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Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

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Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#291

Post by voltaireodactyl »

naasking wrote: post #169
zzzeek wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well a lot of us think Trump was pretty much the definition of evil, i mean, extorted an entire country with the threat of illegally withholding US military aid unless they made up political campaign propaganda for him, sometimes you have to just draw a line, like when it's blindingly obvious Assange preferred helping to install a corrupt grifter to run the US government into the dirt. He hates the US government. A l…

Responses like this are just so bizarre to me. Do you think other Presidents didn't extort other countries for various concessions, even selfish ones that help their political ambitions? Do you think other Presidents were not grifters? Perhaps you should look into Obama's and the Clinton's net worth before and after their presidency. What really broke people's brains about Trump is that he was openly rude and obnoxio…

Reagan had Contra, so there’s definitely precedent. I am reluctant to file it under “normal business” though.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#292

Post by dontlaugh »

mjklin wrote: post #77
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.

A similar thing happened when Alexander Solzhenitsyn defected to the US from the USSR. As long as he was blasting the Soviets everybody listened, but when he started critiquing the US as well…his speaking invitations dried up.

Solzhenitsyn was famously full of shit, according to most historians and his own wife.

Not exactly a good comparison, the only similarity is the reaction of the US press.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#293

Post by 93po »

mhh__ wrote: post #253
93po wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russian-state-hacked DNC emails, right? They weren't Russian state hacked, this is propaganda.

Lots of private companies (there's a list on Wikipedia) performed their own analysis and came to the conclusion that Guccifer 2.0 was/is Russian, what says you?

Private companies paid by who?

CrowdStrike - paid for by the DNC

Fidelis Cybersecurity - paid for by the DNC

FireEye's Mandiant - CEO at the time was Kevin Mandia, who's a known associate of Hillary Clinton and also publicly a democratic financial supporter.

SecureWorks - owned by Michael Dell, a known donator to the Clinton Foundation

ThreatConnect - not much info, but also explicitly only said "likely"

Trend Micro - Hillary and DNC are customers of Trend Micro, and they also did not actually say anything at all about a connection to Russia.

Additionally, the reports don't say it was Russian. They say the tools are ones that Russians have been thought to use, with no context into whether everyone uses these tools, to what confidence level they believe that Russians actually use these tools, no context as to whether someone would deliberately use these tools to make it look Russian, or virtually anything at all that substantiates this argument. They also almost universally use phrases like "likely" or "points to". Trying to characterize this situation as confirmed is just outright wrong.

Anyway, this is exhausting. Hyperbole becomes fact and I'm tired of having to disprove hyperbole.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#294

Post by dontlaugh »

giantrobot wrote: post #289
kornhole wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why has Biden never had any talks with Putin to help broker peace talks, and why did the US and UK block the agreement brokered by former Israeli PM Bennet between Russia and Ukraine?

As we've seen since 2014, Russian "peace" overtures are "give us everything and you get nothing". They've also repeatedly proven that they won't honor agreements. They unilaterally broke the Minsk accords just last year with their invasion of Ukraine. There's no utility in "peace" talks with a dishonest party. All it does is provide the dishonest party with ammunition for propaganda. When the other side balls at thei…

The Ukrainian state has been breaking the Minsk accords for almost as long as they’ve each been in place, most blatantly by bombing the Donbas. Not that this would justify invasion of Ukraine proper, but let’s not pretend this has ever been one-sided.

Wars end through peace agreements. Deliberately preventing them is what war mongers do.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#295

Post by dontlaugh »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #213
gWPVhyxPHqvk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was easy to do all that because he actively put his thumb on the scale for the Republicans. > “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.” https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...

I wonder where his animosity towards Hillary Clinton came from, I guess we will never know.

Maybe butchering Libyans has something to do with it? Or even just her husband cutting welfare?

Both US parties are neoliberal war hawks, sadly.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#296

Post by antisthenes »

actionfromafar wrote: post #279
93po wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire "had sex with a broken condom" saga is ridiculous and built up to be an Assange smear campaign. Neither women went to the police to report a rape, they only wanted him to get tested for STDs, neither wanted charges pressed against Assange, and they both later retracted their stories. If Assange did what was alleged, then that's awful and horrible and abusive and those women are victims. However the entiret…

As long as we remember both things can be true at once.

And as long as we remember the likelihood/probability of things happening given the context.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#297

Post by 93po »

mhh__ wrote: post #252
93po wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was plenty of evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and the Russians. There is zero reputable evidence of this

There's no evidence at all it was from anyone else. Where is the evidence that it was Seth Rich for example? Alex Jones?

The evidence is that Assange emphatically said it wasn't Russia, flatly said it was someone internal to the DNC, and he's never been shown to be wrong or dishonest about Wikileaks business.

Additionally, Assange has implied it was Seth Rich as strongly as he can without actually confirming he was the source, because he's bound by journalistic ethics and his agreement with his source to not reveal them.

Lastly, the Mueller report tries to discredit this and states as fact that Seth Rich was not the source. But it provides absolutely zero reasoning or evidence for this, and there is literally no way they could know this for sure. It claims it as fact regardless, and so does the entire establishment corporate media.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#298

Post by BashiBazouk »

93po wrote: post #239
BashiBazouk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the disillusionment around here with wikileaks had more to do with the way they had changed from careful curation, removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps. Less that Hillary's emails were leaked and more that the personal information of lesser figures in and donors to the DNC were also released in mass. They had changed in perception from journalism to personal revenge ag…

> removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps. This is often repeated anti-WL propaganda that isn't true. There is a vast amount of effort that goes into censoring leaks and it's by far the most time consuming part of the process. They spend literally months on it. Just because they chose not to censor something that you would have preferred for them to censor doesn't mean a tremendous…

As opposed to your pro-WL propaganda that is blatantly false? Yes, what you describe is how I and I think many others generally viewed wikileaks up to 2016. With the DNC email leak, that changed:

https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/22/wikileaks_keep_fighti...

One example news story of many...

As to the RNC hack, I never said wikileaks had anything but the RNC was hacked and whatever was found was never released by the hacking organization. Whether this is intentional or just because what was found was not interesting or too old to matter, just the story circulating added to the perception wikileaks had changed.

Re: Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange

#300

Post by mint2 »

naasking wrote: post #191
mint2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is a conspiracy theory intended to discredit Assange and link him to Trump. There is zero evidence that the leak was timed to distract from anything, or that he and anyone close to Trump were in contact. In fact, Assange had announced…

When I’m wrong I correct myself, I was wrong it wasn’t the dnc emails it was the podesta dump that came immediately after the billy bush tape.(1.)

The emails that turned out to be all hot air but hey use what you got when you’ve declared war like assange had on the Clintons. That’s not me saying he’d declare war on her it’s the Intercept publishing that fact (2.)

1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/dec/18/john-podes...

2. https://theintercept.com/2016/08/06/accusing-wikileaks-bias-...

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