Kudos to you, Wikileaks.

posted by The Vidiot @ 12:45 PM Permalink

It's hard to get back into blogging when your head has been cleared of detritus (and in my case, my lower gut too ... thank you, Mexico.) so I've not been paying too much attention to the news. The BP thing still rattles my cage and every day I wonder, "When will people realize the gravity of the situation?"

But yesterday, the wikileaks guy went all out and performed his version of the Pentagon Papers. And he was damned clever about it. He first released it to three major papers; the NY Times, Der Spiegel and the UK's Guardian. He let them chew on it for awhile and then he released the whole thing on the internet.

But like the BP thing, I don't think the outrage is going to be as much as it could be. There should be people in the streets with pitchforks for the BP thing, these Afghan war papers and so many other things, but still, crickets chirp. And I finally read something that resonated as a reason why:

“We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

So how do we ameliorate that effect?

Labels: bp, oilcano, war Afghanistan war, wikileaks