Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

harpers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 355 posts

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#171

Post by starkd »

mopsi wrote: post #120
starkd wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> And their have been hostilities between the two since 2014 when the US formented a revolution there. This is just another conspiracy theory. In 2014, a pro-Russian president of Ukraine backed down from a very favourable trade deal with the EU at the last minute due to Russian pressure, people came to streets to protest, he ordered snipers to shoot unarmed protestors, after which the unrest only grew, he fled the co…

The manipulations within the state dept. by Victoria Nuland are well known. She was literally caught on the phone planning who was going to be pushed as the next leader. By labelling it a conspiracy, you are simply trying to disparage a very valid possibility. Conspiracies are nothing more than multiple people collaborating to make something happen. It does happen, and they should not be dismissed out of hand.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#172

Post by bayesian_horse »

superkuh wrote: post #2

It's pretty clear what happened. People started to view the reporting of Wikileaks as evil or fake as soon as it negatively impacted $theirpoliticalside. Once these perceptions fell into place it was easy to disregard all the good, villify him personally, and ignore the authoritarian and illegal actions taken against him.

There was no need for villification. For whatever good Wikileaks did for "the truth" or people's curiousity, it was a danger to US troops and their allies from the first moments.

That's got nothing to do with political views. And the charges against him are still perfectly legal. An "authoritarian" system would go about this completely differently.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#173

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

starkd wrote: post #126
CamperBob2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your casualty figures don't seem to line up with most other sources. Any citations?

The sources are all over the place, but they all seem to be horrific. There are estimates that Ukrainian deaths so far could be anywhere from 100K to 200K. Russians have lost a lot too. But the only thing we know is that they are depressingly high.

> The sources are all over the place

You gave specific figures. From which source, and why choose that one?

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#174

Post by monetus »

naasking wrote: post #167
monetus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for op and evil is subjective - If I have to take a stab at their thoughts, it would be along the lines that he was being a useful idiot for an entity whose goal was to harm a society. You can debate those points; what questions he should have asked, if what the Mueller report says about his sources is true, if he had any actual malice - evil is too strong a word for my taste, as I use it for sadism. He…

Retribution for what? I'm just not sure what relevance any of this has anyway. The only questions that are relevant for journalism are, "is the information correct?", and "is the information of interest to the public?". Every source has their own motives, as does every journalist, and no story is so detailed as to paint the full picture. These questions are ultimately all irrelevant.

Hosting things like the snowden and manning leaks caused a lot of fallout for him, iirc. He was rightly pissed off at the administration. The information he had in 2016 was of interest to and was used against the public - those weren't mutually exclusive.

How this affects a legal precedent is infuriating beyond text, and it is incumbent on good people to defend him now.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#175

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

starkd wrote: post #171
mopsi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And their have been hostilities between the two since 2014 when the US formented a revolution there. This is just another conspiracy theory. In 2014, a pro-Russian president of Ukraine backed down from a very favourable trade deal with the EU at the last minute due to Russian pressure, people came to streets to protest, he ordered snipers to shoot unarmed protestors, after which the unrest only grew, he fled the co…

The manipulations within the state dept. by Victoria Nuland are well known. She was literally caught on the phone planning who was going to be pushed as the next leader. By labelling it a conspiracy, you are simply trying to disparage a very valid possibility. Conspiracies are nothing more than multiple people collaborating to make something happen. It does happen, and they should not be dismissed out of hand.

> by Victoria Nuland ... literally caught on the phone planning

This false conspiracy theory is discussed at length here

https://www.thebulwark.com/what-really-happened-in-ukraine-i...

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#176

Post by mopsi »

starkd wrote: post #163
mopsi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing to negotiate at this point. Either Russia moves its guns and tanks and soldiers out of the whole Ukraine like they retreated from around Kharkiv, or Russia gets defeated on the battlefield. Anything else would leave Ukrainians in occupied territories to be wiped out by Russians. Russian hopes of a favorable peace deal is nothing but a coping mechanism, just like top Nazis hoped to reach a peace deal i…

And that completely ignores how the world really works. You are perfectly content to risk WWIII. It is not 1945 anymore. You are risking a nuclear conflict that would be absolutely horrific.

What difference would a nuclear strike make anymore, several Ukranian cities have already been hit with more TNT equivalent than Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wiped from the earth: https://twitter.com/OstapYarysh/status/1632282407578611712

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#177

Post by mint2 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #111
monetus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told Assange “on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange ... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] leaks,” The Daily Beast reported. He got stiffed in that respect, but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign. Old interview of him talking about it: https://www.democracynow.org/201…

Okay, so the "evil" he did is having a preference you don't like? I mean, I don't like that preference either, but the documents he leaked were real. It's true that the documents were one-sided, but do we know that Wikileaks had documents it could have published on Trump and didn't? Can we agree that maybe Clinton shares some of the blame for, you know, breaking the law ? Or the Democrats for even choosing her as a c…

What did wikileaks reveal that showed Clinton broke the law?

They revealed the DNC was trying to tip the scales towards her in their primary which was unsavory but I don’t recall wikileaks having anything to do with the classified emails…

although the main purpose of their release timing was to bury, drown, and distract from a certain other piece of info that had come out - bye bye claim to like transparency lol.

And the email server in hindsight also seems quaint - a scandal from a time of innocence and naivety. At the time it seemed overblown too, but now it’s downright quaint. Non stop private email and encrypted messenger app use followed that, and then we all know how classified docs have gone lately.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#178

Post by starkd »

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #127
starkd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many us legislators are openly admitting it is a proxy war. See Rep. Dan Crenshaw-TX comments on Ukrain support. He calls it a good deal that we get to fight a major geo-political adversary without any American deaths by just supplying Ukraine with weapons. He is not the only one. That is by definition a proxy war. Fighting a war on the cheap that isn't designed to ultimately win anything, meanwhile sending 200,000 o…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#179

Post by caskstrength »

yucky wrote: post #166
ramchip wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I... what? Around me, questioning the war gets you labelled as Putin critic, not an apologist. He literally started the war.

> He literally started the war. When do you think the war started?

> When do you think the war started?

When do _you_ think the war started? Annexation of Crimea was ordered by Putin.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#180

Post by rendall »

starkd wrote: post #33
barrysteve wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was well before the Trump election. Colbert told him that the authorities would come after him in his 2007 appearance on the Colbert Report. The minute he published Collateral Murder, a video maximizing publicity on a fatal error in America's war effort, that was it for Assange and Wikileaks.

And notice how these fatal errors are still occurring. The moment you question the proxy war in Ukraine, you are immediately labelled a Putin apologist. No calls for diplomacy. Meanwhile, 200,000 Ukrainians have been led to their deaths.

> No calls for diplomacy.

Because calls for diplomacy benefit only Russia. Instead, issue calls for Russia to leave Ukraine.

> Meanwhile, 200,000 Ukrainians have been led to their deaths.

Leaving aside your dubious stat, here "Meanwhile, Russia killed x Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation." There. Fixed it for you.

Your passive voice there betrays your pro-Russian sympathies, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. In other words, pro-Putin statements gets you labeled pro-Putin apologist. Stop doing that, and the problem goes away.

Post reply on HN