Wikileaks

Posting this one rather early in the morning, so it is entirely possible/likely that something else will annoy me today, but at the moment it's Wikileaks.

I don't know why they annoy me so much, in essence, everything they are doing should be fine with me, they are speaking out against human rights injustices, which is fine with me, at least they are focused on injustices against humans and not animal. I guess I respect what they are trying to do, I just don't like the way they are doing it, as I don't really believe that citizens undermining other governments, let alone their own, should be tolerated. That is of course unless the government is of the oppressive nature, and you can say 'yeah but different people find different things oppressive', and the people who say that can pull their head out of their ass. If you have the right of free speech and are not being killed for being intelligent/from a certain tribe/of a certain religion, then sorry, buddy, you ain't got an oppressive government.

Now, I know it seems hypocritical for me to talk about the right to free speech and then get annoyed at wikileaks for manipulating that right, but I never said I wasn't a hypocrite. I mean, I wouldn't be so annoyed at them if they were just speaking out against the war in Iraq etc (I would still be annoyed, just not as annoyed) but for me, leaking government documents is taking your rights too far. We have elected officials for a reason, it isn't like they overthrew someone to get into power, they were elected by the people, you know, through democracy. And it is my firm belief that elected government should retain the right to have secrets, we elect them to make the hard decisions, if they had to consult with the public before every decision and if everyone had to agree on it, while that would be 'pure democracy', nothing would ever get done.

Also, what annoys me about wikileaks itself, not just the idea behind it, is that I have seen Julian Assange publicly admit that he presents the leaks in a bias way e.g through heavily emotive titles (Collateral Murder) and by not presenting the entire leak up front, but just showing the worst parts and not making it obvious that what you are reading isn't actually the entire leak. If you have to follow some radical, anti-establishment media form, at least try follow a non-bias one, anyone can make a story say what they want it too, if the leaks are that bad, surely they shouldn't need to use these kinds of methods.