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Practically speaking a good outcome for Assange, but a bad outcome for our rights to free speech and free reporting in a liberal democracy. The US have killed m

• erfgh 6y ago
  whataboutism is a logical fallacy.
  • jonathanstrange 6y ago
    Not necessarily in this area. Wikileaks has exposed a number of US war crimes that went completely unpunished, while a person who was working on behalf of Wikileaks is being prosecuted on grounds that are fairly constructed and far-fetched even by US standards. Morally speaking, even if some of Assange's actions were immoral they might be considered excusable because the perils were outweighed by the benefits of these actions. It's not uncommon to reason that way. The same kind of reasoning is used to justify the means by the ends, e.g. purporters of the US drone strike program argue that the many civilian bystanders that are killed by those strikes are justifiable by the end, which is the extrajudicial killing of the alleged terrorist targets. It's called a balance of consideration argument, sometimes also "conductive argument". Obviously, the legal question is different from this, IANAL and I don't even know if lawyers use conductive arguments in this way. The judge in this extradition case certainly didn't, but that's not surprising since her job wasn't to judge Assange's actions.
    • jboog 6y ago
      Assange literally encouraged people to infiltrate US intelligence agencies and "leak" classified intel. Let's not even get into his work laundering Russian hacked docs to damage the US, and then repeatedly lying about it. He also is credibly accused of being a rapist. The US has done some bad shit, no doubt, but that doesn't make Assange some saint. He's a bad dude.
      • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
        If I encourage people to leak Chinese classified documents, would that make me a bad dude too? I don’t think your reasoning is sound here.
        • jboog 6y ago
          If you raped two women, encouraged people to steal Chinese intel, and then worked with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda, yes, indeed you would be a bad dude.
      • JAlexoid 6y ago
        CIA literally funded drug cartels. Obama literally authorized a drone strike on a "suspected terrorist US citizen" in Yemen. While the rape accusation was retracted. There's no equivalence of a proven fact vs accusation. Assange is unquestionably on a moral high ground here.
        • jboog 6y ago
          This is a straight-up lie. The accusations were never retracted. The women have maintained their allegations ever since. and Not even going to respond to your whataboutism here, just lazy argumentation.
  • konjin 6y ago
    Calling out logical fallacies is a logical fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy It comes from not understanding the difference between logical entailment and logical equivalence when given a set of premises and a conclusion. I'd've hoped programmers would have taken enough discrete maths to know this.
    • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      > I'd've hoped programmers would have taken enough discrete maths to know this. It’s not that I haven’t - but I’m 8 years out of uni and have completely forgotten how to apply Modus tollens and I suspect I’m not alone.
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    Being a hypocrite isn't a logical fallacy, but it isn't a good rhetorical stance for convincing others.
  • swebs 6y ago
    Its a deflection, not a fallacy.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Referencing the US war crimes that Assange helped expose is important though. I'm not denying Assange committed crimes by leaking or helping to leak secret documents, but it was the moral thing to do to expose war crimes that would otherwise be (and which are being) covered up. In this case, the UK should not only consider the extradition request itself, but how they stand with regards to the US and their war crimes. And when it comes to war crimes, for the UK to be silent is to be complicit.
• tedk-42 6y ago
  You forgot Obama https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/18/commentary/world-commentary/obama-war-peace/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/18/commentary/w...
  • h0l0cube 6y ago
    What's particularly disappointing is that Obama was elected after promising to end US military operations in the Middle East, and did much the opposite. Bush could at least be said to be doing what was expected of him, in continuing the legacy of his father. Voters should really be holding their leaders to account the fiscal and moral costs of these wars, especially given their strategic objectives haven't been met. OTOH, one could argue it's kept a lot of people employed, and those people vote too.
    • op03 6y ago
      Well Obama like Trump is a celeb more than a leader. Celebs spend all day pandering to their fan clubs to survive. Leaders dont. And the US is celeb obsessed. So thats a big bug in the code.
      • Dirlewanger 6y ago
        You're getting downvoted, but it's true. Obama ushered in the age of the political personality cult. Pretty much every election from here on out is going to hinge on how well you can sell the politician's personality, and brushing aside his platform, all his shady connections and people he's aligned with. This is very much a byproduct of all the private money in election campaigning.
        • reallydontask 6y ago
          I find it hard to square your statement with the election of Joe Biden, is he an outlier? I guess only time will tell.
          • 6y ago
• mrkramer 6y ago
  European colonial empires killed millions as well and faced no prosecution. Never forget what Hitler said; he said that concentration camps were not his idea instead he learnt about it from reading about British concentration camps during the Second Boer War in which thousands of Boers died.
  • frenchy 6y ago
    Not to mention there was Hitler's quote about how no-one remembers the Armenian genocide. He wasn't even wrong about that, as few remember the brutality that the Nazis exacted on the Poles.
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    And the inspiration for the gas chambers came from US border posts with Mexico, where anyone coming in from Mexico had to have their clothes fumigated with Zyklon-B and themselves bathed in gasoline (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5176177&t=1609770957354 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=517617...).
    • ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      There's a big difference between using chemicals to prevent disease from entering your country (However misguided) and using it as a tool for mass murder and genocide.
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    The comparison is silly. While the Boer War concentration camps were brutal, they were nothing on par with the Nazis. In fact “concentration camp” is largely a misnomer. The sizable majority of Holocaust victims were killed in extermination camps, like Treblinka. These never even purported to hold any prisoner population, and simply murdered all prisoners immediately upon arrival. The British have no shortage of problems. But nothing in their history is even remotely comparable to Hitler.
    • smcl 6y ago
• andy_ppp 6y ago
  US soldiers did not kill millions of people, Iraq is somewhere between 100000 and 650000 excess deaths to Oct 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_cas... The criticisms in the Wikipedia are very detailed and imply there are problems with the 650000 figure of which 186000 are due to US troops direct actions. That still seems high, but you know being caught in the middle of a civil war is challenging.
  • jjgreen 6y ago
    I recall Iraq being more of an invasion than a civil war.
    • kmeisthax 6y ago
      It's complicated, because it started out as "smash the state and let democracy reassert itself". Everyone involved in the room had such a broken mental model of what the Iraqi population was like. American politicians have been getting drunk off the rhetoric of democracy for some time, and we typically forget that most governments are precariously balanced between multiple competing socioeconomic elements with eternal and unending grudges between one another. In the case of Iraq, what started as "invade and impose democracy" quickly progressed into policing sectarian violence as America inherited Saddam's problems.
      • capableweb 6y ago
        > America inherited Saddam's problems Sounds like not only the American politicians were drunk on something, what the hell are you talking about? In no way have the US been through the same pile of shit that Iraq has been through, and neither have any of those problems suddenly walked over the ocean home to the US. Sure, the US has their nose wet in Iraqi and Afghan blood, but let's not pretend and say that US takes any sort of responsibility for the bloodshed they've caused. Otherwise I agree with your comment.
    • austincheney 6y ago
      Iraq began as an invasion in March 2003. The invasion was exceedingly well planned and executed with minimal cost in a very short time frame, but the planning did not account for the resulting occupation that followed. Key figures in Iraq, such as Ali Al Sistani, pressed US civilian authorities to stand up an interim government until a permanent government could be drafted. The interim government stood up in May 2004. But by that time Iraq had become a political vacuum with disastrous results. Various external political factions from terrorist groups and nation states were massively importing arms and radicalized youth to instigate internal tribal warfare and acts of terrorism. Shortly after the interim government stood up GEN Casey took over command of coalition forces in Iraq and promoted a hand's off policy and letting the Iraqis clean up the mess, which further compounded the internal problems when Iraq really needed a strong occupation force to stabilize conditions until conditions allowed the capabilities for self governance. GEN Casey was replaced two years later in 2006. In mid-2006 it really looked like Iraq was on the verge of civil war and the US completely reversed policy by late 2006 announcing a troop surge in 2007. The successful command policies of COL HR McMaster were given some credit for exemplifying a successful approach. GEN Petraeus took command of coalition forces in Iraq and advocated a policy of counter-insurgency (COIN) that made significant advances at reducing internal violence and building trust in internal institutions. Over the next two years the surge declined to prior troop levels with forces more engaged in peace keeping and stability missions. In 2009 coalition forces were drastically reduced in what was called a withdrawal. By that time Iraq was no longer on the verge of civil war. Conditions were improving and permanent government institutions were coming online. Unfortunately, the withdrawal was too early. Newly established Iraqi military forces were still conducting peace keeping and stability missions and had not matured enough yet to focus on national defense. This became apparent with the ISIS invasion of Mosul.