Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Rounding Into the Straight

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, December 08, 2010 8:33 am

I haven't had anything to say about the Wikileaks fiasco, and I still don't have anything extended to say. But a few little things have occurred to me.

The size of the document dumps clearly indicates classified material inflation. Better safe than sorry takes over, and pretty soon you have classified materials which, if stacked together, would reach halfway to the moon. You don't have enough guards to post around the base of that mountain, and pretty soon folks are helping themselves.

Second, notice how this particular problem was created by a previous reform. After 9-11, a hue and cry went up to have all the intelligence agencies share information with one another. And so we had a reform in which seven moderately sized mountains were bulldozed into one big mountain. This was because big government doesn't analyze and solve problems, but rather big government just reacts, staggering from one problem into another. So you can put good money on this -- when our current reforms are done, we have just created the thing which future reformers will have to fix.

Third, the Wikileakers appear unaware of the fact that their revelations appear to support conservative arguments as often as they support leftist arguments. This is because there is no such thing as uninterpreted data, and everybody does with this mountain of classified information exactly what they do with unclassified information. In short, this is a massive data dump, not a paradigm changer.

Fourth, the people who are yelling for Assange's head say that the release of all those embarrassing diplomatic cables means that foreign officials won't deal with the United States anymore. But perhaps it should mean that, where the embarrassment was warranted, that we should concentrate more in the future on such things not being done, as on not being revealed once done. What's good for scientific climate change fraudsters is good for state departmenters.

Fifth, it appears that Interpol had a warrant out for the arrest of Assange for, among other things, his use of a defective condom. Anybody besides me find that a little bit creepy? Of course, a case could be made that because Assange appears to have had sex with a radical feminist in Sweden, a former "campus sexual equity officer," he deserves everything he might get. But still, the Al Capone strategy here seems to have more than just a little of the ick factor.

But stay tuned. To use the immortal words of Wodehouse, this whole farce is picking up speed like one of the Gadarene swine rounding into the straight.