If nothing else, his persistence has been fairly impressive.
I'm still bitter that he became so thoroughly partisan, though. Especially since his organization has or had the motto: "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour".
I'm still bitter that he became so thoroughly partisan, though. Especially since his organization has or had the motto: "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour".
This lists like six such things https://www.salon.com/2017/01/07/donald-trump-julian-assange...
This one https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/303172-pus... is particularly damaging because one of the arguments of the "Wikileaks is not a Russian org" is that it sympathetizes and works with Pussy Riot...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/wikileaks-inside-the-farage-as...
https://gizmodo.com/assange-turned-down-dirt-on-russia-stron...
I would not expect anyone to continue be neutral during such state of affair.
I don't think it's a matter of becoming partisan, I think it's more a matter of getting new opportunities for the orientation he's always had and pursued.
> Especially since his organization has or had the motto: "to publish fact-based stories without fear or favour".
If you had an organization designed from it's inception to selectively leak information with a clearly biased perspective, it would defeat the purpose if you labeled it that way.
What was "biased" about the early wikileaks? It was a general repository of leaked documents uploaded and commented by users
PS: wikileaks didn't "post" documents. users posted documents on wikileaks. it was an anonymous platform
For some reason, The Intercept comes to mind, and people here just love em…
From my experience commenting on the meta stories surrounding them and alluding to the bias always seems to illicit more downvotes than up votes.
Though I would love if there was some kind of agreed upon sentiment analysis algorithm we could run we can go back through all of the meta Intercept posts on HN and calculate the percentage of comments weighted by upvotes for/agaisnt them as an organization.
Yikes. Just read up on this. Pretty damning.
I honestly can't believe why anyone thought this after he published the first thing that put Wikileaks on the map, the embarrassing Collateral Murder video.
It's funny because before that came out, I considered donating money to Wikileaks because I thought it'd be more like an organization like Wikipedia. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people were seduced by the name "Wikileaks" piggybacking off the credibility and mission of Wikipedia.
I guess no one had any critical thinking skills or were prone to conspiracy because everyone from progressives to libertarians started eating everything he did up.
EDIT: Wow just did a search on HN to see what people said back then about it and it seems a few people had the same take I did.
It made it clear to the world that American armed forces could never be trusted to behave honorably in a very different country full of brown people that they think are “terrorists”.
The only difference was that it was under a Republican administration and Democrats were all for it.
Er, no, they generally weren't. WikiLeaks support on the left at the time was mostly from the far left that sees the Democrats as virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans. WikiLeaks has never had support (except maybe in the context of the Trump campaign) from any substantial portion of either major US party.
As far as the ethics of it go, it is pretty typical for media not to air a forty minute video in a one minute news segment. Perhaps the other thirty eight minutes of the killers just chatting was more newsworthy though.
What I find distasteful is that the people who were cheering him on when he was doing it to Republicans are now calling him a Russian asset for doing it to democrats.
And vice versa for the Republicans.
If Assange is partisan who is he partisan for?
I'd imagine that WL just doesn't care very much about Russia, an insignificant, poor country with relatively little international influence.
Technically he's not being held against his will. But the reality is he can't leave.
Of course he can. He can walk out the door right now.
He chooses not to leave because he doesn't want to deal with the consequences of what he has done. You may not agree with that but it's an undeniable fact.
Yours is the weirdest argument imaginable, he's forced to stay in the embassy or he'll be arrested. That is exactly how essentially all western prisons work, some of them might throw minor obstacles on the way to prevent you from walking out but it's rarely that hard.
He has not had a trial, so he neither belongs in prison nor doesn't belong in a prison. He needs to have a trial first.
Do you use the same argument for people that jump bail? "He's on the run because if he wasn't on the run he would be arrested and face trial, therefore he has no choice in the matter?" Because that's the argument you're making, and it's a ridiculous one.
The British government has already kept him confided for 7 years, what good would a trial serve at this point?
>Do you use the same argument for people that jump bail? Because that's the argument you're making, and it's a ridiculous one.
In practice this "ridiculous" argument is probably the very reason why the punishments for jumping bail tend to be quite low, no?
Assange is in a diplomatic embassy. He can walk out. He may not even be arrested, detained or extradited. In fact nobody knows what will happen.
Ah yes, all those cops have spent years outside the embassy just for fun.
>Police said in a statement there is an active warrant for Assange’s arrest and that the police are “obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the Embassy.”
Either the Police are being dishonest or you are.
What? Is there any reasonable source claiming that's remotely possible?
Penalties have gone pretty sideways in the US when it comes to being associated with terrorism, and what qualifies as terrorism extremely broad and nebulous.
Who says the UK will be an EU country if/when it gets around to extraditing him? I mean, the bail jumping charges should give them some leeway on timing.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4378830-Excerpts-Fro...
On 30 August, Assange was questioned by the Stockholm police
On 1 September 2010, Överåklagare Marianne Ny decided to resume the preliminary investigation.
On 27 September 2010 assange left the country, now a month after he had been at the police.
On 18 November 2010, Marianne Ny ordered the detention.
Now that sound like a person running from their crime. Its the most slow motion running of any reported case to reach the news. I also must applaud the Swedish legal system for effective and swift action, in particular for reaching a conclusion three months after the initial investigation when no new facts had been established. If only the prosecutor had reached the decision from the beginning, rather than wait until the accused leave the country, wait a bit longer and then order the detention.
Did I mention rape cases are about the second highest prioritized crime in Sweden, next after murder? There were no murder spree between 20 August 2010 and 18 November 2010.
Oh, and his victims, of course.
He will be arrested if he leaves. How is that particularly different from say HMP Prescoed?