• Julian Assange has been charged in the US, prosecutors reveal inadvertently
    22 replies, posted
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julian-assange-has-been-charged-prosecutors-reveal-in-inadvertent-court-filing/2018/11/15/9902e6ba-98bd-48df-b447-3e2a4638f05a_story.html
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden's sagas are depressing as all holy hell, and watching people blitheringly accept the most expansive, intrusive and outright dangerous surveillance state in the Western world along partisan lines has been sickening to the extreme, especially with the easy placation Obama's lame "reforms" brought. Only China's gross excesses in the field have made America's now-revealed, long standing machinations seem even remotely tame. That people even remotely believed Sweden wouldn't hand Assange over to the US for a quick and efficient espionage trial if he "faced up" to the flimsy rape allegations still frustrates me. "But Snowden is a filthy Russian traitor and Wikileaks are useful idiot sockpuppet trolls for tsar Putin!" If you cannot stand up for the people who want to pull the mask off the monster, you don't deserve to be surprised when the monster lashes out at you. I sincerely hope that if Trump pulls off the byzantine crypto-fascist coup that a handful of folks around here crow about, the NSA's tentacles choke you too.
Snowden isn't a traitor but Assange and Wikileaks have made it abundantly clear over the past two years that they are not about transparency when they started releasing information on a partisan basis to support their own views rather than their declared goal of government transparency.
I honestly don't care what they've done. It's hard for me to fault them when their leader has been reduced to living in an expensive prison cell, and they're up against a world power that for decades had the monopoly on electronic espionage. People here for some reason can read about Antifa smashing cars and store fronts, then sympathetically whimper, "well they're just opposing fascists, so they're by definition good," but they seem to think that you can go it alone against the literal Men In Black without ending up as someone else's cat's paw. If Assange hadn't been pigeonholed, and Wikileaks wasn't essentially treated like a terrorist organization, would they still be Russia's pawns? I don't know. I do think though if you cheer every time some stupid leak from Trump's whitehouse exposes some gaffe or excess, whether it's "Trump owns a bathrobe lol" or "Jeff Sessions secretly wants to make all sexual congress illegal," you should also be willing to bend a sympathetic attitude towards the exposure of the DNC's internal affairs, and frankly anti-Democratic behaviors. Or would you be happy if Wikileaks were America's pawns, and only released incriminating dirt on Valdimir Putin's inner circle and illegally broke out things like the Panama Papers? Because it's the same bushel of goods. Transparency cuts both ways, and it is a core ideal of mine that if you champion any transparency, you should champion all transparency, even when it's "inconvenient."
I'm championing nonpartisan transparency. Partisan transparency serves an underhanded goal and I will not support that. That is why I differentiate between Snowden and Assange/Wikileaks. Snowden's leak revealed US government abuse in a responsible enough manner. Assange and Wikileaks started out like that but then started choosing not to release some information because it ran contrary to their goals. The moment they did that they stopped being a transparency organization and became a part of the machine they were trying to fight. I don't care that Wikileaks released dirt on the Democrats. (In fact I support it, really.) I care that they chose not to release dirt on the GOP because it didn't suit their goals which goes completely against their entire reason for existing. That's an important distinction to make that you don't seem to be considering valid for some reason.
You are literally arguing against yourself. WikiLeaks are not championing transparency at all, they are literally only releasing material damaging to the Democrats. That's not transparent. That's propaganda. There is evidence that the Republican party was also hacked, but no material was released.
Because I think once you begin guffing over "non-partisan transparency" you're essentially indulging the absolute epitome of the "enlightened centrist" meme. Everyone has an agenda. Do you really think white knights just ride around blowing whistles without bias for the fun of it? What's next, are we going to start booing down the NY Times when they get yet more leaks on Trump because they didn't break any humiliating stories about Democrats? No you won't, nobody here will. Folks just want to defend "the good guys," by swiping the "neutrality" club around to banish the scary demons. What's next, plug our ears with wax, lest Donald Trump's biased detractors leak another humiliating, stupid thing about the anthropomorphic orange? Hardly. The leakers, whistle blowers and story breakers of the world are never and will never be totally unbiased, and believing anything else is an absolute fraud. I'd like to think I can discern that, perhaps, maybe, Wikileaks has some sort of agenda. I'd like to think, oh yeah, I guess maybe they do have dirt they're witholding for purely political reasons. Does that make the emails from the DNC fake? Does it somehow make real material they release less real? I know I might not get a straight shake from them, but I won't pretend they're the boogie man because they're doing a thing because they have clear and evident motives. Do you wake up in the morning, read your news and think, "wow, I'm such a clear thinker, and I know that the stories I'm reading from The Washington Post (A Subsidiary of Jeff Bezos) will guide me true and that these headlines from CNN sure don't have any bad news about the Democrats, so they must be trust worthy!" What sort of world is that? I'm not saying "oh boy it sure is good to be biased," but, to warp a turn of phrase, their money is still green and their shit still stinks.
If the NYT had proof of corruption of a democrat and refused to release it over a story over Republicans, then yes, I would boo them about it.
Would you charge them with a crime?
Depends on how they came about that information.
He literally released information showing the Democratic primary was undemocratic.
Except I'm not even a centrist at all, lol. With the exception of gun rights (where I generally side with conservatives) and privacy (where my views largely don't align to any specific side) I fall firmly on the side of a liberal. Yeah, they do have an agenda. It's called fucking transparency. Something they threw in the trash the moment they decided not to release info because it no longer fit their actual agenda. And if the New York Times had information on the Democrats and kept it hidden because it didn't suit their agenda you can be damned sure I'd be condemning them for their actions as well. You're completely missing my point here and trying to paint me as partisan myself when I'm literally not being partisan. I'm refusing to support a blatantly partisan group. You're still missing the point. They're withholding information because of their own biases and blatantly flouting their own organization's entire reason for existing. You're making assumptions about me without any evidence. There's very few sources I automatically assume are completely accurate. Reuters, for example, is respectable enough that I'll treat them as if they're telling the truth simply because of their track record (a lot of effort to vet information and quick corrections when there's a mistake) and efforts to avoid bias. A source like the NYT I will give the benefit of the doubt until I have a reason not to. (Ie: If the NYT times had a piece defending Amazon I would assume it's complete bullshit or incredibly biased until a more reputable source reinforces it.) Same with a right leaning source such as my state's local newspaper which is pretty solidly center-right. I've read that newspaper for years and have seen the efforts they put into being factual, even if their opinion on a given subject does come through clearly, so I give them the benefit of the doubt on a given article until I have reason not to believe them In contrast there are plenty of news sources I don't give the benefit of the doubt and they're not all on one side or the other. CNN and Fox are the obvious ones since they're so news-worthy (hah) lately. But also ones which are commonly wrong such as Breitbart or all too often biased like RT (who I find hard to trust when they're the only one to report on a story considering the history between a place like the US and Russia). You seem to be assuming that I'm saying no bias is allowed ever but that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying when your stated goal is government transparency then you have no place being partisan about it or you're not actually adhering to your stated goal. And I cannot support such a blatantly partisan organization because they clearly have goals that differ from what they state are their goals. In contrast I can support Snowden or The Oregonian or Reuters because even if I disagree with them on a given subject or even if they are biased they are capable of still adhering to their goals despite that bias. Why is it an issue to actually demand integrity from a transparency organization? I really don't get it. I'm not stating they shouldn't have released the DNC stuff. I'm condemning them for not releasing the other information that they had and chose not to release. If the situation was reversed and they leaked the GOP info but not the DNC info I would hold the same opinion despite that having benefited the political party I generally support. It's called integrity. Adhering to one's beliefs regardless of whether they actually benefit you right this moment. Something I generally put quite a bit of effort into doing. While keeping information unreleased from a party whose power largely lies in subverting the Democratic process and who seems to have ties to a regime that's infamous for their lack of an actual democracy. I don't understand why it's so hard for people to understand why others are skeptical of his motives.
If that's your attitude, then there's a lot of reading to do about America' foreign policy between 1950 and 2000, and the methods we employed in suppressing Communism around the globe, and in post-Soviet states Ah, but that's ancient history, we're reformed, etc. etc. Nevermind, I guess. Yes, only good, unbiased agents can be trusted at all times. Who exactly is unbiased? Frankly, I think I can both stand up for Assange and Wikileaks, and think they are repugnant lapdogs of Putin's regime. But I'll still say they deserve our sympathy. I think there is no hypocrisy in saying that they are bent to a cause I admire, but for larger purposes I do not support. I trust my local news affiliate to tell me what's happening in my city, but I know they're part of a larger news machine I actively oppose. I, like many Americans, simply have to hope I can boil off as much bullshit from my news as possible. To be simple, I think when it comes to "leaks," to "whistleblowing," it's silly to pretend or demand that the people doing the delivery will always have clean hands. I think it's absurd to say, "oh, you're partisan, so you're fakenews." I stress, I value Wikileak's clearly partisanal leaks because otherwise nobody would have even tried to hold the Democratic party accountable for it's repugnant behavior otherwise. Or did CNN plan on running an expose on how they collaborated with Hillary Clinton after the election was over? Any speculators? My judgement is that the ends do justify the means. (Before someone ad absurdums about bombing schools or taking hostages, this is nowhere near that ballpark. This is about information, it's exchange, and it's flow.) If you think the ends don't justify the means, then somebody needs to roll up the twelve miles of leaked stuff from Trump's Whitehouse and say sorry to the Orange, because I can't imagine all of those leaks are "fair." Unless you start making banal exceptions like, "it's not confidential if they do it." >>Depends on how they came about that information. Do you seriously think nothing say, the New York Times has run from a "confidential insider" wasn't, you know, even a little improperly disclosed?
Ah, the ends justify the means. The "ends," in this case, being the creation of a political environment that has done far more to damage transparency and freedom of speech than a thousand NSA spooks listening for keywords ever could. Well when Assange is rotting in a federal prison, I'm sure he'll see his best friend Trump decrying every bit of unflattering information as fake news by the treasonous, enemy of the people media, and he'll know his ever-so-pragmatic moral compromises were all for the greater good.
I've brought it up before but there are plenty of reasons to hate Assange beyond the fact that he is a brazen tool of the Putin regime who is only as transparent as his political biases allow. -As others have said, has outright admitted not to be interested in leaking stuff about the Republicans or Russia -As a pattern, doesn't censor his leaks well enough, putting innocent lives in danger including his sources --When Snowden criticized the above Assange said that the former was only saying that to get clemency from Hillary Clinton -Released the "Erdogan emails", which were ostensibly high-level communciations from Turkey's government but actually ended up just being identifiable voter data for millions of Turkish citizens --When a Turkish journalist confronted him about this he called her an "Erdogan apologist" -Called the Panama Papers leak a US and George Soros funded attack on Putin -Retweeted a fake news story about Clinton asking if she could "drone" him in a meeting. -Fueled the Seth Rich conspiracy theory which is going on to this day.
So that justifies setting a bad precedent by charging them for releasing this information? Fuck that, I despise Trump and his associates as much as anyone but defending such treatment of Assange is hypocrisy.
i'm gonna post this as many times as it takes until people drop the pretense of Wikileaks being anything other than a Russian stooge https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/831468455413030912
Except... I never hinted that I think Wikileaks or Julian Assange should face charges for the leaks? I was only ever stating they're not a transparency group and as such I cannot condone or otherwise support their actions.
You definitely seem like you're projecting your own lack of principles onto everyone else. If the NYT chose not to run a story on corrupt Democrats I would be upset. Just because you wouldn't doesn't mean everyone is as bad as you are.
How to make assumptions based on nothing: The post.
"I don't care what they've done but I'm going to try really hard to defend what they did anyway"
It's a dumb idea not to pursue a principle just because people are failing at it right now. Hell, there are some principles we'll never meet - we'll just asymptotically approach those ideas. And that's a good thing. Saying, "ah, we're all biased" is missing the point. You aim for the center.
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