I jest about Assange, of course, but can't help thinking that his musings from 2006 - revealed via the Internet Archive - are very Secret Life of Adrian Mole, with added crypto and arrogance.
What's one to make of -
Sat 24 Jun 2006: CanberraAssange channelling Barbara Cartland is not pretty. He continued that -
Canberra, Australia; the physical realisation of Rand corporation propaganda films about the beneficial effects of the neutron bomb. From the air it's a Walter Burley-Griffin concentric bomb target. From the ground, well, the bomb has landed --- everywhere there's the faceless facades of government. If there is an average Canberrian, milling about the grand emptiness, it is the Doric column. Canberra is encircled by them, weaving about like the Styx, bordering nowhere and Hades, and like the corporate firewall, keeping the dead in and the living out.
After my state sponsored stay at ANU, I ended up at a backpackers filled with some of the 900 Christians from the Australian University Christian Convergence. Most were young women and I turned, somewhat disgracefully, into a sort of Chesterton's Hardy, the village atheist, brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot, while they, for their part, tried to convert me with the rise and fall their bosoms.
One of the devout was the lovely daughter of a New Castle minister. At some point in my unintended wooing of her, she looked up, fluttered her eyelids and said "Oh, you know so much! I hardly know anything!". "That is why you believe in God", I explained. This conversational brutality took her breath away and she swooned.
I was exactly what she secretly longed for; a man willing to openly disagree with her father. All along she had needed a man to devote herself to. All along she had failed to find a man worthy of being called a man, failed to find a man who would not bow to gods, so she had chosen a god unworthy of being called a god, but who would not bow to a man.or
Thu 29 Jun 2006: Krill to the baleen of the feminineAll in all I'd prefer his musings on John Rawls.
I've always found women caught in a thunderstorm appealing. Perhaps it is a male universal, for without advertising this proclivity a lovely girl I knew, but not well, on discovering within herself lascivious thoughts about me and noticing raindrops outside her windows, stood for a moment fully clothed in her shower before letting the wind and rain buffet her body as she made her tremulous approach to my door and of course I could not turn her away.
But then, just when one might suspect that men are krill to the baleen of female romantic manipulation, I found myself loving a girl who was a coffee addict. I would make a watery paste of finely ground coffee and surreptitiously smear this around my neck and shoulders before seducing her so she would associate my body with her dopaminergic cravings. But every association relates two objects both ways. She started drinking more and more coffee. Sometimes I looked at her cups of liquid arabicia with envious eyes for if there were four cups then somehow, I was one of them, or a quarter of everyone one of them ...
Other dicta from St Julian of the Wiki include -
Mon 26 Feb 2007: Average shy intellectualsI'm reminded of a passage in a 23 October NY Times profile by John Burns & Ravi Somaiya -
X is an "average shy intellectual" and in that is a sounding for characters of his type. This type is often of a noble heart, wilted by fear of conflict with authority. The power of their intellect and noble instincts may lead them to a courageous position, where they see the need to take up arms, but their instinctive fear of authority then motivates them to find rationalizations to avoid conflict.
In an online exchange with one volunteer, a transcript of which was obtained by The Times, [Assange] warned that WikiLeaks would disintegrate without him. "We've been in a Unity or Death situation for a few months now", he said.Nothing like dismissing the inconsequential, among whom is presumably found Jaron Lanier - whose critique of Wikileaks strikes me as persuasive.
When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. "I don’t like your tone", he said, according to a transcript. "If it continues, you’re out."
Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. "I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest", he said. "If you have a problem with me", he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.
In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. "He is not in his right mind", he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. "These are not consequential people", he said.
