The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government.
US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Principles aren't really principles if they are being tossed aside when they become uncomfortable.
The turning point regarding the US' stance on democracy and human rights has been, IMO, GW Bush's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court.
There we were, in a world where USSR had collapsed, China not risen yet, with a USA as the uncontested dominant power. It has the unique chance in history to steer the world in one direction or the other.
Building international legal standards, multi-lateral cooperation, ensuring that whoever had the most power at one point would be limited by the world community, was something within US reach, and was a realistic hope. As a bonus, the first thing the community would work on would be tackling the climate change, as it was an obvious field where every country of planet earth had a common interest.
Instead, because of a few hundred "miscounted" votes in Florida, the US president was a zealous anti-intellectual evangelist, who decided that US interests trumps human rights, that denying climate change was a respectable political stance, and instead of spending a mountain of dollars on research, energy transition, diseases eradication, social net improvements, he spent it on invading 2 countries despite experts warning that it would not solve any problem.
There is no such thing as countries spreading democracy and I am not aware of any country that has ever went to war to spread democracy.
The only time the US attempted to "spread democracy" is when their influence over a foreign country was being challenged by anti-imperialist entities. At this point they invade to make sure the country transitions to a democracy, which when it comes to a poor country with little international clout, democracy amounts to it being very susceptible to foreign interference.
And of course the US also invades actual democracies when they elect anti-imperialists that challenge US interests in the region.
You spread democracy by showing it is better system.
A lot of countries that converted to democracy did this because their populations looked up to US and wanted to have better lief.
You also put pressure on other countries when they claim are democratic but fail to do this in practice (which is the case of Belarus or Poland where I live).
US does this actively and frequently in many forms, by voicing "concerns" or putting embargoes on countries that break their own rules.
Obviously, that pressure is much less effective when you do same things you try to pressure other countries to not do.
I am not sure it is always a better system in all situations. Democracies are very easily corrupted by foreign influence.
This is one of the reasons rich western countries love to "export democracy".
One of the reasons strongmen rise to power in third world countries is as a reaction to imperialism.
In that situation it is not even clear you can have a functioning democracy, and then the choice is between a puppet of foreign interests or a strongman.
There exists no system that is best in all situations.
Case in point, a system that does not care about rights of their inhabitants is usually much more effective at running large scale projects. For example, China just deciding to shut down everybody in their houses in Wuhan and shoot if you don't comply. And just like that they got their pandemic under control.
> One of the reasons strongmen rise to power in third world countries is as a reaction to imperialism
No, they rise because they can.
And not just in third world countries. Germany was definitely not a third world country when it allowed Hitler to rise and start a global war. What about Putin?
We see these guys mostly in third world countries now mainly because without democracy it is difficult to keep up with democracies without some special situation (like Saudi Arabia being gifted with huge oil reserves).
In non-democracies normal people have trouble preserving their wealth over long periods of time. You need to be "in favours" of the ruling entity to be wealthy and the wealth vanishes if you fall out of it.
Democracies are on the other hand, by definition, people ruling themselves, and this should in theory mean a lot of focus is on personal security and freedom. This should mean it is safer to conduct business over long periods of time, accumulate wealth and generally contribute to GDP.
People really over sell the spread of democracy in these places. By US design, Japan was a one party state until after the Cold War, with ~six years of opposition party rule total. Similar happened in South Korea, who considers it's first free election in ~2000, and even then one of their few elections saw intelligence agencies ensure the win of their former dictator's daughter. And Germany had a history of democracy without US influence.
Coming out of the 1st and then 2nd World wars the US seemed to be the voice of reason and alongside Britain (and possibly France) had a strong desire to make the world a better place and not repeat the mistakes of the past - which were all around to see.
But I feel after the 1960's the US has slowly lost that ideal, and the visionary leaders (Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt or Eisenhower) are no longer anywhere to be found (whether the electorate don't tolerate or desire them I'm not sure).
I think you've got an overly rosy view of pre-1960's history. Post WWI saw all three of those powers continue their colonialist land grabs, and post WWII saw all three commit many atrocities in the effort to check Russian advances.
Both the Japanese and Korean antidemocratic moves took place in that pre 1960 era for example.
But my point is their intention is to exploit the weakness of the democracy they enforce on the target country. And that is assuming this is a situation where they are exporting democracy.
There are also the opposite situations where they declare democratic outcomes invalid because they don't bow down to US interests. They happily support dictators in that case.
No. The point was to draw a line between the countries who respect humans rights and are willing to be judged and punished when they don't and the countries that did not.
Of course China and KSA would never join. And that would give other countries a clear and objective criterion to apply sanctions and international pressure.
Instead, judging what sanction a country deserves is an arbitrary exercise of executive power.
North Korea, China, KSA, are easy cases, but what do you know of Moldova? Of Hungary? Of Malaysia? Knowing that a country is held to some international standards judged independently would be a huge progress for human rights globally.
>So what should I expect about the integrity of justice here?
You could maybe ask the other 26 nations how they might see things?
Remember the EU is not just 1 lady who had a bad daddy. And her tenure is not forever.
The same is also true of the US, every 4 years the whole country gets to vote for either the worst of their instincts, or for the person that embodies a higher ideal. So a lot can change over the next few decades.
I'm with C. Hitchens, a short term pessimist, but a long term optimist :)
So we're holding Ursula von Der Leyen responsible for her father's actions now? Or is it that his immorality is genetically transmissible and she too is definitely a bad person?
In her case: Der Apfel faellt nicht weit vom Stamm. She is a chip of the old block.
One of the things that got her famous in Germany was her persistent lying and schemeing, including "think of the children", including showing actual child porn to journalists[0], to get her internet censorship and surveillance scheme passed. Definitely her father's footsteps.
Well yes she is a pretty bad person, remember McKinsey? Internet Censor at ISP level? Trying to buy Drones with weapons on board? The probably buy d dissertation for her Dr. Med?
> The EU? The father or Ursula von der Leyen did a false flag against some imprisoned RAF members. They bombed a prison and tried to blame it on the inmates and accomplices.
Could you tell me, where to find more information about this? Thanks!
I see how you can think GW's withdrawal was a turning point, but honestly it was a drop in the bucket. I've spent a long time trying to trace the origins of the current policy, and I mostly lay it at Woodrow Wilsons feet (and his handlers). Handlers being a key word. Do you not think Bush had them? The real power players in DC exist through multiple presidencies. This idea of POTUS being king-like (and therefor X is POTUS fault) is so unrealistic and a very sophmoric analysis of the real power dynamics at that level.
ps. What most people mean when they say "democracy" is "IMF conditionalities", et similar.
There's no way a Democrat president would make US personnel subject to an international court either. If there ever were any prosecutions it would cause a political meltdown. Unilateralism and exceptionalism run deep in the US.
It never was. If we want to talk about the powerful being held to account by the international community, realise that at some point that means canvassing the idea of invading China/India/the United States/Europe when they get out of line. That isn't an option. That would potentially reduce big chunks of the world to sand and anything less can't constrain the powerful. WWII alone levelled an entire continent, and that was with primitive weaponry compared to what is available now.
Trade sanctions aren't effective at changing behaviour and it isn't obvious if they would do more good or more harm if deployed against a superpower. Note that most superpowers' economic problems were due to internal not external policy.
Trade sanction ARE effective and are arguably much more effective than military operations at changing a country's behavior. The main negotiation leverage in talks with Donbass forces or Iran government is the suspension or extension of sanctions. It made Iraq and Libya abandon their WMD programs. Iraq's invasion, on the other hand justified North Korea in not abandoning theirs.
Indeed the whole point of principles is that you keep them when it isn't to your immediate benefit.
That's why "Corporate Values" are so empty. They get tossed as soon as they conflict with the profit motive. Google's "don't be evil" being the classic example.
I think this is the closest to "absolute moral truths". People discover these because these are not some arbitrary rules, the are actually absolute, universal laws.
People understand subconsciously, for example, than a person that does good for no reason expresses higher form of being good that a person that does good in exchange for some kind of benefit.
It doesn't mean that mutually beneficial relations are not good, the society is basically built on spoken or unspoken contracts.
But we understand that a person that does good altruistically, not expecting any benefit for it, is much more likely to be trustworthy in all situation. And a person that does good expecting benefits may (not must, just may) turn on you when they stop seeing benefits.
And I think the same goes for countries.
When we see US performing their foreign relations game but only ever putting their weight when we can later find they were expecting some kind of benefit, and almost never for countries that have nothing to offer, it becomes transparent to us that US is basically much less likely to be trustworthy than if it did its actions based on principles.
French (at least in France): "c'est dans le besoin que l'on reconnaît ses amis" (nearest well-known English saying: 'A friend in need is a friend indeed').
There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty.
Many of those same people don’t do anything about it. They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc.
The real travesty about Assange is that he’s not even a US citizen. He tried to reach out to the state department to redact sections and they refused to respond. Then they go after him for publishing what some other person leaked. Not only that, but the leaker had a publicly funded transition and a short prison sentence. Assange is charged and has endured much worse.
My principles (and many others) still stand. But our “deep state” doesn’t represent the majority.
> There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty.
Not sure that's true, go to reddit for example, and you'll see the majority are already brainwashed into thinking Assange is a Russian asset. US mainstream media is working on it overtime.
And Reddit is usually on the more "enlightened" end on such topics, at least used to be.
Ask some random person on the street about Assange and the best they can come up with is probably something about fleeing from the Swedish police for rape, something Russian agent, maybe something about how he treats his cat horribly or doesn't clean his toilet properly.
The Five Eyed propaganda machine [0] was very effective in smearing him, and even Snowden, among the general public in these past years.
Have you completely forgotten 2020? After a year in which forcefully occupying government buildings was regarded as legitimate protest; a year with over 500 riots, for which arrested rioters were generally not prosecuted; Democrats have no credibility when they complain about the right occupying one government building.
What you've done there is pure partisanship: defining "the other side" by the worst among them while ignoring the behavior of the worst among your own side.
Reddit is definitely not the whole world. It's heavily dominated by people from the US and western europe, and heavily biased towards the the mainstream western propaganda narrative. Reddit is an active target for propagandists (i.e. intelligence communities). Votes and recommendations for news articles are not at all based purely on interest and activity, it's being pushed by actors with various agendas.
How can you vote differently when you always get two nearly identical candidates and the system has been engineered from the late 1800s to only accept two parties (the last real third party being parts of the populist movement)?
To be frank, I think we have a one party state with a global military dictatorship.
Not an American,but born and raised in Germany. For about 20 years now, I have gotten used to a motto (see below).
I had this motto in mind after I once witnessed how political decisions were made within one of the youth organizations of one of the two mainstream parties here in Germany and was disgusted by it.
> The parliament is the theater, which is performed, so that the citizen believes to live in a democracy. While the actual power is exercised elsewhere.
Well, you could do one of (at least) one of two things:
1. Be active in campaigns to boycott the vote. This can be presented both as a permanent stance against the regime in the US, or against the two-party duopoly; but it can also be presented as "I am withholding my vote from party X because it currently has unacceptable positions on issue Y - and I would like them to be punished by losing elections and know that they lost because of Y". If your choice is the deeper/more permanent one, you would likely to try invest effort in non-party organizational forms such as local popular committees, labor unions, protest movements etc.
2. You could join and support one of the existing third parties. Currently, the most viable seem to be: The Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and the recent initiative of the People's Party. The last one is new and is of particular interest, as the other two have been beset by internal trouble for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_a_People%27s_Part...
That’s what elected trump btw... a populist movement effectively trying to take over the Republican Party.
In my opinion, it’s also why the corporate media then attacked him (who btw I think is an idiot and don’t support)
I think it becomes more and more obvious by the day you’re correct. I honestly didn’t see it this way until some of the stuff in 2021.
Case in point So... 12 / 18 people in the michigan plot to capture the governor and stormed the court house were feds (FBI agents or informants directed by FBI).
> Panic rising, Dan slipped away from the group for a moment and spoke into the recording device he was carrying, which he knew was being monitored live by his FBI handlers. The Watchmen, he said, were preparing to breach the Capitol. The agents couldn’t speak back to him, but he hoped they could at least warn the police about what was coming.
> Then something surprising happened. The Michigan State Police stood down and let the protesters — including those in full tactical gear — enter the building unopposed. They could even bring their guns, so long as they submitted to a temperature check for COVID-19.
Media goes wild and blames Trump few weeks pre-election. In reality, the documents filed in court make it look like the fbi entrapped people (remains to be seen in court).
> They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc.
It seems impossible to fix this (or even improve the situation) with voting. Both parties seem to be in agreement on how they would treat Assange. They only differ on unrelated hot button issues.
> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen?
Or I’ve gotten older and more sour on this type of stuff?
Honestly I feel like the change has been, for me, more awareness and less attachement to the narrative forced down my throat. I also don’t believe it to be (as a native US citizen) a US thing. I see it in a huge swing in many countries towards authoritarianism in many ways and towards many goals. It isn’t so much a left or right thing (although I believe it to be more right leaning) but just a greater willingness to use power structures to control others.
Germany was a republic with a constitution and elected leaders after 1918.
Kaiser Wilhelm II took power after Bismark, and abdicated at the end of the first war. Wilhelm died in 1941.
Bismarck unified Germany in the latter 1800's as a constitutional federation with suffrage and elected legislatures, I don't know the fine details except it was some form of confederation and is considered a constitutional monarchy with elected legislature.
And most elements of the regime, excluding a few people at the very top, remained in place after 1945. Like the judiciary, municipal authorities, government bureaucracies etc. - and of course the large company owners.
That is true and one of the few successful examples. I wonder if the cold war played a role here, there was an honest ambition not to let Germany fall to the communits.
I mean ok, but the parent commenter's claim is that the US is _losing_ standing as a spreader of democracy. This is the premise of my question, and I'm not really interested in a random third-party's view that the premise is wrong, especially when it's as trite a view as this one.
You are asking if people think the propaganda has become less true. It's a nonsense question, as if people ever think the US is/was spreading democracy the propaganda has worked.
It doesn't matter if it is happening more or less. The goal is to always be improving.
Values is about what you believe in and strive for, and when you don't reach the standards you set for yourself, you figure out why, and adjust to be inline with your beliefs and goals.
> It doesn't matter if it is happening more or less. The goal is to always be improving.
I'm not sure what you think "mattering" means, but I was responding to a comment that said "the US is loosing[sic] more and more of its standing". I'm not sure why you're so convinced that the relative decline of the US's reputation shouldn't be talked about, but it's pretty bizarre behavior to insert yourself into a conversation about it and assert so.
My theory is that the progressive loss of the US' soft power is fueling the growth of emerging internal extremist groups.
This topic being another shard of the US' soft-power armour lost.
The more it appears that the US reached and maintains it's global superpower status with force, coercion, underhanded tactics, and other abhorrent behaviors that contravene the Geneva Convention (which are handily side-stepped by conducting these behaviors in countries that don't adhere to such laws), it only works to justify extremists groups to use whatever means they consider necessary to achieve their own manifest destiny.
In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority.
1: Moderate doesn't sell eyeballs and clicks, so extremism gets the attention, which is what it wants because it will attract more of the "curious disillusioned" for potential indoctrination
2: Until unknown critical mass of perceived-threat-paranoia, there's no need to publicise / protest / soapbox one's moderate-ness because it can be relatively assumed. ie. I don't need to explain that I'm not one of those nutjobs.
If you're asking "why don't their values dominate" on a foreign policy level, well, I'm unqualified to answer that, except to say that realpolitik is far removed from most citizens' day to day lives (the conundrum semi-explored by A Few Good Men seems appropriate to mention here).
It is often worse than just hypocrisy. If the US hasn’t hand picked a foreign regime and someone wins the democratic election which the US doesn’t agree with the US can just label them a terrorist organization if it is deemed politically necessary.
I am no fan of the Taliban or Hammas - and US probably correctly labeled them terrorist organizations - but it must also be acknowledge they are also “political parties” that have won democratic elections.
... but that would mean acknowledging the non-dichotomy between states and terrorist organizations. States carry out the most terror, but they (mostly) get a free pass. The US (and many other world states) would not want to undermine this situation and make their own actions legitimate targets of the question: "Is this a form of terror?".
Given the thousands of US Mil installations all across the globe, foreign intervention and police actions, geopolitical intrigue, etc it is unfortunately looking more and more like a Pax Romana -- a troubling sign, depending on your perspective.
Yes even going back to Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt rewrote his drafts of his speech to obscure the fact that the Philippines, a major site of the attack, was also a US colony.
I was really surprised to find out, as an american, standing with feet on the ground in Manila, near age 30, having grown up in the US and gone to public schools, that the Philippines had been a US Territory off and on, on par with Puerto Rico, for about 50 years starting around 1898. There's even a big obelisk in the center of Union Square in San Francisco commemorating this event, it turns out.
None of this was ever covered in public schools. I realize there's a lot of history to cover and kids can only absorb so much, but when people talk about "only focusing on europe and the middle east" it's good to have a couple of concrete examples. The Philippines actually has a larger english speaking population than the UK. Anyways, it always seemed that the Philippines got conveniently swept under the rug when discussing things like WW2 and American Imperialism.
Yes certainly. I recently started listening to the audiobook A Peoples History of the United States and there is a LOT of history we don't cover. Right now I am listening to a talk by Noam Chomsky about inequality and it's remarkable that the top % of the wealthy that have control over the country also do not go to public schools. It's as if we have a second school system for the subservient class.
Public schools in some districts are terrible. If you can afford to send your children to private school, that’s an easier option than changing the entire public school system in your district (unless you’re Bill Gates).
Why do you think they are cancelling AP classes in San Francisco and California under the guise of social justice? It's to further weaken the underclass since the rich don't even go to public school.
> Why do you think they are cancelling AP classes in San Francisco and California under the guise of social justice?
Can you document this? I'm a southern California resident, and I keep hearing stuff like this from people online, but I know no local examples of this at all.
Having gone to high school in California, we never covered Mexican-american or Spanish-american wars, civil war focused almost exclusively on slavery. 90% of WW2 was about Japanese internment or how racist nuking Japan was. History of Communism was never mentioned for obvious reasons.
The teacher's union does not dictate the curriculum.
Typically the state legislatures dictate what is in the curriculum broadly, sometimes extra specifically, and the administrators and teachers create their lessons to satisfy the legislation.
How does the teacher's union suppress subject matters in the history department?
It doesn't follow that they suppress Filipino colonization, is there some example of teachers union demanding of legislators that they pass laws like that?
It's also hard to get elected without people voting for you, or funding for political campaigns.
The Army ran out of Native Americans to massacre, so they arranged another indigenous group to terrorize for the next several decades. (It really was the same racist officers doing the same racist shit.) Some Filipinos had thought USA military would join them in overthrowing Spanish tyranny, but they soon discovered the actual intent was to replace Spain. Decent Americans like Mark Twain were horrified, but the war media was full of lies about subhuman savages who needed American government so most Americans had no idea. Plus ça change...
Hmm, don’t know what school you went to, but in my American public school they certainly covered the Spanish-American war, and the consequent status of the Philippines. Spanish colony, turned over to the U.S., taken over by Japan, independant after WWII ended.
I just read this post on Popehat[0] recounting an event while Ken White was working for an LA federal judge back in the day. He was brought to a ceremony conducted by Judge Ronald S.W. Lew where numerous, VERY elderly Filipino WW2 veterans were granted US Citizenship. This was promised to them in addition to veteran's benefits by FDR in exchange for recruitment into the war effort, and after the war quietly swept under the rug by the congress.
> Given the thousands of US Mil installations all across the globe
There are only 750-800 US military installations around the world. Most of these are small. This number has been reduced by about 1000 since the peak in the 1980s (cold war era). The majority of large installations are in the US.
>This Wikipedia article claims “ there are "around" 5,000 bases total
There are 326 bases in the US. https://militarybase.net/u-s-military-bases/ (see the CSV list at the bottom). The US has a total of 50 states and 6 protectorates (Guam, Puerto Rico, etc...). There's no where near 80 bases per state unless you count National Guard Armories (parking lots with a gym in most cases) and recruiting offices. The US has a big military, yes, but not that big.
I did not say military bases, I said installations, which I understand to mean permanent, semi-permanent, or maintained presences of materiel or infrastructure supporting military or reconnaissance.
In retrospect, you are a bit right here. Pardon the bike shedding, but maybe that is not a precise definition due to the vagaries of what "military", "base" and "installation" means. Does room 641a count? I'm not sure. The US Military has its own very special definition, but the general public would know its own.
Under this expanded rubric, National Guard, Coast Guard and Reservist armories would definitely count, CIA black sites[0] would certainly qualify as well (and they are not in your list to be sure), in addition to listening posts, air fields, possibly also foreign naval supply points if they meet some of those continually manned criteria (and hell, why not? Its in the spirit of this thing, we'll just consider them 3/5ths an installation for the purposes of statistics), some forward operating bases if they are continually manned and resupplied for, lets just hand-wave 11 months. Also, private contractors are definitely in this if they have their own separate facilities and especially if they conduct military operations such as "security forces" in Iraq. Now that I'm thinking about it, air craft carriers should be included as well if they are on deployment ... I know, I know, thats pretty rare.
But you are right if you point out that this isn't a precise measure, that it changes continually, and that I don't actually know how many there are--it could easily be tens of thousands! Just scale the definition until it feels most comfortable for you.
> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy.
The US was only ever seen as a spreader of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union/Fascist Europe/European Empires. And it was, but no one knowledgable of the US thought it was an unmitigated assessment! You can definitely compare the US favorably to China in regards to democracy and freedom but no one should be fooled that we don't have perpetual work to make a more perfect union.
There is nothing out of line here. Democracy is not "morality" - it's purely a means by which the majority enforces its decisions onto the minority. In fact democracy is one of the "best" ways for achieving "group irresponsibility" and allows us to do atrocious things with no-one in particular to blame afterwards.
Depending on how low you put your bar for what passes for "democracy", I would very much disagree. Countries like Nazi Germany, USSR, North Korea etc all had/have elections. Of course, you can argue that this does not qualify for a democracy, but then one can argue that neither did the "bad" monarchies in history qualify for proper "monarchies".
To me democracy is also the failed form of it, you cannot just pretend that democracy is that part which you like. And also, you have to consider what better things it prevents us from having. Also, you cannot compare things out of their historical context. Of course democracy is not very bad when we have food and iphones, but you don't have to look very far (North Korea, Venezuela, Africa - you will be surprised how "good" democracy some of these countries have, yet they do not prosper) to see what happens when we don't have them.
One good book on the topic is "Democracy: The God That Failed" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It goes into massive amount of details and is not a pleasant read. Still, probably the best book in existence, for someone to understand what is wrong with our world.
If you argue North Korea to be a democracy, that is a whole different vocabulary, not changing any bar. In that case you are correct I guess.
On the contrary I think Hoppes criticism falls apart at empirical evidence like the cases you mentioned and his ideas of freedom will inevitably result in feudalism, not even a monarchy because the ruler would lack legitimacy and would face constant challenges. Monarchs as government can only exist if constituents can live completely removed from state influence. But that isn't possible in the world of today.
Elections != democracy. In particular, elections where only one party can run do not make a democracy. Elections where only one party can campaign do not make a democracy. And elections where only one party can win (because of who counts the votes) do not make a democracy.
"Having an election" does not make it a democracy. The people choose who rules makes it a democracy.
Yeah, it's much better when one party pretends to be 2 parties and practically nothing changes regardless if you choose one or the other. I am sure people in the US choose who rules - that's a REAL democracy.
I'm not really sure how to feel about this sort of criticism because you could apply it to basically any court case. The goal for any defendant/prosecutor isn't to have a believable case it's to have a legally sufficient one.
Well incentives matter. The government has its incentives, so do drug makers, so do fda members and so do you. Always consider how incentives impact information you receive. Medical textbooks have optimal incentives if you are trying to learn. Media, government and drug makers maybe not.
There are thousands of scientists working on this stuff all over the world. Most of them seem to be on board with the vaccines. You don’t have to trust the government. Just watch what scientists are saying. Considering that these scientists are spread out all over the world it’s hard to imagine that there is a world wide conspiracy to control what all these scientists are saying.
So now we’re just supposed to work off hunches? See, this is why we’re still in this shit situation.
It’s pretty hard for Joe Bloggs to workout who you trust in 2021.
We’re lied to all the time by politicians and government, then when they want us to comply, we’re just supposed to go along with it?
I’m not arguing against the fact that getting the vaccine is probably the right path to take. I am arguing that if governments want people’s trust, they need to earn it, doing this to Assange is doing the opposite and does things like prolonging the pandemic, it fuels mistrust.
I think you've fundamentally missed GP's point which is that when governments lie, they do it because they're self-interested. When a politician tells you something that isn't true, they're lying to make themself seem better or to make their opponents seem worse. (Or, to take an example of "the government" lying to you, when the NSA says they aren't collecting certain data about US citizens, their motivation for lying is avoiding the public outcry should their actions be revealed). What's the motivation behind a global cabal of governments, scientists, independent regulators and drug companies all lying to us about vaccines?
I'd love to actually know how many truly independent scientists work on "looking into these things".
Does anyone have a quantifiable number. I'm again, not doubting what you're saying, but I hear a lot of "thousands of scientists are vetting the medicine etc".
Are they really ?
I think about this with open source software too, I run Linux, but I do actually wonder sometimes how much "vetting" is really going on.
What's considered "truly independent"? Aren't scientists at the various drug companies "independent" from each other, given that vaccines are mostly zero-sum and so drug companies have strong financial incentives to invalidate their competitors' tech? Aren't governments independent from drug companies, given that rolling out an unsafe vaccine would be political suicide? Aren't the scientists who actually work for the government regulators independent from the governments themselves, given that they aren't political appointees and have nothing to gain politically from getting a bunch of people to take an unsafe vaccine (and presumably are motivated by public health, given their career path)? Aren't the academic scientists doing COVID-related research and peer-reviewing COVID-related publications independent from all of the above?
Not to peddle conspiracies but here are some hypotheticals to match yours:
>Aren't scientists at the various drug companies "independent" from each other, given that vaccines are mostly zero-sum and so drug companies have strong financial incentives to invalidate their competitors' tech?
Vaccines are very much not zero game. They are largely interchangable in that governments are under severe pressure to get something / anything into peoples' arms if it means quelling the masses and shaking off COVID-19. We are seeing countries mixing and matching for the double dose vaccines, not to mention every country approving at least two vaccines for usage. If this were zero-game, then governments would seek to only buy the most effective vaccine and do everything possible to secure supply.
As a phramaceutical, choosing to pick holes in your competitors' products may increase your market share temporarily, but will bring scrutiny from your competitors and overall decrease confidence in vaccines. As an example of the prisoner's dilemna, the best way to maximize everyone's share is by just focusing on your own product.
>Aren't governments independent from drug companies, given that rolling out an unsafe vaccine would be political suicide?
At the absolute highest levels, sure. But at the level of the faceless beaurocrats actually making decisions, it is very much a revolving door between industry and government (oversight bodies in particular). Governing body (decision maker) one day, lobbying on behalf of drug makers the next.
>Aren't the scientists who actually work for the government regulators independent from the governments themselves, given that they aren't political appointees and have nothing to gain politically from getting a bunch of people to take an unsafe vaccine (and presumably are motivated by public health, given their career path)?
Same as previous, and it is also very easy for there to be conflicts of interest... even if we assume ample competence in scrutnizing the pretty pamphlets drug makers try to deceive with. There are many ways drug makers can subtly introduce bias or error into their trials. Well intentioned oversight bodies could still be deceived and later have to recall products they have approved (many drugs are recalled after data about effectiveness and side-effects appear from actual use in the population).
>Aren't the academic scientists doing COVID-related research and peer-reviewing COVID-related publications independent from all of the above?
Same as previous, wrt. source of money for studies and journals themselves. We have also seen people acting out of self-interest when their entire field was pulled into question (scientists working in the field of gain of function publishing letters and articles clearing their field of all doubt without substantiative arguments made, e.g. the origins of the virus).
Currently booked in for my Pfizer vaccine (still on the fence about it, a week out). I try look up information about what causes heart inflammation in young men. I do this because it troubles me the mechanism doesn't seem to be understood.
Anyway, when using Google to find information on the topic, top of the search results are news articles from Reuters about the fact it's a known problem, but it's ok.
Do you know who is on the board at Pfizer ? The CEO of Thompson Reuters! James C Smith [1]
I'm the same, not really into pedaling conspiracies, but this definitely feels like a conflict of interest, and it would also disincentive people to speak out, I'm sure someone in his position could make a high-profile persons life difficult if he wanted too.
When considering whether to get vaccinated, you basically have to ask yourself two questions.
1. what are the side effects of the vaccine?
2. what are the side effects of infection with the virus?
In addition, there is the question of what is the probability of the corresponding side effects of vaccination and infection.
All study data that I know of say that serious side effects are 5 - 8 times more likely to occur with an infection with the virus.
In addition, one would have to ask how likely it is that one will be infected with the virus. Here, one can only base ones thinking on mathematical models. At present, it does not look as if we will be able to achieve herd immunity worldwide. That would mean that sooner or later everyone who is not vaccinated would be infected with the virus.
This from the peer reviewed studies I have searched and read via pubmed in the last few months.
> What's the motivation behind a global cabal of governments, scientists, independent regulators and drug companies all lying to us about vaccines?
This is like asking “what incentive does the government have to keep up the airport security theatre?”.
To play up the pandemic, increase the FUD, rule by fear and panic, keep the population permanently locked down, restricted, controlled, … a lot of very juicy incentives for a lot of politicians.
A lot of the scientists and top “scientific” (actually political) institutions were repeatedly wrong, directly lied or indirectly mislead in the past 18 months. Many scientists who disagreed with the official narrative (at the time) were censored or cancelled.
You can't just 'watch what thousands of scientists are saying'. You have to rely on media, which is provably spreading misinformation on a range of topics every single day. The trust in mainstream media is at an all time low and for good reason.
You could read the studies. It isn't that hard actually. One would only need to want to have facts, not opinions and invest some amount of work to understand this.
Not really true, there are critics of mass vaccinations that have formal credentials. Among doctors it is surprisingly widely spread and they have decent reasoning.
You don’t need to trust the government. You can do your own research by starting with some biology textbooks and then progressing to immunology, the history of medical science, etc. Then you can read a bunch of papers on mRNA vaccines and learn exactly how they work. There is a ton of international clinical data available too, which at least means you don’t have to trust just one government.
Note that nowhere did I mention YouTube videos, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.
If "trusting the government" is the reason you are taking a vaccine, you don't know enough about history, current events, or medicine. Any government, as a whole, is stupid and slow. But even stupid institutions can get things right when they are obvious enough. When they do, it doesn't mean you should start trusting them.
Simple understandings of biology and medicine should inform you that taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action.
As far as I'm concerned, no one is supposed to do anything. You do what you decide is best. Hunches and assumptions sound like a bad way to decide on such an important course of action. Instead, if I were you, I'd do a combination of research and choosing someone to listen to that you think is both trustworthy and has spent a long time learning about vaccines. Maybe someone who's got a PhD in molecular biology and has written extensively on the subject.
Do your own research, and trust that person to understand the things that would take too long for you to learn, then make your choice.
I would never let the government do my thinking for me, for free or for pay. They aren't good at it.
Okay, so looking at your other posts, seems like you really love conspiracy theories and tying together any random coincidence you can without evidence. Not going to engage you in conversation again.
Yes, false media can be generated, much like 100 years ago when you could sign a fake signature or misquote someone in a newspaper. No idea is new, just new applications of the idea.
Luckily, we all have brains, and can use them to understand things from first principles. Listening to other people thoughts about what you should be doing is generally stupid. They aren't you, and they have themselves to look after.
Also, no freaking idea why you tangented from vaccines, to taxes, to fake media generation, but unless you pick a topic we are done here.
> taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action
I’m not sure this is a reasonable strategy. 2 years ago, the “worst pandemic in living memory” was some annual flu. Did you take the vaccine against that?
When it comes to vaccines, you don't necessarily have to trust government institutions.
If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated.
A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
> "You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't."
When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".
If I had fifty teachers during my time in public school I'd be surprised if five of them would have been smart enough to teach such a course. None of those taught grade school.
You might not need to trust government institutions in order to be convinced that vaccines in general are effective, you do however need to trust them in order to verify that a specific vaccine is effective and safe. Especially for new vaccines for which we do not have as much data gathered. In addition, the genetic material for the vaccines not being open source (and commonly being patented) stops smaller research labs and individuals from examining them by themselves. Not to mention that even if the vaccine was open source there would still be possible supply-chain attacks, would you for example trust the Chinese government to not secretly conduct experiments on the Uighurs by giving them a modified vaccine? It's not as if human experimentation even in "modern democratic countries" is unheard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio....
Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine.
> You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
> But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.
Vaccines that have been through clinical trials and approved by the FDA generally work. I’m fully vaccinated, but you have to admit that there’s a difference between the COVID vaccine and other vaccines— not just in terms of development and deployment speed, but also in terms of underlying technology, at least in some cases. Skepticism is a reasonable default stance for most things, emergency measures included.
If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world.
So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be.
Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
> Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it.
This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks.
As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another.
So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
How do you explain that, even though significant proportion of populations is already vaccinated, new hospitalizations are almost exclusively people who were not vaccinated?
If vaccines were not effective wouldn't it be true that we should see both vaccinated and unvaccinated in hospitals?
While vaccinated people still can get Covid, they have much lower chance of passing it further. In a vaccinated people the virus cannot multiply as much and with lower and shorter presence of the virus in the organism and much less chance of symptoms that aid spreading the virus (like caughing) there is much less chance you infect other people.
The reality is that Covid is now mostly spreading in circles of unvaccinated people and vaccines are effective at stopping spread of the virus.
The vaccines prevent the disease from becoming bad enough to need hospitalization. That's about it. This answers your question about why hospitalizations are mostly unvaccinated people without negating any of the GP's points, which are well stated.
The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."
It's also worth pointing out that "some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days" is strictly less than that of the virus, because the virus also puts those spike proteins in your body.
And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
Further, GGPs 33% number is actually 39%, and applies specifically to the delta variant. Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
> The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."
That doesn't follow. My point was simply that making an association does not prove causation. Which is true. Observing that giving someone a vaccine reduces their hospitalization is a separate matter, and one I literally stated in my comment (that they reduce COVID hosps by 80-90%)
> And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
You're wrong about the guillain-barre. Unfortunately I can't find the study I'm looking for. There is a paper that looked at the rates of Guillain Barre in the mRNA vaccines and found them 4-5x higher than normal ("normal" is a low base rate obviously), and specifically criticized the misleading math/wording coming from Pfizer and the like where they falsely claimed that the Guillain-Barre was not more common.
> Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
This is why getting naturally infected is so important! You get near 100% infection reduction for a couple years and then immunological memory for the rest of your life. You can't beat those numbers with the vaccines, not even close.
If you look at the 6 month Pfizer trial, the vaccines made no difference in all-cause mortality. In fact there was one more death in the vaccine group. (My interpretation is that the vaccines spared some COVID deaths - a small but real amount - but caused more deaths from the side effects of being injected with a massive bolus of spike protein mRNA (acute clotting disorders, stroke, myocarditis, that kind of stuff))
Unlike the US, which had lots of people dying every day and so chose Emergency Authorization to get any working vaccine ASAP, New Zealand already had eliminated COVID-19 in their general population, so they did the full (albeit expedited, it's not as though there wasn't impatience) medicines authorization process for the Pfizer vaccine they're using.
They've now put well over a million jabs in arms (New Zealand's population is about 5 million) and are starting their "big" population wide rollout at the end of July. There is no sign of any significant problems.
The very rapid success of the trial programmes is actually because we did such an abysmal job stopping the pandemic. Trials work by comparing people who got the test jab against people who got a placebo. For many diseases it might take several years for enough trial participants to get infected so that you learn anything. For COVID-19 it took only a few months for strong signals to emerge, because, (outside of New Zealand and to some extent a handful of other countries that had control) the virus was everywhere, so very quickly your placebo group began to get infected and sick.
HN deals more with technology. Imagine your project takes six hours to compile. You have ten hypotheses for the cause of an important bug. Will you fix it this week? Probably not right, that's sixty hours just for compiling -- maybe you can leave it overnight and manage two tests per day? But best not to chance it. So you tell management you hope to have a fix "the week after next". Sorry, that's the best you can do.
Now, imagine a new compiler version speeds up builds, and they only take 15 minutes. You can try all ten hypotheses in a morning, get a fix reviewed, go to production and it'll be done by Friday close of business no problem.
Management are suspicious. How can the new compiler make such a radical difference? Surely you've cut some corners, you'd better go back and test it "properly" this time.
In this analogy lay people are suspicious management and the vaccine manufacturers are the developer. Also being completely useless at preventing a predictable respiratory pandemic is somehow a new compiler version. That part of the analogy doesn't work very well. Sorry.
There are two separate ideas here. Believing in the concept of a vaccine as an effective disease prevention mechanism, and believing the current narrative that all demographics need a covid vaccine, the risk reward calculus always shows it does more good than harm, etc (I'm not trying to faithfully summarize, but more make the point that there is a distinct and political covid vaccine push that's not the same as just saying a vaccine works)
I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular.
So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine.
Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.
The apolitical government agencies lie a lot less than you are implying.
You also seem to be implying if the government is pushing something than it is safer to do the opposite. Go outside during tornado warnings? Spend all day outside if they forecast extreme heat? Ignore a mandatory evacuation if a hurricane is coming? Keep your seat belt unbuckled? Fly on an unlicensed airline?
Exactly when should you ignore the gov’t and when should you listen?
> A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives.
It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law.
I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
Consider US58 as it crosses a substantial chunk of Kansas. It passes through many very small towns with a (frequently defunct) retail "strip" that lasts less than a mile. The speed limit typically drops from 65 mph to 35 or even 25 mph while passing through these towns.
Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?
Politics is when people yell at each other about what they ought to do.
You're right that there's a "political" covid vaccine push, in that sense. It's because getting vaccinated is your civic duty. If the risk of complications were 10 times greater it would still be your civic duty. The pandemic - a society-wide threat to public health and social integrity - ends only when everyone has sufficient antibodies to prevent the virus from multiplying out of control - the so-called "herd immunity". It'll keep going until it gets there, so you don't really have a choice - you're getting those antibodies, one way or another. You can do that the easy way - through a vaccine - or the hard way, by catching covid, in which case you'll further strain an already overloaded health system and likely pass it on to someone else, risking their death or permanent injury.
So, yeah - you ought to get vaccinated. In a simpler time, it might have been called "the patriotic thing to do".
I am vaccinated and sometimes wish I could unvaccinate when I read hogwash like this.
It isn't you civic duty. Herd immunity isn't achievable, that is scientific consensus by now. You should take more care with demands from others. Much more care.
Totally bad take. A frequently-touted bioethics claim is that it is the individual taking the risk, so the individual's benefit and outcomes is what matters. Any call for "civic duty" is a violation of bioethics.
Further, if anything about the vaccine push made any sense whatsoever, you might have a better case during these "exigent" circumstances. For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven. And, since I personally note that strangely aggressive angle, among many others, it makes me even more suspicious of these vaccines.
Then again, I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid. So anyone telling me vaccines make sense for me is pretty out-of-touch.
>For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven
Firstly, vaccine immunity is superior. Secondly - what are you implying with your eyebrow raise? An undisclosed ulterior motive? Short of kooky 5g-microchips-flat-earth-lizard-illuminati trash, what motive could any government have for deliberately compromising the health of their citizens, never mind all countries - including all the great rival superpowers?
> I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid
Close to zero risk? I'm skeptical. Unless you live off-grid somewhere and have no personal contact at all, in which case - sure, forget vaccination. But all the youth and vitamin D in the world won't stop you from catching and transmitting it the moment you step into civilization.
Most recovered COVID-19 patients mount broad, durable immunity after infection
Neutralizing antibodies show a bi-phasic decay with half-lives >200 days
Spike IgG+ memory B cells increase and persist post-infection
Durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells recognize distinct viral epitope regions
So, in case you haven't been paying any attention, the data from the UK and Israel, some of the most heavily vaccinated places on earth, are showing pretty clearly that the vaccines are not long-lasting, and not robust against the delta variant.
Second, you can't prove that "vaccine immunity is superior". That has never once been the case with any vaccine in history, there're no studies that show it, that's just BS parroted by drones.
Third, you don't need to know the motive when the behaviour is suspicious, you just need to know the creepy, suspicious behaviour. If someone is creeping around my house sneakily, repeatedly, I don't need to know exactly what they plan, but I have every right to want them to gtfo my space.
Fourth, another of the super-suspicious things about these vaccines is just how many of the hoi polloi have been programmed to accuse anyone unvaccinated of being wild 5g-magnetic-brain-impant believers. As though there can be no reasonable way to be suspicious of these experimental vaccines that were rushed to market--you have to be an insane person. That drones like you come out and make these stupid accusations every time I mention that the vaccines aren't some obvious lock on canning this virus is really, really suspicious.
Fifth, asymptomatic spread has NEVER been proven. Pre-symptomatic spread has, but not nearly as widely prevalent as we thought. Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.
>Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.
I'm sorry, we could argue the toss about the other stuff but this is dangerously delusional. You're going to hurt people with that attitude. All of the factors you mentioned just mean you're more likely to survive. They have no bearing on how easily you can catch covid, or pass it on. In the UK, spread is almost entirely driven by the young now.
"For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death."
The #1 additional condition is, you guessed it, obesity.
I'm not fat. I have zero underlying conditions. I am healthier than the vast majority of people. Good bodyfat ratio. Good muscle mass. Really high-quality diet. Zero stress. I don't take any medications.
People like me almost never get sick from covid.
You seem to think that people who never get symptoms also can transmit the disease (so-called asymptomatic spread). This has never been proven to happen. There has been some, much more limited than initially thought, pre-symptomatic spread, but that means that the person doing the spreading without symptoms will get sick in a day or three.
The healthy and young of this world have no observed impact on spread.
You may not take much personal responsibility for your health, and thus may be fat or otherwise at risk. You may have some rare condition beyond your control that puts you at risk. If so, maybe you should take experimental vaccines.
It makes zero sense for people like me, who have taken care of their health and thus have robust immune systems that handle this virus with zero problems and develop robust immunity to it, to take experimental vaccines. You'll have to have some more actual data to back that up, though.
Says the person suggesting that web devs on HN can't Google Scholar and critical think their way to an overridingly authoritative understanding of medical science (which is nothing compared to being a Node ninja)
I'm genuinely curious: what does US democracy have to do with Assange?
Like I'm deeply sympathetic to what has happened to Assange. But I don't see how it has anything to do with democracy, given that he's not a US citizen, and US law rarely applies to non-US citizens outside of US borders.
A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy. Without a working legal system you can't have a functional society. Without society you can't have a democracy.
When a nations legal system is manufacturing false evidence, the target of that become irrelevant. A legal system can't manufacturing false evidence, against anyone, and still be trusted.
> A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy.
While it is true (that you need a functioning legal system), it is also worth mentioning that a lot of regimes have excellently efficient legal systems and judicial branch that put any democratic system to shame.
The issue is what regulations you put in, how independent the judicial branch is and whether it is corrupt or not.
Would you like me to find a link where US Government officially admits to pressuring foreign countries and abusing justice system to prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
Those are all fine and good when you're an employee. When you're not affiliated directly with the United States at all, and we're a means to an end though is where the consternation comes in, and where the U.S. really gave themselves a black eye with Assange.
I was getting at the fact that these two things don't square. The US govt provides whistle blower protection but the parent also claims the US abuses the justice system to:
>prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
So the US govt provides whistle blower protections but it is also abusing the justice dept? The govt publishes materials all the time that makes it look bad:
Whistleblower protections, where they exist, a) don't guarantee that they are applied fairly, b) tend to come with all kinds of "did you do the proper process" restrictions and c) apply to specific groups of people (i.e. people speaking about things they legitimately become aware of due to their work). It very easily squares that whistleblower protections exist and at the same time they want to limit their use and come down hard on anyone falling outside of them. (Some details on how it works in US national security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_protection_in_th... note fun parts like "needs to escalate internally" while at the same time "internal retaliation isn't forbidden and can't be sued against")
People like Assange aren't whistleblowers, so those protections don't apply to them.
I didn't say Assange could take advantage of whistle blower protections. Just that it's weird that the govt provides whistle blower protections at the same time that it "abuses the justice system to stop the publication of embarrassing information"
The US Govt publishes embarrassing information almost daily. The issue is more complicated than this forum leads on but its clear to me which side of the issue you all fall on judging by all my downvotes.
here is an article in German with Nils Melzer, who was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, and who was fired for his assessment of the confinement of Assange as torture. He is also stating that the whole case is about setting a deterring example. (also posted this link here, in another thread)
If Assange is found guilty on most charges, it will effectively work as case law banning the publication of classified documents. The indictment alone shows this is part of their goal.
As per the article, prison has three functions: punish, deter, and reform the prisoner. In regards to the deter function: any attempt to imprison a person can be viewed as an attempt to "ruin them" (through loss of freedom and through the scarlet letter of a felony conviction) in order to "scare... people from running similar actions."
The question in this case is: why is the U.S. trying so hard to extradite Assange? If it is because they don't want a repeat of wikileaks, then the grandparent statement is very reasonable. And I suppose another reference would be the U.S. relationship with whistleblowers. I don't have the energy to do the research myself, but I too have heard they come down on whistleblowers like a ton of bricks. But maybe someone else can supply that reference.
German press stays silent on this, again. Even magazines known for investigative stories just don't mention Assange in the context of the recent developments ([1], [2], [3]). This is so frustrating.
The Berliner Zeitung has had an interesting interview with Nils Melzer, who was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, and who was fired for his assessment of the confinement of Assange as torture. He is also stating that the whole case is about setting a deterring example.
Interesting that the BZ used to be a little bit more liberal than the mainstream press, even back when it was published in East Germany under Socialism ;-)
quote from the linked interview (my translation followed by the original)
Q: Your job was to reveal cases of torture and mistreatment by states. Do governments exert a lot of pressure?
A: I have been always in respect of all of the regulations, and I have to admit that I could always proceed freely with my work. However one is risking his carreer, if one is stepping to much on the feet of the permanent members of the UN security council. I was told informally, that I would have to pay a political price, but I am accepting this (reality).
Original:
Ihre Aufgabe ist das Aufdecken von Folterungen und Misshandlungen durch Staaten. Gibt es da nicht viel Druck von den Regierungen?
Ich habe immer darauf geachtet, dass ich nach den Vorschriften handle. Und ich kann sagen, dass ich meine Arbeit wirklich frei machen konnte. Allerdings riskiert man schon seine Karriere, wenn man den permanenten Mitgliedern des UN-Sicherheitsrats allzu sehr auf die Füße steigt. Man hat mir informell mitgeteilt, dass ich einen politischen Preis zu bezahlen haben werde. Aber das nehme ich in Kauf.
There are several ways to get fired, in my book this qualifies as one of them. In addition to that he had his funding slashed by various governments, in addition to having received these 'hints',
Not that surprising. The German mainstream news landscape is dominated by transatlantic interests.
Pretty much all German politicians, and journalists, of "relevance" are members in some pro-US NGO [0] or another, often even several of them.
Der Spiegel used to be one of thew few wider reaching left-leaning exceptions, they even published Snowden's first interview internationally back in 2013.
But over the years they went trough a slow transformation; They've become noticeably less critical of the US, completely ignoring any further developments around Snowden or Assagne, while ramping up on anti-Russian news.
Why is nobody there reaching out to people like Nils Melzer, as Swiss Republik.ch did? [1]
If Der Spiegel would have published something like that, it would have reached a far wider audience, could maybe even made some actual waves.
It’s not pertinent. The journalistic draw of a years-old case and judicial mechanics. Everyone has a pet agenda that seems irresponsibly ignored by the media and the public. Procedural developments are rarely big news.
They'd probably have thought a key witness who turned out to be a liar and a rapist of underage boys who was given immunity was a little bit newsworthy if it happened during the trial to, say, lock Navalny up.
No. They always have an agenda. And that agenda, overwhelmingly, is pro status quo. Not left, not right, not up or down. Just "things are basically OK except for a few problems here and there which we'll tell you about, though not in much depth".
Looking at the media, it's hard to agree with your claim that it's pro status quo. See any incendiary topic where the media can take opposing sides. Surely two diametrically opposed opinions can't be status quo biased.
Chomsky once said that the way to keep a population passive and obedient was to place strict limits on the range of acceptable debate but encourage very lively debate within that range.
Just focusing on Assange alone, it's not pertinent, sure. But Assange (and wikileaks, and anything behind it) in this (my?) frame of reference is not an individual, but serves as a pars pro toto for the freedom of press and the judicial system as a whole.
To me, the coverage he gets in the far-reaching magazines is a little bit underrepresented, to stay polite. This includes U.S. press, UK press and german press.
The world's most powerful country that constantly trumpets freedom and free speech, and regularly trashes China and other places for lack of press freedoms locks up a journalist for exposing US corruption.
German-perspective news for an international audience (including Germans living elsewhere) about international topics in a large number of languages. Or, to quote the law creating it, its programs
> [...] should provide a forum for German and other perspectives on important topics, predominantly in politics, culture and economy, both in Europe and in other continents, with the aim to foster understanding and exchange between cultures and people. While doing so, it especially supports the German language. (my off-the-cuff translation, but should capture the gist of it I hope)
It's the German state broadcasting agency producing content in many languages for Germans abroad and an international audience. For anti-propaganda reasons they are not allowed to broadcast in Germany. This is in contrast with the German public broadcasting agencies which have a compulsory fee, but are not directly paid by the state. DW have some really good and interesting reporting off the mainstream but should be consumed with care as they are effectively controlled by the German state. Recently they are set to become a sort of counter to Russia Today meant to counter fake news. A friend of mine works at DW and frequently rants about higher-ups revising or canceling reporting because it doesn't fit the desired angle.
I've been disappointed with DW for a long time. One of their ostensible goals is to promote the German language (see the Deutsche Welle Act, which governs it). Finding a live stream in German on their site is near impossible. I expect it's due to agreements with US cable companies, but I haven't been able to confirm that. I can't think of another reason for them to display "Es gab ein Problem Zugang zu dem geschützten Inhalt herzustellen" whenever I attempt to view live German content. Fortunately, some of it is available on YouTube.
For future reference, I did confirm from a support person that live streams are not offered in the US "due to legal reasons". You can only receive it through select cable, satellite, and other operators. Sad.
The Guardian (UK), which made much of Assange's revelations currently has these two phrases as part of it's campaign to raise funds.
"With the funding of more than 1.5 million readers in 180 countries, the Guardian remains open to all and fiercely independent, and can continue chasing the truth."
(Front page promo)
"Because of our independence, we are able to investigate boldly, putting the truth ahead of the agenda of an owner, investors or shareholders. And because we are reader-funded we have been able to keep our journalism open for all to read, so when important stories like this come along, everyone gets to read them."
Katherine Viner - Editor-in-Chief
This was true but revealed in a way that was purposely misleading and to deflect from the Guardian's role in putting intelligence workers at risk. That is, the Guardian's poor OpSec had made all those cables available to anyone without any kind of protections in place. (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20869-assange-why-wik...)
The Guardian does not protect it's sources. The Guardian does not own up to it's mistakes. The Grauniad does not spellcheck.
I think it's more likely that in light of the #MeToo movement, it became untenable for them to defend an accused rapist, regardless of if he was innocent or not.
That sounds like a load of baseless accusations. Printing WikiLeaks leaks doesn't mean they have to defend Assange for his behavior. Assange is also a well established liar.
Their actions in Wikileaks' case and subsequently show they are not acting in the public interest, therefore this public appeal is false and deliberately misleading, and this is known to and actively supported by Katherine Viner.
They continue to employ Luke Harding which seems mystifying.
Maybe it's a really subtle false flag? The spooks have them where they want them so they can't publish the truth meaning they have to publish ridiculous lies which get publicised, then fall over due to contrary evidence and so actually undermine the state's case while seeming to support it? This comically bad example they haven't even bothered to try and salvage their reputation with corrections. Merely added "sources say" in a submarine edit to the headline.
What happens when the US government's whole case against Assange collapses? Presumably they will find another unreliable witness to lie for them?
It's incredibly worrying that this he has been trapped in this situation for so many years, with the prosecution seemingly having the upper hand despite supporting their case with lies.
> What happens when the US government's whole case against Assange collapses?
He walks a free man. Problematic as the American justice system is, Assange’s isolation was a function of his fugitive status. Nothing about U.S. detention per se.
It’s high time, either way, for both sides to be heard in court.
> It’s high time, either way, for both sides to be heard in court.
This is one of those positions that is designed to sound reasonable by appealing to "the middle ground" for its own sake.
It's not time for both sides to be heard in court. It never was. To bring someone into court, you need to make the case that they did something wrong first.
> To bring someone into court, you need to make the case that they did something wrong first
I’m not a fan of our espionage laws. But they are, indisputably, laws. There has been a lot of evaluation of the questions of jurisdiction and standing. Barring wild, new evidence, I don’t see good reason to question that string of precedence.
As far as I understood what was happening is that he may have broken the law by how he got the information, not by releasing the info. I think the accusation is that he essentially encouraged someone to hack into computers, which sounds similar to encouraging someone to break into someone's home or office, to retrieve info.
I haven't followed the case too closely so maybe I'm wrong on that. But if that's what they're accusing him of doing, I struggle to see how that's just doing journalism. Maybe journalistic methods to extract info aren't so black and white and some do similar things and yet I imagine there is a line where that info gathering becomes illegal.
> I think the accusation is that he essentially encouraged someone to hack into computers, which sounds similar to encouraging someone to break into someone's home or office, to retrieve info.
He told Manning "curious eyes never run dry," but more importantly that is one of the eighteen charges he faces. The others are all for publishing classified documents.
If he only faced that one charge, I'd still disagree that it matters but I would understand your point of view. As is, they're using that charge to justify an attack on the free press.
No, he broke the espionage law by releasing the info. It is ludicrously broad.
It's the same reason Snowden refuses to come home. He's repeatedly promised to come home if they tighten the definition of the espionage to include, y'know, just espionage. Congress refuses.
I just looked into the indictment and the laws he's accused of breaking and yeah, they're all in the espionage section. It does seem quite broad to me. I also think way too much stuff is classified these days. At the same time, I guess I'm confused at what a government should do. The way I read the US code title 18 793 is that it's basically illegal to access and disseminate classified information. If that isn't a law, what's the point of having classified information? Shouldn't it be illegal? How could the law be tightened? I'm open for ideas, just not seeing how to tighten it.
I am not following this case to the tiniest detail but I remember, when Assange was originally extracted from the embassy it was advertised that primary charges are around some sexual assault - if I remember correctly these charges had been dropped..
I can recommend reading this interview [0] with Niels Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
It gives a pretty good run-down of what happened, by somebody who's impartial, qualified, and actually had access to a lot of evidence and official documentation around the case.
A somewhat long read, but absolutely worth it in terms of what it reveals. Case in point: Assange was never even accused by anybody of sexual assault or rape, Swedish police changed witness testimonies to fabricate that claim, then leaked it the same night to Swedish press.
Espionage laws are void (per the first amendment), and hence not relevant to legitimate court cases (regardless of how much existing practice fails to respect that). One could perhaps argue that he incited Manning to violate employment-related nondiclosure agreements, but in addition to being iffy on the face of it, AFAIK no has actually made such a argument separately from the anti-free-press-laws argument.
Well, that too, but even ignoring the inalienable rights angle and focusing purely on what's legal, the constitution supersedes congressional law by design.
So you agree with him staying in the UK and being charged under the Official Secrets Act for leaking GCHQ documents?
Wikileaks has leaked documents from the US, UK, Australia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, European Union, and United Nations. He could hang out in Asia or Russia, but would anywhere else be subject to local laws.
If the UK prosecutors think they have a case, they should file it. They're not subject to a statute of limitations, but justice would be served by not dragging the process out any longer.
AFAIK, in the US, the government can bring criminal trials based on indictments either by prosecutorial discretion or by grand jury, both of which require a belief that there is enough evidence to convict but neither having to prove the guilt before the case.
I'm not sure what counts in the Assange case as it relates to someone outside of the US, however I believe many people have been tried in US courts for hacking into American companies from overseas. I don't believe one has to physically be in the US to break American laws and be tried for them, just as a company doesn't have to be in Europe to violate GDPR.
I'm confused why you see it as fallacious. My logic was comparing the jurisdiction to charge a person for a crime they committed digitally upon a geographic region without having to be in that geographic region.
Could you say more why you see it as a fallacious comparison?
GDPR fines companies that operate in the EU. If you don't operate in the EU, you don't have to comply. The only penalty possible in that case is that your operations that are in the EU will be fined. You won't be deported, and also it applies to corporations, not individuals.
I think the analogy is still apt for having laws that charge someone outside of one's geographic region or citizenship. I do agree with you that the analogy does not go much further than that, as GDPR is not for individuals, does not have incarceration as a punishment, and does not have extradition to seek that punishment.
I guess my analogy was specifically targeting whether one government could have a law governing someone's behavior outside of that region, because I was responding to the assumption that he hasn't done anything wrong, and I think in regard to the current laws of the US government, he may have.
>It’s high time, either way, for both sides to be heard in court.
As most of the charges against Assange are related to espionage, it's very likely he will not even be presented an opportunity to defend himself in court, like what happened with Ellsberg. It's nice to think that the courts might ultimately make a fair ruling, but the amount of government misconduct means that will never happen.
They've already compromised the attorney-client privlage, a fair case is already impossible.
I think a document was leaked somewhere that said they'd move him from country to country to face charges, making the process itself the punishment rather than letting the cases conclude. I doubt he'll ever be free again.
I really wish the West wasn't so hypocritical. Between Assange, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, we show all the wrong people what to do. A pity and a shame. I hope Assange is freed soon and can get on with his life.
It isn't incompetence. The security establishment across the west don't share democratic values. The politicians are too weak or distracted to fight them even when they're inclined to, which seems relatively rare. A sad state of affairs.
> How a proposed secrecy law would recast journalism as spying[1] (20/07/21, Guardian)
> The Home Office now wants harder and more extensive secrecy laws that would have the effect of deterring sources, editors and reporters, making them potentially subject to uncontrolled official bans not approved by a court, and punished much more severely if they do not comply. In noisy political times, a government consultation issued two months ago has had worryingly little attention. Although portrayed as countering hostile activity by state actors, the new laws would, if passed, ensnare journalists and sources whose job is reporting “unauthorised disclosures” that are in the public interest.
> Endorsed by the home secretary, Priti Patel, the consultation argues that press disclosures can be worse than spying, because the work of a foreign spy “will often only be to the benefit of a single state or actor”.
> Calling for parliament to consider “increased maximum sentences”, the Home Office claims that there is now not necessarily a “distinction in severity between espionage and the most serious unauthorised disclosures”, including “onward disclosure” in the press. Journalism could even create “far more serious damage” than a spy. Yet the 66-page document does not mention “journalism” once, and refers only to “onward disclosure … without authorisation”.
-----
> Priti Patel is urged to spare a billionaire dubbed 'Britain's Bill Gates' from a 'grotesque and unjust' extradition to US[2] (25/7/21, Mail Online)
Interesting for the plea made by Conservative ex-cabinet-minister David Davis on behalf of the beset billionaire, in terms which (though he would never allow it) could just as well be applied to Assange:
> America has a ferocious legal system with a 97 per cent conviction rate, where prosecutors, not judges, set the sentences. Defendants, too, are subjected to coercive plea bargaining. For example, people are encouraged to admit an offence and get a lesser jail sentence rather than continue to plead innocence and, if convicted, get a much longer term.
and later:
> He ended up in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a Pennsylvania penitentiary, without a clock and thus unable to know what time of day or night it was.
> He and his co-charged were treated like criminals long before any trial began – placed in chains, frog-marched and strip-searched.
> It is now up to the Home Secretary to decide whether Dr Lynch should stay in this country or be sent to a US cell.
> I, and many others, urge Priti Patel not to submit to this grotesque and unjust process. She must wait for the outcome of a separate High Court trial examining the fraud allegations against Dr Lynch.
I'd love to see just one member of the British Government stand up for Assange like that, but I guessing he is lacking the £8B collateral of Dr. Lynch.
Assange will die in prison. it's ridiculous that he is still in prison waiting for US to appeal. the previous trial was in his favor but he is still in prison awaiting the US gov to appeal. it's like the US typed in cheat codes.
Remember when he repeatedly said he'd happily face the charges if he could be given assurances he wouldn't be extradited to the US for spying once he got there?
And Sweden was like "uhmmmm.... nope, we need to leave that option open" and the media made fun of him for being paranoid and delusional.
Correa gave him asylum for a reason. It's too bad Moreno decided to cancel the asylum to score some points with the US.
Sweden was actually like "our law requires us to consider extradition requests on their own merits."
I don't know if he knew that or not, but it's kinda weird he didn't flea to the embassy until his extradition to Sweden was imminent. The UK could've arrested him for extradition to the US any day he was out on bail.
> It's of course entirely their prerogative to not offer any guarantees at all.
If Assange wanted to have a guarantee of not being extradited he should have submitted an application for this to the Swedish justice department and have it reviewed. That's what the law require. The prosecutor or politicians cannot offer any guarantees and trying to bypass the procedure would be breaking the law.
So no, it's not their prerogative. Stop spreading misinformation, it's tiresome.
It's absolutely their prerogative to give him a guarantee.
Or, they can choose to undermine their credibility as a champion of human rights by providing no guarantees of humane treatment to any person under extradition.
Many countries opt to follow this route (not nice countries, mind) and thus voluntarily "fail" to extradite a great number of guilty people as a result. Refusal to respect human rights often comes at a cost.
Sweden's hands were not tied on this issue and it was a reasonable request. The reasonableness and the apparent politically motivated intransigence of the Swedish justice system (something noted by eagle eyed GCHQ employees in leaked emails) is a large part of why the application for asylum was approved.
This is also probably why he made the offer ~30 times.
> It's absolutely their prerogative to give him a guarantee.
By breaking the law? You can't just request something from a prosecutor. You have to follow the process for these kinds of things. The prosecutor has no right to grant what he requested, so how do you propose he would do it?
> The prosecutor who was in close contact with politicia s passes it up the chain of command.
There's no one up the chain of command who is allowed to make the decision. The justice department or the politicians does not have the rights to grant this. You would know this if you had basic knowledge about how Sweden is governed.
It is funny how you claim that there wee unprecedented exceptions for this case when you clearly know zero on the topic. It's an embarrassing read, honestly.
"The Trump administration did <x>. The Obama administration did <y>"
Why try to shoehorn tribal politics into this? The main argument stands on its own merits. The persecution of Assange spans multiple administrations - has the Biden administration dropped the case?
That wasn't the point being made in the article - it was a standard "Trump administration bad, Obama administration good" smear which detracts from the actual argument.
I don't think anyone who cares about whistleblower protection, or the freedom of the press could write "Obama good" or fail to notice the Trump administration is not current.
shameful that his home country is doing nothing for him. imagine he was a US citizen who leaked Australia's dirty doings. he would be free after 1 month.
He didn't really flee to russia, he was on his way to Ecuador, when the US cancelled his traveling documents trapping him in Russia because it's way easier to discredit him while he is residing in Russia
I think technically the problem wasn't that the US had cancelled his travel documents, as the Ecuadorian government could grant the necessary document to a refugee (which is almost what happened[0]), but rather that he was worried the US would force his plane to land in a country where he could be arrested.
That fear was well-founded, given what later happened to Bolivian president Evo Morales when the US suspected he might be transporting Snowden out of Russia[1], even though forcing planes to land to capture political prisoners is more fitting for a dictatorship than a democracy[2], but I suspect that Russia made it a condition of Snowden's safety that he not attempt to travel to any other country.
Of course I'm not saying I would have done anything differently were I in Snowden's position, but it is worth noting that he could in principle have avoided US and NATO airspace by travelling from Russia to Shenzhen to Johannesburg[3] to São Paulo[4] to Ecuador.
He never said anything about agreeing or disagreeing with his conduct.
I disagree with his conduct but I could never condone his treatment because yes, fundamentally the actions of the US government here are as close to fascism as we see in the modern age.
It's putting international justice to shame.
If they don't have a sound case then he shouldn't be persecuted until such time they do. If he truly committed a crime there must be evidence, they should find it and bring proceedings against him in a fair manner.
Unfortunately there is little evidence to suggest the US government is interested in a fair trial and much more that they are just being punitive to trying make an example of him.
I guess for me, I have a hard time judging it as an unfair trial when there hasn't even been a trial. If the trial happens and it's unfair, then I think we discuss that.
Right now it seems as if we're discussing how it is unfair for them to indict him and seek extradition to conduct the trial.
At least for how I understand the US justice system as an American, if I'm indicted, even if I think it's a sham indictment, I don't think I can fight it at the indictment phase. I fight it at trial. Now, if I think the trial won't even be fair, then I'd probably flee, but now I'm a fugitive in the eyes of the law and it doesn't seem to give the trial a chance to be fair.
So I'm confused, what should we demand better of? That the government shows more evidence to the indictment in order to gain the right for a trial? How much evidence needs to be shown before trial vs during the trial?
As provocative as the person you're replying to was, this is a complete strawman. No one mentioned agreeing with his conduct, only treatment. You're only making the person you're replying to more right.
That is literally not the prompt. The prompt is, and I quote, if you agree with the "treatment of Assange". Agreeing with his actions or opinions was never mentioned.
I guess I just don't know what the US govt should do. The following may be totally off so please correct it if it is, however my understanding is that's it kinda like this:
US govt: We believe Assange committed a serious crime agains the US. We want him to come here for trial.
Assange: No, I don't want to go there for trial.
US govt: We want you to come for trial.
Assange: I don't want to come for trial.
What is the US govt supposed to do, say OK and just not let him come for trial? I mean, perhaps one could argue that the US has no legal jurisdiction outside of its geography and/or that extraditions, even of Americans who commit crimes in the US and flee, should be illegal. I dunno. Maybe the torture is that he was being held before being formally charged. I must be missing something because the above seems like how most governments would try to respond to someone who won't come for trial.
There is a fundamental question here: what are the limits of journalism?
So you receive classified information and publish it. In the US at least there are is some precedent for journalistic protection here. Think the Pentagon Papers [1].
Let's take it a step further: what if instead of simply receiving classified information you provide material aid to whoever is stealing it? What if you're directing the thief on what to steal? Are you still a journalist?
Let's take it in another direction: how do you choose what to publish? Generally reputable news organizations will redact things that aren't newsworthy or might, say, endanger people in the field (eg by releasing details about an undercover operation).
But what if your decision on what to publish is partisan or otherwise aimed at achieving a particular end, political or otherwise? Are you still a journalist?
Some will argue there are no limits. I don't think that's a reasonable position as it essentially justifies anything as long as you claim to be wearing a journalist's hat.
So here are the problems for Assange:
1. He wasn't "passive' with Bradley/Chelsea Manning and provided material aid;
2. The Wikileaks releases were clearly aimed at hurting Hilary Clinton in 2016 (eg the Podesta emails). We can speculate as to why. Personal politics? Maybe Assange thought he'd fare better in a Trump administration? I don't know.
3. Additionally, he's kind of a creepy guy. This isn't material to an espionage case but in the court of public opinion, reputation matters. I would love to know how the incident rose to the level of rape charges that Swedish prosecutors decided to pursue because on the face of it, it just doesn't make sense. Some will argue it was at the behest of the US but I'm not really sure that adds up. Maybe someday we'll know the inside story. I can but hope.
Now on the US side, how has this desire to prosecute and to punish Assange by proxy (eg containing him in the Ecuadoran embassy was clearly a "punishment") survived a decade? At the Federal level this has gone through 2 administrations, one of each party, 4 AGs and I'm not sure how many US Attorneys.
It's a little strange that the US continues to push this so hard. Is it just about sending a message to any future leakers? For the record, the Obama administration was particularly harsh with leakers so this is possible.
Maybe this has just taken on a life of its own and there is no puppet master at the top. Stranger things have happened.
James Risen of the NY Times exposed 10x more salient and embarrassing abuses of power than Assange and Snowden combined. When he was prosecuted to reveal his sources he stayed in the US, attended every hearing, continued reporting and was eventually cleared.
Comparing these two cases is not as simple as that. Risen refused to name sources for his book and did so till the end.
The only reason it didn't go further, and he didn't go to jail, was because of an arbitrary decision further up the chain that was already publicly signaled ahead of the hearing [0]
Assagne is spending time in jail right now, for years he was in a self-imposed jail over fabricated accusations, with the US actively violating his rights in every way they could, down to violation the client-attorney privilege.
Nothing out of the US signals that he will get a fair trail, everything suggests he would most likely be made out as a an political example, as he has been and currently is.
Assange is not accused of exposing stuff, some other crimes were fabricated, get familiar with the fake rape accusations where US got involved outside their jurisdiction, then get familiar with the recent fake witnesses. In fact the leaks where the names of agents were not redacted was done by some other guy.
This is more propaganda touted by the same groups as the ones spewing Setch Rich conspiracy claims. Sigurdur was not a key witness. The indictments do not rely on his evidence. Go look at the FBI statements if you don't believe me. Even if he was a key witness, you don't think law enforcement has ever dealt with a witness retracting a statement that they agreed to in exchange for a plea deal or immunity? It wouldn't simply invalidate their statement. Prosecutors plan ahead for things like witnesses dying during trial. Seriously, I've seen this same propaganda being pushed here already based on the same theory that Siggi was holding the entire case together which is just false. It is actually pretty funny... I imagine prosecutors seeing this laughing, saying.. we should use this tactic more where we make people think the case is falling apart, maybe we can get more evidence of crimes in the process of people letting their guards down.
It's less that the evidence was extremely crucial evidence, though it was important enough for them to file a new indictment right before the hearing to include it, and more that the prosecution has basically been found to have "paid" a witness to make false testimony.
Making deals to get testimony isn't unprecedented at all. The terms of the deal are disclosed and can be considered as an element of credibility. If this guy recanted to the media he can be put back under oath and admit to perjury and get his deal rescinded or admit to pandering the media and keep his original statement on the record.
This sounds great if you assume the DoJ was unaware he was lying when they made the deal. Given his past with the FBI and the other public abuses of justice in.this case, I find that unlikely.
>admit to perjury and get his deal rescinded or admit to pandering the media and keep his original statement on the record.
So his options are admit that he lied and face perjury charges or admit that he lied and walk away free? Tough choice.
I haven't seen any critic of the USA "security" state mention Seth Rich in years, yet as seen here he is regularly cited by fans of the authoritarian status quo. Are you guys feeling guilty about something?
What are you even talking about? Are you trying to imply that I'm somehow a member of US intelligence, and trying to spread a conspiracy while simultaneously denying that you are doing so?
Julian Assange was spreading Seth Rich conspiracies in 2016.. to pretend that it was just a one time occurrence and that his supporters stopped "believing" in the conspiracy is just denialism.
Yet somehow you think they wouldn't want people bringing up how conspiracies, like those Assange spread, hurt the family the most. Assange supporters, mainly now alt-right types and bots posing as being on the opposite side oh politics--like you saw with Cambridge Analytica--are still spreading the same conspiracy far and wide today hoping to catch people during a mental break to recruit them into their cults.
The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government.
US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Principles aren't really principles if they are being tossed aside when they become uncomfortable.