Small wonder the state department is crying blue murder. Yet, from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of. Yes, there are echoes of skulduggery at the margins, especially in relation to the conduct of “the war on terror” in the Bush years. Specific questions must be asked and answered. For the most part, however, what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation’s interests and their government’s policies.In fact, my personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches. In recent years, I have found the American foreign service to be somewhat underwhelming, reach-me-down, dandruffy, especially when compared with other, more confident arms of US government, such as the Pentagon and the treasury. But what we find here is often first rate.
It may be cathartic for critics of state power to cheer when Assange sticks an online thumb into leviathan’s eye. But WikiLeaks is at best a temporary victory for transparency, and it’s likely to spur the further insulation of the permanent state from scrutiny, accountability or even self-knowledge.
Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.
less than singular
Cosma Shalizi (click through to the original for important links):
The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the…
Most ‘cheating’ (I truly believe) is undertaken as an act of desperation, a means of coping with failure as measured by receipt of lower-than-average academic grades. 'Cheating’ is a means of striving to succeed within a system which provides extrinsic rewards for optimal performance rather than intrinsic rewards for authentic mastery and authorship. I cannot but believe that the vast majority of students would welcome an academic system in which the goal is not to earn high marks but rather to learn, and that students accustomed to this system would see no need to game the system by 'cheating.’ I’m not so naive as to suppose that every student will respond well: there will always be those so acculturated by thirteen-plus years of a largely competitive educational system that it’s in their blood to fight tooth and nail for every last percentage point that might tip them from a B+ to an A-…but I believe that even those who are very comfortable with this traditional system will abandon it if given the chance to do so.
Daily Lit
Here’s the place to go if you would like to have books emailed to you in installments, at a frequency you set yourself. At first I strongly disliked this idea: I thought, “But what if I get to an…
A company composed wholly of men of learning, though greatly to be valued and respected, is not meant by the words “good company”; they cannot have the easy manners and tournure of the world, as they do not live in it. If you can bear your part well in such company, it is extremely right to be in it sometimes, and you will be but more esteemed in other companies for having a place in that; but then do not let it engross you, for, if you do, you will be only considered as one of the literati by profession, which is not the way either to shine or rise in the world.
The very notion in America of four years of a post-high school liberal arts education as a default experience for people between 18 and 21 is a post-World War II novelty. It is unclear that it has created a populace significantly better informed or intellectually curious. Consider our rampant voter apathy, the ever dismaying revelations of general ignorance as shown in the recent Pew Forum poll on knowledge about religion, and the fact that many younger people get most of their news from a satiric television show.Ideally, high school should be a more concentrated experience than it is now, possibly extending through a 13th grade. Its curriculum would inculcate a healthy volume of knowledge, reasoning skills, and aesthetic awareness. Schools like Bard College at Simon’s Rock, immersing students in college-level work after tenth instead of 12th grade, prove year after year that young people can thrive under such conditions (I was one of them). Or – remember the Civil War soldiers’ letters. It was typical then to leave school after eighth grade, and people then had the same mental equipment as we do.
email, we hardly knew ye
Cringely is sad about the decline and fall of email. Me? Not so much. I like the lightweight minimalism of text/IM/Twitter, and use them when I can in preference to email.