Sunday, December 19, 2010

DADT, WikiLeaks, and Palin - "Meh"

There's a number of subjects in the so-called news that are generating a lot of noise and show, but leave me with a feeling of, "yeah, so" to varying degrees.

First the repeal of  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". This is truly a big deal for gay service members or those who want to serve, so I'm not trying to discount the importance of it.  And it is making the wingnuts heads explode, which is always fun to watch.  Now I think it would've caused a lot of trouble when I was in back in the '80s, but since people overall today are more accepting of it, my response to predictions of doom is "meh", won't happen. Although again, reading wingnuttery at this level of insanity is always good for a chuckle. You know, if it cuts down on the backwards ass hicks who join, that will be a positive result.

Now on to Wikileaks. Julian Assange is either an evil villain or a brave, persecuted hero, depending on your programmed political beliefs, and the cable leaks are either a viscous crime that will cost lives or the greatest unmaking of government corruption since Watergate. Cool your jets people, its neither. Think of it this way, I have a ton of data on various volcanoes and geological terrane boundaries going back over a decade. Some has been selected and interpreted and the results published in peer-reviewed journals. We can say that's like a well done news story. Now imagine I took the rest of the data, did little or nothing to filter the bad points or sort the data in any meaningful way, and just dumped it on the internet. That's Wikileaks (well sorta, to complete the analogy I would have had to have hacked the data from someone else). The data dump I described is about as close to a research paper. as WikiLeaks is to journalism. Most of what's been released is in the category of "tell me something I didn't already know". Wake me when they actually scoop something.

Finally there's frickin' Palin. Of all the topics I ranting on here, her story is the only one that has absolutely no meat to it. Her story is nothing more than thrice chewed gristle being passed as fillet-mignon. No matter how many worthless analysis pieces crowding out legitimate news are published, no matter how many reality shows she does, no matter how much undeserved praise she gets from ignorant conservatives and hand-wringing from spineless liberals, she is nothing. Every week it seems they publish another poll saying showing something like 60% of Americans wouldn't even think of considering her for president, yet these farces keep pushing this narrative. Enough, I don't care, she's not even worth attacking.

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