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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

The US also has laws protecting whistleblowers, which to me just highlighted the complete moral bankruptcy of some Republican members of the US Congress when they tried to out the whistleblower who brought Trump's phone call with the Ukrainian president to light, but more importantly, when they tried to impugn his motives.

The thing that made me so angry about this is that a huge point of whistleblower laws is that it doesn't matter what the motives of the whistleblower are. Of course many whistleblowers are disgruntled for various reasons, but who cares? Whistleblowing laws aren't about taking the whistleblower's accusations at face value, it's just about protecting whistleblowers' ability to bring inside information and evidence to light, and then that information can be investigated independently.

The push by folks like Rand Paul to expose and condemn the whistleblower was one of the most disgusting political acts I've ever seen.

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I found the treatment of Julian Assange to be the disgusting poltics; after that its just more of the same, innit?

No, it’s not the same because it doesn’t benefit him this time. Leftists are like libertarians, if libertarians only applied their principles to themselves. Bodily autonomy, firearm rights, private property, taxation, misinformation censorship, death penalty, etc. Whether or not they support it depends not on what it does but who it benefits, and so a left winger can never truly take a concrete position like “I support gun control” when they need to make exceptions for SRA, Natives, Palestinians, etc.

Putting aside your implied definition of Leftists here. The Palestinian point is broadly enlightening, but maybe not in the way you intended. Armed struggle for the purpose of self determination should be materially supported in Ukraine, but not in Palestine. This is the glowing contradiction, and I'm not sure real leftists are the most guilty party here.

I don’t want to materially support either country.

As someone who considers themselves on the left, i have broadly the same view.

I also don't have a hard view on gun control, because if the state authorities are militarised then it's hard to argue that civil society can't be. The solution for this of course is to demilitarise the police.

US complicity has permitted the decades long ethnic cleansing of Palestine to continue unabated.

It is truly abhorrent.

However, there's a significant difference between arming a nation under invasion, and arming religious fundamentalists.

The treatment of Assange defies belief, and the hypocrisy is off the scale. The defense from many people who would nominally be appalled by this, seems to rest on the poor character of Assange, so he gets written off. The poor character point may or may not be correct, but is completely irrelevant, and if it relates to civil or criminal offences then it has never been allowed to be tested.

Also it's just insanely easy to malign the character of someone with a few well placed news articles and tweets.

He avoided prosecution of three credible separate sexual abuse allegations by hiding in a non-extraditing country for seven years.

He's also not a whistleblower.

US law doesn't allow public interest as a defence defence, that was partly why Snowden refused to return to the US. https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Justice-Dept-s...

are there any whistleblowers who keep working in their field in the US?

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