I think that most systems are flawed and, given enough time, will be corrupted and ruined.
That has happened with (to my knowledge) every communist nation out there, from USSR to Cuba.
Similarly, that has already happened with the capitalist US: corporate interests over those of people, and the interests of the rich over everyone else; at times, it's something like the plot right out of a Deus Ex game: https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo .
Honestly, the same is also probably happening with the more socialist leaning EU, at least based on how many stories about corruption and bribes one hears on the news in my country, not even thinking about the same on a grander scale.
I don't really have any solutions to offer or ideologies to push and i'm not sure whether individuals being politically active is (always) even that effective, just look at Russia and how many people there are in prisons, or how polarized everything is in US with identity politics.
All i can say for sure is that humans and human nature are the common denominator in every single one of those systems, in which the reality eventually differs from the theory behind them.
I feel like trying to make a scale and throwing numbers around would be problematic, because it would detract from the overall argument that all systems have significant problems.
If you're interested in that doing that, i'm sure that there are places online that try to document the various injustices (here's a US centric one https://www.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/top/?t=all though probably also biased due to the political polarization) as well as historical writings about the exposed problems in the communist countries of the old days. If anyone has any good ones, feel free to link them, because aside from the actual argument, i'm also curious.
Of course, in my day to day life, it really doesn't matter whether that's 40 or 400 billion, because i will hardly ever even make a million myself (living in the EU, at my current salary it would take me 49 years of work, aside from inflation, salary increases etc.). Not to say that it's not important to talk about these things, just that the scales at play are so mindbogglingly huge that they are hard to even reason about.
The point of things like constitution and Universal Charter of Human Rights is not to actually prevent anybody to infringe human rights; people with enough power can always do that.
Rather, like any other form of contract, it is supposed to act as a tripwire which gives ordinary people information that the infringing party might actually try to do something worse. It's a defense in depth.
The powerful are in power not because they are better, or stronger, but because they control the information we have about them. That's why transparency is so useful in rooting out the corruption.
Unfortunately, the counterplay to this "tripwire" from the powerful is to disable it by making people cynical (like the boy who cried wolf), that they get used to it and dismiss these violations as false alarms. Effectively, they are saying, "contracts do not matter", and wrongly justify it by correct observation that contracts always rely on weak link, which is the judiciary system.
So we should try not to be cynical, and rather use this information in the future. Maybe at some point, some of us come to a decision whether to support CPJ or Reporters without Borders; and then this tripwire will give us guidance to make the right call.
> ... not to actually prevent anybody to infringe human rights; people with enough power can always do that. Rather, like any other form of contract ...
That's a very insightful analysis, thank you.
I think another example of this is Google having a motto of "Don't be evil". Obviously a motto isn't enough to prevent evil, and it can't even define what "evil" actually means, but, like you say, it is a tripwire, or like a warrant canary, and a reminder to the public to always be vigilant against the threat that such a powerful entity represents.
(The point of this comment isn't to condemn Google, as I think it's probably the least evil of the MAMAA oligarchs, and people can decide for themselves whether Google's motto worked while it existed).
It makes perfect sense, they are the true journalists according to their own definition, so they don't just report facts, but they use "editorial process". /s
Maybe it’s just that the vast majority of people freely choose to disagree with you on this.
Let me put it another way, how would you go about increasing peoples freedom (or reducing the authoritarianism you perceive) in such a way that they started meeting your expectations of behaviour?
I don't understand the silence, as I've said on here before - how can an Australian citizen who published articles in Iceland, who was captured in the UK be extradited to the US for crimes under US law?
You look at the Australian journalist who was working in China as a journalist and was imprisoned for vague charges, and there's an outcry.
Look at the Australian citizen who was captured half a world away they're trying to drag to the US for crimes under US law that weren't committed in that country - is there a difference? It could be argued the case of Assange is even worse. Imagine if China decided Assange was guilty of crimes under Chinese law and reached out like this, the outrage would be palpable.
To paraphrase the gangster saying “It’s easy to be a vocal proponent of human rights when it’s not your power that’s being threatened.”
That’s what I appreciate about the US system and the words of its founders - it’s basically set up assuming whoever gets power will eventually abuse it. It’s just human nature - we’re great at convincing ourselves we’re in the right.
You think China or the Taliban think they’re bad people? Of course not, everything they do is for the greater good.
So it’s not surprising when a group of journalists, when given the choice (for any number of reasons) chose the status quo and their position of power in it, versus their journalistic idealism.
That's not human nature, since there is no abstract human nature! Human beings are social animals, it's all about “social relation!” It's all about conditions of the real material world. The slavery, feudalism or capitalism are not an arbitrary choices of human beings, they are social relations changing with class struggle! Why no powerful person or group wants to enslave, literally enslave, others? because this way, they make more profit! It is all about profit in the capitalism.
I’d say the USSR and other non-capitalist systems completely blows up your theory. They were more than happy to violate human rights in the goal of “the greater good”. Communist systems are actually fantastic examples that it is human nature.
There is one small but fundamental problem with your example: USSR was a state capitalism and not a socialist "state". Lenin expected a socialist revolution in Germany while it failed. It failed and freikorps killed Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For sure you cannot have a socialism in s backward country like Russia. Socialism, in Marxism-Leninism, as a science, is the dialectical negation of capitalism.
Wasn't it actually the Guardian that published in a book the password to a circulating archive of secret information? It was the Diplomatic Cables if I'm not mistaken.
It also is highly selective of the documents it publishes - his policy of “radical transparency” didn’t survive the TV deal he signed with Russian state media, and proof that he suppressed whistleblowers evidence of Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war was met with outright retaliatory threats against those who deigned to report on it.
This. I thought Wikileaks was an important endeavor and Julian Assange should be protected right up until he released "Collateral Murder." All he had to do was release the audio and video undoctored, it was damning enough in the raw. But the moment he decided to jazz it up with sound effects and music he lost all integrity. Ever since then Julian Assange's Wikileaks has only released "curated" information that he felt fits his narrative. The original Wikileaks was nothing like that, it was just that a wiki of leaks. I still think the original Wikileaks has a place in this world, but Julian Assange's Wikileaks is horseshit and I don't care if he gets arrested.
It's honestly stuff like this that gives a modicum of merit to the often repeated sentiment that NYT and WaPo are corrupt organizations that are just propaganda for the toads living under a volcano plotting out every passing moment (or whatever, IDK).
I remember a few years back, when NYT was really suffering a huge loss in readership, they had this mega panel to try and figure out why the paper was failing. At no point did their own editorial choices figure into the picture. (I think they decided the solution they needed was these sort of digital hybrid articles that have slick graphics, or something along these lines.)
In the big picture, I think these traditional news outlets do good, important work. However, they've really failed at times spectacularly in ways that have just given fodder to less reputable outlets, which people do listen to, and thus harmed even the notion of truth itself?
Examples would be how Iraq was covered, when the NYT had evidence similar to what Snowden leaked like 10 years later, but chose not to publish because the WH said they'd have a lot of death on their hands and stuff. Also, I think a lot of people feel that they pushed way too hard for a Clinton coronation, instead of really being objective and reporting on the phenomenon that was Bernie.
I don't bring up Bernie because I'm a Bernie Bro btw, I'm just saying that he was usually editorialized as a nuisance, perineal loser, who was a bad politician, when in the meanwhile his foil (trump) was seeing a similar populist rise that was met with similar befuddlement. The truth is, that Bernie and Trump were huge misses by media outlets and in many ways, these institutions couldn't see past their own certainty of how the world works.
So, when I read that no one is going to stand up for Assange, I just sort of shake my head and think that they really haven't learned a thing. They've missed opportunities to break huge stories, while at the same time have done very, very good reporting in the things that they excel at (I.e. Trump taxes, Panama papers, etc...) The problem is in an unfair fight, where one side isn't burdened by the truth, you can't even slip an inch. You have to follow the truth, wherever the story may take you, and a lot of these editors in my opinion have been failures for not taking this seriously.
It gives a semblance of credibility to the finger wagging from laughing stock alternative outlets, because sometimes (very rarely) they do have a point.
> In the organization’s press release on the 2021 index, it states, “No journalists were jailed in North America at the time of the census deadline.” That is only true if one redefines Assange as someone who is not a journalist.
I don’t understand that logic. AFAIK, Assange is in prison, but not (yet) in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange agrees: “Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019”
The complaint should be that he isn’t on their list for the UK.
37 comments
[ 320 ms ] story [ 1621 ms ] threadThat has happened with (to my knowledge) every communist nation out there, from USSR to Cuba.
Similarly, that has already happened with the capitalist US: corporate interests over those of people, and the interests of the rich over everyone else; at times, it's something like the plot right out of a Deus Ex game: https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo .
Honestly, the same is also probably happening with the more socialist leaning EU, at least based on how many stories about corruption and bribes one hears on the news in my country, not even thinking about the same on a grander scale.
I don't really have any solutions to offer or ideologies to push and i'm not sure whether individuals being politically active is (always) even that effective, just look at Russia and how many people there are in prisons, or how polarized everything is in US with identity politics.
All i can say for sure is that humans and human nature are the common denominator in every single one of those systems, in which the reality eventually differs from the theory behind them.
If you're interested in that doing that, i'm sure that there are places online that try to document the various injustices (here's a US centric one https://www.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/top/?t=all though probably also biased due to the political polarization) as well as historical writings about the exposed problems in the communist countries of the old days. If anyone has any good ones, feel free to link them, because aside from the actual argument, i'm also curious.
Personally, in regards to the modern day world, i'd say that stealing 400 billion from taxpayers is pretty bad, which is one colorful example in recent memory: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
Of course, in my day to day life, it really doesn't matter whether that's 40 or 400 billion, because i will hardly ever even make a million myself (living in the EU, at my current salary it would take me 49 years of work, aside from inflation, salary increases etc.). Not to say that it's not important to talk about these things, just that the scales at play are so mindbogglingly huge that they are hard to even reason about.
Rather, like any other form of contract, it is supposed to act as a tripwire which gives ordinary people information that the infringing party might actually try to do something worse. It's a defense in depth.
The powerful are in power not because they are better, or stronger, but because they control the information we have about them. That's why transparency is so useful in rooting out the corruption.
Unfortunately, the counterplay to this "tripwire" from the powerful is to disable it by making people cynical (like the boy who cried wolf), that they get used to it and dismiss these violations as false alarms. Effectively, they are saying, "contracts do not matter", and wrongly justify it by correct observation that contracts always rely on weak link, which is the judiciary system.
So we should try not to be cynical, and rather use this information in the future. Maybe at some point, some of us come to a decision whether to support CPJ or Reporters without Borders; and then this tripwire will give us guidance to make the right call.
That's a very insightful analysis, thank you.
I think another example of this is Google having a motto of "Don't be evil". Obviously a motto isn't enough to prevent evil, and it can't even define what "evil" actually means, but, like you say, it is a tripwire, or like a warrant canary, and a reminder to the public to always be vigilant against the threat that such a powerful entity represents.
(The point of this comment isn't to condemn Google, as I think it's probably the least evil of the MAMAA oligarchs, and people can decide for themselves whether Google's motto worked while it existed).
Let me put it another way, how would you go about increasing peoples freedom (or reducing the authoritarianism you perceive) in such a way that they started meeting your expectations of behaviour?
You look at the Australian journalist who was working in China as a journalist and was imprisoned for vague charges, and there's an outcry.
Look at the Australian citizen who was captured half a world away they're trying to drag to the US for crimes under US law that weren't committed in that country - is there a difference? It could be argued the case of Assange is even worse. Imagine if China decided Assange was guilty of crimes under Chinese law and reached out like this, the outrage would be palpable.
Even the deputy PM has recently came out and said Assange shouldn't be extradited - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-14/barnaby-joyce-opposes... and said similar things.
That’s what I appreciate about the US system and the words of its founders - it’s basically set up assuming whoever gets power will eventually abuse it. It’s just human nature - we’re great at convincing ourselves we’re in the right.
You think China or the Taliban think they’re bad people? Of course not, everything they do is for the greater good.
So it’s not surprising when a group of journalists, when given the choice (for any number of reasons) chose the status quo and their position of power in it, versus their journalistic idealism.
Wikileaks takes far less care with vetting classified documents than for example Glenn Greenwald did with the documents Snowden provided.
Talking about responsible disclosure.
> She was detained even before The Intercept published the article that was based upon the leaks.
Sounds to me like essentially every news organization ever.
There is a thing called journalistic integrity, it does exist and is practiced. It is also something Assange completely lacks.
Trust in the media is at an all time low, mainly because many (not all) "journalists" threw integrity out the window in favor of activism.
I remember a few years back, when NYT was really suffering a huge loss in readership, they had this mega panel to try and figure out why the paper was failing. At no point did their own editorial choices figure into the picture. (I think they decided the solution they needed was these sort of digital hybrid articles that have slick graphics, or something along these lines.)
In the big picture, I think these traditional news outlets do good, important work. However, they've really failed at times spectacularly in ways that have just given fodder to less reputable outlets, which people do listen to, and thus harmed even the notion of truth itself?
Examples would be how Iraq was covered, when the NYT had evidence similar to what Snowden leaked like 10 years later, but chose not to publish because the WH said they'd have a lot of death on their hands and stuff. Also, I think a lot of people feel that they pushed way too hard for a Clinton coronation, instead of really being objective and reporting on the phenomenon that was Bernie.
I don't bring up Bernie because I'm a Bernie Bro btw, I'm just saying that he was usually editorialized as a nuisance, perineal loser, who was a bad politician, when in the meanwhile his foil (trump) was seeing a similar populist rise that was met with similar befuddlement. The truth is, that Bernie and Trump were huge misses by media outlets and in many ways, these institutions couldn't see past their own certainty of how the world works.
So, when I read that no one is going to stand up for Assange, I just sort of shake my head and think that they really haven't learned a thing. They've missed opportunities to break huge stories, while at the same time have done very, very good reporting in the things that they excel at (I.e. Trump taxes, Panama papers, etc...) The problem is in an unfair fight, where one side isn't burdened by the truth, you can't even slip an inch. You have to follow the truth, wherever the story may take you, and a lot of these editors in my opinion have been failures for not taking this seriously.
It gives a semblance of credibility to the finger wagging from laughing stock alternative outlets, because sometimes (very rarely) they do have a point.
I don’t understand that logic. AFAIK, Assange is in prison, but not (yet) in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange agrees: “Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019”
The complaint should be that he isn’t on their list for the UK.