Posts by HORansome
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to HORansome,
Sorry, schooled you again because I hadn't seen the admission of previous schooling.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Russell Brown,
I wouldn't say WikiLeaks has fostered that culture because that culture already existed. The cables certainly feed that culture and, arguably, some of the impetus behind organisations like WikiLeaks comes from being part of that culture, but, for all the things we might be able to pin on WikiLeaks, making some of us (not us, of course; we're all examples of hyper-rational agents) conspirational isn't really a fair accusation.
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Yeah, we can't blame WikiLeaks for the fact that a lot of people are interpreting every cable as evidence of whatever conspiracy theory they happen to currently believe in, but I don't think Russell is doing that. He's merely exasperated (as am I) that people are seeing what they take to be clear evidence of conspiratorial machination in what might be merely business as usual.
Let me preface the following statement with "I'm no psychologist (I'm a philosopher), so take this with a grain of salt:" It seems that people like to explain events with regard to narratives which make the event the result someone wanted to bring about. Not only that, but when we hear about things we didn't already know, we often want a simple explanation here and now, and explanations that go "X wanted it/made it happened" fit that bill quite nicely. Such explanations might be the explanation but often we infer to such intentional explanatory hypotheses because it's convenient rather than because we've just excelled at the task of reasoning inferentially.
Which is the by-the-by; frankly, humans have been explaining things conspiratorially almost as long as we've had recorded history, and so it clearly isn't a case of WikiLeaks causing people to come up with conspiracy theories to explain recent events but rather our tendency to be conspirational explains the conspiracy theories about the WikiLeaks' cables and their contents.
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Jeeves will know how to fix what ails you. Don't, whatever you do, take advice from Bertie.
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I wrote a blog post about the correlation (not necessarily causation) between the arrest warrant and Assange's increased public profile (using those celebrated critical thinking tools I have) and, as I did so, my hosting provider decided that they needed to upgrade the MySQL databases, rolling the database back to April 10th in the process. Now my post has gone away and I have an even bigger headache than I had when I started trying to disentangle this affair.
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Here’s a bit of speculation (I’m only putting this out there because it provides a rival explanatory hypothesis for the timing of the arrest warrants; I’m not saying this is the case):
Perhaps the Swedish authorities, when the cables were leaked, went “We need to act with regard to this investigation sooner rather than later because we now have good reason to think Assange will go to ground.”
If anything like that were true, it would provide a plausible explanation of the timing of the arrest warrant that does not invoke a grand conspiracy or smear campaign.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Che Tibby,
no no, that was directed at one of Craig's diatribes, not the victims of sexual assault.
Perhaps, if you were to carefully read what Craig has written, you might realise just how callous what it is you have just said.
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So all the usual apologists for power discovering they understand how awful rape is and that the things men accused of rape say can be made to appear weaselly no matter what they say or do, is no different than all the local dairy owners getting many more bunches of roses in on the second week in February than they do any other week of the year.
Thanks for that. It's a lesson no one will ever forget.
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I think his point is "I think my argument is so powerful that it's not necessary to talk about it."
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An organisation like Wikileaks with no single figurehead... If it also had no name; well, it would fulfil the dreams of conspiracy theorists left and right.
Seriously, though; no matter what one thinks of Assange, if Wikileaks is entirely reliant on him, then the organisation is doomed. I mean, what happens if he just dies of perfectly normal causes?