2 ms·
Let me take on that question, as someone who would willingly attack Hillary while simultaneously refusing to support Trump. If I want to be internally consiste
by existencebox 10y ago
Let me take on that question, as someone who would willingly attack Hillary while simultaneously refusing to support Trump.
If I want to be internally consistent as a supporter of truth/justice/liberty/all those tasty things, I MUST NOT hesitate to release damaging information along those lines for the sake of a "lesser of two evils" justification. Your statement of zero-sum two person race is also a principle I believe one must sacrifice a "lesser of two evils" discussion to rally against, I believe that accepting we are in a two person race is part and parcel with the level of polarization/group-think we're seeing nowadays. The first steps to a better world in my eyes are to question EVERYTHING and become as vehemently anti-tribal as possible, and that means not withholding things that my moral code would demand I act on, even if it might harm the horse I'm rooting for. (quite to the opposite actually, if I saw that my main candidate had flaws and wasn't getting called out on them, I would see it as my obligation to do so even MORE so, since to whitewash in that direction to my eyes weakens what would otherwise be a valid stance. e.g., all things have negatives, even perhaps a positive choice, but to ignore them is duplicitous.)
tl;dr, my goals in this are not "this election" or "this candidate"; it's "getting people to question more"; "getting people to realize it doesn't NEED to be a zero-sum game". One may say this is idealistic/drop in the ocean etc; but I cannot reconcile with my personal philosophy giving up, because if I did, then there is no justification for ANYONE ELSE to push for these "impossible" goals, and thus the status quo/tragedy of the commons continues.
- tptacek 10y agoTo believe that's what Assange is trying to do, you'd have to explain away the drip-drip scheduling of the releases and the (often false) editorializing he does with decontextualized snippets from the email leaks. It's not simply that Assange is exclusively leaking stolen emails from Democrats, but the manner in which he's doing it.
- existencebox 10y agoThat's a fair point, I can't say I'm as tuned into the drama as tightly as I should (or shouldn't, for my mental sanity?) be. I was more addressing the general case of your question; can his local actions of seeming uniformly opposing one party occur out of any incentive other than being in the pocket of that party, and additionally your statement re: zero-sum-game given that being an argument I find frustrating. Taking into account broader context should adjust your prior, for sure.
- tptacek 10y agoYeah, I completely agree! that there is a way for a "leak broker" trying to serve the same role as WL to responsibly publish leaked email dumps from Russian hackers, even if those hackers are only sourcing from the Democrats and not the Republicans. It is not my argument that third parties can't publish unfavorable things about Clinton without implicitly supporting Trump! The problem is that what Wikileaks is doing is much worse than that.