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Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

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Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#881

Post by qsdf38100 »

kzzzznot wrote: post #875
Wytwwww wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day Why, though? I didn't even think that was a thing in Britain, at least if you're not some very high risk criminal convicted of violent crimes, which I don't think he is? Regardless of what one think about what Assange did that just seems extremely unnecessarily cruel unless he was a threat to guards or other prisoners...

Why? To punish and deter. He exposed terrible things done by large powers, therefore he was persecuted absolutely.

He didn’t expose anything significant on Russia, for some reason.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#882

Post by grumple »

nikkwong wrote: post #850

Is anyone else here surprised that the reaction to him being free is so overwhelmingly positive? Assange certainly did great work to reveal government corruption and abuses of power. At the same time, some state secrets are best kept secret for national interests and Assange seemed to show a lack of regard for protecting this type of information. It often seemed that he was working in his own self interest rather tha…

Same. Assange was an actor for Russia, and acted against American interests, whether by design or by accident. He played a role in the election of Trump and in the weakening of US standing and intelligence.

This soft-handed approach towards anti-American behavior is the culmination of multiple movements in the post-Soviet era where the remnants of Soviet-sponsored communists and other home-grown agitators align themselves with anti-western groups around the world (Russia, Iran, China, various terrorist groups, etc). These groups have a lot of influence in the left in general, and in the current US administration, so it's not surprising that now is the time that Assange gets a friendly deal. Between this and Manning's sentence being commuted, I think a lot of damage has been done to our security apparatuses. What's the dissuade the next kid with delusions of toppling the corrupt American empire from exposing state secrets in a noble act on behalf of our comrades in the benign and honorable states of Russia, China, and Iran?

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#883

Post by EnergyAmy »

nikkwong wrote: post #865
skilled wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But of course it is positive. This is a huge deal, even if only one that will benefit himself. I don’t know anything about any secrets that he showed any lack of regard for, but I definitely know about the files he exposed that showed the US government is a bunch of cowards who manipulate people and then use the full force of the law to defend themselves when caught with their pants down. Instead of making people gue…

The US government needs to prosecute actors who infiltrate secure systems with the aim to leak state secrets as a way to prevent this type of behavior from happening in the future. Say what you want; even if the premise of leaking is seeking to enrich the interests of the public--there are many state secrets that are secret for very good reasons, such as protecting the lives of informants, diplomats, etc. There were…

> They have thwarted many potential terrorist attacks since 9/11

Is there a source for this claim that isn't just the NSA saying "trust us"?

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#884

Post by ngcazz »

dcow wrote: post #838
meroes wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is no dilemma! We need a harsh societal reminder that you are not responsible for the actions of other people. It’s a moral fallacy to say that JA would be responsible for getting informants killed (if any were actually killed—they weren’t) by exercising fundamental inalienable freedoms. If somebody kills an informant, that is on them . This mindset of culpability for consequences of exposing evil is literally…

tangential but ultimately the same mentality that thinks enacting collective punishment is okay

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#885

Post by lp0_on_fire »

jorblumesea wrote: post #840
drojas wrote: post #764

This is almost bringing me to tears today. I am happy he's finally going to be free but I am still in deep sadness because this is not the world we are supposed to living in. With all of our knowledge and technology we are still doing horrible things as a civilization and we have lost control of our leadership. This scares me a lot because it is a growing problem and every day it seems like humanity is losing more an…

The entire point was to embarrass the US, not to take some high minded stance. Wikileaks has shown some extreme bias, after refusing to expose dirty secrets of the Kremlin. They are hardly some do-gooder organization. If it came out in 15 years that wikileaks was Russian funded, I would not be surprised. Spreading false rumors and misinformation, failure/refusal to fact check sources, anti-semitism, possibly editing…

> The DNC hack/wikileaks release timeline is absolutely disgusting and shows the true nature of the organization.

in my experience people who condemn wikileaks for this almost universally praise wikileaks for other releases (just so longs as the other releases happened to paint their political opponents in a bad light).

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#886

Post by qsdf38100 »

resters wrote: post #834
jfax wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is beautifully articulated. I myself thought for a long time that if the day ever came that Assange walks free, I'd cry, but instead I feel a strange emptiness inside. The world isn't the one I'd imagined for this day.

Indeed. Though it is still inspiring that there are people like Assange who are willing to face personal hardship in the name of democratic values such as press freedom and government accountability / transparency. None of the US leaders whose crimes were exposed by Assange have faced any consequences whatsoever, and many of them remain influential, lauded figures in American society.

[flagged]

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#887

Post by robxorb »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #858
jorblumesea wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point was to embarrass the US, not to take some high minded stance. Wikileaks has shown some extreme bias, after refusing to expose dirty secrets of the Kremlin. They are hardly some do-gooder organization. If it came out in 15 years that wikileaks was Russian funded, I would not be surprised. Spreading false rumors and misinformation, failure/refusal to fact check sources, anti-semitism, possibly editing…

This fact isn’t stated often enough. Not to mention the usually cited helicopter video is highly edited and anything but impartial, with an American Bradley fighting vehicle under ambush a block away as can be heard in the audio. And I can’t fathom why a journalist, accompanied by men with AK’s themselves, would be pointing what obviously looks like an RPG from a distance at troops in a firefight- not to mention brin…

The "edited" version's edited. The unedited version, released by WL at the same time, isn't. The entire war was a crime and killed 150K+ innocents. If the release of video of a fraction of those deaths puts attention on that; excellent journalism.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#888

Post by kzzzznot »

4bpp wrote: post #830
consumer451 wrote: post #784

He should not have spent all of this time being persecuted by the US government, but he should have been ostracized by the public long ago. I believe that if not for the prior, the latter would have occurred much more readily. > A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "W…

What part of the US government or its decision-makers spent 10 years stewing in prison for bribing Afghans to expose themselves to that same risk of death, or straight up killing many more Afghans for no other reason that they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time? Does the US government have some special natural right to toy with the lives of Afghans that Assange does not have? Unless you believe it to…

This seems like some real mental gymnastics. Not sure how true the above is, but your argument has some serious holes.

Does the bad entity that is doing bad things have a right to do bad things? No

Does a man exposing the bad entity have a right to do bad things? Also no

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#889

Post by calf »

tootie wrote: post #811
drojas wrote: post #764

This is almost bringing me to tears today. I am happy he's finally going to be free but I am still in deep sadness because this is not the world we are supposed to living in. With all of our knowledge and technology we are still doing horrible things as a civilization and we have lost control of our leadership. This scares me a lot because it is a growing problem and every day it seems like humanity is losing more an…

Read some Steven Pinker. Your observations about our present state are not wrong, but seriously consider every other point in human history and realize we are not worse off in any measurable way. In fact, much better.

How is that different than my dad saying the cliche "Back in the day we had it much worse?" It's just a book to make the same conservative point. Since when did any child of a parent hearing that ("Back in the day, we didn't have food / shelter / etc.") respond in agreement? Talking about how much worse things were back then is beside the point, because it is the wrong category of comparison to make. It just shows the person - a parent, a teacher, Prof. Pinker - saying it is out of touch and doesn't understand the actual complaint in todays' context. It's just paternalism expressed with more words.

In fact I can answer my question in another way. We do not exist as a hive collective and nor ought we individuals compare our lives to an alternate life living in the past. A historical societal fact that is technically does not apply to the problems of individual people living today. It was wrong of Pinker to inconsiderately apply those historical facts on the level of societies by further making his implied political points about the individual needs of the marginalized and the oppressed today, but in public that is what he has constantly done.

Re: Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free

#890

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

shafyy wrote: post #855
tootie wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read some Steven Pinker. Your observations about our present state are not wrong, but seriously consider every other point in human history and realize we are not worse off in any measurable way. In fact, much better.

[flagged]

Probably he is indeed a moron, or perhaps the shrewd academic.

The peasant who used to get one square meal in 3 days now gets one square meal a day. So objectively we are better off. ( And the HN idiot will gloss over the stats to point out how fortunate we are to have software jobs)

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