One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party.
It's hard to put a finger on just how much the current form of western democracy differs from the 18th century ideal of western democracy. Let this concretize it: Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade in jail indefinitely on fictitious charges and virtually nobody cares. Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
"Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?
> "[...] support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party"
Wikileaks released all of Clinton's/DNC/Podesta email at a timing chosen specifically to inflict damage on the campaign of one party, and in concordance with the other party.
The public is partisan if it dislikes damnatory but true information when the timing of it is inconvenient to a political party.
It's sort of similar to the Brett Kavanaugh ordeal. Going from memory, the first accuser told her story in private to a Congresswoman in the summer of 2018, I believe it was in July. That politician sat on the information for the rest of July, the entirety of August, and the first few weeks of September. Only when it was closer to the midterm elections and the confirmation process did the Democrats launch their attack against Kavanaugh's character. They urged Congress to delay the vote until after the midterms, which they were hoping to win in a landslide, so that they could deny Kavanaugh a seat.
In either case, we have politically-minded people deliberately timing the release of information. As regular voters, we have to decide what's more important: what the information reveals, or how it is being weaponized.
The point is that journalists are not supposed to be "politically minded", especially when they're leaking damaging confidential information. Revealing information that hurts one party, but deliberately withholding information that hurts the other, is lying by omission and downgrades you from "brave whistleblower who needs protection" to "low-life partisan information warrior who deserves to have the book thrown at them".
I've read lots about the charges filed against Assange, and "timing his release" was not among them. If you want that to be a law, contact your legislators.
The first comment on this thread was lamenting that the issue became partisan. The rest explained why. The partisanship is precisely what makes discussing the fairness of the charges and laws difficult.
In other words, he isn’t on trial for the timing. But he’s friendless because of it.
Thanks for explaining this distinction. Of course Assange isn't "friendless" in general, but I would agree that he is with respect to the sorts of people who have any effect on who does and who does not face USA federal charges. That indicts the entire federal judicial system. As if we needed additional proofs of their evil.
I have no sympathy for Assange. There are legitimate avenues for whistleblowers. Trying to hack into protected government systems in order to leak information to the public while pushing conspiracies about Seth Rich in conjunction with Kim Dotcom is not one of them.
If the doorbell does not work, ring the bell and complain, we will fix it. We never had a issue with the doorbell.
Blowing the whistle using the designated pathways is basically useless suicide, as to the socially useful suicide that is blowing the whistle on the outside.
The point of the article is precisely that the hacking allegations against Assange were made up by Icelander "Siggi the Hacker", a sociopath, liar, con-man, pedophile. One of the crimes was stealing funds from wikileaks.
The FBI knew it and gave him protection from prosecution for a lot of his crimes if he witnessed to the alleged hacking.
He continued committing crimes without stopping afterwards. They are still protecting him to this day.
You might want to edit this comment to be more clear. While I see you mentioned the Islandic person who obviously isn’t the Australian born Assange, people seem to be getting tripped up.
Why do you suggest Assange is a pedophile? The primary reference I can find for this is when Wikileaks threatened to sue CNN for defamation and CNN apologized. [1]
I didn't suggest he was a pedophile. I know my syntax is not perfect, but still... Please re-read it.
The false "witness" alleging Assange hacked, "Siggi the Hacker" was a pedophile, con-man and thief, not Assange. That guy is Icelandic, while Assange is Australian. "Siggi" has just been interviewed in Studin.is saying he invented everything, FBI knew, still gave him immunity, etc. Here are the sources [1] [2]
As for rape charge, you fell prey to propaganda. There was no "condom stealthing" accusation, full stop. There was no rape accusation, full stop. It is all a proven lie, fabricated by the police and prosecutor, which were caught red-handed later on, and documented in a subsequent judicial procedure.
Here's my own TLDR here to somebody else a couple days ago [3]. If you got 20 minute, I suggest the full, sordid story, as told in excruciating detail by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. He gave a long form interview giving all the details of the fabrication, showing the documents, outlining all of lies and judicial misdeeds of both Sweden and the UK [4].
They weren't made up, there were the reason Chelsea Manning was jailed because they had evidence believing that Assange had tried helping her decrypt confidential information. This wasn't information provided to them by Sigurdur. Sigurdur was never a major part of the investigation. People are falling again for propaganda.
I don't think anyone's alleging it's against the law to time news releases. But both countries (both US and UK) have violated their own laws time and again in the persecution of Julian Assange. They have thrown all pretense of due process (e.g. access to attorney) and human rights (denial of medical care) out the window, just to punish him.
There were 10+ violations that would have been more than enough to let a murderer go free.
The problem, in other words, with Assange is that he didn't really commit a crime, or more to the point, that's not why the US is after him. And clearly, as a country, the US is perfectly willing to violate it's own constitution to punish this person. The allegation is that this is, among other things, due to the timing of the releases. And because of the danger that it would make Hillary Clinton lose the election.
It would be funny if it wasn't both such a sad, sad failure for the US state and an enormous crime, committed by the state.
The Kremlin would have probably poisoned him with Novichok nerve agent or jailed him under fabricated charges. The only difference is that the US and the UK haven't generalised usage of nerve agents on dissidents and that they also have to fabricate evidence, instead of charges only. What a waste of legal resources.
If you define yourself in contrast to what Russia might have done and use it as an excuse, you are still justifying political prosecution. I think that might be why people dislike either party in the US. And they maybe should.
Far be it from me to defend the nature of the charges against Assange. The US government has some pretty wildly unconstitutional tools, and in this instance it chose to wield them. That should not stop us from having a reasoned discussion about the merits of the actions that drew such negative attention.
Also, I didn't say anything about timing. Selective and partisan release alone is highly dubious, timing notwithstanding.
The fact that the media constantly does this let's me assume that this argument is partisan itself and projection. It sound hurt because the hand was caught in the cookie jar.
I think "low-life partisan information warrior who deserves to have the book thrown at them" is way too strong. You might think it's slimy, sure, but it's still journalism and the information is still important to the public. It passes Kant's test: if everybody did it, it would be a net positive. If we had a bunch of partisan information warriors that leaked information at the most inconvenient time to the party that they disliked, that would keep all parties honest (as long as they all had enemies).
Also, you don't necessarily have to be partisan to want to release a story at time that's inconvenient to a party. It's natural for a journalist to want to break a big story, and it's also more beneficial if an important story reaches more people. If you want some important information to be shared widely, one of the best times to drop it is when it will cause a nation-wide sensation.
To be clear, the thing I object to isn't leaking damaging information at the worst possible time. It's withholding information because it hurts the "wrong" people.
Kant's test implicitly relies on the idea of some sort of deviation from the norm. If the norm is that everyone punches each other in the face, and I decide to merely slap you, that's an improvement; if everyone did that it would be a net good. But if the norm is a polite handshake, then a slap is worse. Kant's test is always relative to expectations.
Expectations are what distinguish "honest whistleblower with a love for truth" and "propaganda merchant". Leaking information hurts people. The ethical defense of it is "public interest" - that it's a net good when truth is more widely known. If you're prepared to leak information, I expect you to leak all of it. When you selectively release information, you cannot expect me to believe that public interest is really the principle you are abiding by, and any beliefs about the world derived from that information come under suspicion, as they have been engineered.
Kant objected pretty strongly to lies, and so do I - even lies by omission.
I can't figure out if you are arguing for- or against- Assange, but just in case people are interpreting it as the against-...
The email leak was exposing corruption in the DNC handling of Bernie Sanders' campaign. Particularly when the corruption being exposed was related to an ongoing election, it is easy to believe Wikileaks just released what they had ASAP without waiting for any particular time.
The emails didn't exist before the election and waiting until later is, from a neutral leakers point of view, kinda silly. It is not at all obvious Wikileaks acted partisanly.
If you are rotting in a room in an embassy on made-up false accusations, everything you do to the people who put you there is a fair game. Timing the release of information is the least worrisome thing he could have done.
You are correct, that it is not ok in principle. The personal grudge of Assange against Clinton is understandable, but shouldn't have influenced releases. But I also think the US democrats basically played themselves and had it coming, especially since the media was partisan in favor of democrats. And that isn't an understatement.
The accusation of partisan hack from anyone supporting either party of the US rings a bit hollow to be honest. To a degree also because they are just unlikable. As if the info uncovered would make them victims. Perhaps they are, they pretty much look like it.
> we have to decide what's more important: what the information reveals, or how it is being weaponized.
False choice. They are both important -- you don't have to choose. Selective and timed use of facts is often a way to hide behind "truth" while being completely biased.
> Only when it was closer to the midterm elections and the confirmation process did the Democrats launch their attack
Well, but that was also when Kavanaugh became a supreme court nominee. He wasn't a nominee in the summer of 2018.
And getting nominated to the Supreme Court is what made the accuser want to go public. She didn't want to initially, which makes it hard to do anything with the information.
> The public is partisan if it dislikes damnatory but true information when the timing of it is inconvenient to a political party.
Unless the source of the information is a foreign government, trying to wreak havoc in an enemy country and profit from it, possibly putting some poor folk's life in grave danger.
Journalists shouldn't side with dictators and/or agitprop, IMO, no matter what.
They shouldn't also meddle with a country they are not citizens of national security.
Assange clearly stated his purpose for starting Wikileaks [0, 1]: to make people in government fear that their corruption and incompetence will be exposed and therefore encourage them to act properly and carefully. Consistent with that purpose, Wikileaks timed the information release for maximum negative impact on the offender.
He might have had those reasons at the beginning, but by the time the 2016 elections came around, he was, wittingly or not, a stooge with a grudge. He exposed himself as the corrupt, incompetent political hack when he went spouting conspiracy theories abuot Seth Rich.
>when he went spouting conspiracy theories abuot Seth Rich.
I have noticed that the people who support Assange never want to talk about how Assange implied that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source which resulted in repeated harassment of the family of a murder victim. Assange knew Rich wasn't the source of the DNC leaks because Assange was still in contact with the source after Rich was murdered. There is no journalistic justification for that behavior.
Your comment seems to imply that I support Assange. Please read my comment again, carefully. You will notice that I said nothing about whether Assange or his actions are good or not. I tried only to refute the parent's claim that Wikileaks acted with partisanship when it released the emails.
"Simple people talk about people. Common people talk about events. Highly intelligent people talk about ideas."
Government transparency is necessary to prevent a never-ending dark age of fascism and suffering. Organizations like Wikileaks support democracy and thereby support human progress.
Assange is not a nice person and that doesn't matter. Julian Assange started and ran Wikileaks, and thereby contributed massively to the welfare of humanity.
How has anything from Wikileaks massively improved the lot of collective humanity? I genuinely don’t know - it seems like he released a bunch of stuff that revealed bad behavior, but how has that improved anyone’s welfare in a material sense?
People are much more aware of privacy and how their innocuous private life details can be used against them. Thank you Wikileaks for helping Snowden find a safe harbor.
The Collateral Damage leaks greatly reduced the credibility of the US military as a worldwide humanist agent.
The alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime was used as a justification for a full blown invasion of Syria; yet the political push back was too strong and the attacks were reduced to air strikes. Thank you Wikileaks for publishing the cables showing how US had plans in motion to topple Assad since a very long time.
But more importantly people are beginning to question their government and that is a good thing.
People have long questioned their government; it’s almost written into the US culture. That same distrust, stoked by Reagan, is part
Of the reason we haven’t reached here immunity.
I agree with some of what you said, directionally - some people are more aware of their privacy. Some people have also tuned out the arguments because they appear to be noise. It’s also hard to judge something when we don’t know effect size, or even if it was causal, however.
Many of your points are good examples and I appreciate you posting them.
I don't think you actually refuted the parents suggestion that timing the release alongside an election would have maximum negative consequences, and that that would be in line with their stated objectives. Further I think this is what the root post was alluding to about attacking "your favorite political party."
The idea that journalism shouldn't be "partisan" is a bizarre American fantasy, not an international standard.
From day one, Wikileaks had a stated policy of trying to achieve "maximum impact" for their publications. For instance, the same claim is also made at the release of the Afghan War logs in 2011: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/wikileaks-file...
Certainly not a US ideal. The only place I have ever seen this talking point echoed is by Democrats explaining why they want Assange to be extrajudicially persecuted by secret intelligence agencies. Wouldn’t at all be surprising if the idea of Wikileaks as a partisan organization started as an CIA/FBI plant in the WaPo.
I think it's fair to imagine that had Wikileaks not published the emails they would have been accused of favoring the democrats. In a highly ideologically polarized climate you can't win.
> Wikileaks released all of Clinton's/DNC/Podesta email at a timing chosen specifically to inflict damage on the campaign of one party
Do you mean the emails concerning attempts to steal/fix the Democrats primary? Why would wikileaks sit on those emails? Would you prefer they waited to release them until the primary was over?
I looked it up, and apprently this could be true, assuming that wikileaks were given the emails ahead of time. Some of those emails were first posted to a DCLeaks website, then Wikileaks announced they'd be posting some, then DCLeaks posted more a few weeks later, then Wikileaks posted some, then Wikileaks posted more just before the election.
It makes sense to time these things for impact, assuming you want to punish corruption, and that's the motivation behind these kinds of leaks, right? People seem to focus on the part Assange and the Russians played in this instead of the actual corruption - how Bernie Sanders and millions of his supporters were screwed by Clinton and the DNC.
I don't think it's partisan to expose the truth. To do otherwise serves those in power at the expense of the general public.
I believe it. I just don't see the big deal, given the fact that Clinton and the DNC were exposed trying to steal an election. That's why this happened. Assange and the Russians didn't screw Bernie Sanders. Truth is truth, right?
The delegates were exposed as disliking Bernie Sanders. That's it. There's nothing illegal or immoral about that, which is why there were no criminal charges or lawsuits even after Republicans won the election and both houses of Congress.
It was a smear campaign targeted at democrats, nothing more.
This is textbook whataboutism. "Stealing a hundred thousand confidential emails from political rivals is fine because look at all the bad things they said about Bernie Sanders"
Look at the even more outrageous event of Trump magically getting the laptop of his rival's son and parading it around in 2020. It's organized crime trying to corrupt politics that you're rooting for. The kind of thing that happens in Russia or deeply corrupt banana republics
I don't think it's whataboutism. We were discussing if exposed corruption should be dismissed as being partisan.
There was more than just a DNC dislike of Bernie Sanders. There were financial, policy, and hiring decisions involved, arranged between Clinton and the DNC, contrary to a free and fair election. From wikipedia [0]:
> The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership's publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives seemed to deride Sanders' campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton's nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. The revelations prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz before the 2016 Democratic National Convention. The DNC issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters "for the inexcusable remarks made over email" that did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process." After the convention, DNC CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall, and Communications Director Luis Miranda also resigned in the wake of the controversy.
I'm rooting for the exposure of political corruption on all sides. I think it is an important thing for the people to know the truth, no matter the messenger.
Imagine how partisan it would look the other way if they waited until _after_ the election.
Just imagine that Clinton won in a landslide and then right afterwards WikiLeaks comes out with the podesta emails saying they waited until after the election to share it so they wouldn't hurt her chances.
In a democracy the people have the right to decide which information they care about, it shouldn't be decided for them by the media.
WikiLeaks expressly says that they time their releases to get the most coverage. It's why a whistleblower might choose them over other outlets that may publish their story to get minimal coverage of it would hurt the powers that be.
Releasing information about a political candidate during an election is exactly the right time to release it. People should have as much information as possible when trying to make an informed decision when voting. Trying to make this into a partisan issue is just shifting the goal posts.
Disagree. Releasing unverified slog about your opponent days before an election when there's no time to find out if the claims are even true is the definition of a smear campaign.
They're also completely out of context and dumped on the media so close to election that nobody had a chance to go through them.
When they did, they found nothing wrong. But it didn't stop the pure FUD cloud around them from affecting Hillary's reputation.
When something is leaked, people automatically assume it's bad. Republicans rode that high through election day.
The emails got dumped the same day extremely damaging "grab em by the pussy" video evidence of Trump was release. The whole thing screams political hitjob.
It's like when Trump's lawyer magically got his political rival's son's laptop and paraded it around, even though nothing damaging was on it. Republicans are resorting to banana republic style hacking and theft against their political enemies, which should terrify everyone
Is it their job to protect Trump? Because they happened to release the emails on the same day as the most damaging info about Trump came out during entire campaign.
If journalists that timed their articles for maximum effect or didn’t willingly impact both parties the same way are to be thrown at the lions, I think we’ll all end in a bad place.
A way to look at this is that we should have more Assange and Wikileaks, and get leaks of problematic facts from all over the boards. If you feel Wikileaks was biased, it means we need different shades of it, and to get there we first need at least one shade of it. And currently we’re not even there.
This is the same problem that Comey had after writing the letter to Congress on October 28th. Like it or not it would have looked a LOT worse if either of them had waited until after the election.
The RNC was also hacked by the same people as the DNC, yet we're supposed to believe the Democrats emails which ultimately proved to contain nothing of major importance were the ones that needed releasing? Come wasn't writing a press release, he has doing his job and keeping Congress informed and a Republican congressman then chose to misrepresent the content and meaning of Comey's letter for the political gain of his own party.
These two situations are only the same in that they both benefitted the Republican party by misrepresenting the facts in order to make the public think the Democrats were guilty of a major political scandal.
The difference is that Comey didn't know that Congressman would do what he did, where as there is convincing evidence that Assange knew about the RNC hack and emails, possibly even had access to them and said nothing. Comey got used, but Assange knowingly helped Russians spread disinformation.
The following list of links literally took one minute on DDG. However, you should know this already, since these reports about her anti-democratic shenanigans were the only reason that Clinton lost to Trump. [EDIT:] The whole premise of this thread is that there must have been RNC emails that would have harmed Trump's campaign as much as the DNC emails harmed Clinton's. One could simultaneously feel that the DNC emails shouldn't have harmed Clinton's campaign, but one can't simultaneously feel that the emails did and did not harm it.
>'Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,' Paustenbach wrote. Miranda spurned the idea, although he agreed with Paustenbach's take: 'True, but the Chair has been advised not to engage. So we'll have to leave it alone.' "
Nothing in here supports the claim that the DNC kneecapped Bernie. All it shows is that Democrats heavily favored HRC, who also happened to receive many more votes than Bernie (who I voted for) in the primary.
I'm not going to peruse that list because I know how the Dems kneecapped Bernie: with super delegates. During Clinton's primary run against Obama the super delegates kept their mouths shut until the convention. Which is how it was intended to work when the super delegates were set up in the 70s. In 2016 however, the super delegates for Clinton were very vocal early on, giving Clinton an insurmountable lead right out of the gate. Several states voted for Bernie and he won the "regular" delegates but ended up losing the state because of the super delegates. When the DNC was sued for defrauding the Bernie supporters lawyers for the DNC argued in open court that they didn't have to run a fair primary because they're a private corporation. It's beyond me why anyone would have anything to do with the Democratic party at this point. They are corrupt and they don't care that you know it.
I had actually forgotten about that, but you're totally right that was an additional outrage. The media was even more to blame for that one. If they had reported results comprehensively, the super delegates would have been embarrassed into silence.
The election was on Tuesday November 3rd, and Pfizer announced their results on Monday November 9th. They were only notified of the results the previous day.
> Dr. Jansen said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election. “We have always said that science is driving how we conduct ourselves — no politics,” she said.
Edit: It would be nice if the people downvoting this could explain why you disagree.
The best thing to do would have been to hold onto this information (to not affect the sacred election), and release it when it lacked any relevance whatsoever.
The idea that this was partisan because it hurt the Democratic party is bizarre.
Releasing information will hurt either side without discrimination. You can’t applaud it when it hurts republicans and boo it when it hurts democrats and still claim you support releasing the truth to the public.
Food for thought... Obama literally ran on a platform of transparency and whistleblower protection. What did he actually do in office? The exact opposite.
Did Assange lash out at the Democrats? Yes. Did he throw the first stone? Not even close.
The only opportunity to keep elected officials accountable from a normal citizen point of view is to vote them out; and very damning stories get memory holed from corporate news organizations all the time. Otherwise, as we have seen with multiple hearings and official inquiries, elected and non-elected government officials are immune from consequences.
Wikileaks did the right thing timing their release right before people are making their final decision when casting the ballot.
Assange has also stated that he had documents related to the Trump campaign that he wouldn't publish because they were no "more controversial... than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day"[1]. Meanwhile they posted thousands of totally mundane emails from Democrats that included things like office lunch orders and automatic out of office replies that were not controversial and served no public good. Wikileaks clearly had a different standard for publishing documents that hurt Democrats and documents that hurt Republicans.
I'm not sure what you consider "the story at hand", but this conversation was kicked off with "One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue". The explanation for why support of Assange became partisan is because Assange's actions started having partisan bias. That is extremely relevant to the conversation at hand in my book.
This meme you keep trying to make happen is a logical fallacy called “begging the question.” petitio principii. It is not explanatory. Why don’t you just outright say, “I think they are partisan because I suspect there are things they could have published that they chose not to because of partisanship.” Instead you’re trying this dance about evidence that you cannot see and reasoning on others’ behalf that you cannot know.
>“I think they are partisan because I suspect there are things they could have published that they chose not to because of partisanship.”
I don't "suspect" their are things they could have published. I know there are things they could have published because Assange has said exactly that.
Either Wikileaks works for complete transparency or they don't. They either have editorial control over what they publish or they don't. Once they admit that some documents aren't worth putting on their site, they need to justify why the documents they do have on their site are worth being there. What documents about the Trump campaign could Assange be referring to which would be worth mentioning but would also be less worthy of publishing than these[1]? What reason can exist for that disparity besides bias?
1) Assange did not say that. You misinterpret what he said.
2) Your contrived absolutism about publishing everything is a strawman. Wikileaks never committed to publishing everything, couldn’t, not even a sensible or practical idea.
3) Literally any reason at all invalidates this claim. Not enough time. Someone asked not to. Boring. Hard to contextualize. Literally anything.
The Free Press is about the ability to publish, not a requirement to publish.
“We are free press activists. It’s not about saving the whales. It’s about giving people the information they need to support whaling or not support whaling. Why? That is the raw ingredients necessary to make adjustments to society and without that we’re just sailing in the dark.”
>1) Assange did not say that. You misinterpret what he said.
When we talked about this last week you said the quote meant "we have some information that is not worth publishing."[1] The documents I linked in the previous post are obviously on the site so they by definition are "worth publishing" according to Wikileaks. What documents can possibly have less value than emails saying something like "I'll get the Caesar salad for lunch"?
>2) Your contrived absolutism about publishing everything is a strawman. Wikileaks never committed to publishing everything, couldn’t, not even a sensible or practical idea.
Those absolutist statements were made to show that Wikileaks obviously isn't absolutist in their mission. It shows that they do make editorial decisions about what they post. Once that is accepted as fact, it is completely fair to compare these decisions to each other. That is what I am doing, comparing the decision to leak certain documents with no public value to the refusal to leak other documents which Assange has stated Wikileaks possesses. I am then judging their decision making process based off that comparison.
>3) Literally any reason at all invalidates this claim. Not enough time.
I am not sure what you mean by "not enough time"? Are you suggesting that they didn't have enough time to vet all the DNC docs leaked or that there wasn't enough time to leak the Trump docs?
If they didn't have enough time to vet the value of the individual DNC docs, how did they have the time to vet the authenticity of the individual DNC docs?
That Assange quote was from 2016. They had 4+ years to get those Trump docs vetted so no time constraint there.
>Someone asked not to.
Who is this "someone" that Wikileaks would defer to on this decision? What are this person's biases? Why isn't Wikileaks transparent about who is making these decisions for them?
>Boring.
Yes, those previously linked DNC autoreplies were very exciting.
>Hard to contextualize.
Throwing a bunch of emails into a search engine on the site isn't contextualizing them. The lack of context on the DNC leaks is how we got things like Pizzagate from these emails.
Documents about Trump were and are irrelevant because we have ironclad proof, in volume, that no amount of what would for others be damning information has any effect on Trump support.
The only way we have discovered to counter him is to get more of the people not committed to him to come to the polls, or to vote by mail.
Thus, we see efforts in numerous states to curb access to polls. Successful efforts.
I think you are mischaracterizing why Julian Assange has lost support. He has not lost support because of exposing corruption in any political parties, he's lost support because its become clear he works with Russian intelligence services.
People have leaked data on Russian corruption to WikiLeaks, which went unpublished. His leaks coincide with what is politically favorable to Russia, not with making all information free to the world.
One niggle I have is that both Snowden and Assange get accused of being agents of Russia.
It's a ridiculously and simplistically too convenient argument and therefore attractive to anyone with the slightest bias against 'information I don't like' (or a tendency towards being a 'shoot the messenger' type of person).
That Assange / Wikileaks don't follow the same bias as the local US media, doesn't mean he's / they're an enemy agent. Thinking of the world in black and white like that is dangerously reductive.
Not to mention the chilling effect that comes with that sentiment. It reminds me of the Rick Rubin style of creating "fuck the system" propaganda. Only complain about the parts of the system that don't actively benefit me if you want to keep your record deal.
I would actually be curious to hear more about that perspective on Rick Rubin. A very cursory Google doesn't come up with much, and I'll dig a bit harder soon, but if you want to elaborate or link to something about this, I'd very much appreciate it!
An article I read years ago blasted him for nepotism and using typical unethical manipulation tactics to get ahead. Unfortunately, ever since Amit Singha left Google, half of the things I look for are no longer accessible.
> One niggle I have is that both Snowden and Assange get accused of being agents of Russia.
I've never seen that about Snowden except in regard to activities after taking io residence in Russia, and even then its usually more “Snowden is subject to influence by Russia” more than “...an agent of Russia”.
Assange is a different story, but the both the uncontroversial facts and the controversial detailed claims on which a conclusion about being a Russian agent might rest about Assange are different.
Well, Snowden actually IS borderline agent of Russia since he was¹ perfectly fine with seeking KGB asylum, so right after exposing the evils of mass surveillance he relocated to... Surveillistan.
¹ Or maybe still is, presumed he's still alive and can move freely, which is highly unlikely.
He's explained that pretty well. He didn't plan on going to Russia, he first went to HK, but he was advised that it wasn't safe for him at the time. He went to Russia because that's the only option he had. It's not just disingenuous to blame him for that, it's downright malicious.
It's still a joke. Even if he is Russian (which is a very convenient boogieman), the fact is he DID expose corruption in US parties.
He may be partisan, he may not be revealing damaging info about Russia. But if the information is true, so what? Shouldn't we be doing something about the corruption he revealed regardless of why he revealed it? I can't believe all you have to do is say the R-word and suddenly people are just willing to ignore everything he says, its ridiculous. Like uhh enemies of the US are more likely to expose damaging information about them as compared to allies, no shit?
4 or 5 people at the top of the DNC resigned because of saying mean things about Sanders and invitations to avante garde art shows? That's not how it works.
The appearance of impropriety is still important to some folks though, so when private emails (that didn't lead to rigging an election, something the DNC has no power to do anyway) that show that folks in the DNC favored one candidate over the other, they resigned.
This isn't the same thing as admitting the impossible (that the DNC somehow got HRC ~4 million more votes)
A link between Wikileaks and the Russian government has never been substantiated. The "didn't publish Russian leaks" smear is one of many.
The "Russian leaks" that Wikileaks declined were sent to them during the DNC/Podesta/Hillary email release when their resources were obviously stretched. The "leaks" were mostly public, were deemed unimportant and were declined. As we know that didn't stop whoever anonymously submitted these documents from immediately using this to orchestrate a smear campaign against Wikileaks with full compliance of the media (funny timing during the DNC email release, wonder who it could have been?)
A little later the "leaks" were fully published elsewhere and nobody cared (but let's not kid ourselves that anybody who claimed to care actually cared at all).
I agree. It seems to me that even after the allegations against Assange were proven wrong, people still refuse to accept his innocence in this case and try to find something else to blame him for. As when you're proven wrong in an argument and then try to defend your ignorance with a fallacy; "yeah you're right about this problem, but you still smoke weed and voted for Trump".
If what he says is true, why does it matter that its politically favorable to Russia? As a liberal democracy we should strive to be more moral and upstanding, hiding those things for politics is the opposite of that.
2 people run for office, both committed a crime. 1 of them supports Russia in their ongoing aggression. So Russia has WikiLeaks post only the information on the candidate they don't like, securing the election for a politically favorable but perhaps even more corrupt person.
How and what information is being presented is an incredibly important part of "the truth" as a whole.
There are 4 things he could have done:
1. Don't reveal any secrets.
2A Reveal secrets that harm candidate A.
2B Reveal secrets that harm candidate B.
3. Reveal all secrets that harm candidate A and candidate B.
I don't think anybody on HN argues that option 3 is preferable over all the other options. You seem to think option 1 is preferable to both options 2A and 2B. GP and I seem to think the opposite.
I can understand your argument that half the truth can be worse than no truth at all. But as there are very few sources for information like WikiLeaks I think in cases like this, half the truth might be all the public can get and it at least gives you a basic idea of what is happening when nobody is looking.
> I don't think anybody on HN argues that option 3 is preferable over all the other options.
From context, ITYM "disputes", not "argues". Or least that's the only way your comment makes sense; "argues" a position generally refers to supporting that position.
> So Russia has WikiLeaks post only the information on the candidate they don't like, securing the election for a politically favorable but perhaps even more corrupt person.
There are three answers for that: If Wikileaks has a bias than it can easily explained by the fact that Assange's woes were caused by the Obama admistration. And even if they didn't have a bias, most of their staff at Wikileaks do not speak Russian and they try to verify every piece they publish; as opposed to making claims based on partisan funded opposition research. It's also far harder to leak from Russia and other authoritarian/mafious states and also because their intelligence agencies use mechanical typewriters.
Disclaimer: I dont have much of an opinion on the topic of Assange himself since years after in his "embassy prison" he certainly went nuts in a way. It's not the same person you could talk with on IRC years ago. He was also pretty much okay back in 2011 durign his iterview with Eric Schmidt.
Yet here is the idea for your mind: all around the world including Russia political leaders of authoritarian countries trying to sell bullshit like every single problem their regime has is caused by some US conspiracy. They'll of course tell you that all independent journalist and activists work for US and spread only lies.
Does Snowden going for asylum in Russia make what he exposed unimportant? What if famous Iraq civilians killing video would be provided not by someone from US, but Russian FSB or Islaeli Mossad? Will it make people less dead?
So obviously any whistleblower or journalist can be biased and some country will benefit more than other. There is absolutely no point of arguing who working for whom - only facts are important.
> all around the world including Russia political leaders of authoritarian countries trying to sell bullshit like every single problem their regime has is caused by some US conspiracy.
This "bullshit" has a Pentagon-sized kernel of truth to it.
Washington is the only regime with hundreds of foreign military bases.
Washington is the only regime that directly funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in resources to foreign rebel groups through channels such as NED, DRL.
Washington is the only regime capable of unilaterally blockading entire economies through crushing sanctions.
So yes, it does really matter to 90%+ of the world population if the "journalists" they trust are actually paid couriers of Washington's foreign agendas.
"There is absolutely no point of arguing who working for whom - only facts are important."
I don't think so.
There's generally no such thing as 'individual blocks of truth' as independent things. The truth is always contextual.
New Orgs have biases that exhibit themselves in all sorts of ways, and they matter.
I'm not fully sure if either of these things are fully true but if 1) Assange was actively trying to help people steal sensitive information form the US and 2) has some kind of implied relationship with an American adversary whereupon they support him politically or with information - and whereby he returns the favour by suppressing leaks on their behalf - then what does this look like? This person basically becomes a foreign agent, intent on discrediting one party over another. The 'facts' released are ultimately selective. It'd be 'journalism' in the same way that Putin could use his powers to 'uncover' information and then frame and leak the information selectively. Again: I don't know if 1 and 2 are true.
I'm also not fully on board with the notion that information about Assange is suppressed in the conspiratorial sense it'd be interesting to see more behind the scenes mechanics of how that might work.
> There's generally no such thing as 'individual blocks of truth' as independent things. The truth is always contextual.
On the one hand, I absolutely agree with this statement in isolation. On the other, I don’t need him to be unbiased, as he isn’t the only journalist in the world — if he wants (or needs) to keep Russia happy, so long as he has a counterpart that doesn’t, between them the public is informed.
Yes. And why is the USA trying to take him into custody? While in the USA for a US citizen to work as a foreign agent is illegal, I fail to see why Assange, who is a citizen of Australia and mostly has resided in other countries, should be arrested by yet another country and shipped to the USA. Did Assange commit a crime in the USA? Wasn't it Manning who got the supposed "classified" info and gave it to Assange?
How about a little goddamn proof? How about a valid legal case that follows the laws of the USA? This whole Assange thing is just a streaming shit-show of nonsense and a shameful attempt to drive one man to ruin and worse.
Both Democrats and Republicans have other problems to worry about every day b/c they don't have their acts together. All this trouble comes b/c a cabal of jerks somewhere (probably the intelligence community) has a hard-on to fuck Assange over and is somehow tolerated.
Just for comparison: would it be ethical for the USA to bushwhack and extradite a street vendor in Egypt who cries "Kill the USA!" and burns Uncle Sam in effigy? Hell No! This stuff happens all the time. The USA bureaucracy is like an information sieve. If you wanna fix it, find a better way to work.
Give Assange his freedom. Drag into the sunlight those fools who are perpetuating this nonsense and terminate their employment. Brand their foreheads with a giant letter "A" so they're identifiable forever. Anything Assange has revealed is by now "water under the bridge". To use another metaphor, "the genie is out of the bottle" and you can't put it back. Grow up!
> How about a little goddamn proof? How about a valid legal case that follows the laws of the USA?
In theory, that’d be the job of the court case he’s fighting an extradition to not face.
And, to be clear where I stand, in the (unlikely) event that anyone’s secret services care what I think, they’d have to be a lot more open and honest about their mistakes for me to trust them when they say “we need X secret, trust us” — almost everything that people like me get to hear about them are their mistakes, and a whole lot of hubris to go with those mistakes; while I like to assume they can’t all be that bad, the fact is I can only form opinions by what I learn, and whatever good any of them might do is kept secret (or so vague it might as well be) and is unlearnable, while the bad stuff is writ large.
(None of this is relevant to the judicial systems in any country or Assange).
Water under the bridge or not, they don't want people doing it again or supporting Russia. It could be as much as a message to the next potential Assange - don't even try. If you believe he's an enemy of your interests and working with your enemy to hurt you, I have a hard time seeing a calculation they would make that says leave him alone since what's done is done. They are going to make his life miserable forever and hope it's a deterrent. That's the realpolitik of the situation - morals ignored.
He's not a US citizen, he was outside the USA. So what?
If we tried to arrest every person outside the USA who is trying to do something to/in the USA we'd have to put out arrest warrants for millions of people. We'd be, and are, the laughingstock of the diplomatic world.
Aside: we apparently assassinate hundreds of individuals outside the USA every year (something that Obama complained about IIRC ) with God-knows-what justification. We're well on our way down the Road to Ruin.
I'm hardly a bleeding-heart, but for the USA intelligence agencies to dog Assange to death is immoral, unethical and illegal even under our legal system.
Pursuing Assange is the worst of all causes: a fishing expedition, a routine overextension of international and national law, legal malpractice, and a giant fool's errand for every man involved in this.
Only a psychopath would put the pursuit of Assange on their resume. Of course we likely have plenty of those working for us. Apparently they float to the top, like shit.
jollybean says>"I think your comment implies an general ignorance of the situation."
Nope. But your reasoning above amply demonstrates a bit of how the powers-that-be twist language, logic and reason to justify contemptible behavior and justify crushing an individual. You should write an "Anti-Declaration of Independence" for spies that outlines their grievances against free agents and how they should be able to kill/maim/wound/harm anyone, anywhere just b/c they are irritated with those agents' behavior.
An honest leader would publicly fire with malice every asshole who participated in or encouraged this shitfest and make sure the government never employed them again. Of course, that would be a bit (but only a bit) similar to doing to them what is being done to Assange! Perhaps that would be justice. I'll have to think about it.
You're not grounded in material reality of the situation.
When a crime is committed, justice is pursued.
The nationality of the individual doesn't matter that much. American or not, if they've committed a crime against the US, then they will face justice.
If he possibly raped a woman in Sweden, then he's extradited to Sweden to face justice for that crime.
If he possibly robbed someone in Switzerland, then he's extradited to face justice there.
Since it looks like he conspired with Pt. Manning to steal classified data from the US Military, he's going to be extradited to the US to face trial.
" how the powers-that-be twist language, logic and reason to justify contemptible behavior and justify crushing an individual."
This is not some YouTube conspiracy story, for the most part it's really not that complicated.
There is already reasonable evidence in the public domain that a crime was committed, he's going to have to get a lawyer and face a judge so we can find out the truth.
I see no crime. Find another way to employ the multitude of overpaid and useless intelligence agents than siccing(1) them on the citizens of the USA and other nations.
The laws of the USA apply only within the boundaries of the USA with minor exceptions by treaty. Application of USA law outside the USA is illegal, delusional and megalomanical. Furthermore, other nations will either object (the only reasonable response) or expect full reciprocation. Imagine life in a country where USA, French, British, Scottish, South African, Russian, Chinese, etc. law all simultaneously applied? Your suggestions are nonsensical and self-contradictory.
(1) To sic, to attack (used especially in commanding a dog):to incite to attack (usually followed by on).
Ironically, though the latter’s position is reversed with regard to Assange himself and the former’s famous intervention in the domestic affairs of other sovereign nations, Henry Kissinger would agree with you that law stops at the border, while Amnesty International would disagree and say certain crimes have universal justification.
And indeed, the USA isn’t the only nation claiming universal jurisdiction for various offences.
I think it's would make sense to take into account who specific person working for in situation when we have proven facts about them. Unfortunately it's almost always impossible to get those unbiased facts since there is so much of misinformation everywhere.
And even if you knew for sure that Assange knowingly working for Russia you will never know why he doing it. After all US wants to get him on US soil and to put him in prison (for 300 years) to make him an example of US power and "justice".
And on other hand Putin's regime can just threat to kill his friends and family since they totally capable of doing it, no defending against it in UK court.
Oh, looks like i posted some funny conspiracy here. Conclusion: when we try to dig into information about specific people we end up with conspiracy mess. That information impossible to check and it doesn't prove anything.
On other side when activists or journalists publish stories about something like war crime, PRISM or Panama Papers facts can usually be verified because when it's leaked it's too big to hide.
Doesn't leaking information that exposes flaws of a country make it more resilient in the future against bigger attacks? So even if he is helping Russia spread their propaganda isn't it making us stronger to find this out and plan against it instead of an all out information war? How does Russia win here.
> Doesn't leaking information that exposes flaws of a country make it more resilient in the future against bigger attacks?
Not necessarily, obviously. For instance: if someone leaks information to an enemy about a fatal flaw in their nation's military equipment, and the enemy nation attacks and exploits that flaw to victory; all the leak did was make their country weaker and more vulnerable.
I'm not aware of any improvements in the resiliency of the US in response to Assange's leaks, except that the Democratic party has better opsec now (e.g. uses 2FA and has anti-phishing drills). They may have locked down their secret-level networks in response to Manning's activities, but that could arguably make the US less resilient.
Of course it does. In addition, it should true the course of the country to its ideals. Clearly there are some who wish to hide information from our own citizens, lest public opinion root them out of their sinecures.
Please don't break the site guidelines when posting here. It only makes things worse. I realize it's extremely frustrating when you're representing a minority/contrarian viewpoint and it feels like the majority is not only wrong but ganging up on you. But there's not much that can constructively be done about it other than to patiently present your substantive points (or, failing that, ignore).
Public information in a language none of their staff speaks.
People say Wikileaks is wrong that all the information offered to them was public, but none of the published chat logs show anyone explaining to Wikileaks that there are unpublished leaks in there.
> It’s not like anyone still holds the opinion that Russia is even a semi-democracy.
There's a reason they still conduct elections in Russia, to give the appearance of democracy. Yes, people still think it's a democracy… as long as their favourite leader is in power.
There are precisely 0 slavs alive today who trust their government or politicians. We've been fucked over by our own governments for going on nearly a century at this point, and there's no reality in which anyone other than the old and senile believes elections are anything other than a scam.
In Serbia's last elections, Vucic falsified COVID numbers on the days leading up to voting day so that his party could convince his voterbase, the elderly, to go out in droves to vote. After the election he stopped the reporting of false numbers and put the country into a lockdown because to no one's surprise, the numbers were sky high. There were massive protests because of the lockdown measures, where police brutality ran rampant, all on Vucic's orders. Expired tear gas was used on unarmed civilians protesting peacefully, cops in full riot gear were beating the crap out of unarmed protesters and chasing them down the streets. He goes around poorer regions of the country and bribes people with sandwiches and basic supplies like wheat and flower for a vote. His son is good friends with famous, high profile criminals, and Vucic himself was buddy-buddy with a bunch of the former guard, more than half of which either have been, or are currently standing trial for war crimes committed during the Yugo wars.
This list goes on and on, and similar things happen in most balkan and eastern european country. Nobody sane trusts a single thing these "people" do, and people definitely don't trust elections, so what ends up happening is that people just don't see the point in participating in an obvious scam. None of us actually believe we're living in a democracy, we're all aware it's a farcical facade that dictators put up.
I know several Russians who do trust their government and to a lesser extent their politicians. All claims are met with 'western propaganda' and 'it is the same in the west'. They even deny Soviet atrocities, claiming either that were either made up by the CIA or that they happened due to poor conditions from war, despite the fact they themselves were born in the USSR in the 70s. Don't be so sure that nobody believes the government, plenty do.
I doubt there are many Russians who trust current government, I live in Russia and can't recall anyone. Even kids today are mostly opposite to government due to huge information campaigns. Those who deny Soviets crime are mostly misinformed, like US citizens believing in little green men.
Man... Every Soviet schoolboy knows that the existence of an electoral system does not necessitate a democracy. It's not Russia that is your existential problem in US, it's education.
Yet, we do. Assange would not be able to change that. And really, it is about as "none of our business" as any major criminal activity you could think of.
It is Russians' business, technically, but in practice regular Russians are no better equipped to act on information about it than we are.
The West would have legal standing to sanction, freeze the assets of, and arrest employees of oligarchs who use their wealth to commit financial crimes in the West. So yes, having leaks from Russia is very useful.
>Maybe provide some feedback, so I can understand why you disagree with me?
From your second link "These incidents don’t prove, as some have alleged, that Assange is some kind of paid Russian agent, or that WikiLeaks is a Russian front organization"
Your first link was addressed elsewhere. I can't personally blame Assange for liking Russia more than the country that has spent a decade making his life a living hell. Even if Russia's motives are obviously impure, they are more helpful to furthering Assange's goal.
You're upset that wikileaks didn't report on a leak that was known for 2 years by major western media organizations, and was later forwarded to them? Despite their longstanding policy to not report on leaks that have already been reported on elsewhere?
This blaming Russia thing is way beyond ridiculous now. WHAT "Russian corruption" are you talking about? Is it the same as the "Russian interference in the US elections," i.e. something that has never existed in reality and was just invented by the US mass media for their purposes?
The 12 Russians, and the 3 Russian companies all hired attorneys to represent them and counter sue for defamation. When their attorney went in front of the judge, all charges were dropped by the Justice Dept, refusing document discovery "on issues of national security".
It's all political reality television, from both the right and the left. It's like a cable TV wrestling match.
"""
In January 2019, the federal government accused Concord of violating a protective court order designed to safeguard information shared among lawyers on the case. Prosecutors said a trove of nonclassified information they had turned over to Concord’s defense team had turned up on a website the previous October.
A message on a newly created Twitter account read: “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!”
"""
RT's claim that these groups are not responsible for these troll farms is not credible. The claim that these organizations were attempting to use the court case to get detailed information on how they were investigated however, is.
As I warned, do what you wish with the RT article.
Didn't take it as a credible source in the matter, but wasn't going to bother with a longer than 2 min. search either for all details.
On a side note, I don't take the NYT to be any less biased that RT. All of them will conveniently forget about the parts of the story which they don't like. They all have favourites in the matter (Trump, Barr, Democrat leadership, Putinistas, etc).
> One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party.
There are many instances of this, and the corporate media does this on both sides of the aisle. Of course, there's one dominant one at the moment. There's a heavy-handed corporate media attempt to squeeze out compliance - from biased stories (that are later proven false) from mainstream outlets as the most serious, to the cover of Vogue as the most silly.
What's disturbing is that if you point this out to people, what happens? Ah hah, they discovered someone on the other side of the political aisle. Their enemies. Again, this is true for both parties.
Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore.
"Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary" - not just Americans, but that aside, isn't that inevitable when parties compete for power - allegiances form to gain numbers, and mergers take places until there are only two competitors left with no groups left to merge with. The inevitable strategic optimum.
I think that is only inevitable when the rules of democracy have been set up to give overwhelming power to a single winner.
Here in the Netherlands, the number of parties represented in parlement has been rising for decades - there are currently 18 parties. And yes, that causes different kinds of problems.
Ironically I think you've hit the nail on the head, but not for the reasons that are obvious: each side specifically frames the issue in a rigid fashion so it certainly appears obvious that they are morally in the right.
Hence the binary nature of the conversations.
I take the approach that one should be able to CONVINCINGLY argue the opposite side before having a meaningful opinion on the issue. If you can't do that because you view the other side as insane or fully incorrect, then it might be you that's insane. I'm not talking about the-Earth-is-flat type issues, but issues of the day (whatever that day is over the course of time).
While I agree with what you are going for, I also struggle to figure out how to describe it, as the whole problem here is that people (and I am including everyone) can't obviously tell the difference between something that is simply falsifiable and something which is murky; like, the entire premise in some sense of these rigid framings is that "if you can't see how" [ "murdering a child that you might even be complicit in causing to exist" / "forcing a woman to carry to term a baby at great cost to her health and destruction of her livelihood that might literally have been forced upon her by rape or coercion"] (and I am sorry if I accidentally sound sided here in either direction as my goal is merely to provide two arguments people make strongly on the topic as it got mentioned in this thread: I am not trying to carefully balance an actual debate on this topic) "is wrong then you probably also believe the Earth is flat". We can't push for the premise that "you absolutely need to be able to convincingly argue the opposite side of of an issue to have a meaningful opinion on it" and then make exceptions for "the-Earth-is-flat type issues" (which I can like, provide an attempt to defend but it comes out sarcastic as it essentially involves knowingly working with limited data and constantly stating as such... it just sounds like "well without knowing I am stupid, I might think X").
But yeah the struggle to find the right argument, rather than to win an argument...
Sadly the second of those is, I think, the more common. Interesting to see from your example how stupid it makes us -- if I try to win an argument without understanding the alternative, the the thing I gain most, is a reduction in my ability to reason
For instance, there are plenty of practical approaches that greatly reduce the number of abortions while still supporting women's rights.
But, for some reason, one side of the issue would rather not reduce abortion while still permitting women's choice because that would take away the 'wedge' issue as a partisan political hammer. So they insist on ever more draconian, misogynistic laws to force the wedge deeper and deeper. That's not because it's an unreconcilable issue. Its because they want the issue.
>But, for some reason, one side of the issue would rather not reduce abortion while still permitting women's choice because that would take away the 'wedge' issue as a partisan political hammer. So they insist on ever more draconian, misogynistic laws to force the wedge deeper and deeper. That's not because it's an unreconcilable issue. Its because they want the issue.
Except terminations in the US are at their lowest levels[0] since they became legal in 1973.
One side says:
Abortion should be safe, legal and rare.
Another side says:
Abortion is *literal* murder and women who have
them, as well as the doctors who perform them
should be imprisoned and/or executed.
There is (as I mentioned in another comment on this topic) a significant amount of nuance for most Americans. With a sizable majority supporting safe, legal abortions, but with significant disagreement as to the timing and mechanism(s) of such terminations.
Personally, I believe that women (and men, for that matter) should have control over their bodies. Full stop.
As for the termination of a pregnancy, that should be up to the individual who is pregnant -- likely (but not necessarily) with input from the other potential parent and/or medical professionals.
To put a really fine point on it: If you don't have a functional uterus, shut the fuck up -- it's none of your business.
>To put a really fine point on it: If you don't have a functional uterus, shut the fuck up -- it's none of your business.
I don't really have a position on abortion, but I don't like this point at all. It says too much, I think.
Imagine there's a genocide in North Korea. I'm not North Korean, I'm not friends with anyone from North Korea. Does accepting this point mean that I have to accept that genocide in North Korea is none of my business and is above my criticism? And, if not, what distinguishes the two?
Should Biden not sign a pro-choice bill because he lacks a uterus and therefore is forbidden from taking a side?
I said, a few sentences before the bit you quoted:
"Personally, I believe that women (and men, for that matter) should have control over their bodies. Full stop."
I believe that should be enough information to answer your question, unless you somehow believe that being mass-murdered is the same thing as having control over one's own body.
But a pro-life woman is demanding the same amount of control over others' bodies as a pro-life man, less one. And a pro-choice man is not advocating for any control at all. Your conclusion should be that only pro-choice people should voice their opinions, not people with functional uteri.
>Your conclusion should be that only pro-choice people should voice their opinions, not people with functional uteri.
No. Because what you (or I, for that matter) want or believe is only relevant for our own bodies.
What happens to the bodies of others is up to those others. No one, other than the owner of that body, has anything to say about what happens to their body.
I considered for a few minutes that you might have meant "people who aren't pregnant with the specific fetus in question should shut up".
But I ruled it out confidently: The situation where a bunch of people are weighing in on a specific abortion is not one that really comes up, whereas people discuss abortion in general nonstop. You had just said that you aren't opposed to the other potential parent and medical professionals having input in a specific abortion. It doesn't make any sense to phrase that idea that way- having a functional uterus has no bearing on whether you're the one who is considering an abortion. And the other reply also interpreted you as saying men shouldn't comment on the issue and went uncorrected. Taken together, I thought there was no way that was what you meant and I was being excessively charitable.
I misunderstood, but I think you could have been clearer.
>having a functional uterus has no bearing on whether you're the one who is considering an abortion.
I'm not sure how you can make that statement seriously. The only situation where one might want or need to consider terminating a pregnancy is if you have a functional female reproductive system.
Each individual should make those decisions for themselves without a bunch of busybodies telling them what they should do with their own bodies.
As for potential fathers and medical professionals, their opinions may be useful to the person considering such a procedure, but it isn't their body and, as such, that's an advisory situation at most.
>And the other reply also interpreted you as saying men shouldn't comment on the issue and went uncorrected.
Which doesn't make a lot of sense, since I (as a male) was, in fact, commenting on the issue. Or did you miss that part?
People should absolutely be able to express their opinions.
However, when it comes to a specific person considering a specific procedure (whether that be a pregnancy termination, a haircut or removal of a hangnail), the decision necessarily should be that of the specific person involved, and the opinions of others aren't at all relevant.
That's my point. If you can and/or do become pregnant, then the decision whether to terminate or not is yours alone -- but only for your own body.
If you don't have a functional female reproductive system, such decisions are irrelevant to you. If you do have a functional female reproductive system, how that system is used (or not) is completely up to the individual involved and no one should have any decision making power over how another person's body is used.
Feel free to disagree with my position and make your opinions clear. But when it comes to a specific person making a specific decision about their own body, you have no say unless it's your body.
>I misunderstood, but I think you could have been clearer.
That's entirely likely. I tried to elucidate my point. If I failed to do so, my apologies. I attempted to do so again in this comment. I hope I was clearer this time.
I agree, but the other side does the same. Why do pro-choice groups oppose holding abortion clinics to the same medical standards as other medical facilities? Because "access" is their political hammer, and they want to keep using the issue.
>Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore.
I would slightly disagree. Americans are typically very moderate and I believe made to not understand the concepts of politics, when there's capitalism and liberalism involved it's just too complex to understand. The biggest and obviously evidence of this is the apathy toward voting, why even be engaged in something that isn't felt to be a democratic system? How many feel marginalized and the kinds of communities that say so. As impacftul Assange's work may be, the shakers and movers of the world are doing a good job at damage control sounds like.
>Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore.
Perhaps that's true of some (perhaps many) Americans, but certainly not all. Please don't paint 330 million individuals with the same broad brush. If for no other reason than you're doing exactly what (taking a binary, categorical view of a gigantic group instead of treating individuals as individuals) you're complaining about.
For me (as well as many other Americans), I recognize that context and nuance are important when considering most issues.
Assuming that tweets or political slogans represent the views of all (or even many) Americans is shallow indeed.
The devil (as well as the solutions) is always in the details, whether it be the minimum wage, broadband competition, healthcare or dozens of other issues.
Many people (myself included) are ignorant of the details surrounding a variety of issues unless it directly affects them.
However, many (if not most) have a nuanced understanding of issues (at all levels of government) that impact them.
The nationalization of party politics (helped along quite a bit by the decline and disappearance of much of the local journalism in the US) creates least-common-denominator messaging that ignores any nuance or context whatsoever.
As for Assange, it's not a left/right dichotomy at all.
In fact, many who generally vote (D) are among Assange's biggest supporters, and many who generally vote (R) are among his biggest detractors.
IMNSHO, it has much more to do with whether or not you believe that Assange can get a fair trial in a US Federal court.
There are dozens (50 state court systems, many more municipal/county/territorial court systems) of other courts in the US, but the Federal court system is generally among the fairest of US court systems. Especially if there's a lot of publicity surrounding a particular case -- as there is here.
And Assange will be tried in Federal court.
The man himself doesn't think so, or he wouldn't have cloistered himself in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years.
Given that no journalist has ever been convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act[0], under which the really serious charges against Assange was indicted, it seems unlikely in the extreme that he'd be convicted of those charges.
The charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[1] do not carry heavy sentences, nor (at least as I understand it) is the evidence of violations of that law very strong.
As such, it's quite likely that if Assange hadn't jumped bail and hidden out in the Ecuadorian embassy, all this would have been over and he'd have been banging Swedish girls again for at least a few years.
As someone who generally votes (D), I'd like to see Assange acquitted and let him move on.
His credibility has suffered mightily, but most of that (IMHO) was a result of his own actions and statements (Seth Rich? Really?).
Regardless, you're flat wrong about Americans as mindless morons parroting their particular party line. Sure there are some who do so, but certainly not all (or even most).
> Please don't paint 330 million individuals with the same broad brush
Small note: about 150m people voted for D or R. Out of almost 230m eligible voter pool, the rest just didn't vote.
I think it's fair to say that US Politics is framed as a binary choice (regardless of how you justify it) because that's the party system that is in place...along with the common winner-takes-all systems.
>I think it's fair to say that US Politics is framed as a binary choice (regardless of how you justify it) because that's the party system that is in place...along with the common winner-takes-all systems.
That's an excellent point. No third party has come anywhere close to the major levers of power in more than 150 years.
And first-past-the-post elections certainly contribute to that.
But that's orthogonal to my point. GP said:
"Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore."
Note that GP doesn't address parties or elections. Rather they claim that Americans have a "binary, categorical view of issues."
That's to what I took exception. Many Americans have nuanced views of a variety of issues.
That said, the reality is that neither major party platform supports all the good ideas from across the ideological spectrum.
But, as you correctly pointed out, most people pick the party that they think gives them more of what they think is right.
That doesn't mean every (R || D) voter supports every (R || D) position. Nor does it mean that every (R || D) voter blindly accepts the talking points of their selected party.
Yes. There absolutely are voters who just vote their party without giving a thought to the policies advocated by that party. Sometimes because they're one-issue voters, sometimes because they, their extended families and communities have voted that way for generations, sometimes because they're too intellectually lazy to understand the issues and take the easy way out.
But to ascribe the above to all Americans (whether they voted or not -- GP talked about issues, not votes) is equally intellectually lazy.
> "Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?
I'd say that the focus on party loyalty is more a feature of authoritarian parties in general and not fascism specifically.
If there's any single tenet that can be called central to fascism (a debatable premise), it's probably the idea that "the nation" can reattain its former glory by forcefully purging various forms of "degeneracy" and thereby becoming "pure".
Maybe we need new words? Someone had to invent the word "fascism" once upon a time too. The problem with using established words that almost fit is that people quibble over semantics.
> Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
I’ve been following the story since the Slashdot days. Why am I not outraged? Why am I not protesting? It’s certainly doesn’t have to do with some political party that I don’t belong to. I fundamentally feel that Assange and Wikileaks went about things the wrong way. They feel more like an anarchists organization than some sort of journalists organization to me. I certainly do not feel outraged nor inclined to protest.
Unfortunately, most of the replies I got are stuck debating Assange and his character. But it's wholly irrelevant if Assange and Wikileaks went about things the wrong way. This story is about the behavior of the unelected officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI that are making things up out of thin air by trading leniency for false statements with known criminals.
If he's committed a crime, charge him with it and give him his day in court. If he hasn't -- like in the case of this story where he never asked anyone to commit any crimes against the Icelandic government, don't make charges up. I can't believe this even needs to be said.
That's what you should be outraged about, and you don't have to like Assange or Wikileaks to be outraged about that.
There are lots of unusual things about the Assange case, but the fact that the government tried to strengthen it by offering leniency to an informant isn’t one of them.
The biggest problem is that there are no reliable mechanisms to hold law enforcement accountable when they abuse their power or fabricate evidence. Even getting a conviction overturned is a slim chance, let alone any kind of consequences for the officials involved.
While I can understand this point of view, I have to ask. Do you think that how Assange went about things justifies the magnitude of the effort to punish and silence him?
>It’s not journalism when you’re just a cutout for the Russian government
Why not?
>The irony of all ironies is that many of the same people who complain about editorializing in journalism and media are the same ones who back Assange.
I don't want what I view as the US backed media outlets in jail either. This isn't irony, disliking something and state prosecution are drastically different.
Assange maintained that he was fine in the UK, but worried about Sweden because it would be easier for the US to extradite from Sweden.
That's quite simply a load of bollocks. The UK has been pally with the US, was involved in Iraq with the US, and willing to extradite far more than Sweden in the past.
The UK doesn't even typically allow rendition flights to even refuel, and absolutely requires all extraditions to go through the strict legal process. I think it's mainly a pride thing about not rolling over and letting a former colony run amok extrajudicially in your homeland.
I can see why he didn't want to step on Swedish soil if he got a hint of US led shenanigans.
The main difference is that the UK judicial system is much more open than Sweden's, and he explicitly stated that he feared being held incommunicado in that country.
> purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party.
Purely because both parties needed some way of turning the people against Wikileaks.
TFTFY.
People act like it was just “randomly people decided he wasn’t sympathetic” all the while we had the government ov the most powerful nation doing everything in their power both legal and illegal to undermine him. It’s not accidental that you feel like Assange and “might be a bad character” it’s be design and the people behind it must have so much worse stories hidden away than the ones we already know of to go to this much trouble to kill freedom of information.
Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is
Most American's probably don't actually know much about him. They may have encountered a few stories over the years-- in many cases just the headlines.
There wouldn't be outrage & protests for a few reasons:
1) The news stories people have read would frequently have been about him helping hack US computers, often with the added context of his rape prosecution, so there wouldn't be a lot of automatic sympathy.
2) The testimony retraction is only a few days old, so not much time to get upset especially without greater media coverage.
3) The story is basically "Witness lies to FBI". People aren't going to take to the streets over that. If the DoJ still go after Assange, that would be worse, but I still don't think we'd see much protesting for 1 more main reason:
4) Americans have more than enough sources of outrage much closer to home. If something is going to overcome Americans' "outrage fatique", it isn't going to be recanted testimony in the prosecution of a supposed co-conspirator for an incident that occurred over 10 years ago. It's not even an issue of partisan politics: Whether you're to the right or the left, you probably have more immediate things to be angry about than this.
Is it really a surprise though: the mainstream media is totally permeated with “former” intelligence operatives turned pundits, run major stories based on “anonymous sources” within the intelligence community, etc.
They are telling people what to think and it is working.
> exposed corruption in your favorite political party
Yeah, if this is intended to mean the democrats, I'm going to need an unbiased source on that. If there was actual corruption in the Democratic Party uncovered in these leaks, I don't remember hearing anything about it. I remember hearing a lot of partisan and daffy trash about pizza parlors and a DNC conspiracy against Sanders, though.
What did they resign for, exactly? IIRC it was a nothingburger -- it was because they privately said mean things about Bernie Sanders, and not much else.
> Donna Brazile, a longtime Clinton ally who stepped in as DNC chair last year in the wake of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s resignation, published an excerpt of her upcoming book in Politico in which she disclosed the details of a fundraising agreement between the DNC and the Clinton campaign reached in August 2015.
> “The agreement — signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook with a copy to [Clinton campaign counsel] Marc Elias— specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised,” Brazile wrote in the story under the headline “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC.”
> Brazile added of the deal: “[Clinton’s] campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
> During the 2016 election, Sanders allies alleged that the DNC did not act as a neutral arbiter of the Democratic primary, favoring Clinton in its selection of debate times and fundraising. Their suspicions were only heightened when leaked emails published by WikiLeaks, and now reported to have been hacked by the Russians, appeared to show DNC staffers deriding Sanders and plotting ways to help Clinton. The accusations grew so heated that Wasserman Schultz resigned, which is when Brazile took over.
> But now Brazile has provided explosive new evidence for the initial allegations. "The shocking news here is this idea they were exerting a level of control over DNC affairs that we didn't know about," said Kenneth Pennington, who served as digital director for the Sanders campaign. "If you had told me this during the primary — that they're using the joint fundraising committee to get veto power over DNC functions — I would have called you a conspiracy nut."
The rigging of the primaries was bad, but that's only half the story. The bigger reason for the resignations probably had a lot to do with what they said about their donors and the way that people pretty clearly were buying federal appointments.
That's quite a stretch. No, the DNC didn't "rig" the primary; Clinton actually did receive far more votes than Sanders. Also, nothing you linked implicates anyone in "buying" federal appointments.
When the DNC heavily favors one candidate and gives that candidate unfair advantages (like having the unique ability among candidates to decide how DNC funds are spent), unbeknownst to other candidates and their campaigns, it's got to be called something. If you won't call it corruption and you won't call it rigging and you won't call it conspiring, what would you be willing to call it?
Sanders isn't a member of the Democratic Party. The DNC owes him nothing. It would have been corrupt for the DNC to spend its resources backing a candidate who was not a registered Democrat.
Those rape accusations have soured me on "official" rape narratives. As in, I believe women, but I don't believe anyone speaking on behalf of women. When I heard about Matt Gaetz's thing, my first question was "what did he do recently to piss off the war pigs?"
Tbh he and his ego (and probably mental problems) did it to himself.
He hid out in the UK to aviod questioning in sweden because they were going to ship him off to america. This would be a legitimate concern if the UK were not the worlds most agressive at shipping people off to the US to 'face justice'. He was actually at far greater danger in the UK, which he had to know because he leaked the UK role in the extrodinary rendition programme, than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
> Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade in jail indefinitely on fictitious charges
Which country claims they want indefinite detention for Assange? Are you claiming that all of the DoJs indictment is fabricated? Have you actually read through the governments published information?
> Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
Why should anyone trust Julian Assange in the first place? Specifically, why should anyone trust that Julian Assange dumps all the data Wikileaks receives, when it receives it, instead of selectively disclosing whatever Julian wants whenever it suits him? The latter behavior, which has borne out, constitutes the actions of someone with a hidden agenda who should not be trusted.
Like, what has Julian done to earn our trust, and demonstrate that he is being completely forthright and transparent?
I'm just curious why Assange and Wikileaks have failed to release the GOP emails. Despite the lofty rhetoric about being journalists they seem to have "picked a side" in terms of their stance towards the US Government. That's my criticism of both Assange and Wikileaks, they seem to have an agenda beyond their stated one.
Why is him preferring the GOP an issue? He's free to have his personal opinions and it's easy to understand why he wouldn't want Clinton to be president as she, probably as a joke, called for him to be drone striked.
And Assange seems like a misogynistic antisemite from what I've seen posted by Lee. Yet even he agrees that the US's attack is based solely on disliking his journalistic endeavors, and is an attack on a free press.
By their own admission, "You're right, I mis-posted that," the link they posted was not evidence that Wikileaks was offered the RNC emails. They changed their argument, so I addressed their new one
> "Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?
The "it's a private company they can do what they want" argument often thrown by those who claims to "fight fascism" is just plainly ignorant of how fascism and Nazism got and stayed into power in the first place.
There were other news websites talking about this but they are algorithmically supplanted by "mainstream" news sites. For example it has gotten so bad that searching for the SpaceX's stream on YouTube yielded an entire page or results from "mainstream" outlets before the actual stream, even if the keywords were explicitly just about SpaceX.
For example, do a normal google search for "assange ntlm xmpp manning" (without quotes) and you'll see a mere 8 results from:
- justice.gov
- forbes
- abcnews
- reuters
- washingtonpost
- newyorker
- pbs
- apnews
Google needs to cut this shit out. The most appalling part is they don't even put a warning on the results to tell you that you typed a no-no keyword and that they've filtered the results. You might be lead to believe that only these news agencies wrote about it -- that the heterodox opinions don't even exist. It's completely Orwellian.
> Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
Unfortunately, in general, the republican base is not going to protest anything, preferring to settle things legally and in court. The main exception was Jan 6, which we've been taught to believe is apparently worse than the civil war. And yes, the sentiment to free assange is currently very common on the right.
> The main exception was Jan 6, which we've been taught to believe is apparently worse than the civil war.
Taught? We don't need anyone to teach what happened, it was on national television. We have perfectly good eyes and ears.
The only teaching necessary is some history: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
I'm not justifying Jan 6. I'm merely pointing out that it was an expression of frustration and that it's not anywhere close to the civil war, as some politicians have put it.
I think the same is true of other domestic terror violence we've seen. The Civil War is still the worst domestic insurrection in history. The two are not even comparable. That this comparison is even humored shows a major problem.
> The only teaching necessary is some history: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
I'm sorry you're being ridiculous. The US capitol has been bombed and parts destroyed by domestic terror groups in living memory. Those attacks were way worse than this.
US congressmen have been shot at by radicalized domestic terrorists as well.
Considering (1) Jan 6 resulted in minimal property destruction (certainly no structural damage) and (2) no politician killed (the only person dying directly as a result being Ashli Babbett, a rioter), it's safe to say that the bombings were worse (due to worse property destruction) and the shootings were worse (due to imminent potential of death to the victims)
Oh my goodness. this is simply something else. This is why the country is so divided.
Despite my dislike of left-wing insurrections, like seattle's chop, in which they actually did install a government [1] for a few days before American forces reclaimed it, it would be absolute hyperbole to believe that it was in any way an actual threat to American sovereignty.
Or when protestors broke into the Supreme Court to overturn the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh, no one compared it to the civil war. How hyperbolic can we get?
And yet, hyperbole like yours is not only tolerated by mainstream news sources, it is parroted by elected officials, other news outlets, and regular people. It's absolutely insane.
[1] By all measures, Raz the warlord's occupation of chaz qualifies as having been, for a few days, the sovereign government of that area. They enforced a law, punished criminals, taxed people, and provided safety, all the while preventing other forces from doing the very same. This meets any reasonable definition of sovereignty.
Bad faith false equivalencies like yours? Couldn't agree more!
Protestors disrupted Kavanaugh's hearing, they didn't try to overturn his confirmation after the fact. And even had they attempted to (not even sure what this looks like since GOP controlled the presidency and the Senate), that is far cry from attempting to overthrow the democratically-elected leader of our country with tacit and explicit support from government officials, weapons, and much malicious intent.
And comparing Jan. 6 to CHAZ is honestly a total joke not even worth acknowledging further.
I guess, I don't really get it. I'm happy to denounce Jan 6 as terrible. I just don't understand the hyperbole, and because I don't denounce it enough that's seen as many as bad faith.
On the other hand, God forbid you express concerns over the summer of violence we saw in 2020, because then you're just exagerating.
I am frankly exasperated at continuously having to keep track of not only what I ought to feel but also what level of passion I need to express my thoughts with in order to be taken in good faith.
I am willing to take it in good faith that you honestly believe Jan 6 is basically the worst thing to happen since the civil war. I don't really get how you can say that, but I don't think you're being disingenuous, or even malicious, in your statement of equivalence.
Unfortunately, since I don't see it the same way and don't feel Jan 6 is as bad as you make it out to be, I am apparently not only misguided or hyperbolic (what I believe you are) but -- as you've claimed -- a government abolitionist who lacks integrity.
Let me be specific: when you drew an equivalence of severity between the events of Jan. 6 and A) the CHAZ and B) protests for Kavanaugh's confirmation, you made it very hard for me to believe that you're operating in good faith.
You don't need to be in the streets protesting for shit, I don't need you calling your reps to ask them to support an independent commission. But I do need it to not be compared to situations that are not laughably benign by comparison.
> I am willing to take it in good faith that you honestly believe Jan 6 is basically the worst thing to happen since the civil war.
I didn't say that and I don't believe it. I reread my words, I don't feel I communicated such a sweeping conclusion / assessment.
> I am apparently... a government abolitionist who lacks integrity.
I attacked your argument, you've made it an attack on you. I don't know you, but that comparison was whack, be it bad faith, naivety, or ignorance. In my opinion, of course, however misguided, hyperbolic, or otherwise.
And when you dismiss it with accusations of bad faith and 'refute' the argument by primarily throwing derisive adjectives at it, that leads me to strongly believe you are operating in bad faith and making the accusation to pre-counter the obvious conclusions that can be drawn from the way you are conducting yourself.
You are primarily trying to refute the the argument by throwing as many derisive marks as possible at it, a joke, whack, naivety etc etc and demanding it not even be considered.
From intention there was plenty in the Chax situation that you really don't want to have your name associated with.
> You are primarily trying to refute the the argument by throwing as many derisive marks as possible at it, a joke, whack, naivety etc etc and demanding it not even be considered.
I was specific about what I found to be bad faith: drawing a false equivalency between Jan. 6 - an attack on our system of governance as a whole, supported by politicians - to those other examples. Yes, I used derisive adjectives, because I find the comparison worthy of derision.
> From intention there was plenty in the Chax situation that you really don't want to have your name associated with.
You won't find me defending CHAZ, like you seem to assume I will. Their intentions were far more benign than Jan. 6, but not benign or harmless, nor should many of the individuals involved be considered blameless. But there was certainly less intent to harm in CHAZ, and absolutely less intent to challenge our system of governance.
I used testy words, but they didn't detract from the point I felt it quite clear: minimizing the significance of Jan. 6 through equivocating it with CHAZ or Kavanaugh protests is an argument made in bad faith, naivety, or ignorance.
No you don't get to brush off actual armed establishment of an autonomous zone with "benign intention". That is the equivalent of mass-hostage taking and the beginnings of a coup; exactly as "benign" in intention as the 6th.
> You won't find me defending CHAZ, like you seem to assume I will.
This is exactly what you're doing here, you saw the claim and came running. You're just having to back-peddle now that someone is calling you on what you're doing.
Also, it's funny how intention is the only thing you are grabbing hold of and bringing up. Is that because of literally everything else about the CHAZ situation and the riots and the destruction of property that surrounded it are completely indefensible and infinitely worse?
Is the only reason "Intention" even becomes something you care about because it's the one thing you could try and twist into X is worse than Y?
> No you don't get to brush off actual armed establishment of an autonomous zone with "benign intention".
Please read my comment again. I said "more benign" (than Jan. 6), but literally also said "not benign." I found CHAZ very troubling in both idea and practice. But it doesn't hold a candle to breaking into the Capitol to disrupt our system of governance, possibly murder congresspersons (and the VP), and install their preferred president. CHAZ was bad, but orders of magnitude less so.
And since that's all you thought was worth responding to, I think that's my exit in this conversation.
> And comparing Jan. 6 to CHAZ is honestly a total joke not even worth acknowledging further.
> But I do need it to not be compared to situations that are not laughably benign by comparison.
> I don't know you, but that comparison was whack, be it bad faith, naivety, or ignorance. In my opinion, of course, however misguided, hyperbolic, or otherwise.
You said what you said ^ and no hand waving about "oooh I didnt mean it like that" will change that.
> And since that's all you thought was worth responding to,
That's all you've given to respond to. All you've done is hysterically scream "False equivalence" and make weak claims of "Intention", which I've already pointed out are bunk when compared alongside the obvious intention of CHAZ.
> I think that's my exit in this conversation.
Yes I think that's about your only option at this point.
> Despite my dislike of left-wing insurrections, like seattle's chop, in which they actually did install a government [1] for a few days before American forces reclaimed it, it would be absolute hyperbole to believe that it was in any way an actual threat to American sovereignty.
Right, it was a (trivial, both in scale and plausible durability) threat to territorial integrity, not sovereignty or Constitutional order.
Unlike Jan. 6, which sought to enforce the President's stated desire to overturn his electoral defeat, a desire in which the insurrectionists were joined by a substantial number of lawmakers, and sought to coerce or remove key opponents (most critically the Vice President acting as President of the Senate, under a theory that electoral votes could be arbitrarily discarded by whoever was serving in that position, which the President and his allies endorsed and advocated but the VP had publicly rejected.)
> if the attackers had succeeded in their aims to overturn a legitimate and fair election, that would've been the end of the United States as a constitutional republic.
Hyperbole to the Nth.
Do we really want to go down the path of judging and punishing people for what they'd have been able to accomplish if they hypothetically had unlimited resources they really wouldn't ever have access to?
Everyone would deserve a death sentence in all instances of just about anything.
> Everyone would deserve a death sentence in all instances of just about anything.
Now that's hyperbole to Nth degree. That's the slippery-slope fallacy all the way down to the most extreme conclusion.
Let's instead stick to what we know:
1) Many of the rioters had an intent to de facto overthrow the government. They had guns, nooses, there were chat logs, etc. This is not conjecture.
2) Many of the rioters had the resources to do what they intended: they easily outmatched the Capitol Police forces, and backup forces were slow to respond. The physical barriers rioters encountered were not sufficient to the task.
3) What they they lacked was the knowledge of where to go to accomplish their aims. They were too slow to the chambers, and couldn't locate their targets. When they got close, those at the front lacked conviction after seeing their friend justifiably shot.
I'm think it's quite appropriate to consider January 6th a "near miss" for our country as we know it, but given comments like yours and the revisionism happening before our eyes it doesn't quite seem we're out of danger. It is very appropriate to me to punish people for their actions, and sometimes for their intended actions. "Attempted Murder" is a crime for a reason, just because they failed to complete their task doesn't de facto exonerate them of wrong doing!
You're already lying about the rioters being armed with guns in point 1. If you're willing to lie here then what value is there in any of the rest of your claims?
The Oath Keepers brought arms to DC for this rally they had a major hand in planning. That the FBI only seized one handgun from the riot doesn't by any means indicate or imply there were not other armed rioters, especially given evidence from chat logs and social media that these militia groups did travel with their weapons. And many of the rioters had non-firearm weapons as well (e.g., tasers, bats, crowbars, stunguns, knives, chemical sprays, etc.)
The reality is we'll never know the extent of how armed (guns or otherwise) the rioters were, because almost everyone was allowed to leave unimpeded.
Also watch basically any video reconstruction to see any number of people treating any number of objects like clubs. But I'm not going to rewatch the videos to find the timestamps. And now that I've jumped through your hope, I'll reinforce a key point: the vast, vast majority of rioters (both that entered and just lingered outside the capitol) were not searched.
As it should be. I never intended to imply otherwise.
> The original claim was that these particular capitol rioters could have actually destroyed the republic in that moment.
I think there is a reasonable chance that they could have, had the been able to murder the "enemies" on that day. What does that mean or look like? I don't know. But what happens when the only decision-makers left for our Republic are those that tacitly and explicitly supported this action, if not immediately then more and more in hindsight.
> If every member of Congress died, would the Republic cease to exist? Probably not. There's a contingency plan for that.
Those plans assume good faith leadership. This insurrection was encouraged by the lame duck president and supported by members of Congress that now refuse to investigate it. And it wouldn't have been every member of Congress dead, would it? Those supporting the Big Lie would have been around to govern. Not exactly comforting to me, and I think well within the realm of believabilty for at least the possibility of a permanent change to our Republic as we know it.
> The claim can't be made if this can't be answered.
On the contrary: the fact that the question can't be answered confidently supports my point rather than refuting it. We don't know what would have happened. It's conceivable or systems would have endured, contingencies enacted, order restored. But there's good reasons to think that may not have happened as well.
Honestly, I'm at the point where I hope you get your way. It'll hopefully lead to a proper secession of states so that the increasingly obvious fact that the country has split into two irreconcilable societies can be made a reality and we can all live in peace. Let's hope that the separation happens peacefully.
> Honestly, I'm at the point where I hope you get your way
What is "my way"? That I want people who clearly intended harm to be subject to the consequences of that action (within our justice system and with the burden on the state to prove their guilt)? Is that so radical to you? I'm not asking anyone be hanged ffs. Nor am I advocating for any sort of detention for every person at the capitol that day. But this isn't something we should just try to forget, downplay, minimize, revise.
No coherent aim, people just coincidentally had human restraint-grade zip ties with them at a peaceful protest?
Nope, don't try to whitewash this. Thirty seconds of google searches easily puts these efforts to lie.
> In the weeks before supporters of then-President Donald Trump assaulted the U.S. Capitol, TheDonald.win forum commenters debated how best to build a gallows for hanging — or simply terrifying — members of Congress deemed disloyal. What kind of lumber? What kind of rope? And how many nooses?
> “The website, TheDonald, played a far more central role in the January 6th Capitol insurrection than was previously known,” he said. “There are thousands of posts — with tens of thousands of comments — detailing plans to travel to Washington and engage in violence against the U.S. Capitol. The ultimate end goal of this violence was, on behalf of Trump, disrupt the Congress and overturn the presidential election.”
> TheDonald.win forum commenters debated how best to build a gallows for hanging — or simply terrifying — members of Congress deemed disloyal. What kind of lumber? What kind of rope? And how many nooses?
And wallstreetbets debates how to please your wife's boyfriend. That is to say both /r/thedonald and /r/wallstreetbets (who has also harmed people via their encouragement of gambling the markets) have similar cultures of irreverence, hyperbole, trolling, and joking with the intent of setting people off. They find it funny when taken out of context and used to terrify people. For example, it's the same thing behind how 4chan jokingly made the OK sign into a white supremacist hand sign, thus causing a moral panic.
I'm not saying one way or the other as to whether the comments here are right. But you're dealing with a forum that trolls people by posting cartoon frogs, mocking the OK sign, and calling each other centipedes.
> For example, it's the same thing behind how 4chan jokingly made the OK sign into a white supremacist hand sign, thus causing a moral panic.
A lot of the 4chan dynamic involves people starting with something edgy as a dumb joke, and then the site's large subset of actual idiot racists taking it seriously. The OK sign was a great example of that - some people started it as a dumb joke and then actual racists enthusiastically embraced it. Hell, 4chan's racism in general started as a dumb joke and ended up with 51 people being murdered in Christchurch.
So I wouldn't use the fact that some subset of people have an edgy sense of humor as a license to hand-wave away other violent idiots who were serious as a heart attack with their planning.
Which were found on a table, not brought in to the "insurrection". Anyway, the entire narrative of the "insurrection" is a useful tool for the larger state security apparatus to justify ever increasing and intrusive technological surveillance - this time on US Citizens ("domestic war on terror" anyone? [0]). Which explains why the lie about the death of the Capital Police officer[1] was so useful that it wasn't corrected, even though it was verifiably false the entire time. I'm not aware of a single person who's been charged with "insurrection" in this alleged "insurrection" that took place. Happy to be proven wrong here. Lots of trespassing, assaulting a peace officer, and felony rioting though. The point I'm trying to make is that the technology a lot of us work on allows violent lies to spread with unprecedented ease, but there isn't a real way for them to be walked back after they're out in the open.
>Nope, don't try to whitewash this.
There's also some historical context that everyone seems to be forgetting. Puerto Rican nationalists shooting congressmen from the House balcony in the 50s (Carter pardoned them), the Kennedys, all the Weather Underground bombings in DC in the 70s, more actual assassination attempts in the 80s, various far-right and far-left terrorism here and there. This is to say that events like this are not exactly unique, and it's been really weird for me since I spent most of my early 20s studying this kind of thing (history, terrorism both here and abroad) when I was in the Army. It's like I'm watching everyone collectively want to LARP that this is the "worst thing ever" so that they can be a part of history. "Insurrection", for me at least, carries a very specific definition, and what happened on 6JAN2020, while awful, certainly doesn't fit into that category. Felony riot, absolutely. It surely isn't the worst thing ever, yes you are a part of history (however you want to define that), and the Republic is carrying on just fine.
> There's also some historical context that everyone seems to be forgetting.
Agreed.
The difference between January 6 and previous incidents is there's a very well-reasoned argument to be made by people who are experts in this area that the events of January 6 were the culmination of a self-coup attempt we typically only see in developing nations[1]. Fortunately the execution was inept and the institutions were able to withstand the assaults against them, but there were serious efforts to accomplish it nonetheless. The actual assault on Congress was just one facet of the attempt.
I've watched the footage of the rallies in the days before January 6. The people who assaulted the capitol were fed a firehose of lies for days and weeks (and actually going back to 2016) about the election which dovetails nicely with your point:
> The point I'm trying to make is that the technology a lot of us work on allows violent lies to spread with unprecedented ease, but there isn't a real way for them to be walked back after they're out in the open.
>here's a very well-reasoned argument to be made by people who are experts in this area
Honestly, this is an amazing essay thanks for sharing. From an anthropological perspective this is exactly what I'm talking about, people wanting to feel like they're at some apex of history. Her arguments amount to "this was a coup attempt because I've redefined what a coup attempt means to fit this specific instance". The entire piece is an exercise in redefining what have long been well understood to be the hallmarks of a Coup actually are. Exaggerated language is throughout the essay, but there's a couple sentences that stand out to me:
>>During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Trump drew Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper out of a White House meeting to follow him for a provocative photo-op in front of a historic church. Paramilitary forces under the president’s command cleared a passage for his group across Lafayette Square.
Summarily debunked[1], but it's one of those enduring memes from this that strikes onlookers as so foul that that any attempt to correct the record is met with discordance and invective. "Paramilitary" forces? The Park Police are now a ... paramilitary force? Let me get my cousin in Montana on the phone, I'm sure he'd love to know this.
>>As in the case of other coup attempts, the president’s actions have put us on the brink of civil war.
Yes, a very "expert" opinion here. "On the brink of civil war", we are.
We're in a situation where we're watching the same film, and seeing two different movies. I don't have anything to blame here but the technology we all help build which allows the narrative to be manipulated like this in real time, with no meaningful way to update.
> Her arguments amount to "this was a coup attempt because I've redefined what a coup attempt means to fit this specific instance".
No, its a classic autocoup (self-coup) attempt. Executive leader directs loyalists against another government power center for the purpose of either extending term beyond what has been secured through the regular process or seizing additional unauthorized powers in the existing term. It wasn't even covert, they were literally overtly directed to go to Congress for that end.
Now, was it a poorly planned, uncoordinated, sloppily executed, and ultimately failure of an autocoup attempt? Sure, but that doesn't make it not a coup attempt.
> Everyone can keep saying this, but if the "autocoup" is so plainly obvious then why hasn't a single person been charged with a relevant crime?
Dozens of people have been charged, and a founding lifetime member of the Oath Keepers has plead guilty, to relevant crimes, to wit, unlawfully entering the Capitol with the intent to influece, obstruct, and/or interfere with the electoral vote count, and/or conspiring to do so.
Its not like “attempt or conspiracy to effect an autocoup” is a separate offense under the US Code.
Is there a particular charge that has been levied against someone that is relevant to the "autocoup" that you think happened? I mean, beyond trespassing of course.
The idea that "trespassing" into the Capital is something you can charge against the citizens of a democratic country, and not an Imperial Empire, is probably a separate question.
She's not inventing a new term, self-coups are well known things that I guess you weren't aware of[1]. You keep citing Glenn Greenwald as if he still has some credibility left with people outside of Tucker Carlson's core viewers. His tortured analysis of the IG report has some major (and given Greenwald's courting of right-wing news consumers for the past few years, likely intentional) holes[2].
> The new IG report is being used by some Trump supporters and anti-anti-Trumpers to revisit coverage of that sort and argue that it unfairly assigned blame to Trump. While some mainstream outlets have misleadingly suggested the new IG report proves Trump didn’t order protesters to be cleared out, Trump supporters have gone even further and have used it to try to discredit the media in general.
> ...However, the operation to clear Lafayette Square involved numerous other law enforcement agencies, including Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). And the report makes clear that the various agencies involved in the chaos that unfolded outside the White House that day were not always in radio communication with one another — and overall were certainly not on the same page.
> Notably, as lawyer Luppe Luppen highlighted on Twitter, the IG report indicates that Secret Service officers on the scene — who were aware of USPP’s operational plan — escalated the situation by using pepper spray against protesters, and by doing so before USPP officers had a chance to give demonstrators any warnings to disperse. The report says a Secret Service official later apologized to USPP officials for the incident, but didn’t explain why it happened.
Yes, but what you've seen is a sampling of the hours and hours of video from that day that has not been released.
So you don't really know what's on the rest of that video and why it has not been released. What we do know that some of the main participants and organizers have not been charged, while some of the 500 others that had very minor roles are facing harsh charges, and were denied bail.
It makes sense not to charge the main characters, only if some of those people most combative and leading the charge, were in fact FBI informants, as has been alleged on the house floor. Subversion of a political movement, to discredit the movement by the government is a common tactic. Just hasn't been seen in the US before, other than maybe during the civil right movement.
That's possible, he is a politician after all.
However, here's a civil rights lawyer's take on it and seems to echo this:
https://youtu.be/1Ozbqjv0xw4?t=937
Is it not because they are still building the cases? Also that guy tried to overturn the election in late December so could he as well not be a agent provocateur? Trying to rile up members of the republican party against the newly elected president.
What should we do about this terrorist? Put her on the Board of Directory of Thousand Currents, sponsor of the Black Lives Matter movement, of course. Oh hold on, Snopes protests..."In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism." But everybody who protested in Jan. 6th is a "terrorist" correct?
How about Bill Ayers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers, with his Bombing...ahem..."activism" as Wikipedia calls it? In 1971 Bill Ayers bombs the US Capitol building. What happens to him? Why he is deeply associated with community leader cum President Barack Obama for decades. Let's make him an esteemed Professor at the University of Chicago for his crimes...
Now January 6. Perhaps your eyes & ears can tell me who died during the protest? Oh yeah, Ashli Babbitt who was shot by a police office despite not attacking anybody or presenting any imminent danger. Did she really deserve to be shot? Is this "justice", where the punishment depends on politics?
Sure, how justice is served does depend on politics, but should it be this way?
>The only teaching necessary is some history: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
The one person who died violently in the "sack" was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
>Taught? We don't need anyone to teach what happened, it was on national television. We have perfectly good eyes and ears.
Let me guess: You "saw" a police officer being hit by a fire extinguisher, right?
The one difference between what happened at the Capitol that day and the attempted assault on the White House during the George Floyd riots (serious enough for the Secret Service to take Trump to a secure bunker) was that the former was allowed to enter its target.
Because the poster is doing a textbook strawman argument, probably.
Original point: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
Response (paraphrased): So?, only one person died violently, [various unrelated distraction arguments attacking claims not made]
This poster also advances the controversial (I'd call it a howler) claim that 'the former was allowed to enter its target' as if the Capitol Police intended for a sack of the Capitol to happen. Most people find these arguments downright offensive.
> as if the Capitol Police intended for a sack of the Capitol to happen
For the past year, I've been hearing about how police often times help right-wing protestors. Now I'm being told they never do and such a suggestion is offensive. Which is it?
Anyway, if this is about sacking the Capitol, then why bring up the Civil War. In that case, Jan 6 would be the worst thing since the War of 1812, not the Civil War. Since apparently simply protesting in unauthorized areas of capitol buildings (like has happened countless times before Jan 6 since 2016 and before[1]) is basically equivalent to sacking DC. This is why I think there's hyperbole.
[1] and there have been several bombings as well, orchestrated by people who are now well-accepted as political pundits in the mainstream, such as Bill Ayers and Susan Rosenberg. In fact, the current DA of San Francisco is the adopted son of Bill Ayers and the bio son of a convicted terrorist and doesn't believe his bio dad did anything wrong. We accept such terrorism as completely mainstream. Any attempt to question is met with accusations of racism or hyperbole. This is ridiculous. It seems as if only one capitol riot is ever seen as meriting such strong condemnation, despite the constant barrage of attacks on the capitol for many years that have occured with impunity [2] [3].
>Original point: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
I was unaware that the Capitol had been torched after being emptied of its treasures and nubile women, as opposed to being invaded by morons who were more focused on taking selfies than sacking.
>Response (paraphrased): So?, only one person died violently, [various unrelated distraction arguments attacking claims not made]
You and I both know that the media has done a very good job of convincing the public that multiple police officers were killed during the "sack", when (as I said) the only person who died violently was an unarmed rioter.
>This poster also advances the controversial (I'd call it a howler) claim that 'the former was allowed to enter its target' as if the Capitol Police intended for a sack of the Capitol to happen. Most people find these arguments downright offensive.
What else would you call a fully armed force not using armed force to prevent rioters (all but a handful unarmed) from entering a prohibited area? Remember, said rioter who died was killed after force was finally used (better late than never). If the Capitol Police had chosen/been allowed to do so, no rioter would have ever entered the building.
Let me repeat: The only difference between what happened at the Capitol and what almost happened at the White House the preceding June is that the rioters did not get inside in the latter case.
> What else would you call a fully armed force not using armed force to prevent rioters (all but a handful unarmed) from entering a prohibited area?
I've seen no evidence for that 'all but a handful unarmed' claim. I have seen interviews with Capitol Police saying they were afraid to use their firearms because they believed they were massively outgunned and would be killed if a serious gunfight broke out.
Even allowing for that hypothetical though, the allegedly unarmed mob a massive tactical advantage[1]:
> “We weren’t battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel,” he said in the first public account from D.C. police officers who fought to protect the Capitol during last week’s siege. “We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene.”
> Rioters swarmed, battering the officers with metal pipes peeled from scaffolding and a pole with an American flag attached, police said. Both were struck with stun guns. Fanone suffered a mild heart attack and drifted in and out of consciousness.
> All the while, the mob was chanting “U.S.A.” over and over and over again.
> “We got one! We got one!” Fanone said he heard rioters shout. “Kill him with his own gun!”
> The main exception was Jan 6, which we've been taught to believe is apparently worse than the civil war.
I’ve only seen that claim made in very narrow contexts (e.g., insurrectionists actually occupying the Capitol), in which it was central to the context of the comparison with the Civil War on the narrow dimension that it was universally understood that the Civil War was generally worse.
Also seen some “not since the Civil War” comparisons (e.g., billeting troops in the Capitol for its security), but those aren't even narrow-dimension “worse than” comparisons.
> The main exception was Jan 6, which we've been taught to believe is apparently worse than the civil war.
People died. The insurgents erected gallows and carried plastic handcuff-strips.
They were flying the Confederate flag INSIDE the US Capitol. That didn't even happen during the Civil War.
They tried to interfere with the appointment of the president.
And worst of all, the response by the national guard was delayed, and the Capitol police force's equipment was limited, by order of the DOJ Barr, who is appointed by the losing president.
This WAS the worst incident, since the Civil War, not perpetrated by foreigners.
No need 'to teach' anyone that fact. It was apparent and visible to everyone who isn't a part of the Trump cult.
> Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade
Really? A lot of stuff they leaked wasn't even that damaging, like Hillary's emails, because it just showed that the DNC wasn't really up to anything. But they made sure to release them at the most politically damaging moment possible. While they sit on other documents for years.
> The special counsel’s office determined that hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta were transmitted from a Russian-government proxy, Guccifer 2.0, to WikiLeaks on July 14, 2016.
> The report does not resolve the question of coordination between the campaign and WikiLeaks’ timed release of hacked emails from Podesta. The report does note, however, that the hacked emails were released on Oct. 7, the same day as the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump was heard making vulgar boasts about women.
> The report adds “the release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.”
Context is needed: Assange was the darling of the Dems until they won the presidency and started getting hit with leaks via Wikileaks too. So yeah, political affiliation does count, on the part of the Dems. And no, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Neo from the Matrix shows up with actual information in real life, and thousands of Agent Smiths fall all over themselves trying to explain to each other why they have just cause to murder him.
Unfortunately analogies to The Matrix abound in the US these days. Most people get their information from 6 mainstream media corporations that were left(down from 50) after the 1996 Telecommunications Act eliminated restrictions on monopolies in media. That's 6 billionaires determining what everyone gets as news. So yeah, welcome to the matrix: red pill or blue?
Huh? DWS got forced out because she was a shit DNC chairman who couldn't keep her foot out of her mouth and then started chewing.
And, personally, I don't give a damn if the DNC was hostile to an avowed independent. Bernie was a carpetbagger. I like Bernie, but the Democrats treated him far better than I expected.
I am interested in hearing more about about how "Bernie was a carpetbagger" if you don't mind.
I really liked him, but I do also see how he was a thread to the Democrats winning in both 2016, and 2020. So I have mixed feeling about what the DNC did.
I have no idea what you mean you when you say carpetbagger and am legitimately curious to hear your perspective.
The DNC didn't really do anything. Staff talked outside of school about him but that's it. Bernie was never a player in the Democratic Party, as he just caucuses with them, wasn't a fundraiser, and didn't stump for many other politicians in the party. He ran for the D nomination and lost by millions of votes. He didn't appeal to as many people in the primaries as HRC and he lost.
Not the parent but Sanders wasn't a member of the Democratic Party yet he attempted to be nominated on the Democratic ticket with the goal of taking over the Democratic apparatus. After losing the nomination he went right back to not being a Democrat and acting like an outsider. I think that's what's meant by calling him a carpetbagger.
Yeah but what portion of what Assange has done is illegal? Being a liar and yellow journalist is not illegal, however unethical or even immoral.
On the one hand we have an innocuous, as in inconsequential character, Putin suck up who will probably go to prison forever. On the other hand, a consequential character, who groveled so magnificently in public, debased himself and his entire nation, continues to get accolades by 1/3 of that nation, who even think he'll be reinstalled as president come this August.
One of these things is pathetic, the other is a significant mass delusion. How can it be surprising that rank and file Republicans don't recognize Assange as a liar? They have consistently lacked or repressed the basic character assessment skills to identify and avoid empowering liars, grifters, and groveling toward dictators.
It's quite bizarre and outside the realm of politics in my view. It's some kind of macro psychological event that has more in common with behavioral economics (just how irrational are people anyway?)
It wasn't just the leaks that was used.. Wikileaks had them timed up to be used by other operations pushing PizzaGate and Seth Rich, along with other similar conspiracies. It is clear that the leaks were done in conjunction to influence the election.
> Assange and WikiLeaks are guilty of participating in Russian attempts to spread disinformation in support of the Russian's agenda at a bare minimum.
What disinformation? They were hacked emails, the contents of which were authentic. Any disinformation involved would be intentional misinterpretation of the emails, which trolls on 4chan did, not Julian Assange or WikiLeaks afaik. Trolls on 4chan should never be taken seriously.
Also, is there any evidence that WikiLeaks had access to GOP hacked emails? You seem to imply it in your comment, but I have not found any sources claiming this is the case from brief Googling.
The biggest, real story exposed in those hacked emails was simply that the DNC was not a neutral party. They were helping Hillary Clinton get nominated, specifically in the case of sharing debate questions with her. Is there a reason this should not have been an important story at the time? I think it actually got a bit drowned out in comparison to all the trolling over Pizzagate. My base assumption is the people who even paid much attention to that story were the subset of Democrats who wanted Bernie to win the nomination.
I guess you'd need to provide something more than a blanket "that's a smear Campaign" in response to a 4 page article with citations of all the connections to Russia and their intelligence agencies.
It's absolutely his own doing though. He targeted Hillary in the 2016 election and supported Trump. Then told everyone the DNC leak came from Seth Rich. He is absolutely not a good person or an ethical journalist regardless of whether or not he's guilty of any crimes.
> One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption
No, they became a partisan issue because Putin's intelligence apparatus took control of WikiLeaks
> One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party.
This is because Wikileaks is objectively partisan. Do you recall the leaked conversations between Trump Jr and Wikileaks where they suggest coordinating a controlled "leak" of Trump's tax returns in order to bolster their own credibility?
In wikileak's own words: "if we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality".
This doesn't invalidate the content of the leaked e-mails, but it does demonstrate that their goals were partisan in nature.
I think it's hard to tell whether Wikileaks was a convenient patsy in this process being played to the best advantage of one side (likely the Russians) over others, or whether they actively played along either because of partisan bias or because they hoped to get more dirt to publish.
The thing is we all used to love WL for their active transparency and independence, but when they started playing these games (or allowing themselves to be played) they lost that respect
There are a lot of us who don't consider Assange a journalist, but some foreign actor with a website collecting and publishing secrets to injure the enemies of Russia. To call him "the most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade" is frankly laughable.
I'm not sure how you can claim the charges are fictitious unless you haven't read them. The charging document for the superseding indictment is fairly straightforward and relatively short. What problems do you have with it?
As it is possible to be biased and misleading while still only saying true things, I think it’s possible to be both "the most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade"[0] and “foreign actor with a website collecting and publishing secrets to injure the enemies of Russia”.
Likewise, I am of the opinion that the attempted extradition and prosecution for the sex offences would not have happened if he hadn’t upset the wrong people, while also being of the opinion that he did the crimes.
[0] That’s said, I wouldn’t describe him that way. Plenty of other journalists doing fine work.
> they exposed corruption in your favorite political party.
No, that would have been fine. The problem is that Assange himself is clearly partisan. I doubt they would have leaked anything damaging to Trump. There are chat logs attesting to the fact that they timed the leaks to influence the election.
Murky secretive organizations can't be trusted, period. It doesn't matter what they are or whether they are "alternative" or "mainstream." I don't see why I should trust Wikileaks any more than I trust the CIA or the FSB. There's no transparency. I have no way of knowing if Assange has an agenda or what that agenda might be.
We need an entirely algorithmic / protocol driven leaker platform that verifiably removes human beings from the loop or at least chains their hands when it comes to when to leak things and whether to leak them.
(For the record I am not a fan of either of the 2016 candidates. They were both awful, but Trump was worse largely because of the ideological fascists that surrounded and backed him. Trump himself is not ideological, just a power hungry narcissist who will ride whatever horse will take him further.)
I find it curious that this line of thinking has only recently cropped up. Assange and by extension WikiLeaks has literally never claimed that they weren't partisans. Their whole mission statement is basically leaking things when they would make the biggest impact, and they've pretty much always done their big info dumps at opportune times when they would make the biggest noise. Should they have waited on the emails until after the election? Why? Why does it matter who or what Assange sides with, if the things he releases are 100% true?
I don't remember seeing these same criticisms back in 2010 during the cable leaks, curious that this is only an issue now, after the light is being shined on the democrats rather than the republicans for a change...
The really startling thing is ... considering how effective this technique is with the internet it must have been nearly flawless prior to about 2015 when most of the world didn't have access to the internet.
What we're seeing isn't so much an elite group controlling the narrative as an elite group who used to be able to control the narrative and now can't patch over the rough spots.
Assuming that the Internet only became significantly effective in media when direct acceess to it exceeded 50% of the global population ... makes little sense. It needen't even be considered where 50% of, say, advanced media markets have Internet access.
What's necessary is for Internet connectivity to be high enough that other media gatekeepers are ineffective, and that's a threshold which was all but certainly crossed somewhere between the 1990s and early 2000s. With other nontraditional media channels (samizdat printing presses, pirate radio, 'Zine culture, and the like), there were pretty big holes in the mainstream media monopoly even earlier, though perhaps not quite at mass media level.
(Interestingly, if you go further back, there was enough diversity in mainstream media that a single unitary media culture didn't exist. It's helpful to realise that this mass-media culture was a largely novel development of the 1950s, much commented on at the time.)
That said: media control, expressed as the ability to promote and suppress specific narratives, is as old as speech. Methods exist and have varied, but distraction, taboo, blacklisting, and access control (that is, denying personal access to reporters or publications which don't toe the official or blessed line) are key mechanisms.
In today's mobile social Internet age, distraction, trust attacks, firehose, and that old classic, the Big Lie, are still effective methods of media control.
It's not an elite group, it's a character in the collective unconscious. Or to put it another way it's a stable set of interacting memes that tilt the conversation based upon their preferences.
Let's not kid ourselves, outside of a vanishingly small minority of people who consume independent or leftist media this is not a story. The rough spots are still only rough at a microscopic scale.
2015? In the big picture there's hardly any difference in active internet users in the countries involved compared to today. In Scandinavia in 2015 it was already at around 96% and I'm guessing UK and US wasn't that far behind.
Edit: Looked it up. UK was close to those numbers in 2015 too. The US was far behind though. But that hasn't changed much since so it doesn't really matter in this context.
I don't think Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson is a "key witness" in the claims against Assange. He might be A witness, but I very much doubt the charges rely on his testimony. As far as the media goes, most people don't care about Assange as much as the conspiracy crowd. And some of the comments here are verging on very conspiratorial.
What makes you say that? He was used to strengthen the US case late into the proceedings. The UK judge, while refusing extradition on humantiarian grounds, sided with the US based in part on his testimony:
> The Stundin article continued:
> ‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.
The main charges are related to Chelsea Manning. This was a charge for hacking in Iceland completely unrelated to that. That charge could be completely removed from the case and he would still be on trial for the other charges.
> That charge could be completely removed from the case and he would still be on trial for the other charges.
That charge was completely absent from the case until the US decided it needed to strengthen its case and added it last-minute. So clearly they disagree with you, otherwise they would have kept it out (knowing the background of the individual involved). And again, why would the judge refer to it specifically in siding with the US if it were so unimportant?
I agree, coverage of the Assange case is more sporadic now but a quick search of the NYT website shows they wrote about this indictment June 12th. It's no secret. If there's something to this new claim it may be in their next article about it, they seem to get back to Assange once a month or so.
I find it hard to believe the media would be silent if similar revelations came to light about anyone else.
I agree with Media Lens:
> in a sane world, Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness – that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from prosecution – would have been headline news everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian and more. The silence is quite extraordinary; and disturbing.
You are implying this is a major story… it isn’t. If Assange were actually standing trial, that’s interesting. Hearing more random court proceedings of a very bizarre 10 year fiasco is not.
Everybody is a critic of what the MSM is covering. They cover what is interesting. It isn’t a giant conspiracy to explain their behavior.
> Yes in an American court, they are the ones charging him with these crimes.
Yes, the USA is charging him. It would be very odd for extradition hearings on US federal charges to be heard in a US court, and, in fact, these are not. Assange is not on trial, and the process he is currently undergoing in is not in an American court, though there are charges pending that he would face in a US court if that process completes as the US prefers.
I can see you arguing that that's not important, but falsely denying the assertion that its not in a US court is...I mean, what's even the point?
Assange is set to face trial in a US court, and that is the only reason he is facing extradition.
> I can see you arguing that that's not important, but falsely denying the assertion that its not in a US court is...I mean, what's even the point?
I am arguing that it is important and view the extradition hearing as part of his larger US trial. His trial for skipping bail in the UK is long over, the only trial left is the US one.
> I am arguing that it is important and view the extradition hearing as part of his larger US trial.
The extradition hearing is factually not part of his US trial.
> the only trial left is the US one.
The US charges are the only ones that he is currently known to be facing a potential future trial for, sure. But “potential future” and “actual current” are not the same thing.
The first step of the trial was for charges to be filed. The next part was using those charges to request his extradition. At this point you could say the extradition hearing is not a part of his trial, but it is only happening because of the trial and the US is the reason he is in prison currently.
I'd write this off as weird pedantry but you're accusing me of lying for some reason.
This entire conversation would be much more productive if you did more than just say I'm wrong or lying.
All of this seems like parts of the pretrial layed out by the US constitutional criminal procedure. I guess you could distinguish trial from pretrial, but if that was your point you really could have just stated that right away.
It doesn't matter whether it's the "first" step or an "early" step. It doesn't matter if the entire process is being summed up as "trial", even though parts of the process are not technically part of the trail.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. It poisons the ecosystem here, and it discredits your view. The latter is especially pernicious if your view happens to be the right one, because then you're also discrediting the truth, which harms everybody (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Edit: yikes, you've been breaking the site guidelines a ton lately. When accounts are primarily using HN for ideological or political battle, we ban them; also when they're mostly posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments; and you've been doing both of these things. That's not cool. We've also had to warn you several times about this in the past. I don't want to ban you because you've posted good and relevant comments in the past, but if you don't stop this pattern, we're definitely going to have to. Please stop this pattern.
Assange was an interesting story with him trapped in the embassy and his cat pooping but now it consists of more mundane legal proceedings. One is a made for TV spy thriller. The other is discussion of paperwork.
>>> Edward Snowden said: "This is the end of the case against Julian Assange."
>> What does Snowden know? He's not a lawyer of any sort.
> He is broadly considered a generic authority based on his long, deep thinking and publications about leaks and legal consequences.
Maybe so, but I wouldn't hire him as my lawyer or rely on his judgements about when a legal case will fail.
It's the difference between thinking about the consequences of a technology and building/operating that technology. For instance, someone might be an expert on the pernicious social effects of Facebook, but would flame out if they actually worked as a developer there. Snowden more than likely doesn't have the technical knowledge of the British legal system for him to reliably tell the difference between a major and minor development, let alone make trustworthy prediction about the future outcome of the whole thing.
Please don't cross into personal attack. Disingenuous is a fancy way of saying liar, which implies intent to deceive. That's not a legit move in forum discussions where you can't know the other person's intent. Please make your substantive points without that.
>> the NYT website shows they wrote about this indictment June 12th. It's no secret.
> "These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin."
> Has the NYT covered them?
I think the point is that the Assange story isn't that important or interesting anymore, so they don't breathlessly cover every development like some corners of the internet want to (and sometimes interpret the lack of breathless coverage as some kind of conspiracy).
Do you realize that it's not hyperbole to say press freedom in the United States hinges on this case? American journalists have always been protected from prosecution for publishing factual information. If Assange is convicted, he will be the first. That would fundamentally change freedom of the press in the US.
Assange isn't a US citizen. He's not charged with publishing the information but soliciting and attempting to assist in the exfiltration of the information.
What Manning did was illegal whether you agree with her motivations or not. Soliciting someone with clearance to leak information and assisting them in the process is also illegal. It doesn't matter if Assange's assistance was effective or not.
If all Assange did was publish information Manning brought to him, there would likely be no charges and they'd be easily dismissed otherwise. He'd have been clearly acting in the role as a journalist. But that's not what happened.
Assange wants to be considered a journalist (with its protections) while at the same time playing spymaster and hacker.
Sorry but you're not correct. Here's [0] the law he's being charged of violating. You'll notice that intent is the crux of the disclosure subsections he's being charged under. He's being charged with publishing the information he received with the intent to do harm to the US. That's what the prosecution will argue and his defense for those charges will be entirely about intent.
Independently intent would be a difficult thing to prove but his public actions and the conspiracy charges with will be used to establish intent. Like I said, he wants to claim all of the protections of journalism while he's acting as a spymaster.
I don't really think it's possible to claim (objectively) any of Assange's actions with Wikileaks could be considered journalism. Besides not really practicing anything that might be considered journalism he also exercised a lot of editorial control in what Wikileaks didn't or wouldn't publish.
You previously claimed he's charged with "soliciting and attempting to assist in the exfiltration of the information", "not with publishing". I fail to see how arguing intent invalidates one without the other. I copied and pasted the charges from the indictment, which can be found at the bottom of the page I linked.
It's okay when CIA convinces some non-US citizen to become an agent and provide secrets from their government. All governments do this. Somehow it's different in Assange's case because he is not government entity.
> It's okay when CIA convinces some non-US citizen to become an agent and provide secrets from their government. All governments do this. Somehow it's different in Assange's case because he is not government entity.
It's pretty standard to be friendly to people who spy for you, and hostile to those who spy against you. If the FBI catches a Russian spy who doesn't have diplomatic cover, that person is going to get prosecuted (and if they do have cover they'll become persona non grata and expelled); ditto if the Russians catch an American spy.
Replying to myself because the two replies apparently missed the distinction between the entity doing the "coercion" (Assange/CIA) and the entity doing the spying (the agent, or Manning in this case). Nobody prosecutes the CIA/GRU/PRC for coercing others to spy.
> Nobody prosecutes the CIA/GRU/PRC for coercing others to spy.
Except for expulsion of diplomats, arrests of agents, sanctions against government officials, indictments for officials and agents, and of course war.
Besides all of those things that happen all the time nobody prosecutes spy agencies. eyeroll
Assange is a self-styled spymaster that's not actually very good at the job. Spies that go around advertising their spying and bragging about conspiracies of which they are a part are not good spies.
All governments do that but those agents are persecuted when they're caught by the targeted government. If the spymaster is also caught they'll also be persecuted under the target country's laws unless they have some sort of diplomatic cover from their own government.
> Do you realize that it's not hyperbole to say press freedom in the United States hinges on this case?
If that were actually the case, I'd expect the kind of breathless coverage from the rest of the press that Assange's fans are clamoring for. So it's either...
1. there's a conspiracy afoot, and the press (as a whole) is deliberately coordinating amongst themselves to suppress this significant development, because they're all in the pocket of... etc., etc.;
2. the mainstream press are all dumbasses who don't know the difference between their head and a hole in the ground; or...
3. it is hyperbole to say press freedom in the United States hinges on this case.
My bet is with the latter. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the far safer bet.
Personally, I've long since stopped expecting breathless coverage of important events from a press that collectively prefers covering who Miley Cyrus most recently flashed her crotch to. You'll need to go beyond CNN, MSNBC, or FOX.
“For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration's attacks on journalism, and a direct assault on the First Amendment. It establishes a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets. And it is equally dangerous for U.S. journalists who uncover the secrets of other nations. If the US can prosecute a foreign publisher for violating our secrecy laws, there’s nothing preventing China, or Russia, from doing the same.”
"Don’t let the misdirection around “blown informants” fool you—this case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity."
"The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom. The Trump DOJ is exploiting animosity toward Assange to launch a thinly disguised effort to criminalize core functions of investigative journalism."
>Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.
That he is in any way involved with the case on the US govt side is extremely unsettling. Especially if he were given immunity child rape for any testimony.
There are two schools of thought. There are those that think Assange is a hero or a martyr to a surveillance state and those that think little if anything about him.
I've said this before: Assange dabbled in espionage without a Nation-State backer and is experiencing the repercussions of that gamble. Right or wrong the realpolitik is what Assange is living now.
Yes, and someone who's followed the case pretty closely agrees with you:
> Except, Siggi retracts nothing substantive that is alleged in the indictment, so this drama is instead a demand that you accept the word of a liar rather than read the documents to show that the liar’s claims are irrelevant to the charges against Assange.
This analysis fails to make the case that having a witness recant is irrelevant. It is also full of nonsense hyperbole, as though it were written by a very passionate person who does not command faculties of reasoning.
If this happened to Trump it would be on all of the right wing news channels for a full news cycle and used to discredit all investigations/charges against him.
Different people have different levels of access to ensuring media coverage, in part because of biases in those media outlets.
Casually thrown into the article is this rather startling claim:
> Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks.
Is these any evidence backing up this claim of what would essentially be an act of (cyber)war against a NATO ally?
When it comes to Five Eyes, which one of the five actually executes an action is somewhat secondary. They plan and share the intel together, formally or informally (depending on legality).
As much as they definitely could be doing that I doubt they automatically share every single operation. It's not clear what the target was in Belgium or who wanted it done.
The Stundin article they are quoting has the source, it's
Ögmundur Jónasson, who was Iceland's minister of interior at the time.
Also ... maybe there is a problem with censored news in the US. Because outside the US mainstream media reporting on the latest "US intelligence caught spying on everyone again" is as common as the latest "Russia caught mistreating dissident artist" story.
I can't find that. Here's what I think you're citing as the relevant passage from Stundin:
> Thus, when Thordarson continued his previous pattern of requesting attacks on Icelandic interests, the FBI knew and saw an opportunity to implicate Julian Assange.
> Later that month a DDoS attack was performed against the websites of several government institutions.
> That deed was done under the watchful eyes of the FBI who must have authorized the attack or even initiated it, as Sabu was at that point their man. What followed was an episode where it seems obvious that Icelandic authorities were fooled into cooperation under false pretenses.
That's not saying the FBI attacked Iceland at all, it's saying THORDARSON was "asking" for attacks (From... other wikileaks-affiliated folks? That isn't clear to me). And it's just inferring without other evidence that the FBI must have known because they were working both Thordarson and Sabu as sources.
I mean, maybe the FBI did know. But it's not substantiated that they did, at all. And it's certainly not substantiated that they were "complicit" in those attacks as Media Lens reports.
Gotta say, that one word makes me question a ton more about this article. That's just not a minor mistake, someone is spinning hard here. What else is spun?
Sabu should have been detained and on trial at that point, the FBI is thus complicit in any illegal acts he does as they are the reason he had the opportunity. Even if the FBI was not aware of the action, their agent was responsible for it happening.
The U.S. does sort of have a habit of treating NATO allies as such publicly while privately violating their sovereignty and treating them as vassal states or something so I wouldn’t really be surprised. There are regularly stories of us getting caught spying on allies etc
Not a popular opinion but I think most countries at this time are vassal states of the US, China or Russia. That power is wielded in different ways by each and with different levels of openness but I think its true.
Perhaps this wasn't covered by the American media, but PRISM didn't just target American citizens. In most of the world, especially in "allied" nations, the controversy was about America spying on their supposed allies, especially Merkel's phone, much more than it was about some known-shady government agency monitoring phone calls.
An FBI DDoS against the USA's allies is nothing out of the ordinary. Russia, the EU, the USA, everyone is waging cyberwar against each other. Nobody wins if actual, physical, violent war is declared, so nobody admits anything.
When it comes to national security, America is not an ally that can be trusted. Just look at the sabotage the US government is applying to the European gas pipeline to Russia; afraid of losing control over the European power market, the US government is doing everything in its power to stop its allies letting them make their own decisions about the power grid when it doesn't benefit themselves. I'm no fan of Russia, its government, and I'm not exactly happy with the added influence Moscow gains over Europe with this project, but America's actions show that their government is just as bad when it comes to national sovereignty of its allies.
For many western countries, America doesn't need to very trustworthy or reliable; the bar is "better than trusting Russia or China", and that's a pretty damn low bar to set. Many of these countries are no better themselves, of course, and they would do the exact same thing if they'd have the power and influence the American government has.
Every large-enough political protest in USA since the creation of FBI has been well-attended either by FBI agents themselves or by CIs in their employ. Infiltration of groups who posed a "threat" to the status quo was one of JEH's priorities.
Of course you're right, though. This isn't OK, and on balance FBI is like any other federal TLA. The average citizen will be better off on the day they are disbanded.
> The average citizen will be better off on the day they are disbanded.
I’m not sure about this. Can you provide some more info? The FBI isn’t perfect but I don’t think they are a net negative. The FBI does lots of good stuff like investigate Ferguson, MO and other corrupt local police departments.
That investigation was a good thing. Definitely not something that could have been performed by the governments of Ferguson, St Louis County, or Missouri. I'm not convinced that FBI is the only federal body that could have performed that investigation, however. Considering FBI's animus for Black Lives Matter [0] (and, frankly, for every civil rights organization in USA history), it's hard to believe that all of them have their hearts in the right place.
What other federal body has jurisdiction? The reason the FBI investigated is because the city, county, and state weren’t.
No one is claiming that all of the FBI “have their hearts in the right place.” I’m just refuting your statement that the average person in the US would be better off without them.
Any other part of the Justice Dept. could have done it. Perhaps the Civil Rights Division? You can't use the current organizational structure to "refute" anything. I'm proposing changes to that structure.
This reminds me of the arguments for bank bailouts. There are lots of capable police and investigators in USA. Most of them don't work for FBI. Some of them who do work for FBI would do better work in a better organization. FBI isn't the only authority focused on crime. Other authorities could take over more duties, or new authorities could be created. It's fine for things to change occasionally, especially when toxic organizations are replaced by something better.
And please, it's not as though FBI really focuses on the two concerns you highlighted.
It's discussed quite a bit in Manufacturing Consent, with many many examples given - in those days, the U.S. war with Iraq featuring prominently in examples of how broadcast and print media behaved.
There are actually at least two persons who downvoted you because I upvoted the comment above and I see you are still in grey :-D
Complaining about downvotes is however not OK here according to the rules.
Sometimes when I am really confused I ask politely why something I wrote was downvoted, but more importantly I got used to it and get over it. In fact I wonder if I have collected most downvotes (and later upvotes) on my most important comments :-)
It's strange - I'm OK being downvoted if I have a poor argument, am mean (and I'm not), or make a factual mistake.
People vote based on whether they agree or disagree with a political opinion (and is mentioning Manufacturing Consent so partisan in the first place?). I tend to upvote or downvote based on argument strength even if I disagree or agree with the generalized point of view.
That's my philosophy. So it makes me slightly bitter when people downvote 'just because.'
Keep in mind this is just my opinion, not a statement of fact, as I do not have any inside details.
The notion of neutral or unbiased media is a little strange IMHO; they're a for profit corporation, for one. The media has an agenda and it's usually to please the particular political party they favor.
In this specific scenario, I don't think it's too hard to identify. Assange embarrassed key members of a certain American political party and likely cost them an entire election. It's one of those scenarios where if you don't conform you will be silenced.
> Assange embarrassed key members of a certain American political party and likely cost them an entire election
Other people embarrass the GOP on a daily basis and they have daily nightly TV news shows.
If you mean the other political party - they have a habit of losing elections because they don't fight dirty..., so I just don't see how that's a coherent argument.
Now, if you're referring to _the establishment_, that's different - and it's not a political party _per se_.
They literally fabricated an entire narrative about Russian collusion out of thin air and pushed it for years despite having little to no evidence. I wouldn’t say they don’t play dirty just because they’ve lost more than they’ve won since 1980
Not out of thin air. A Russian funded group leaked confidential information after a presidential candidate requested them to at a rally. It's worth investigating.
If you're being consistent, you must believe that the (Republican-led) Senate Intelligence Committee also fabricated a narrative when they wrote in their report:
"It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era."
Yeah they pretty much did. The idea that purchasing Facebook ads & social media bots represents “one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security” is absurd.
Maybe there was more going on than "purchasing Facebook ads & social media bots", as evidenced by the fact that multiple members of Trump's campaign and (separately) Russian intelligence agents were indicted for conspiracy in 2017 and 2018.
Papadopoulos fucked up and lied to the FBI which by itself is a felony. That’s all he got caught up in, because nothing else he did was illegal. Manafort was arrested for unrelated financial crimes in an attempt to get him to cooperate in their investigation, which apparently led them nowhere. That’s not much of evidence of anything. Then yes there were indictments of some Russian nationals & organizations, most of which were quickly dropped bc it was just political theater. The stuff that wasn’t was really just unsubstantiated allegations that GRU was responsible for hacking the DNC.
But now, let’s look at what was done with the Steele Dossier before the election was even over. That was itself based largely on “Russian disinformation” and was used to obtain a FISA warrant and spy on the Trump campaign. It was obviously a garbage document from day 1, but they used it to “legally” spy on their political opponents anyways. That is imo far worse than anything that happened between Trump & Russia.
For the record I’m not a Trump supporter either and I am generally left leaning, but it’s clear to me that media & intelligence agencies really cannot be trusted as a result of the blatant lies they have pushed over the last few years. Just because I want universal healthcare etc doesn’t mean I need to repeat “2 + 2 = 5” because some jerk off on TV told me to.
a simpler explanation would be that many people simply don't care that much about the Assange case at the moment, and this is just a development or such, nothing conclusive. were the case to be completely dropped in court due to this, I think it would make the news.
Isn't that arguing that MSM report what people want to know as opposed to people knowing what the MSM report? It's hard to know about something MSM doesn't report.
> Isn't that arguing that MSM report what people want to know as opposed to people knowing what the MSM report?
What's particularly interesting about the Assange case at this point? He's a guy in an extradition hearing, probably like thousands of others. If the end result is the extradition is rejected because of this detail, then it will more than likely be reported as part of that larger story.
Assange has a small but vocal fan base, but fans don't make the minutiae of these court proceedings interesting or relevant to non-fans.
Also he testified to one thing, waited for the case to be closed, then said something else to the media. His media statements could easily be self serving (I have no idea what his motivations are) as they are not under oath they have no bearing on the case. The case which was already adjudicated in Assange's favor. It's entirely moot.
Nobody cared until the media made them care in the first place, to build anti-Wikileaks and anti-Assange sentiment. Awful convenient that they stop talking about him the moment there’s concrete evidence that the whole thing was a setup.
> Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks. In reality, the approach was a ruse to fool Iceland into cooperation in an attempt to entrap Assange.
> the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks
What's really stunning that this statement does not seem like just a wildly crazy accusation.
I'm a Canadian and the CIA has literally kidnapped innocent people off the streets of my city and tortured them to insanity, it's far from the worst that could happen.
It's very difficult to know. Weirdly, while the CIA released a lot of the data about général MKULTRA, no data about the Montréal operations were released. There are certainly even more facets to the program we don't know about.
If you wanted to know, the CIA decided in 1973 to burn all documents about MKULTRA, fearing Watergate would lead to the Church Committee. One cache of documents had been incorrectly stored, which later came to light giving us all we are certain of about the project.
Oh, the Duplessis Orphans are a completely separate and just as tragic catastrophe of Quebec history :(
That said, yes we do actually know about the MKULTRA Montreal Programme, because of testimonies. We just don't know what more there was, and there is certainly more.
An outstanding cover-up. They convinced McGill and the Canadian government to completely shut up and not a single document relating to their actions in Montreal leaked. We don't even know the half of it.
You can see topics trending in right media (this was) and compare to the left media. I tend to send friends of either affinity topics from the other, my own effort to bring people together... or at least understand each other (have the same facts).
The daily mail owned metro is described as "left media" while RT is shoved in the same category as fox news.
They should really categorize by more fine grained biases and allegiances. E.g. WaPo to the US military industrial complex, RT to putin, CNBC to the DNC, Fox to RNC/Rupert Murdoch, BBC to the tories, Metro to lord rothermere.
Any black/white distinction is a joke, for that matter. There's never just two sides to any complex issue, but framing it like that is one of the most powerful ruses in the media (and in politics).
CNBC to the DNC is a fabrication, and a recent one at that. As an outlet focused on US economic news, their traditional bias has always been towards low-tax, low-regulation free market capitalism.
No, corporate consolidation in America isn’t just a coincidence but it is irrelevant to this discussion. Comcast only bought NBCUniversal in 2009.
Roger Ailes, longtime chairman of Fox News, was president of CNBC in the early nineties and is credited with making the network successful. I don’t think it’s possible to watch CNBC hosts (and guests) praise Bush-era economic policies for a decade and come away thinking they’re Democratic mouthpieces.
Even that would be contested though. Fox/FoxNews isn't actually considered all that Republican right now because they aren't fullstop on Trump.
And these categorizations could probably vary wildly. This is the first time I've ever heard of the WaPo being aligned with the US military industrial complex and I was part of that complex for twenty years. I'm guessing this new title is because it's owned by Bezos and he provides a lot of AWS tech?
> This is the first time I've ever heard of the WaPo being aligned with the US military industrial complex
Did you not hear about the US 2003 invasion of Iraq? WaPo news stories in the lead up were certainly aligned with the US military industrial complex. In my memory, the NYT and WaPo (the most important two "liberal" newspapers) both being in support of a republican president invading a third world country is one of the most notable evidences that the MSM is complicit with the government.
Another serious gap in coverage, and response to the revelations, is any hint of discipline for the FBI agents and prosecutors who spun the tissue of lies, or even questions about why there isn't any.
They’ll go full throttle on something like WMDs, border crisis, lab leak cover ups, etc., but also be complicit in burying things like the new border crisis (which appear worse than Trumps) this witness recanting, etc., when it doesn’t fit a narrative.
It’s concerning because there has to be some agenda somewhere for things to switch on and off like this.
Russia is the biggest threat, no, China is the biggest threat. Oh, no Trump said that, they’re not. But now they’re the biggest again.
It’s not “pelosi” it’s not the Congress, it’s most likely what people derisively call the deep state. Unelected bureaucrats with inertial agendas that filter down to the media.
I can’t imagine the media running with this 24x7 to make up for their previous bias and asking for forgiveness and demanding the government come correct.
USA news media has always been biased. They used to be biased toward what would sell more papers, e.g. "Remember the Maine!" They still have that bias to some degree, but the overriding bias now that ownership rules have been scrapped is to report the interests of the five or six rich assholes who own most of our media. Since allied rich assholes control the military-industrial complex, we're constantly told to fear and murder brown people on the other side of the globe. Anyone, like Assange, who offers rational alternatives to that racist fear is sure to be the continual victim of biased reporting.
I'm not sure the media is complicit more-so than they are being manipulated by what they like / need: money; just as US corporations and through them the US government is being manipulated by what they need by China.
We'll let you sell in our market as long as you sign away all your IP is the same as we'll let you in on presidential press meetings as long as you'll say nice things.
Also, all those "anonymous" sources from "intelligence agencies" are information / propaganda plants. The CIA doesn't leak very often unintentionally, when it does, people get tortured (Manning / Assange) and/or exiled (Snowden).
IP is not a natural law. If a country doesn't want to enforce literal state control over your intellectual process or wants to enforce it in a more lax way, there is nothing wrong with that.
>We'll let you sell in our market as long as you sign away all your IP is the same as we'll let you in on presidential press meetings as long as you'll say nice things.
Those are not comparable at all though. One is a law that the US seem to believe is A Good Thing to try to enforce everywhere, but that doesn't make it universally true, while the other is preferential treatment (or corruption, abuse of power). One can be bad (it's not in this example IMO) while the other is always bad.
They are both an example of short term gain at the expense of long term viability based on poor judgement influenced by money.
"The idea behind the trap is that you drill a hole in a log and drop a small shiny object in the hole, then you drive nails into the shaft. The raccoon will see the shiny object at the bottom and want it, so they reach into the hole and grab it, but once they grab it they can’t pull their hand out because the of the nails that make the hole too small for their closed fist to get back through.
It is simple to seek the hole in this plan, why can’t the raccoon just let go of the object and pull their hand out? Billy’s grandpa explains that the strange thing about raccoon are that they are too stubborn to let go of the shiny thing. Once a raccoon decides that it wants something it becomes so determined to have it that it will not stop until it get the thing. So the raccoon will sit there forever until it ether pulls it’s fist out (which it won’t,) or the hunter comes along. Another interesting thing is that raccoons are not the only animals that do this human do this as well."
From what I can tell from the article, this witness testified about hacking MP's. Was this the same witness that said Assange was-- at least attempting-- to provide support to Chelsea Manning hacking passwords?
In the article they talk about right wing propaganda but after admitting the huge amount of resources Obama used to catch Assange, using nefarious means.
It is not the right, it is not the left, it is power. Power (anybody in power) does not like anybody criticizing them. In the US, in China or everywhere in the world.
The US has a big War industry and infrastructure, that is a power on their own. It tells presidents what to do and not the other way.
Witch-hunt by the powerful backed by party of money.
It maybe a partisan issue at the grassroots, but it's not really such in government where the majority of politicians are in the same bubble of silencing dissidents and whistleblowers using any means to the end.
The whole fiasco is a "This is what happens to you... reporters, publishers, and snitches.. when you threaten to expose our lies and our crimes. We invent crimes and murder you slowly."
The only way to prevent this from happening again is to overthrow the powers-that-be because it will keep happening.
The impact of media organizations discrediting and completely debasing themselves over Assange, but also Snowden and a host of other U.S. false issues related to the law enforcement and intelligence community and its contagion into social platforms is what has really cleaved the culture. These are bad people exploiting bad people to ensure that worse people can keep doing terrible things. It's capital-E evil.
Personally I think we could probably trace it back to soviet infiltration of the university education system around the world in the 60's and 70's, which within a lifetime has produced multiple generations of nihilistic bureaucrats trained to seek power for its own sake, and now they occupy our institutions at all levels and have used them to destroy the foundations of the culture and seize its means of production, while subordinating them to a global regime. All without firing a shot. The reason these people believe what they're doing is ok is because someone taught them that the ends justify the means.
The Assange affair is just a symptom of a much more terrible disease, and this witness and the media compliance around him are about par for the course in all of this.
> Personally I think we could probably trace it back to soviet infiltration of the university education system
What, not into our precious bodily fluids[1]?
This is a facile explanation. America’s politics and culture over the last 80 years have first and foremost been a reaction to the perceived threat of the Soviets. There’s no particular reason, especially as the United States remains remarkably conservative for a developed nation, to blame things on a country that’s been gone for over 30 years.
> There’s no particular reason, especially as the United States remains remarkably conservative for a developed nation, to blame things on a country that’s been gone for over 30 years.
The USSR is gone, but the CPSU is alive, and kicking under a new brand, more determined, aggressive leader, and as a highly distilled, more pure mafia than it was before, without even a pretence of behaving like statesmen.
My understanding (which, again, is completely irrelevant to this thread) is that Putin and his party are still in complete control of Russia, at least in all ways that matter. But again, I fail to see what Russia’s myriad dysfunctionalities have to do with the topic at hand.
> I fail to see what Russia’s myriad dysfunctionalities have to do with the topic at hand.
I'll explain. See, the thread starter says that US now reaps the consequences from letting people subverted by soviet idiological subversion into the circles of power.
Then people say its all irrelevant as USSR is no more.
Then, I come here and tell to people to open snap out of this. The former CPSU is not only still around, but is even more aggressive, and concerted at idiological subversion.
Now, they are putting an even bigger priority on melding themselves into American political elites, and bureaucracy.
How many more Hunter Bidens are there waiting to join American political establishment? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
I think this needs clarified, are you be referring to the communist party or United Russia. The communist party has practical no influence outside of Russia and like most opposition parties, little internally either. United Russia is absolutely not Communist, statist yes, communist no.
> I'd say the CPSU is dead, but some of its members who liked power more than communism shifted with the political winds.
What is communism? Peace in the world, and utopia for workers?
Or more like mafia-serfdom-militarist system, where actual proletariat are put lowest of the low, and abused by everybody on the party ladder, and what USSR actually was for most of its history?
The CPSU never, ever cared for one, and even lowest tiers in the party were fully aware of this.
In this, it's true that the communist party of the soviet union never ever been the dictionary definition of communism (which they themselve defined) It was a cynical kratocratic cult without any morals.
I guess the point is "communism" was just a flag of convenience for those people, so it doesn't make sense to call them by that if they don't use that flag anymore, and especially if that flag is now used by others.
According to the excellent book "Putin's people" by Catherine Belton the people who are running the show now were more aligned with the KGB rather than the party.
> more aligned with the KGB rather than the party.
What was "the party?" The party itself been the puppet of:
1. KGB
2. Interior ministry
3. Military
Which were the real power behind it, and essentially were the source of CPSU policy, with ordinary low rank members being mere "shesterkas" errand boys.
So now what was the actual political force running the CPSU is now having an even more direct control of Russia, and without military, and MVD competing with them for power.
The CPSU was never even remotely the puppet of the KGB. The KGB had so little influence in the party that they weren't able to influence it without coups. All of which failed.
I'm not sure you have to keep pointing to the boogie man of soviet infiltrators to explain power hungry bureaucrats. Those have existed in literally every society since at least the early bronze age.
>> Those that will do anything for power have an advantage over others, ergo people at high level positions are disproportionately those types of people.
One thought is that we could try to fix that problem with some type of screening, but that would be another system to game or corrupt. Also, those kind of people (high ambition and drive) can be really useful in those positions so long as they don't go off the rails.
I like the solution from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Elect some random person as president of the galaxy, but don't tell him about it. Just have conversations with him to find out what he thinks about things, but don't let him know that you actually run the galaxy based on these conversations. If power corrupts, make it impossible to seek power, and don't let the person that wields it know that they have it.
This is pretty much how the Shogunate in Japan worked.
Once a single war lord controls the “security” of the Emperor, they then wield power and justify all of there actions based on sole access to the Emperor.
No, those features have also been intrinsic to bureaucrat classes as a whole since the dawn of organized society.
Bueracrats are sort of like neurons in the organism of society. They don't have a lot individual intrisic power, but gain power by moving to common (albeit very complex) beat, and commanding the other types of cells according to the machinations of that emergent beat. That manifests as both groupthink as they attempt to play their part in the neural system as a whole, and "ends justify the means" mentality as they look at the rest of us as other specialized cells that exist to serve the societal organism as a whole.
I guarantee you that on average a 15th century BCE Egyptian bureaucrat trended the same way, as it's core to the space.
Devil is in the details and I also guarantee you there are important differences between how western bureaucrats operate and how they operate in USSR/elsewhere despite any commonalities that can be drawn.
I've never said there weren't differences. Only that the specific aspects being pointed out in this thread as signs of continuing soviet corruption of American values are actually aspects of bureaucracy as a whole older than recorded history.
There's a difference between operating within the constructs of power and having a reductionist worldview of power. The 2nd one is more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> I'm not sure you have to keep pointing to the boogie man of soviet infiltrators to explain power hungry bureaucrats. Those have existed in literally every society since at least the early bronze age.
No, I'd say power hunger is one thing, but what you face now is unique to this poisonous "Soviet Culture." A very special, aggressive brand of social nihilism at the apex of civil society, characteristic of one party/social class governments.
Putin put his own spin on the timeless demoralisation tactic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA ,) an even more aggressive targeting of both the new elites, and the establishment (see Biden Jr. adventures with in Ukraine.) Or plainly speaking playing both sides.
"No, I'd say power hunger is one thing, but what you face now is unique to this poisonous "Soviet Culture." A very special, aggressive brand of social nihilism at the apex of civil society, characteristic of one party/social class governments"
What you're describing is late stage capitalism.
""Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes," Keith McCoy, the Exxon (XOM) lobbyist, said during a covertly filmed job interview recorded by Greenpeace's UK investigative platform.
"Did we join some shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true," McCoy said in the video, which was published Wednesday by the UK's Channel 4. "But there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. we were looking out for our shareholders."
The reframing of a company's purpose to "generate shareholder's wealth" is a relatively recent development (1970's) that came on the heels of right wing economic ideas gaining widespread adoption in American universities (Chicago School, etc). This is one of the reasons companies use to justify destruction of society and the planet in the pursuit of more, wealth, power, status, etc.
There is nothing "Soviet Culture" about this or myriad other examples such as the tobacco industry or pharmaceutical companies and the opioid epidemic.
> There is nothing "Soviet Culture" about this or myriad other examples such as the tobacco industry or pharmaceutical companies and the opioid epidemic.
Exactly this is a very good example of it being Randist, and Soviet.
They believed in extreme social darwinism, in kratocracy, in moral legitimacy of their economic parasitism to feed off "weak bourgeois, civil society idiots, and lumpen-proletarian serfs"
I other words, you have to feed fat communist bastards because of their self-proclaimed "class superiority."
Putin's tactics are postmodern, a philosophy that at it's core (despite right wing propaganda around the terms) is intrinsically anti Marxist.
Seeing the ghosts of soviets in every dark corner is something that these very elites we're talking about use to control you and your perceptions of reality.
>Putin's tactics are postmodern, a philosophy that at it's core (despite right wing propaganda around the terms) is intrinsically anti Marxist.
That's not true. Postmodernism and Frankfurt School of Marxism are synonymous in todays culture. However I agree that late stage postmodernism is almost indistinguishable from Real Politik. End result is the same if your worldview reduces everything to power plays between collectives.
Postmodernism was a reaction to movements like Frankfurt School which is pretty much peak Modern. You can see that in how pretty much the only consistent part of postmodernism is rejecting cognitive structures and abstractions for interpreting society like the example you gave of "reduc[ing] everything to power plays between collectives."
A reaction that builds upon and encapsulates Marxist meta-narratives. Yes in theory postmodernism can point to a diverse set of perspectives but in practice it's homogenous groupthink within a Marxist meta-narrative. End result is people operating in worldviews consisting of moral relativism and variations of "Marxist struggles". It's a worldview that has conflict intrinsic to it.
The rejection of meta-narratives is the underlying theme of postmodernism, and is common throughout it.
I would suggest you dig deeper into these concepts, as you seem to have basic misunderstandings about what they mean.
And there's nothing wrong with safe spaces. You're not owed "logical discourse" on your terms. People sometimes just want to occasionally not be bothered by every bro who thinks that because they've watched a lot of Jordan Peterson videos that they're suddenly on the pinnacle of philosophical thought. It's tiring in a way orthogonal to the validity of any points being made. Additionally safe spaces aren't typically where instruction is held, and, despite the propaganda, not an effective way to avoid topics completely by design.
> Putin's tactics are postmodern, a philosophy that at it's core (despite right wing propaganda around the terms) is intrinsically anti Marxist.
This is what they want the West to believe. They want you to lower your guard, they want you to start working with them, and put thoughts like "hey, maybe those guys are a lesser evil than communists" into your head.
> This is what they want the West to believe. They want you to lower your guard, they want you to start working with them, and put thoughts like "hey, maybe those guys are a lesser evil than communists" into your head.
They're doing a terrible job then. They've somehow created an even worse society for Russians as far as I can tell.
You realize that your citation of Useful Idiot literally points out that there's no record of the term actually being used by the soviets, but instead appears to have been first used by the New York Times?
I'm sorry, but pinning this on soviet infiltration is hilarious and is ironically the result of the exact debasement and exploitation you decry.
In reality, this kind of thing has been going on in the US since the late 19th century. It's a 100% normal thing and there is absolutely no need for an ebil gommunist boogeyman for it.
What you're seeing is those precious institutions operating as intended and as they always did. Just like they do pretty much everywhere.
> Personally I think we could probably trace it back to soviet infiltration of the university education system around the world in the 60's and 70's, which within a lifetime has produced multiple generations of nihilistic bureaucrats trained to seek power for its own sake, and now they occupy our institutions at all levels and have used them to destroy the foundations of the culture and seize its means of production
> soviet infiltration of the university education system around the world in the 60's and 70's, which within a lifetime has produced multiple generations of nihilistic bureaucrats trained to seek power for its own sake
It is only a small cookie in comparison to what people in USSR had to deal daily. Regular bureaucrats being bastards was a given, the only difference being how much. From customary "f__k off attitude," to ones laughing, and spitting you in the face while waving their party member card.
I don't have many ideas how to build a system to keep non-appointed government workers in line. Any kind of promotion system can get corrupted in its own way. There is no magic bullet.
What the West got right in general about bureaucracy were these:
1. Less government officers as such
2. Them being given less duties
3. Good distance in between them (this is what is getting eroded lately, with government service becoming a monolith with rich law schools)
Bad things, and bad class culture perpetuate faster than good ones, and is in generally more resilient against deliberate campaigns for cleansing institutions.
Taking the example of Georgia (a country of,) it was proven to be much easier to oust small time habitual bribe takers, nihilists, or poor performing bureaucrats, than "talented villains" who are both more hardcore in their ill, and are better at hiding their crimes, bad ideological stances, or underperformance.
If you kick out those half-corrupted people, but pass a few completely rotten ones, you often empower the later. They can quickly recruit more co-conspirators from new bloods, and corrupt their surroundings more completely. Paradoxically, half-hearted purges in state institutes can often exacerbate the problem by "distilling the poison."
It takes generations, or an extreme shock therapy to disrupt such institutional nihilism.
I do agree that this sentiment now extends to almost all power and influence institutions.
News outlets produce stories solely as a commodity to influence behavior on behalf of large corporations (paid) or government entities. Journalism integrity is at a all time low in the US and honestly doesn’t look good moving into the future.
This is common knowledge [0], but the common person has come to this conclusion on her own without the help of media. That this would never be "a story" of any size is the point of this discussion.
>soviet infiltration of the university education system around the world in the 60's and 70's, which within a lifetime has produced multiple generations of nihilistic bureaucrats
Defectors nearly always parrot prevailing scare tactics of a society, regardless of the veracity of those statements. You can see that today with North Korean defectors. Is North Korea an awful country with mind boggling human rights violations? Absolutely. Are North Korean defectors heavily incentived to come up with increasingly out there stories, even stories that are contradicted by their previous stories because they're shunned by ROK society at large and have trouble finding other sources of income than selling tales to the media that won't be fact checked? Also true.
Why do you believe this man is who he says he is? Why do you take what he says to be true at face value?
I find it amusing how people bring up Soviet propaganda in schools and always link this same video to this one person (who criticizes the inability to assess true information), while simultaneously not questioning whether or not they are consuming propaganda themselves. Wouldn't it be funny if this guy is a CIA plant repeating neocon talking points from the 80s?
When I traced back any of the sources that "confirmed" his past, they always dead-ended at his own writing in papers. I'd be interested if you have something else that confirms that this is a "KGB defector".
As someone that grew up in a totalitarian communist government. What Yuri speaks is consistent with my lived experience of how the communists acted to maintain power, in a country they occupied.
The sources used in that article that mention his Soviet life are this very Youtube video(!), his own writings (sometimes under a pseudonym), a single newspaper obituary with no sources except quotes from people that knew him, or the CIA. I don't find any of that particularly convincing, especially when the topic is "propaganda".
Bezmenov is great fun but he's hardly trustworthy. His whole professional life was in propaganda. It's like the scorpion crossing the river on the foxes back. He just has to sting.
OP here. Not sure about other people posting it but it’s a pretty well known interview. What makes it propaganda? Do you have a better source for what the IC communities of other countries are doing to weaken our institutions than a defector from a rival country? What do you think our very own CIA does with the opaque budget we provide it with every year?
The same thing. They do the same thing. Don’t turn a blind eye to it.
Also the Assange case is near and dear to a lot of people. It’s evil what’s happening to him. And the only reason it continues to happen is because of the silent consent of people who really probably have no idea what our intelligence agencies are doing and because of the cultivated ineptitude at some of our important institutions.
Yes, CIA does all sorts of horrible things. (On January 6 I remarked that events in Washington reminded me of similar events in Latin American capitals. Bad thoughts!) I'm sure KGB did as well, while it still existed. I'm even prepared to consider that USA college professors have done some bad things. Some professors may even have implied that communism isn't the most terrible invention of humanity.
All of that is true without doubt. But why listen to this guy? "Bezmenov" literally translates to "nameless". [0] He claims in this video to be a propagandist with a history of producing propaganda. His specific claims (e.g. the 15%/85% thing) are totally unverifiable. (And by the way, that does the 15%/85% thing imply about CIA, FBI, etc? Whose opinion do they really want to influence?) Listening to him reminds me mostly of the "incubator babies" girl. If you already believe what he's saying, maybe it's reassuring. If you don't, it won't convince you.
I still don't understand why this character fascinates you so. I honestly wish that more of my schoolmates had been convinced of the benefits of communism. I wasn't, but I would appreciate a modicum of ideological variety. Clearly the way we're doing things in this country is fucked up, and there is very little public discussion of that fact that doesn't boil down to red-blue distraction. Let's try anything else. Ghosts of the Cold War might imply something not to do, but they aren't the solution to our problems.
Seize the means of production...? That has an actual meaning and I don't think that's what you're describing. I assure you that hasn't happened in the US yet. The means of production have generally been controlled by the ruling elite since the founding of the nation.
According to whom? There is a pretty strict definition of means of production, as it was labeled by Marx & Engels, and 'bureaucracy' as a concept isn't it.
Adding on to this: there is no rough equivalent to Lenin capturing the railroads in the USA, at all. The bourgeoise have controlled the means of production from 1776 til now.
Who owns amazon fulfillment centers? Who owns media companies? Who owns airlines? If it ain't the workers, then nobody has seized the means of production.
Bureaucracies are not the means of production. Actually, Marx specifically sees bureaucracy as the polar opposite of the means of production, and a large part of Marxism is that the bureaucracy and other state apparatus molds itself to the owners of the means of production.
Railroads and infrastructure are the means of production because they're the material things that are required to produce other material things.
I think you are letting your imagination come up with elaborate explanations when very simple ones are available. Soviet infiltration? Come on dude. Seeking power for it's own sake is not uniquely soviet and predates any imagined university infiltration.
Yeah this is some John Birch Society level shit. The Soviets invented being power hungry? The US has used its own brand of Realpolitik to maintain its empire since long before it was “infiltrated by the Soviets,” and has nearly always been co-signed by the media apparatus.
Seeking power is the goal. But the way to achieve it is through consensus building. So you need ideas and an ideology to rally people around you.
Like for example these two intellectuals
that overtly had the goal of subverting society. They came up with an actual plan how to go about doing it.
OK I will admit I am not convinced, but you know what, if compelling arbitrary assumptions against the chinese come up I might make my mind, openmindedness and all.
"The impact of media organizations discrediting and completely debasing themselves... is what has really cleaved the culture."
Really, that's what did it? I'd wager that a majority of Americans don't even know who Assange or Snowden are, much less care about them. I think constantly living in self-selected information bubbles might be just a tad more significant..
Having a hard time thinking of any self-selected bubbles that are not aware of Assange or Snowden given that the two big political bubbles have been both assisted (and embarrassed) by Wikileaks.
Our own officials, agencies, etc are involved in this stuff & media cooperated with them. The CIA has been using both foreign and domestic “journalism” as a weapon for pretty much as long as it’s existed. If anything, our own practices got worse because of our reaction to Soviet infiltration not as a direct result of the thing itself.
> Personally I think we could probably trace it back to soviet infiltration of the university education system around the world in the 60's and 70's
The Soviet Union is over, you can't keep relying on the Red Scare any more.
I mean, there definitely are problems with US media - concentrated ownership and a reliance on hyperbole, as well as pundits who retreat behind the "it's entertainment, no reasonable person would have taken what I said seriously" defense when sued over their lies. But wheeling out McCarthyism again is ridiculous.
Indeed. Some citizens in your country having common beliefs or interests as people in another country is their own business. We all have allies and like minded people abroad. Maligning fellow citizens as foreign dupes is a common and despicable tactic. If you find actual evidence of specific crimes, prosecute them, otherwise it's just dirt flinging.
I've never read a first paragraph more fully undermined by the rank speculation of your second paragraph.
I'm imagining a teacher giving eloquent explanation of discrete Fourier transform to students, then going on claim that the whole purpose is compute horoscopes for cats.
Over the last 50 years capitalism has gotten everything it wanted - extremely free trade with minimal tariffs, international agreements on IP and corporate law, and the freedom to offshore production to any number of less-than-democratic states where labor is cheap. And you're saying that this capitalist utopia is the result of soviet infiltration? That's a little hard to believe.
All of the media organizations discrediting and debasing themselves are private companies who prioritize ROI above anything else. They're not run by bureaucrats, but by amoral capitalists. The universities themselves are also increasingly run "like a business".
It takes some serious blinders to look at the consequence of 50 years of free market maximalism and say: "This is the work of the communists".
That's interesting, and I know from the Bezmenov video and commentary on it Barak Obama is supposed to be the prime example of a Marxist infiltrator promoting the rot from the inside.
Except - Obama chose not to prosecute Assange because of potential collateral damage to independent journalism, a well known major concern of Soviet infiltrators (er...). It's only after Trump came to power that his administration got the ball rolling on prosecution and offering Thordarson an immunity deal. It's all in the article.
So what's the contention, that Trump's administration was the result of a Marxist inspired Russian plot to subvert the universities in the 60s? Well, that's a new one.
Dr Robert Malone got censored for speaking out about some of the research being done on Covid Vaccines, including having his name wiped from the Wikipedia article about the invention of mRNA tech and having his premium LinkedIn account deleted. Enough to make a person suspicious...
In the end be it democracy or totalitarianism there's always a small elite controlling discourse. And I'm starting to think china's is managing their country better than ours
The promise was that we would bring democracy to China. I think the opposite happened to a large extent. It's like doing business with the cartel, you're bound to get corrupted.
Even by official Chinese numbers ~10 million is a pretty low estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Wikipedia has it as "between 15 and 55 million" deaths just to the Great Leap Forward alone.
Yes, the transition to modernity was almost as much of a shock for China as it was for the west. Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent.
>Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent.
Taiwan, Singapore and Korea started from around the same starting point as China after World War Two, and all became developed countries much faster (compare their GDP per capita now to China's). You could say "their populations aren't as big as China", but in that case wouldn't the ideal solution have been to split China up into a bunch of smaller countries that could grow just as fast as Korea etc?
There's no theoretical reason a political region should develop slower if the population is larger, if anything economic theory suggests the opposite (a common argument for why America's GDP is higher than Europe's is that it has a larger homogenous internal market). So China's size can't be used as an excuse for its slower development.
China didn't really attempt to start the process of increasing until the late 70s to early 80s. Their cultural revolution was focused on rooting out hidden vestiges of the old power structures before attempting to modernize. Since that point their growth rate has been quicker, they just got started later.
What? The highest points on that graph are Chinese. And there are similar Chinese bursts to the Korean one you're talking about, followed by China sustaining higher growth.
The highest single point is China, followed by a very low point the following year. If you average the growth rate over 3-5 year period their maximum rates are similar.
Well, the highest four points on the graph are Chinese. Yes you can cherry pick a three year period that makes Korea look good, but you can do the same with China.
You reject population as a factor in modernization (along with, apparently, initial development level, initial education level, initial infrastructure, etc.) and you offer instead... longitude? Why are you comparing China to Singapore?
China developed more slowly than its neighbors, unsurprising given the communist party’s crushing of free communication and enterprise and the killing of tens of millions of people. You’ve gotta be playing really dumb to pretend there’s anything complicated about that.
"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance. Less charitable people than myself might suspect that your personal reason is one you can't mention in polite company.
>"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance.
Sorry, what does relevance geographic proximity have to economic growth? The point is that those countries all have similar cultural and racial backgrounds to China, yet developed much faster.
Obviously, relative proximity has very little to do with economic growth. No one ITT ever mentioned any other unifying factor, so I was being charitable by suggesting it. You seem less sophisticated than 'woah, in that you've openly stated the racial assumption that 'woah left unsaid.
Are you seriously calling people racist for comparing China with the islands and peninsulas surrounding it? Is it racist to compare Germany with England?
If you invoked race as an explanation for e.g. why South Korea and Taiwan had similar modernization experiences, that would be weird but maybe not obviously wrong. Among the dozens of other similarities between these two nations, race as perceived by white Americans is one similarity. It's not the most salient similarity to reasonable people, but there's no inherent contradiction involved.
That's not what's going on ITT. China has had a different modernization experience from the other nations discussed above, which is entirely understandable given their very different histories, assets, infrastructures, populations, demographics, educations, etc. Your racism is that you ignore all those obvious differences in favor of one trivial, contingent aspect in which to an ineducable white American they might seem similar.
In an effort to silence legitimate criticism of a totalitarian regime, you are making the assertion that comparing a country to its neighbors is racist. Amazing.
Dude this thread is buried under several flagged posts. No one is reading this. No one will care about racism here. The things we're saying won't silence anyone.
However, you could still learn something. When you compare two different groups of people, be sure to have something besides "they have the same skin color" to say when someone asks the obvious follow-up question.
Huh? China literally slowed its pace of development intentionally so they didn’t kill millions more. They learned that the Great Leap Forward was too fast so they slowed it down and made it a multi-decade project. Interior China was largely subsistence farming 50 years ago and now boasts some of the largest cities in the world. They have industrialized incredibly quickly given the scale of the challenge. You can’t bootstrap enough industry to modernize 1.6 billion people overnight; it takes decades to build.
They haven’t gone faster because a country like Singapore can buy enough industrial output from Japan or the US to bootstrap their industry. Nobody has enough spare capacity to build at the scale of China, so the Chinese had to cultivate industry over a period of decades. Given that most of the worlds manufacturing is done there now, I’d say they’ve been quite successful.
So what we are saying is that the dropping of socialism and adoption of capitalism lifted 800 million people out of poverty in a generation? I don't think that's a bad review of capitalism at all.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you try to undo 200 years of colonial rule. It’s actually a surprisingly low number as a percentage of population when compared to Russia or Eastern Europe.
That's ridiculous. Most of the deaths were due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward; how could any part of that be justified as "undoing 200 years of colonial rule"? That wasn't even a justification used by the Commmunist Party at the time.
Well, when the youth wing of Lumumbians started practicing a nutritionary democracy (that is, murdered and had a nurse from the West for dinner) this was exactly the justification used by the socialists. "They are undoing the colonial rule", -- they said. That's even more ridiculous and yet they find this theory convincing. So, I don't think it can be helped.
There’s no playbook for undoing colonial rule at mass scale. Said colonial rule prevented China from participating in the industrial revolution, so converting an agrarian economy to an industrial one is in fact undoing colonial rule.
So yeah, they made mistakes and a lot of people died. I’m not going to glorify Mao but you can’t argue with results. The Great Leap Forward largely succeeded, they just realized it needed to be rolled out at a smaller scale over a longer period of time.
That's disingenuous. The government of China, People's Republic of China, has only been around since 1949 and even if you include the ROC's mainland tenure that only extends it back to 1912.
China got lifted out of poverty after they abandoned communism and transitioned to a mixed economy with respect for private property rights. So I'm not sure what your point is.
In ninth grade my biology teacher took a vote about whether to do this for one test. I voted against it (in the minority). It didn’t take three tests to see the effect. Immediately people stopped studying for the test. We failed. The teacher cheated and gave us all a C.
Ok, cool. Despite Snopes saying that never happened, China doesn’t do that; in fact they have more billionaires than the US. It’s almost like they learned from the failures of other communist states and adapted their system.
What they have done is create a base standard of living that is dependent on location. They can’t move every rural farmer to urban population centers all at once, so they’ve been doing it gradually over time. Do a lot of Chinese live in poverty? Yeah, but they’ve been living in poverty for a few hundred years. A lot fewer live in poverty in 2021 than in 1990.
Why would you want to move farmers to cities where they cant farm? who would do the farming then? why not just pay farmers what you would pay a factory worker in the city?
Because agricultural modernization universally requires at least an order of magnitude less labor, and society is then better served by those workers being in urban centers where they can work first in factories then transition to a service economy for the ones who'll work unskilled labor, and concentrate access to quality education for the ones that can contribute intellectually.
Those "ghost cities" that the media pearl clutched for a while there have for the most part been slowly filled in with previously agrarian workers making the urban transition.
Except, the current media outlets will use their monopoly power to suppress you, and the government will do jack diddly squat to stop them. Just look what happened with parler and Gab. Both sought to get around Facebook and Twitter and Reddit's bans on right-wing speech by building their own facebook and twitter.
In response, companies like Amazon banned them from their platform. And Gab, for example, cannot distribute their apps on either the google play or apple app store.
So no. In a normal society with a government-protected free market, you'd be right. But we currently live in what is quite obviously a corporatocracy, even if no one wants to admit it.
I was being sarcastic (it dismays me a little to have to explain it). I agree with you, I was only parodying the majority position on this site any time someone they dont like is suppressed.
The burden of the proof is always on the person trying to emerge.
Both Assange and Snowden wanted to emerge to notoriety, and projected their own mind frame onto others, thinking they had some sort of royal flush, and as soon as they'd sign off and reveal the information they had , they'd have been acclaimed and an immediate rise to stardom would have ensued.
In reality the military is the most popular Federal agency, they should have focused their efforts on George W. Bush who ended his mandate with a 19% approval rating
So you’re saying unless there’s evidence that someone is explicitly telling them not to talk about it, it doesn’t matter? They pushed the narrative that he was guilty in the first place! They have a responsibility to make a correction and instead they say nothing.
I'm saying the author(s) of this piece shouldn't pass off their speculation, correct or not, as fact.
Heck, my speculation is that the reason this article does overstate the case is to work readers up for more donations, but that's different than knowing so as a fact.
Personally I think the silence speaks for itself. If this wasn’t a story they had previously covered (very aggressively) it would be different, but it’s basically impossible that the media just doesn’t know about this.
Plus, they’ve all been pumping out anti-Assange propaganda at pretty much every opportunity. I don’t think standards of absolute factual correctness really apply when you’re criticizing organizations which regularly frame facts in a way which is deliberately misleading.
And even if it were true that they are exaggerating to try to get donations…that’s a lot less sinister than doing the bidding of the intelligence agencies in persecuting an innocent man for years. Regardless nobody is stopping you from making that claim, it’s up to others to decide whether or not it’s plausible.
The source that this article cites is stundin.is. That article does not have any links or citations for what it's saying. It just refers to 'court documents'. It also cites other evidence obtained by stundin directly, but does not link to it or quote from it directly. How do we know if this claim is even true?
The article is nothing but filled with citations. Are we looking at the same thing? All those quotes, and who said it, are the citations. And all of them are traced to its respective sources.
There isn't a single link in that article. It makes tons of claims but does not include references to the primary source. For example:
"Thordarson spoke with a journalist from Stundin for several hours as he prepared a thorough investigative report into his activities that include never before published chat logs and new documents."
It's honestly not clear whether his sentence refers to the journalist or Thordarson when it says "as he prepared", but either way, it references previously-unpublished chat logs and repeats what is in them but does not actually show any of the logs.
I'm not saying the claims aren't true, just that this article sets of my BS detectors because there isn't a single link in it. They are asking the reader to take a lot on faith.
It's more a question about the visibility of information, and HN increases visibility. HN originating content is irrelevant.
News about Assange is niche, that niche is here. Lack of mainstream reporting might not be a vast conspiracy. So I would say that this news has been surfaced appropriately to the correct audience, and not actually suppressed.
If you want to be pedantic, HN also does not fact check its articles or comments. Nothing else supports HN being a media outlet or rebut this as a media blackout.
There have been 20 articles in print and on the web mentioning Assange in the NY Times since 2021 began, avidly covering the details of his trial and extradition, but now nothing. If their search features are any indication, CNN doesn't believe you should seek out news as much as passively accept it-same pattern and then no recent mention.
Reuters' latest article from 25 June in a break from the style of their previous coverage leaves out mention of the trial details entirely in favor of a human element story petitioning Biden free Assange "to show the US has changed". This narrative does little to exculpate Assange or share why the trial may be over for good while preempting any credit for what follows to the mercy and wisdom of Biden. Whether Biden ignores or denies, well, them's the laws, you know.
If the whole rest of the town doesn't have power and you refuse to call it a blackout because you can see some people have working generators, you don't understand what a blackout is.
Your literal blackout analogy falls apart pretty quickly when you consider that this story lives in the attention economy, a seething ocean of information all vying for our eyeballs. It's more like there's a town (with power) and somewhere there a light that's blue and nobody can see it from the air, and you think everyone in an airplane should be able to see it. Maybe there is a vast conspiracy, but just because this one story didn't show up in in the mainstream news, reputable or otherwise, doesn't mean there's a conspiracy against blue lights.
I don't understand this claim that left-leaning media is biased against Assagne. Pretty much all the left and center-left outlets I know say he should not be prosecuted:
Where is this impression that "the media wants Assagne in jail" coming from? It doesn't seem supported by any evidence beyond people disliking other people's tweets.
These are mostly opinion pieces in 'left leaning' media. All of these are known for once in a while publishing dissenting voices. I mean NYT regularly publishes Ross Douthat and David Frum.
I'm guessing the sentiment though comes from talking with the base. In a strange reversal, many democrat voters (or at least the ones that appear on online forums) seem okay with locking Assange up, while it's a common sentiment on thedonald and such 'right wing' forums that Assange ought to be free. That's what I'd guess.
Personally, I don't see this is a left/right issue.
It's hard to put a finger on just how much the current form of western democracy differs from the 18th century ideal of western democracy. Let this concretize it: Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade in jail indefinitely on fictitious charges and virtually nobody cares. Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
"Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?