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Florida Man Sues WikiLeaks For Scaring Him
Stoobalou writes "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been accused of 'treason' by a Florida man seeking damages for distress caused by the site's revelations about the US government. From the article: 'David Pitchford, a Florida trailer park resident, names Assange and WikiLeaks as defendants in a personal injury suit filed with the Florida Southern District Court in Miami. In the complaint filed on 6th January, Pitchford alleges that Assange's negligence has caused "hypertension," "depression" and "living in fear of being stricken by another heart attack and/or stroke" as a result of living "in fear of being on the brink of another nuclear [sic] WAR."' Just for good measure, it also alleges that Assange and WikiLeaks are guilty of 'terorism [sic], espionage and treason.'"
It will be hard for anything else to beat this for the dumbest thing I've seen on the internet today.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Wouldn't it make more sense to sue the government for doing those things, instead of suing Wikileaks for talking about them?
I knew this would happen when I heard that Walmart was putting in self-serve legal departments.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Luckily, nuclear war is a cure for depression, hypertension, heart attack and stroke.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Don't you have to be a citizen in order to be charged with treason?
From the summary: "in fear of being on the brink of another nuclear [sic] WAR."'
From the article: "in fear of being on the brink of another nucliar [sic] WAR".
It would help if posters didn't correct spelling for words which are followed by [sic].
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But this guy is merely a risibly hyperbolic instance of a much broader, more common, and (in alarmingly many circles) respected position: Namely, that the person who reveals wrongdoing is somehow guiltier of that wrongdoing than the person who commits it.
I can't figure out if this view is a cancerous outgrowth of the morally monstrous "My country right or wrong" brigade(who are certainly louder and more numerous than there more honorable "May my country always be right and, when wrong, be set right" counterparts) or if it is a symptom of an even deeper flavor of cognitive limitation and/or ethical infantalism.
Below a certain age, and in some lower animals, "object permanence" is not well established. If they see an object enter a bag, they still lose track of it once it leaves their vision, and do not conclude that it must be residing in the bag, and can be found there. Above a certain age, and in smarter animals, this conclusion sticks. One is inclined to wonder if there is some moral variant of this, where some people, for who knows what reason, cannot apply "ethical action permanence" and conclude that, if Wikileaks took it out of the bag, and the government is the one who puts stuff in the bag, even though Wikileaks is holding the unethical object, it is merely the entity that took the object out of the bag where it had earlier been placed, not the entity that created the object.
In a way, I actually find the straight-up belligerent "USA! USA! Nuke ALL RAGHEADS!!!!" crowd to be more respectable. They are atavistic, barbarous scum, but they are refreshingly honest and straightforward about their bloodlust. The mealy-mouthed "respectable" apologists, on the other hand, are ethically no better; but spend their time dripping honeyed words and "nuance" to cover for the policies that they don't have the guts to endorse public-ally. It's like Fred Phelps: He is an awful human being, and merely by existing makes one wish there were a hell for him to inhabit; but he is all honesty. No equivocation, no focusing only on soft targets(anybody can picket an abortion clinic without much in the way of controversy, hitting military funerals takes serious guts...), no "Oh, we just stand for commonsense family values" circumlocution.
...I'm suing Fox, NY Times, Washington Post, etc. They've got REAL money.
Because people that live in the Panhandle of Florida (which has some of the poorest areas) are notorious for insurance/government program fraud. I used to live there and can tell you all sorts of stories about how the locals have been trying to screw people over for money. There's a documentary of a town about a half hour away from where I used to live where people were maiming themselves (cutting off limbs and such) to collect insurance on such a wide scale that insurance investigations into fraud were conducted on just about everyone in the town.
The stereotype implied isn't just him living in Florida, or being a trailer park resident, but a combination of the two as there is an existing stereotype for that group.
Doesn't make the stereotype right, but it does exist.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
how exactly does one commit treason against a country you have no affiliation with? Given that Assange is Australian, it'd be a pretty bizarre contortion of the law to conclude that he's committed treason against the US government. Espionage perhaps, but by definition: only Australia can charge him with treason.
Thankfully nature finds its balance, as now millions of people can sue David Pitchford for choking whilst laughing and coffee all over their keyboards.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Prejudice is just the drunk, mean, cousin of pattern recognition, which is just the folksy-handyman version of the scientific method....
As opposed to what? The correct spelling, which is nukular?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Oh the crime has been committed, don't you worry about that. They've just not invented a name for the crime and the requisite paperwork to go along with it yet, but most certainly the crime was committed.
I'm not in the least surprised that this fine example of human rational superiority lives in Florida. I read Fark, after all, and have seen no shortage of this kind of mind-boggling idiocy. More to the point, I think the this guy's anxiety is more likely caused by the fact that trailer parks attract tornadoes.
--Udo.