> If America truly values an informed public, the persecution of Julian Assange must end.
We've pretty clearly answered that negatively, America values an indoctrinated public. To the point that our debates aren't about right or wrong, fact or fiction, but whose doctrine one hews closest to.
Here's a list of reasons I think the American public has such huge problems with indoctrination:
- The vast majority of people enjoy indoctrination and very few people will say "hold up" when presented with a story that doesn't line up with other stories or that seems synthetic. This is partly because doctrine is designed and evolved to be salient, and partly because many people have not experienced an environment of truth, where things make sense, that could give non-sensemaking a contrasting emotional character.
- There are occasional isolated incidences of powerful interests wanting very badly that the public stay uninformed, but no counterbalancing incidences of similarly powerful interests wanting the public to be informed. This averages out to a downward pressure, even though each instance is brief and each power incomplete.
- Even when people want to be informed, they will usually be satisfied with the synthetic feeling of being informed, and stop there. Realizing that what you think is informing you is actually wasting your time takes a humility and emotional fortitude only present in the strongest, most humble, and most epistemically virtuous people. Consequently it is rare for people to realize it.
Not the OP, but the lab leak theory being 'debunked' in the press very swiftly, before any real research, in stories sourced from a bunch of people who would be implicated to some degree by such a thing would be one recent example.
That's not to say it's proven by any means, but various media outlets credulously accepting stories from conflicted sources and not even disclosing that conflict is itself a black mark whether or not the theory pans out later.
Well, first, that's not what the word "debunked" even means. Two, there were and are plenty of odd signs, like the furin cleavage site.
Yes, that's by no means conclusive, but they say that we should research this instead of coming to hasty conclusions in either direction that are, as you point out, manifestly political.
A claim that, when being asked "where's your proof," is met with absolute silence if not wild claims without evidence, can be dismissed immediately. Just because a broken clock is right twice a day doesn't mean it's a solid timepiece.
More and more communication happens abstractly, away from the facts. An article titled "The lab leak theory is false" is not merely trying to inform people of a fact. Some call these Simulacrum Levels of communication. [1]
The hypothetical article may also be trying to cause people to act like the lab leak theory is false. The statement doesn't indicate whether the author believes the fact is true or false, it indicates the behaviors they desire from the reader - for example, not being biased against Asians. See also "You don't need N95 masks", which means is that the speaker doesn't want a panic buy of masks so they're unavailable for medical personnel.
It could also be written to cause people to believe that the speaker is part of the group that advocates against the lab leak hypothesis. "That sounds like a conspiracy theory, or racist, or nationalist, and I'm a part of the team that's against those things, go team, we're the best!". By taking a stance against the lab leak hypothesis they indicate their memebership in these causes, regardless of the truth or falsehood of the statement or the behaviors that belief or disbelief in the statement would entail.
Finally, it may be expected to benefit the speaker in an abstract sense. If you have any position at all on a hot news item, that brings in eyeballs, which the publisher values. None of the correctness, behavior, or group identification results really matter in this context, their incentive is orthogonal to the communicated information.
The lab leak theory was pushed heavily by QAnon and then got picked up by the usual right wing news outlets without actually providing any proof. It made great TV, and also made conservative news outlets a bit of good profit as well.
But since Fox news' (and others) prime time is mostly opinion, not news, it makes it hard to separate what is "fact" and what's someone's opinion stated as fact.
I think what you're complaining is valid, but you need to look at both sides. There appears to be a million different hypotheses for how the first transition to human happened, the lab leak is just one of them. Responsible journalism would have included the other hypothesis instead of highlighting the most panic/profit inducing one.
IIRC, what QAnon pushed was beyond the standard lab-leak theory, that it was an lab leak of something created as an offensive bioweapon. I do think that that had the effect of poisoning the well on the plain lab leak theory (one might even speculate that that was the purpose for which QAnon pushed the theory.)
Ironically, we're on a thread discussing Assange, who ran Wikileaks, which published (often cryptographically verifiable) source information. The editor of that publication has been locked in prison indefinitely. So if you're having trouble distinguishing trusted information, you might think that the solution extends beyond "responsible journalism."
Then we had another thread on HN thereafter suggesting that Google & co. rotate out their DKIM keys to make this sort of news less verifiable. This seems to suggest that factual accuracy is not always the primary concern.
On the third point about feeling informed but not really being informed, there was something earlier this week where Vox had an article claiming that publications were ganging up on blackrock. Turns out one of the board members has a huge conflict of interest and is an investor in blackrock. https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac...
Now let’s say you read the vox article but nothing else. You might feel informed, like you’re doing something good keeping up on the news or whatever, but you’re potentially worse off if you don’t know the whole story
Eh. After yesterdays annoucement on CDFI by US treasury, which indicates that it includes venture capital funds, I can see why some might get a little miffed on missing out on grabbing goverment largesse..
It is not possible to give specific examples without crossing paths with readers who happen to have that particular epistemic monkey on their back. I want to avoid political arguments, so I think this tack fits the HN ethos best despite being, admittedly, an imperfect solution to a sticky problem. Although I think anyone can come up with their own examples.
Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests using historical examples, when making points about politics – like French Revolution or earlier. I know you're talking about contemporary US politics, but people are people are people and it can't be that different to something from history.
I'm not sure if information availability has ever been this high (before modern era). When everyone in your town believes the same thing and only the most wealthy people can or have any reason to send a letter to another country, sustained misinformation is a lot easier to justify without recourse to anyone's preferences, at the top or bottom of society.
I was not criticizing the prevalence of parking, it is obvious you need a lot because most amenities will have one. What I found weird was that places of worship is the second absolutely necessary amenity according to the American mindset.
Places of worship are places where you are taught to respect a lot of indoctrination techniques as valid and where you do weekly exercises at shutting down critical thinking. I can't imagine it having a positive contribution over the wisdom of the general public.
I don't think there's much worth responding to in this comment except to say that I disagree and that some atheists have very strange ideas about religion and I don't know if that's because they don't understand what's going on or something else.
This is just dumb. A person spends 15% of their life using educational facilities. It is possible they will need parking and attend places of worship for close to 80% of their lives. The latter are also not amenable to geographic consolidation; you can't build one parking lot for entire medium sized city, but you might be able to only have one secondary school.
I'm not sure how dumb it is if you really think about it. Why is theology the only field with widespread public lecture halls? Why can't I go to botany church every Saturday? If there was anywhere near the public interest in knowledge about the world as there is in knowledge about the world-to-come, you could go to church on Saturday to hear about botany. You wouldn't even have to cancel anything on Sunday.
How is theology not knowledge about the world? Religion is the original form of moral philosophy and sociology, and contains thousands of years of experiential learning about how to lead a positive individual life within a society that enables said individuals. That's much more important to be informed about than botany.
Having said that, skill-oriented communities would be great too - they primarily exist online right now because participants are often spread out, or otherwise take the form of friend groups based on shared interest.
Gather all the theologies into a room and get them to agree on the evidence for their points of dogma if you can. There's a first test of knowledge. Beyond pragmatic social strategy, these ancient tribal writings are a vestige of ignorant mummery.
"My Sky Avenger versus your Sky Avenger," as George Carlin might have said.
> Religion is the original form of moral philosophy and sociology, and contains thousands of years of experiential learning [...]
Sure, humans (and likely other extinct hominins) have speculated about their life and the world. It is not given that all their conclusions favoured a Sky Avenger. Some notable ancient Greeks were atheists. So, no, "religion" does not contain thousands of years of experiential learning. Speculation only becomes learning when it can be tested. Arrant nonsense is not learning, even if bound in leather and printed in gold on vellum.
Theology is knowledge only in the same sense that astrology, Scientology, or QAnon claims are knowledge. It is knowledge about a system of false and/or untestable assertions, constituting in all a set of conventions to which a power structure may ally itself. Old religions become mythology when there is no longer a power structure to promote them.
People make pragmatic choices every day to live in the real world. Purveyors of religion just build fantasies atop these pragmatic choices.
This little screed just betrays a lack of knowledge about religion. The idea of gods as being imaginary beings that people believe to be, Idk, invisible or something rather than anthropomorphised representations of the laws of nature is a pretty low effort atheist trope.
I used to believe this stuff when I was a know-it-all 15 year old too and used to joke about the flying spaghetti monster, but I've since attempted to actually understand some of these ideas rather than dismissing religion as crazy imaginings by those stupid people from over 70 years ago and all of history before that, compared to us modern enlightened atheists. I was raised atheist and have only come to understand some Christian ideas via learning some philosophy and 20th and 21st century scientific theory.
Good Sir, in my best and kindest humour I must say that neither of us is 15 years old ^_^ and I am aware that a literary interpretation of 4000 [1] years of mythology is not just possible, it has been offered in notable works by Joseph Campbell and JG Fraser.
Although literary criticism far from a rigorous field of thought, I am happy to celebrate your interest, especially if you have devoted most of your adult life to it.
What ignorance, cruelty, strife, and murder have been committed in the cause of other interpretations of 4000 [1] years of mythology is to my mind the greater concern. But we can of course agree to disagree on the InterWobbles.
Cheers!
[1] An arbitrary number to include various artefacts.
I actually haven't devoted any of my adult life to it - I was raised without religion and grew up not understanding the nature of religion and thinking science was somehow its successor as JG Fraser believed. But this belief was born of ignorance, not knowledge. My primary studies in adulthood have been systems theory and some dabbling in moral philosophy, rather than studying the Bible.
I suspect that wars between sects is not a simple matter of killing the non-believer, but an excuse for the real reason wars have always been fought: expansionism and colonialism in order to control scarce resources.
From your kind reply, Sir, I am led to suspect that we agree on much more than we would at first assume. Bread, circuses, and other mummery are distractions useful to the powerful as they concoct and enact their schemes.
And, of course, the winners of a conflict write the historical account and the myths. The losers lose their voice and often their lives.
There are some relatively lucid works in literature. But literature serves artistic purposes. There are honest and more rigorous works in economics, history, and anthropology that lead to a stark conclusion. [0]
if you're implying that religion is just a tool used by the powerful to manipulate the masses, then I'd say that while that does happen for sure, that it's far from the purpose and benefit that religion brings to a culture. Religious literature is not just artistic, it prescribes a set of behaviour (morals) that, when engaged in by the individual, leads to the best outcome for the collective. No other system has successfully done this, and the 20th century was a catastrophe of political movements attempting to replicate this cultural success using bureaucracy and violence.
The history of human catastrophes extends far enough back in time that I conclude it to be the functions of a pre-compiled, statically-linked library.
I don't agree that there is any rigorous system to be found in the topic we are discussing. But we certainly can agree that anyone trying to be good is a welcome candle in the darkness. ^_^
Parkings make sense, I was merely pointing out that something as optional as places of worship are as prevalent as parkings.
You don't "need" to attend places of worship 80% of your life. A place of worship is usually a place where you are told to consider respectable several of the tools for indoctrination:
The reasons you cite should have applied equally well back before the propaganda outlets took over.
I think this is the main reason the US population is so poorly informed and polarized:
- For the last 40 years, the Republican Party has systematically defunded education and consolidated the news media.
The Democrats haven’t done enough to push back, and many of the left wing media outlets copied Fox’s playbook, but that’s not the same as spearheading these changes.
I suspect you may be over-evaluating the quality of news sources / the public discourse 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, the US was willfully escalating in Vietnam! The founding fathers were complaining about the yellow press in some of their communications about freedom of speech. WWI had media restrictions on anti-war text issued straight from the presidency. I really don't think the troubled discourse was invented in the lifetime of anyone around today.
There is an argument that Assange wants an an indoctrinated American public too, just in a different direction. The prime example is how he repeatedly implied that Seth Rich was the source for the DNC leaks despite knowing that wasn't true because Wikileaks was still in contact with their source after Seth Rich was already dead. That act shows that Assange's goal isn't to reveal truth or corruption. His goal is to seek specific political ends and the missions of truth-seeking and anti-corruption are just an act to help achieve those ends.
Yes. Instead of saying it's obvious nonsense, they said it might be true, basically encouraging readers to keep digging into the ridiculous conspiracy.
Maybe because pizzagate actually was really disturbing. You can get your life ruined over making an OK sign, because it's a "dogwhistle", but powerful people making references to pedophilia and satanic rituals is just fine and dandy, nothing to see here? Do you actually know what pizzagate is beyond that one shooting? I don't know if there is any "conspiracy", but some of those people are actually really messed up.
Wikileaks more or less went down the road of being a tool for indoctrination. The notion that wikileaks is useful for an informed public is long dead. They made fools of everyone who thought they were champions of unbiased free information.
> Chelsea Manning provided Wikileaks with the tape
Actually the entity Bradley Manning provided the tape as is seen in the Army's court records. The last time I checked, changing one's name doesn't retroactively wipe out all usage of a prior name.
Funny to see the user kordless's comment auto killed by the fake, woke HN company culture towing the line with hollywood trying to revise history to make it seem as if homosexuality, and the "robust and complex" science of transgenderism is something that has existed since the dawn of time, is a problem for more than 2% of the population, just like TV would have you believing that every couple is some interracial woke fever dream that adopts a kid for every color of the rainbow. Venture capital idiots, woke idiots, and the MBA idiots have ruined modern culture
Assange was pretty clearly outed as having been working for or at least with Russian disinformation agents. He kept trying to push the Seth Rich conspiracy even after the truth about the DNC hack was already out. At his best, he was a guy willing to host sensitive content that other people gave him. At his worst, he's an abusive, manipulative self-promoter. We've gotten 1000X more valuable and more responsible investigative journalism from the the NY Times, Guardian, ProPublica and even Buzzfeed at this point. We don't need to prop up a guy like Assange who doesn't deserve it.
This always seems to get buried when talking about Assange on HN. The guy was pretty clearly biased in the reports he would send out and they _just so happened_ to harm Hilary Clinton during the 2016 election, in spite of the fact that Republican email servers were also compromised.
If he really had an interest in transparency he'd release the Republican emails. But he didn't. So I can only assume the guy is a propagandist designed to sow chaos.
Even if you assume that Assange just released all information that was available to him, I still think it's hard to argue he's completely blameless. It seems naive to think that you wouldn't be made a tool of propagandists, even if you didn't endeavor to be a propagandist yourself.
Suppose that Russia gave you a cache of emails implicating a politician of your own favorite party in some kind of massive corruption scandal. Furthermore, suppose that you somehow knew they were real, and also somehow knew it was Russia (the second condition being the least realistic, but I'm working with you here.) Would you hide the emails to protect your former favorite party, allowing the corruption to continue, or would you release them in an action that would appear to help a foreign power? That's a serious question and I am interested which side HN would come down on.
Nice hypothetical for some political ethics class, but nothing to do with what actually happened. Assange wanted to influence the US election, specifically, to defeat Clinton and elect Trump. He worked with the Trump campaign and the Russians to do everything within his power to make that happen. Meanwhile, Wikileaks was provided with leaked Trump campaign emails and refused to release them, claiming it wasn't important to do that.
To portray this as an difficult decision for poor Assange is just absurd. He made clear in his own emails, his entire goal was to bring down Clinton. She lost the election for many reasons, including Assange's efforts but also a very poorly run campaign and many bad decisions on her own part.
Emails specificially? I'm not sure if that has ever been confirmed, but this is directly from Assange[1]:
>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post.
>“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said.
If Wikileak's primary goal is transparency, why not release these docs too?
You won't because Wikileaks refused to release them. Their stated justification for this was, so much bad stuff had already been revealed about Trump that there was no need. Reallly.
That's because it's nonsense. The US media hypes and kills stories constantly based on political disposition. Is it also designed to sow chaos?
Freedom of reportage doesn't have a political party. It is literally ensconced in the 1st Amendment. Attacking messengers when personal causes are impugned by truth: this is a red flag for extraordinary hackery.
Can you cite me a single case of a politically-timed release of information from any of those? And I don't just mean that it had a political impact, I mean that editors deliberately held a story until it could have more effect on an election.
This has always been my reservation. If you have all the knowledge in the world, but only expose the transgressions of people and institutions you have a vendetta against, how does that improve anything?
This is why we have crackpots like Trump, chants of "lock her up", skepticism of established institutions, and skepticism of science moving to the forefront. Assange isn't the only one doing this, but he was a big part of it.
You don't have to lie to disinform or propagandize. In fact it works a lot better if you don't. What you do is selectively reveal only certain truths at select times and in a select order. Deliberately redacted and spun truths can effectively work as lies.
In this case the way it works is that Wikileaks drops select truths in a select order and then other more transparently bad faith actors in the "alternative media" use what Wikileaks drops as the kernels of lies and wild-ass conspiracy theories. All this happens long before good faith actors can manage to even start digesting the information.
I have not seen proof of collusion in this process, but in 2016 it was so well executed that I would not be surprised. I watched all that stuff unfold in real time and it was obviously a propaganda operation... and a really damn slick one. I was kind of impressed.
Edit: here's a somewhat clunky made up example to illustrate the principle:
Lets say you are driving and you accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian who happens to be an ex business partner. Lets say you and this ex business partner had a falling out, but later made up and came to an amicable agreement.
Lets say I leak e-mails showing the disagreement and falling out, but sort of "forget" to leak the make-up and later agreement. I also leak only the most damning e-mails from your side, redacting e-mails from the other side that might cast our accident victim in a bad light.
I can make you look like a murderer when in reality the event was just an accident. I have done nothing but tell the truth.
> Due to the contradictory dates, possible evidence of forgery, strong motivations for fabrication, and few motivations for a legitimate revelation, the images should not be taken at face value.
I would encourage anybody to read the source document above to see the whole analysis, but it's pretty impartial and paints a sceptical picture.
And then, as OP requested, "compare that to the track record of the organizations compared to" and try think of a time the NY Times, Guardian, ProPublica or even Buzzfeed published a hoax but decided it was worth publishing so long as they put a disclaimer on it saying "this probably isn't real."
fact-checking organisations like Snopes do that all the time.
I don't see anything wrong with journalists addressing a claim, investigating it and declaring in their opinions that it's probably not true. What, specifically, is wrong with that?
The fact that you posted the image without referencing the article that claims it's probably a hoax makes me think you were intentionally trying to mislead people.
Whatabout those other flawed journalist? Well, they're flawed. But Wikileaks, high standards? You must have missed the exposes in The Intercept of how they were actually working in 2016!
In its heyday Wikileaks was lauded by the left mainly because it provided evidence that the US did “bad things”. It didn’t matter that there was nothing bad coming from China or Russia or Nigeria. All that mattered back then is that he had dirt on the US.
But... then there was a falling out between the left and Assange when he found out Hillary wished out loud that he was dead and he then cherry picked the bad stuff even more... though he never had inauthentic releases. They just didn’t like what they saw (in the mirror).
So, it’s clear his motives shifted (given the circumstances it was reasonable), but the left suddenly didn’t want more dirt from him cuz he was making them look bad (and forced the question, are WE the baddies?)...
So here we are, he was the useful idiot they now can throw under the bus accusing him of being in cahoots with the Russians (a charge dismissed when people on the right claimed the same back in the good old days way back when Wikileaks and the left were aligned)
> It didn’t matter that there was nothing bad coming from China or Russia or Nigeria. All that mattered back then is that he had dirt on the US.
Because liberals hate America, right? This sort of thinking from conservatives baffles me. Improvement of any sort - personal, cultural, political - depends on acknowledging legitimate criticism. US citizens aren't required to be blindly loyal to their country. To state an obvious near-tautology, the only way to make things better is to encourage and facilitate useful criticism, so that bad things can be improved.
The relative lack of freedom to criticize is exactly why so many autocratic states become mired in corruption; there's no non-destructive mechanism for accountability and change in government.
It’s a legitimate concern and we can always improve, so it kind of baffles me that now the left find him antithetical when they used to laud him just because he doesn’t follow their narrative. Never the less, what he releases can always be used for improvement even by the left, but it seems they don’t want to hear it any more.
I think it depends on your definition of constructive criticism. Assange breaking news of US coverups of war-zone crimes is useful, imho. Assange serving as a mouthpiece of Russian disinformation is not.
He kept claiming that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the leaked DNC emailes (and not Russian military/GRU hackers) and that Rich had been killed as a result.
He also released actual CIA hacking tools (Vault 7), which was a monumentally stupid, destructive act.
> In its heyday Wikileaks was lauded by the left mainly because it provided evidence that the US did “bad things”.
That's because it's a valuable service. Look, I'd love it if sunshine could shine equally into all corners of the world, but if an ideologically impure weirdo with bad hygiene and some vile sexual habits wants to shine sunshine just into my own country's dark corners.... then fine!
I want my country to live up to its own ideals, and that requires making everyone aware of when it doesn't. Justice isn't a zero-sum international game of tit-for-tat.
If you're referring to the allegations made against Assange and investigated by the Swedish prosecutor's office that forced him to remain confined in the embassy in the UK, then those were dropped, and the UN special investigator who looked at Assange's case found that the whole investigation was conducted in bad faith:
> But that’s exactly the point. I don’t know whether Julian Assange committed sexual assault or not, but what I do know is that Sweden never cared to find out. They wanted to use these allegations to discredit him. And once they had actively spread these allegations into every corner of the world, they then made sure that there would never be a proper trial because, as the prosecutor finally admitted in November 2019, they never had sufficient evidence to even press charges against Julian Assange.
> Sweden went out of its way to make sure the public was informed of the allegations against Assange, even against the will of the concerned women,
So- these women (plural) DID make allegations. And if publicizing them was against the womens' will, then we know that they didn't make these claims for the sake of publicity.
I'll readily believe that Sweden publicized them with political intent, and that they didn't have enough evidence to successfully prosecute. But what evidence there is (regardless of legal standards) definitely exists, and has not been recanted, and I have seen nothing to suggest it was a lie. And in general, I believe women. Just because it's not up to a legal standard of convincingness doesn't mean we have to just ignore it.
Normally I fully agree with you, but when the allegations are against such a high-profile international declared enemy of some of the most powerful nations on Earth, I do reserve judgment.
Similarly if Bielorussian authorities were investigating claims made by women against Roman Prostaevich, I would be less inclined to automatically believe that he had doone something to some women than I am for women telling their stories against Jeffrey Epstein.
Why are you criticizing the left for only caring about corruption from the opposing political side but Assange gets a pass for only caring about corruption from the opposing political side?
The truth is only being anti-corruption when your opponent is corrupt and ignoring corruption from your allies is itself a form of corruption.
I’m not an American so I may have a different perspective on it than you, but is Hillary Clinton the left?
From my perspective she sort of make Margret Tatcher look like a socialist.
I do think most of us were fooled by wikileaks because it starter out being against the Iraq war. This was before snowden, back when people weren’t actually being serious when they joked about echelon listening in on us. It was also back when we, at least in Europe, figures that Russia was going to be our friend and it was sort of pre-information war. Apparently the information was was already well on its way, but we didn’t really know, and we didn’t take anyone who warned us serious. Us being the general public.
It was also a world where everything surrounding American politics, and to some extend all western politics, wasn’t always this us/them, left/right, blue/red nonsense that it is today. Anyone, from the most conservative to the most liberal who watched the wikileaks leaks on the journalist and the children being killed by drones (or maybe it was far away airplanes) were appalled by it, because it was simply appalling and back then, people cared more about wrong/right than their “team” looking good.
So I think it is understandable that people bought into wikileaks being genuine but these days… well… let’s just say that the west still hasn’t recovered from in the war on truthful information and that we are still struggling with trust issues and all the wonderful things like flat-earth, anti-vaccine and what not stupidity that’s running ever more rampant in our society. Among other things, because people like Assange showed us why we shouldn’t trust our institutions.
In the 1990s, while first lady, Clinton served on a task force for public healthcare [0], and she wrote a book entitled It Takes a Village arguing for this and other state intervention. Regardless of how left she is compared to parties in other countries, this immediately placed her on the left of the USA's partisan divide.
When running for president, her policies were at least significantly left of the Republican party's platform. She's firmly in the authoritarian end of that axis, but also a bit to the left.
> I’m not an American so I may have a different perspective on it than you, but is Hillary Clinton the left? [..] From my perspective she sort of make Margret Tatcher look like a socialist.
I remember a comment from some years ago that went like: America's left is Europe's right and America's right is Europe's batshit lunatics :-P
the point is that the US is the only super-power. so comparing BadThings done by the US with BadThings done by Russia or Nigeria or some other place would be nothing but whataboutism.
if a country is nr. 1 and runs the biggest propaganda operation the world has ever seen (Hollywood, Netflix, but also US based social media companies inventing algorithms that influence and steer behavior) then they need to be treated with large amount of pressure and critic to everything they do (justified or not).
The problem in all of this is that the emperor has no clothes. E.g. the emperor being the polarized US public that doesn't see that their country didn't have any form of coherent foreign policy that wasn't a racist, war-mongering and hypocrite "America first" (since at least Reagan).
what Wikileaks/Assange has taught us (and what Assange learned sometime between 2014-1016) is that there is no such thing as a truly independent citizen journalist.
if you upset enough people (which a truly independent non affiliated journalist would do) you're likely to get killed.
Bellingcat is a great example of an outfit aligned with the 9 eyes intelligence community, Elliot Higgins will never go against what Nato or the Atlantic Council stands for (at least not in a meaningful way). Wikileaks and Assange have tried to do this but got hunted down and then had no choice but to seek cover and support from the "enemy"
Assange decided to upset the US and for better or worse had no choice but align himself with either Russia or even worse countries.
Americans are the most propagandized people in the world who's media is owned by a bunch of billionaires (as is the case in all English speaking countries), and no matter who speaks the truth the unwashed mob will eventually come after them (and then cry foul if the person switches sides).
> Bellingcat is a great example of an outfit aligned with the 9 eyes intelligence community, Elliot Higgins will never go against what Nato or the Atlantic Council stands for (at least not in a meaningful way).
And you know this how exactly?
> Americans are the most propagandized people in the world who's media is owned by a bunch of billionaires (as is the case in all English speaking countries),
Obviously that's far worse than living in countries where the state run media are your only source of information, cause they would never indoctrinate anyone?
by what they report on. it's not rocket science, it's not like they're operating "in the dark". Also if they would really have bought RU passport data of diplomats and assassins without protection from MI6 they'd be dead (even based in the UK).
> far worse than living in countries where the state run media
like Germany where the state run channel today broadcasted a special on refugees from 1945 of WWII Nazi victims or immigrants from ex Yugo or Vietnamese boat people that came to Germany? Unlike most of continetial Europe Britain and the US never have faced up to their colonial and oppressive past. This is what makes them regressive and backward societies.
News are problematic all around the world but the US population gobbling up the garbage from Murdoch or Bezos enterprises stands out by constantly talking about "patriotism" or how somebody is "un-American" ... just check how many people on LinkedIn have an American flag in their profile or how many times the word "patriotism" is mentioned by Americans on Social Media.
This mentality is a lot closer to China or the DPRK than any civilized society and is a sign of heavily propagandized[1] population.
Corporate mass media isn't a monolith. Do you think ProPublica is publishing clickbait? Do you think The Guardian publishing the Snowden leaks was manufacturing consent. Do you think James Risen at the NY Times didn't do 1000X more work to uncover Stellar Wind than a guy who publishes leaks? Do you think Buzzfeed writes clickbait headlines? Wait, forget that last one.
Seriously, the notion that "media" does anything is preposterous. Even if you think they want to manufacture consent, it's pretty obvious there is nothing near consensus amongst themselves. Everyone who writes news can make mistakes or let bias slip in, but that's not a conspiracy.
On the flip side, Assange was always pretty upfront about how he did his work for his own agenda. Anything he ever published that actually helped people was purely coincidental.
When the leakers get leaked. The Intercept published a trove of private communications showing Wikileaks anti-Hillary (as well as casually sexist and racist) agenda:
Where's that evidence beyond (a) he's anti-US government and (b) of all the international powers that might wish to launder dirt on the US through Asssage, one of the names on that list is Russia?
That doesn't make anything "pretty clear" that his information just so happened to come from the place that was also the convenient national bogeyman of the time.
What I said. He pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy even when we knew he was talking to Roger Stone and Guccifer 2.0. He knew better than anyone that Russia was behind the hack and that pro-Trump operators were in the loop. Instead he pushed a baseless far-right conspiracy theory. An actual journalist, even an agenda-driven muckraker, would never be so brazen as to make such wild accusations to protect their own butt.
You clearly out yourself as a disinformation agent by attempting to steer the conversation into character assassination, knowing full well this not about Assange the man but the legality of investigative journalism as a check-and-balance on power.
I'm attacking him for being willfully dishonest which is pretty negative trait for a "journalist" which I also don't think he is one. I fully support genuine journalism. Compare him to a guy like Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald has a lot of the same personality flaws as Assange but he's still a genuine investigator. I think he definitely pursues an agenda, is prone to delusions of grandeur and paranoia, and occasionally sticks to some flimsy arguments. He's also obviously made heavy use of illegally leaked information. But I don't think Greenwald deserves any sort of punishment and I don't believe he's being suckered by intelligence agents.
You are feeding a political movement that supports allowing a man, dishonest or not, to be jailed for protecting his sources, which will set a precedent that inhibits ALL genuine journalistic investigation.
Debatable. For one, we already know who his sources are. Chelsea Manning was already convicted, jailed and commuted. Roger Stone was convicted and pardoned. His friends at GRU are under indictment and likely beyond prosecution. Assange himself barely qualifies as a journalist. I mentioned James Risen with the NY Times before. He went to trial for his sources and faced no punishment. Assange isn't being pursued for protecting sources, he's being pursued for actively engaging in hacking. There may not be enough evidence to convict, but the indictment isn't for normal journalism activities. It's for his own activities.
How can you credibly assert he has friends at the GRU?
If it's not malevolent to write that, then I assert the same for you. You have friends at the GRU, and you're distributing toxic disinformation at the behest of foreign intelligence agencies.
I'm kinda surprised at all the moralizing over this like I'm talking conspiracy theories. We have the DM logs between WL and Guccifer 2.0. It's possible though hard to believe that he legitimately didn't know how G2 was, but that only elevates him to patsy for foreign disinformation instead of a willing participant. And the fact that he very boldly lied about it for so long doesn't paint a positive picture.
You repeatedly cite incorrect facts and unproven theories, then expand them into elaborate, slanderous, and entirely unfounded stories.
Here’s a quick example:
> We have DM logs between WL and Guccifer 2.0.
This is simply untrue. You sent a link to messages between Emma Best and WL. The messages indicate that a WL twitter user knew of G2. That is all the information available there. Emma likely gave them out. Everything you extended from that is purely hypothetical.
As such you either don’t know what you’re doing, or you know it and are malicious. Stop.
The entire premise of the article is that Assange is good because he might have saved us from the Iraq war, while completely ignoring his alliance with Trump and disinformation like Seth Rich conspiracy. We can't prove the counterfactual but we can see what he actually did.
Note that you unwittingly confirm parent's point on tribalism and sides by discounting Assange based on Trump. There are valid points to be made against both but guilt by association should not be one of them.
Regardless of how you feel about Assange, what's happening with him should send shivers down your spine. His attempted prosecution attacks source protection, a very important component of investigative journalism.
In America, it seems the breakdown is:
* Are you an individual? If yes, when you have biases, make mistakes, or commit crimes, you are a villain and are given no benefit of the doubt.
* Are you a corporation or company? If yes, it's just business.
NYTimes, WaPo, TheIntercept, ..., all published disinformation to support their singular echo chamber narrative this past election cycle. Pretending that folks like Assange are deeply problematic but avoiding that same look into MSM is fairly bizarre.
This is a terrible piece. The implication is that Google was set up as a government spying program from the beginning through sneaky programs within DARPA. And this is just flat on its face ridiculous if you've spent any time at all with funding agencies or CS research.
Source protection is when journalists (including heads of international organizations engaged in journalism) protect the sources of their information that enables said journalism.
A "journalistic courtesy" that people like you would make illegal so as to shutdown journalism that goes against your agenda.
Given the choice, Trump pardoned rappers and war criminals but not him. A man that did more to expose the swamp than anyone. Was Trump just rhetoric, and bolster with no backbone. Other then twitter trolling, what exactly did he accomplish.
Back in the J. Edgar Hoover days the FBI kept dossiers on Presidents so they could be blackmailed.
Trump was under active FBI criminal investigations, spanning every aspect of his life, for the entirety of his presidency. Two of his lawyers had their offices raided by the FBI, all looking for anything they could find on him.
He started out as a hacker, but turned into something else, not sure what.
This situation reminds me of that Petyr Baelish scene from GoT, when he proclaimed that knowledge is power only to find out that power is power.
In any case it was proven time and time again that spotlight is deadly for individuals like him, but instead he sought out more of it, one way or another.
Little finger's demise was not due to being overpowered. He lost the information war he was waging. His opponent who thought of him an ally eventually did read through his manipulations, re established the truth with the aid of the man with the greatest information seeking powers, who can even navigate to the past to reveal certain well kept secrets. Baelish died because outraced on the information front. The power cutting his throat was a strong teenager, but one who could do so because nobody remained on his side after the unveiling of the shocking truth to those present in the scene.It’s all information. Just saying.
He hacked, did phenomenal work on database technology and opensourced his work, had plenty of meaningful experience which he realised could be put together to inform the public. And is currently in prison with only a slice of human rights supposedly guaranteed on UK soil.
Our press, in coordination with the intelligence apparatus of the United States, turned Wikileaks into a referendum on Assange and his personality.
This has always and obviously been a psyop/frame job, ever since Robert Mueller's FBI agents were kicked out of Iceland for their efforts to attack Wikileaks.
It is only since the neoliberal generation, which controls power, felt themselves threatened by their own supposed ideals, that they were more than happy to hop in bed with the spy apparatus and hang Assange high.
There are many sane alternatives. I was speaking of the specific alternative pushed during the 20-teens starting with the Gamergate era and proceeding all the way up through MAGA, the alt-right, and Qanon, and with which Assange was clearly either allied or serving as a useful idiot. That alternative is significantly worse than the orthodoxy.
BTW authoritarian Marxism is not a sane alternative either. I see people pushing that too, but they never got close to real political power.
Far from alternatives, more like bedfellows or twins. The specious labels belie the hard reality that the US political, bureaucratic, and secret police apparatus is powerful, extensive, and weaponized.
The reality of the situation we are in, the rise of Trump, the alt right, Le Pen, and others is this: for neoliberals, if the alternative to leftism is fascism, they will actually choose fascism.
As people all over the US (and the world) are becoming more receptive to traditionally leftist talking points - labor vs owners, corporate control of the media, poverty, the evils of globalism etc. - neoliberals have been investing good money in supporting the alt right, neo-fascist voices that blame these problems on immigrants and jewish conspiracy theories. Fascism is much safer for the rich than even social-democracy (not to mention the, to them, terrifying spectre of socialism).
Assange has been using Wikileaks as human shields against his own terrible behavior for years. If they're collateral damage, then they're only that way because he made it that way.
Your allegations of "terrible behavior" are false, conveyed by intelligence agencies directly out of your keyboard, intended to short-circuit actual thinking on freedom of information.
The fun thing about freedom of information is that it ceases to be that way when you act as a gatekeeper. Poor little Julian had political axes to grind using information that didn't belong to him and thought that to be a journalist, all he had to do was claim to be one. His ego outmatched his wits, and that's why he's in the situation he finds himself.
Right, because information is best delivered in the service of the Rich and Powerful. Journalists™ and Journ-o-lists are the best form of right-think and certified information.
No, but I can understand how someone committed to being an ideologue might pretend to think that. Just turn your brain off and pretend you're carrying that cross.
Totally. Because having a negative opinion of Assange due to his rhetoric, behavior, and hypocrisy is simply showered with positivity here. So enjoyable to have people talk past you in an insulting manner because they hate addressing your points directly.
> When Wikileaks revealed the DNC gamed the 2016 Democratic Party primaries, the punditry judged democratic derailments not newsworthy when the higher good was resistance to Trump. Media ran faster with narratives ripping Assange than questioning or correcting them.
And rightfully so. Leaking classified government information about war-crimes is fundamentally different then hacking into the private email correspondence of organizations with the explicit intention of damaging them politically. And conflating the two is absolute madness and is antithetical to privacy advocacy.
We have a right to know if the American election has been the victim of a CIA style mis-information campaign from a foreign government. Assange's ability to be an absolute hippocrate about transparency and play a dangerous shell game about where the emails came from has convinced me that the only people Assange believes deserve privacy are the people useful to Assange.
I support Wikileaks. I do not think I support Assange.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadWe've pretty clearly answered that negatively, America values an indoctrinated public. To the point that our debates aren't about right or wrong, fact or fiction, but whose doctrine one hews closest to.
- The vast majority of people enjoy indoctrination and very few people will say "hold up" when presented with a story that doesn't line up with other stories or that seems synthetic. This is partly because doctrine is designed and evolved to be salient, and partly because many people have not experienced an environment of truth, where things make sense, that could give non-sensemaking a contrasting emotional character.
- There are occasional isolated incidences of powerful interests wanting very badly that the public stay uninformed, but no counterbalancing incidences of similarly powerful interests wanting the public to be informed. This averages out to a downward pressure, even though each instance is brief and each power incomplete.
- Even when people want to be informed, they will usually be satisfied with the synthetic feeling of being informed, and stop there. Realizing that what you think is informing you is actually wasting your time takes a humility and emotional fortitude only present in the strongest, most humble, and most epistemically virtuous people. Consequently it is rare for people to realize it.
That's not to say it's proven by any means, but various media outlets credulously accepting stories from conflicted sources and not even disclosing that conflict is itself a black mark whether or not the theory pans out later.
It was a wild political swing at a manufactured enemy to shift blame from a void of American leadership.
Yes, that's by no means conclusive, but they say that we should research this instead of coming to hasty conclusions in either direction that are, as you point out, manifestly political.
There were a lot of clues that it might indeed have originated from a lab but these were selectively ignored, thus it "didn't amount to a theory".
The hypothetical article may also be trying to cause people to act like the lab leak theory is false. The statement doesn't indicate whether the author believes the fact is true or false, it indicates the behaviors they desire from the reader - for example, not being biased against Asians. See also "You don't need N95 masks", which means is that the speaker doesn't want a panic buy of masks so they're unavailable for medical personnel.
It could also be written to cause people to believe that the speaker is part of the group that advocates against the lab leak hypothesis. "That sounds like a conspiracy theory, or racist, or nationalist, and I'm a part of the team that's against those things, go team, we're the best!". By taking a stance against the lab leak hypothesis they indicate their memebership in these causes, regardless of the truth or falsehood of the statement or the behaviors that belief or disbelief in the statement would entail.
Finally, it may be expected to benefit the speaker in an abstract sense. If you have any position at all on a hot news item, that brings in eyeballs, which the publisher values. None of the correctness, behavior, or group identification results really matter in this context, their incentive is orthogonal to the communicated information.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-...
I think what you're complaining is valid, but you need to look at both sides. There appears to be a million different hypotheses for how the first transition to human happened, the lab leak is just one of them. Responsible journalism would have included the other hypothesis instead of highlighting the most panic/profit inducing one.
IIRC, what QAnon pushed was beyond the standard lab-leak theory, that it was an lab leak of something created as an offensive bioweapon. I do think that that had the effect of poisoning the well on the plain lab leak theory (one might even speculate that that was the purpose for which QAnon pushed the theory.)
Now let’s say you read the vox article but nothing else. You might feel informed, like you’re doing something good keeping up on the news or whatever, but you’re potentially worse off if you don’t know the whole story
I am toying with GIS tools these days and it kind of shocked me that when I queried for "most common amenities" in a medium sized US city, I got:
1: parkings
2: places of worship
Well above any educational facility.
Also, lack of atheism is not a sign of lack of education or presence of ignorance.
Places of worship are places where you are taught to respect a lot of indoctrination techniques as valid and where you do weekly exercises at shutting down critical thinking. I can't imagine it having a positive contribution over the wisdom of the general public.
Having said that, skill-oriented communities would be great too - they primarily exist online right now because participants are often spread out, or otherwise take the form of friend groups based on shared interest.
Gather all the theologies into a room and get them to agree on the evidence for their points of dogma if you can. There's a first test of knowledge. Beyond pragmatic social strategy, these ancient tribal writings are a vestige of ignorant mummery.
"My Sky Avenger versus your Sky Avenger," as George Carlin might have said.
> Religion is the original form of moral philosophy and sociology, and contains thousands of years of experiential learning [...]
Sure, humans (and likely other extinct hominins) have speculated about their life and the world. It is not given that all their conclusions favoured a Sky Avenger. Some notable ancient Greeks were atheists. So, no, "religion" does not contain thousands of years of experiential learning. Speculation only becomes learning when it can be tested. Arrant nonsense is not learning, even if bound in leather and printed in gold on vellum.
Theology is knowledge only in the same sense that astrology, Scientology, or QAnon claims are knowledge. It is knowledge about a system of false and/or untestable assertions, constituting in all a set of conventions to which a power structure may ally itself. Old religions become mythology when there is no longer a power structure to promote them.
People make pragmatic choices every day to live in the real world. Purveyors of religion just build fantasies atop these pragmatic choices.
I used to believe this stuff when I was a know-it-all 15 year old too and used to joke about the flying spaghetti monster, but I've since attempted to actually understand some of these ideas rather than dismissing religion as crazy imaginings by those stupid people from over 70 years ago and all of history before that, compared to us modern enlightened atheists. I was raised atheist and have only come to understand some Christian ideas via learning some philosophy and 20th and 21st century scientific theory.
Although literary criticism far from a rigorous field of thought, I am happy to celebrate your interest, especially if you have devoted most of your adult life to it.
What ignorance, cruelty, strife, and murder have been committed in the cause of other interpretations of 4000 [1] years of mythology is to my mind the greater concern. But we can of course agree to disagree on the InterWobbles.
Cheers!
[1] An arbitrary number to include various artefacts.
I suspect that wars between sects is not a simple matter of killing the non-believer, but an excuse for the real reason wars have always been fought: expansionism and colonialism in order to control scarce resources.
And, of course, the winners of a conflict write the historical account and the myths. The losers lose their voice and often their lives.
There are some relatively lucid works in literature. But literature serves artistic purposes. There are honest and more rigorous works in economics, history, and anthropology that lead to a stark conclusion. [0]
Civilisation is a hard system to build. ^_^
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_homini_lupus
I don't agree that there is any rigorous system to be found in the topic we are discussing. But we certainly can agree that anyone trying to be good is a welcome candle in the darkness. ^_^
You don't "need" to attend places of worship 80% of your life. A place of worship is usually a place where you are told to consider respectable several of the tools for indoctrination:
- Trust in a authority
- Faith over knowledge
- Revelation as a valid source of information
I think this is the main reason the US population is so poorly informed and polarized:
- For the last 40 years, the Republican Party has systematically defunded education and consolidated the news media.
The Democrats haven’t done enough to push back, and many of the left wing media outlets copied Fox’s playbook, but that’s not the same as spearheading these changes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5c8u9l/we_are_the_wik...
For example could allowing other countries to develop vaccines seriously damage American or European IP?
https://www.openglobalrights.org/vaccine-apartheid-global-in...
Actually the entity Bradley Manning provided the tape as is seen in the Army's court records. The last time I checked, changing one's name doesn't retroactively wipe out all usage of a prior name.
If he really had an interest in transparency he'd release the Republican emails. But he didn't. So I can only assume the guy is a propagandist designed to sow chaos.
To portray this as an difficult decision for poor Assange is just absurd. He made clear in his own emails, his entire goal was to bring down Clinton. She lost the election for many reasons, including Assange's efforts but also a very poorly run campaign and many bad decisions on her own part.
>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post.
>“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said.
If Wikileak's primary goal is transparency, why not release these docs too?
[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...
Freedom of reportage doesn't have a political party. It is literally ensconced in the 1st Amendment. Attacking messengers when personal causes are impugned by truth: this is a red flag for extraordinary hackery.
Then, compare that to the track record of the organizations you compared to. Wikileaks has incredibly high standards.
This is why we have crackpots like Trump, chants of "lock her up", skepticism of established institutions, and skepticism of science moving to the forefront. Assange isn't the only one doing this, but he was a big part of it.
In this case the way it works is that Wikileaks drops select truths in a select order and then other more transparently bad faith actors in the "alternative media" use what Wikileaks drops as the kernels of lies and wild-ass conspiracy theories. All this happens long before good faith actors can manage to even start digesting the information.
I have not seen proof of collusion in this process, but in 2016 it was so well executed that I would not be surprised. I watched all that stuff unfold in real time and it was obviously a propaganda operation... and a really damn slick one. I was kind of impressed.
Edit: here's a somewhat clunky made up example to illustrate the principle:
Lets say you are driving and you accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian who happens to be an ex business partner. Lets say you and this ex business partner had a falling out, but later made up and came to an amicable agreement.
Lets say I leak e-mails showing the disagreement and falling out, but sort of "forget" to leak the make-up and later agreement. I also leak only the most damning e-mails from your side, redacting e-mails from the other side that might cast our accident victim in a bad light.
I can make you look like a murderer when in reality the event was just an accident. I have done nothing but tell the truth.
https://file.wikileaks.org/file/steve-jobs-hiv/steve-jobs-hi...
> https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_purported_HIV_medical_...
> Due to the contradictory dates, possible evidence of forgery, strong motivations for fabrication, and few motivations for a legitimate revelation, the images should not be taken at face value.
I would encourage anybody to read the source document above to see the whole analysis, but it's pretty impartial and paints a sceptical picture.
I don't see anything wrong with journalists addressing a claim, investigating it and declaring in their opinions that it's probably not true. What, specifically, is wrong with that?
The fact that you posted the image without referencing the article that claims it's probably a hoax makes me think you were intentionally trying to mislead people.
But... then there was a falling out between the left and Assange when he found out Hillary wished out loud that he was dead and he then cherry picked the bad stuff even more... though he never had inauthentic releases. They just didn’t like what they saw (in the mirror).
So, it’s clear his motives shifted (given the circumstances it was reasonable), but the left suddenly didn’t want more dirt from him cuz he was making them look bad (and forced the question, are WE the baddies?)...
So here we are, he was the useful idiot they now can throw under the bus accusing him of being in cahoots with the Russians (a charge dismissed when people on the right claimed the same back in the good old days way back when Wikileaks and the left were aligned)
Because liberals hate America, right? This sort of thinking from conservatives baffles me. Improvement of any sort - personal, cultural, political - depends on acknowledging legitimate criticism. US citizens aren't required to be blindly loyal to their country. To state an obvious near-tautology, the only way to make things better is to encourage and facilitate useful criticism, so that bad things can be improved.
The relative lack of freedom to criticize is exactly why so many autocratic states become mired in corruption; there's no non-destructive mechanism for accountability and change in government.
He also released actual CIA hacking tools (Vault 7), which was a monumentally stupid, destructive act.
That's because it's a valuable service. Look, I'd love it if sunshine could shine equally into all corners of the world, but if an ideologically impure weirdo with bad hygiene and some vile sexual habits wants to shine sunshine just into my own country's dark corners.... then fine!
I want my country to live up to its own ideals, and that requires making everyone aware of when it doesn't. Justice isn't a zero-sum international game of tit-for-tat.
If you're referring to the allegations made against Assange and investigated by the Swedish prosecutor's office that forced him to remain confined in the embassy in the UK, then those were dropped, and the UN special investigator who looked at Assange's case found that the whole investigation was conducted in bad faith:
https://www.exberliner.com/features/julian-assange-trial-202...
> But that’s exactly the point. I don’t know whether Julian Assange committed sexual assault or not, but what I do know is that Sweden never cared to find out. They wanted to use these allegations to discredit him. And once they had actively spread these allegations into every corner of the world, they then made sure that there would never be a proper trial because, as the prosecutor finally admitted in November 2019, they never had sufficient evidence to even press charges against Julian Assange.
> Sweden went out of its way to make sure the public was informed of the allegations against Assange, even against the will of the concerned women,
So- these women (plural) DID make allegations. And if publicizing them was against the womens' will, then we know that they didn't make these claims for the sake of publicity.
I'll readily believe that Sweden publicized them with political intent, and that they didn't have enough evidence to successfully prosecute. But what evidence there is (regardless of legal standards) definitely exists, and has not been recanted, and I have seen nothing to suggest it was a lie. And in general, I believe women. Just because it's not up to a legal standard of convincingness doesn't mean we have to just ignore it.
Similarly if Bielorussian authorities were investigating claims made by women against Roman Prostaevich, I would be less inclined to automatically believe that he had doone something to some women than I am for women telling their stories against Jeffrey Epstein.
The truth is only being anti-corruption when your opponent is corrupt and ignoring corruption from your allies is itself a form of corruption.
From my perspective she sort of make Margret Tatcher look like a socialist.
I do think most of us were fooled by wikileaks because it starter out being against the Iraq war. This was before snowden, back when people weren’t actually being serious when they joked about echelon listening in on us. It was also back when we, at least in Europe, figures that Russia was going to be our friend and it was sort of pre-information war. Apparently the information was was already well on its way, but we didn’t really know, and we didn’t take anyone who warned us serious. Us being the general public.
It was also a world where everything surrounding American politics, and to some extend all western politics, wasn’t always this us/them, left/right, blue/red nonsense that it is today. Anyone, from the most conservative to the most liberal who watched the wikileaks leaks on the journalist and the children being killed by drones (or maybe it was far away airplanes) were appalled by it, because it was simply appalling and back then, people cared more about wrong/right than their “team” looking good.
So I think it is understandable that people bought into wikileaks being genuine but these days… well… let’s just say that the west still hasn’t recovered from in the war on truthful information and that we are still struggling with trust issues and all the wonderful things like flat-earth, anti-vaccine and what not stupidity that’s running ever more rampant in our society. Among other things, because people like Assange showed us why we shouldn’t trust our institutions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_19...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Takes_a_Village
I remember a comment from some years ago that went like: America's left is Europe's right and America's right is Europe's batshit lunatics :-P
It is all relative.
if a country is nr. 1 and runs the biggest propaganda operation the world has ever seen (Hollywood, Netflix, but also US based social media companies inventing algorithms that influence and steer behavior) then they need to be treated with large amount of pressure and critic to everything they do (justified or not).
The problem in all of this is that the emperor has no clothes. E.g. the emperor being the polarized US public that doesn't see that their country didn't have any form of coherent foreign policy that wasn't a racist, war-mongering and hypocrite "America first" (since at least Reagan).
if you upset enough people (which a truly independent non affiliated journalist would do) you're likely to get killed.
Bellingcat is a great example of an outfit aligned with the 9 eyes intelligence community, Elliot Higgins will never go against what Nato or the Atlantic Council stands for (at least not in a meaningful way). Wikileaks and Assange have tried to do this but got hunted down and then had no choice but to seek cover and support from the "enemy"
Assange decided to upset the US and for better or worse had no choice but align himself with either Russia or even worse countries.
Americans are the most propagandized people in the world who's media is owned by a bunch of billionaires (as is the case in all English speaking countries), and no matter who speaks the truth the unwashed mob will eventually come after them (and then cry foul if the person switches sides).
And you know this how exactly?
> Americans are the most propagandized people in the world who's media is owned by a bunch of billionaires (as is the case in all English speaking countries),
Obviously that's far worse than living in countries where the state run media are your only source of information, cause they would never indoctrinate anyone?
The less time you spend engaging with HN's right-wing and alt-right trolls the better off you will be...
by what they report on. it's not rocket science, it's not like they're operating "in the dark". Also if they would really have bought RU passport data of diplomats and assassins without protection from MI6 they'd be dead (even based in the UK).
> far worse than living in countries where the state run media
like Germany where the state run channel today broadcasted a special on refugees from 1945 of WWII Nazi victims or immigrants from ex Yugo or Vietnamese boat people that came to Germany? Unlike most of continetial Europe Britain and the US never have faced up to their colonial and oppressive past. This is what makes them regressive and backward societies.
News are problematic all around the world but the US population gobbling up the garbage from Murdoch or Bezos enterprises stands out by constantly talking about "patriotism" or how somebody is "un-American" ... just check how many people on LinkedIn have an American flag in their profile or how many times the word "patriotism" is mentioned by Americans on Social Media.
This mentality is a lot closer to China or the DPRK than any civilized society and is a sign of heavily propagandized[1] population.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
Seriously, the notion that "media" does anything is preposterous. Even if you think they want to manufacture consent, it's pretty obvious there is nothing near consensus amongst themselves. Everyone who writes news can make mistakes or let bias slip in, but that's not a conspiracy.
On the flip side, Assange was always pretty upfront about how he did his work for his own agenda. Anything he ever published that actually helped people was purely coincidental.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
Where's that evidence beyond (a) he's anti-US government and (b) of all the international powers that might wish to launder dirt on the US through Asssage, one of the names on that list is Russia?
That doesn't make anything "pretty clear" that his information just so happened to come from the place that was also the convenient national bogeyman of the time.
... says the guy who shows up to plant intel agency propaganda.
> Assange was pretty clearly outed as having been working for or at least with Russian disinformation agents.
This is 100% false, and you should be liable for defamation.
Your personal (absurdly malformed) opinions about personality shouldn't play a role in whether someone is subject to persecution and imprisonment.
If it's not malevolent to write that, then I assert the same for you. You have friends at the GRU, and you're distributing toxic disinformation at the behest of foreign intelligence agencies.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevincollier/assange-se...
Here’s a quick example:
> We have DM logs between WL and Guccifer 2.0.
This is simply untrue. You sent a link to messages between Emma Best and WL. The messages indicate that a WL twitter user knew of G2. That is all the information available there. Emma likely gave them out. Everything you extended from that is purely hypothetical.
As such you either don’t know what you’re doing, or you know it and are malicious. Stop.
In America, it seems the breakdown is:
* Are you an individual? If yes, when you have biases, make mistakes, or commit crimes, you are a villain and are given no benefit of the doubt.
* Are you a corporation or company? If yes, it's just business.
NYTimes, WaPo, TheIntercept, ..., all published disinformation to support their singular echo chamber narrative this past election cycle. Pretending that folks like Assange are deeply problematic but avoiding that same look into MSM is fairly bizarre.
iow: expand
It's a statement of fact.
That you don't like it doesn't make it less factual.
The sole basis for Politico was to distribute planted stories out of DC.
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
I don't know how source protection would apply to Julian Assange. He's not a source, he's the head of an international organization.
Also, source protection is a journalistic courtesy and is completely removed from the legal system.
A "journalistic courtesy" that people like you would make illegal so as to shutdown journalism that goes against your agenda.
Trump was under active FBI criminal investigations, spanning every aspect of his life, for the entirety of his presidency. Two of his lawyers had their offices raided by the FBI, all looking for anything they could find on him.
Maybe that had something to do with it?
This situation reminds me of that Petyr Baelish scene from GoT, when he proclaimed that knowledge is power only to find out that power is power.
In any case it was proven time and time again that spotlight is deadly for individuals like him, but instead he sought out more of it, one way or another.
Edit: typos
This has always and obviously been a psyop/frame job, ever since Robert Mueller's FBI agents were kicked out of Iceland for their efforts to attack Wikileaks.
It is only since the neoliberal generation, which controls power, felt themselves threatened by their own supposed ideals, that they were more than happy to hop in bed with the spy apparatus and hang Assange high.
To dislodge an incumbent orthodoxy you have to actually offer something better, not something profoundly worse.
BTW authoritarian Marxism is not a sane alternative either. I see people pushing that too, but they never got close to real political power.
As people all over the US (and the world) are becoming more receptive to traditionally leftist talking points - labor vs owners, corporate control of the media, poverty, the evils of globalism etc. - neoliberals have been investing good money in supporting the alt right, neo-fascist voices that blame these problems on immigrants and jewish conspiracy theories. Fascism is much safer for the rich than even social-democracy (not to mention the, to them, terrifying spectre of socialism).
I've noticed a pattern that attacks against Assange supporters are tolerated here.
And rightfully so. Leaking classified government information about war-crimes is fundamentally different then hacking into the private email correspondence of organizations with the explicit intention of damaging them politically. And conflating the two is absolute madness and is antithetical to privacy advocacy.
We have a right to know if the American election has been the victim of a CIA style mis-information campaign from a foreign government. Assange's ability to be an absolute hippocrate about transparency and play a dangerous shell game about where the emails came from has convinced me that the only people Assange believes deserve privacy are the people useful to Assange.
I support Wikileaks. I do not think I support Assange.