Wikileaks On Why Leaking Is Good

WikiLeaks is a website dedicated to releasing leaked information. It isn't doing anything new, leaked information has been a large part of Journalism for a while, but what is different that the leaks are delivered in an almost no edited format.

Recently WikiLeaks got hold of 251,287 leaked US Embassy Cables. These are short reports about all manor of things. I found the report on colonel Gaddafi rather interesting, but there has been a lot of criticism towards the leaks; mainly around the possibility that they would harm diplomatic relations and cost lives. Reading the reports you can see many of the names have been removed, so I am not convinced by the loss of life argument, but there was a TED talk earlier in the year with WikiLeak found Julian Assange giving his account on why WikiLeaks is a force for good.
WikiLeaks is under (government?) attack, so has several Mirror Sites setup.

Inclusive Vs Exclusive Groups

As Humans we are programmed to seek our place in the world, to question ourselves and to never be happy with what we have. So that's why groups be them religions, political, school fraternities or people of similar ideals like Neo Nazis come together because it makes them feel apart of something and more whole than if they weren't in that group. This is partly because Human instinct is towards running in a pack rather than alone, but ideologically it makes us feel less alone.

In my life I have experienced many such groups and is occurred to me while watching Accepted that exclusive groups where membership is filtered to only allow the "right sort of people" in normally feel hollow because when you join such a group you are buying into the group founder's vision and not something you can influence yourself.

Inclusive groups are groups of people who all try to get along. And since everybody in them puts effort into getting along, being part of the group feels more whole as everybody has a viewpoint that is heard. A lot of inclusive groups like sports clubs, music and other groups are so inclusive that they transcend any physical place and become an idealogical movement like Wikipedia (the open source encyclopedia), The Skeptics Movement (critical thought in search of exposing truth), Parkour (be strong to be useful) or any number of civil rights movements.

However the biggest inclusive and exclusive groups in the world is society itself. In some parts of the world people actively segregate themselves in order to find their place in the world and in other places people pay for services like national health so that everybody is more equal.

So what I am trying to say is that there are a lot of people in the world that try to find their place in the world by excluding other people or ideas. Even to the point where they suppress freespeech and commit hate crimes against people who they consider to be apart of another group, this is probably a natural instinct for Humans, but I think if we all tried to be a little bit more inclusive by helping others, listening to others and giving others our time then the group that we are already in, society, becomes a much better place.

American Freedom

America does a lot of things in the name of freedom, the Iraq War is a current example of that. Nobody seems to be able to explain how the Iraq War is necessary to preserve American Freedom, but the war still continues in Freedom's name.

As a free country it surprised me earlier to learn that in January they forfeited the right to Habeas corpus. Which is the right to not be held in incarceration without reason. Seems to me like the current administration has done more to harm American freedom than any terrorist. And the ruling in January applies to everybody in America including citizens. So although I don't hate America I do think they are hipocritical B.O.B.s sometimes.