7 ms·

Did you miss that WikiLeaks met with Trump campaign staff that had close relations with russian secret services and then leaked DNC campaign mails so that right

Did you miss that WikiLeaks met with Trump campaign staff that had close relations with russian secret services and then leaked DNC campaign mails so that right wing actors could make that into a pedophile pizza place conspiracy theory? I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone. They promised leaks on russian oligarchs that never happened. They promised to "bring down" Bank of America. They promised to release another video showing war crimes by the US that was never released. They criticized the release of the Panama Papers. People who still support WikiLeaks are either lunatics or they tend to have right wing agenda of their own.

sunshinerag 6y ago
so you did not care about the content of the DNC campaign mails? And you are asserting an order of events that hasn't be established... is that what ran in your mind?
- eli 6y ago
  What was newsworthy in the campaign emails that justified dumping a guy’s whole inbox?
  - px43 6y ago
    The illegal coordination between the Hillary campaign and the DNC was kind of a big deal, and did trigger a wave of corruption getting flushed out of the DNC. I voted for Hillary in 2016, she was by far the better candidate, but I also seeded the fuck out of those Podesta emails because DNC corruption is absolutely inexcusable.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      It wasn't illegal; DNC is a private org and sets its own rules. Name someone who went to jail over the content of the emails? The emails do demonstrate that the party game is rigged (i.e. parties have favorites and tilt the scales in their favor). That's not only legal, it's intended---the point of parties is to coalesce political power. The GOP demonstrates why the DNC is set up to tilt scales. GOP has fewer mechanisms to filter the popular vote in the party than the DNC does, and as a result, there was no backstop to Candidate Trump.
      - briantakita 6y ago
        So all this talk about Democracy is just one big show...
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        Democratic elections are how we choose between the candidates sponsored by the parties. Hypothetically, there's nothing actually stopping those elections from choosing someone outside the party, but when we're talking in election over a population of 350 million people, even getting an individual's name in front of the voters such that they think to write them in requires a level of organization on par with a national party. Popular votes also inform, but do not single-handedly control, who the parties sponsor. But the story of the parties themselves is a story of slowly widening democratic representation. The DNC system was even more tilted towards party insiders before the McGovern election. It's been pulling in popular vote over the decades, but it's not a mobocracy. I wouldn't be surprised if the RNC, after Trump, modifies its rules to add some kind of backstop against a television celebrity having so easy a path to the Presidency over career politicians.
        briantakita 6y ago
        Given the obvious election fraud caught on camera, forensic evidence, voter roll issues, intimidation of poll watchers, lack of transparency, & the lack actionable oversight that we saw in the 2020 election, is there any hope to reform the corrupt political system or even to ascertain "the consent of the governed"? If you add a backstop against political outsiers gaining office, only insiders who are under control of entrenched politicrats (who have no interest in reform), corrupt actors & revolving door beurcracats/lobbyists can win a significant political position. Thats a lot of words to say the whole system is rotten and any narrow window of reform is quickly shut... As George Carlin said: It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe
    - rendall 6y ago
      > .. did trigger a wave of corruption getting flushed out of the DNC Sadly, it resulted in only a shuffle of players around the board. Wasserman-Schultz has plenty of congressional committee and leadership appointments. Donna Brazile was rewarded with Wasserman-Schultz's old gig at the helm of the DNC for leaking debate questions to Clinton
    - eli 6y ago
      It wasn’t illegal, surprising, or even a particularly big deal that the DNC was leery of Sanders and had friends in the Clinton camp. If anything it’s remarkable that there was no there there. All those emails and there was barely anything that, even out of context, looked really bad. In the public imagination the hacked emails got conflated with the “Clinton email server”. The point was just to muddy the water. I wonder if the Russians dumped the whole inbox rather than selected messages because they couldn’t find any really bad ones.
  - rendall 6y ago
    You missed the part where Donna Brazile gave Presidential Debate questions to Hillary Clinton? Or the collusion between the DNC and NYT/WaPo to kneecap Sanders' campaign? The DNC strategy to promote Trump over the other GOP candidates? Edit: Downvote if you must, but the question was what was newsworthy about the DNC Wikileaks release. Is it incorrect or that you don't like it?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - thakoppno 6y ago
    the part that stands out to me is that the Clinton campaign and the media coordinated to elevate the candidacy of Trump, believing that he’d be easier to defeat in a general election
    - eli 6y ago
      An email said they wanted to elevate Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson. At the time those seemed like the easiest people to beat. That’s the big scandal? I guess that’s newsworthy in a very inside-baseball kind of way but I don’t think it justifies posting someone’s whole inbox online.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        The big scandal is the knowledge that third way democrats have moved so far to the right, that they need fascist-lite candidates on the right to contrast themselves with, to the point that they gave material support to the farthest right wing components of the republican party. The major message for two presidential campaigns has been "we must do everything possible to defeat Trump, and by that we mean not voting for progressives" is BS when the third wayers had a major hand in putting him in the White House to begin with, and their long term strategy more or less requires similar tactics in the future.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mhh__ 6y ago
I don't think people who support WikiLeaks are lunatics but it is clear now that Assange is obviously not merely a journalist.
- pydry 6y ago
  He's more journalist than most. Reprinting Twitter spats and press releases does not make you a journalist. Publishing newsworthy information in the public interest does.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    If you have an explicitly political motivation to all your reporting and what you choose to print does that make you any better?
    - briantakita 6y ago
      > If you have an explicitly political motivation to all your reporting and what you choose to print does that make you any better? Same could be said about the New York Time, the Washington Post, Fox, & NPR. All media outlets are biased. Some are more honest about it than others.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - pydry 6y ago
      I find it incredible that you think that the answer to this could be "no". Would you honestly rather read from an "unbiased" journalist who diligently repeats what both sides said on Twitter than a biased one that actually uncovered important new facts? Especially when that "unbiased" "journalist" probably is just as biased as Assange, anyway, and their only real purpose is to construct a filter bubble for you.
    - stale2002 6y ago
      > does that make you any better Yes. Because at least you are publishing new information. And then then people can decide for themselves how to interpret it.
Foober223 6y ago
> into a pedophile pizza place conspiracy theory The Epstein incident where they used the code word "pizza" for sex turned out to be real. Imaginations running wild turned that into a false conspiracy about a literal pizza shop. Is it fair to criticize wikileaks for unrelated parties imaginations running wild?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Pizza was never a codeword for sex---Epstein was wholly disjoint from the data Wikileaks divulged and was brought down by a long-running FBI investigation.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Maybe they were referring to Prince Andrew's alibi of being at a Pizza Express in Woking, UK? Which has nothing to do with "Pizzagate".
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      "false conspiracy about a literal pizza shop" is Pizzagate.
      - tyingq 6y ago
        A different pizza shop in a different country, but sure.
px43 6y ago
The BOA leak, and several others, got burned by that Daniel Dumbshit guy over some petty personal disputes on how Wikileaks was run. That's what the Benedict Cumberbatch movie was all about, told from the perspective of the shithead who wiped all that data. Wikileaks had an image of a Bank of America VP laptop with email discussion about the creation and exploitation of predatory loans, and a complete indifference to the eventual 2008 crash that they knew it would cause. As to the DNC stuff, yeah Assange was probabally used by the Russian intelligence, but it was probabally an easy sell. Hillary really did (maybe jokingly?) call for Assange to be assassinated when she was secretary of state. He had every reason in the world to cut off her ascent to power. If you want a really good look at Assange's humanity around the time of all the DNC craziness, Laura Portrias was living with him at the time and filming him all day every day, and turned it into a movie called "Risk". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ Very similar vibe to Citizen Four, but with Assange instead of Snowden. Also for some reason it didn't get much attention because all sides hating on Assange became super trendy around that time. For what it's worth, my political alignment is probabally far more liberal than the majority of people on this site, and I've been a Wikileaks supporter since they were just leaking internal fraternity documents.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  To sum this post up with the reference only. Recommended documentary by Laura Poitras about Assange, called Risk [1]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/
- nullc 6y ago
  > As to the DNC stuff, yeah Assange was probabally used by the Russian intelligence, but it was probabally an easy sell. Hillary really did (maybe jokingly?) call for Assange to be assassinated when she was secretary of state. He had every reason in the world to cut off her ascent to power. Hillary's joke (if that is what it was) was an assault. She had the means to actually carry out the murder she suggested. Such actions, even in jest, have been known to cause people to get killed when some subordinate takes it as an order. I think it takes a tremendous lack of empathy to not allow Assange a grudge against someone who quipped about murdering him and potentially the people around him, particularly someone with the awesome power of the united states behind them. Journalists often have their axes to grind and their blind spots. It isn't great but it's just something we have to factor in... and I think this is one that a lot more justifiable than most. And while he may have been used by Russia in the DNC leak, the leak revealed substantial unethical conduct that people were rightfully fired over. It brought transparency to the world that we deserved. If its publication depended on some bias on Assange's part, I think it wouldn't require much bias perhaps only would have been with respect to the timing of it.
AsyncAwait 6y ago
> I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone. Then you've been duped. The prosecution of Assange is based on his work with Chelsea Manning on US war crimes in Iraq. But if the lives of poor brown people far away are not as important as cheap partizanship then the CIA can make you believe anything. Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture. I presume you're OK with torture too as long as you think it serves your club?
- evgen 6y ago
  The only dupes at this point are the useful idiots who still support WikiLeaks. It has long since passed from being anything useful into being an cult of personality built around Assange.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I'd call it halfway between cult of personality and idealistic belief that maximizing free flow of information maximizes beneficial outcomes without attention to measuring whether that assumption is true. It turns out some secrets are harmful, and some are helpful to the stable function of a society. Practically speaking, I believe it is hard to make a case that Wikileaks has been a net positive, unless one can see a president Trump as part of a net positive story. On the flip side, history is also dotted with obvious examples of secret keeping resulting in long-term damage. The truth, I think, is that the beneficial nature of secrets is something you can only evaluate situationally.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. They catalyzed Arab Spring by pushing the delicate realm of international diplomacy into the eyes of the public, leading to hundreds of deaths and, fundamentally, no real change. Possibly setting back democracy in the Middle East by a generation or so. I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
austhrow743 6y ago
That they've over promised sounds like pretty weak reason to claim people that support them are either lunatics or right wing. Political campaign staff and people with ties to secret services seem like the exact sorts journalists should be meeting with. If they're one and the same even better.

sunshinerag 6y ago

so you did not care about the content of the DNC campaign mails? And you are asserting an order of events that hasn't be established... is that what ran in your mind?

eli 6y ago
What was newsworthy in the campaign emails that justified dumping a guy’s whole inbox?
- px43 6y ago
  The illegal coordination between the Hillary campaign and the DNC was kind of a big deal, and did trigger a wave of corruption getting flushed out of the DNC. I voted for Hillary in 2016, she was by far the better candidate, but I also seeded the fuck out of those Podesta emails because DNC corruption is absolutely inexcusable.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    It wasn't illegal; DNC is a private org and sets its own rules. Name someone who went to jail over the content of the emails? The emails do demonstrate that the party game is rigged (i.e. parties have favorites and tilt the scales in their favor). That's not only legal, it's intended---the point of parties is to coalesce political power. The GOP demonstrates why the DNC is set up to tilt scales. GOP has fewer mechanisms to filter the popular vote in the party than the DNC does, and as a result, there was no backstop to Candidate Trump.
    - briantakita 6y ago
      So all this talk about Democracy is just one big show...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        Democratic elections are how we choose between the candidates sponsored by the parties. Hypothetically, there's nothing actually stopping those elections from choosing someone outside the party, but when we're talking in election over a population of 350 million people, even getting an individual's name in front of the voters such that they think to write them in requires a level of organization on par with a national party. Popular votes also inform, but do not single-handedly control, who the parties sponsor. But the story of the parties themselves is a story of slowly widening democratic representation. The DNC system was even more tilted towards party insiders before the McGovern election. It's been pulling in popular vote over the decades, but it's not a mobocracy. I wouldn't be surprised if the RNC, after Trump, modifies its rules to add some kind of backstop against a television celebrity having so easy a path to the Presidency over career politicians.
        briantakita 6y ago
        Given the obvious election fraud caught on camera, forensic evidence, voter roll issues, intimidation of poll watchers, lack of transparency, & the lack actionable oversight that we saw in the 2020 election, is there any hope to reform the corrupt political system or even to ascertain "the consent of the governed"? If you add a backstop against political outsiers gaining office, only insiders who are under control of entrenched politicrats (who have no interest in reform), corrupt actors & revolving door beurcracats/lobbyists can win a significant political position. Thats a lot of words to say the whole system is rotten and any narrow window of reform is quickly shut... As George Carlin said: It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe
  - rendall 6y ago
    > .. did trigger a wave of corruption getting flushed out of the DNC Sadly, it resulted in only a shuffle of players around the board. Wasserman-Schultz has plenty of congressional committee and leadership appointments. Donna Brazile was rewarded with Wasserman-Schultz's old gig at the helm of the DNC for leaking debate questions to Clinton
  - eli 6y ago
    It wasn’t illegal, surprising, or even a particularly big deal that the DNC was leery of Sanders and had friends in the Clinton camp. If anything it’s remarkable that there was no there there. All those emails and there was barely anything that, even out of context, looked really bad. In the public imagination the hacked emails got conflated with the “Clinton email server”. The point was just to muddy the water. I wonder if the Russians dumped the whole inbox rather than selected messages because they couldn’t find any really bad ones.
- rendall 6y ago
  You missed the part where Donna Brazile gave Presidential Debate questions to Hillary Clinton? Or the collusion between the DNC and NYT/WaPo to kneecap Sanders' campaign? The DNC strategy to promote Trump over the other GOP candidates? Edit: Downvote if you must, but the question was what was newsworthy about the DNC Wikileaks release. Is it incorrect or that you don't like it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- thakoppno 6y ago
  the part that stands out to me is that the Clinton campaign and the media coordinated to elevate the candidacy of Trump, believing that he’d be easier to defeat in a general election
  - eli 6y ago
    An email said they wanted to elevate Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson. At the time those seemed like the easiest people to beat. That’s the big scandal? I guess that’s newsworthy in a very inside-baseball kind of way but I don’t think it justifies posting someone’s whole inbox online.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      The big scandal is the knowledge that third way democrats have moved so far to the right, that they need fascist-lite candidates on the right to contrast themselves with, to the point that they gave material support to the farthest right wing components of the republican party. The major message for two presidential campaigns has been "we must do everything possible to defeat Trump, and by that we mean not voting for progressives" is BS when the third wayers had a major hand in putting him in the White House to begin with, and their long term strategy more or less requires similar tactics in the future.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mhh__ 6y ago

I don't think people who support WikiLeaks are lunatics but it is clear now that Assange is obviously not merely a journalist.

pydry 6y ago
He's more journalist than most. Reprinting Twitter spats and press releases does not make you a journalist. Publishing newsworthy information in the public interest does.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  If you have an explicitly political motivation to all your reporting and what you choose to print does that make you any better?
  - briantakita 6y ago
    > If you have an explicitly political motivation to all your reporting and what you choose to print does that make you any better? Same could be said about the New York Time, the Washington Post, Fox, & NPR. All media outlets are biased. Some are more honest about it than others.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pydry 6y ago
    I find it incredible that you think that the answer to this could be "no". Would you honestly rather read from an "unbiased" journalist who diligently repeats what both sides said on Twitter than a biased one that actually uncovered important new facts? Especially when that "unbiased" "journalist" probably is just as biased as Assange, anyway, and their only real purpose is to construct a filter bubble for you.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    > does that make you any better Yes. Because at least you are publishing new information. And then then people can decide for themselves how to interpret it.

Foober223 6y ago

> into a pedophile pizza place conspiracy theory The Epstein incident where they used the code word "pizza" for sex turned out to be real. Imaginations running wild turned that into a false conspiracy about a literal pizza shop. Is it fair to criticize wikileaks for unrelated parties imaginations running wild?

shadowgovt 6y ago
Pizza was never a codeword for sex---Epstein was wholly disjoint from the data Wikileaks divulged and was brought down by a long-running FBI investigation.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Maybe they were referring to Prince Andrew's alibi of being at a Pizza Express in Woking, UK? Which has nothing to do with "Pizzagate".
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    "false conspiracy about a literal pizza shop" is Pizzagate.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      A different pizza shop in a different country, but sure.

px43 6y ago

The BOA leak, and several others, got burned by that Daniel Dumbshit guy over some petty personal disputes on how Wikileaks was run. That's what the Benedict Cumberbatch movie was all about, told from the perspective of the shithead who wiped all that data. Wikileaks had an image of a Bank of America VP laptop with email discussion about the creation and exploitation of predatory loans, and a complete indifference to the eventual 2008 crash that they knew it would cause. As to the DNC stuff, yeah Assange was probabally used by the Russian intelligence, but it was probabally an easy sell. Hillary really did (maybe jokingly?) call for Assange to be assassinated when she was secretary of state. He had every reason in the world to cut off her ascent to power. If you want a really good look at Assange's humanity around the time of all the DNC craziness, Laura Portrias was living with him at the time and filming him all day every day, and turned it into a movie called "Risk". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ Very similar vibe to Citizen Four, but with Assange instead of Snowden. Also for some reason it didn't get much attention because all sides hating on Assange became super trendy around that time. For what it's worth, my political alignment is probabally far more liberal than the majority of people on this site, and I've been a Wikileaks supporter since they were just leaking internal fraternity documents.

Fnoord 6y ago
To sum this post up with the reference only. Recommended documentary by Laura Poitras about Assange, called Risk [1]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4964772/
nullc 6y ago
> As to the DNC stuff, yeah Assange was probabally used by the Russian intelligence, but it was probabally an easy sell. Hillary really did (maybe jokingly?) call for Assange to be assassinated when she was secretary of state. He had every reason in the world to cut off her ascent to power. Hillary's joke (if that is what it was) was an assault. She had the means to actually carry out the murder she suggested. Such actions, even in jest, have been known to cause people to get killed when some subordinate takes it as an order. I think it takes a tremendous lack of empathy to not allow Assange a grudge against someone who quipped about murdering him and potentially the people around him, particularly someone with the awesome power of the united states behind them. Journalists often have their axes to grind and their blind spots. It isn't great but it's just something we have to factor in... and I think this is one that a lot more justifiable than most. And while he may have been used by Russia in the DNC leak, the leak revealed substantial unethical conduct that people were rightfully fired over. It brought transparency to the world that we deserved. If its publication depended on some bias on Assange's part, I think it wouldn't require much bias perhaps only would have been with respect to the timing of it.

AsyncAwait 6y ago

> I used to be a big WikiLeaks supporter but these days are long gone. Then you've been duped. The prosecution of Assange is based on his work with Chelsea Manning on US war crimes in Iraq. But if the lives of poor brown people far away are not as important as cheap partizanship then the CIA can make you believe anything. Not to mention the fact HRC called for the assassination of Assange and his treatment has been characterized by the UN as torture. I presume you're OK with torture too as long as you think it serves your club?

evgen 6y ago
The only dupes at this point are the useful idiots who still support WikiLeaks. It has long since passed from being anything useful into being an cult of personality built around Assange.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I'd call it halfway between cult of personality and idealistic belief that maximizing free flow of information maximizes beneficial outcomes without attention to measuring whether that assumption is true. It turns out some secrets are harmful, and some are helpful to the stable function of a society. Practically speaking, I believe it is hard to make a case that Wikileaks has been a net positive, unless one can see a president Trump as part of a net positive story. On the flip side, history is also dotted with obvious examples of secret keeping resulting in long-term damage. The truth, I think, is that the beneficial nature of secrets is something you can only evaluate situationally.
shadowgovt 6y ago
The Manning leaks were hugely irresponsible. While whistleblowing is a vital activity, the data dumps Manning pulled from the military network and State Department were unredacted raw dumps. They catalyzed Arab Spring by pushing the delicate realm of international diplomacy into the eyes of the public, leading to hundreds of deaths and, fundamentally, no real change. Possibly setting back democracy in the Middle East by a generation or so. I like Manning as a person, but state secrets exist for a reason and she deserved to be imprisoned for her crimes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

austhrow743 6y ago

That they've over promised sounds like pretty weak reason to claim people that support them are either lunatics or right wing. Political campaign staff and people with ties to secret services seem like the exact sorts journalists should be meeting with. If they're one and the same even better.