Media blackout after key witness against Assange admits lying
medialens.org
medialens.org
It's hard to put a finger on just how much the current form of western democracy differs from the 18th century ideal of western democracy. Let this concretize it: Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade in jail indefinitely on fictitious charges and virtually nobody cares. Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
"Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?
People have leaked data on Russian corruption to WikiLeaks, which went unpublished. His leaks coincide with what is politically favorable to Russia, not with making all information free to the world.
To the downvoters: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia...
Maybe provide some feedback, so I can understand why you disagree with me?
How and what information is being presented is an incredibly important part of "the truth" as a whole.
This is simply not supported by the policies enacted during by the Trump Administration:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/09/25/o...
> So Russia has WikiLeaks post only the information on the candidate they don't like, securing the election for a politically favorable but perhaps even more corrupt person.
There are three answers for that: If Wikileaks has a bias than it can easily explained by the fact that Assange's woes were caused by the Obama admistration. And even if they didn't have a bias, most of their staff at Wikileaks do not speak Russian and they try to verify every piece they publish; as opposed to making claims based on partisan funded opposition research. It's also far harder to leak from Russia and other authoritarian/mafious states and also because their intelligence agencies use mechanical typewriters.
I don't think anybody on HN argues that option 3 is preferable over all the other options. You seem to think option 1 is preferable to both options 2A and 2B. GP and I seem to think the opposite.
I can understand your argument that half the truth can be worse than no truth at all. But as there are very few sources for information like WikiLeaks I think in cases like this, half the truth might be all the public can get and it at least gives you a basic idea of what is happening when nobody is looking.
Really? I think that’s probably the most popular option. Why do you say that?
From context, ITYM "disputes", not "argues". Or least that's the only way your comment makes sense; "argues" a position generally refers to supporting that position.
One by dnc and one by rnc. You have video of the dnc one and you don't show it because you lack the other video?
You hide the truth because it is not fair to the first murder that you don't have proof of the other?
> As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission.
There's a reason they still conduct elections in Russia, to give the appearance of democracy. Yes, people still think it's a democracy… as long as their favourite leader is in power.
In Serbia's last elections, Vucic falsified COVID numbers on the days leading up to voting day so that his party could convince his voterbase, the elderly, to go out in droves to vote. After the election he stopped the reporting of false numbers and put the country into a lockdown because to no one's surprise, the numbers were sky high. There were massive protests because of the lockdown measures, where police brutality ran rampant, all on Vucic's orders. Expired tear gas was used on unarmed civilians protesting peacefully, cops in full riot gear were beating the crap out of unarmed protesters and chasing them down the streets. He goes around poorer regions of the country and bribes people with sandwiches and basic supplies like wheat and flower for a vote. His son is good friends with famous, high profile criminals, and Vucic himself was buddy-buddy with a bunch of the former guard, more than half of which either have been, or are currently standing trial for war crimes committed during the Yugo wars.
This list goes on and on, and similar things happen in most balkan and eastern european country. Nobody sane trusts a single thing these "people" do, and people definitely don't trust elections, so what ends up happening is that people just don't see the point in participating in an obvious scam. None of us actually believe we're living in a democracy, we're all aware it's a farcical facade that dictators put up.
It is Russians' business, technically, but in practice regular Russians are no better equipped to act on information about it than we are.
People say Wikileaks is wrong that all the information offered to them was public, but none of the published chat logs show anyone explaining to Wikileaks that there are unpublished leaks in there.
The 12 Russians, and the 3 Russian companies all hired attorneys to represent them and counter sue for defamation. When their attorney went in front of the judge, all charges were dropped by the Justice Dept, refusing document discovery "on issues of national security".
It's all political reality television, from both the right and the left. It's like a cable TV wrestling match.
I've had trouble finding English language sources giving the full story with a 2 min search. They all just cite the dropping of charges against the companies. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/justice-department-russia-com...
Here's an RT link with a little more info, for whatever that's worth: https://www.rt.com/usa/483279-concord-russiagate-charges-dro... . You might have better luck looking for a little longer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/politics/concord-case-...
""" In January 2019, the federal government accused Concord of violating a protective court order designed to safeguard information shared among lawyers on the case. Prosecutors said a trove of nonclassified information they had turned over to Concord’s defense team had turned up on a website the previous October.
A message on a newly created Twitter account read: “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!” """
RT's claim that these groups are not responsible for these troll farms is not credible. The claim that these organizations were attempting to use the court case to get detailed information on how they were investigated however, is.
Didn't take it as a credible source in the matter, but wasn't going to bother with a longer than 2 min. search either for all details.
On a side note, I don't take the NYT to be any less biased that RT. All of them will conveniently forget about the parts of the story which they don't like. They all have favourites in the matter (Trump, Barr, Democrat leadership, Putinistas, etc).
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/18/russia-sorm-nokia-surveill...
It's a ridiculously and simplistically too convenient argument and therefore attractive to anyone with the slightest bias against 'information I don't like' (or a tendency towards being a 'shoot the messenger' type of person).
That Assange / Wikileaks don't follow the same bias as the local US media, doesn't mean he's / they're an enemy agent. Thinking of the world in black and white like that is dangerously reductive.
I've never seen that about Snowden except in regard to activities after taking io residence in Russia, and even then its usually more “Snowden is subject to influence by Russia” more than “...an agent of Russia”.
Assange is a different story, but the both the uncontroversial facts and the controversial detailed claims on which a conclusion about being a Russian agent might rest about Assange are different.
¹ Or maybe still is, presumed he's still alive and can move freely, which is highly unlikely.
He may be partisan, he may not be revealing damaging info about Russia. But if the information is true, so what? Shouldn't we be doing something about the corruption he revealed regardless of why he revealed it? I can't believe all you have to do is say the R-word and suddenly people are just willing to ignore everything he says, its ridiculous. Like uhh enemies of the US are more likely to expose damaging information about them as compared to allies, no shit?
The appearance of impropriety is still important to some folks though, so when private emails (that didn't lead to rigging an election, something the DNC has no power to do anyway) that show that folks in the DNC favored one candidate over the other, they resigned.
This isn't the same thing as admitting the impossible (that the DNC somehow got HRC ~4 million more votes)
From your second link "These incidents don’t prove, as some have alleged, that Assange is some kind of paid Russian agent, or that WikiLeaks is a Russian front organization"
Your first link was addressed elsewhere. I can't personally blame Assange for liking Russia more than the country that has spent a decade making his life a living hell. Even if Russia's motives are obviously impure, they are more helpful to furthering Assange's goal.
The "Russian leaks" that Wikileaks declined were sent to them during the DNC/Podesta/Hillary email release when their resources were obviously stretched. The "leaks" were mostly public, were deemed unimportant and were declined. As we know that didn't stop whoever anonymously submitted these documents from immediately using this to orchestrate a smear campaign against Wikileaks with full compliance of the media (funny timing during the DNC email release, wonder who it could have been?)
A little later the "leaks" were fully published elsewhere and nobody cared (but let's not kid ourselves that anybody who claimed to care actually cared at all).
There are many instances of this, and the corporate media does this on both sides of the aisle. Of course, there's one dominant one at the moment. There's a heavy-handed corporate media attempt to squeeze out compliance - from biased stories (that are later proven false) from mainstream outlets as the most serious, to the cover of Vogue as the most silly.
What's disturbing is that if you point this out to people, what happens? Ah hah, they discovered someone on the other side of the political aisle. Their enemies. Again, this is true for both parties.
Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore.
I would slightly disagree. Americans are typically very moderate and I believe made to not understand the concepts of politics, when there's capitalism and liberalism involved it's just too complex to understand. The biggest and obviously evidence of this is the apathy toward voting, why even be engaged in something that isn't felt to be a democratic system? How many feel marginalized and the kinds of communities that say so. As impacftul Assange's work may be, the shakers and movers of the world are doing a good job at damage control sounds like.
Woman’s rights vs killing unborn children does not leave much moral middle ground.
For instance, there are plenty of practical approaches that greatly reduce the number of abortions while still supporting women's rights.
But, for some reason, one side of the issue would rather not reduce abortion while still permitting women's choice because that would take away the 'wedge' issue as a partisan political hammer. So they insist on ever more draconian, misogynistic laws to force the wedge deeper and deeper. That's not because it's an unreconcilable issue. Its because they want the issue.
They don't, in general.
They do oppose creating “generally-applicable” standards that have the principal effect of preventing access to abortion services, though.
Except terminations in the US are at their lowest levels[0] since they became legal in 1973.
One side says:
Abortion should be safe, legal and rare.
Abortion is *literal* murder and women who have
them, as well as the doctors who perform them
should be imprisoned and/or executed.
Personally, I believe that women (and men, for that matter) should have control over their bodies. Full stop.
As for the termination of a pregnancy, that should be up to the individual who is pregnant -- likely (but not necessarily) with input from the other potential parent and/or medical professionals.
To put a really fine point on it: If you don't have a functional uterus, shut the fuck up -- it's none of your business.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/health-united-states-ap-top-news-...
I don't really have a position on abortion, but I don't like this point at all. It says too much, I think.
Imagine there's a genocide in North Korea. I'm not North Korean, I'm not friends with anyone from North Korea. Does accepting this point mean that I have to accept that genocide in North Korea is none of my business and is above my criticism? And, if not, what distinguishes the two?
Should Biden not sign a pro-choice bill because he lacks a uterus and therefore is forbidden from taking a side?
"Personally, I believe that women (and men, for that matter) should have control over their bodies. Full stop."
I believe that should be enough information to answer your question, unless you somehow believe that being mass-murdered is the same thing as having control over one's own body.
No. Because what you (or I, for that matter) want or believe is only relevant for our own bodies.
What happens to the bodies of others is up to those others. No one, other than the owner of that body, has anything to say about what happens to their body.
But I ruled it out confidently: The situation where a bunch of people are weighing in on a specific abortion is not one that really comes up, whereas people discuss abortion in general nonstop. You had just said that you aren't opposed to the other potential parent and medical professionals having input in a specific abortion. It doesn't make any sense to phrase that idea that way- having a functional uterus has no bearing on whether you're the one who is considering an abortion. And the other reply also interpreted you as saying men shouldn't comment on the issue and went uncorrected. Taken together, I thought there was no way that was what you meant and I was being excessively charitable.
I misunderstood, but I think you could have been clearer.
I'm not sure how you can make that statement seriously. The only situation where one might want or need to consider terminating a pregnancy is if you have a functional female reproductive system.
Each individual should make those decisions for themselves without a bunch of busybodies telling them what they should do with their own bodies.
As for potential fathers and medical professionals, their opinions may be useful to the person considering such a procedure, but it isn't their body and, as such, that's an advisory situation at most.
>And the other reply also interpreted you as saying men shouldn't comment on the issue and went uncorrected.
Which doesn't make a lot of sense, since I (as a male) was, in fact, commenting on the issue. Or did you miss that part?
People should absolutely be able to express their opinions.
However, when it comes to a specific person considering a specific procedure (whether that be a pregnancy termination, a haircut or removal of a hangnail), the decision necessarily should be that of the specific person involved, and the opinions of others aren't at all relevant.
That's my point. If you can and/or do become pregnant, then the decision whether to terminate or not is yours alone -- but only for your own body.
If you don't have a functional female reproductive system, such decisions are irrelevant to you. If you do have a functional female reproductive system, how that system is used (or not) is completely up to the individual involved and no one should have any decision making power over how another person's body is used.
Feel free to disagree with my position and make your opinions clear. But when it comes to a specific person making a specific decision about their own body, you have no say unless it's your body.
>I misunderstood, but I think you could have been clearer.
That's entirely likely. I tried to elucidate my point. If I failed to do so, my apologies. I attempted to do so again in this comment. I hope I was clearer this time.
Ironically I think you've hit the nail on the head, but not for the reasons that are obvious: each side specifically frames the issue in a rigid fashion so it certainly appears obvious that they are morally in the right.
Hence the binary nature of the conversations.
I take the approach that one should be able to CONVINCINGLY argue the opposite side before having a meaningful opinion on the issue. If you can't do that because you view the other side as insane or fully incorrect, then it might be you that's insane. I'm not talking about the-Earth-is-flat type issues, but issues of the day (whatever that day is over the course of time).
But yeah the struggle to find the right argument, rather than to win an argument...
Sadly the second of those is, I think, the more common. Interesting to see from your example how stupid it makes us -- if I try to win an argument without understanding the alternative, the the thing I gain most, is a reduction in my ability to reason
Here in the Netherlands, the number of parties represented in parlement has been rising for decades - there are currently 18 parties. And yes, that causes different kinds of problems.
"It took a record 225 days for the Dutch to get a government" (https://qz.com/1112509/the-dutch-took-a-record-long-225-days...)
"Dutch government resigns over child benefits scandal PM Mark Rutte will stay on in caretaker capacity until general elections scheduled for 17 March" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/dutch-governme...)
"Dutch talks on forming coalition government still deadlocked (June 22, 2021)" (https://apnews.com/article/europe-government-and-politics-79...)
The Mainstream Right, the Far Right, and Coalition Formation in Western Europe, Kimberly Ann Twist (https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Twist_be...)
Perhaps that's true of some (perhaps many) Americans, but certainly not all. Please don't paint 330 million individuals with the same broad brush. If for no other reason than you're doing exactly what (taking a binary, categorical view of a gigantic group instead of treating individuals as individuals) you're complaining about.
For me (as well as many other Americans), I recognize that context and nuance are important when considering most issues.
Assuming that tweets or political slogans represent the views of all (or even many) Americans is shallow indeed.
The devil (as well as the solutions) is always in the details, whether it be the minimum wage, broadband competition, healthcare or dozens of other issues.
Many people (myself included) are ignorant of the details surrounding a variety of issues unless it directly affects them.
However, many (if not most) have a nuanced understanding of issues (at all levels of government) that impact them.
The nationalization of party politics (helped along quite a bit by the decline and disappearance of much of the local journalism in the US) creates least-common-denominator messaging that ignores any nuance or context whatsoever.
As for Assange, it's not a left/right dichotomy at all.
In fact, many who generally vote (D) are among Assange's biggest supporters, and many who generally vote (R) are among his biggest detractors.
IMNSHO, it has much more to do with whether or not you believe that Assange can get a fair trial in a US Federal court.
There are dozens (50 state court systems, many more municipal/county/territorial court systems) of other courts in the US, but the Federal court system is generally among the fairest of US court systems. Especially if there's a lot of publicity surrounding a particular case -- as there is here.
And Assange will be tried in Federal court.
The man himself doesn't think so, or he wouldn't have cloistered himself in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years.
Given that no journalist has ever been convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act[0], under which the really serious charges against Assange was indicted, it seems unlikely in the extreme that he'd be convicted of those charges.
The charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[1] do not carry heavy sentences, nor (at least as I understand it) is the evidence of violations of that law very strong.
As such, it's quite likely that if Assange hadn't jumped bail and hidden out in the Ecuadorian embassy, all this would have been over and he'd have been banging Swedish girls again for at least a few years.
As someone who generally votes (D), I'd like to see Assange acquitted and let him move on.
His credibility has suffered mightily, but most of that (IMHO) was a result of his own actions and statements (Seth Rich? Really?).
Regardless, you're flat wrong about Americans as mindless morons parroting their particular party line. Sure there are some who do so, but certainly not all (or even most).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
Edit: Added referenced links.
Small note: about 150m people voted for D or R. Out of almost 230m eligible voter pool, the rest just didn't vote.
I think it's fair to say that US Politics is framed as a binary choice (regardless of how you justify it) because that's the party system that is in place...along with the common winner-takes-all systems.
That's an excellent point. No third party has come anywhere close to the major levers of power in more than 150 years.
And first-past-the-post elections certainly contribute to that.
But that's orthogonal to my point. GP said:
"Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore."
Note that GP doesn't address parties or elections. Rather they claim that Americans have a "binary, categorical view of issues."
That's to what I took exception. Many Americans have nuanced views of a variety of issues.
That said, the reality is that neither major party platform supports all the good ideas from across the ideological spectrum.
But, as you correctly pointed out, most people pick the party that they think gives them more of what they think is right.
That doesn't mean every (R || D) voter supports every (R || D) position. Nor does it mean that every (R || D) voter blindly accepts the talking points of their selected party.
Yes. There absolutely are voters who just vote their party without giving a thought to the policies advocated by that party. Sometimes because they're one-issue voters, sometimes because they, their extended families and communities have voted that way for generations, sometimes because they're too intellectually lazy to understand the issues and take the easy way out.
But to ascribe the above to all Americans (whether they voted or not -- GP talked about issues, not votes) is equally intellectually lazy.
The "it's a private company they can do what they want" argument often thrown by those who claims to "fight fascism" is just plainly ignorant of how fascism and Nazism got and stayed into power in the first place.
There were other news websites talking about this but they are algorithmically supplanted by "mainstream" news sites. For example it has gotten so bad that searching for the SpaceX's stream on YouTube yielded an entire page or results from "mainstream" outlets before the actual stream, even if the keywords were explicitly just about SpaceX.
Censorship never yielded net positive results.
For example, do a normal google search for "assange ntlm xmpp manning" (without quotes) and you'll see a mere 8 results from:
- justice.gov
- forbes
- abcnews
- reuters
- washingtonpost
- newyorker
- pbs
- apnews
Google needs to cut this shit out. The most appalling part is they don't even put a warning on the results to tell you that you typed a no-no keyword and that they've filtered the results. You might be lead to believe that only these news agencies wrote about it -- that the heterodox opinions don't even exist. It's completely Orwellian.
Unfortunately, in general, the republican base is not going to protest anything, preferring to settle things legally and in court. The main exception was Jan 6, which we've been taught to believe is apparently worse than the civil war. And yes, the sentiment to free assange is currently very common on the right.
Taught? We don't need anyone to teach what happened, it was on national television. We have perfectly good eyes and ears.
The only teaching necessary is some history: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
I think the same is true of other domestic terror violence we've seen. The Civil War is still the worst domestic insurrection in history. The two are not even comparable. That this comparison is even humored shows a major problem.
> The only teaching necessary is some history: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
I'm sorry you're being ridiculous. The US capitol has been bombed and parts destroyed by domestic terror groups in living memory. Those attacks were way worse than this.
US congressmen have been shot at by radicalized domestic terrorists as well.
Considering (1) Jan 6 resulted in minimal property destruction (certainly no structural damage) and (2) no politician killed (the only person dying directly as a result being Ashli Babbett, a rioter), it's safe to say that the bombings were worse (due to worse property destruction) and the shootings were worse (due to imminent potential of death to the victims)
Perhaps you have some learning to do.
It makes sense not to charge the main characters, only if some of those people most combative and leading the charge, were in fact FBI informants, as has been alleged on the house floor. Subversion of a political movement, to discredit the movement by the government is a common tactic. Just hasn't been seen in the US before, other than maybe during the civil right movement.
Louie Gohmert making the allegation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCHL2GEO9hw
Agent provocateur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur
Weird how this person making these allegations would vote against the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the very claims he's making.
Not weird at all though if he were making the allegations in bad faith.
The one person who died violently in the "sack" was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
>Taught? We don't need anyone to teach what happened, it was on national television. We have perfectly good eyes and ears.
Let me guess: You "saw" a police officer being hit by a fire extinguisher, right?
Officer Sicknick did not die from being hit by a fire extinguisher because that never happened (<https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brian-sicknick-fire-exting...>). He died of a stroke which the autopsy found no connection with the riot (<https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/19/brian-sickn...>).)
The one difference between what happened at the Capitol that day and the attempted assault on the White House during the George Floyd riots (serious enough for the Secret Service to take Trump to a secure bunker) was that the former was allowed to enter its target.
The New York Times retracted its story on officer sicknick. They agreed with the autopsy. He died of natural causes.
The capitol is broken into quite often, for example, during Kavanaugh's confirmation.
Original point: even in the darkest hours of the civil war, the enemies of the Constitution never managed to sack the US capitol.
Response (paraphrased): So?, only one person died violently, [various unrelated distraction arguments attacking claims not made]
This poster also advances the controversial (I'd call it a howler) claim that 'the former was allowed to enter its target' as if the Capitol Police intended for a sack of the Capitol to happen. Most people find these arguments downright offensive.
For the past year, I've been hearing about how police often times help right-wing protestors. Now I'm being told they never do and such a suggestion is offensive. Which is it?
Anyway, if this is about sacking the Capitol, then why bring up the Civil War. In that case, Jan 6 would be the worst thing since the War of 1812, not the Civil War. Since apparently simply protesting in unauthorized areas of capitol buildings (like has happened countless times before Jan 6 since 2016 and before[1]) is basically equivalent to sacking DC. This is why I think there's hyperbole.
[1] and there have been several bombings as well, orchestrated by people who are now well-accepted as political pundits in the mainstream, such as Bill Ayers and Susan Rosenberg. In fact, the current DA of San Francisco is the adopted son of Bill Ayers and the bio son of a convicted terrorist and doesn't believe his bio dad did anything wrong. We accept such terrorism as completely mainstream. Any attempt to question is met with accusations of racism or hyperbole. This is ridiculous. It seems as if only one capitol riot is ever seen as meriting such strong condemnation, despite the constant barrage of attacks on the capitol for many years that have occured with impunity [2] [3].
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/kavanaugh-protests-escalate-... -- unlawfully entered the capitol rotunda. Entered the office of a senator without permission.
[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/arrests-violence-flares-part... -- definitely people storming the area around the capitol in an attempt to apparently overthrow an election. They just weren't very good at it I guess
I was unaware that the Capitol had been torched after being emptied of its treasures and nubile women, as opposed to being invaded by morons who were more focused on taking selfies than sacking.
>Response (paraphrased): So?, only one person died violently, [various unrelated distraction arguments attacking claims not made]
You and I both know that the media has done a very good job of convincing the public that multiple police officers were killed during the "sack", when (as I said) the only person who died violently was an unarmed rioter.
>This poster also advances the controversial (I'd call it a howler) claim that 'the former was allowed to enter its target' as if the Capitol Police intended for a sack of the Capitol to happen. Most people find these arguments downright offensive.
What else would you call a fully armed force not using armed force to prevent rioters (all but a handful unarmed) from entering a prohibited area? Remember, said rioter who died was killed after force was finally used (better late than never). If the Capitol Police had chosen/been allowed to do so, no rioter would have ever entered the building.
Let me repeat: The only difference between what happened at the Capitol and what almost happened at the White House the preceding June is that the rioters did not get inside in the latter case.
I've seen no evidence for that 'all but a handful unarmed' claim. I have seen interviews with Capitol Police saying they were afraid to use their firearms because they believed they were massively outgunned and would be killed if a serious gunfight broke out.
Even allowing for that hypothetical though, the allegedly unarmed mob a massive tactical advantage[1]:
> “We weren’t battling 50 or 60 rioters in this tunnel,” he said in the first public account from D.C. police officers who fought to protect the Capitol during last week’s siege. “We were battling 15,000 people. It looked like a medieval battle scene.”
> Rioters swarmed, battering the officers with metal pipes peeled from scaffolding and a pole with an American flag attached, police said. Both were struck with stun guns. Fanone suffered a mild heart attack and drifted in and out of consciousness.
> All the while, the mob was chanting “U.S.A.” over and over and over again.
> “We got one! We got one!” Fanone said he heard rioters shout. “Kill him with his own gun!”
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/01/14/dc-police...
Oh my, the Capital building was bombed in 1980? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1980s-far-left-female...
What should we do about this terrorist? Put her on the Board of Directory of Thousand Currents, sponsor of the Black Lives Matter movement, of course. Oh hold on, Snopes protests..."In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism." But everybody who protested in Jan. 6th is a "terrorist" correct?
How about Bill Ayers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers, with his Bombing...ahem..."activism" as Wikipedia calls it? In 1971 Bill Ayers bombs the US Capitol building. What happens to him? Why he is deeply associated with community leader cum President Barack Obama for decades. Let's make him an esteemed Professor at the University of Chicago for his crimes...
Now January 6. Perhaps your eyes & ears can tell me who died during the protest? Oh yeah, Ashli Babbitt who was shot by a police office despite not attacking anybody or presenting any imminent danger. Did she really deserve to be shot? Is this "justice", where the punishment depends on politics?
Sure, how justice is served does depend on politics, but should it be this way?
I’ve only seen that claim made in very narrow contexts (e.g., insurrectionists actually occupying the Capitol), in which it was central to the context of the comparison with the Civil War on the narrow dimension that it was universally understood that the Civil War was generally worse.
Also seen some “not since the Civil War” comparisons (e.g., billeting troops in the Capitol for its security), but those aren't even narrow-dimension “worse than” comparisons.
Jan 6 is about as bad as the Bundy nonsense in Oregon.
People died. The insurgents erected gallows and carried plastic handcuff-strips.
They were flying the Confederate flag INSIDE the US Capitol. That didn't even happen during the Civil War.
They tried to interfere with the appointment of the president.
And worst of all, the response by the national guard was delayed, and the Capitol police force's equipment was limited, by order of the DOJ Barr, who is appointed by the losing president.
This WAS the worst incident, since the Civil War, not perpetrated by foreigners.
No need 'to teach' anyone that fact. It was apparent and visible to everyone who isn't a part of the Trump cult.
Wikileaks released all of Clinton's/DNC/Podesta email at a timing chosen specifically to inflict damage on the campaign of one party, and in concordance with the other party.
Wikileaks became partisan, not the public.
These two situations are only the same in that they both benefitted the Republican party by misrepresenting the facts in order to make the public think the Democrats were guilty of a major political scandal.
The difference is that Comey didn't know that Congressman would do what he did, where as there is convincing evidence that Assange knew about the RNC hack and emails, possibly even had access to them and said nothing. Comey got used, but Assange knowingly helped Russians spread disinformation.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/23/487179496...
https://time.com/4422715/bernie-sanders-dnc-apology-leaked-e...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-sanders_...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/25/debbie-wasse...
https://www.newsweek.com/clinton-robbed-sanders-dnc-brazile-...
This gives more insight into the nuance lacking from statements insinuating the only reason Bernie lost to HRC was because the DNC made it happen: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/0...
The biggest issue with wikileaks release is that the media failed to report on it properly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Democratic...
16,917,853 13,210,550
>'Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,' Paustenbach wrote. Miranda spurned the idea, although he agreed with Paustenbach's take: 'True, but the Chair has been advised not to engage. So we'll have to leave it alone.' "
lmao
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/covid-vaccine-pfiz...
> Dr. Jansen said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election. “We have always said that science is driving how we conduct ourselves — no politics,” she said.
Edit: It would be nice if the people downvoting this could explain why you disagree.
[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...
I don't "suspect" their are things they could have published. I know there are things they could have published because Assange has said exactly that.
Either Wikileaks works for complete transparency or they don't. They either have editorial control over what they publish or they don't. Once they admit that some documents aren't worth putting on their site, they need to justify why the documents they do have on their site are worth being there. What documents about the Trump campaign could Assange be referring to which would be worth mentioning but would also be less worthy of publishing than these[1]? What reason can exist for that disparity besides bias?
[1] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q=&title=automatic+reply&c...
The only way we have discovered to counter him is to get more of the people not committed to him to come to the polls, or to vote by mail.
Thus, we see efforts in numerous states to curb access to polls. Successful efforts.
The Free Press is about the ability to publish, not a requirement to publish.
“We are free press activists. It’s not about saving the whales. It’s about giving people the information they need to support whaling or not support whaling. Why? That is the raw ingredients necessary to make adjustments to society and without that we’re just sailing in the dark.”
When we talked about this last week you said the quote meant "we have some information that is not worth publishing."[1] The documents I linked in the previous post are obviously on the site so they by definition are "worth publishing" according to Wikileaks. What documents can possibly have less value than emails saying something like "I'll get the Caesar salad for lunch"?
>2) Your contrived absolutism about publishing everything is a strawman. Wikileaks never committed to publishing everything, couldn’t, not even a sensible or practical idea.
Those absolutist statements were made to show that Wikileaks obviously isn't absolutist in their mission. It shows that they do make editorial decisions about what they post. Once that is accepted as fact, it is completely fair to compare these decisions to each other. That is what I am doing, comparing the decision to leak certain documents with no public value to the refusal to leak other documents which Assange has stated Wikileaks possesses. I am then judging their decision making process based off that comparison.
>3) Literally any reason at all invalidates this claim. Not enough time.
I am not sure what you mean by "not enough time"? Are you suggesting that they didn't have enough time to vet all the DNC docs leaked or that there wasn't enough time to leak the Trump docs?
If they didn't have enough time to vet the value of the individual DNC docs, how did they have the time to vet the authenticity of the individual DNC docs?
That Assange quote was from 2016. They had 4+ years to get those Trump docs vetted so no time constraint there.
>Someone asked not to.
Who is this "someone" that Wikileaks would defer to on this decision? What are this person's biases? Why isn't Wikileaks transparent about who is making these decisions for them?
>Boring.
Yes, those previously linked DNC autoreplies were very exciting.
>Hard to contextualize.
Throwing a bunch of emails into a search engine on the site isn't contextualizing them. The lack of context on the DNC leaks is how we got things like Pizzagate from these emails.
It's sort of similar to the Brett Kavanaugh ordeal. Going from memory, the first accuser told her story in private to a Congresswoman in the summer of 2018, I believe it was in July. That politician sat on the information for the rest of July, the entirety of August, and the first few weeks of September. Only when it was closer to the midterm elections and the confirmation process did the Democrats launch their attack against Kavanaugh's character. They urged Congress to delay the vote until after the midterms, which they were hoping to win in a landslide, so that they could deny Kavanaugh a seat.
In either case, we have politically-minded people deliberately timing the release of information. As regular voters, we have to decide what's more important: what the information reveals, or how it is being weaponized.
In other words, he isn’t on trial for the timing. But he’s friendless because of it.
The FBI knew it and gave him protection from prosecution for a lot of his crimes if he witnessed to the alleged hacking. He continued committing crimes without stopping afterwards. They are still protecting him to this day.
[1] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...
The false "witness" alleging Assange hacked, "Siggi the Hacker" was a pedophile, con-man and thief, not Assange. That guy is Icelandic, while Assange is Australian. "Siggi" has just been interviewed in Studin.is saying he invented everything, FBI knew, still gave him immunity, etc. Here are the sources [1] [2]
As for rape charge, you fell prey to propaganda. There was no "condom stealthing" accusation, full stop. There was no rape accusation, full stop. It is all a proven lie, fabricated by the police and prosecutor, which were caught red-handed later on, and documented in a subsequent judicial procedure.
Here's my own TLDR here to somebody else a couple days ago [3]. If you got 20 minute, I suggest the full, sordid story, as told in excruciating detail by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. He gave a long form interview giving all the details of the fabrication, showing the documents, outlining all of lies and judicial misdeeds of both Sweden and the UK [4].
[1] https://stundin.is/grein/13627/key-witness-in-assange-case-a...
[2] https://grapevine.is/news/2020/06/25/wikileaks-doj-witness-i...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27653029
[4] https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikilea...
Anyways, "FREE ASSANGE" !
Also, I didn't say anything about timing. Selective and partisan release alone is highly dubious, timing notwithstanding.
Telling the truth doesn't become partisan simply because the truth hurts one party.
There were 10+ violations that would have been more than enough to let a murderer go free.
The problem, in other words, with Assange is that he didn't really commit a crime, or more to the point, that's not why the US is after him. And clearly, as a country, the US is perfectly willing to violate it's own constitution to punish this person. The allegation is that this is, among other things, due to the timing of the releases. And because of the danger that it would make Hillary Clinton lose the election.
It would be funny if it wasn't both such a sad, sad failure for the US state and an enormous crime, committed by the state.
Where are you finding journalists that aren’t politically minded?
The email leak was exposing corruption in the DNC handling of Bernie Sanders' campaign. Particularly when the corruption being exposed was related to an ongoing election, it is easy to believe Wikileaks just released what they had ASAP without waiting for any particular time.
The emails didn't exist before the election and waiting until later is, from a neutral leakers point of view, kinda silly. It is not at all obvious Wikileaks acted partisanly.
Also, you don't necessarily have to be partisan to want to release a story at time that's inconvenient to a party. It's natural for a journalist to want to break a big story, and it's also more beneficial if an important story reaches more people. If you want some important information to be shared widely, one of the best times to drop it is when it will cause a nation-wide sensation.
Kant's test implicitly relies on the idea of some sort of deviation from the norm. If the norm is that everyone punches each other in the face, and I decide to merely slap you, that's an improvement; if everyone did that it would be a net good. But if the norm is a polite handshake, then a slap is worse. Kant's test is always relative to expectations.
Expectations are what distinguish "honest whistleblower with a love for truth" and "propaganda merchant". Leaking information hurts people. The ethical defense of it is "public interest" - that it's a net good when truth is more widely known. If you're prepared to leak information, I expect you to leak all of it. When you selectively release information, you cannot expect me to believe that public interest is really the principle you are abiding by, and any beliefs about the world derived from that information come under suspicion, as they have been engineered.
Kant objected pretty strongly to lies, and so do I - even lies by omission.
The accusation of partisan hack from anyone supporting either party of the US rings a bit hollow to be honest. To a degree also because they are just unlikable. As if the info uncovered would make them victims. Perhaps they are, they pretty much look like it.
False choice. They are both important -- you don't have to choose. Selective and timed use of facts is often a way to hide behind "truth" while being completely biased.
Well, but that was also when Kavanaugh became a supreme court nominee. He wasn't a nominee in the summer of 2018.
And getting nominated to the Supreme Court is what made the accuser want to go public. She didn't want to initially, which makes it hard to do anything with the information.
Unless the source of the information is a foreign government, trying to wreak havoc in an enemy country and profit from it, possibly putting some poor folk's life in grave danger.
Journalists shouldn't side with dictators and/or agitprop, IMO, no matter what. They shouldn't also meddle with a country they are not citizens of national security.
that's what secret services are for.
Then, they'd be treating both republicans and Democrats equally. Bad for the libertarians or the greens though
Not sure what type of equality you need == or ===
Do you mean the emails concerning attempts to steal/fix the Democrats primary? Why would wikileaks sit on those emails? Would you prefer they waited to release them until the primary was over?
They did sit on them, until a timed moment.
I looked it up, and apprently this could be true, assuming that wikileaks were given the emails ahead of time. Some of those emails were first posted to a DCLeaks website, then Wikileaks announced they'd be posting some, then DCLeaks posted more a few weeks later, then Wikileaks posted some, then Wikileaks posted more just before the election.
It makes sense to time these things for impact, assuming you want to punish corruption, and that's the motivation behind these kinds of leaks, right? People seem to focus on the part Assange and the Russians played in this instead of the actual corruption - how Bernie Sanders and millions of his supporters were screwed by Clinton and the DNC.
I don't think it's partisan to expose the truth. To do otherwise serves those in power at the expense of the general public.
It is true. One of the findings from the Mueller report identified the very day that the emails were sent from Russian intelligence to WikiLeaks
It was a smear campaign targeted at democrats, nothing more.
This is textbook whataboutism. "Stealing a hundred thousand confidential emails from political rivals is fine because look at all the bad things they said about Bernie Sanders"
Look at the even more outrageous event of Trump magically getting the laptop of his rival's son and parading it around in 2020. It's organized crime trying to corrupt politics that you're rooting for. The kind of thing that happens in Russia or deeply corrupt banana republics
There was more than just a DNC dislike of Bernie Sanders. There were financial, policy, and hiring decisions involved, arranged between Clinton and the DNC, contrary to a free and fair election. From wikipedia [0]:
> The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership's publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives seemed to deride Sanders' campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton's nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. The revelations prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz before the 2016 Democratic National Convention. The DNC issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters "for the inexcusable remarks made over email" that did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process." After the convention, DNC CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall, and Communications Director Luis Miranda also resigned in the wake of the controversy.
I'm rooting for the exposure of political corruption on all sides. I think it is an important thing for the people to know the truth, no matter the messenger.
Are you rooting for something different?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
Wikileaks did the right thing, else imagine what they would be doing now.
Also, who killed Epstein?
A way to look at this is that we should have more Assange and Wikileaks, and get leaks of problematic facts from all over the boards. If you feel Wikileaks was biased, it means we need different shades of it, and to get there we first need at least one shade of it. And currently we’re not even there.
When they did, they found nothing wrong. But it didn't stop the pure FUD cloud around them from affecting Hillary's reputation.
When something is leaked, people automatically assume it's bad. Republicans rode that high through election day.
The emails got dumped the same day extremely damaging "grab em by the pussy" video evidence of Trump was release. The whole thing screams political hitjob.
It's like when Trump's lawyer magically got his political rival's son's laptop and paraded it around, even though nothing damaging was on it. Republicans are resorting to banana republic style hacking and theft against their political enemies, which should terrify everyone
... Or perhaps your perspective is partisan.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2016/10/want-know-julian-assanges-endg...
I have noticed that the people who support Assange never want to talk about how Assange implied that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source which resulted in repeated harassment of the family of a murder victim. Assange knew Rich wasn't the source of the DNC leaks because Assange was still in contact with the source after Rich was murdered. There is no journalistic justification for that behavior.
"Simple people talk about people. Common people talk about events. Highly intelligent people talk about ideas."
Government transparency is necessary to prevent a never-ending dark age of fascism and suffering. Organizations like Wikileaks support democracy and thereby support human progress.
Assange is not a nice person and that doesn't matter. Julian Assange started and ran Wikileaks, and thereby contributed massively to the welfare of humanity.
The Collateral Damage leaks greatly reduced the credibility of the US military as a worldwide humanist agent.
The alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime was used as a justification for a full blown invasion of Syria; yet the political push back was too strong and the attacks were reduced to air strikes. Thank you Wikileaks for publishing the cables showing how US had plans in motion to topple Assad since a very long time.
But more importantly people are beginning to question their government and that is a good thing.
I agree with some of what you said, directionally - some people are more aware of their privacy. Some people have also tuned out the arguments because they appear to be noise. It’s also hard to judge something when we don’t know effect size, or even if it was causal, however.
Many of your points are good examples and I appreciate you posting them.
From day one, Wikileaks had a stated policy of trying to achieve "maximum impact" for their publications. For instance, the same claim is also made at the release of the Afghan War logs in 2011: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/wikileaks-file...
Just imagine that Clinton won in a landslide and then right afterwards WikiLeaks comes out with the podesta emails saying they waited until after the election to share it so they wouldn't hurt her chances.
In a democracy the people have the right to decide which information they care about, it shouldn't be decided for them by the media.
WikiLeaks expressly says that they time their releases to get the most coverage. It's why a whistleblower might choose them over other outlets that may publish their story to get minimal coverage of it would hurt the powers that be.
Releasing information will hurt either side without discrimination. You can’t applaud it when it hurts republicans and boo it when it hurts democrats and still claim you support releasing the truth to the public.
Did Assange lash out at the Democrats? Yes. Did he throw the first stone? Not even close.
Wikileaks did the right thing timing their release right before people are making their final decision when casting the ballot.
I'm not sure how you can claim the charges are fictitious unless you haven't read them. The charging document for the superseding indictment is fairly straightforward and relatively short. What problems do you have with it?
Likewise, I am of the opinion that the attempted extradition and prosecution for the sex offences would not have happened if he hadn’t upset the wrong people, while also being of the opinion that he did the crimes.
[0] That’s said, I wouldn’t describe him that way. Plenty of other journalists doing fine work.
That's quite simply a load of bollocks. The UK has been pally with the US, was involved in Iraq with the US, and willing to extradite far more than Sweden in the past.
The UK doesn't even typically allow rendition flights to even refuel, and absolutely requires all extraditions to go through the strict legal process. I think it's mainly a pride thing about not rolling over and letting a former colony run amok extrajudicially in your homeland.
I can see why he didn't want to step on Swedish soil if he got a hint of US led shenanigans.
And Assange seems like a misogynistic antisemite from what I've seen posted by Lee. Yet even he agrees that the US's attack is based solely on disliking his journalistic endeavors, and is an attack on a free press.
Ok so he does have it, but it is totally not a problem.
No, that would have been fine. The problem is that Assange himself is clearly partisan. I doubt they would have leaked anything damaging to Trump. There are chat logs attesting to the fact that they timed the leaks to influence the election.
Murky secretive organizations can't be trusted, period. It doesn't matter what they are or whether they are "alternative" or "mainstream." I don't see why I should trust Wikileaks any more than I trust the CIA or the FSB. There's no transparency. I have no way of knowing if Assange has an agenda or what that agenda might be.
We need an entirely algorithmic / protocol driven leaker platform that verifiably removes human beings from the loop or at least chains their hands when it comes to when to leak things and whether to leak them.
(For the record I am not a fan of either of the 2016 candidates. They were both awful, but Trump was worse largely because of the ideological fascists that surrounded and backed him. Trump himself is not ideological, just a power hungry narcissist who will ride whatever horse will take him further.)
I don't remember seeing these same criticisms back in 2010 during the cable leaks, curious that this is only an issue now, after the light is being shined on the democrats rather than the republicans for a change...
I'd say that the focus on party loyalty is more a feature of authoritarian parties in general and not fascism specifically.
If there's any single tenet that can be called central to fascism (a debatable premise), it's probably the idea that "the nation" can reattain its former glory by forcefully purging various forms of "degeneracy" and thereby becoming "pure".
You're not allowed to mention that ideology here. Except in a distant historical context.
No, they became a partisan issue because Putin's intelligence apparatus took control of WikiLeaks
Why should anyone trust Julian Assange in the first place? Specifically, why should anyone trust that Julian Assange dumps all the data Wikileaks receives, when it receives it, instead of selectively disclosing whatever Julian wants whenever it suits him? The latter behavior, which has borne out, constitutes the actions of someone with a hidden agenda who should not be trusted.
Like, what has Julian done to earn our trust, and demonstrate that he is being completely forthright and transparent?
Most American's probably don't actually know much about him. They may have encountered a few stories over the years-- in many cases just the headlines.
There wouldn't be outrage & protests for a few reasons:
1) The news stories people have read would frequently have been about him helping hack US computers, often with the added context of his rape prosecution, so there wouldn't be a lot of automatic sympathy.
2) The testimony retraction is only a few days old, so not much time to get upset especially without greater media coverage.
3) The story is basically "Witness lies to FBI". People aren't going to take to the streets over that. If the DoJ still go after Assange, that would be worse, but I still don't think we'd see much protesting for 1 more main reason:
4) Americans have more than enough sources of outrage much closer to home. If something is going to overcome Americans' "outrage fatique", it isn't going to be recanted testimony in the prosecution of a supposed co-conspirator for an incident that occurred over 10 years ago. It's not even an issue of partisan politics: Whether you're to the right or the left, you probably have more immediate things to be angry about than this.
Yeah, if this is intended to mean the democrats, I'm going to need an unbiased source on that. If there was actual corruption in the Democratic Party uncovered in these leaks, I don't remember hearing anything about it. I remember hearing a lot of partisan and daffy trash about pizza parlors and a DNC conspiracy against Sanders, though.
> Donna Brazile, a longtime Clinton ally who stepped in as DNC chair last year in the wake of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s resignation, published an excerpt of her upcoming book in Politico in which she disclosed the details of a fundraising agreement between the DNC and the Clinton campaign reached in August 2015.
> “The agreement — signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and [Clinton campaign manager] Robby Mook with a copy to [Clinton campaign counsel] Marc Elias— specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised,” Brazile wrote in the story under the headline “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC.”
> Brazile added of the deal: “[Clinton’s] campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
> During the 2016 election, Sanders allies alleged that the DNC did not act as a neutral arbiter of the Democratic primary, favoring Clinton in its selection of debate times and fundraising. Their suspicions were only heightened when leaked emails published by WikiLeaks, and now reported to have been hacked by the Russians, appeared to show DNC staffers deriding Sanders and plotting ways to help Clinton. The accusations grew so heated that Wasserman Schultz resigned, which is when Brazile took over.
> But now Brazile has provided explosive new evidence for the initial allegations. "The shocking news here is this idea they were exerting a level of control over DNC affairs that we didn't know about," said Kenneth Pennington, who served as digital director for the Sanders campaign. "If you had told me this during the primary — that they're using the joint fundraising committee to get veto power over DNC functions — I would have called you a conspiracy nut."
The rigging of the primaries was bad, but that's only half the story. The bigger reason for the resignations probably had a lot to do with what they said about their donors and the way that people pretty clearly were buying federal appointments.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/07/leaks-show-dnc-aske...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/24/he...
He hid out in the UK to aviod questioning in sweden because they were going to ship him off to america. This would be a legitimate concern if the UK were not the worlds most agressive at shipping people off to the US to 'face justice'. He was actually at far greater danger in the UK, which he had to know because he leaked the UK role in the extrodinary rendition programme, than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
This is because Wikileaks is objectively partisan. Do you recall the leaked conversations between Trump Jr and Wikileaks where they suggest coordinating a controlled "leak" of Trump's tax returns in order to bolster their own credibility?
In wikileak's own words: "if we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality".
This doesn't invalidate the content of the leaked e-mails, but it does demonstrate that their goals were partisan in nature.
They are telling people what to think and it is working.
I’ve been following the story since the Slashdot days. Why am I not outraged? Why am I not protesting? It’s certainly doesn’t have to do with some political party that I don’t belong to. I fundamentally feel that Assange and Wikileaks went about things the wrong way. They feel more like an anarchists organization than some sort of journalists organization to me. I certainly do not feel outraged nor inclined to protest.
The irony of all ironies is that many of the same people who complain about editorializing in journalism and media are the same ones who back Assange.
Why not?
>The irony of all ironies is that many of the same people who complain about editorializing in journalism and media are the same ones who back Assange.
I don't want what I view as the US backed media outlets in jail either. This isn't irony, disliking something and state prosecution are drastically different.
If he's committed a crime, charge him with it and give him his day in court. If he hasn't -- like in the case of this story where he never asked anyone to commit any crimes against the Icelandic government, don't make charges up. I can't believe this even needs to be said.
That's what you should be outraged about, and you don't have to like Assange or Wikileaks to be outraged about that.
Isn’t this exactly what the government has done? https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1289641/downl...
There are lots of unusual things about the Assange case, but the fact that the government tried to strengthen it by offering leniency to an informant isn’t one of them.
Which country claims they want indefinite detention for Assange? Are you claiming that all of the DoJs indictment is fabricated? Have you actually read through the governments published information?
The thing is we all used to love WL for their active transparency and independence, but when they started playing these games (or allowing themselves to be played) they lost that respect
Purely because both parties needed some way of turning the people against Wikileaks.
TFTFY.
People act like it was just “randomly people decided he wasn’t sympathetic” all the while we had the government ov the most powerful nation doing everything in their power both legal and illegal to undermine him. It’s not accidental that you feel like Assange and “might be a bad character” it’s be design and the people behind it must have so much worse stories hidden away than the ones we already know of to go to this much trouble to kill freedom of information.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
> Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade
Really? A lot of stuff they leaked wasn't even that damaging, like Hillary's emails, because it just showed that the DNC wasn't really up to anything. But they made sure to release them at the most politically damaging moment possible. While they sit on other documents for years.
Trump's closest advisors had direct contact with WikiLeaks, which doesn't make sense unless they were collaborating https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-campaign...
> The special counsel’s office determined that hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta were transmitted from a Russian-government proxy, Guccifer 2.0, to WikiLeaks on July 14, 2016.
> The report does not resolve the question of coordination between the campaign and WikiLeaks’ timed release of hacked emails from Podesta. The report does note, however, that the hacked emails were released on Oct. 7, the same day as the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump was heard making vulgar boasts about women.
> The report adds “the release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.”
Yeah, definitely not partisan
What we're seeing isn't so much an elite group controlling the narrative as an elite group who used to be able to control the narrative and now can't patch over the rough spots.
I can't tell if you're being facetious or not...
https://archive.org/details/inventingrealit100pare
A quick video discussing both Chomsky and Parenti: https://youtu.be/unKNNiYQFp4
Edit: Looked it up. UK was close to those numbers in 2015 too. The US was far behind though. But that hasn't changed much since so it doesn't really matter in this context.
What's necessary is for Internet connectivity to be high enough that other media gatekeepers are ineffective, and that's a threshold which was all but certainly crossed somewhere between the 1990s and early 2000s. With other nontraditional media channels (samizdat printing presses, pirate radio, 'Zine culture, and the like), there were pretty big holes in the mainstream media monopoly even earlier, though perhaps not quite at mass media level.
(Interestingly, if you go further back, there was enough diversity in mainstream media that a single unitary media culture didn't exist. It's helpful to realise that this mass-media culture was a largely novel development of the 1950s, much commented on at the time.)
That said: media control, expressed as the ability to promote and suppress specific narratives, is as old as speech. Methods exist and have varied, but distraction, taboo, blacklisting, and access control (that is, denying personal access to reporters or publications which don't toe the official or blessed line) are key mechanisms.
In today's mobile social Internet age, distraction, trust attacks, firehose, and that old classic, the Big Lie, are still effective methods of media control.
> The Stundin article continued:
> ‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.
That charge was completely absent from the case until the US decided it needed to strengthen its case and added it last-minute. So clearly they disagree with you, otherwise they would have kept it out (knowing the background of the individual involved). And again, why would the judge refer to it specifically in siding with the US if it were so unimportant?
That he is in any way involved with the case on the US govt side is extremely unsettling. Especially if he were given immunity child rape for any testimony.
Different people have different levels of access to ensuring media coverage, in part because of biases in those media outlets.
The title for this link is exaggerated at least.
That's not about this news story.
"These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin."
Has the NYT covered them?
Here's an NYT search showing everything they published with the term "Assange" in the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&endDate=2021070...
There's a lot going on in the world, not everything can be covered urgently in a general interest publication. They don't have unlimited reporters.
Edward Snowden said: "This is the end of the case against Julian Assange."
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1408847450656415751
I find it hard to believe the media would be silent if similar revelations came to light about anyone else.
I agree with Media Lens:
> in a sane world, Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness – that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from prosecution – would have been headline news everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian and more. The silence is quite extraordinary; and disturbing.
Everybody is a critic of what the MSM is covering. They cover what is interesting. It isn’t a giant conspiracy to explain their behavior.
His extradition hearing to see if this charge can be tried is currently facing an appeal, and he is still in prison partially for this charge.
And it is getting coverage! It just isn’t front page news.
And it isn't getting any major oublisher coverage, searching "Julian Assange" on both DDG and Google news shows only Democracy Now covering the story.
Yes, the USA is charging him. It would be very odd for extradition hearings on US federal charges to be heard in a US court, and, in fact, these are not. Assange is not on trial, and the process he is currently undergoing in is not in an American court, though there are charges pending that he would face in a US court if that process completes as the US prefers.
I can see you arguing that that's not important, but falsely denying the assertion that its not in a US court is...I mean, what's even the point?
> I can see you arguing that that's not important, but falsely denying the assertion that its not in a US court is...I mean, what's even the point?
I am arguing that it is important and view the extradition hearing as part of his larger US trial. His trial for skipping bail in the UK is long over, the only trial left is the US one.
The extradition hearing is factually not part of his US trial.
> the only trial left is the US one.
The US charges are the only ones that he is currently known to be facing a potential future trial for, sure. But “potential future” and “actual current” are not the same thing.
I'd write this off as weird pedantry but you're accusing me of lying for some reason.
No, that's neither the first step of the process (even the formal legal process) nor any step of the trial.
All of this seems like parts of the pretrial layed out by the US constitutional criminal procedure. I guess you could distinguish trial from pretrial, but if that was your point you really could have just stated that right away.
It doesn't matter whether it's the "first" step or an "early" step. It doesn't matter if the entire process is being summed up as "trial", even though parts of the process are not technically part of the trail.
> Edward Snowden said: "This is the end of the case against Julian Assange."
What does Snowden know? He's not a lawyer of any sort.
You're treating him like he's some generic authority, who's pronouncements on any subject carry weight. That's weird.
I think your response is not weird but disingenuous.
>> What does Snowden know? He's not a lawyer of any sort.
> He is broadly considered a generic authority based on his long, deep thinking and publications about leaks and legal consequences.
Maybe so, but I wouldn't hire him as my lawyer or rely on his judgements about when a legal case will fail.
It's the difference between thinking about the consequences of a technology and building/operating that technology. For instance, someone might be an expert on the pernicious social effects of Facebook, but would flame out if they actually worked as a developer there. Snowden more than likely doesn't have the technical knowledge of the British legal system for him to reliably tell the difference between a major and minor development, let alone make trustworthy prediction about the future outcome of the whole thing.
> "These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin."
> Has the NYT covered them?
I think the point is that the Assange story isn't that important or interesting anymore, so they don't breathlessly cover every development like some corners of the internet want to (and sometimes interpret the lack of breathless coverage as some kind of conspiracy).
Do you realize that it's not hyperbole to say press freedom in the United States hinges on this case? American journalists have always been protected from prosecution for publishing factual information. If Assange is convicted, he will be the first. That would fundamentally change freedom of the press in the US.
What Manning did was illegal whether you agree with her motivations or not. Soliciting someone with clearance to leak information and assisting them in the process is also illegal. It doesn't matter if Assange's assistance was effective or not.
If all Assange did was publish information Manning brought to him, there would likely be no charges and they'd be easily dismissed otherwise. He'd have been clearly acting in the role as a journalist. But that's not what happened.
Assange wants to be considered a journalist (with its protections) while at the same time playing spymaster and hacker.
It's pretty standard to be friendly to people who spy for you, and hostile to those who spy against you. If the FBI catches a Russian spy who doesn't have diplomatic cover, that person is going to get prosecuted (and if they do have cover they'll become persona non grata and expelled); ditto if the Russians catch an American spy.
Except for expulsion of diplomats, arrests of agents, sanctions against government officials, indictments for officials and agents, and of course war.
Besides all of those things that happen all the time nobody prosecutes spy agencies. eyeroll
Assange is a self-styled spymaster that's not actually very good at the job. Spies that go around advertising their spying and bragging about conspiracies of which they are a part are not good spies.
He's charged with both.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wikileaks-founder-julian-assa...
Criminal No. 1:18-cr-l 11 (CMH)Count 1: 18 U.S.C.§ 793(g)Conspiracy To Receive National DefenseInformation
Counts 2-4:18 U.S.C. § 793(b) and 2Obtaining National Defense Information
Counts 5-8: 18 U.S.C. § 793(c) and 2Obtaining National Defense Information
Counts 9-11: 18 U.S.C. § 793(d) and 2Disclosure of National Defense Information
Counts 12-14: 18 U.S.C. § 793(e) and 2Disclosure of National Defense Information
Counts 15-17: 18 U.S.C. § 793(e)Disclosure of National Defense Information
Count 18: 18 U.S.C. §§ 371 and 1030Conspiracy To Commit Computer Intrusion
Independently intent would be a difficult thing to prove but his public actions and the conspiracy charges with will be used to establish intent. Like I said, he wants to claim all of the protections of journalism while he's acting as a spymaster.
I don't really think it's possible to claim (objectively) any of Assange's actions with Wikileaks could be considered journalism. Besides not really practicing anything that might be considered journalism he also exercised a lot of editorial control in what Wikileaks didn't or wouldn't publish.
If that were actually the case, I'd expect the kind of breathless coverage from the rest of the press that Assange's fans are clamoring for. So it's either...
1. there's a conspiracy afoot, and the press (as a whole) is deliberately coordinating amongst themselves to suppress this significant development, because they're all in the pocket of... etc., etc.;
2. the mainstream press are all dumbasses who don't know the difference between their head and a hole in the ground; or...
3. it is hyperbole to say press freedom in the United States hinges on this case.
My bet is with the latter. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the far safer bet.
“For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration's attacks on journalism, and a direct assault on the First Amendment. It establishes a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets. And it is equally dangerous for U.S. journalists who uncover the secrets of other nations. If the US can prosecute a foreign publisher for violating our secrecy laws, there’s nothing preventing China, or Russia, from doing the same.”
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-comment-julian-assa...
"Don’t let the misdirection around “blown informants” fool you—this case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity."
https://www.cjr.org/opinion/assange-extradition-espionage-ac...
"For the sake of press freedom, Julian Assange must be defended"
https://cpj.org/2019/12/press-freedom-julian-assange-wikilea...
"The most dangerous press freedom issue of 2020 is Trump’s prosecution of Julian Assange"
https://freedom.press/news/the-most-dangerous-press-freedom-...
"The US should never have brought the case against the WikiLeaks founder. This attack on press freedom must be rejected"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/18/the-gu...
"The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom. The Trump DOJ is exploiting animosity toward Assange to launch a thinly disguised effort to criminalize core functions of investigative journalism."
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/11/the-u-s-governments-indi...
The claim about Assange guiding Manning that Thordarson is testifying too is definitely a major piece of most of the related court cases.
> Except, Siggi retracts nothing substantive that is alleged in the indictment, so this drama is instead a demand that you accept the word of a liar rather than read the documents to show that the liar’s claims are irrelevant to the charges against Assange.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/06/27/wikileaks-and-edward-s...
(I really don't know anything about the case so I don't have an opinion, other than to be reflexively skeptical of sweeping claims of conspiracy)
I've said this before: Assange dabbled in espionage without a Nation-State backer and is experiencing the repercussions of that gamble. Right or wrong the realpolitik is what Assange is living now.
~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko
> Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks.
Is these any evidence backing up this claim of what would essentially be an act of (cyber)war against a NATO ally?
Of course you're right, though. This isn't OK, and on balance FBI is like any other federal TLA. The average citizen will be better off on the day they are disbanded.
And please, it's not as though FBI really focuses on the two concerns you highlighted.
I’m not sure about this. Can you provide some more info? The FBI isn’t perfect but I don’t think they are a net negative. The FBI does lots of good stuff like investigate Ferguson, MO and other corrupt local police departments.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/28/documents-show-us-...
No one is claiming that all of the FBI “have their hearts in the right place.” I’m just refuting your statement that the average person in the US would be better off without them.
Also ... maybe there is a problem with censored news in the US. Because outside the US mainstream media reporting on the latest "US intelligence caught spying on everyone again" is as common as the latest "Russia caught mistreating dissident artist" story.
It really does seem like you all aren't aware of the (deserved) reputation of the FBI outside the US.
What news sources do you follow?
> Thus, when Thordarson continued his previous pattern of requesting attacks on Icelandic interests, the FBI knew and saw an opportunity to implicate Julian Assange.
> Later that month a DDoS attack was performed against the websites of several government institutions.
> That deed was done under the watchful eyes of the FBI who must have authorized the attack or even initiated it, as Sabu was at that point their man. What followed was an episode where it seems obvious that Icelandic authorities were fooled into cooperation under false pretenses.
That's not saying the FBI attacked Iceland at all, it's saying THORDARSON was "asking" for attacks (From... other wikileaks-affiliated folks? That isn't clear to me). And it's just inferring without other evidence that the FBI must have known because they were working both Thordarson and Sabu as sources.
I mean, maybe the FBI did know. But it's not substantiated that they did, at all. And it's certainly not substantiated that they were "complicit" in those attacks as Media Lens reports.
Gotta say, that one word makes me question a ton more about this article. That's just not a minor mistake, someone is spinning hard here. What else is spun?
They injected malware into belgium’s core telecommunication infrastructure: https://theintercept.com/2014/12/13/belgacom-hack-gchq-insid...
They spied on angela merkel’s calls and texts: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-us-reportedly-spied...
An FBI DDoS against the USA's allies is nothing out of the ordinary. Russia, the EU, the USA, everyone is waging cyberwar against each other. Nobody wins if actual, physical, violent war is declared, so nobody admits anything.
When it comes to national security, America is not an ally that can be trusted. Just look at the sabotage the US government is applying to the European gas pipeline to Russia; afraid of losing control over the European power market, the US government is doing everything in its power to stop its allies letting them make their own decisions about the power grid when it doesn't benefit themselves. I'm no fan of Russia, its government, and I'm not exactly happy with the added influence Moscow gains over Europe with this project, but America's actions show that their government is just as bad when it comes to national sovereignty of its allies.
For many western countries, America doesn't need to very trustworthy or reliable; the bar is "better than trusting Russia or China", and that's a pretty damn low bar to set. Many of these countries are no better themselves, of course, and they would do the exact same thing if they'd have the power and influence the American government has.
I've recognized this happening but I have never had a word for it until now.
Complaining about downvotes is however not OK here according to the rules.
Sometimes when I am really confused I ask politely why something I wrote was downvoted, but more importantly I got used to it and get over it. In fact I wonder if I have collected most downvotes (and later upvotes) on my most important comments :-)
People vote based on whether they agree or disagree with a political opinion (and is mentioning Manufacturing Consent so partisan in the first place?). I tend to upvote or downvote based on argument strength even if I disagree or agree with the generalized point of view.
That's my philosophy. So it makes me slightly bitter when people downvote 'just because.'
Don't get bitter. It only hurts you.
I'm actually serious here.
* Lying by omission - the passive omission of relevant information.
* Paltering - active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression.
But knowbody will know what you mean if you use the word paltering, so "by omission" would still be the go-to phrase.
The notion of neutral or unbiased media is a little strange IMHO; they're a for profit corporation, for one. The media has an agenda and it's usually to please the particular political party they favor.
In this specific scenario, I don't think it's too hard to identify. Assange embarrassed key members of a certain American political party and likely cost them an entire election. It's one of those scenarios where if you don't conform you will be silenced.
Other people embarrass the GOP on a daily basis and they have daily nightly TV news shows.
If you mean the other political party - they have a habit of losing elections because they don't fight dirty..., so I just don't see how that's a coherent argument.
Now, if you're referring to _the establishment_, that's different - and it's not a political party _per se_.
"It is our conclusion, based on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
But now, let’s look at what was done with the Steele Dossier before the election was even over. That was itself based largely on “Russian disinformation” and was used to obtain a FISA warrant and spy on the Trump campaign. It was obviously a garbage document from day 1, but they used it to “legally” spy on their political opponents anyways. That is imo far worse than anything that happened between Trump & Russia.
For the record I’m not a Trump supporter either and I am generally left leaning, but it’s clear to me that media & intelligence agencies really cannot be trusted as a result of the blatant lies they have pushed over the last few years. Just because I want universal healthcare etc doesn’t mean I need to repeat “2 + 2 = 5” because some jerk off on TV told me to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
And speaking of bias, it's clear from leaked messages that Assange was targeting Dems and timed his releases to support Trump.
What's particularly interesting about the Assange case at this point? He's a guy in an extradition hearing, probably like thousands of others. If the end result is the extradition is rejected because of this detail, then it will more than likely be reported as part of that larger story.
Assange has a small but vocal fan base, but fans don't make the minutiae of these court proceedings interesting or relevant to non-fans.
And if and when Assange goes on trial in a US Federal court, that will be covered ad inifinitum, ad nauseam by the US press.
The FBI is a criminal organisation.
What's really stunning that this statement does not seem like just a wildly crazy accusation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_PXI5Ba1Ak
Not sure how true it all is.
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/topic/the-duplessis-orphans
What I've read so far is horrible :(
That said, yes we do actually know about the MKULTRA Montreal Programme, because of testimonies. We just don't know what more there was, and there is certainly more.
You can see topics trending in right media (this was) and compare to the left media. I tend to send friends of either affinity topics from the other, my own effort to bring people together... or at least understand each other (have the same facts).
The daily mail owned metro is described as "left media" while RT is shoved in the same category as fox news.
They should really categorize by more fine grained biases and allegiances. E.g. WaPo to the US military industrial complex, RT to putin, CNBC to the DNC, Fox to RNC/Rupert Murdoch, BBC to the tories, Metro to lord rothermere.
And these categorizations could probably vary wildly. This is the first time I've ever heard of the WaPo being aligned with the US military industrial complex and I was part of that complex for twenty years. I'm guessing this new title is because it's owned by Bezos and he provides a lot of AWS tech?
Did you not hear about the US 2003 invasion of Iraq? WaPo news stories in the lead up were certainly aligned with the US military industrial complex. In my memory, the NYT and WaPo (the most important two "liberal" newspapers) both being in support of a republican president invading a third world country is one of the most notable evidences that the MSM is complicit with the government.
Roger Ailes, longtime chairman of Fox News, was president of CNBC in the early nineties and is credited with making the network successful. I don’t think it’s possible to watch CNBC hosts (and guests) praise Bush-era economic policies for a decade and come away thinking they’re Democratic mouthpieces.
They’ll go full throttle on something like WMDs, border crisis, lab leak cover ups, etc., but also be complicit in burying things like the new border crisis (which appear worse than Trumps) this witness recanting, etc., when it doesn’t fit a narrative.
It’s concerning because there has to be some agenda somewhere for things to switch on and off like this.
Russia is the biggest threat, no, China is the biggest threat. Oh, no Trump said that, they’re not. But now they’re the biggest again.
It’s not “pelosi” it’s not the Congress, it’s most likely what people derisively call the deep state. Unelected bureaucrats with inertial agendas that filter down to the media.
I can’t imagine the media running with this 24x7 to make up for their previous bias and asking for forgiveness and demanding the government come correct.
We'll let you sell in our market as long as you sign away all your IP is the same as we'll let you in on presidential press meetings as long as you'll say nice things.
Also, all those "anonymous" sources from "intelligence agencies" are information / propaganda plants. The CIA doesn't leak very often unintentionally, when it does, people get tortured (Manning / Assange) and/or exiled (Snowden).
Those are not comparable at all though. One is a law that the US seem to believe is A Good Thing to try to enforce everywhere, but that doesn't make it universally true, while the other is preferential treatment (or corruption, abuse of power). One can be bad (it's not in this example IMO) while the other is always bad.
"The idea behind the trap is that you drill a hole in a log and drop a small shiny object in the hole, then you drive nails into the shaft. The raccoon will see the shiny object at the bottom and want it, so they reach into the hole and grab it, but once they grab it they can’t pull their hand out because the of the nails that make the hole too small for their closed fist to get back through.
It is simple to seek the hole in this plan, why can’t the raccoon just let go of the object and pull their hand out? Billy’s grandpa explains that the strange thing about raccoon are that they are too stubborn to let go of the shiny thing. Once a raccoon decides that it wants something it becomes so determined to have it that it will not stop until it get the thing. So the raccoon will sit there forever until it ether pulls it’s fist out (which it won’t,) or the hunter comes along. Another interesting thing is that raccoons are not the only animals that do this human do this as well."
Everyone has biases.
Is whether someone has the integrity to recognize and air them, while reporting matters of import that go against their own views/agenda.
It is not the right, it is not the left, it is power. Power (anybody in power) does not like anybody criticizing them. In the US, in China or everywhere in the world.
The US has a big War industry and infrastructure, that is a power on their own. It tells presidents what to do and not the other way.
It maybe a partisan issue at the grassroots, but it's not really such in government where the majority of politicians are in the same bubble of silencing dissidents and whistleblowers using any means to the end.
The whole fiasco is a "This is what happens to you... reporters, publishers, and snitches.. when you threaten to expose our lies and our crimes. We invent crimes and murder you slowly."
The only way to prevent this from happening again is to overthrow the powers-that-be because it will keep happening.
Personally I think we could probably trace it back to soviet infiltration of the university education system around the world in the 60's and 70's, which within a lifetime has produced multiple generations of nihilistic bureaucrats trained to seek power for its own sake, and now they occupy our institutions at all levels and have used them to destroy the foundations of the culture and seize its means of production, while subordinating them to a global regime. All without firing a shot. The reason these people believe what they're doing is ok is because someone taught them that the ends justify the means.
The Assange affair is just a symptom of a much more terrible disease, and this witness and the media compliance around him are about par for the course in all of this.
Those that will do anything for power have an advantage over others, ergo people at high level positions are disproportionately those types of people.
One thought is that we could try to fix that problem with some type of screening, but that would be another system to game or corrupt. Also, those kind of people (high ambition and drive) can be really useful in those positions so long as they don't go off the rails.
So the new most powerful position is the person that knows who runs the galaxy and talks to her/him. That person can make up things or sway the ruler.
If you have many people, you now just have an oligarchy.
Once a single war lord controls the “security” of the Emperor, they then wield power and justify all of there actions based on sole access to the Emperor.
1. Very extreme militaristic response that will surely cause many deaths. Clearly unacceptable.
2. Very weak bordering on non-existent response. Clearly unacceptable.
3. What pentagon has already decided to do. Clearly the “only” viable option.
No, I'd say power hunger is one thing, but what you face now is unique to this poisonous "Soviet Culture." A very special, aggressive brand of social nihilism at the apex of civil society, characteristic of one party/social class governments.
Putin put his own spin on the timeless demoralisation tactic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3EZCVj2XA ,) an even more aggressive targeting of both the new elites, and the establishment (see Biden Jr. adventures with in Ukraine.) Or plainly speaking playing both sides.
Seeing the ghosts of soviets in every dark corner is something that these very elites we're talking about use to control you and your perceptions of reality.
This is what they want the West to believe. They want you to lower your guard, they want you to start working with them, and put thoughts like "hey, maybe those guys are a lesser evil than communists" into your head.
They rely on people who they call "useful idiots" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot) in communist lingo to perpetuate, and spread such ideas to the West.
They're doing a terrible job then. They've somehow created an even worse society for Russians as far as I can tell.
> They rely on people who they call "useful idiots" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot) in communist lingo to perpetuate, and spread such ideas to the West.
You realize that your citation of Useful Idiot literally points out that there's no record of the term actually being used by the soviets, but instead appears to have been first used by the New York Times?
That's not true. Postmodernism and Frankfurt School of Marxism are synonymous in todays culture. However I agree that late stage postmodernism is almost indistinguishable from Real Politik. End result is the same if your worldview reduces everything to power plays between collectives.
Lyotard in fact defines postmodernism as "incredulity to meta-narratives".
It's full of performative contradictions in practice.
Hence the need for "safe spaces". It doesn't stand up to logical discourse when its application is confronted.
I would suggest you dig deeper into these concepts, as you seem to have basic misunderstandings about what they mean.
And there's nothing wrong with safe spaces. You're not owed "logical discourse" on your terms. People sometimes just want to occasionally not be bothered by every bro who thinks that because they've watched a lot of Jordan Peterson videos that they're suddenly on the pinnacle of philosophical thought. It's tiring in a way orthogonal to the validity of any points being made. Additionally safe spaces aren't typically where instruction is held, and, despite the propaganda, not an effective way to avoid topics completely by design.
Sure that's the theme. A theme that's intertwined with Marxist meta-narratives. Like I said, performative contradiction.
>I would suggest you dig deeper into these concepts, as you seem to have basic misunderstandings about what they mean.
Internet stranger trying to appeal to his own authority. Great argument
>And there's nothing wrong with safe spaces. You're not owed "logical discourse" on your terms.
There's nothing wrong with it. It's in the context of Marxist meta-narratives that it becomes toxic.
What you're describing is late stage capitalism.
""Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes," Keith McCoy, the Exxon (XOM) lobbyist, said during a covertly filmed job interview recorded by Greenpeace's UK investigative platform.
"Did we join some shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true," McCoy said in the video, which was published Wednesday by the UK's Channel 4. "But there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. we were looking out for our shareholders."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/01/business/exxon-tape-video-kei...
The reframing of a company's purpose to "generate shareholder's wealth" is a relatively recent development (1970's) that came on the heels of right wing economic ideas gaining widespread adoption in American universities (Chicago School, etc). This is one of the reasons companies use to justify destruction of society and the planet in the pursuit of more, wealth, power, status, etc.
There is nothing "Soviet Culture" about this or myriad other examples such as the tobacco industry or pharmaceutical companies and the opioid epidemic.
Exactly this is a very good example of it being Randist, and Soviet.
They believed in extreme social darwinism, in kratocracy, in moral legitimacy of their economic parasitism to feed off "weak bourgeois, civil society idiots, and lumpen-proletarian serfs"
I other words, you have to feed fat communist bastards because of their self-proclaimed "class superiority."
Bueracrats are sort of like neurons in the organism of society. They don't have a lot individual intrisic power, but gain power by moving to common (albeit very complex) beat, and commanding the other types of cells according to the machinations of that emergent beat. That manifests as both groupthink as they attempt to play their part in the neural system as a whole, and "ends justify the means" mentality as they look at the rest of us as other specialized cells that exist to serve the societal organism as a whole.
I guarantee you that on average a 15th century BCE Egyptian bureaucrat trended the same way, as it's core to the space.
...
...what?
In reality, this kind of thing has been going on in the US since the late 19th century. It's a 100% normal thing and there is absolutely no need for an ebil gommunist boogeyman for it.
What you're seeing is those precious institutions operating as intended and as they always did. Just like they do pretty much everywhere.
Never responsible, never accountable, and most importantly, never wrong.
I do agree that this sentiment now extends to almost all power and influence institutions.
News outlets produce stories solely as a commodity to influence behavior on behalf of large corporations (paid) or government entities. Journalism integrity is at a all time low in the US and honestly doesn’t look good moving into the future.
Really kind of dystopian :/
That would be a big story if true.
[0] https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2021/us-ranks-last-amon...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Source please?
The same thing. They do the same thing. Don’t turn a blind eye to it.
Also the Assange case is near and dear to a lot of people. It’s evil what’s happening to him. And the only reason it continues to happen is because of the silent consent of people who really probably have no idea what our intelligence agencies are doing and because of the cultivated ineptitude at some of our important institutions.
All of that is true without doubt. But why listen to this guy? "Bezmenov" literally translates to "nameless". [0] He claims in this video to be a propagandist with a history of producing propaganda. His specific claims (e.g. the 15%/85% thing) are totally unverifiable. (And by the way, that does the 15%/85% thing imply about CIA, FBI, etc? Whose opinion do they really want to influence?) Listening to him reminds me mostly of the "incubator babies" girl. If you already believe what he's saying, maybe it's reassuring. If you don't, it won't convince you.
I still don't understand why this character fascinates you so. I honestly wish that more of my schoolmates had been convinced of the benefits of communism. I wasn't, but I would appreciate a modicum of ideological variety. Clearly the way we're doing things in this country is fucked up, and there is very little public discussion of that fact that doesn't boil down to red-blue distraction. Let's try anything else. Ghosts of the Cold War might imply something not to do, but they aren't the solution to our problems.
[0] https://translate.google.com/?sl=sk&tl=en&text=Bezmenov&op=t...
Directly from a KGB defector lecture on this topic.
Yuri Bezmenov - Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society Complete Lecture
I find it amusing how people bring up Soviet propaganda in schools and always link this same video to this one person (who criticizes the inability to assess true information), while simultaneously not questioning whether or not they are consuming propaganda themselves. Wouldn't it be funny if this guy is a CIA plant repeating neocon talking points from the 80s?
When I traced back any of the sources that "confirmed" his past, they always dead-ended at his own writing in papers. I'd be interested if you have something else that confirms that this is a "KGB defector".
As someone that grew up in a totalitarian communist government. What Yuri speaks is consistent with my lived experience of how the communists acted to maintain power, in a country they occupied.
what's the point of fighting, when you can spread bullshit on other's country internet and divide people?
Really, that's what did it? I'd wager that a majority of Americans don't even know who Assange or Snowden are, much less care about them. I think constantly living in self-selected information bubbles might be just a tad more significant..
The Soviet Union is over, you can't keep relying on the Red Scare any more.
I mean, there definitely are problems with US media - concentrated ownership and a reliance on hyperbole, as well as pundits who retreat behind the "it's entertainment, no reasonable person would have taken what I said seriously" defense when sued over their lies. But wheeling out McCarthyism again is ridiculous.
It is only a small cookie in comparison to what people in USSR had to deal daily. Regular bureaucrats being bastards was a given, the only difference being how much. From customary "f__k off attitude," to ones laughing, and spitting you in the face while waving their party member card.
I don't have many ideas how to build a system to keep non-appointed government workers in line. Any kind of promotion system can get corrupted in its own way. There is no magic bullet.
What the West got right in general about bureaucracy were these:
1. Less government officers as such
2. Them being given less duties
3. Good distance in between them (this is what is getting eroded lately, with government service becoming a monolith with rich law schools)
Bad things, and bad class culture perpetuate faster than good ones, and is in generally more resilient against deliberate campaigns for cleansing institutions.
Taking the example of Georgia (a country of,) it was proven to be much easier to oust small time habitual bribe takers, nihilists, or poor performing bureaucrats, than "talented villains" who are both more hardcore in their ill, and are better at hiding their crimes, bad ideological stances, or underperformance.
If you kick out those half-corrupted people, but pass a few completely rotten ones, you often empower the later. They can quickly recruit more co-conspirators from new bloods, and corrupt their surroundings more completely. Paradoxically, half-hearted purges in state institutes can often exacerbate the problem by "distilling the poison."
It takes generations, or an extreme shock therapy to disrupt such institutional nihilism.
Antonio Gramsci https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdsSIWh_VkQ
Theodor Adorno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YGnPgtWhsw
That intellectual subversion, and propaganda is and was a political tool is fairly obvious to anyone that has lived under a totalitarian government.
Adding on to this: there is no rough equivalent to Lenin capturing the railroads in the USA, at all. The bourgeoise have controlled the means of production from 1776 til now.
Who owns amazon fulfillment centers? Who owns media companies? Who owns airlines? If it ain't the workers, then nobody has seized the means of production.
Railroads and infrastructure are the means of production because they're the material things that are required to produce other material things.
What, not into our precious bodily fluids[1]?
This is a facile explanation. America’s politics and culture over the last 80 years have first and foremost been a reaction to the perceived threat of the Soviets. There’s no particular reason, especially as the United States remains remarkably conservative for a developed nation, to blame things on a country that’s been gone for over 30 years.
The USSR is gone, but the CPSU is alive, and kicking under a new brand, more determined, aggressive leader, and as a highly distilled, more pure mafia than it was before, without even a pretence of behaving like statesmen.
I'll explain. See, the thread starter says that US now reaps the consequences from letting people subverted by soviet idiological subversion into the circles of power.
Then people say its all irrelevant as USSR is no more.
Then, I come here and tell to people to open snap out of this. The former CPSU is not only still around, but is even more aggressive, and concerted at idiological subversion.
Now, they are putting an even bigger priority on melding themselves into American political elites, and bureaucracy.
How many more Hunter Bidens are there waiting to join American political establishment? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
I didn't realize that USA national politicians were so virile.
And then then it instantly reassembled itself under a new name.
At some point they were 90%+ ex-CPSU members, and somehow they are still not communist?
90% communist, and still not communist? Well, lets call them 10% non-communists then, if you want.
So? China's actual Communist party isn't exactly very communist anymore.
I'd say the CPSU is dead, but some of its members who liked power shifted with the political winds.
I'm not as familiar with Russia, but it wouldn't surprise me if Putin's ideology is power-for-its-own-sake and nationalism, in that order.
What is communism? Peace in the world, and utopia for workers?
Or more like mafia-serfdom-militarist system, where actual proletariat are put lowest of the low, and abused by everybody on the party ladder, and what USSR actually was for most of its history?
The CPSU never, ever cared for one, and even lowest tiers in the party were fully aware of this.
In this, it's true that the communist party of the soviet union never ever been the dictionary definition of communism (which they themselve defined) It was a cynical kratocratic cult without any morals.
There were people that literally read Friedman and wholeheartedly agreed that were in the CPSU.
Hell, Yeltsin was the 7th most powerful man in the CPSU. He wasn't much of a communist.
What was "the party?" The party itself been the puppet of:
1. KGB
2. Interior ministry
3. Military
Which were the real power behind it, and essentially were the source of CPSU policy, with ordinary low rank members being mere "shesterkas" errand boys.
So now what was the actual political force running the CPSU is now having an even more direct control of Russia, and without military, and MVD competing with them for power.
The Politburo was always the head of the party.
Except - Obama chose not to prosecute Assange because of potential collateral damage to independent journalism, a well known major concern of Soviet infiltrators (er...). It's only after Trump came to power that his administration got the ball rolling on prosecution and offering Thordarson an immunity deal. It's all in the article.
So what's the contention, that Trump's administration was the result of a Marxist inspired Russian plot to subvert the universities in the 60s? Well, that's a new one.
I'm imagining a teacher giving eloquent explanation of discrete Fourier transform to students, then going on claim that the whole purpose is compute horoscopes for cats.
All of the media organizations discrediting and debasing themselves are private companies who prioritize ROI above anything else. They're not run by bureaucrats, but by amoral capitalists. The universities themselves are also increasingly run "like a business".
It takes some serious blinders to look at the consequence of 50 years of free market maximalism and say: "This is the work of the communists".
In response, companies like Amazon banned them from their platform. And Gab, for example, cannot distribute their apps on either the google play or apple app store.
So no. In a normal society with a government-protected free market, you'd be right. But we currently live in what is quite obviously a corporatocracy, even if no one wants to admit it.
Both Assange and Snowden wanted to emerge to notoriety, and projected their own mind frame onto others, thinking they had some sort of royal flush, and as soon as they'd sign off and reveal the information they had , they'd have been acclaimed and an immediate rise to stardom would have ensued.
In reality the military is the most popular Federal agency, they should have focused their efforts on George W. Bush who ended his mandate with a 19% approval rating
There isn't a single link in that article. It makes tons of claims but does not include references to the primary source. For example:
"Thordarson spoke with a journalist from Stundin for several hours as he prepared a thorough investigative report into his activities that include never before published chat logs and new documents."
It's honestly not clear whether his sentence refers to the journalist or Thordarson when it says "as he prepared", but either way, it references previously-unpublished chat logs and repeats what is in them but does not actually show any of the logs.
I'm not saying the claims aren't true, just that this article sets of my BS detectors because there isn't a single link in it. They are asking the reader to take a lot on faith.
Have you ever seen any original reporting here?
News about Assange is niche, that niche is here. Lack of mainstream reporting might not be a vast conspiracy. So I would say that this news has been surfaced appropriately to the correct audience, and not actually suppressed.
There have been 20 articles in print and on the web mentioning Assange in the NY Times since 2021 began, avidly covering the details of his trial and extradition, but now nothing. If their search features are any indication, CNN doesn't believe you should seek out news as much as passively accept it-same pattern and then no recent mention.
Reuters' latest article from 25 June in a break from the style of their previous coverage leaves out mention of the trial details entirely in favor of a human element story petitioning Biden free Assange "to show the US has changed". This narrative does little to exculpate Assange or share why the trial may be over for good while preempting any credit for what follows to the mercy and wisdom of Biden. Whether Biden ignores or denies, well, them's the laws, you know.
If the whole rest of the town doesn't have power and you refuse to call it a blackout because you can see some people have working generators, you don't understand what a blackout is.
Vox: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2019/4/...
The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-indictment...
Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/traditional-j...
The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-ass...
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/julian-assange-wi...
Where is this impression that "the media wants Assagne in jail" coming from? It doesn't seem supported by any evidence beyond people disliking other people's tweets.
I'm guessing the sentiment though comes from talking with the base. In a strange reversal, many democrat voters (or at least the ones that appear on online forums) seem okay with locking Assange up, while it's a common sentiment on thedonald and such 'right wing' forums that Assange ought to be free. That's what I'd guess.
Personally, I don't see this is a left/right issue.