Wikileaks had the public backing of, and was composed of, people who had proved the painful way that they weren't working for governments or other established interests.
Merely getting access to flashy hacks will never win DDoSecrets that.
Assange paid a huge price for being the organization's public face, but it wasn't for nothing. It could never have worked as well as it did unless someone was willing to play that role.
But I did not say they were above politics. On the contrary, they had very strong anti war, anti establishment politics, which they were credible about from their long public history as non-anonymous actors. (Which is also why we laugh at your unsubstantiated accusations that he worked for Putin.)
DdoSecrets will never have that. God knows what they actually believe. They don't think it's important that you know, at least we know that.
This nonsense narrative is merely designed to deflect from the very real, heinously evil, war crimes that Americans commit on the regular, every twenty minutes, for the last twenty years - for which there is a lot of evidence you Americans choose to ignore in the rush to maintain pride in yourselves...
Why blame all Americans, all Chinese, for the crimes of a few of them? All Chinese didn't force Uighurs into organ harvesting camps. All Turks didn't genocide Armenians, All Americans don't commit war crimes every 20 minutes, although some gangs in Chicago come close if you loosen your definition of "war crimes".
Are you American? Then fix the crimes of your state. Are you not-Russian? You can do nothing about Russia for as long as you are unable to jail your own war criminals.
The moral authority you claim is non-existent.
The only remaining effective option is to identify the source of the problem, and shift public opinion to recognize it; With further draconian measures, more people notice the corruption and overextension of the state, and with enough people alternate means of accountability become viable. Until then you're mushed crabs dispersing amongst the waves and cliffs.
Where have I claimed moral authority?
*all citizens of all nations are
Then your nation is a farce and you should be rioting. The fact you aren't is due to the decadence that the military-industrial complex provides. Too bad its dependent on the death of innocent people around the world.
Or, just perhaps, you should hold yourselves accountable, and resist the anti-Wikileaks agitprop that is clearly coming from the very war criminals, themselves, in order to escape justice from public oversight.
>Where have I claimed moral authority?
Justifying American war crimes and crimes against humanity, whatabout-ma'-Russia, is a particular type of posturing designed to elevate the moral authority to commit those crimes over any other nation. The USA is not a moral nation, by any stretch of the imagination - it does not take care of its own people, even, and is murdering innocent people, on average, every twenty minutes ..
If that is not the #1 priority for your political mind to address, then you do not have any moral authority to address the Russia situation.
How would rioting benefit? So far it has only played right into their hands.
Again; Where have I claimed moral authority?
I have listed various nations not to compare them and declare one to be better than others "because of muh morals". I was merely pointing out how war crimes are commited by all nations, and hinting at the fact that war in itself is a crime, only possible by the extortion of the populace. Saying Americans are "muh evil", is guilt by association, and does not identify the root cause. How effective has it been to get Americans to effect change by calling them evil? Otherizing whole swaths of the world population based on the actions of their local slave masters, is not going to ingrain trust in your judgment, instead is more likely to have them reject and ignore you as some radical blowhard.
Also, you are the one who has mentioned Russia, not me. You and I both know the Motherland is the only nation where the people truely pay their taxes voluntarily, government actually works to support the people and not some corporations, war is a myth, and milk and honey flows. I would never speak up against the Motherland, Tovarisch.
The USA kill innocent people every twenty minutes, and is the #1 funder of terrorism and calamity across the globe. This is only possible because of ignorant bootlickers choosing to cowardly ignore the crimes and engage in distraction.
Put out the bigger fire: the US' funding of terror across the globe in order to foment conditions for further weapons sales.
As long as the published work is the truth, even if just "one side" of it, it's better than lies all the way down.
Would it be better if we had leaks about every regime? Sure!
Wouldn't it even be better if we had no regimes and no need for Wikileaks at all? Definitely!
But "one-sided" truth is still (part of the greater) truth.
What if Hilary had come out in February of 2016 and said "Hey, Putin's not so bad, he's got legitimate interests in Ukraine and I think we should leave Europe to stand on it's own" - do you think the campaign of leaking hacked material to wikileaks would've happened? Or do you think maybe Trump's tax returns might have come out instead?
What I care about is the truth and the truth alone.
And if it turns out both Trump and Clinton were bad candidates for the US maybe the US should finally change their voting system.
I mean if it's that easy to topple an election in the most powerful country in the world, we should really make democracy more resilient
It's game of thrones in the truest sense and I personally don't think the track record of the US is much better for Europe in the last 7 decades, so...
When it comes to meddling with elections I think nobody has as much experience in doing so than the US.
So part of me was quite happy that this super power could have a taste of their own medicine at some point.
While at the same time I wish all the people in the world the best, including the US and Russia :)
Are you talking about the mainstream media here? They leaked every scrap of dirty laundry about Trump that they could find (not all of which were true), yet Wikileaks was the only one willing to leak the DNC leaks.
At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the same as some supposed FSB spy.
Expecting anyone to be impartial is a big mistake, especially when you can conveniently persecute and try to kill said person and with that pretty much force them to cease being being "impartial" at the very least in the public perception. Under the circumstances laid out all it takes to discredit someone as an "useful idiot" is to persecute and corner them into "enemy territory".
Also let's take a step back and differentiate between something being of interest to exclusively US enemies, that would be a detriment to the US directly, or a matter of international policy, which is the case of the Ukraine position you cited. The Ukraine position is not a threat to the US either way, it's just a position in foreign policy.
Edit: It seems the case of an example of that exact alternative to wikileaks cited did exist already, by micheal moore of all people, focused on trump however. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-im-launching-trumpileaks-...
>At the end of the day the US is most likely the country with the highest amount of espionage in the world, maybe barring china, it's not like they can't do the
Absolutely, they could, this weird whataboutism doesn't help your position. Either what I'm saying is correct - and you concede that, in which case we can talk about the US capabilities - which we can view in the correct context of capabilities operated under a free accountable democratic society. Or you don't agree, in which case your whatabouttery is moot, since you think it's fine, and therefore the US intelligence could just intervene to get their way. As you say, they probably have more capabilities.
I can't agree with that, the election was decided by the US citizens, they saw the information and made their choice. Unless you're arguing that said leaks are fake as far as I'm concerned information is information, if the candidate did something the voter base wouldn't approve of and it was unveiled the source is completely irrelevant. Under those pretenses any kind of leak can be trivially attributed to some enemy and now its discredited, call those who report on it pawns of the $enemy_state and there you go. You can see this being attempted in real time in US politics, thankfully with waning success.
My point about the capabilities of the US espionage comes in when you factor counterintel and exposing falsehoods, as I said before my position is that information is information and the only thing that can be argued against information is whether it was fabricated or not. For an example, as far as I'm concerned the entire hunter laptop scandal being completely pushed under the rug by intel agents[0] is far closer to actual manipulation than the DNC e-mail leaks, because it was a lie that it wasn't real and conveniently no journalist wanted to fact check it, just to come out now 2 years later after the election is done and walk back on it. I'm citing this to try and make clear that the veracity is far more important than the source.
I do concede the point that arguing that just because the US can do the same supposed leaking of documents to another country doesn't change much, although assuming they're actual leaks i'd like them to.
[0]:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...
If there's no dirty laundry to air, this strategy doesn't work. Clean up your act at home and your enemies will have no ammunition. Guess what's the first step to do that...
Even if this was a Russian ploy, you should be thanking them.
Individuals have a right to privacy. Those who hold power in the public's trust, have no right to secrecy.
That's like seeing a weird shaped airplane and saying it's UFO's instead of the obvious explanation that a 3 year old can come up with: "maybe they just believe what they say and the corruption in the government is both real and bad".
Second, it’s possible to believe that statement and still follow Occam’s razor: if Assange says something convenient for Russia, it makes sense for Russia to offer its support. It also follows that over time, Russia could “convert” Assange.
I never liked Assange, but someone with a similar story that I did like is Snowden. I am under no belief that he was a Russian spy “all along” as implied by many conspiracy theories, and I have a huge amount of respect for him (even now…).
But it only takes a glance at his Twitter feed to realise that in his time being hosted by Russia (who likely just offered its help to someone convenient for them to help), the guy got turned. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
In other words, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
The simple explanation is that these people had no idea about each other, since identifying and coordinating that effort would be tantamount to a grand conspiracy theory; and I don't buy that people are so extremely competent as to have working apparatus to catch this.
That it was politically convenient for Russia doesn't necessarily mean there was any collusion and I think it's odd to jump directly to that conclusion.
There are lots of things that are politically convenient for Russia, like the way the wind is blowing in Ukraine right now. -- that does not mean the wind is colluding with Russia.
It does not. Do you truly not understand that people can be principled?
Assange has a long history of anti war and anti establishment activism. He is dying in jail for his convictions as we speak. He was arrested within days of publishing evidence of war crimes, and hasn't been a free man since. And he knew exactly what he was getting into, too.
If you think a man like that can be "turned" by extending a little sympathy and server space, well, it says a lot about what kind of person YOU are.
And Snowden was prepared to sacrifice everything too, except that Assange, who Snowden didn't even trust at the time, set heaven and hell in motion to save his life and get him to Latin America. (The US preferred to strand him in Russia, which should tell you a lot about what they really feared.)