Friday 11 February 2011

Some things are better not being known.


Let's just get this out the way first. I am a firm believer of freedom of speech. But all this malarkey that Julian Assange is doing is just ridiculous and in light of the start of his court trial, I thought I'd type a blog up about it and how I feel about this whole affair. If you can't access this blog in the future, it's because 4chan have found me and killed me with an email bomb.

Granted, perhaps the Swedish government probably didn't handle the whole alleged rape claims very well. But I believe that this was purely because of the amount of pressure they were getting from the US to get Assange in a place where they could get to him.

Did the founder of Wikileaks rape these women as alleged? We won't know until the judge makes his decision. But either way, he does look like a seedy and grimy sort of fellow, with a little bit of the banker breed thrown in for good measure.

Julian Assange
There have been calls from fair right American's for him to be executed. Which is frankly barbaric, however it doesn't excuse the fact that some of the leaks that he has been responsible for have been totally and unjustifiably unwarrantable, and dangerous for the national security of America. 

Leaks such private conversations between members of the American government about their opinions of certain countries and War Logs of both Afghanistan and Iraq. It's not just America that he's attacking either with these publications, but other countries that approach him with illegally gotten information. It's all on the same par with treason, and anybody who is caught doing it should be treat in the same way as somebody who is caught selling information to a foreign state. There is always talk of somebody being a traitor and posing serious risk to the country every time a somebody is caught selling secrets to the Chinese, Russians, Koreans. So how is this any different? 

There is a reason why governments don't publish this information. Granted some of it is because of self preservation; nobody wants bad PR, no matter how honest the government is. However, some is genuinely for the  public's best interests and safety, and to upkeep sometimes fragile relationships with other countries to keep the peace and maintain the best interests of their country at heart. Who doesn't want their country's best interests put first?

To callously put all this information up for world wide viewing is completely wrong. Some of it can be justified - SOME OF IT. And Julian and his crew at Wikileaks need to be able to strike the balance between what the public have a right to know, and what the world DOESN'T need to, and has no business knowing. 

Half the people up in arms about this probably never even heard about Wikileaks before August last year. And probably never even bothered their arsed to read through the 400,000 files in the Iraq war log. I know I sure as hell didn't, I have better things to do then stick my nose into things that don't concern me, and be safe in the assumption that if there was anything that the media thought the public ought to know, it would be published.

The argument of free speech is a ridiculous excuse for the justification of the use of offensive comments. The boundary lines of this is pushed to the absolute limits by the likes of the Daily Mail and the Star - the latter of which published an anti-Muslim front page headline, and then manage to misspell the word heroes whilst printing the story right next a flesh abundant picture of a woman. And they wonder why Muslims can be so hostile toward us. Anyway, here's the online article. At least the Star had the decency to disable the comments section on this page. Impending racism thwarted. 

[Insert a picture of this front page here....anyone?]

It would appear that I can't in fact find a picture of this. But whilst I was searching through the archives of the Daily Star, I was absolutely flabbergasted by how much space Katie Price has taken up on their front pages in recent weeks! All space wasted for actual real news. 

Until next time, folks.

1 comment:

  1. I'm torn on this one. I'm completely for freedom of speech, and i think some of the leaks are probably stuff the public deserve to know - like bullshit the government has done wrong. I completely see the fine line of balance though whereby Assange should feel some responsibility to not let delicate information get into the wrong hands, thus dangering peoples lives!
    The rape charges... i think that's bullshit just to get him tied down to one place where they can keep an eye on him. It's all one big conspiracy theory in my crazy little mind lol. x

    ReplyDelete