It's pretty well known that Assange has a vendetta against Hillary Clinton. Just searching for Assange Clinton on Google brings up lots of articles on the subject.
But a little further checking showed that despite this being tweeted in August this year with a headline and hashtag suggesting a link to the leaked emails, this video is actually from 2010, moreover from my exhaustive five minute search (it wasn't exhaustive really) I couldn't find any evidence of a link to Clinton's campaign, in fact according to Wikipedia the last campaign this strange chap worked on was Walter Mondale's in 1984.
It looks like the True Pundit article (linked above) is the original source for this claim, which is sourced as "according to State Department sources". Then there was a wikileaks email (https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/1099) which has the subject "an SP memo on possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks", but which doesn't actually mention the strategies and only says "The result is the attached memo, which has one interesting legal approach and I think some very good suggestions about how to handle our public diplomacy". The attachment is not provided as far as I can tell.
I agree that it sounded like a joke. However the article says she pushed ahead discussing it after the laughter ended. Given that the source didn't want to be identified it makes it rather hard to verify.
She didn't deny it, but said “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don't recall that.” I say that indicates she likely said it, although maybe jokingly.
Speaking for myself I know I would never say that, so the response would be "No, I never said that."
When your entire life is recorded, you never know what soundbite is floating around out there that will contradict your position. If you say something as a joke or that could be taken out of context, and then later claim to have never said it, suddenly you are a liar even though you didn't actually do anything wrong. It's possible that she just didn't want to get contradicted by some frustrated exclamation she had made years previously.
and yet, it's exactly this same person who will strengthen the NSA security apparatus that slurps up domestic communication wholesale, and saves it for all eternity. I hope you don't end up on the wrong end of a powerful person's anger, because you will go down the exact same way.
This election is trending beyond being too much too keep up with. I think we'll see more bullheaded decision making in the this same vein as we get closer to the date.
yeah, but everything she and WJC say has to be filtered through the lawyer lens... depending on what the definition of is is. She's good at that - almost anything she says can be spun multiple ways.
Aside from the "can't we just drone this guy" comment that Clinton doesn't remember saying and if she did it was a joke, etc. the closest I can find:
I would also add that to the American people and to our friends and partners, I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.
No, it's pretty well known that Assange claims to have a vendetta against HRC. The details of that vendetta don't make much sense. It's clearly easier for him and his supporters to claim that they're acting out of enmity towards Clinton --- a minor figure in virtually all of Assange's dealings with the US --- than to simply cop to the fact that they are aggressively and overly supporting Donald Trump.
Nerddom and the left (and I'm somewhere in the overlapping circles on that Venn diagram) have a powerful rooting interest in Julian Assange and Wikileaks, who many of us see as a vanguard of an effort to disrupt politics and the media, both of whom we as a demographic have little respect for. The simple fact is that Assange is campaigning for Donald Trump. But that's very hard for us to admit, regardless of the amount of evidence we're confronted with.
You're entitled to think whatever you want, but I am entitled to remind you that 2 + 2 = 4. We have an "A vs B mentality" because that's the design of our political system: it is structured to favor two dominant parties, which are themselves coalitions of interests.
Assange is many things, but "stupid" isn't one of them. Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump has the obvious impact of helping Trump, which is why the Trump campaign claims to coordinate with him.
That is really dangerous way to view people. I hope we have more common sense when we view security researchers that publish security vulnerabilities, rather than see them as campaigning for the competitor. Every published security vulnerability for windows is not an advertisement for apple, or vice versa. "If you are not in favor of Microsoft, you are in favor or Apple" is unhealthy way to view the world.
And it's not because I think security experts are stupid and don't realize the obvious commercial impact that a security vulnerability has.
I mean, you've made it clear how you feel, but not so much what that feeling has to do with the facts of this election. The choices are Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. To oppose Clinton is to support Trump. It is a zero-sum contest. If Assange wishes a pox on both parties, he could stay out of the election altogether. But of course, that's not what he's doing.
Your choices are Clinton + Kaine (Dem), Trump + Pence (Rep), Johnson + Weld (Lib), and maybe Stein + Baraka (Grn). No one else could win without deadlocking the electoral college.
To oppose Clinton is little more than calling a turd sandwich a turd sandwich. One does not also need to point out that her douche opponent is a douche.
While the US elections systems virtually guarantee a two-party system, it does not mean the two on top always have to be the same parties. If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I do wish a pox on both houses--along with a hemorrhagic fever, parasitic worm infection, and some kind of blotchy skin rash. I am not staying out of the election. I think Clinton would competently lead the country in the wrong direction, and I think Trump would be a national embarrassment on multiple fronts. Strategically, the best strategy I could follow would be to bash the presumptive front-runner, whomever it may be, to keep the two major candidates as close as possible, and hope that the minor candidates can somehow win enough states to deadlock the electoral college.
Note that it is unlikely that is the primary motivation for Wikileaks. But it does show that this game is not a zero-sum either-or.
> If the Republicans fall apart after this, Libertarian, Green, and Constitution will certainly devour the corpse, and one of them will eventually grow fat enough to take its place and push the others back down and away from the table.
I think it's far more likely that if the Republicans fall apart, a large component will pivot and eat up one or more of those other parties to retain a Republican designation with slightly different values. It's a mistake to think of either of the two major parties as static.
This. An extremely important thing to understand about the American political system, and also the exact reason why the Trump campaign is failing (the belief that the Republican party is a single ideological force and not a coalition of different interests).
I learned this from The West Wing, along with most of my knowledge of how federal politics works. There are conservative Democrats, and liberal Republicans. Being a bleeding heart liberal in a swing state isn't going to win you the a seat.
This is in strong contrast to Westminster parliaments, where political parties are for the most part a monolith, only occasionally allowed a "conscience vote" (that's not to say there isn't infighting). To vote against the party is a very good way to get booted from the party, which as far as I'm aware is practically impossible in Congress, the closest you have is being expelled from a caucus.
Unless your argument is that HRC would be equivalently as bad for the US as Trump, this argument does not make sense. Neither Stein nor Johnson can win this election; neither has a chance materially better than that of Joe Exotic Speaks For America 2016.
I have no expectation that Johnson or Stein could win, except in a strictly mathematical-theoretical sense. They are both on enough ballots that they could win a majority in the electoral college, if and only if enough people voted for them.
But they do not have those votes--largely because many people who share your general opinion keep hammering home the message that if you do not vote for one of the top two candidates, then at best your vote does not matter, and at worst it destroys America.
My concerns are that Trump is a misogynistic sleaze who will undermine US diplomatic prestige, be generally ineffective as a government executive trying to act like a business executive, and will damage international trade; and that Clinton is a corrupt politician who will undermine US liberty, continue indefinitely the harmful policies of Bush II and Obama, and will damage the rule of law. The fact that those third-party candidates have a statistically zero chance of winning actually makes me more comfortable in voting for one of them.
On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place. And on the even more remote chance that the Democrats self-destruct, I want the Greens to be big enough to step into their shoes. Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power.
They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
> On the off chance that the Republican party could finally destroy itself by choosing an even more unsuitable candidate next time around, I want the Libertarian Party to be strong enough to take its place.
Don't kid yourself about some other party ever taking the place of the Democrats or Republicans. The best you can hope for is that the libertarians gain more influence than they currently have through the larger Republican party consuming them. Whether you view this as a needed shift in the right direction for the Republicans or not enough of a shift and at the cost of any power the libertarians had likely depends on how far you lean libertarian. Same with the Democrats and Green Party.
Our two party system hasn't survived for as long as it has because each party innately catered to it's constituents needs from the beginning. Each party has shifted greatly over time to track what their constituents cared about.
> Having lived in Chicago, I have had enough of oily, corrupt Democrats in power. And having lived in the South, I have also had enough of smarmy, bigoted, hypocritical Republicans in power. ... They are never going to die out if people keep voting for them and sending them money!
They are never going to die, period. But that's okay. They don't need to die, they just need to change, and there's plenty of precedent for that.
Just to amplify the comments nearby: politics is more than presidential elections.
In presidential elections, because of the US political system, you really do have just two choices. You may lament this - I have! But it's the world we live in. Saying you'll vote for a third party candidate to "register your complaint" is a null gesture.
If you really care about politics, you'd have to work to push the party of your choice in the direction you want. This is long, hard work, and happens outside the presidential cycle. You have to march with signs, attend boring meetings, and persuade people you just met.
Complaining about the broken system every four years is neither mature nor effective.
I am moved to write this because, for multiple election cycles, I was that guy, until I realized my folly.
In a election that has the lowest ever recorded public opinion of the two candidates, my feeling of the election is this. The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.
If I was to favor the majority opinion, to oppose both Trump and Clinton is to campaign for democracy. If I had to guess what motivities Assange, if Clinton win people won't trust the government and if trump win people will fear the government. It is possible that the later will slightly produce more Snowden's.
"Public opinion of the candidates" doesn't mean anything. Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie Sanders, beating him by ten times the number of votes Obama beat HRC with in 2008. Similarly, Trump demolished his Republican opponents in the GOP primary. The voters made a clear choice.
Douglas Adams joked about this phenomenon by describing that people will vote for lizards they hate so long it means that the wrong lizard won't win. In a zero-sum game, that result is a Nash equilibrium.
It is still a lizard that get voted into office at the end of the day.
None of this is responsive to my comment. Hillary Clinton did not win in a squeaker over Sanders; she crushed him. The voters made a clear choice, and it wasn't for "the right kind of lizard". This is the Democratic primary we're talking about, and it wasn't a "lesser of two evils" race there.
If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion. Popularity opinion is shared between the left and right while same can't be said when talking about the vote for party candidates.
Some would point to the political events that the dc leaks talked about.
> If you are asking why Clinton won over sander, while sander has a higher opinion rating, feel free to write your suggestion.
In favorability or approval (whatever that means in the context of a nominee) ratings? They mean different things, and aren't always directly related[1]. I could definitely see how Sanders would be liked more, but people would believe he's less likely to do a good job.
To suggest an explanation myself, voting where majority vote win has a different result that voting where highest ranking wins. When there is extreme high and extreme low opinion about choices, there is commonly a third option which is rated higher in average.
Say I rated taco, pizza and Italian salad as 10, 8, and 2, and you rated them as 2, 8, and 10, we can easily see that pizza wins even if neither of us has it as our primary pick. pizza in this case has highest opinion rating while the other two choices are quite far behind.
I don't dispute that, but it's not what I was referring to. Some polls ask what people think of the president (favorability ratings), and some are more specifically geared to asking about the job the president is doing (approval ratings). The article I linked to from Gallup points to situations where they do not always correlate as you would expect. For example, Bill Clinton in 1993 and 2000. In 1993 he had 59% favorability and 49% approval,and that just about reverse by 2000 when he had 60% approval, but only 46% favorability. People disliked him after the scandal, but they also conceded he was doing a good job.
So, what I wonder is what questions are actually asked regarding candidates? There isn't any data on them doing the job itself yet (unless they are an incumbent, which none are this cycle), so are they asking about how much they like the person, like the policies, or how confident they are the candidate can perform well? The answer to that question may lead to different likely reasons for the question at hand. Sanders is a likable guy. I like him. I'm also not convinced his policies, as expressed on the campaign trail, are feasible. Conversely, Hillary Clinton isn't very likable. I don't really like her. I do agree with many (but not all) of her policies, but most importantly I think her policies are feasible and have a chance of being implemented if she's elected. I am, in fact, the exact sort of person that might have expressed a favorable opinion for Sanders but voted for Hillary.
> The what ever allowed this situation to happen is proof that it is broken.
Says right in the article, it was Russian hackers aiming to undermine the US democratic system. They saw this beautifully pristine, perfect and fair democratic system and said to themselves "let's undermine the fuck out of this thing".
Surely if it was already undermined to the point of being utterly broken they wouldn't have to bother, right?
Imagine a lake of piss, next to it, a mountain of shit.
Now I dump a whole bunch of garbage onto one of them.
Which am I supporting?
Or maybe you can explain this bit from the article that really mystified me: "[Russian hackers did something] with the aim of undermining the US democratic process". We've all seen what this democratic process looks like on TV, so what does it actually still mean, to undermine this democratic process?
Most Americans, do not really want to support Clinton over Trump or vice versa, they're angry and disappointed that from a nation of several hundred million people, apparently these two are the choices given to them by "the democratic process".
And apparently this is the way it is, because the election system makes it that way. It's probably the same causes that make just about every US election for as long as I remember end up just about this close to 50/50. Which, if you know anything about voting systems theory, is the number one failure mode of majority voting. But nobody finds this cultural either/or winner/loser fixation alarming at all, apparently. So again, what's left to undermine, really?
It's just like accusing someone of trying to undermine freedom of speech in China.
Suppose someone decides whether he wants to join the military or not. Isn't it important for him to know, that either a moron or a psychopath will decide where to deploy him? That he'll be deployed either because a foreign leader said something mean about the president on twitter or because someone bribed the president?
Are those the only choices? Or could the nation undergo a transformation about how money & politics are entwined and rethink the presidential elections?
Citation please. I haven't heard anything about that.
> Running Wikileaks as a year-long oppo research firm for Trump
Wikileaks can only leak what they've been given. Maybe people are feeding them more info about Hillary, but I would respect Wikileaks far less if they withheld information during an election year to protect a candidate.
The voters deserve to know everything there is to know about their candidates. It's an assault against the voters to withhold negative information about a candidate because you don't want their opponent to win.
Why would Assange, a confirmed Anarchist, support conservative, capitalist Republicans? That doesn't make any sense.
If anything, Assange would want the third party libertarian to win since he is the only guy advocating to stop the wars and reduce American involvement overseas, which is what Assange wants. He sees America as a menace and wants to stop the brutality of American "peace" in countries they have no business being in.
Assange doesn't support Trump or the Republicans. He supports Hillary Clinton not becoming President, because of his personal vendetta against her. It just happens that his efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign help Trump.
As an anarchist, Assange probably wouldn't care about the libertarians more than any other candidate, since any candidate would only futher the existence and legitimacy of a state which he would rather see destroyed. If he did support Trump, it would be because he believes a Trump Presidency would only hasten America's demise.
Assange/Wikileaks nemesis is secrecy and corruption, not HRC specifically. Now if they view her as the most corrupt, they would naturally be against her, and inevitably that supports Trump. But that is not the same as the rabid right wing supporter of Trump.
Assange is savvy enough to know their position inevitably supports Trump, but there isn't any reason to think if they viewed Trump as more corrupt they would be against him. So it is possible they take a principled position while wrongly accused of having a preference in who wins the election.
This argument depends on Trump being "less corrupt" than HRC. If you believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate, you can plausibly argue that Assange is somehow justified in supporting a candidate who is calling for the death penalty for leakers. It won't be a strong argument, but it'll be coherent.
But very few observers of US politics believe Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. A more widely held belief is that he's the most corrupt major party nominee in the history of US politics.
It depends what you consider to be corruption. I don't have any confidence that they will enact the policies they describe. Trump is a well-known charlatan and liar. Clinton, however, comes closer to corruption via corporate interests and wealthy friends.
Disclosure: I support neither candidate and will probably vote the Party for Socialism and Liberation this cycle.
I hear people saying the 'most corrupt candidate ever!' about both candidates. More about HRC than Trump though. For some reason I doubt both assertions.
Look, if you're a Trump supporter, I exempt you from criticism about support for Wikileaks. As a Trump supporter, your support for Wikileaks is totally coherent.
Trump's corruption and naked greed is overt and out-in-the-open. He's even proud of it.
Clinton's happens in secret and is masked by insincerity, lies, etc.
I think there's a brain glitch at play here -- corruption in the style of Clinton feels more corrupt because it's secretive, even if the out-in-the-open corruption is just as bad or worse.
You write as if Trump is just as dirty as Clinton and Assange is simply choosing to not release that information. It is possible that Clinton is, as Trump says, the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics. She's been hit with scandal after scandal. And before you say those scandals are a result of partisan witch-hunting, Obama never had these scandals that Hillary did.
>And before you say those scandals are a result of partisan witch-hunting, Obama never had these scandals that Hillary did.
Um, are you just blanking 2004 out of your head? This is just the same stuff all over again. All of the screaming and shouting about birth certificates and generally shady connections? His ultimate Muslim agenda to bring down the Great Satan that is America?
Absolutely nothing of worth is coming from the leaked documents, despite all hell being raised about a smoking gun (that no one can point to) in them. It literally is a witch hunt. If these past 4 elections aren't going to kill the GOP in general, I don't know if anything will. It should be disgusting the out right lies and propaganda that they employ, with a complete lack of integrity and standards. But people still buy into the juicy conspiracy theories and the generally "known and accepted" unknowns.
If HRC is the dirtiest candidate in the history of politics, then then last 4 decades of investigations and general obstructionism were undertaken by the most incompetent politicians in the history of politics. Not just one, a whole collection of individuals (senators, house members, governors) from one party who despite their best efforts continually fails at proving claims they have no problem repeating until people start to believe them.
The Republicans have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars investigating Hillary and so far, nothing has stuck. She may actually be the cleanest candidate in the history of politics.
Nothing sticking on her doesn’t have to mean she is the cleanest. It could also mean she has the best spin-doctors or very influential friends that help steer the public discourse.
There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms.
There really are people who believe that.
In fact, depending on where you get your news, you might also believe that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actual literal demons, who smell of sulfur.
I don't believe I made any outrageous claims. I literally linked to a CNN article (which is usually considered middle to slightly left leaning) regarding a top clinton donor being appointed to a security committee.
I definitely don't think you should disregard others opinions just because,
"There are also people who believe Obama created Hurricane Matthew to suppress turnout without, using his network of wind farms."
The article you linked to does not make the claim you did. Why is your spin more credible than the claim that Clinton is a sulfurous demon who is motivated only by a hatred of Christianity?
But, again! This is an unproductive political argument. If you support Trump, your support for Wikileaks is entirely coherent. I'm not here to argue that people shouldn't support Trump (I hope those arguments are self-evident). I'm here to point out that people who oppose Trump should recognize the role Wikileaks is playing.
The article did make the claim, it was pointing out how one of the largest clinton foundation donors, as well as straight political donors was given a seat on the state departments Intel board, despite not being qualified. Eventually, they had to step down.
Again, what you said has no bearing on what I said... I wasn't even discussing wikileaks - I was responding to the parent, mentioning how nothing sticks.
As for political ideology, again I made no comment. It's fair to call Hilary corrupt because she is, there's no political leaning involved in my comment. She clearly did a bunch of stuff on the edge of what was moral/legal. She clearly makes deals to gain favors - that's basically what politics is. I made zero comments on trump.
Finally, I am not a supporter of either candidate - they both suck and both aren't representative of my views. Nor are either going to improve my quality of life or increase my personal (or family) security.
There are also people who believe exactly what you do politically, but also believe in alien abductions, crop cirles, homeopathy and what have you. You can be sure of it.
Pointing to fringes to discredit the mainstream of said fringe is just a cheap tactic, not something worth doing out of concern for the truth.
I wouldn't say "cleanest". A lot of the stuff she's been investigated for is completely true, but for whatever reason hasn't stuck. We know for a fact the whole emails thing was completely true. She sent state secrets over a private email server using non-secured devices, and those emails were leaked to foreign governments. Doesn't sound "clean" to me.
An aside - it's been mentioned many times in recent years that the rules regarding email for adminstration officials were never so clearly defined as to preclude someone from running their own email server and the Bush administration employed many non governmental email accounts and servers. They even 'lost' Up To 22 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
I'm honestly curious as to why that was never investigated with the same level of intensity.
The simplest explanation is that the Democrats were only briefly in power in Congress and going after the Bush administration didn't make political sense — Obama rather famously called to move forward rather than fight over the past.
In contrast, a wide range of right-wing people have spent three decades and many millions of dollars going after both Clintons, with considerable personal demonization over that time. When Obama was elected, the GOP's goal was to limit him to one term. That means a bunch of people had angles to exploit anything remotely plausible: it kept the base riled up and voting accordingly, it helped attack the sitting president by association, and maybe damage his most likely successor. The entire email story was only discovered as part of the endless attempts to trump up a scandal from the Benghazi attack, by which time the pattern of relentlessly litigating everything was just the assumed default.
There just isn't an equivalent on the Democratic side. Yes, there are people who don't like Bush (or now Trump) but there aren't rich people pushing to scrutinize his private life and the members of Congress don't seem to think that's a good use of their time.
We in fact do not know that. Moreover, during the time period Clinton was using her personal mail server --- a thing she discussed at length with Colin Powell, her predecessor --- the State Department's own email server was comprehensively owned up by (wait for it) Russian hackers.
It is not only possible but actually somewhat likely that her mails were safer on her own server.
The "msm echochamber" thing is an especially funny trope, as it amounts to saying, "source on that claim, apart from all of the journalists who actually investigate claims like this".
There's evidence in the leaked emails that parts of the media take orders from political entities or politically interested parent companies. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a source that isn't essentially a known liar.
Trump is much dirtier, and most of that, including outright bribery illegally using charity fund, had come out without needing anything like WikiLeaks.
Interesting. I was under the impression that it was mostly a vendetta against Clinton, not support of Trump. I don't pay that much attention to Assange or Wikileaks to be honest, I personally find quite a lot of what they do distasteful.
Could you link to statements where Assange is given praise to Trump and encouraging people to vote for Trump, you know like quality comments do that make assertion about peoples intentions. It would be a nice change to the many political opinions being thrown around here that assume that people can't just hate both political figures and view them both as corrupt and harmful.
This is one of those weird arguments I hear all the time from WL supporters that I don't understand why I'm supposed to even take it seriously; it's gaslighty in the same way Mike Pence's claim that Trump hadn't said those things about Syria and Russia are.
Obviously, he doesn't have to say anything positive about Trump at all to support him, and in fact the kind of support he's offering (a drip-drip feed of the products of Russian hacking calculated to create an "October Surprise") is far more valuable than any verbal support he could give Trump directly.
I mean here to be dismissive without being too disrespectful. But I'll be candid: people who say Assange isn't supporting Trump sound pretty silly. Like, the claim says more about them than it does about the election.
You're asserting that Assange supports Trump because of the fact he's opposing HRC on the basis of "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality.
Believing that sort of dichotomy is "pretty silly" and says plenty about you.
I entertain many ideas, though I don't see that one as particularly likely. I was just pointing to an unstated assumption, not one that I saw as likely to be false.
To be equally candid, I find people silly who proclaim that every time someone say a negative about something they are promoting something else.
Through I must say, it does making viewing news more interesting. Someone say a negative about a product, I wonder which competitor paid them? Someone released a security vulnerability, I wonder what competing product they are trying to sell.
It basically makes all negative statements into a conspiracy, which honestly is silly, but fun thought experiment.
There actually is what I believe a credible alternate explanation to Wikileaks supporting Trump, and it's that Wikileaks (or perhaps just Assange) is fighting for relevance, and is willing to be the obvious pawn of others to keep that relevance. What if it's not Wikileaks that's drip-feeding the information, but the source itself? One would think Assange would be smart enough to not promise what he hasn't already gotten hold of, but perhaps he agreed to a release schedule before getting all the information, and is following through on his promise. Not that I think that excuses being a pawn for what is most likely a state actor trying to meddle in the national election of another country.
Neither case really paints a good picture of Wikileaks as an impartial journalistic organization.
Assange is an Anarchist who was to end America's constant war with the rest of the world. Trump and Clinton are the last people he would want to see in the Whitehouse. You know who make perfect sense for Assange to Support? Gary Johnson, the only anti-war candidate and Libertarian. But continue on with your mental gymnastics to turn the anti-war Assange into a capitalist, warhawk republican.
And I'm sure, were his sources to give him a cache of (ostensibly) damaging documents about Trump, he'd drip-drip it out along with teasers and editorialized (and falsely contextualized) snippets, too.
Of course, that's not what's going to happen, because Wikileaks is in effect if not design a propaganda organ of the Russian Federation.
This is completely tangential to the OP, but what do the "means of production" mean nowadays? It's more and more about intelligence, intelligence property, knowledge and brain power. The latter is clearly owned by the workers who have brains; how do you socialize or nationalize them? And how do you nationalize IPR?
It means power -- power to the people in the interest of constitutional equality and liberty, not a tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, or bad democracy.
Aristotle said there are 6 kinds of government, 3 good ones and 3 bad ones.
The bad ones are where the ruler rules in their own interest. The good ones are where the ruler rules in the public interest.
How many people rule:
In Tyranny - 1 person rules in their own interest
Monarchy - 1 person rules in the public interest (a good tyrant is a monarch)
Aristocracy - a few people rule in the public interest
Oligarchy - a few people rule in their own interest
Democracy - all people rule in the public interest
Bad Democracy - all people rule in the interest of the majority and oppress the minority
>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” Mr. Assange said on Fox News. “I mean, from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second of the day.”
Assange is stuck in an embassy in the UK. Any normal, rational person would want to leave that situation.
Hillary has made it quite clear that would never happen however Trump has been far more supportive of Assange especially since Wikileaks has been his biggest asset.
Secondly, and with a little more convoluted reasoning: it seems to be a truism that Republican/Conservative presidencies are harder economically for people living in poverty. Republicans are less socialist, in other words. I think it's pretty clear that Assange would like to see a revolution in the US, and revolutions tend to happen when the people don't have enough to eat. Hoping for Trump to win could be seen as hoping for a revolution in that light.
No, Trump hasn't joked about drone-striking Assange. He has joked about torturing suspected terrorists and stated his intention to see Edward Snowden executed. But he didn't make a tasteless drone joke, that's true.
Right. Trump hasn't attacked Assange personally. If I had read a news article alleging that HRC had said, "Can't we just drone this guy?" about me, I would be pretty terrified to leave my flat as well. Even more so if it appeared that she was about to become the CEO of the US military.
If I could, I would encourage Julian Assange to stopfearingfor his life, and startliving it, whatever precious little (or lot) of it he might have left. Unfortunately, if he can't access the internet, he can't read this comment.
It's true that the whole world is watching this, and a lot of us in the US care not only for the fate of Assange, but also for the fate of our nation, how these two have become intertwined, and what it will mean if Assange does indeed come to harm as a result of his journalistic actions.
If I were Julian, I would use right now as the perfect opportunity to walk out, and face the charges in Sweden. At least then I could serve actual time (if necessary), and have an end to my imprisonment within sight.
Above all, this is certainly an excellent opportunity for Hillary to show that she can resolve a crisis diplomatically. If she could just tone things down a bit, she could assure Julian (and the world) that she does not actually mean him any harm. Of anyone, I would think that Hillary could be quite good at projecting soft power globally.
Besides, can you imagine what it would be like if they killed him now? The Hollywood trailer of his biopic would have to start with, "First, they cut your internet access ..." ;)
He could imagine (perhaps justifiably) that by serving as Putin's pawn and supporting Trump he could secure a better venue to seek asylum from Swedish rape charges than the Ecuadoran embassy, whether at the hands of Putin or Trump.
>Sarah Harrison, a British journalist and a longtime WikiLeaks editor, says that the organization would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them.
The bloomberg article also quoted someone from reddit as evidence that the right wing was 'shivering in anticipation' of leaks damaging to clinton. It's not great journalism and seems biased but it doesn't seem there is any evidence that assange is pro trump.
The Guardian one is slightly better. I don't think there is real evidence, and Assange isn't so stupid as to publicly say he supports Trump (even if he does, for whatever reason).
But if there is no agenda, it does make one wonder why the Wikileaks of late have focused on Clinton in the run up to the election
Occams Razor says that they've only received credible leaks about the HRC campaign.
Seems to me like anyone with credible evidence against Trump can sell it to the highest bidding mainstream media org and be sure it will get national attention. Why would a Trump leaker need wikileaks?
