, identical immigration policy, government deficits, (soon to be) no change in healthcare...

I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed you were gone

Assange is a hero to everyone who feels the system doesn't care about them. But as I have indicated with references, graphs, and statistical models, the problem isn't the system, xxx xxxxxxx xx xxx.

Assange's popularity among Americans should be, but isn't, a prompt for self-reflection. "Why do I want this guy to succeed, again?"^xxv

5. The winner is Big Business, the loser is you.^xxvi

Back to the trucking analogy. If the government can't control the cargo or the trucks, it will try to control the roads.^xxvii Since it can't, it will get private sector industry to do so. Ten years ago internet regulation would have been impossible, but the corporations that could have stopped it -- e.g. Google -- now would love a way around the net neutrality they thought they wanted a decade ago. Bonus: if the government imposes the restrictions, Google et al can't be blamed for making money on it.^xxviii

1. Hey, remember back when wikileaks was a thing ? [↩]
2. That last part being the only important part.

   People in fact do not have any strategy for approaching information. Tellingly, even the most minute, self-obvious improvements appear Earth-shattering "who could have predicted"-isms to them.

   This claimed "appear" is not genuine, but feigned ; and the reason for the pretense is, to quote a slavegirl recently surprised that her own experience and her personal history are not immediately and directly meaningful to her, but have to be interpreted like any other thing,

   I find it odd to imagine that accrued experience should not be used as a support for considering and completing current or future tasks, though perhaps I have been attempting to replace honest analytical consideration of orders with comparisons to experience, which would account for the ablation of details otherwise recognizable as important, but lost in the process of my contextual loading.

   People commonly want to have something, to have something gained, something saved for their suffering. This desire is so overpowering (betraying its involvement in the very mechanisms of survival, ie, that a large part of how they get themselves through their suffering is by that promise of that future gain) that they'll readily turn a blind eye to the obvious : if experience were in fact directly and immediately meaningful, experience would therefore be oppressive! The necessary correlate of any possible version of a subjective idea of the self is the natural situation, where the self's own experience is just another writ among many, and in no substantial way different from any work of fiction. Were in fact experience anything more than that, the only possible idea of the self would be historical, rather than subjective -- the self would become an object. Indeed the oft-voiced, typically female "you can not understand" mantra speaks directly to this juncture : the fundamental yearning of the reproductively-inclined female mind is objectification. They want to have grown, sure, why not -- but it must be organically, it must be immediately and directly, it must be for the bare living. Yet ideas grow differently from how a broken bone mends ; a system of thought grows differently from how a baby grows. Being a person is ultimately unrelated to being a mother in that personhood requires awareness, while motherhood is orthogonal to it. [↩]

3. "Mainstream Media" doesn't even mean anything besides "the bruteforced collection of all the dumb shit unreflective experientialists tend to come to believe". It's like the skid row marks on a virtual Formula 1 circuit, the places where all the 9 to 17 yo virtual Formula 1 pilots ~actually~ drive their virtual cars, obviously different (and often predictably different) from the actual road as depicted in the virtual world. [↩]
4. Oldest trick in the book, hide lying under quoting. That's why you don't generally want to participate in the charade (and some kind or other of charade -- it'll aways be).

   When the representatives of stupidity show up "to do a story about you", they're only there to ask if you're willing to act as a figurehead while they scam, so they can attempt to deflect responsibility on this basis, during and after their swindle. [↩]

5. What he means is, "it's taken as fact", "that's the starting point of the discussion". [↩]
6. Remarkably, he intuits the true drive of that assault on fiatist pretense to sovereignity. Yes, the idea is to destroy the capacity of these idiots to talk to each other, at all. [↩]
7. Worked splendidly well, in that USG lost control of its own internal processes cca 2016. [↩]
8. This is a misstatement of the point. What government workers don't have the discipline to do is use "their" work "computers" in such a way as to derive more benefit for their adversarial employer than for their sovereign owner, The Most Serene Republic ; and it's not even a matter of discipline alone -- they don't have the tools, either (nor can they have the tools, for fundamental reasons very much to do with precisely their substance). Quite a different matter altogether, it's not whether the [lol]cow has the discipline to stop milking out the udders. It's whether the cow somehow manages to prevent the milkmaid getting more milk than the foal. How the hell could that happen when the only agent in the story is the milkmaid !? [↩]
9. It actually constituted a pre-ov moment for most of the ESLtarded aspirational class ; the obvious finally dawned on them, namely, that the USG won't be able to either feed or protect them. And... that's that. [↩]
10. There's nothing illegal about the taking of the Sabines. [↩]
11. What does the author want to be true ?

    Pro tip : is it that he wants "Assange couldn't possibly have not given shit one about USG" to be true because he wants the USG to matter, because it's the only meal ticket he foresees for his old age ? [↩]

12. Depends for whom. For instance : people picking their nose, stealing, beating suspects or masturbating in public are still doing what they believe in notwithstanding it's not so likely to get them popular. [↩]
13. Not so, as history meanwhile confirmed. There's no "lefty" and "righty" anymore, the DNC got destroyed, the GOP got moved into the slot the DNC used to occupy, and a whole huge other thing showed its evanescent, barely visible margins by driving that epic smash of [what to someone who wants to believe in USG & pantsuitisms looks exactly like the] Overton window.

    Think about it, the erstwhile "Republicans" have to cling to survival by becoming what the Democrats used to be ?! If an Iran-Soviet expeditionary force invaded they couldn't have driven such societal change in "the land of the brave", meanwhile slaves on the continent their fathers fought to conquer.

    Does the magnitude and magnificence of The Most Serene Republic finally focus into view for you, or is it still too close for the myopia to permit perception ? [↩]

14. Belief is immaterial. Nobody cares what "the public" believes or doesn't believe, the driver of power structure change isn't in any sense nor to any degree "the public". On the contrary -- the public is the principal subject of the societal shift, much like the Earth is the subject of earthmoving machinery at work.

    And yes, this still means no pension for you. [↩]

15. What does the author want to believe ?

    Is "USG == reality" quite so important to eschew noticing for its sake that "once the cross replaces Montezuma you won't need the Nina, Pinta & Santa Maria for anything" is an exact restatement of his (formally mistaken if broadly irrelevant) diagnosis ? No, USG is not reality ; no TMSR is not "a sign". TMSR is reality ; and USG used to be reality up until that moment when TMSR showed up. [↩]

16. Hate has absolutely nothing to do with it.

    Again : what does the author wish to be true ?

    What does every desperate housewife wish just as much to be just as true ?

    That it's "hate" rather than disinterest, amirite ? Well then... [↩]

17. Communism has utterly nothing to do with it. [↩]
18. No -- bigger than itself.

    That's the problem here, "the system" meanwhile got bigger than itself. That situation continued for a while in a vacuum, for "lack of alternative", much like the 35yo may persevere in an uninteresting relationship past the event horizon.

    Then an interesting (and apparently interested!) 19yo showed up, and suddenly everything's up for grabs. It's not "the 19yo is punishing the 35yo's uninteresting ex for being older than 19". It's very much "the 19yo permits the 35yo to punish the ex for being older than itself". See ?

    (This also happens to be the case of a much hotter/smarter/talented 19yo than anyone in the 30yo to 40yo range, coincidentally, but that's not even part of this edge of the discussion.) [↩]

19. There's such a thing as a paradigm shift. For instance : everyone who crossed the Atlantic came from a land where they spoke a human language. Once they crossed the Atlantic, however, they conformed to the new-local habit of speaking a subhuman pigdin. This took neither increment nor revolution, it was just a context shift. I happen to specialize in these, the great sexual revolution of the late 80s/90s also took no rioting, and yet it completely, and very deeply changed things -- in fact, deeper and moreso than any piddly revolution could have had -- and my words are buttressed by direct experience. [↩]
20. "Treason never prospers -- because if it prospers you pretend to not notice it if you know what's good for you." [↩]
21. To close down Guantanamo / take USG out of the criminal organisation business. [↩]
22. And yet it's not obvious why the USG's being tuned out ? [↩]
23. It's okay to say "monkey trained to do tricks -- not more intelligent than any other not trained to do tricks monkey randomly chosen", I don't think anyone still harbors any delusions as to Bahamas' personhood. [↩]
24. Bwahahahaha.

    Why the fuck would anyone sell themselves on this kinda idiotic story ?! [↩]

25. Nobody gives shit one ; it's not that anyone "wanted this guy to succeed" -- it's that everyone suddenly found themselves lined up in the square, out in the cold, with some incoherent oldfag babbling nonsense and... well... they just didn't feel like applauding anymore. That's all that fucking happened, nobody "wants Assange to" anything whatsoever -- even leaving aside wtf is this "success" thing ?

    No, they just stopped taking the USG seriously, that's absolutely all that occurred. [↩]

26. When mommy says "if you don't brush your teeth / if you rub your clit the bugaboo under the bed grows bigger", what does mommy want to be true ? [↩]
27. There is no more "the government". TMSR took over. That's it. [↩]
28. They also can't be blamed for going broke -- a change in the fantasy "financials" to match the change in the actual "operations".

    Given the choice between not being blamed for going broke and not being blamed for making money, "big business" (aka non-business -- that's why the "big' is there, to excuse the lack of business) will prefer not being blamed for going broke. Every time.

    Much like given the choice between not being blamed for not getting it up and not being blamed for raping the slut, "real men" (aka, bois -- the that's why the "real" is there, to excuse the undescended testes) will prefer not being blamed for not getting it up. Also every time.

    It's not so much that these two "are the same thing" -- it's that inferiority fails the same way necessarily -- implied by and part of the very definition of what inferiority even is in the first place. [↩]