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According to Fox News wikileaks will release the launch codes for every single nuke in the United States, and even some in Russia.
And it shall come with a bonus leak of the GPS coordinates of every major city in the world.
Say I wont nuke Mexico City, say I wont!
TEAM CHUBB LUBB.
I'd get the Rx8 just so I can mess with the magical spinning dorito motor.
Thank you for providing us with the direct-port nitrous... uh... injection, four-core intercoolers, an' ball-bearing turbos, and... um... titanium valve springs..
I am not totally sure what you are trying to say here. If the first few sentences are from the leaked cables you should say so and also say why they are relevant to your argument.
They reveal nothing new, as for 99% of the "revelations".
Yes people are more aware, information equates to awareness. I covered this issue already with Christof, if you want a more detailed answer then read back over the last few pages.
They are not more aware, they just receive much more information without the ability or time to analyse it.
The quality of the information can only be judged by the individual. Example; I personally have no interest in celebrities and never look at the entertainment of the newspaper, I personally think that people who read about this kind of stuff are wasting their time. However, I can still say that someone who has an interest in celebrities is more aware about them after reading the entertainment section. This is because they now know more about celebrities than they did prior to reading and they are best positioned to judge their own interests and thus which information is quality and which is not.
The most important thing to do to analyse an information is to verify various sources, to see the pro an con opinions. Nowadays all the mass media just are parrots and do not do their job to analyse or filter what is relevant and what is not (I'm not speaking of censorship but more of deontology). There is also a concentration of the medias in fewer and fewer hands.
I understand your point that we are constantly bombarded with information and that we do not have time to absorb it all. This is true, but it is completely illogical to suggest because we do not have the time to explore all issues to an infinite depth, this equates to not knowing anything at all. Of course no-one person can absorb all information, but they can absorb some information, and after absorbing some information they will know more about the issue of their focus than they did prior to receiving the information.
They absorb information but not necessary understand it. And the information they will absorb is the one that is the more repeated by the medias.
To examine your statement "Too much information = No information". What is too much information? When exactly can I know how much is too much? I assume by "too much" you mean more than you or I could absorb. If this is the case, then too much information would equate to some known information plus more unknown information. As follows;
Too much information= known information + unknown information
Contrastingly, no information would equate to no information. It does not follow that some information equates to no information.
Ok my equation was to simple. What I think is that people need to be able to analyse the information and be able to build their own opinion.
To make another example; There are 6,888,035,045 people in the world (according to the US census data), all of which have their own interests and are doing something slightly different. Economies are built on specialisation and comparative advantage. A stock broker does not generally know how to build a house, a plumber is generally not also a proficient philosopher. People specialise in their area of knowledge and rely on others to fill in the gaps where required. Even if the stock broker does not know about house building, it does not mean they knows 'nothing'. The stock broker knows about about trading in financial assets and other areas of interest. In the same way you and I know about our work and area's of interest.
Your argument suggests to me that you feel like a victim. If you read the news and think "I don't have time to possibly fact check all this information", and because of this thought you give up on fact checking any of it. Then this is a personal decision, it is not necessarily reflective of the decisions of others. Even still, this means you would at least have a cursory knowledge of the issues in the news and would definitely not know nothing.
I don't feel like a victim. I am just amazed to see how it is easy to manipulate people.
Education is key and the more we go the less the people are educated and consequently more prone to be manipulated.
They reveal nothing new, as for 99% of the "revelations".
They are not more aware, they just receive much more information without the ability or time to analyse it.
The most important thing to do to analyse an information is to verify various sources, to see the pro an con opinions. Nowadays all the mass media just are parrots and do not do their job to analyse or filter what is relevant and what is not (I'm not speaking of censorship but more of deontology). There is also a concentration of the medias in fewer and fewer hands.
They absorb information but not necessary understand it. And the information they will absorb is the one that is the more repeated by the medias.
Ok my equation was to simple. What I think is that people need to be able to analyse the information and be able to build their own opinion.
I don't feel like a victim. I am just amazed to see how it is easy to manipulate people.
Education is key and the more we go the less the people are educated and consequently more prone to be manipulated.
that was well said, especially this;The most important thing to do to analyse an information is to verify various sources, to see the pro an con opinions. Nowadays all the mass media just are parrots and do not do their job to analyse or filter what is relevant and what is not (I'm not speaking of censorship but more of deontology). There is also a concentration of the medias in fewer and fewer hands.
bigg upps
They reveal nothing new, as for 99% of the "revelations".
They are not more aware, they just receive much more information without the ability or time to analyse it.
The most important thing to do to analyse an information is to verify various sources, to see the pro an con opinions. Nowadays all the mass media just are parrots and do not do their job to analyse or filter what is relevant and what is not (I'm not speaking of censorship but more of deontology). There is also a concentration of the medias in fewer and fewer hands.
They absorb information but not necessary understand it. And the information they will absorb is the one that is the more repeated by the medias.
Ok my equation was to simple. What I think is that people need to be able to analyse the information and be able to build their own opinion.
I don't feel like a victim. I am just amazed to see how it is easy to manipulate people.
Education is key and the more we go the less the people are educated and consequently more prone to be manipulated.
Like I said to Christof, I definitely learnt something new from reading headlines and cables. If you didn't then you must be really all over US diplomacy and IR to have already known the information contained in 250,000 cables. If that's the case then kudos to you, if its not then I suggest that you explain how you can receive new information without becoming more aware of the topic of its focus.
Sure its important to understand information, how does that happen? Well you absorb it, process it, contextualise it etc. Anyway, this is really off topic from your original post about your idea that too much information equates to no information. Which I think we have safely established is incorrect. Gripes about the education or the media are irrelevant to this discussion.
killuminati, just shut the fuck up dude, no one gives a shit. I'm gonna continue deleting your bullshit until I get tired and then you'll get banned, so if you wanna stick around and do what you wanna do on other forum sections go ahead, just don't bother coming into this one.
killuminati, just shut the fuck up dude, no one gives a shit. I'm gonna continue deleting your bullshit until I get tired and then you'll get banned, so if you wanna stick around and do what you wanna do on other forum sections go ahead, just don't bother coming into this one.
you are just like all these walking dead mutha fucka...you think you the shit because you have the power to delete...suck a nut fucking cupcake chump.go spend all your fucking useless time playing your idiotic video games............................trick
there are actually real people not internet viruses like yourselves, making some actual journalism to acquire the most intellectual and most logical truth to whatever subject is presented. and risk there life's to do this........unlike yourself......pinche mamon....hurry up your flock of sheep are leaving you..
Dude, you are so cliche. You don't even put forward logical trains of argument. You just assert things with rapid fire posts without actually putting forward any evidence or convincing argument.
Just saying shit isn't going to convince anyone, so it just makes it sound like you are self promoting by saying "I'm the guy that knows what everyone else is too dumb to see. I have have superior insight".
And no one cares about that shit mate, people have been saying that kind of stuff for decades now. The people who do attract attention are those who can actually make a good argument based on logic, rational thought and evidence, so far all you've had is assertions and this character of the persecuted vigilante of truth. And that shit is so old and played, dude, it's what 15 year olds do after the first time they see bowling for Columbine or Loose Change. Either step it up about 5 levels or just fuck off.
Sorry, I know I shouldn't feed the troll, my frustration got the better of me.
Last edited by christo-f : 12-17-2010 at 02:57 AM.
Like I said to Christof, I definitely learnt something new from reading headlines and cables. If you didn't then you must be really all over US diplomacy and IR to have already known the information contained in 250,000 cables. If that's the case then kudos to you, if its not then I suggest that you explain how you can receive new information without becoming more aware of the topic of its focus.
Sure its important to understand information, how does that happen? Well you absorb it, process it, contextualise it etc. Anyway, this is really off topic from your original post about your idea that too much information equates to no information. Which I think we have safely established is incorrect. Gripes about the education or the media are irrelevant to this discussion.
You tell me after having read the 250'000 cables. Average People do not process or contextualise anything. News replace news. You can have your opinion. Fine. But do not say that education or media are irrelevant to this discussion. They are fundamentally linked to it.
You tell me after having read the 250'000 cables. Average People do not process or contextualise anything. News replace news. You can have your opinion. Fine. But do not say that education or media are irrelevant to this discussion. They are fundamentally linked to it.
Thanks for giving me permission to have an opinion! haha
I don't need to read ALL of the cables, which is exactly my point. Even if I simply read ONE of themI will know more about its content than I did previously. If I read two, I will know more, and if I read ten I will know even more. This is really elementary stuff here. At what point does this magical trick happen where I read too much and then my brain short circuits and I realise I haven't processed anything?
Your gripes over education and the media are irrelevant to the point that you are trying to make and that I called you on, which is that people are bombarded with information which prevents them from substantially understanding any of it. A point which is incorrect for the reasons I have stated earlier. If you have softened your argument now to say that people are bombarded with information which prevents them from processing much of it. This may be correct in some circumstances, but it is an individual choice to not follow up and fact check issues, not a symptom of 24hour news media or anything else but the individuals interests and priorities. The simple fact is that some people may not see sufficient reward in personally researching stories that they have seen/read in the mainstream news. This is a decision that they have made, rather than an intellectual slight of hand trick perpetuated by news organisations. It may be more likely that choose to read further if they are educated, but becoming educated is a process of gathering information too, and can be equally tested against your hypothesis of too much information equates to no information. Do you walk into a book store and think "there are more books than I could ever read here so there's no point in trying to read any of them"? This hypothetical is analogical to your assertion. Why would it apply to news, but not a bookstore or a lecture theatre?
Regardless, to talk about "average people" is really code for saying "I am going to now make a huge generalisation with little to no evidence". How do you know what "average people" do? How do you know you are not one of these "average people" yourself? Do you process or contextualise anything? You are certainly not processing the content of my previous posts if you are still banging on about this issue.
Last edited by frankiefiver : 12-18-2010 at 11:53 PM.
i see average people all around me, who make statements about things they do not understand and are fake or partially true and are deeply convinced because they heard it 100 times on tv and read it into their free newspapers.
I know that I am not an average person on this matter because most of the "super secrets" revealed were already known to me.
Yeah, withouth entering in to the this topic again I think you can use average person in context. When talking about cars you can say the average person is some one who is not a mechanic or has never worked on a motor before (such as myself). Likewise when talking about medicine an average person is some one who has never studied any kind of medicine (orthodox, Chinese, wholistic, shakra fucking healing, etc.) or is first aid qualified.
In this case I'd say the average person is some one who has never studied politics, sociology, doesn't know the name of their respective foreign minister or doesn't read a Time or Newsweek magazine (or equivalent) at least once a week.
The more I think about this issue the more I wonder if there is actually some valid criticism of wikileaks. They only have what, maybe ten people in their operation and they are releasing hundreds of thousands of documents. It makes me wonder just how closely these documents were reviewed before being released. I know they asked people in the press and at the pentagon to help them review the documents but the establishment refused. They just seem to be huge info dumps. I'm all for more transparency but releasing things like the names of informants in Iraq and Afghanistan does seem to be endangering the lives of these people. Wikileaks tried cooperating with the pentagon so I have to give them that. I can't understand why the pentagon would refuse to cooperate in this situation when it would have been in their best interests.
The sheer volume of these info dumps by wikileaks makes me wonder how much of it is actually legitimate whistleblowing. I don't think I will ever in my life read all these documents. Probably a lot of them might be really boring. But the line between whistleblowing and transparency advocacy seems to be getting a little blurry. I guess I'm questioning wikileaks motives. Maybe if they focused more on actionable intelligence to stem corruption there would be less controversy. Focus seems a little soft and hazy at this point.
I would also like to see these corrupt banks and corporations exposed. Reforming big business would help reform government by proxy. And they would probably win more sympathy from people.
I don't think they are huge info dumps, the last one was but lets put that in context.
These documents revolve around US embassy's and diplomats, so to someone in the U.S. it seems like too much.
If you just so happen to be from outside of the U.S. the irrelevant information to your own concerns is less prominent.
Your country or region may only be concerned with a small percentage of this latest release.
Contrary to popular beliefs there are people from outside the U.S. and they do matter.
I can understand how this latest infodump may seem like too much but let's just imagine if they had released it in small tidbits.
The thing is, people would feel as if they had some agenda and were only releasing information that supported their own political perspective.
Verifying then dropping the diplomatic cables all at once was probably the best thing for their credibility.
Let's say you don't want to sift through the massive amounts of information yourself, that's what the press is supposed to do anyway.
They have done a fairly good job (at least some organizations) of sifting through said data and dropping the interesting tidbits in news stories.
Not everything needs to be pre packaged into easy to digest processed info and 5 minute CNN stories or soundbites to make a difference or impact.
I think Wikileaks is positioning itself as a reliable source for a specific type of raw data for the press to draw from.
The Iraq war documents they managed to release by far have had the most impact on my thinking.
Not that I was ever for the war in the first place or had no clue that war is hell, it's just the civilian and innocent deaths made me hate this war even more than I already did.
I remember watching the video of reporters and civilians getting mowed down for no reason other than bragging rights.
Then looking through the guardians map of deaths in Iraq where most of the dead were non combative civilians in "escalations" was an eye opener.
Shit like building the interactive map can't be done by a small organization, it takes a major investment from a large organization to accomplish.
It just seems like everyone is expecting Wikileaks to produce well written editorials in this thread which isn't really their goal.
They are providing verified information for the press to draw from instead of just asking the government who classifies everything relevant.
You think the pentagon would ever release said information to CNN or someone and admit the innocent lives they take far outnumber "enemy combatants"?
You think any diplomat or government agency would ever say the Saudi's want us to bomb Iran or the truth behind anything?
Or do you just think every piece of information they release should be relevant to crossfire posters specific interests?
i see average people all around me, who make statements about things they do not understand and are fake or partially true and are deeply convinced because they heard it 100 times on tv and read it into their free newspapers.
I know that I am not an average person on this matter because most of the "super secrets" revealed were already known to me.
So first can we assume that since you have not attempted to defend your "too much information=no information" hypothesis , you concede that it is flawed?
Don't you think it's a little ironic that you say people all around you make statements about things they do not understand and are fake or partially true? The irony is in the fact that you have just perfectly illustrated this point with your previous 'too much info' assertion which is either fake or at best partially true. But by your argument you are not average but exceptional? How is this so?
You say the proof of your exceptionalness is demonstrated by your knowledge of the information contained within 250,000 cables. To be honest I find this a little hard to believe. If we were face to face I could design a test to see if this is true by plucking a cable out at random and asking you to expand on the subject. Since this would not work online I will have to rely on my suspicion based on the calibre of your previous comments.
Btw, while The Chaser are pretty funny their skit is certainly not valid social research haha
Christof; Fair point. I agree that it becomes a harder case to make the more narrow and specific a qualification you make on a statement about average people, ie average people are not astrophysicists. This statement is very certainly true. However, it is often attempted to use this phrase to summarise a package of behaviours; the average person likes sport, drives a car and does not thoroughly investigate information contained in the news. This statement might be likely to be true, but it would require some research to say with any certainty. It would also only be applicable within a certain context, ie the average person in the US likes sport. This may be true, but it doesn't equally apply to the average person in Tibet. Furthermore, this kind of hazy description of "average people" is often used as a counter-weight against the originators self granted superiority, ie average people don't know how to manage their own lives so I will have to enact some laws to do it for them. Or by implication, ie average people don't know what they are talking about (therefore I do).
So, my previous statement should have been qualified to say; broad, unsubstantiated, applications of the phrase "average people" is almost always code for saying 'I am going to make a huge generalisation based on little to no evidence'. RIPS's statement; "Average people do not process or contextualise anything" brilliantly illustrates this point by absurdly generalising the intellectual behaviour of the "average person" in absence of a context and by implication asserting his/her superiority in-contrast to this generalisation.
Also, "persecuted vigilante of truth" made me fucking laugh!
I don't think they are huge info dumps, the last one was but lets put that in context.
These documents revolve around US embassy's and diplomats, so to someone in the U.S. it seems like too much.
If you just so happen to be from outside of the U.S. the irrelevant information to your own concerns is less prominent.
Your country or region may only be concerned with a small percentage of this latest release.
Contrary to popular beliefs there are people from outside the U.S. and they do matter.
I can understand how this latest infodump may seem like too much but let's just imagine if they had released it in small tidbits.
The thing is, people would feel as if they had some agenda and were only releasing information that supported their own political perspective.
Verifying then dropping the diplomatic cables all at once was probably the best thing for their credibility.
Let's say you don't want to sift through the massive amounts of information yourself, that's what the press is supposed to do anyway.
They have done a fairly good job (at least some organizations) of sifting through said data and dropping the interesting tidbits in news stories.
Not everything needs to be pre packaged into easy to digest processed info and 5 minute CNN stories or soundbites to make a difference or impact.
I think Wikileaks is positioning itself as a reliable source for a specific type of raw data for the press to draw from.
The Iraq war documents they managed to release by far have had the most impact on my thinking.
Not that I was ever for the war in the first place or had no clue that war is hell, it's just the civilian and innocent deaths made me hate this war even more than I already did.
I remember watching the video of reporters and civilians getting mowed down for no reason other than bragging rights.
Then looking through the guardians map of deaths in Iraq where most of the dead were non combative civilians in "escalations" was an eye opener.
Shit like building the interactive map can't be done by a small organization, it takes a major investment from a large organization to accomplish.
It just seems like everyone is expecting Wikileaks to produce well written editorials in this thread which isn't really their goal.
They are providing verified information for the press to draw from instead of just asking the government who classifies everything relevant.
You think the pentagon would ever release said information to CNN or someone and admit the innocent lives they take far outnumber "enemy combatants"?
You think any diplomat or government agency would ever say the Saudi's want us to bomb Iran or the truth behind anything?
Or do you just think every piece of information they release should be relevant to crossfire posters specific interests?
You make some valid points but maybe wikileaks should have an agenda. For example: Is exposing the saudi royals as corrupt really helpful in the larger scheme of things? They are barely holding onto power as it is and the country is awash with extremists. Would it be helpful if Saudi Arabia became another terrorist state like Somalia or Afghanistan? The apparent lack of an agenda by wikileaks in these seemingly indiscriminate leaks still advances or hinders the agendas of others. I appreciate wikileaks being an honest broker of information and bringing some transparency to world affairs but the lack of an agenda by wikileaks is also creating an opportunity for less honest brokers to advance their own agendas.
I've heard Julian Assange described as an anarchist who wants all governments and institutions to fail. By not having an agenda it can be construed as advancing the agenda of anarchy. I believe most governments and politicians to be corrupt and I'm something of an anarchist myself, but I guess I just believe in a more strategic revolution (or better yet, a renaissance). This revolution seems to be truly chaotic, without rhyme or reason. I support more transparency, and stopping overclassification, but that does not change the fact that some things are better left unsaid.
The foundation of good reporting is presenting unbiased facts.
Publishing facts that only further ones own agenda does nothing for the credibility of a press organization.
Presenting the truth, in an unbiased manner, is the backbone of a free press and free society, everything else is pushing opinions.
The problem with opinions is that they tend to stray away from truth and cannot be trusted.
There have always been convincing opinions, sometimes from good people that were on the wrong side of history
It works out for you if share the same opinion and agenda, but then what's the point, nothing will change if you agree.
Let's say their agenda or opinions differ from your own, again, you'll see the bias and understand the information is being manipulated.
The only thing that will change an opinion is having all the facts presented in a unbiased manner for the readers to form or modify their own opinions.
Not sharing your own opinion doesn't mean you don't have one, it just means your focused on sharing the facts and remaining credible.
If your opinion is truly closer to the truth, then others will naturally agree if given non opinionated facts about a situation.
Anyone can take a look at a situation and present an opinion on it by manipulating the facts as a whole and presenting only those that support their opinion.
I think the facts Wikileaks is sharing confirms some opinions or speculations, and discredits others.
It has also brought to light the need for more transparency and the inevitable downfalls of presenting opinions.
Sure, we all knew war was hell, but did we know that the majority of the deaths in Iraq were non combative citizens.
Yea, maybe we know not all soldiers are able to make sound decisions on who to take out but seeing video of a group of reporters and civilians being killed puts that into perspective.
I think we've all forgotten here what it truly means to live in a free society over the last decade.
As voters we should know what our government is up to, why someone in Iraq or the middle east might have good reason to hate us.
These are our tax dollars paying for those bullets and our soldiers putting through innocent people.
Without any facts to make an informed decision we might as well not live in a democracy and let our elite make all our decisions for us.
Which I believe we already do.
Actually I thought people already knew civilian deaths in Iraq were much higher? Iraq Body Count has been around pretty much since the war started: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
They have pretty much always been saying the civilian death toll has been much higher than combatants. Especially since we kicked off the war with Operation "Shock and Awe" (the name alone suggests excessive brutality), I've never seen such a display of primate chest thumping... yet while it was happening, it seemed like I was the only person appalled by such a thing. 1700 air sorties, striking vital infrastructure and god knows what else.... We devastated Iraq and they still welcomed us as liberators at first.
The subsequent counter insurgency has also been doomed from the beginning. Not only has there never been any care for the welfare of Iraqi civilians (rebuilding of vital infrastructure has been painfully slow, a corrupt money pit allowing favored companies like Halliburton to do as little work for as much money as possible, allowing Iraq to descend into chaos) but many soldiers have been inimically hostile to Iraqis. A lot of these buttheads and beavis' actually think it is cool to blow shit up and kill people, especially the ones who are still green, and since the average age in the military is 19 that is just about everybody (well maybe not everybody, but people in combat arms units seem to be like this almost invariably). I know the military actually trains people to have a bloodlust, but a lot of people come into the military already having a bloodlust. What is it? The glorification of violence in Hollywood and video games? Whatever the reason, our generation seems to be the most violent since our forebears were killing Native Americans.
The civilian death toll in Iraq is nothing new to me. Seems like a lot of these leaks are telling us what we already know, or are confirming what we already suspected.
Re: wikileak -
12-16-2010, 02:27 AM
