Posted on Thursday, 9 February 2012

A week later, the raft was stolen, and I managed to track down the people who took it. They were boys a couple of years older. We ran a mission at night to hijack it back, cut it loose, and let it drift downstream. The raft drifted out into the middle of the river. We paced along and the river got wider and wider, and I realized I’d have to dive in to get it, there in the middle of the night, with no one else. Thoughts of bronze whaler sharks started entering my head. I instructed my body to jump, but it refused to do so under those conditions. So even I have had that moment where I was a coward, but I think the situation called for it.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview | Politics News | Rolling Stone

Of everything in this lengthy Julian Assange, this story stood out to me as a strangely poetic interlude.

What the whole Assange/Manning/Wikileaks affaire impresses upon me is that hindsight isn’t 20/20. Sometimes, we don’t have hindsight at all. Remember when the whole world was about to collapse into simultaneous unrest because those diplomatic cables were released? We forgot about that 1984 authoritarian outrage, and how the terrible things that were supposed to happen because classified documents were freed never happened. We also forgot Assange is still under house arrest and Bradley Manning is still in the brig facing court marshall. Sometimes, we’re so quick to move on. Let’s get our hindsight back.

(via gainfulunemployment)

This part struck me as well, but in part because whale sharks don’t eat people. But then I found out that bronze whaler sharks are copper sharks, which DO eat people.

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