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Comment by drojas | Hacker News Reader

This is almost bringing me to tears today. I am happy he's finally going to be free but I am still in deep sadness because this is not the world we are supposed to living in. With all of our knowledge and technology we are still doing horrible things as a civilization and we have lost control of our leadership. This scares me a lot because it is a growing problem and every day it seems like humanity is losing more and more of itself to evil and greedy powers that be. Assange did a great thing by exposing corrupt and criminal behavior at the highest levels and got such a inhumane treatment from the most powerful organizations on earth. He should not have been punished, he should have been protected and praised and his case should be a matter of study on every school on earth.

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This is beautifully articulated. I myself thought for a long time that if the day ever came that Assange walks free, I'd cry, but instead I feel a strange emptiness inside. The world isn't the one I'd imagined for this day.

Indeed. Though it is still inspiring that there are people like Assange who are willing to face personal hardship in the name of democratic values such as press freedom and government accountability / transparency.

None of the US leaders whose crimes were exposed by Assange have faced any consequences whatsoever, and many of them remain influential, lauded figures in American society.

I still remember the day they arrested him and how awful it felt. He is an incredibly strong person to withstand that level of isolation and see the light of day.

Very understandable. There is an emptiness because it should have never come to this.

The last line of Chapter 31 Tao Te Ching sayings it right.

"Fine weapons are instruments of misfortune; all creatures fear them. In peace we favor creation; at war we favor destruction. Weapons are tools of misfortune, not the tools of the wise. The sage uses them only as the very last, with calm restraint. Victory is no cause for rejoicing; victory comes from killing. If you enjoy killing, you can never be fulfilled. When victorious, celebrate as if at a funeral."

Read some Steven Pinker. Your observations about our present state are not wrong, but seriously consider every other point in human history and realize we are not worse off in any measurable way. In fact, much better.

In that argument, Pinker is playing the role of court academic.

I have no doubt Steven Pinker is very well off indeed.

How is that different than my dad saying the cliche "Back in the day we had it much worse?" It's just a book to make the same conservative point. Since when did any child of a parent hearing that ("Back in the day, we didn't have food / shelter / etc.") respond in agreement? Talking about how much worse things were back then is beside the point, because it is the wrong category of comparison to make. It just shows the person - a parent, a teacher, Prof. Pinker - saying it is out of touch and doesn't understand the actual complaint in todays' context. It's just paternalism expressed with more words.

In fact I can answer my question in another way. We do not exist as a hive collective and nor ought we individuals compare our lives to an alternate life living in the past. A historical societal fact that is technically does not apply to the problems of individual people living today. It was wrong of Pinker to inconsiderately apply those historical facts on the level of societies by further making his implied political points about the individual needs of the marginalized and the oppressed today, but in public that is what he has constantly done.

It is different because one is a human mind falling prey to selective memory and sympathy, and Pinker's book is about facts and data.

I see two sides:

- we're better off because there is less human suffering "per capita" for lack of a better word.

- we're worse off because technology has allowed us all to instantly see and learn about every human (and animal) atrocity anywhere in the world.

I'm sure if I keyed up a gore site right now I could find the latest mexican cartel atrocity, or a necklacing in Africa, or someone somewhere else being cruelly hurt. But in the 1950s you had to pay for a paper which was excessively rate-limited and narrow in scope.

The entire point was to embarrass the US, not to take some high minded stance. Wikileaks has shown some extreme bias, after refusing to expose dirty secrets of the Kremlin. They are hardly some do-gooder organization. If it came out in 15 years that wikileaks was Russian funded, I would not be surprised. Spreading false rumors and misinformation, failure/refusal to fact check sources, anti-semitism, possibly editing or doctoring videos.

The list goes on, they are not the BBC or Al-Jazeera. The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.

Just such a bizarre take completely divorced of reality.

This fact isn’t stated often enough.

Not to mention the usually cited helicopter video is highly edited and anything but impartial, with an American Bradley fighting vehicle under ambush a block away as can be heard in the audio. And I can’t fathom why a journalist, accompanied by men with AK’s themselves, would be pointing what obviously looks like an RPG from a distance at troops in a firefight- not to mention bringing women and in children with him in the minivan.

If this highly edited footage was the worst that could be found in such a large dump of documents- I’m highly underwhelmed.

Evidence of war crimes? Hardly. A chance to see how ugly these conflicts are and another reason why Americsn troops perhaps should never have been there in the first place? Yep, absolutely.

But my hunch is that the entire event is a Rohrschack test where most people will take away from it the same perceptions that they walked in with.

It wasn't the worst that was found but it did show a war crime. It wasn't the only one by any stretch.

It showed a cover up of the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan which had been caused by American Troops.

It showed significant horrific human rights violations against innocent and untried inmates at Guantanamo Bay. (As if just the existance of that wasn't enough.)

It showed illegal spying by the NSA on governments around the world.

Plenty of good done by wikileaks.

I don't think it materially changed anyones perception, maybe gave fuel to the fire and reminded people it was still going on

"Torture At Abu Ghraib" was published in 2004, Collatoral Murder not until 2010. Were there still fence-sitters at that point? I honestly can't recall the prevailing attitude of the time, besides Assange being an enemy of democracy who deserved to be brought in and shot. I think the reaction was most telling, the continued bloodlust for traitors who are doing little more than advertising the US's incompetence and aimlessness in that war. If collateral damage didn't make me any less patriotic, seeing our politicians harass an australian for treason (???) certainly did

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu...

2004 was only a year after the war started, so yes many wouldn't have been swayed of their patriotic view. It was still too soon to know definitively it hadn't been worthwhile going to war. By 2010 it was extremely clear the Iraq war was a mistake and wikileaks only added to that.

Saying the above, the reason to release wasn't to sway patriotism, it was to get the truth out. For that reason it was the right decision even if it ended up with a portion of society disliking Assange for his so called 'treason' (which of course it wasn't as he isn't an American).

Anyone that has blind patriotism without any doubts, to the US military, after Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib can't be helped.

The "edited" version's edited. The unedited version, released by WL at the same time, isn't. The entire war was a crime and killed 150K+ innocents. If the release of video of a fraction of those deaths puts attention on that; excellent journalism.

Did you really watch the helicopter video and think 'wow the US military is definitely in the right!'. I was young when the video was released, and it was a huge step in my journey to becoming critical of imperial powers.

> And I can’t fathom why a journalist, accompanied by men with AK’s

I don't remember the bystanders to the camera man being armed?

Also, the camera might look like a RPG barrel on the ground, not from the helicopter.

> The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.

in my experience people who condemn wikileaks for this almost universally praise wikileaks for other releases (just so longs as the other releases happened to paint their political opponents in a bad light).

Even if everything you say is true (and FWIW I think you're exaggerating a lot), so what? None of that makes them not journalism or not free speech. They're clearly not a spy agency. They published important facts and that's something we should be grateful for; that they did so for their own purposes, and may have chosen not to publish other important facts, does nothing to diminish that.

Embarrassing the US is worth being jailed for years or being extradited to a country where you don't reside and are not a citizen and being tried for sedition in said country?

I share the general disappointment but to steelman a positive outlook: People in power have always done horrible things and orgs like wikileaks and some from the media counterbalance this. While this was a tragedy, if not for such a strong light being shined on Assange, he surely would've disappeared. At least he is getting freedom now, at least he exposed many important things with his organization and at least he inspired many people to do similar things. It's true I've never really felt worse about the future. Maybe because I was blissfully ignorant, or maybe because things are actually worse. I try (and struggle) to stay positive because it is so easy to be cynical and detractive and I think that ultimately makes things worse for the world AND my own mental health.

> we have lost control of our leadership

In what locale and at which time did humans have control of their leadership?

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