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> WikiLeaks cited the unidentified person as saying the planned expulsion is a response to the organization’s recent tweet linking to a website that alleged mon

> WikiLeaks cited the unidentified person as saying the planned expulsion is a response to the organization’s recent tweet linking to a website that alleged money laundering and corruption during Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno’s time as United Nations special envoy for the disabled in Geneva. Foreign Minister Jose Valencia said last month that the government was “very surprised” by that and other actions by Assange and his lawyers. It's generally a bad idea to insult your hosts, and expect to remain in their home.

legitster 8y ago
There were all sorts of reports that he was a pretty taxing guest as well. Cleaning, hygiene, etc.
- whamlastxmas 8y ago
  Clearly propaganda, and there was only the single source that as we can clearly see now was adversarial.
  - idlewords 8y ago
    Consistent with many descriptions of what it was like to have Assange on one's sofa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le3jrp6LzjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le3jrp6LzjI
    - whamlastxmas 8y ago
      Someone let him sleep on their couch and then was upset he didn't move over when they passively used body language to suggest they wanted to sit there. The very concept that this is notable at all amongst the severity of everything else around this situation makes it pretty obvious to me it's just a smear. The dude is a slob so fuck em, let him rot in solitary for 30 years
      - leftyted 8y ago
        No one in this thread has said anything remotely like "The dude is a slob so fuck em, let him rot in solitary for 30 years". He can be a bad house guest and not deserve to rot in prison, right? I think it's pretty clear to anyone even attempting to be objective that Assange has a "difficult personality". Even if you broadly approve of him, he's burned a lot of bridges and appears to have quite an ego.
        ben_w 8y ago
        I think a difficult personality is a necessity for the role he is performing. While a difficult personality absolutely is not and must not be a reason to condemn someone, the good such people perform doesn’t mean anyone should have to put up with their antisocial behaviour, nor that he in particular gets a free pass from the court processes which caused him to end up in the embassy in the first place. Same rules for everyone. None of us are pure saints, and even those of us who are pure evil [1] should only be prosecuted for acts which one can reasonably believe them to be guilty of before a trial actually demonstrates the quality of the evidence. [1] by which I mean dark triad personalities, not religious/utilitarian/etc. ethics.
      - jacobolus 8y ago
        If you’re going to live permanently as an un-paying guest in someone else’s building (in this case, the Ecuadorian embassy in London), it’s not a smart idea to be such “a slob” that your hosts are just waiting for an excuse to get rid of you and stop dealing with your bullshit. Similarly, if you are a miserable guest when staying temporarily at a string of friends’ houses, you won’t keep having friends for very long.
        A2017U1 8y ago
        You say guest as though he can just walk out the door anytime in the last 7 years. Will his real hosts let him catch a plane to Ecuador? Terrible analogy.
        8y ago
    - ohhNoes 8y ago
      Those people are so smarmy and pathetic that it's pretty laughable to hear them whine. Which, I guess, is the intended effect of the video. The complaints are so underwhelming that you wonder if these people have ever been on a camping trip, or, dare I say, drank an entire beer in one evening. It's like, you really have to wonder, what if he were so bold as to place a plastic yogurt cup in the recycle bin without rinsing it out first? Is he capable of such things? After watching that video, I just don't know anymore...
    - kids_ith 8y ago
      Ha ha ha! It's like an episode of Kids in The Hall! I half expect Scott Thompson to chime in on the phone call and complain about Assange taking off his socks and just leaving them in the living room. The nerve!
    - wazoox 8y ago
      The fact that he is an asshole is clearly unimportant compared to what he achieved as a whistleblower. Clearly, I don't give a damn and nobody should.
    - plankers 8y ago
      What a dominant way to handle that situation. Especially the rotted fruit.
- bredren 8y ago
  I thought I read something about his cat shitting everywhere too, which was revealing as a cat companion myself. How rude.
- sittingnut 8y ago
  Ad hominem attacks; refuge of the lost.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    That's not an ad hominem, as the reports of his behavior as a guest are offered relevant to discussion of his behavior as a guest, not as dismissal of his claims to which that is irrelevant.
    - seba_dos1 8y ago
      > as a guest You can hardly feel as a guest anymore if you live somewhere for 7 years.
      - saalweachter 8y ago
        I suspect tenant/squatter's rights do not apply in embassies, but I would love to hear a lawyer's opinion on that point.
        village-idiot 8y ago
        Well, first I believe that Equador’s laws would be in play here, because it’s their sovereign land. But it’s also government property, which typically has different rules than private property, presumably including areas like squatters rights.
        torstenvl 8y ago
        At common law, you cannot gain title by adverse possession against the government. However, for leaseholds, it's all going to be determined by the pertinent statutes. That's even more true for Ecuador, which - as far as I know - is not a common law country. The real issue is that ejecting him from the embassy is, in effect, ejecting him from the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Depending on the exact basis they claimed when allowing him to stay, it could constitute refoulement of an asylee, which would violate international law.
- comboy 8y ago
  As Eric Weinstein put it, "we are standing on shoulders of jerks"[1]. I posted it already here once, but it is such a valuable insight that I think it's worth repeating. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeMIWVOnbo&feature=youtu.be&t=553 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeMIWVOnbo&feature=youtu.be...
  - neom 8y ago
    Thanks for posting this, I hadn't given that thought much time and it was interesting to hear it put so succinctly. In my opinion it's a pretty valid perspective, however, it does create a very narrow definition of genius. I'd suggest that the loud stomps unsavory genius in their sensibilities may very well create a lack of space for the quite, introverted, polite, snowflake philosophical or artistic genius, and that this to me would be equally disappointing. I think a good underlying lens is meeting people where they are, whoever they are.
cm2187 8y ago
I wonder if Ecuador didn’t see hosting him as a kind of insurance against being targeted by wikileaks.
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  Correa was a genuinely good person. There are a number of other ways he demonstrated this.
  - s0l1dsnak3123 8y ago
    Such as? It'd be interesting to see what else he's known for
    - mr_luc 8y ago
      I lived down there for 7 years that coincided with his presence in the country, and I've commented on the uniqueness of Correa as a politician before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5984041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5984041 I think it's still a good comparison: Correa was his country's Bismark. He was in the right place at the right time -- Bismark himself famously having said that the job of the politician is to listen for God's footsteps and grab onto His coattails as he passes by -- and he legitimately did build a massive amount of eg. roads, hospitals (some decent multiple of the previous N presidencies combined), reformed the tax service, got a ton of small businesses paying taxes for the first time ever (by making it incredibly cheap for even the very poorest small businesses to get into the system) ... and was pretty much like Bismark in relations with the opposition press, too.
      - whb07 8y ago
        I’d love to hear how long you’ve lived in Ecuador and how do you like it there?
        johnwyles 8y ago
        I have little clout but as an American who visited for 2 weeks during the whole Snowden ordeal I felt it kinda "meh" looking at the place through expatriation goggles at the time. Quito is a very religious and conservative city, Baños is a cute mountain village with a quiet reserved culture, and Guayaquil was the more liberal but raw and somewhat... "boisterous" city. Not sure that word fits but outside of smoking pot and surfing all day in the costal town of Montanita all day I would say it's not a great ex-pat country. Overall the country felt very religiously devout and not starting to hockey-stick (at the time anyway) on tech-forward business and culture. It also is an OPEC country so it is bogged down with corruption and political issues though it does seem to strive to stamp them out. However, if your goal is South America and you would like to expatriate and remain in tech, Chile would be the place I would recommend most for all the programs the government is pushing for startups. Much more to say but I'll just wrap up with that...
toyg 8y ago
Assange has not been on the wikileaks staff for 6 months, reportedly. It’s not even clear whether he has internet access anymore. And obviously, if they had been silent on this matter people would now throw accusations of a convenient coverup.
- dTal 8y ago
  Well that's interesting. It suggests that whoever controls the Wikileaks twitter account may have intended this to happen. And it's a rather interesting time to be stirring up this particular pot in the UK...
  - lucozade 8y ago
    > And it's a rather interesting time to be stirring up this particular pot in the UK... Can you elaborate? I can't think of any reason why this would be more or less interesting than any time since the Swedes dropped the rape case. But i can't say I've been following that closely recently.
    - toyg 8y ago
      The UK is in the middle of a constitutional and social crisis that goes by the name of Brexit.
      - lucozade 8y ago
        I'm aware. What's that got to do with Assange?
        dTal 8y ago
        Assange is a polarizing figure. He's a reminder of how irritating it is to comply with international law (it wasn't an uncommon sentiment in the UK that they should just barge in to the embassy and get him anyway). He's a reminder of "overly liberal" European laws (there was a lot of talk about the supposedly unreasonable nature of Sweden's rape laws). In other words, nothing directly, but just seeing his name again is, politically, so much fuel for the fire. In fact I see that this entire news story has been engineered by the Wikileaks Twitter account, both the actual story and the supposed reason for it.
matt4077 8y ago
Not to mention all his trouble started when he raped (allegedly) one of his former hosts, who had also put him up for free and was generally a fan until he violated the house rules on hygiene.
- burgerboy 8y ago
  You sheep
- mpfundstein 8y ago
  I can’t believe you still buy into that narrative. It has been shown over and over again that the rape accusations are questionable. Not guilty until proven so. Did we forget that?
  - throwaway194444 8y ago
    Nobody who is a long-term friend or close acquaintance of Jake Appelbaum (ioerror), and isn't a sociopath themselves, believes he is innocent of rape. By association, it is quite hard to give Julian the benefit of the doubt, given their closeness and Julian's presence at several parties where Jake is known to have drugged and raped unsuspecting women/groupies. Either way, Assange is free to be a man, walk outside those doors, and face his day in court for the crime he definitely committed: Violating the terms of his bail. Bail. B-A-I-L. Assange was given bail. If he was going to be extradited to the USA, he never would have been given bail. Assange is just an attention-seeking snowflake who failed in his own Breitbart-esque attempt to control the political narrative, and now he's throwing a 7-year long pity party. It would be nice to know if I committed a crime I could hide out in an embassy with free housing, free food and no bills.. I certainly wouldn't poop on the floor as a thank you.
viivaux 8y ago
He's not a guest in Moreno's home. He's a political asylum seeker in a sunless room in a sunless country, where he's been for seven years despite a UN panel ruling that he was being unlawfully detained. Further, political pressure was put on Ecuador to mess with Assange by the US despite the above and more. None of this is secret information. "Hacker News" letting this misinfo stand as top comment - I'm no longer surprised but I'm still disgusted.
engineerworks 8y ago
If he liked keeping quiet he wouldn't need asylum in the first place.
bliblah 8y ago
After accusations of being a Russian mouthpiece during the 2016 election it might help their public image by releasing information regardless of how it might affect a former member.
phasnox 8y ago
Ecuadorian here. Revealing the truth is not insulting us. Most of our people are(or at least should be) grateful that corruption activities are disclosed.
- ReptileMan 8y ago
  But it is not your people that are hosting, but the government. The Equadorian government are literally the only people assange should be on the good side.
  - gcb0 8y ago
    the irony of what you just said.
xster 8y ago
Us: you're clearly partisan because you only publish bad things against muh abuela. Also us: you don't self-censor to benefit your self-interest? That's just not smart.

legitster 8y ago

There were all sorts of reports that he was a pretty taxing guest as well. Cleaning, hygiene, etc.

whamlastxmas 8y ago
Clearly propaganda, and there was only the single source that as we can clearly see now was adversarial.
- idlewords 8y ago
  Consistent with many descriptions of what it was like to have Assange on one's sofa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le3jrp6LzjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le3jrp6LzjI
  - whamlastxmas 8y ago
    Someone let him sleep on their couch and then was upset he didn't move over when they passively used body language to suggest they wanted to sit there. The very concept that this is notable at all amongst the severity of everything else around this situation makes it pretty obvious to me it's just a smear. The dude is a slob so fuck em, let him rot in solitary for 30 years
    - leftyted 8y ago
      No one in this thread has said anything remotely like "The dude is a slob so fuck em, let him rot in solitary for 30 years". He can be a bad house guest and not deserve to rot in prison, right? I think it's pretty clear to anyone even attempting to be objective that Assange has a "difficult personality". Even if you broadly approve of him, he's burned a lot of bridges and appears to have quite an ego.
      - ben_w 8y ago
        I think a difficult personality is a necessity for the role he is performing. While a difficult personality absolutely is not and must not be a reason to condemn someone, the good such people perform doesn’t mean anyone should have to put up with their antisocial behaviour, nor that he in particular gets a free pass from the court processes which caused him to end up in the embassy in the first place. Same rules for everyone. None of us are pure saints, and even those of us who are pure evil [1] should only be prosecuted for acts which one can reasonably believe them to be guilty of before a trial actually demonstrates the quality of the evidence. [1] by which I mean dark triad personalities, not religious/utilitarian/etc. ethics.
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      If you’re going to live permanently as an un-paying guest in someone else’s building (in this case, the Ecuadorian embassy in London), it’s not a smart idea to be such “a slob” that your hosts are just waiting for an excuse to get rid of you and stop dealing with your bullshit. Similarly, if you are a miserable guest when staying temporarily at a string of friends’ houses, you won’t keep having friends for very long.
      - A2017U1 8y ago
        You say guest as though he can just walk out the door anytime in the last 7 years. Will his real hosts let him catch a plane to Ecuador? Terrible analogy.
        8y ago
  - ohhNoes 8y ago
    Those people are so smarmy and pathetic that it's pretty laughable to hear them whine. Which, I guess, is the intended effect of the video. The complaints are so underwhelming that you wonder if these people have ever been on a camping trip, or, dare I say, drank an entire beer in one evening. It's like, you really have to wonder, what if he were so bold as to place a plastic yogurt cup in the recycle bin without rinsing it out first? Is he capable of such things? After watching that video, I just don't know anymore...
  - kids_ith 8y ago
    Ha ha ha! It's like an episode of Kids in The Hall! I half expect Scott Thompson to chime in on the phone call and complain about Assange taking off his socks and just leaving them in the living room. The nerve!
  - wazoox 8y ago
    The fact that he is an asshole is clearly unimportant compared to what he achieved as a whistleblower. Clearly, I don't give a damn and nobody should.
  - plankers 8y ago
    What a dominant way to handle that situation. Especially the rotted fruit.
bredren 8y ago
I thought I read something about his cat shitting everywhere too, which was revealing as a cat companion myself. How rude.
sittingnut 8y ago
Ad hominem attacks; refuge of the lost.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  That's not an ad hominem, as the reports of his behavior as a guest are offered relevant to discussion of his behavior as a guest, not as dismissal of his claims to which that is irrelevant.
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    > as a guest You can hardly feel as a guest anymore if you live somewhere for 7 years.
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      I suspect tenant/squatter's rights do not apply in embassies, but I would love to hear a lawyer's opinion on that point.
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        Well, first I believe that Equador’s laws would be in play here, because it’s their sovereign land. But it’s also government property, which typically has different rules than private property, presumably including areas like squatters rights.
      - torstenvl 8y ago
        At common law, you cannot gain title by adverse possession against the government. However, for leaseholds, it's all going to be determined by the pertinent statutes. That's even more true for Ecuador, which - as far as I know - is not a common law country. The real issue is that ejecting him from the embassy is, in effect, ejecting him from the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Depending on the exact basis they claimed when allowing him to stay, it could constitute refoulement of an asylee, which would violate international law.
comboy 8y ago
As Eric Weinstein put it, "we are standing on shoulders of jerks"[1]. I posted it already here once, but it is such a valuable insight that I think it's worth repeating. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeMIWVOnbo&feature=youtu.be&t=553 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKeMIWVOnbo&feature=youtu.be...
- neom 8y ago
  Thanks for posting this, I hadn't given that thought much time and it was interesting to hear it put so succinctly. In my opinion it's a pretty valid perspective, however, it does create a very narrow definition of genius. I'd suggest that the loud stomps unsavory genius in their sensibilities may very well create a lack of space for the quite, introverted, polite, snowflake philosophical or artistic genius, and that this to me would be equally disappointing. I think a good underlying lens is meeting people where they are, whoever they are.

cm2187 8y ago

I wonder if Ecuador didn’t see hosting him as a kind of insurance against being targeted by wikileaks.

crdoconnor 8y ago
Correa was a genuinely good person. There are a number of other ways he demonstrated this.
- s0l1dsnak3123 8y ago
  Such as? It'd be interesting to see what else he's known for
  - mr_luc 8y ago
    I lived down there for 7 years that coincided with his presence in the country, and I've commented on the uniqueness of Correa as a politician before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5984041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5984041 I think it's still a good comparison: Correa was his country's Bismark. He was in the right place at the right time -- Bismark himself famously having said that the job of the politician is to listen for God's footsteps and grab onto His coattails as he passes by -- and he legitimately did build a massive amount of eg. roads, hospitals (some decent multiple of the previous N presidencies combined), reformed the tax service, got a ton of small businesses paying taxes for the first time ever (by making it incredibly cheap for even the very poorest small businesses to get into the system) ... and was pretty much like Bismark in relations with the opposition press, too.
    - whb07 8y ago
      I’d love to hear how long you’ve lived in Ecuador and how do you like it there?
      - johnwyles 8y ago
        I have little clout but as an American who visited for 2 weeks during the whole Snowden ordeal I felt it kinda "meh" looking at the place through expatriation goggles at the time. Quito is a very religious and conservative city, Baños is a cute mountain village with a quiet reserved culture, and Guayaquil was the more liberal but raw and somewhat... "boisterous" city. Not sure that word fits but outside of smoking pot and surfing all day in the costal town of Montanita all day I would say it's not a great ex-pat country. Overall the country felt very religiously devout and not starting to hockey-stick (at the time anyway) on tech-forward business and culture. It also is an OPEC country so it is bogged down with corruption and political issues though it does seem to strive to stamp them out. However, if your goal is South America and you would like to expatriate and remain in tech, Chile would be the place I would recommend most for all the programs the government is pushing for startups. Much more to say but I'll just wrap up with that...

toyg 8y ago

Assange has not been on the wikileaks staff for 6 months, reportedly. It’s not even clear whether he has internet access anymore. And obviously, if they had been silent on this matter people would now throw accusations of a convenient coverup.

dTal 8y ago
Well that's interesting. It suggests that whoever controls the Wikileaks twitter account may have intended this to happen. And it's a rather interesting time to be stirring up this particular pot in the UK...
- lucozade 8y ago
  > And it's a rather interesting time to be stirring up this particular pot in the UK... Can you elaborate? I can't think of any reason why this would be more or less interesting than any time since the Swedes dropped the rape case. But i can't say I've been following that closely recently.
  - toyg 8y ago
    The UK is in the middle of a constitutional and social crisis that goes by the name of Brexit.
    - lucozade 8y ago
      I'm aware. What's that got to do with Assange?
      - dTal 8y ago
        Assange is a polarizing figure. He's a reminder of how irritating it is to comply with international law (it wasn't an uncommon sentiment in the UK that they should just barge in to the embassy and get him anyway). He's a reminder of "overly liberal" European laws (there was a lot of talk about the supposedly unreasonable nature of Sweden's rape laws). In other words, nothing directly, but just seeing his name again is, politically, so much fuel for the fire. In fact I see that this entire news story has been engineered by the Wikileaks Twitter account, both the actual story and the supposed reason for it.

matt4077 8y ago

Not to mention all his trouble started when he raped (allegedly) one of his former hosts, who had also put him up for free and was generally a fan until he violated the house rules on hygiene.

burgerboy 8y ago
You sheep
mpfundstein 8y ago
I can’t believe you still buy into that narrative. It has been shown over and over again that the rape accusations are questionable. Not guilty until proven so. Did we forget that?
- throwaway194444 8y ago
  Nobody who is a long-term friend or close acquaintance of Jake Appelbaum (ioerror), and isn't a sociopath themselves, believes he is innocent of rape. By association, it is quite hard to give Julian the benefit of the doubt, given their closeness and Julian's presence at several parties where Jake is known to have drugged and raped unsuspecting women/groupies. Either way, Assange is free to be a man, walk outside those doors, and face his day in court for the crime he definitely committed: Violating the terms of his bail. Bail. B-A-I-L. Assange was given bail. If he was going to be extradited to the USA, he never would have been given bail. Assange is just an attention-seeking snowflake who failed in his own Breitbart-esque attempt to control the political narrative, and now he's throwing a 7-year long pity party. It would be nice to know if I committed a crime I could hide out in an embassy with free housing, free food and no bills.. I certainly wouldn't poop on the floor as a thank you.

viivaux 8y ago

He's not a guest in Moreno's home. He's a political asylum seeker in a sunless room in a sunless country, where he's been for seven years despite a UN panel ruling that he was being unlawfully detained. Further, political pressure was put on Ecuador to mess with Assange by the US despite the above and more. None of this is secret information. "Hacker News" letting this misinfo stand as top comment - I'm no longer surprised but I'm still disgusted.

engineerworks 8y ago

If he liked keeping quiet he wouldn't need asylum in the first place.

bliblah 8y ago

After accusations of being a Russian mouthpiece during the 2016 election it might help their public image by releasing information regardless of how it might affect a former member.

phasnox 8y ago

Ecuadorian here. Revealing the truth is not insulting us. Most of our people are(or at least should be) grateful that corruption activities are disclosed.

ReptileMan 8y ago
But it is not your people that are hosting, but the government. The Equadorian government are literally the only people assange should be on the good side.
- gcb0 8y ago
  the irony of what you just said.

xster 8y ago

Us: you're clearly partisan because you only publish bad things against muh abuela. Also us: you don't self-censor to benefit your self-interest? That's just not smart.