Julian Assange: Hero or Villain?
- Thread starter Rearden Metal
- Start date
Well the local level is very complex. Have you been to Chicago?
Let me follow up on this. The reasons for poverty in Ohio are different then the reasons for poverty in East St. Louis or LA and different from the poverty in Hawaii. You can't use a federal government one size fits all solution to solve it. That is specifically the reason why we have state and local governments.
Amen to that.
Quote from jammy:
Continued:
A couple days ago, Advocatus Diaboli sent me a link to a blog post outlining Assangeâs true goals for Wikileaks. Itâs truly a fascinating read:
In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American stateâs conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.
In other words, the point of posting leaked diplomatic cables on the Internet is not to embarrass the government, but to impede their communications and thus make them less capable of committing harm. Wikileaks is pouring sugar into the gas tank of the government-corporate complex.
Also of interest, Bryan Caplan posted a link to an interview of Assange in which he describes his politics. Everyone who accused him of being a leftist is way off the mark, as heâs actually somewhat of a libertarian:
Would you call yourself a free market proponent?
Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets. Having lived and worked in many countries, I can see the tremendous vibrancy in, say, the Malaysian telecom sector compared to U.S. sector. In the U.S. everything is vertically integrated and sewn up, so you donât have a free market. In Malaysia, you have a broad spectrum of players, and you can see the benefits for all as a result.
How do your leaks fit into that?
To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.
Thereâs the famous lemon example in the used car market. Itâs hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers canât get a good price, even when they have a good car.
By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means thereâs a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who theyâre dealing with.
Julian Assange is less CounterPunch, more LewRockwell.com. Neither are my bag, but whatever.
Yesterday, after I posted my rhetorical question about the PATRIOT Act and Wikileaks, Paul Elam commented on Facebook that six hours had passed and no one had answered me. Truth be told, I wasnât expecting an answer, but making a broader point.
A month after I began blogging, I wrote a post in which I explained why I named my blog In Mala Fide:
We all know that society is sick and civilization is waning, but how is an individual supposed to react to this? Once youâve learned that following the rules is a sure way to get screwed over, you canât go back to being Boobus Americanus (to borrow from Mencken). Western civilization, in its politically correct, feminized state, demands that you bend over and grab your ankles in order to be a good citizen, and breaking the rules will earn you the contempt of society at large â and yet, breaking the rules is the only way to survive. Thereâs no proper ethical code in existence that requires people to submit to tyrants who seek to bind them in chains. Much like how the Christians of the Roman Empire refused to worship the emperor, sane Westerners are refusing to worship the various false idols that comprise our dying cultureâ¦
â¦The moral configuration of Western society, as chronicled on this blog and others, requires its best citizens to rebel, to go against the grain, to behave in mala fide in order to secure their own fortunes.
The reason you need to behave in bad faith towards society and government is because society and government are behaving in bad faith towards you, in the form of feminism, socialism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism and other similar ideologies. That is the underlying theme of everything I write about, be it sexuality or politics or race relations.
The point I was trying to make with my question is that if a government repeatedly and continuously behaves in bad faith towards its citizens, its citizens will start behaving in bad faith towards it. Itâs physics. Itâs inevitable. If a government begins spying on and prying into the lives of private citizens, they will feel no remorse about reciprocating the favor. Whether you think its justified is irrelevant. Would Assange have been so quick to publish the cables had the U.S. government not acquired such a nasty reputation thanks in part to idiocy like the PATRIOT Act? Would Wikileaks even exist if Western governments and corporations werenât colluding to screw people over to enrich themselves? I doubt it.
This is something that neocons and other police state fetishists donât understand, as evidenced by their hysterical reaction to Newtonâs Third Law of Physics. Everyone from the incoming House Homeland Security Chairman to everyoneâs favorite retarded Alaskan hick is screaming for Julian Assangeâs head, and one particularly deluded neocon twerp is outright calling for his assassination:
I canât believe this Tom Flanagan guy. After the CBC anchor expressed shock at what he said, he replied âIâm feeling very manly today.â You little chickenshit. Calling for other men to assassinate someone from the safety of your tenured professorial position is the opposite of manly. If you had a pair, youâd pick up a sniper rifle and a Kevlar vest and go shoot Assange yourself. You wonât, because you neocons are all the same â cowardly little worms who talk tough, writing checks your asses will never cash.
Thatâs the neocons, right there. Rah rah rah, God bless America, right up until their necks are on the line. Isnât war just wunderbar? Especially when itâs other boys who are doing the fighting for you? More war, more war, MORE! Letâs invade Iran! Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran! Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler! Donât appease, attack! Itâs all to keep them from getting nukes theyâll never develop â erm, I mean to oust a tyrannical regime â erm, I mean to spread democracy and FREE-DUMB! Just donât ask ME to serve, because dying in battle is for the proles!
And these jokers think theyâre manly? They view themselves as the last vestiges of masculinity in the West? Theyâre about as manly and courageous as Eric Cartman:
Breast Cancer Show Ever
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmoreâ¦
Yes, Julian Assange is far from perfect. Yes, heâs an attention whore. Yes, his actions may be tainted by anti-Americanism. None of that matters. What matters is this man struck a hard blow against a corrupt institution that is working against all of our interests. He hit the school bully dead center in the face with a dodgeball, leaving him with a bloody nose and a river of tears flowing down his cheeks. Nobody felt sorry for Cartman when he got his comeuppance, and nobody with a sane bone in their body will feel one iota of sympathy for Uncle Sam.
And for that alone, Iâm standing behind him one hundred percent.
Dude, who are you talking to? You have me confused with someone else. Maybe some guy over on a 9/11 truther board. Please link my posts where I say I support that or STFU.
Phenomena, I'm going to try to engage you here. See if it's possible to get some intelligent dialogue out of you. How exactly is supporting Assange going to change anything? Do you think these leaks have revealed anything that we don't already know about how the world works? Next thing you are going to tell me is people on Wall Street are greedy and men cheat on their wives. I mean seriously, what is the end game here? Washington is laughing at this. Obama is laughing at this. Hillary Clinton is laughing at this. You think this changes anything? Are you really that naive? I'm curious what your response is.
Total crap. To say millions are hungry in a nation that is one of the most overweight on the planet is a complete, ridiculous distortion of reality. It's simply absurd that you Americans are giving food stamps to these millions of fat, stupid people.
And this suspected rapist stuff is absolute bullshit too. For me this guy is a freedom fighter.
Jammy, I want to thank you for linking here that excellent commentary! Nothing to add to that.
Respect, but I am a bit busy right now, and it's going to be hectic for me over the weekend and I wont be able to post. I will respond more thoroughly after that, sorry I'm not able to right now. If for some reason I forget just remind me and I'll respond more thoroughly after the weekend. I just have time for short posts btwn tasks right now...
Here's where I stand right now: On one hand I find myself agreeing with Jammy's article, while on the other hand I am horrified with myself for doing so, knowing that the flag-waving, patriotic guy I was just a few years ago would have <b>never</b> even considered becoming an Assange sympathizer! This is all a direct consequence of the War On Drugs, and the resulting United States of America vs. Rearden Metal criminal court case.
People, this isn't good at all. United we stand, divided we fall. All I ever did 'wrong' was ingesting the only substance capable of neutralizing my depression, and for that the feds labeled me a 'criminal' and charged me with a felony. Can't you people see the futility in senselessly attacking & oppressing loyal, patriotic citizens for no reason, and thus turning friends into enemies? I don't <i>want</i> to be a fucking Assange sympathizer! I'd much rather be the loyal, patriotic American citizen I once was. Think I'm alone? This isn't about me, personally at all. The war on drugs has turned <b>millions</b> of former patriots into something else entirely, and this madness needs to stop <b>immediately</b>! All this senseless prohibition oppression is literally tearing the country apart. :eek: