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Comment by erfgh | Hacker News Reader

whataboutism is a logical fallacy.

Not necessarily in this area. Wikileaks has exposed a number of US war crimes that went completely unpunished, while a person who was working on behalf of Wikileaks is being prosecuted on grounds that are fairly constructed and far-fetched even by US standards. Morally speaking, even if some of Assange's actions were immoral they might be considered excusable because the perils were outweighed by the benefits of these actions. It's not uncommon to reason that way. The same kind of reasoning is used to justify the means by the ends, e.g. purporters of the US drone strike program argue that the many civilian bystanders that are killed by those strikes are justifiable by the end, which is the extrajudicial killing of the alleged terrorist targets.

It's called a balance of consideration argument, sometimes also "conductive argument".

Obviously, the legal question is different from this, IANAL and I don't even know if lawyers use conductive arguments in this way. The judge in this extradition case certainly didn't, but that's not surprising since her job wasn't to judge Assange's actions.

Assange literally encouraged people to infiltrate US intelligence agencies and "leak" classified intel.

Let's not even get into his work laundering Russian hacked docs to damage the US, and then repeatedly lying about it.

He also is credibly accused of being a rapist.

The US has done some bad shit, no doubt, but that doesn't make Assange some saint. He's a bad dude.

If I encourage people to leak Chinese classified documents, would that make me a bad dude too? I don’t think your reasoning is sound here.

If you raped two women, encouraged people to steal Chinese intel, and then worked with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda, yes, indeed you would be a bad dude.

CIA literally funded drug cartels. Obama literally authorized a drone strike on a "suspected terrorist US citizen" in Yemen.

While the rape accusation was retracted.

There's no equivalence of a proven fact vs accusation. Assange is unquestionably on a moral high ground here.

This is a straight-up lie. The accusations were never retracted. The women have maintained their allegations ever since.

and Not even going to respond to your whataboutism here, just lazy argumentation.

Referencing the US war crimes that Assange helped expose is important though. I'm not denying Assange committed crimes by leaking or helping to leak secret documents, but it was the moral thing to do to expose war crimes that would otherwise be (and which are being) covered up.

In this case, the UK should not only consider the extradition request itself, but how they stand with regards to the US and their war crimes. And when it comes to war crimes, for the UK to be silent is to be complicit.

Calling out logical fallacies is a logical fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

It comes from not understanding the difference between logical entailment and logical equivalence when given a set of premises and a conclusion. I'd've hoped programmers would have taken enough discrete maths to know this.

> I'd've hoped programmers would have taken enough discrete maths to know this.

It’s not that I haven’t - but I’m 8 years out of uni and have completely forgotten how to apply Modus tollens and I suspect I’m not alone.

Being a hypocrite isn't a logical fallacy, but it isn't a good rhetorical stance for convincing others.

Its a deflection, not a fallacy.

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