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What is not equal is the asymmetry of the information. In 2016 (2015?) the information was skewed to that provided by Russian intelligence. If there were equa

by e40 6y ago

What is not equal is the asymmetry of the information. In 2016 (2015?) the information was skewed to that provided by Russian intelligence. If there were equal amounts of dirt on every politician, then fine, but there is clearly not. This is what bothers me about the whole thing. It can be manipulated by powerful states, and some of them are more willing to use it than others.

erentz 6y ago
I would like to see the dirt on every politician also. But I'm not going to complain because I can only see the dirt on some of them. And if Wikileaks received information about Politician D and did not publish it because they did not have equal information about Politician R to release at the same time then they would be taking an editorial bias in favor of D. Now if you show that Wikileaks sat on information about R, then there is something serious to point at. Until then, to me it sounds like everyone who complains about this is really just upset that their preferred politicians dirt was exposed and they think they should be allowed to get away with it.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  How do you know Wikileaks does all of these things? How do you audit wikileaks?
  - erentz 6y ago
    You can’t know, and you don’t need to know. I think that’s really missing point of what I said. There is no requirement that Wikileaks or any media only publishes simultaneous dirt on opposing politicians. That would be impossible and can never make sense by the own twisted standards people who complain about Wikileaks are constantly coming up with. To make it possible would mean wikileaks would have to hold back publishing dirt on one until they had enough on the other. Which automatically makes Wikileaks biased in that time period in favor of the one they hold back on. Complaining about Wikileaks publishing dirt makes no sense. The only thing that can make sense is if evidence were ever leaked from a whistleblower in Wikileaks that they had dirt on someone they didn’t leak. Then you’d have evidence of bias. Until then there is none.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      You're missing the point. How do you know that wikileaks is trustworthy? Answer please.
      - erentz 6y ago
        That’s an impossible question for any organization but it’s entirely irrelevant and that’s what you’re missing. The information they leaked was real and important. Where it came from is secondary matter. People only got worked up about it because the information was about their preferred politician. The information could not be disputed, it was correct and not fabricated. But they cared more that dirt was leaked than the fact their politician was dirty. They should examine their principals.
davrosthedalek 6y ago
Additionally, the same dirt is damaging to different degrees, depending on the person it's about. See current politics in the US. But I would also think that a US president-approved hit on somebody in, say England, would be treated differently than the hits perpetrated by Russia. It's a complicated balance act. You want to hold "your" party accountable, and the scale is not "better than the others". At the same time, you don't want to diminish the difference, by just talking about your side's problems. A "we publish everything we get" policy is then not necessarily balanced, if one party plays this game, and the other doesn't.
belorn 6y ago
> there were equal amounts of dirt on every politician, then fine, but there is clearly not. If we are talking about the 2016 election then there is actually data on how much dirt was being thrown around. Looking at all the scandals being printed in news papers, with the big ones being the email scandals for Clinton and audio tapes for trump, the data as presented in a research paper was that the intensity of scandal articles was higher for Trump, but the duration of articles was higher for Clinton. Trump scandals got focused in the news during the last month of the election, while the Clinton scandals had been published on and off for almost a half year. In total, articles writing about scandals was around 3-4 times more in total for Clinton and distributed over a half year, than those of trump which was distributed over the last month of the election. The general conclusion I got from that research is that dirt that can be dripped over a long period has a better chance to stick than a louder but shorter lived dirt. It also makes comparing one kind of dirt to an other difficult. This lesson seems to have been taken in by heart in the Snowden leaks and panamaleaks, both which stretched out their leaks for months.

by e40 6y ago

erentz 6y ago

I would like to see the dirt on every politician also. But I'm not going to complain because I can only see the dirt on some of them. And if Wikileaks received information about Politician D and did not publish it because they did not have equal information about Politician R to release at the same time then they would be taking an editorial bias in favor of D. Now if you show that Wikileaks sat on information about R, then there is something serious to point at. Until then, to me it sounds like everyone who complains about this is really just upset that their preferred politicians dirt was exposed and they think they should be allowed to get away with it.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
How do you know Wikileaks does all of these things? How do you audit wikileaks?
- erentz 6y ago
  You can’t know, and you don’t need to know. I think that’s really missing point of what I said. There is no requirement that Wikileaks or any media only publishes simultaneous dirt on opposing politicians. That would be impossible and can never make sense by the own twisted standards people who complain about Wikileaks are constantly coming up with. To make it possible would mean wikileaks would have to hold back publishing dirt on one until they had enough on the other. Which automatically makes Wikileaks biased in that time period in favor of the one they hold back on. Complaining about Wikileaks publishing dirt makes no sense. The only thing that can make sense is if evidence were ever leaked from a whistleblower in Wikileaks that they had dirt on someone they didn’t leak. Then you’d have evidence of bias. Until then there is none.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    You're missing the point. How do you know that wikileaks is trustworthy? Answer please.
    - erentz 6y ago
      That’s an impossible question for any organization but it’s entirely irrelevant and that’s what you’re missing. The information they leaked was real and important. Where it came from is secondary matter. People only got worked up about it because the information was about their preferred politician. The information could not be disputed, it was correct and not fabricated. But they cared more that dirt was leaked than the fact their politician was dirty. They should examine their principals.

davrosthedalek 6y ago

Additionally, the same dirt is damaging to different degrees, depending on the person it's about. See current politics in the US. But I would also think that a US president-approved hit on somebody in, say England, would be treated differently than the hits perpetrated by Russia. It's a complicated balance act. You want to hold "your" party accountable, and the scale is not "better than the others". At the same time, you don't want to diminish the difference, by just talking about your side's problems. A "we publish everything we get" policy is then not necessarily balanced, if one party plays this game, and the other doesn't.

belorn 6y ago

> there were equal amounts of dirt on every politician, then fine, but there is clearly not. If we are talking about the 2016 election then there is actually data on how much dirt was being thrown around. Looking at all the scandals being printed in news papers, with the big ones being the email scandals for Clinton and audio tapes for trump, the data as presented in a research paper was that the intensity of scandal articles was higher for Trump, but the duration of articles was higher for Clinton. Trump scandals got focused in the news during the last month of the election, while the Clinton scandals had been published on and off for almost a half year. In total, articles writing about scandals was around 3-4 times more in total for Clinton and distributed over a half year, than those of trump which was distributed over the last month of the election. The general conclusion I got from that research is that dirt that can be dripped over a long period has a better chance to stick than a louder but shorter lived dirt. It also makes comparing one kind of dirt to an other difficult. This lesson seems to have been taken in by heart in the Snowden leaks and panamaleaks, both which stretched out their leaks for months.