I agree, mostly. I stopped caring about Assange since the incident because selective information feeding is not a whistleblowing move but political manipulation. I don't have doubt that people representing my interests are corrupt to some degree but I don't want them eliminated in favor for people who don't represent my interest and are just as corrupt but protected from expose because the interests of the leaker aligns with them.
Whistleblowers are allowed to have an agenda. In practice most do. But for society it's better that shady stuff get revealed than them staying hidden because the whistleblower is not a paragon of morality.
You can be a whistleblower, you can be a journalist. I don't think you can be both. It's the job of a journalist to keep personal grudges out. It would be their job to keep political bias out too, but I guess we can't have that.
Journalists are people, and people have not been impartial ever. I don’t know where this meme came from, but even deciding to report on a story is being partial. There is no such thing as objective reporting, and it was not better 60 years ago.
The idea that journalist are not perfect, therefore they are terrible and entirely untrustworthy is much more dangerous than any journalist’s corruption.
The idea that it used to be better a century ago is laughable.
Which meme? The straw-man you just attacked?
There is a difference between the attempt to be impartial, or "declared" partial, on one side, and reporting maximally optimized to be one-sided, manipulative and biased on the other. Many US outlets are the latter. Many German ones are still the former.
It is clearly in the job description of a journalist. The complaint is not about the inability of humans to not live up to the ethics. The complaint is about not even trying. The pervasiveness of this has certainly increased, and is not the same between countries. The thought that this has been static in a profession which has changed dramatically (print to online, just as an example), is "laughable".
There are different cultures in different countries. While journalist often had a political lean in Germany, I think it has gotten worse. And the amount of manipulative methods US media outlets employ in current times is astonishing.
The fairness doctrine meant that when they aired something considered controversial, they had to give equal time to the opposing viewpoint. That didn't mean they had to be fair, since everybody got latitude on what was considered controversial i.e. if they ban you for something on twitter now, it wouldn't have been "controversial" then, it would have been settled, so you'd get no time without at least going to court over it. Also, they could just give some objector 2 minutes to make their case into a camera and play it during the news.
The things that would end up being "controversial" are things that your local Chamber of Commerce or an international fossil fuel lobbying group would find controversial.
Its scary how easy you think it is to dictate actual fairness and impartiality in law, though. The only places that have laws like that are extremely authoritarian and corrupt, like Zimbabwe.
nor ever. The only things in the news that are not biased are the sports scores and stock quotes. A major difference between good and bad journalists is whether they are up front about their biases. Julian was very upfront.
It’s probably the one that said not to use ivermectin and now say that what they said is that they didn’t recommend it meanwhile all news orgs and social media suppressed any mention of ivermectin and when they did it was to confound it with veterinary medicine.
Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations that turned out to be best to their knowledge and not absolute truth?
No government officials promoted certain narratives which have been proven false and they walk things back and the news doesn’t push back on that.
Moreover the government had embeds and was in communication with social media and traditional coordinating what to disseminate and what to suppress.
The. You have more dignitaries at the WEF and UN COP saying how wonderful it was that Covid prepared people and provided for better government control…
I just don't see how a government body responsible for the public health having an advice for health which is pushed by some of the media counts as ministry of truth.
It's already been pointed out to you that when people say "Ministry of Truth", they're referring to the defunct "Disinformation Governance Board" created within the DHS. You chose to ignore that.
> Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations
If you think the government phone-calling people at social media companies flagging specific instances and people for "misinformation" is not a form of intimidation, then you need to familiarize yourself with the legal precedent here.
They "shut it down" when it became public due to the backlash[0]. But not really, they just started working in secret. Now we have a secret ministry of truth[1] like some nations have secret police.
Yes, the disinformation board was actually an attempt to formalize and create some oversight over the ad hoc, unaccountable process that the government has to go through today to pressure media companies to manipulate and censor the public.
I prefer it this way. It's better for people to feel like criminals who whiteboard in backrooms how to manipulate public opinion by laundering prior restraint through putting pressure on the incomes of billionaires. Formalization of this process would just be permanent institutionalization, and the US government has shown throughout the 20c to now that a public board won't prevent abuses, abuses will just be routed around the board.
You mean the fascist that kept bombing a country his own invaded because of "self-defense"? the same one who presided over the biggest government surveillance leak in the entire history, and then made sure to hunt down the leaker into the only place that would provide him safety and now conveniently uses it to discredit him?
Or you mean the fascist warhawk that actually started several wars that ravaged the middle-east and passed the patriot act to give the government untold power over its citizens, both with bipartisan support I might add?
How can Trump be seen with such disdain in comparison when at worst he's just a more incompetent version of Obama with a social media addiction and republican slant. The NSA scandal was merely a decade ago, george w bush wasn't that far back either, how short are the memories. If anything his unconditional withdraw of all troops in afghanistan is the biggest anti-fascist action the last 3 presidents have done, although this one action certainly doesn't put him above being one given he wasn't even pulling the breaks on their actions beforehand.
Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here, but let me try to engage constructively here, by pointing out that your text betrays a complete ignorance of what exactly fascism is and how it acts upon societies it infects.
Now if you want to talk about the many times that Democrats and Republicans all had a big lovefest so they could all vote together to invade a country, I'm with you on that, but it's a problem of both parties, as the voting record clearly demonstrates.
What's been happening the last decade or so is another thing entirely.
> Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here
Funnily enough, so is yours.
What I highlighted pointed towards government becoming increasingly overbearing and ramping up surveillance on its citizens(NSA and patriot act), military extremism(patriot act again and the middle east), paternalism over other cultures(fear that the people would choose the "wrong"side in a country they invaded as an excuse to keep troops or to install proxy governments), and the list goes on.
You're at a point that covering true stories like the hunter biden laptop(that now journalists are verifying its authenticity) have made people like glenn greenwald persona non-grata in mainstream journalism circles, while having the intelligence agencies saying it is false. You have people that risked and are paying with their life to make information known to the public demonized because apparently leaking things about the candidate I like is bad, regardless of it being true. You have people asking for oversight for the contributions to Ukraine being labelled as russian assets(ie:enemy of our great state). You have intelligence agencies being labelled as some all knowing benevolent protectors of the populace not even a decade after the NSA leaks. The only thing that could be disguising it is because as it stands mostly the democrats seem to be on this publically, but make no mistake the moment push comes to shove the republicans will also take such position as they had taken before trump, and with thunderous applause from the "bipartisan" population if the current outlook is something to go by.
Fascism has been acting on the american society for a long time, Trump just coincidentally showed where the allegiances lied once someone that wasn't a career politician took over, luckily for them the man was an incompetent buffoon with his own laundry list of problems who got assimilated into the machine very fast, even if he would say otherwise.
If all of this for you isn't clear signs of fascism and instead trump, who mostly just inherited the actions of his predecessors is(making him just as much as the others I might add), we'll just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Again, you need to study up on the difference between fascism and other forms of authoritarian government. If you said that the US government has been becoming more authoritarian we would have no argument, because it absolutely has been doing that, but it has only been going fascist for a very short time, relatively speaking. Many bad things happened in the last fifty years, but this is something worse that a bunch of people seem to be convinced is something better. A conflagration that they are mistaking for a light at the end of a tunnel.
Fascism arises from a bad economy and a population who feel that they have no prospects or future. This tends to create a lot of angry young men hanging out in the streets, with nothing but time and cheap beer on their hands - a resource for sociopathic power seekers.
Whether these young men are Germans living under the absurd conditions of the Versailles treaty, lads from the trampled working class in Thatcher's England, or Americans working under late stage capitalism with No Child Left Behind Act schools, the fascist always works from the same playbook: Stoke the anger, and provide a convenient, nearly always racialized scapegoat outsider, then promise to do something about those outsiders with a never-ending reign of power as the actual goal.
One way to spot a fascist is, if they lose legitimate elections, they will attempt things like insurrections where they storm capital buildings. It's like a dark spot on the society's x-ray.
Those putsches don't always succeed, but as far as getting a movement of armed thugs to fight in the streets, the playbook works every time. The Republican party has been showing signs of a willingness to engage in Fascist behavior for decades, ever since they embraced the Southern Strategy, which even [Barry Goldwater](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/777519-mark-my-word-if-and-...) said would be the death of the party. And here we are, living with the GOP that he predicted would come as a result of their doing just that.
You bring up the NSA's surveillance, the Patriot Act, the various foreign wars that everyone except Bernie voted for with a rah rah rah - these all happened under GOP presidents, with a compliant, cooperative Democratic party that got behind the president, supposedly for the safety of the nation. This is the opposite of fascism.
I leave it to you whether you're gonna choose to notice the clear difference between the recent actions of the two parties, and I hope at the very least you can employ the right terminologies. Sometime in the early aughts I got into it with a Bush cheerleader who kept saying things like "You don't understand the philosophy of terrorism. Terrorists make women wear robes that cover their entire bodies and their societies are like, sexist!" That's what your use of the term "Fascism" reads like.
Yeah I definitely don't agree with that opinion. Whistleblowing is about helping the public By doing the right thing for the right reasons. It's a highly moral act. When society puts a higher value on selfishness over selflessness corruption becomes a big part of the problem. We already live in a world where people are too selfish we don't need any more of that.
It's your prerogative to not care about someone being imprisoned indefinitely and illegally as a political prisoner because they have different politics than you, but it's not a virtue.
I don't care about legality, I'm not a judge or in the law enforcement. Was he wronged? Yes. Did he wronged the people who supported him in an attempt to get back to people wronged him? Yes. Well, then it's up to him and his remaining supporters to pursue justice. I don't care as long as he doesn't do more harm to me.
I have family in Turkey and spent good chunk of my adulthood in this country. Trump was a big enabler for Erdogan, to the point that 2020 election results were broadcasted live all day together with live graphics and stats just as the elections in Turkey as it was viewed as Erdogans last hope if Trump wins again.
Erdogan is destroying my alma mater, his ridiculous economics are having very bad impact on my parents and friends, kids are sent to religious schools in much larger numbers than before which means social problems in the years to coma and the general totalitarian approach of his is something I don’t like enduring.
This whole thing didn't start with Trump. I have family that is no longer eligible for ESTAs in the US and people like to put it all on the racists in Trumps admin like Miller.
Quite a bit of this stuff actually went through both House and Senate during the Obama presidency. The coup d'etat in Turkey happened in July 2016 and the subsequent purge and extra radicalization of Erdogan didn't just suddenly happen with Trump. Things like this are usually planned a while in advance. On top of that Trumps cabinet was a mess and took a while to get started, so it's inconceivable that it started during Trump days.
It doesn't really absolve Trump's administration from anything, but at the same time don't think that Obama's administration and by extension Hillary and Biden didn't have their hand in this crap either.
I'm quite concerned that some of these leaks that are now gone are for example the current CIA directors Burns' warnings about Ukraine when he was still ambassador to Russia back in the days. Or just unrelated things like documentations about Landmark or other cults that were removed from all other parts of the web due to lawsuits.
The coup of 2016 and many other independent things happened through the years, what having Trump in power instead of someone else changes how Erdogan navigates through these things.
Do you know that Erdogan today is a nationalist and pro Ataturk(Ataturk himself is not purely right or left wing) right winger? A decade ago he was almost the exact opposite and was targeted harshly by his current coalition partners and his primary rivals were his partner in crime. Go back one more decade and Erdogan was pro-West liberal. He simply navigates the conditions and the US president is one of the major conditions.
You mean just like how you go back 1.5 decades and Putin was a pro-West liberal? Just like like how Biden with his almost 80% Obama cabinet navigated the Ukraine-Russia thing so nicely. Biden and Burns both called Ukraine the brightest of all red lines for Russia[1]. I'd like to post the wikileaks link for Burns' comment, but it's sadly gone.
Yes presidents are supposed to navigate these situations. But none of the past couple of administrations have. To try to pin it all on Trump is a cop-out.
As I said, Trump was one of the factors how he navigates. Obviously, if the coup hand't happen or a meteor struck Istanbul we would have completely different political landscape. Trump was a very influential enabler for Erdogan and that's why all the pro-Erdogan media covered the US elections as if they are Turkish elections.
What kind of nonsense is that Trump enabled Erdogan. Sure, if Trump hadn't been POTUS then, would you have expected another President to intervene in Turkey? Definitely, not.
I think you underestimate the kind of example the US president sets in the world. Lesser devils Luke Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Orban, were quick to mimick Trump talking points and policies, just as they are quick to package and pace things differently when a Democrat's in office. Potus sets a tune that's heard far and wide. Pointing at Amicans and the American president as an excuse for bad behaviour is a time honored tradition amongst the opportunistic after all.
People gave him some crap because he didn't leak the white rose Trump leak, but it was already everywhere and he mostly just declined to promote it. Other than that, there were no Trump related leaks in the inbox, so it's not like he leaked for one side of an election, but not the other. Also Trump's corruption was already known far and wide. It's the kind of shit he brags about.
I was pretty shocked not only at how far right media twisted the contents of the Podesta emails into wild conspiracy theories like PizzaGate etc, but fully disgusted at the sheer volume of people who just ate all that up without a moment of critical thinking.
Even still, no sane person thought that Trump was going to win. Even the couple days before the election, all the polls had Hillary up by a wide margin. I highly doubt that Julian was hoping for a Trump presidency. I think it's much more likely that he was imagining a Clinton presidency, but where people were a lot more critical of her actions.
Lots of people were saying he was gonna win, including me to everyone around me. It's not that we were so smart, I'm sure of that because Michael Moore is an idiot much of the time.
Nobody cares, though, what he thought he was doing. In social justice circles, we talk about impact being what matters, not intention. There's a lot of impact that he has to answer for.
You seem to assume, that one can know what the impact of one's actions will be. That's basically asking for the ability to predict the future.
I don't want to imply that the outcomes don't matter. But at least I prefer living in a justice system where planned murder and fatal accident are not considered as equal offences, although outcomes might be the same.
We have evidence that when the DNC was hacked, so was the RNC. Only one of those hacks has ever been released. Unless you believe republicans have literally never done anything wrong, something doesn't add up.
Assuming those hacks did happen, is there any evidence that the hackers gave the info to Assange? And what could they have found that would hurt Trump?
As far as I can remember, the RNC was openly anti-Trump in 2016. There was no need to leak that, unlike the DNC being anti-Bernie, which wasn't so open.
And any damaging leaks about the RNC would only have helped Trump's anti-establishment campaign. Other Republicans being corrupt was a big part of his message.
>And what could they have found that would hurt Trump?
So just to be clear, you think information should only be released if it hurts someone you want to hurt? Is that the ethical standard that was touted by Wikileaks?
No, I think the original accusation was "selective information feeding", meaning that Assange was trying to hurt Hillary and help Trump, and therefore held something back.
That accusation falls apart if the accuser can't even think of a plausible scenario in which Assange might have had information that would have hurt Trump. Assange couldn't hold back information he didn't have.
It's just made up. The "logic" goes: if there was bad stuff about H. Clinton out there, there must be worse stuff about Trump out there, because Trump is worse than H. Clinton. Therefore, Assange ignored all of the bad stuff (that neither the FBI, constant congressional investigations, numerous private intelligence firms, and every single anti-Trump media outlet spent nearly a decade at this point looking for still have yet to find) just to target poor H. Clinton.
The most bizarre part of this theory is why anyone would think that Trump, a NYC real estate guy who wasn't good at actually building things so turned into a guy who sold his branding to real estate projects, a wrestler, a game show host, would have more or worse skeletons in his closet than H. Clinton, somebody at the center of one of the two ruling parties of the world hegemon for 25 years. We know everything that H. Clinton did (she was proud before she wasn't, like the rest of the New Democrats), so the leaks were literally about her corruption and DNC corruption during the election. The DNC also fired all of their executives over it because they were obviously corrupt. If the DNC were actually concerned about corruption rather than being caught, you'd think they'd celebrate Assange for smoking it out.
I always used to wonder how dictatorships or strikebreakers could call in huge groups of thugs to beat up people at protests, or to show up to rallies for the dictator. A lot of them are paid, of course, but a lot of them just have the mindset that really prioritizes trying to figure out if Trump was misrepresenting his net worth by exaggerating the success of some of his buildings in order to secure financing from new investors, over what H. Clinton did to Haiti. Or Honduras. Or Iraq.
But, you know, I think the Trump Foundation was a way for him to avoid paying taxes on a painting in the lobby of his building. Lock him up.
I agree, mostly. I stopped caring about Assange since the incident because selective information feeding is not a whistleblowing move but political manipulation. I don't have doubt that people representing my interests are corrupt to some degree but I don't want them eliminated in favor for people who don't represent my interest and are just as corrupt but protected from expose because the interests of the leaker aligns with them.