Been away for a couple days.
The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.
Not that Manning's intentions were good so much as they were petty and stupid... "Oh, I'ma get them militaries by stealing all these random messages sent by people who were not them to people who were also not them and sending them to a random third party!" He was disgusted by small, isolated incidents he felt his direct superiors mishandled, so he stole documents from an entirely different branch of US operations and leaked them, without regards for their contents. In doing so, he put his head on the chopping block, and, quite hilariously, accomplished exactly nothing that he wanted, aside from a smug sense of self-importance.
I don't get this. You're saying absolutely nothing here but a bunch of random negative assumptions about the character of a guy you know very little about. I suppose attributing his actions to good intentions is also an assumption, but it would seem more likely that it was an act of conscience than a petty attention-seeking scheme, considering the consequences he surely knew he faced.
I never said he was after attention, only that his actions were petty and misguided. Chain of events:
Manning decides he doesn't much like the military after seeing some trivial, isolated events mishandled by low ranking officers -> Manning decides to try to hurt the military by leaking a bunch of documents he stole from the state department (which is, notably,
not the military) -> Manning
brags about this in a chatroom -> Manning has spent the better part of the last year in solitary for his own protection -> the leaks didn't actually contain anything important (well, if they provided solid enough evidence to bring down Sarkozy I might have to make the concession that "yes, they did manage to hurt a deserving party, although notably one entirely unrelated to the US," though since these were US documents that were stolen, that meant our diplomats knew about it, and thus had a bargaining chip to manipulate him with, so that coming to light might still be for the worse (after all, even if he's brought down, he'll probably be replaced by someone as bad or worse)), so Manning laid his head on the chopping block for nothing.
I suppose pundits and petty figures in mostly irrelevant political arenas got some new things to harp on about ineffectually, but that's not all that great for anyone but them, and I doubt Manning was on a quest to bring them some new material...
You also - and this is the really big thing I keep trying to drill into your head - don't understand that humans are inherently self-serving.
I hear this every single time I ever say anything the least bit idealistic or positive about humanity in general. I might believe it if it was something I only heard occassionally, but this is the argument I get from every misanthropic cynic I ever encounter.
A endorses necessary evils as self-defense against B's actual evil.
B endorses necessary evils as self-defense against A's actual evil.
If A and B would attempt at least enough trust to communicate properly, they'd discover they amount to a very sad, pathetic scene.
"Misanthropic cynic"? Wouldn't that require I was bitter about it? I'm just stating plain fact. If you bothered to read the full explanation of that which I've posted god knows how many times in various threads, and I believe two or three times in this thread alone (at least twice
in response to you specifically) you'd see it's not nearly so simple as
"herp people are bastards derp." Reality is, of course, far more complex than can be put to words, but still I try, however ineptly it may turn out. I never have felt myself all that eloquent, after all, but that still doesn't stop me from speaking.
Then there's the No True Scotsman you keep pulling, where someone is only "acting with their conscience" or "with good intentions" if you personally agree with what they're doing. I suppose it really is inconceivable that anyone could ever think something you don't like is morally right, so obviously everyone that does anything you disagree with is evil, because I mean, what's right is just so glaringly obvious to everyone, not to mention universal... 
Yeah it basically is. Respect and kindness are quite universal and intuitive, if requiring a little effort once in a while.
Golden Rule.
Yes I know the counter to the golden rule. "That means if I like to be kicked in the face, that I should kick other people in the face, right?" No. You may know someone who enjoys golden showers, but you most likely would not appreciate one uninvited. Just as you would prefer others have respect for your needs and preferences, you should make every effort to have respect for other's. It doesn't take rocket science to understand that most people don't like to be kicked in the face, thus you shouldn't do so unless invited to. Problem solved. Golden rule upheld. Simple. Universal.
Look, you can't just tell everyone "Hey you guys, you should totally play nice and not try to gain any kind of upper hand over each other ever or ever act in the sole interest of yourself and the people you're responsible for helping ever you guys," and expect them to pay you any heed. People can only be trusted to act fairly when there is something in place to force them to. That's not to say they will inevitably act unfairly if there is not, only that they cannot be trusted not to.
Say you walk down the street. 99% of the people you see wouldn't dream of robbing you, maybe 1% would if there weren't ramifications for doing so, maybe .1% would anyways. How many people are there in a city? How many does it take to rob you? You can't depend on the general...
apathy is probably a better word than benevolence, of humanity when your life and livelihood is at stake, because it doesn't take that many exceptions to the general rule to fuck over everyone else. It is the reaction to this general principle that has created the brutal clusterfuck that is politics. In this day and age it's actually becoming milder and more benevolent, yet you want to burn it all because we haven't yet managed to weed out the old corruption, or completely eliminate human error? There's no doubt that there's corruption, and that they make mistakes, but they manage to do less of both than their citizenry, and certainly the other contemporary governments. Compared to humanity as a whole, western governments are paragons of efficiency and virtue. You have to stop and think about just how much worse they could be; case and point: everything that has ever happened in human history.
As an aside, it is reaction to this principle that gives us laws and enforcers of laws, and soldiers of all forms for the games between states. Diplomacy is a game every bit as vicious as war, and indirectly just as bloody. You cannot be selfless and passive in both face and truth and expect anything but the most abject of failure at the hands of people who aren't constrained by some arbitrary set of rules. And so intelligence agencies must gather as much information as possible on opposing ("opposing" including those of friendly nations as well as neutral and hostile, since it's always a competition, even when you're working together) diplomats and prominent (or potentially prominent) political figures, no matter how trivial or invasive, since you never know what might end up useful to your own diplomats. Beyond that, it's the diplomat's job to protect the interests of the nation they represent, which includes acting to literally protect its citizens, particularly agents of the state, from foreign powers, even when they've committed crimes within that nation's jurisdiction (that goes double when said crime is committed by an agent of the state who was ordered to commit it; you can't send someone in to do something, then hang them out to dry when you've got what you wanted, that's
Stupid Evil supervillain shit right there).
1. You seem to have completely forgotten about the war logs, which is also attributed to Manning and was most certainly not trivial.
What did it accomplish? Sweeping reforms? Criminal investigations? Jack shit, aside from giving a few pundits another talking point? Guess which one it was.
2. Why is it that the same people who call the leaked information trivial are also the same people who shamelessly call for Assange/Manning's blood? Doesn't add up.
I do not. Assange, lunatic douchebag though he may be, hasn't committed any crime. The only thing that makes him any different from any other journalist or publisher is that he's as much of an attention whore as Glenn Beck. And I have done nothing but disparage Manning as misguided, and even gone so far as to say, in these exact words "he doesn't deserve what he's going to get, he was just a dumbshit kid who thought he was doing the right thing." Admittedly my opinion on "thought he was doing the right thing" has changed since it came to light that it was just a petty act of revenge against an institution he (wrongly) felt betrayed by, that hurt
an entirely different institution, but it doesn't change the heart of what I was saying.
3. Also, yes a lot of this stuff was previously known, but not in a substantive capacity. For instance, everybody knew that civilians were dying in the wars. However, scale and ratios were hotly disputed for years. Now many of those disputes have been put to rest. No more disputing sources or willful ignorance excused by lack of official information. The only question now is how many deaths aren't reported at all.
You mean
people die when bombs go off nearby and
when people with guns are shooting at other people with guns in the general proximity!?!?!?!?!
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Topic: Wikileaks guy arrested, Senator attempting retroactive law changing! (Read 51156 times)