Yes, a deliberate smear campaign exists, but also these are institutions with complex histories. You cannot simply call anyone critical of them "gullible".
Ignore Assange's character, make him an anonymous person instead and think "is the process X person has gone through for Y actions reasonable/legal/supportable?"
Should whistleblowers be supported or vilified?
I don't like the guy, but I also don't like arguments based on political narratives.
Is the evidence Assange released factual?
Assange has certainly played with outright lies e.g. Seth Rich.
Most of WikiLeaks output as far as I'm aware is mostly truthful to what was given to them, with the caveat that they are telling a story (e.g. bellingcat have no issues finding dirt on Russians, WikiLeaks don't).
They are also very happy to cause collateral damage of their own, IIRC they're very happy to leak personal details & CC numbers of people associated with those they dislike (iirc it was democratic donors in some US state, the data was leaked unredacted).
I mean, if Wikileaks did (I wish they did, political bias ruins everything) release both troves, would your thoughts on the current situation change?
Nothing - but that moral judgment has a lot to do with some people deciding the cause is not worth supporting after realizing what the cause truly is about.
Are they? What's the "evil" you're accusing them of? If you're going to accuse people of things, don't be vague.
a) Alleged sexual assault of staffers (which again, alleged, but could be considered evil)
b) Leaking of personal information that is of no public interest, e.g. unredacted SSNs
c) Leaking private medical records of otherwise ordinary individuals, including e.g. medical records of teenagers who were raped
d) Leaking the names of people who are LGBTQ+ in dictatorial countries where that's illegal, putting their lives in danger
e) Timing the release of DNC hack is arguable, but I could see how someone might consider the timing of that release to be evil
f) There's some antisemitic stuff happening with Assange/Wikileaks. There's nothing like, glaringly out of line, but there's a whooole lot of stuff that's just over the line. (e.g. use of (((name))), calling his opponents "Jewish" media, employing holocaust denier and denying it, etc)
g) Assange himself is quoted as saying, "[We might] have blood on our hands" due to their editorial policy of publishing everything, unredacted, about potentially vulnerable people
Rot in prison, Julian.
What evil things, specifically?
His preferences in specific political outcomes are well known:
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
So yes, that would be why $politicalside doesn't like him, because he aligned with a very specific, pro-fascist $politicalside (whether or not he is actually a fascist).
downmod away folks but that's why $politicalside doesnt like Assange. He is extremely biased which makes the "journalist" angle look pretty weak. there's your answer
I mean, I don't like that preference either, but the documents leaked were real, and I haven't heard that Wikileaks/Assange had equivalent dirt on Trump they could have leaked and didn't.
What really broke people's brains about Trump is that he was openly rude and obnoxious and unapologetic about it, and so didn't hide the self-serving behind a polite facade that preserved the collective fiction that politicians were looking out for the people and not themselves. That's what people both love and hate about him.
illegally withheld US military aid unless the country fabricated a story to help the candidate's campaign? No Democratic president in modern times has done such a thing. Obama had a fully Republican congress for 6 years and they would have impeached him for such a thing. But that didn't happen. Nor for Clinton, who was of course impeached, but not for extorting another country; just for lying about sexual favors. that's the best they could come up with. If either president had some something 1% as evil as what Trump did in just that one incident, we of *course* would have been hearing about it for years.
Obama, Cheney and Bush are war criminals under international law and Trump isn't, but boy when Trump is rude to someone, there's no end to the condemnations that he's the worst person ever, despite being the only president of the past 30 or so years who didn't start a war. Even crazier, those war criminals are now all darlings of the Democrats because they trash talked Trump.
Trump and the way the media played on his craziness for ratings really broke people's brains. I wouldn't want that buffoon as president either, but really, get some perspective. He wouldn't be nearly as appealing if politicians weren't almost universally awful and self-serving, but because that's normal and they're "polite" about screwing you over, well that's just fine and dandy.
Which is to say, while I take your point about the relative morality of large scale leadership, having lived through all the folks you mentioned and more, that Trump’s naked pursuit of personal scores with public resources was unprecedented in my lifetime. Society is a shared illusion, presentation matters, and boy did his coarsening of that conversation have far-reaching consequences.
He got stiffed in that respect, but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
Old interview of him talking about it: https://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/25/exclusive_wikileaks_j...
The only questions that are relevant for journalism are, "is the information correct?", and "is the information of interest to the public?".
Every source has their own motives, as does every journalist, and no story is so detailed as to paint the full picture. These questions are ultimately all irrelevant.
How this affects a legal precedent is infuriating beyond text, and it is incumbent on good people to defend him now.
I mean, I don't like that preference either, but the documents he leaked were real. It's true that the documents were one-sided, but do we know that Wikileaks had documents it could have published on Trump and didn't? Can we agree that maybe Clinton shares some of the blame for, you know, breaking the law? Or the Democrats for even choosing her as a candidate?
They revealed the DNC was trying to tip the scales towards her in their primary which was unsavory but I don’t recall wikileaks having anything to do with the classified emails…
although the main purpose of their release timing was to bury, drown, and distract from a certain other piece of info that had come out - bye bye claim to like transparency lol.
And the email server in hindsight also seems quaint - a scandal from a time of innocence and naivety. At the time it seemed overblown too, but now it’s downright quaint. Non stop private email and encrypted messenger app use followed that, and then we all know how classified docs have gone lately.
This is a conspiracy theory intended to discredit Assange and link him to Trump. There is zero evidence that the leak was timed to distract from anything, or that he and anyone close to Trump were in contact. In fact, Assange had announced an imminent release of information before that "other piece of info" had come out, so if you want to make a causal claim, it would make more sense that that info was timed to distract from Assange's release.
The emails that turned out to be all hot air but hey use what you got when you’ve declared war like assange had on the Clintons. That’s not me saying he’d declare war on her it’s the Intercept publishing that fact (2.)
1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/dec/18/john-podes...
2. https://theintercept.com/2016/08/06/accusing-wikileaks-bias-...
I read thru that interview and wasn't able to suss out where Assange asserted he had a goal of tanking the Clinton campaign. Could you repost those lines here for us?
Your parent said:
but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign [here is an] Old interview of him talking about it: (link)
That seems to clearly imply that Assange would talk about his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
>Thanks for the polity - the undertone of your question implies he has to confess that word for word for that to be his intent.
The article fairly well debunks the source for those narratives (that Assange tanked the DNC on behalf of Russia). Here is the relevant quote.
Outraged the Clinton campaign swiftly ascribed the leaks to Vladimir Putin's intelligence apparatus as part of an operation to secure Trump's victory. The accusation was fueled by forensic analysis from the DNC's cybersecurity consultants, from CrowdStrike, detailing the potential links between the leaks and the Russian government.
Testifying under oath in a closed-door session before the committee in 2017, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer Shawn Henry admitted that he had no “concrete evidence” that the Russians had stolen the emails, or indeed that anyone had hacked the DNC’s system.
This crucial interview remained locked away until 2020. The press did little to acknowledge it; the testimony failed to attract even a passing mention in the New York Times, the Guardian, or any other mainstream outlet that had previously charted the Russian hacking story.
Do I think Assange targeted the DNC? Perhaps in the larger context of targeting powerful entities who hide details that directly affect the non-powerful. As to claims that Assange was directly working for the Russians, I strongly recommend reading the article all the way through.
sidebar: I like the work polity, btw. I can't recall coming across it before.
I am curious if he thought he was targeting the DNC, because his public presence was disproportionately about things related to them. Notably, Daniel hale chose not to leak to them.