Interesting position that Foggy Bottom should move toward a less secretive diplomacy instead of hunkering down in the wake of the WikiLeaks fiasco.
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
I read the parts about open source systems architectures and it's applicability to the diplomatic corp.
and the implied segue to "Franklin’s best friends in France were spies",
but I also read over and over that the DOS needs more burro-crates,, to fill more positions,, to spend more money on their openness,, and do it faster with less vetting. (ref #2)
None of which has any positive nor negative effect of the WIKI leak(s), with the exception that more burro-crates,, create more potential leaks.
Open source applied to systems architecture implies less management and less bureaucracy. A system where small changes by individuals can magnify their impact thru faster implementation using simple peer review replication.
I am not sure where Mr Spalter is coming from or going to, but it appears that he loves barry & the witch.
Using a mixture of the old Ben Franklin diplomacy and with current techno speak, he is attempting to get the young left academics to embrace the current administration's bumbling efforts as the New Age Political System(ref #1).
He needs the young to embrace this philosophy as they have the money to sustain BHO's re-election. Something his core electorate does not have.
I think this is an effort at Double-Think(ref: #3)
:munchin
REF #!: Prolefeed - Rubbishy "entertainment" and spurious news which The Party hands out to the masses. This includes written literature, movies, porn, music, and other various propaganda created for the proles.
REF #2: memory hole - A system of pipes, similar to pneumatic tubes, which were used to destroy documents. A document stuffed in the memory hole would be conveniently whisked away to the furnaces below - quickly & easily wiped from history.
The memory hole, as in the phrase "Going down the memory hole," refers to a mechanism for wp:censorship in George Orwell's novel, 1984.
In the novel, the memory hole is a slot into which government officials deposit politically inconvenient documents and records to be destroyed. 1984's protagonist Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth, is routinely assigned the task of revising old newspaper articles in order to serve the propaganda interests of the government. For example, if the government had pledged that the chocolate ration would not fall below the current 30 grams per week, but in fact the ration is reduced to 20 grams per week, the historical record (e.g. an article from a back issue of the Times newspaper) is revised to contain an announcement that a reduction to 20 grams might soon prove necessary, or that the ration has in fact gone up to 20 grams from some lower number, in a deliberate example of doublethink. The original copies of the historical record are deposited into the memory hole. A document placed in the memory hole is supposedly transported to an incinerator from which "not even the ash remains".
The term now generally refers to the alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. The term is the name of one website (The Memory Hole) which is notable for preserving web-publishable materials, which would be typically destroyed, altered, or simply forgotten if left to the discretion of official publishing.
[edit] External Links
The Memory Hole Includes documents released under the US Freedom of Information Act that reveal government activities rarely reported by the mainstream media.
Category: Newspeak words
Ref #3: Doublethink: Doublethink is both a Newspeak word and an integral concept in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, fervently believing both.
[edit] Definition
This word has made its way into the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
dou•ble•think ('d&-b&l-"thi[ng]k), noun, Date: 1949 :
a simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas.
Here is how Winston Smith described doublethink in the novel:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
Category: Newspeak words
http://wiki.newspeakdictionary.com
My $00.0002
;)