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Your comment seems to imply that I support Assange. Please read my comment again, carefully. You will notice that I said nothing about whether Assange or his

Your comment seems to imply that I support Assange. Please read my comment again, carefully. You will notice that I said nothing about whether Assange or his actions are good or not. I tried only to refute the parent's claim that Wikileaks acted with partisanship when it released the emails. "Simple people talk about people. Common people talk about events. Highly intelligent people talk about ideas." Government transparency is necessary to prevent a never-ending dark age of fascism and suffering. Organizations like Wikileaks support democracy and thereby support human progress. Assange is not a nice person and that doesn't matter. Julian Assange started and ran Wikileaks, and thereby contributed massively to the welfare of humanity.

edmundsauto 5y ago
How has anything from Wikileaks massively improved the lot of collective humanity? I genuinely don’t know - it seems like he released a bunch of stuff that revealed bad behavior, but how has that improved anyone’s welfare in a material sense?
- heavenlyblue 5y ago
  So you are implying that the information about bad behaviour should not be released because there was no act upon it?
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    No, I was asking if anyone had insight into the results of the leaks. Has it affected change?
    - TeeMassive 5y ago
      People are much more aware of privacy and how their innocuous private life details can be used against them. Thank you Wikileaks for helping Snowden find a safe harbor. The Collateral Damage leaks greatly reduced the credibility of the US military as a worldwide humanist agent. The alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime was used as a justification for a full blown invasion of Syria; yet the political push back was too strong and the attacks were reduced to air strikes. Thank you Wikileaks for publishing the cables showing how US had plans in motion to topple Assad since a very long time. But more importantly people are beginning to question their government and that is a good thing.
      - edmundsauto 5y ago
        People have long questioned their government; it’s almost written into the US culture. That same distrust, stoked by Reagan, is part Of the reason we haven’t reached here immunity. I agree with some of what you said, directionally - some people are more aware of their privacy. Some people have also tuned out the arguments because they appear to be noise. It’s also hard to judge something when we don’t know effect size, or even if it was causal, however. Many of your points are good examples and I appreciate you posting them.

edmundsauto 5y ago

How has anything from Wikileaks massively improved the lot of collective humanity? I genuinely don’t know - it seems like he released a bunch of stuff that revealed bad behavior, but how has that improved anyone’s welfare in a material sense?

heavenlyblue 5y ago
So you are implying that the information about bad behaviour should not be released because there was no act upon it?
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  No, I was asking if anyone had insight into the results of the leaks. Has it affected change?
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    People are much more aware of privacy and how their innocuous private life details can be used against them. Thank you Wikileaks for helping Snowden find a safe harbor. The Collateral Damage leaks greatly reduced the credibility of the US military as a worldwide humanist agent. The alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime was used as a justification for a full blown invasion of Syria; yet the political push back was too strong and the attacks were reduced to air strikes. Thank you Wikileaks for publishing the cables showing how US had plans in motion to topple Assad since a very long time. But more importantly people are beginning to question their government and that is a good thing.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      People have long questioned their government; it’s almost written into the US culture. That same distrust, stoked by Reagan, is part Of the reason we haven’t reached here immunity. I agree with some of what you said, directionally - some people are more aware of their privacy. Some people have also tuned out the arguments because they appear to be noise. It’s also hard to judge something when we don’t know effect size, or even if it was causal, however. Many of your points are good examples and I appreciate you posting them.