Julian Assange’s Information Coup: The Long Tail of Regime Change

big journalism ^ | 12/7/10 | John Sexton

[Nachum]

Turns out there’s a fairly clear answer to the question Why is Julian Assange doing this? Anyway, it’s as clear as the topic of human motivations ever really get. Back in 2006, Assange wrote a couple of essays on the topic of conspiracy and control. He takes the position that all authoritarian structures are conspiracies of power. His thoughts are interesting. Their may even be some truth to some of what he says. In any case, if you want to understand his motivation, grasp what he’s saying here:

Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

A bit later he asks “How can we reduce the power of a conspiracy to act?”

We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment. We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to …

When we look at a conspiracy as an organic whole, we can see a system of interacting organs, a body with arteries and veins whos blood may be thickened and slowed till it falls, unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its environment.

[Nachum]

The list, ping

Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list

http://www.nachumlist.com/

http://nachumlist.com/Wiki-gate.htm

[Frantzie]

I am not convinced he is the bad guy. The lack of negative info about Obama and Soros make me thing he is not a good guy either.

[hoosierham]

It takes good information to make good decisions;a lot of profit is made by with=holding information from the buyer.This applies to ideas as well as physical objects.

Just observe how the control of information has served to keep over a billion people enslaved in a vicious iligarchy that murders dissenters and honors lies.

[Matchett-PI]

Rush Limbaugh Wants Julian Assange To Find the Really Good Stuff
Glynnis MacNicol | Dec. 7, 2010, 10:05 AM | 440 |
http://www.businessinsider.com/rush-limbaugh-wants-julian-assange-to-find-obamas-birth-certificate-2010-12

If WikiLeaks TMZ ever becomes a reality maybe Rush could have his own segment. From yesterday’s radio show:

“Where are the WikiLeaks documents to prove 9/11 was inside job by George Bush and Dick Cheney? Let me ask you liberals, where are these cables?

“Where are the documents to prove Bush intentionally lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to invade the country?

Where is the WikiLeaks document, the State Department cable, whatever, that [Karl] Rove leaked Valerie Plame’s name to the media?

Where’s all this good stuff? ...

“Where are the WikiLeaks cables proving that the CIA invented AIDS? Where is Obama’s birth certificate? Where’s the real good stuff?

And how about all the hundreds of other left-wing lies we’ve been hearing about for years?

[Is] WikiLeaks covering up for the United States?”

[stubernx98]

It is an un correctable problem - here is why:

People are wired from birth a certain way very complex) However to be very simple about it, summarize:

17% of the population are Influence-rs, 17% are task driven, 33% are security oriented and 33% are compliance oriented.

‘Influence rs’ are people who satisfy their egos through the control of people, they are personable, friendly, and look good. They are poor delegators, and control people through the dissemination of information(Lawyers-Politicians-Marketers-Sellers).

Task Driven people satisfy their egos through getting things done, they tend to be blunt, tell you like it is, delegate well, do not worry how they appear(CEO’s,Surgeons, business owners).

Compliance Oriented - Do what your told low risk
Security Oriented - Need to know the environment - low risk savers.

This group 66% of folks are the engineers, doctors, scientists and workers.

And this is why we go from Bondage to Freedom and back. Once a world government is established we will be subject to permanent serfdom.

It is much more complex than I presented here, but you get the idea.

[Zeppo]

A bit later he asks “How can we reduce the power of a conspiracy to act?” We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment. We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to...

If he can deconstruct the world in this fashion, then there's no good reason why we can't do the same thing.

If you accept his premise, then there is a case to be made that he's in jail now due to a complete and total role reversal, wherein Assange and his Wikileaks co-conspirators are being split by "us" in order to marginalize their attempt at control...

Call it 'what goes around comes around' or karma or whatever...

[GonzoGOP]

As anyone who has ever read Saul Alinsky will tell you just because someones goals are pure evil, it doesn't mean that their tactics are not sound. Conspiracies need to communicate with their members, and they need to keep that communication secret. Remove the ability to keep a secret, and communication fails. If communication fails the ability to run a top down organization falls apart.

Importantly a bottom up organization has much less need for secret communications. The tea party for example can organize over open internet sites. We don't need secret talking point memos being distributed to the press. We publish position papers, or have speeches on the steps of the Lincoln memorial.

I think it is important to touch on the difference between operational secrets and institutional secrets. Operational secrets are those that need to stay secret for a short time while an operation is under way. However you have no problem with them becoming public knowledge once that operation is concluded. For example an undercover cop infiltrating the mob needs to keep what he is doing secret in order to stay alive. However once the arrests are made he can come right out in open court and present evidence of what he has done. There was an elaborate web of secrecy and deception before the Normandy landings. But now those secrets are the subject of numerous books and movies.

In contrast an institutional secret is one that the institution can never allow to become secret. And these secrets are almost always negative. Rigged elections, assassinations, payoffs, corruption are all in this category. And institutional secrets have been the bulk of what is showing up on Wikileaks.

Every organization has the need for operational secrets. But if it conducts itself in an ethical manner an organization should have little need for institutional secrets.

[MsLady]

The man reminds me of a weasel. They sneak up to the hen house in the dead of night to kill just for the fun of it.

[Talisker]

A bit later he asks “How can we reduce the power of a conspiracy to act?”

I'm so sick of the Left's "value-free" pretentious bullshit. It sells in college coffee shops, but that's it.

If "we reduce power" then THAT is a use of superior power. Everything is power - everything. There is noting but power interacting with power.

Being a human being means owning your own value system. That's why people are people, that's what it means to be human - you have to stand for something. That is the spiritual meaning, and challenge, of being a human being.

Seeking to escape it doesn't work, because God set up the rules. All weasels can do is rev up their lawyer verbiage and start redefining everything as something else, so they end up "non-responsible" and "corporate" and "indemnified" and "group" and "consensus" and "powerless" while they seek with every cell in their bodies to personally control as much power as possible, and destroy everyone elses power as ruthlessly as possible - and lose their souls in the process.

But God is not mocked. Patient, yes - mocked, no. People who play word games and indulge in sadism will inevitably come up against the Source of All Power, and be crushed like the bugs they've chosen to be.

[Springfield Reformer]

Deconstruction is a bit like Frodo’s Ring of Power. The user of it may see their cause as just, but deconstruction lures the user into presupposing some neutral meta-framework, immune to deconstruction, from which they may conduct their crusade.

And therein lies the flaw. If no particular gathering of force in the world is any better than any other, if there really is no right and no wrong, because all are acting under no more than the will to power, then the WikiLeaks’ self-image as heroic (or right or somehow better than their opponent) is illusory as well.

Thus deconstruction tends to the demise of those who accept its operational premise. Such become eventually incapable of moral judgment, and would rather see men and women die and nations become paralyzed than give up their reckless urge to show the moral superiority of their amorality.

Better are the words of Samwise, that there is good in the world, and it is worth fighting for (even if that fight requires the cautious and ethical use of information).

Or, as Solomon put it, only a fool actually blurts out everything that’s on his mind.

[The_Reader_David]

Actually, most scientists of any consequence are task-driven people. The main difference between them and a business owner is that the tasks they like to undertake and the motive (the “aha!” of the big break-through, rather than a monetary bottom-line) are different.