One of Stephen Harper’s advisors is “feeling manly” today and says that Julian Assange should be assassinated.
I have some good news for manly men like this guy. Because they’ve been under a massive denial of service attack, Wikileaks now hosting at Amazon. Last time I checked, Amazon is a US company, so unlike the treasonous rapist Assange, it’s subject to masculine US law. After the dick measuring and pissing contests are over, perhaps all the smack-talking manly men will find a way to persuade feminine Amazon to stop hosting the most dangerous organization the world has ever known.
AhabTRuler
Edit: Wikipedia should read Wikileaks.
ETA: Editors of the world, unite!
mistermix
Got it, thanks.
JPL
I just hope that Wikileaks follows through and releases information about the banks.
giltay
Holy crap, Tom Flanagan is crazier than I thought. He was Harper’s mentor at the University of Calgary, although he recently spoke out against Harper for being too extreme. I thought that meant he had mellowed.
Scott
@JPL: I hope they don’t wait for 2011 either — better to get it out there before someone actually shoots Assange or figures out a way to shut down the site…
stuckinred
Huckaby feels about the same.
sal
How exactly does Amazon host Wikileaks, and wht would they, considering the blowback they’re likely to receive?
polyorchnid octopunch
Flanagan is an authoritarian tool. However, his protege is never going to get the unlimited power that a majority government brings in our parliamentary democracy. And thank ghod for that.
You know, I really hated Brian Mulroney when he was PM and leader of the Tories, but I kind of miss him now. Mind you, I refuse to call the current wrecking crew running the show up here Tories; they are anything but.
Todd
Is he manly enough to be involved in the “circle jerk” that is this blog?
JMC_in_the_ATL
@sal: The two main companies that host cloud computing to the public are Amazon and Rackspace. Basically anyone can sign a contract with either to gain virtual access to server space and set up content for very little cash.
polyorchnid octopunch
Oh… and I imagine that part of his bravado is a very real fear of what’s going to be revealed in tomorrow’s publication of the Canadian contingent of the cable link. Considering some of the action we’ve been seeing up here for the last four years, it could be very very damaging to the sitting government… and I certainly hope it will be.
JMC_in_the_ATL
Also, since this is an open thread: I will no longer be providing click-throughs on Kain posts. Since he doesn’t engage commenters (only here though, he has plenty of time during work hours to trash the blog elsewhere to the rest of the glibertarian nerd herd), I don’t really see the point. And as far as I can tell, withdrawing participation from his potential revenue stream is the only way I can adequately communicate that I want him to withdraw his productivity from this space. That seems to be the proper free market response.
Svensker
The “conservative” response to anything they don’t like seems to be KILL IT! And they consider that manly. They are Death Eaters.
Keith G
I just can’t get that excited about the leaks and about Assange (With apologies to Ash Can, soonergrunt, et al).
We have been inconvenienced. This is not anywhere near an existential problem. Our domestic society is fraying at the seams, we can’t seem to find policies that can deal with new economic realities, our internal political culture seems bent on self destruction.
Julian Assange is a side show. He is nothing.
scot
Flanagan is American born and educated. Hardcore republican family. Unfortunately he’s ours now.
debbie
This advisor is just like the guys who led us into Iraq. Guys who feel manly only when they’re at a safe distance and hiding behind someone else. The same kind of coward who would criticize the feminizing of the Medal of Honor. Just goes to show: The bigger the swagger, the smaller the dick.
David
Is Julian Assange The Leaker or just the conduit for the info like a reporter?
soonergrunt
@Keith G:
No apologies necessary. With respect to my earlier hyperbole regarding the Afghan stuff, for the most part, I stand by what I said, although I have moderated my positions a bit. There are contact reports that I sent up that include names and locations of people we talked to and gathered information from. These leaks put those people at unnecessary risk. I don’t have any current visibility on the ground there, so I don’t know what may or may not have happened to those people. I do know what the Taliban does to collaborators. That said, the Talibs are their own worst enemy, and I’m not particularly worried about Afghanistan.
Assange isn’t the tool of American destruction he evidently imagines himself to be. The best thing we could do to that self-important fool would be to try to kill him, because that would elevate him. I never considered that, or any other active measures against him to be particularly viable with respect to the the blowback outweighing the transient advantage.
I won’t shed a tear if the Russians pop him though.
As to the rest of your comment, I don’t the the country is going to tear itself apart or anything. I think we’ve got some rough economic times ahead, but the boom inevitably follows the bust, just as the reverse is true. The republican party is in about the same place the Democratic party was in the early 80s–rent by internal strife with the far wing of the party dragging them so far off the track as to guarantee them minority status for a generation. This recent election is but a small bump for them, and primarily caused by the economy, just as the 1982 election was a small bump, caused by the economy, for the Dems.
me
They’re hosted in the US and France right now.
Linda Featheringill
I don’t think that Wikileaks is the real story here, interesting though it may be. And the stuff leaked has not been all that earth-shattering.
The real story is the reaction to Wikileaks. A lot of people are really excited. Over what? Are they excited about the stuff that has already been released or are they worried about what might be released?
Or is transparency a threat to their power bases?
Or perhaps, having deified themselves, they no longer should tolerate pesky little gadflies?
matoko_chan
@Keith G: Assange is Ellsworth, Manning is Adams. we are seeing history being made.
and the diplo cables just put an abrupt end to the neocon fantasy of an Iranian front.
the american voters are stupid enough to support America doing Israels scut-work…..but they are not stupid enough to support doin’ the
Arabmuslim countries’ scut-work, not in this economy, and not after being Weimar’d on the ground zero mosque.the Iraq and A-stan docs just ensured our beaten cur departure from the ME, like the Pentagon papers fragged the american “mission” in vietnam.
its ovah cudlips. you lost. american exceptionalism is revealed as the unmitigated crapolgy it always was.
On to the bankstahs!!
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
as if on cue, with the cudlips. vietnam! adams and ellsworth!
btw, the Pentagon Papers weren’t published until 1971. IIRC, Vietnam was lost long before that.
Resident Firebagger
Regarding the “conspiracy theory” post from yesterday, I hate to say it, but when was the last international manhunt for a rapist? We can’t even bring ourselves to haul in Roman Polanski. The Assange story isn’t about any rape. Not a chance.
But, for some much-needed perspective, I give you Robert Gates:
I’d take a shot at Obama here, but I don’t want to muddle the message…
matoko_chan
@soonergrunt: sooner has his tongue up the warpimps ass is all. he just cant acknowledge he and his fellow soljahs got used as cannon fodder so that fucking WEC retard Bush could be re-elected.
and all the god and country crap was a bunch of lies told so the oligarchs could keep gassing their bentlys and american kids could get turned into hamburger to preserve american hegemony.
the republicans are a minority that keep power by telling lies to people like sooner and eemom.
wikileaks is their doom.
along with the demographic timer…..and salam-douthat stratification on cognitive ability.
there are no hackers or geeks on Team Conservative.
:)
Keith G
@soonergrunt: I hope you are right.
THE
I understood the release of the war docs.
I have no problems with the bankster data.
They are public companies and have no business keeping secrets from their shareholders.
But the diplomatic release ticks me off because diplomats are in the main good guys that have helped to prevent and end wars,
And I know their work cannot be done in the open
because other nations won’t play that way
for reasons of domestic politics and international prestige.
So you either play by the rules in the world diplomatic space
or you go back to isolationism and let China run the world.
Keith G
@matoko_chan: People who speak in superlative laced absolutes are almost always wrong.
burnspbesq
@JMC_in_the_ATL:
Remind me again why I should care what you do.
soonergrunt
@Keith G: I could be wrong. It’s happened before.
@matoko_chan: I like pie, too. I’m glad you’ve gone back to simply telling everyone how much you like pie. You’re a lot more coherent and understandable when you confine yourself to things you actually understand. Pumpkin pie isn’t my thing, though.
burnspbesq
Amazon will be getting an email from me, letting them know that the thousands of dollars a year that I normally spend there will be going elsewhere for as long as it are providing hosting services to Wikileaks. I imagine that mine will not be the only such email it receives.
One assumes that someone is paying Amazon to provide those services. Would be interesting to know who that is.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: Ellsbergs own words, dumbass.
matoko_chan
@soonergrunt: better hurry up, they are going to slime Manning as a homo next. jump on board, Sooner, that is obviously why Manning turned. he was mad about DADT.
Todd
@burnspbesq:
Remind me again why I should care what you do.
DougJ
What could be more manly than trying to convince another government to kill someone with a drone?
matoko_chan
@burnspbesq: hahaha
wikileaks is here to stay, and there is absolutely NOTHING the Unipolar Power can do about it.
got up on the cranky side of the bed this morning, burn?
its going to take a whole lot of hired skiddies and spammers to crack Amazon’s server cloud ice.
i love this.
we are living in Neuromancer and Snowcrash RIGHT NAOW!
how long before we are living in Diamond Age and Woken Wuries?
can’t wait.
score; US- 0 Wikileaks – 4
WIKILEAKS FTW!
THE
@matoko_chan:
Fuck the unipolar power shit.
The USA could be about to be passed.
ppcli
@polyorchnid octopunch:
I’ve been thinking similar things. I never thought I could detest a PM as much as I detested Mulroney. But it’s a tough call ’cause I hate them for different reasons. Mulroney was corrupt, while Harper doesn’t appear to be. Harper is actively hostile to many of the things I most love about Canada while Mulroney seemed to actually love many of the things Harper hates. Mulroney made a quite moving speech against the death penalty in the last free vote on it. Impossible to imagine those words coming out of Harper’s mouth. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine Harper engaging in the kind of nation-mortifyingly boot-licking behaviour Mulroney displayed in the (choke) “shamrock summit” with Reagan. Harper’s French has gotten better – it doesn’t hurt my ears as much as it used to – but Mulroney spoke it like a native. So adding it all up, I hate a PM more than the guy who gave us the Shamrock summit. I would have found that unbelievable at the time.
WyldPirate
@Keith G:
This is the whole point. Our entire culture and system of governance has completely jumped the shark. It’s been sliding this way since the Reagan years at least.
The diplomatic leaks funneled through Assange’s Wikileaks are basically a big pile of nothing and reveals the pettiness that has riven the entire operation of our government, Most of it is not that unlike the stuff that goes on in the comment section here–a bunch of back-biting, petty squabbles over nothing of import.
The bigger issue is the sideshow that our government has become. It can’t solve the simplest of problems anymore. There’s a reason for that and Sen. Michael Bennett nailed it yesterday when he was caught on the Senate floor on an open microphone saying “It’s all rigged”. Now Bennett was saying this in context of the senate’s scheduled lame duck session agenda, but it gets to the broader point. “It”, or the government in general is run by a bunch of people who don’t have the citizen’s best interest in mind but the interests of the rich and business as the milk the last bit of money they can out of America and move on to wherever else provides the best prospects for profit.
The US has always been this way to one extent or another and it emerged as an economic power from the wreckage by the collusion of circumstance. Decades of previous theft and unchecked capitalism prior to the Depression) and the machinations resulting from the political wreckage of that event (WWII) allowed us to emerge as the preeminent and only economic power left standing. That was, in my view a complete anomaly of historic circumstance and not due to any sort of American exceptionalism.
The rich and powerful have, over the last 30 years, worn down the checks and balances placed on capitalism that restrain it from pillaging its citizenry. Each recovery has been more anemic than the past and more of America has fallen into decay with each passing decade. Fewer people employed and median wages down from the previous decade. Every “economic recovery” since the ’82 recession has been on the back of some sort of speculative bubble.
The steady parade of spectacles in the news are simply a useful distraction for the monied class to steal whatever else isn’t nailed down. It’s Nero fiddling while Rome burns while the sheeple enjoy the modern day “bread and circuses” of the distractions they have to avail themselves of.
matoko_chan
@THE: and that will be a good thing. the US read a lot of false positive into the sovs going down.
it was not a vindication of American WEC protestantism….it was a vindication of the oligarchs Ponzi scheme.
we merely outspent the old adversary with borrowed money.
with any luck, China and India will keep us honest, humble and striving.
the new arms race is human capital.
america is a comparative pauper.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@soonergrunt:
Assange isn’t the tool of American destruction he evidently imagines himself to be.
I’ve actually read his comments on what Wikileaks is supposed to do. You, obviously, haven’t. Brief clue: it’s not to act as a means of destroying America.
soonergrunt
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: Really, cause I’ve read what Assange has actually said he wants to do, wrt the US.
Pssst–what the org and most of it’s people believe is immaterial when the guy running the show has a different agenda than the org’s stated agenda and keeps firing those who disagree with him.
dhd
And people wonder why people in Québec would want to separate from a country run by such brilliant humanitarians…
Maude
@soonergrunt:
Wonder if the guys that work with Mr. A will turn him in.
THE
@matoko_chan:
Now will you learn Mandarin?
matoko_chan
@THE: why not? it has to be easier than arabic and japanese.
:)
@Maude: no they wont. the spin off are distributed nodes that will also perform wikileaks functions.
Wikileaks charter is internet information transparency so we wont get spoofed into meaningless unwinnable clusterfucks like Vietnam, Iraq, and A-stan anymore.
sooner is a dumb cannon fodder grunt that can’t accept that the warpimps dont have his best interests at heart, so he believes all their spin.
look! a squirrel!
THE
@matoko_chan:
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
bjacques
@matoko_chan: There are plenty of rightwing hackers. I used to hang out with them in the early 1990s. To the extent they were political at all, they were more like right-libertarians shading toward Republicans. They didn’t care about abortion or leading America back to God, they liked to do drugs and didn’t like paying taxes, especially if the money would go to poor and/or dark people.
Wikileaks is not attacking the US or any other government, but is going after the culture of secrecy that lives inside it like a parasite. Their methods may be crude sometimes and Julian Assange needs to learn nuance on this (and maybe with women too), but I think they’re generally doing the right thing.
JMC in the ATL
@burnspbesq: Two minutes and the googles, and you would know that Amazon Cloud Hosting accounts are free for the taking. Remind me again why Amazon will care about your Sternly Worded Letter.
debbie
Ellsberg is mistaken when he compares Assange’s actions to what he did. The Pentagon Papers exposed a secret war, one that the Congress had explicitly forbidden and that Nixon had opted to ignore and by so doing, subvert the Constitution. Where is the equivalence in Assange’s actions? All he did was expose a bunch of gossipy bureaucrats. There’s not a whole lot of news in these documents and where there has been new information (Arab states being anti-Iran, North Korea selling bombs to Iran), this exposure only endangers chances for their success. How does this advance the cause of world peace?
Ellsberg uncovered illegal actions; Assange does nothing more than embarrass officials and obfuscate some notable opportunties for cooperation. He’s more like a little boy than a whistleblower.
matoko_chan
@bjacques: maybe there were back in the 90s.
twenty years ago. ;)
but today Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability is resulting in elite students fleeing the GOP like scalded cats.
almost the top students are liberal. and since being a l33t hacker requires upper tail IQ, hackers are liberal.
geeks are liberal.
look at what happened to michael steeles website and the american ideas websites — prank linkers, trolls, mobies. totall infestation.
DOITFORTHELULZ and the script kiddies are not republicans– they are crypto-anarchists and criminals. that is why the US had to hire skiddies and spammers to attack the wikileaks servers.
there are no hackers on Team Conservative.
in my uni, we can take hacking 101 and be on a competitive hacker team.
Assange is our hero.
but none of us are republicans n/e more.
94% of scientists are NOTrepublican.
i betcha 99% of hackers are NOTrepublican.
and 100% of geeks.
Douthat et al know this is a problem.
but they don’t know how to deal with it.
:)
matoko_chan
@debbie:
hahahaah, u tell him debbi.
one problem, ‘sline. Assange is just the conduit. the “client” is the leaker, the whistleblower.
matoko_chan
for debbi, sooner, burn eemom et al.
this is what is in the diplo cables.
a dying empire, paranoid, crazed with fear and entirely mad.
the warpimps and spinners told you Assange was the bad guy, and besides there is nothin new in there– nothing in the A-stan docs, nothing in the Iraq-docs, nothing in the cables.
you dumbass cudlips just shut up and swallow.
this is what is in there.
sparky
@matoko_chan: thanks for the link, but couldn’t you just link to the actual writer rather than the Atlantic?
and what is the fascination with the Atlantic, anyways [sic]? is it the ne plus ultra of establishment thinking? the banality of the everyday in a nice wrapper? the thrill of watching for that stopped clock to be right again? why not read “the superficial” instead? at least there there’s no pretense of, well, anything.
ps: read your frum link. interesting, if preliminary notion, but IMO in your enthusiasm you are conflating politics (D v R) with policy. i see no evidence that the upper strata of the mandarin class are going to be more “liberal” than in the past. two examples: (1) AFAIK no one has resigned from the Obama administration over civil rights; (2) the views of many of the “pragmatic” commenters here. if anything, i would expect more younger people who have no idea of shared sacrifice (ala the 1930s & 40s) to perpetuate the foolish selfishness that passes for political thought on the right.
matoko_chan
@soonergrunt: C’mon Sooner…….ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION!
What is the mission, soldier?
matoko_chan
@sparky: the link is under ‘this’ above the quote. Simon Jenkins via Sully.
Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability (IQ) is not the entire problem.
there is also an emergent culture gap.
intellectual elites and cultural elites have left the conservative building.
only business class elites remain on the right.
that is what Murray’s new book is going to be about.
El Cid
I’m sure they can upload zips and text files and binaries up to the Usenet.
PonB
I can’t help thinking of Mr. Neutron from Monty Python’s last season…
Mr. Neutron (nee Julian Assange)
– PonB
matoko_chan
@sparky: i read sully…its part of the “Once Was Conservative” thingy, like i read Cole.
im still trying to puzzle out how they scammed me…i mean, i was born into it. i suppose i could have become a bot like McArdle if my IQ was a few points lower.
sully and i correspond.
sometimes he prints my letters.
i love him….he is a drama queen and sometimes wrong (well…always wrong-wrong about dead-white-guy first culture bullshytt, but hell, that was his thesis), but still……. you can warm your soul on the fire of his passions.
he is real.
THE
@matoko_chan:
See that’s where you and I differ.
I don’t see conservatism as a scam. I see conservatism and radicalism as two different strategic mindsets in a continuum that just happens to be bimodal.
Given that both have survived and persist in the population, there are probably circumstances when one strategy works better and circumstances where the other one does.
The population shifts from one mindset to the other as they perceive the likely payoffs from the two strategies shifting.
sparky
@matoko_chan: fair points. though i have never been a conservative, i sometimes visit red state just to see what the denizens think of a particular development. these days it looks more or less like the John Birch society except with the overtly offensive behavior policed.
as to why someone would be “conned”, i don’t think it’s that difficult. apologists, courtiers and front people for reactionaries are, necessarily, likeable and all about the wisdom of centuries. lefties on the other hand are rude, sometimes priggish and always advocating something “different” and fraught with problems. also, the reactionaries have the $, so their wine and cheese parties are waaaaaaaay betterer.
as for Sullivan, the qualities you like him for are ones that i find rather appalling in a writer who opines on political and economic issues. writing self-reflective drivel is fine when the subject is of no matter, but when lives are at stake masturbating in print is not something i need to see.
if i want to warm my hands at the prose of outrage, i read Chris Hedges or Arthur Silber, both of whom i recommend, not as gospel but as provocative and outraged chronicalers (sp) of these days.
@THE:
whether this is true as a general statement is not relevant to US politics and policy these days, as “conservativism” has become a subterfuge for wealth transfer at home and belligerency abroad, and radicalism, in the sense of the Left*, is essentially absent from the debate in the US.
*as the Ds, so as to keep their funding (and employment) intact have decided to aquiesce in these campaigns, they cannot be said to be “left” in anything other than social (read: morals) debates.
sal
@JMC_in_the_ATL:
Thanks. Not sure how that differs from getting your own domain and allowing users to log in. but that’s why I didn’t go into networking. I see Amazon’s canned Wikileaks now, which is what I’d expect.
Bill Arnold
@matoko_chan:
Worldwide, maybe. But a lot of them are criminals and/or ultranationalists and/or working for governments on or off the books, etc. (And Stuxnet is interesting. If you haven’t read the technical accounts at e.g. Symantec dossier or eric chien’s (also symantec) blog posts on it, they’re worth reading, at least if you have the background.)