5 ms·

Congratulations! I share in the popular jubilation and sense of epoch-making reconciliation, that aligns with the stars, even tho I think Assange acted like an

Congratulations! I share in the popular jubilation and sense of epoch-making reconciliation, that aligns with the stars, even tho I think Assange acted like an egotistical fool who squandered the great lens of transparency and accountability he had created through misjudged self-importance and vulnerability to manipulation by his sources for their own ends. Hopefully his Second Act brings good fruits without the thorns and rot of the previous ages. Good luck to him!

keepamovin 2y ago
53 points and counting
drekipus 2y ago
Yes, we should whip him for not having a level head when the entire US government is against him. Someone like you and I would have been sure to keep humble and not be egotistical when seeking asylum and fair justice against an entity that has military bases all over the world
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Well you don't know what I would do (except for what I'm saying here where you can see I wouldn't do what he did! haha), but I understand if you're speaking for yourself. I think precisely in that situation is when you need that kind of ability. But I wouldn't say we should whip him! Again speaking for yourself I suppose hahahahahaha! :)
  - radu_floricica 2y ago
    I don't know there's a teapot on Mars either. But it's an easy guess.
    - keepamovin 2y ago
      The silence and arrogance of the HN COMMENTARIAT makes this point unwinnable for you. You miss a key emotional boundary: to cannot know. You dismiss just undermines by revealing lack of empathy
- mschuster91 2y ago
  I think the person you're replying to is referring to the accusations against WikiLeaks of just dumping raw documents without at least removing information that could lead to identifying (and thus endangering) people who e.g. assisted the US in Afghanistan or who provided documents to WL in the first place. Yes, there was a point in getting the information out as fast as possible, but I think it's fair to blame Assange for not putting in the redaction work.
  - vasco 2y ago
    If they removed that, the machinery of the US would come up with another angle to say what he did was very bad. This should be obvious.
  - loup-vaillant 2y ago
    If I recall correctly, the endangering information was not originally published by Wikileaks, but by other journalists (the decryption key was written in a book or something, my memory is fuzzy on this); and Wikileaks only published the whole thing once the cat was already out of the bag. To sum this up, they were putting the redaction work, but someone else failed to, and at that point it was too late.
    - rjzzleep 2y ago
      The material was shared with The Guardian and several other (including prominent US) media outlets, they are the ones that published it unredacted. Never was there any proof provided that those articles caused any harm to any personnel at any point in time. Those media outlets that are in fact guilty of what Assange/Wikileaks was accused of jumped at the first opportunity to throw Assange under the bus.
  - underlipton 2y ago
    Something tangential that I don't think has happened, but that I'd be curious to see the results of: an analysis of the number of people endangered by Wikileaks disclosures versus the number of people endangered by Americans abandoning interpreters and collaborators, or other action expressly consistent with US policy. With how mad we are about him fcking over our people, surely we haven't fcked them over ourselves at a higher rate.
- jonathanstrange 2y ago
  People are so sure he made the wrong choice when he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, but I wonder how they can be so sure. At the time, his biggest worry was to get assassinated or get snatched off the street and end up in a secret CIA torture prison. Neither of these fears were unjustified. Add to this the belief that US maximum security prisons are blatant violations of basic human rights and the belief that the UK and Sweden are close allies of the US, and his actions made perfect sense. His notoriety and his choices saved him from either of these fates, albeit at a high price. Did he make the right choices? Who knows. There is always a lot of counterfactual reasoning involved.
  - nextaccountic 2y ago
    The worst choice he made in this period was to be a terrible guest and eventually be evicted. However he had going through psychological problems and honestly I'm not sure if he wouldn't be evicted regardless (the new president was aligned with the US and wanted him gone)
mc32 2y ago
I hope he does something on X where he delivers dead drops given to him by whistleblowers on an episodal basis, and he grows big enough that he become _the_ place to go when you want to blow the whistle, whether it be rushed pharmaceuticals, govt morally dubious black ops, bad NGOs, front orgs, etc.
- zztop44 2y ago
  Is this a joke? If so I don’t get it. You’re describing Wikileaks.
  - mc32 2y ago
    With a personality and context, with guests to discuss. Wikileaks was dry and left up to other journalists to write stories. Few journalists would do that today because most now toe the main line -or they think it’ll give the “other guy” cover. No one bucks the incumbents these days. See anyone criticizing any western government actions these days? It’s not like there isn’t any fodder.
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      This is an idiotic statement. The governments I'm most familiar with are criticised daily. The most recent: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jun/25/how-tory-neglect-flooded-britains-rivers-with-sewage https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jun...
      - lukan 2y ago
        'When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.' https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - dns_snek 2y ago
        All of this is petty criticism, it makes headlines one day and it's gone the next. You're allowed to say anything as long as it doesn't threaten to effect real change, you're allowed to protest as long as you do it at a scheduled time and place without seriously inconveniencing anyone, and you're allowed to expose crimes as long as they don't pose a serious threat to the institutions or people in power. It gives us an illusion of freedom of speech for the 99.9% while the heavy hitters are taken care of through persecution, false prosecution, torture, and occasional murder.
DaoVeles 2y ago
Couldn't have said it any better. People have polarized him and his actions but it is a marbled tapestry of right and wrong - good and bad.
dclowd9901 2y ago
I’m not sure if I care at all that he was capitalizing on it. Frankly, I wouldn’t care if this info was dropped by the Kardashians on a very special episode. It was crucial public information and it needed to get out one way or another. If vanity is an incentivizing factor toward someone taking that risk, so be it. What is it about someone being incentivized to be a whistleblower, in your mind, changes the validation of the act?
- keepamovin 2y ago
  That’s not it, but valid point in your domain. It’s what happened to him after fame
nemo44x 2y ago
No one is perfect. But overall his actions were brave and he paid a terrible price. The worst part is probably that what he published ended up making no real difference.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Agree. But that’s the issue with modern discourse: no sense of values. We cannot discuss nuance without feeling desperate to reduce everything to safe binary moral surety
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 2y ago
  It is difficult to see the difference but very few people are privy to the planning of the programs revealed. Only those who oversaw the entirety of the programs can really grasp the scope due to the compartmented nature of the programs. I think these disclosures helped arrest a rapid decay into a dystopian surveillance state. However the motivations and irrational belief systems behind these programs persist so the fight is not over. Instead the proponents of unchecked surveillance powers are increasingly on the defensive and face more scrutiny than their arguments and results can justify leading to a continued reigning in of their powers that seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. I’m not satisfied with this state of affairs but I am unsure how to reach a better one with the power systems and officials at hand. If you have any ideas please share.
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    Doubt Assange arrested anything. The forces in league with survey are beyond government
  - nemo44x 2y ago
    I don't think there's any way to "fight the system" or w/e without becoming the system, or a part of it, as the system will consume whatever is useful and generates more power for itself. It co-ops everything. It's a useful lesson from the book Gravity's Rainbow. The only thing you can do is to fly under the radar and not participate, or participate as little as possible, and build your communities and relationships outside of it.

keepamovin 2y ago

53 points and counting

drekipus 2y ago

Yes, we should whip him for not having a level head when the entire US government is against him. Someone like you and I would have been sure to keep humble and not be egotistical when seeking asylum and fair justice against an entity that has military bases all over the world

keepamovin 2y ago
Well you don't know what I would do (except for what I'm saying here where you can see I wouldn't do what he did! haha), but I understand if you're speaking for yourself. I think precisely in that situation is when you need that kind of ability. But I wouldn't say we should whip him! Again speaking for yourself I suppose hahahahahaha! :)
- radu_floricica 2y ago
  I don't know there's a teapot on Mars either. But it's an easy guess.
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    The silence and arrogance of the HN COMMENTARIAT makes this point unwinnable for you. You miss a key emotional boundary: to cannot know. You dismiss just undermines by revealing lack of empathy
mschuster91 2y ago
I think the person you're replying to is referring to the accusations against WikiLeaks of just dumping raw documents without at least removing information that could lead to identifying (and thus endangering) people who e.g. assisted the US in Afghanistan or who provided documents to WL in the first place. Yes, there was a point in getting the information out as fast as possible, but I think it's fair to blame Assange for not putting in the redaction work.
- vasco 2y ago
  If they removed that, the machinery of the US would come up with another angle to say what he did was very bad. This should be obvious.
- loup-vaillant 2y ago
  If I recall correctly, the endangering information was not originally published by Wikileaks, but by other journalists (the decryption key was written in a book or something, my memory is fuzzy on this); and Wikileaks only published the whole thing once the cat was already out of the bag. To sum this up, they were putting the redaction work, but someone else failed to, and at that point it was too late.
  - rjzzleep 2y ago
    The material was shared with The Guardian and several other (including prominent US) media outlets, they are the ones that published it unredacted. Never was there any proof provided that those articles caused any harm to any personnel at any point in time. Those media outlets that are in fact guilty of what Assange/Wikileaks was accused of jumped at the first opportunity to throw Assange under the bus.
- underlipton 2y ago
  Something tangential that I don't think has happened, but that I'd be curious to see the results of: an analysis of the number of people endangered by Wikileaks disclosures versus the number of people endangered by Americans abandoning interpreters and collaborators, or other action expressly consistent with US policy. With how mad we are about him fcking over our people, surely we haven't fcked them over ourselves at a higher rate.
jonathanstrange 2y ago
People are so sure he made the wrong choice when he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, but I wonder how they can be so sure. At the time, his biggest worry was to get assassinated or get snatched off the street and end up in a secret CIA torture prison. Neither of these fears were unjustified. Add to this the belief that US maximum security prisons are blatant violations of basic human rights and the belief that the UK and Sweden are close allies of the US, and his actions made perfect sense. His notoriety and his choices saved him from either of these fates, albeit at a high price. Did he make the right choices? Who knows. There is always a lot of counterfactual reasoning involved.
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  The worst choice he made in this period was to be a terrible guest and eventually be evicted. However he had going through psychological problems and honestly I'm not sure if he wouldn't be evicted regardless (the new president was aligned with the US and wanted him gone)

mc32 2y ago

I hope he does something on X where he delivers dead drops given to him by whistleblowers on an episodal basis, and he grows big enough that he become _the_ place to go when you want to blow the whistle, whether it be rushed pharmaceuticals, govt morally dubious black ops, bad NGOs, front orgs, etc.

zztop44 2y ago
Is this a joke? If so I don’t get it. You’re describing Wikileaks.
- mc32 2y ago
  With a personality and context, with guests to discuss. Wikileaks was dry and left up to other journalists to write stories. Few journalists would do that today because most now toe the main line -or they think it’ll give the “other guy” cover. No one bucks the incumbents these days. See anyone criticizing any western government actions these days? It’s not like there isn’t any fodder.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    This is an idiotic statement. The governments I'm most familiar with are criticised daily. The most recent: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jun/25/how-tory-neglect-flooded-britains-rivers-with-sewage https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jun...
    - lukan 2y ago
      'When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.' https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      All of this is petty criticism, it makes headlines one day and it's gone the next. You're allowed to say anything as long as it doesn't threaten to effect real change, you're allowed to protest as long as you do it at a scheduled time and place without seriously inconveniencing anyone, and you're allowed to expose crimes as long as they don't pose a serious threat to the institutions or people in power. It gives us an illusion of freedom of speech for the 99.9% while the heavy hitters are taken care of through persecution, false prosecution, torture, and occasional murder.

DaoVeles 2y ago

Couldn't have said it any better. People have polarized him and his actions but it is a marbled tapestry of right and wrong - good and bad.

dclowd9901 2y ago

I’m not sure if I care at all that he was capitalizing on it. Frankly, I wouldn’t care if this info was dropped by the Kardashians on a very special episode. It was crucial public information and it needed to get out one way or another. If vanity is an incentivizing factor toward someone taking that risk, so be it. What is it about someone being incentivized to be a whistleblower, in your mind, changes the validation of the act?

keepamovin 2y ago
That’s not it, but valid point in your domain. It’s what happened to him after fame

nemo44x 2y ago

No one is perfect. But overall his actions were brave and he paid a terrible price. The worst part is probably that what he published ended up making no real difference.

keepamovin 2y ago
Agree. But that’s the issue with modern discourse: no sense of values. We cannot discuss nuance without feeling desperate to reduce everything to safe binary moral surety
Red_Leaves_Flyy 2y ago
It is difficult to see the difference but very few people are privy to the planning of the programs revealed. Only those who oversaw the entirety of the programs can really grasp the scope due to the compartmented nature of the programs. I think these disclosures helped arrest a rapid decay into a dystopian surveillance state. However the motivations and irrational belief systems behind these programs persist so the fight is not over. Instead the proponents of unchecked surveillance powers are increasingly on the defensive and face more scrutiny than their arguments and results can justify leading to a continued reigning in of their powers that seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. I’m not satisfied with this state of affairs but I am unsure how to reach a better one with the power systems and officials at hand. If you have any ideas please share.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Doubt Assange arrested anything. The forces in league with survey are beyond government
- nemo44x 2y ago
  I don't think there's any way to "fight the system" or w/e without becoming the system, or a part of it, as the system will consume whatever is useful and generates more power for itself. It co-ops everything. It's a useful lesson from the book Gravity's Rainbow. The only thing you can do is to fly under the radar and not participate, or participate as little as possible, and build your communities and relationships outside of it.