Saturday, December 04, 2010

Okay. I Know...

UPDATE: Australia has abandoned me

More like you've abandoned her, Julie.
====================================
...I'm obsessing about Julian Assange, but there's one more article (for now) that I want to comment on, if only because it expresses my thoughts so well:
"For a man at the forefront of the full-disclosure business, Assange is remarkably reluctant to reveal anything much about himself. The rare interviews he gives are notable for the feinting and weaving deployed to avoid questions he doesn’t want to answer. Prominent among these are inquiries about his early life, his finances, why his hair went white at the age of 25, and what exactly happened between himself and two women he met on a visit to Sweden last year.

To those who like what WikiLeaks does, the Australian-born Assange, 39, is rock-star glamorous – a vagabond warrior wreathed in deadly cool. Give him a sombrero and replace his BlackBerry with a smoking carbine, and it isn’t hard to imagine him holed up in the hills with the compañeros, waiting for the corrupt citadels of concealment to fall. To those who don’t, he’s a slippery, self-aggrandising charlatan, running what amounts to a criminal enterprise. (That would include me.)
[---]
"Many of the people who knew Assange in these formative years now find it advisable to remain anonymous. Even so, a picture of his strange, obsessive life has emerged. One woman who shared a house with him in Melbourne in the time before WikiLeaks was launched told the Sydney Morning Herald about his living arrangements. Glued to the computer, he would usually neglect to eat, sleep or change his clothes, while the doors and walls of his room were decorated with dense mathematical formulas. Only red light bulbs were permitted, on the grounds that early man, upon waking, would see only the comforting red glow of a campfire. “He was always extremely focused,” she added.

The nomadic life continues. Assange claims to have no real home or base of operations; to move constantly between friends in Britain, Scandinavia and Africa, carrying little more than a rucksack and a laptop. Given such meagre resources, it’s hard not to admire the global attention he has attracted."
[---]
"Yet the biggest problem for Assange, his International Man of Mystery image, and his ambition to free the world of censorship may be his failure, in this latest episode, to uncover anything terribly interesting. The hype surrounding last week’s revelations soon gave way to derisive headlines along the lines of “WikiLeaks latest: Pope a Catholic; Bear seeks relief in woods”. Perhaps soon to be followed by: “Whistleblower all out of puff”."
Yup. I hate to tell ya this, Julie, but you're not just creepy. You're boring, too.

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