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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

First they laugh at you.......................then you win.

I am pretty tired of this meme (incidentally, often misattributed to Gandhi, but appears to actually come from some guy called Nicholas Klein: * First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.*" [1])

Anyway, the classic duelling-quotes response:

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan

[1] I find it amusing that not only did Mr Klein never did get the monument he wanted, he is now remembered purely for a comment he made which has been popularly reattributed to someone more famous.

I suppose if "you win" means a jail sentence, then yes.

Is that what you have to say about King, Ghandi, Castro, and Mandela (amongst others)?

I am not equating Assange with these folks, but I am using their jail sentences to suggest that while going to jail is not winning, it certainly doesn’t preclude winning later on. If anything, it may indicate that they are doing something to endanger the status quo, which is a necessary precondition of winning.

Why not equating him to these ? In my opinion, Assange is well worthy of a peace Nobel prize. He after all contributed a lot to the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq [1] and for the beginning of the Tunisian uprising [2]. Such a prize would also be very useful in that the money attached would greatly help fuel his efforts.

[1] http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/ http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/1023/Iraq-s-...

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/feb/02/wikileaks-exclus... http://articles.cnn.com/2011-01-18/opinion/tunisia.wikileaks...

"Castro, and Mandela"

Mandela and Castro are murderers. Why are they even included on your list?

I think his point is not that everyone who goes to jail for political reasons is good, but that you can win politically despite facing/doing jail time.

Absolutely, and thank you. Although I don’t think it has anything to do with my point, I personally have extremely mixed feelings about Castro and about the choices Mandela made before his prison years.

Wait, what? Mandela is not a murderer. It's kind of difficult to qualify Castro of being a murderer with so much certainty. You have got to be a troll.

If you apply the same conspiracy law that would be applied to you and I to Castro I'm pretty sure he's legally responsible - by our standards - for tens of thousands of deaths.

Tanks roll and bombs fall on his command and if those weren't all criminals - duly convicted by a court - his orders to use those weapons is murder.

But yeah, he's certainly not Idi Amin.

I see we have some extreme leftists in the house. Pol pot, mao, and stalin should be on your list too.

http://raganwald.posterous.com/hello-my-name-is-reginald-and...

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