Silk Road forums
Market => Product offers => Topic started by: RickyRango on March 06, 2012, 11:01 pm
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Hey everybody, I started up a lottery to benefit Wikileaks. Check it out on SR:
http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/silkroad/item/115d6328c0
Here's the deal, after the drawing takes place, 50% will go to the winner, and 50% goes to Wikileaks. I will not benefit from this venture. If you chose to enter you will be helping out a great cause for personal liberty, plus you'll have a chance of wining some money. It's a win-win, so please take the time to enter if you have some spare BTC laying around.
Thanks!
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bump
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Why not... I got a few spare coin. Power to the people!!!
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At the risk of earning bad karma I would like to point out that political dissidents in repressive countries often talk to the U.S. (believing it to be the land of freedom and democracy and all that baloney) and when wikileaks published the state department cables including their names, some good people ended up in nasty situations. I believe in freedom of information and transparency but I think that things need to be done responsibly.
I have brought this up before IRL and responses have either been to deny that this could happen or to assert that anyone working with the U.S. is bad. Wikileads has caused problems for Belorussian and Chinese democracy activists. The U.S. government is not my friend and I believe it to be my enemy but it that doesn't make anyone working with them automatically a bad person.
"my enemies enemy is my friend" is the same weak thinking as "you work with a bad person therefore you are a bad person" it leads to some very silly decisions
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I have a few extra coins also, cheers!
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@bananatinpots, I don't think you deserve any bad karma for raising this issue. I think you're right, it's very hard to believe that the revelations by Wikileaks haven't caused problems for some good people somewhere.
On the other hand, I can't think of any other current organization that has done, and is doing, and probably will continue to do, so much good, all over the world. When I think of exciting things going on in the world that give me hope for a better future, Wikileaks is the main thing that comes to mind. They definitely deserve the support of all people who love freedom.
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Okay so I will push it a little bit more then. SR is doing more good and helping freedom and the oppressed than wikileaks, hands down SR wins every day of the week, every week of the year.
Wikleaks is futile, all it is doing is forcing governments to stop writing embarrassing things down and that is a trend that was started before Wikileaks began anyway. There is going to be a tiny amount of good caused by revealing a few secrets today and a lot of bad in terms of fucking the lives of "opposition" and "traitors" under truly repressive regimes.
Knowledge is not really power, but to the extent it is: Power requires responsibility.
Today we can read a lot about messed up things thanks to declassification of historical archives, our kids won't be able to read anything, Wikileaks is the end of history.
I might be wrong, so I ask what exactly has it done that is good apart from share some info? What positive result has occurred because of Wikileaks?
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I love SR, and I really admire the people who wrote it and run it. They are seriously heroes to me. But I can't agree they are doing more good in the world than Wikileaks.
The answer to the question of what good Wikileaks has done is, I think, complicated, partly because the good that it's doing has only just started. But my favorite thing is that it's fundamentally changing journalism. It's no longer acceptable for news organizations to withhold source materials. Their new role is to digest publicly accessible documents, to provide perspective. And it's forcing the news organizations that function as government shills to out themselves.
I think your question is sort of like "what good has it ever done for people to know the truth?" The good is really widespread and varied. I think you're right that the government will try to clam up. It's doing this now, at least in America. More and more documents are being classified, and Obama is directing the government to be less and less transparent. And the powers of various intelligence agencies are being brought to bear more and more on their own citizens. So maybe there will be a big fight about this. I don't know who will win. But I know that for anyone to have a chance of acting in a reasonable way, they need to be informed, and that is Wikileaks's mission. The fact that it has so many powerful enemies when its mission is simply to tell people the truth, shows how badly it is needed at this time.
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Forcing newspapers to reveal sources is bad... really bad, it means less whistle blowers....
I get where you're coming from, people should be able to know the truth and in principle that is right but government can't operate without some level of secrecy, there has to be a space for people within government with different views to be able to talk it over without it escalating into a public scandal.
We are going to end up in a worse situation where not only are we unable to hear the truth of the matter from government but we will never have a chance to hear the truth because many important decisions, viewpoints and pieces of information will never be recorded.
Historians will tell you that their profession is going to be a lot less interesting in twenty years time as there will be no way of knowing what any decision maker really thought and what the influencing factors were.
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I know I'm going to sound like an idealist (I think that's the right word) but imagine if all the governments of the world actually told the truth and were open and honest with each other? Now I'm not that naive to to think that this would ever happen (not even sure this would be the best idea), but imagine a completely transparent government across the world. I think that wikileaks is at least trying to achieve this.
Could be completely wrong, just my 2c
Try it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxLnIRVVwIM
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@bananatinpots: Woah, nobody is advocating forcing journalists to reveal sources. I was talking about the source materials. Wikileaks protects its sources, and releases the data.
There may be legitimate reasons for governments to have secrets, but I think most of us can agree that they actually need to keep far fewer secrets than they have been. When a government keeps so much secret about its activities that its own citizens have almost no idea what things are being done in their names, it's not wielding authority by informed consent.
@msween27: Yes, that would be awesome. Let's not be so cynical and jaded that we think it's impossible for our governments not to lie to us every single day.
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yeah I agree, there are many people in government that are in it solely for the good of the people. I shouldn't put everyone in government into one category, I just have this feeling that the gov has a whole feels like they need to keep info from the people and basically lie(I know, a dirty word). Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm being too critical, maybe it is necessary for the greater good to lie, IDK. I do know that my pharmville order came in today and I am on EST time and probably 10 keystrokes away from typeing pure gibberish, so goodnight to you all and maybe we'll continue this convo tomo. Nite
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I love this idea. How much is the lottery going to be?
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It's actually a complete fallacy that Wikileaks published any sensitive names in the state dept cables, yet people still believe this to be true.
The unredacted version of the cables was eventually released by Wikileaks because a Guardian journalist published the decryption password in a book, and the encrypted cables were already in the public domain due to being placed on a public directory by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, which was later archived into a data dump.
Here's Wikileaks' version of events, but don't take their word for it. You can find plenty of viewpoints, even from the Guardian themselves (claiming they didn't breach a the confidentiality agreement because they thought it was a one time password that would expire)
http://www.wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html
Really folks, i know there's a lot going on surrounding this subject, but it only takes a quick google to get your facts right.
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Okay so I will push it a little bit more then. SR is doing more good and helping freedom and the oppressed than wikileaks, hands down SR wins every day of the week, every week of the year.
Wikleaks is futile, all it is doing is forcing governments to stop writing embarrassing things down and that is a trend that was started before Wikileaks began anyway. There is going to be a tiny amount of good caused by revealing a few secrets today and a lot of bad in terms of fucking the lives of "opposition" and "traitors" under truly repressive regimes.
Knowledge is not really power, but to the extent it is: Power requires responsibility.
Today we can read a lot about messed up things thanks to declassification of historical archives, our kids won't be able to read anything, Wikileaks is the end of history.
I might be wrong, so I ask what exactly has it done that is good apart from share some info? What positive result has occurred because of Wikileaks?
You have both pointed out, and completely missed, the point.
http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
Systems that communicate freely are more efficient than closed systems.
If a corrupt system is forced to not write information down, or be careful about what it writes and who it shares its information with, it is made less efficient, and eventually destroys itself.
One direct example of the benefit of Wikileaks, would be a document that was released prior to the 2007 Kenyan elections detailing the deaths and disappearances of ~500 people after a police crackdown. Although it didn't feature much on western media radars, there's a strong argument that it changed the entire result of the elections.
I really think you're misguided here. It's impossible to see the worldwide implications with something so complex.
Personally, i'm convinced that the CONCEPT of Wikileaks, nevermind Wikileaks itself...which has been out of action for quite some time now, is a cruicial civilisation paradigm shift, and a force for good.
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Next time around, fight the good fight and set it up to donate those in the drug scene that have previously fallen. Not that Wikileaks isn't doing some good but they are hypocrites. They only release information they deem safe to release; when someone released information they thought could harm the public they threw a hissy fit.
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@BuddyRoyale: Citation for "hissy fit"?
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They are suing the guardian and the journalist that released the password that ended with them losing control of cables, "hissy fit" maybe a poor choice of words because they didn't make any outlandish statements but actions speak louder than words. They should not be censoring information AT ALL if they truly believe in their cause.
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They never claimed to have an absolutist stance on freedom of information. To quote Assange:
To me it seems those are the only two things he considers end goals. The first one I think is a mistake, it is making the method the goal. Just like WikiLeaks, our goal is justice our method is transparency. But we do not confuse the goal and the method. To Obama, the goal is compromise, I would rather say his goal should be justice and his method should be compromise.
So yes, subjective judgement calls are part of the equation.
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so when exactly does this lottery take place???? When all the tickets are sold? Could take awhile. Did I miss it on the page?
http://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion/silkroad/item/115d6328c0
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Hey everybody. Yes the lottery is still going on. There are about 50 more tickets up for sale. The winner takes $100, and $100 goes to Wikileaks. Let me know if there are anymore questions.
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Come on guys, spare a few bit coins for a good cause! I still want to be alive when this lottery is drawn.
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yeah me too )':
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time to refund?
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Too bad there isn't SR Gambling besides lotto tickets.. like poker or hold em.