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Comment by AndyMcConachie | Hacker News Reader

I've honestly been amazed in these past few years how many people have started hating Wikileaks for leaking things that didn't agree with either their interpretation of the world, or made their favorite politician look bad. The only interpretation I can draw from it is that many people crave ignorance. And when they're confronted with something that challenges their ignorance they blame the messenger.

Overall I find the sentiment pathetic and cowardly. I want to know what my government and powerful people are up to. I have a right to know it and Wikileaks was giving me information about this.

IMO people who get angry at WL for telling them what powerful people and governments do behind their back are pathetic bootlickers.

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A lot of people in the USA were fans of Wikileaks when it was almost entirely anti the current administration of the time, which was Bush Jr. Not by design but because that's who was in charge of the illegal offensive wars at the time. But then the diplomatic cable leaks in 2010 included high profile Democratic party leaders, and that's when I believe people not only turned their backs on Wikileaks but leaks in general. They already knew their enemies were garbage and they didn't want to admit their own were too.

Most people were supportive of their leaks that were critical of the Obama administration aggressive use of drone strikes, his support for Israel etc.

It was only when they turned out to be pro-Russian propagandists that the support turned.

Wikileaks, pro-Russian propagandists? I believe they have leaks on Russia too, so we're gonna need something more solid than "published documents that happened to come from Russian agents".

And selectively not leak documents that would hurt the Russian agenda of having Trump be president.

It's unclear to me that there was anything to leak.

I mean, Trump's scandals were pretty public already, and people voted for him all the same.

This narrative is fictitious, though. It's not as if an alleged leaker of such content couldn't possibly have sent it elsewhere...

Assange had a TV show on Russian state TV.

I agree. But keep in mind the narrative makes the opinion. If modern media has become masterful at one thing, it is manipulating the narrative and deceiving their readers without them realizing.

You are right: People would much rather not know how bad the world really is, especially if it affects those that they held in high esteem. There is only a limited willingness to update one's information state (in the Bayesian sense), they'd rather vilify the bearer of the news (=WikiLeaks, investigative journalists etc.).

> I've honestly been amazed in these past few years how many people have started hating Wikileaks for leaking things that didn't agree with

It feels like the narrative has shifted from us vs them to us vs us with them on the side controlling it all.

> The only interpretation I can draw from it is that many people crave ignorance.

"People" want to be informed themselves, so they themselves seek out novel information, but they do not want that for others. For others, they simply want them to support their causes - even if it means supporting lies and hiding truth.

I guess people expected WikiLeaks to expose the corruption in governmental institutions and are not buying the idea that Hillary was corrupt therefore exposed and Trump was clean as an angel and therefore there was nothing to expose. Just at the election time.

People don't feel that WikiLeaks is impartial which makes it espionage and not whistle blowing in the eyes of the affected.

The major issue with Trump is that his dirty laundry is public. There's very little to leak, even back then.

Holding political office gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself, because every day you make difficult decisions.

That fancy dinner that someone paid for as a sign of good faith, was that a bribe for a decision you had already made or was it completely innocent? Does it matter if it's a news outlet, what about a diamond miner? What about Google?

But a business person not paying taxes, or a bigot misogynist saying something obscene about women? That's expected.

The major issue is that if a whistleblower takes side, its no longer whistleblowing but espionage. Maybe there was stuff that could have hurt Trump but wasn't released? His presidency wasn't a smooth sail and ended with a bang.

We wouldn't know because there's no ant-Trump whistleblower organisation.

>The major issue is that if a whistleblower takes side, its no longer whistleblowing but espionage

What? So if I'm an employee of the DNC, and I want to blow the whistle on what I see by leaking documents, I need to somehow get the corresponding RNC documents or else I'm a spy?

This viewpoint makes no sense. Maybe you're calling Wikileaks the whistleblower, but they really can't be considered one.

> What? So if I'm an employee of the DNC, and I want to blow the whistle on what I see by leaking documents, I need to somehow get the corresponding RNC documents or else I'm a spy?

No, that's not what the parent is saying. If (1) you have acquired documents on both the DNC and the RNC, (2) they are both damaging and (3) you choose to only leak the ones about the DNC... well then it's not as clear cut and ethical as leaking both troves.

It's their use of "whistleblower" that seems wrong. If a whistleblower was behind the DNC leaks, there's no way they had RNC documents.

1) I said that there's not much dirty laundry on Trump to leak and I explained why.

2) Even if there was, it doesn't mean you need to wait for leaks from both sides of a political spectrum to report on them

3) Even if point 2 was true: how would you reconcile one side having more leaks than the other side, or if one is unverified or hard to verify?

4) Even if you could reconcile point 3 somehow: people will still call you biased because the nature of the leaks might not be symmetrical.

How would you operate in such a world.

FWIW I have no real dog in that fight, I am not on one of the US sides, I'm mostly worried about my own politics in the UK and I'm worried that our journalism is not functioning properly, and part of the reason is because the UK is following tact of the US and poisoning public opinion and treating journalists as inhuman meat to be derided publicly and discarded when public support wanes enough.

Wikileaks aren't whistleblowers, they're journalists.

Even if they did take a side there (which is unclear to me), journalists take sides all the time.

It's not that Trump was clean. It's that he was a game show host. Government agencies don't spend much time compiling information on game show hosts that can then be leaked.

You should know that any so called leaks could be manipulated. As any other agenda that you can spot, leaks or not.

We live in post-factic time when anything can be disputed and I think its one of sign of healthy democracy.

TLDR you believe in leaks, others don't. At the end it's just a personal decision of what you want to believe.

> We live in post-factic time when anything can be disputed and I think its one of sign of healthy democracy.

Dangerous wording there. The ability to dispute stuff is good, but the facts are the facts, and what we think of the shape of the Earth or whodunnit, doesn't change the actual shape of the Earth, nor who actually did it. And sometimes the evidence is overwhelming enough that disputing it is at best a distraction.

> At the end it's just a personal decision of what you want to believe.

I hope for your own sake that you only want to believe true things. Besides, you don't really have a choice: what "choosing to believe" a false thing even means? If you make that choice it's too late already: you can't believe something you know to be false. Maybe you can persuade yourself that you believe it, but… you don't.

You need to distinguish the political ideal, where it is very important that you do not mandate or forbid people from believing any particular thing, from the rational ideal, where you need to recognise that you don't actually have a say in what you believe. Evidence comes your way, and that evidence is supposed to make you believe things to various degrees. The maths of it (probability theory) is intractable, but it is inevitable.

For instance, if you see a green traffic line you probably don't want to walk across that road just yet.

"but the facts are the facts"

Leaks on internet are information that you probably cannot verify by yourself. So you cannot clarify it as observable fact.

"you can't believe something you know to be false"

Yet, a lot of people believe in things that cannot be proved as fact. And I'm not talking about religious things. Just random information in news, internet, etc. For example there are a quite a lot people who believe in in flat earth, third gender, global warming, alliens or immunity from vaccines, even though they cannot prove it (and I'm not saying it if that is right or not).

One thing I know for sure is that the leaks concerning the US were real. That's the reason why Assange has been so relentlessly pursued by the US. US authorities aren't doing this for fun or when someone posts fictitious information that would give them no legal grounds for prosecution.

We know from history that a lot of government actions has no legal grounds whats so ever. I'm not saying that what you write is right or wrong. I just cannot prove any of leaks, you probably either.

I'm just trying to explain you why there are people who don' believe in same things as you do. Or simply find out that information are irrelevant for them.

That's not the whole story, though. If government employees with security clearance are reminded by their government that reading leaked documents constitutes a crime, as happened with documents stored by Wikileaks, you have good indication that the leaks are genuine.

If leaks are not genuine, then governments simply say so and move on. They're not overly concerned with false stories, these are everywhere. It's not as if they persecute people who make up stories about UFOs in Area 51. They are persecuting Assange, however, and with an unusually malignant ferocity.

Well they arrest Joerg Arnu for photos of Area 51 on his web, should we start believe in UFO?

No, because his photos present no evidence of UFOs whatsoever.

If someone would manipulate images, would you believe in UFO?

That's a deviation from the topic and completely irrelevant to this thread. Even worse, what falsified photos would tell me or not is also logically independent of my claim that his photos did not show any evidence of UFOs.

Moreover, Arnu wasn't arrested for making up stories about UFOs, so the whole subthread is pointless and cries false analogy.

We can safely close the discussion at this point.

So your analogy is simple. Leaked data are 100% true because government take action against publishing. There is no chance whats so ever that some of data could be falsified/manipulated, ie to deceive foreign intelligence. Correct?

Wrong, of course, and I believe you know that very well and are trolling. I laid out how to use corroborating evidence to come to a reasonable conclusion about the authenticity of the data while you're just setting up a strawman argument. "100% true" What a nonsense and waste of time...

And to continue the false analogy: Yes, I do believe Arnu made actual photos and not imaginary ones and that's why he has been arrested. I very much doubt he would have been arrested for publishing falsified photos of Area 51.

You're speaking as if rationality was something most people aspire to. Something acknowledged as worth the effort. However, it doesn't look like this view is shared by many people.

Not to mention, people are perfectly capable of believing in something (whether it's in any way a fact or not, doesn't matter) while still acting rational regarding something else. You'd think that schizophrenic state of mind has to collapse at some point. Yet, in many people, it's perfectly stable, and they live and die without ever confronting the contradiction.

> you can't believe something you know to be false.

Of course you can. The easiest way is to simply ignore the question of falsity completely. Another is to cling to controversies, blowing them out of proportion and invalidating the question that way. There's a conspiracy-theoretic way, too.

I don't know if people are on average more rational than irrational, but I know for sure that every single person can be both rational and irrational at the same time. I'd say this is the natural, innate state of the human mind, even.

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