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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The moral of the story of Julian Assange is that you shouldn't make heroes of people solely on the grounds of being enemies of the state. Even when the state is bad. What defines a person on a moral level isn't what they're against. People have all kinds of reasons for being against the same things. What defines people morally is what they're for.
We see this same dynamic in the Trump era. A lot of people are against Trump. Not all of them are worthy of your support. Some people oppose Trump because he tramples on civil liberties and others oppose Trump because his racism is turning people away from their love of unregulated capitalism. Black Lives Matter opposes Trump and The Lincoln Project opposes Trump, but you should support BLM and oppose TLP.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Dec 14th 2020 at 12:04:22 PM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Not to put a fine point on it but I believe the point is that thousands of people were dying because of it.
A democratic society cannot exist without an informed public.
But I admit, my bias on this subject is considerable.
Edit:
I should clarify I have no love of Assange now and believe he's a monster. I believe his relationship with Russia began in the 2016 election rather than something predating it. I believe the idea he was always a Russian agent is a Conspiracy Theory and not true.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Dec 14th 2020 at 12:06:18 PM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Biden is now 199 to Trump's 167. I did some math and the remaining states that have yet to finish are: California (55), Hawaii (4), Massachusetts (11), New Jersey (14), Oregon (9), and Washington (12). I don't see any of those flipping.
You might say "See? There was nothing to worry about", but we can't take anything for granted this election. Now we just need Congress to certify it and Trump's officially done.
He is actually guilty of it to Australia and the Commonwealth, so Treason still counts.
And I don't disagree about state secrets themselves also costing lives, but there's ways to expose that kind of thing WITHOUT doing what Assange did, and he knew that.
Semper Fi. Semper Paratus. Vigilo Confido.Yeah, it was an object lesson in how bad people can do some good things, but it doesn't always make them good people.
And honestly, America needed to be burned back then, with the shit the NSA was pulling, not just domestically but abroad. They were really overreaching back then.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesSometimes bad people do good things. When Japan is ravaged by tsunamis and earthquakes, the yakuza are known to pitch in and assist with crisis management. A lot of people have been helped by yakuza.
But at the end of the day, they're still yakuza.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I always thought it was extremely unlikely that there was anything to worry about with faithless electors. Like I said before, it's not that the attempts by trump and co. to undermine the election will have any effect as far as preventing Biden from becoming president. Rather, it's that cements this idea in the republican base that Biden is a fundamentally illegitimate president and that the institutions of democracy are rigged against them, therefore anything republicans do to cheat back is legitimate.
@Tobias Drake: That analogy doesn't exactly work, but that's more because Organized Crime more often than not sees themselves as the "new nobility" (or in the case of the italian mob, carrying it on from their roots) so it's a matter of honor to take care of people in their "jurisdiction" per se. I can actually respect that.
Semper Fi. Semper Paratus. Vigilo Confido.It's not exactly an uncommon thing with organized crime generally, as I understand it. In Brazil, when the pandemic started, the drug cartels started enforcing a quarantine in the favelas because the state was not willing to or able to do so effectively. Granted, the fact that this was presumably upheld with implied violence is pretty horrible to think about, but the intention of enforcing a quarantine is at least sensible.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Dec 14th 2020 at 5:22:31 PM
Well, in fairness to Brazil and the Cartels, their president is also a Trump-supporting Coronavrus-denying nitwit. So, someone had to do something.
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Essentially, yes. Remember the Mafia actually started out as Noblemen. It was seen as your job to protect the people on your turf, and people who did otherwise tended to get "dealt with".
My Stepmom actually used to live in the neighborhood Nicky Scarfo controlled back in the day. The area was notably near-crime free, because people knew crossing him or the family would get you a one-way ticket into the nearby bay.
Edited by Pendrake on Dec 14th 2020 at 12:32:44 PM
Semper Fi. Semper Paratus. Vigilo Confido.Even if criminal organizations are helpful in some ways when they want to, it's always with the implicit threat of violence somewhere in the background. Yakuza helping in the aftermath of a tsunami do so to help with their image, but let's not pretend they don't intend to get anything in return. They're going to want the favor returned somewhere down the line.
@Resi Leafs: Yep. Hence the oft-quoted Godfather line: "One day, I will call upon you to do a service for me, but until that day, consider this a gift."
Semper Fi. Semper Paratus. Vigilo Confido.Assange has been leaking stuff that had zero public interest for a long time, the man engaged in doxing from the very start (such as of the last few Jewish people in Bagdad). He’s also the reason that Snowden ended up in Russia, which did nothing to help the American people.
Manning is a cautionary tale of what happens when you fail to care for your troops, they lash out however they can. Sometimes you get a shooting at a fort, sometimes you get the likes of Manning handing over state secrets to someone like Assange, in both cases you’ve got a person who did a bad thing but did it in large part because they were failed by a system that should have cared for them.
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No, Assange is opposed to pre-vetting information on principle. Well when it’s US information, I believe he’s sat on Russian information.
Edit: Biden is at 215 in CNN’s live vote count. California alone will put him over the top.
Edited by Silasw on Dec 14th 2020 at 8:47:07 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranManning wasn't disgruntled.
Manning was horrified by the information she saw about US abuses of power and the culture of violence. For example, one of the first things they gave Assange was the fact that US gunships had killed a bunch of journalists then covered it up. The US army had been passing the video as a joke among themselves, though.
And the US State Department determined absolutely no one was killed or endangered because of the improperly redacted (as in any redaction) done of names. That was a smear created by the Far Right.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Dec 14th 2020 at 1:37:56 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Also, the early in person voting has commenced in Georgia
.

Assange isn't an American citizen. So you'd actually be accusing Private Manning of treason.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Dec 14th 2020 at 12:02:13 PM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.