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Time Reporter "Can't Wait" To Justify Drone Strike On Julian Assange

First time accepted submitter Tuck News writes "A reporter for TIME Magazine sparked a Twitter war when he said that he 'can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange'. Michael Grunwald deleted his tweet after a follower argued that it would only encourage Assange supporters.Grunwald's employer distanced itself from the tweet, saying 'Michael Grunwald posted an offensive tweet from his personal Twitter account that is in no way representative of TIME's views.'"

12 of 490 comments (clear)

  1. Journalists licking Obamas boots by hsmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is anyone really surprised to see one kissing the drone emperors feet? When can a Nobel prize be revoked exactly?

    1. Re:Journalists licking Obamas boots by stenvar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why revoke it? The actions of the Nobel peace prize committee and Obama's subsequent conduct as president are a perfect microcosm of the unbridgeable gap between progressive and left-wing aspirations and reality.

      We should award the Ignoble peace prize to the Nobel peace prize committee for making this point so clearly.

    2. Re:Journalists licking Obamas boots by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, since Kissinger got to keep his, I guess a LOT more is necessary than what Obama did. Le Duc Tho at least had the guts to be honest and say "nope, thanks. I prefer to win".

      And don't make me start on Arafat.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. Re:How is that legal? by Stumbles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not really hate speech. Obama has use drone strikes against individuals, so really all the tweet was doing is drawing attention to our president indiscriminately murdering individuals without a warrant or like means. The Internet would be a much better place if we had sarcasm tags. I think that was the reporters intent.

    --
    My karma is not a Chameleon.
  3. Re:Know how you can spot an irrelevant "journalist by dbIII · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The bullshit questioning rubbish against Assange (no charge had been laid) is because he can't be handily moved into a US military prison without a few silly games being played due to the UK having a thing about the rule of law. It's a bit late to pretend that they are anything other than a pretext.
    The depressing thing is these drone strikes are effectively the same thing as the car bomb in Washington DC that was used by the Chileans to kill off a political enemy some years back. That's what the US can turn into if it keeps going down this path. Don't get me wrong, it's a long path and the US has barely set foot on it while the Russians are happily running down it killing people with rare poisons as a calling card, but the path leads to the sort of horrors we associate with the worst bits of the third world.

  4. The usual test balloon? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Let's see how the population reacts, if they just shrug to it, let's see how much else we can get away with. If it causes an outcry, we can always say it was the idea of a solitary lunatic"

    It's not like it would be the first time...

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  5. Re:Try claiming "Death to the Great Satan". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any illness requires a pathology. An idea or a belief is not pathological unless it causes significant distress or impairment in functioning (social, work, personal, etc.). Children who believe in the tooth fairy or Santa don't have mental illnesses. People who are communists don't have mental illnesses. Nor do religious people. The point it becomes a mental illness is the point where you can't function or are in too much pain. Believing you have the Holy Ghost inside of you doesn't do that, but believing you are covered in bedbugs will cause significant distress. And believing that you are always followed and snooped on will impair your ability to function.

    A mental illness isn't a judgement, it is a need to fix a behavior that is causing distress or inability to function. Political beliefs don't do that. The Nazis weren't mentally ill--not even the ones in the death camps. What so many people forget is that a mental illness is not distorted thinking--it is pathological thinking.

  6. Re: Try claiming "Death to the Great Satan". by johanw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    However, telling inconvenient thruths seems to be illegal there. Even if you're not American and don't even live there (Assange).

  7. Re:Try claiming "Death to the Great Satan". by Artifakt · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'm religious because I think the advice in the Sermon on the Mount is generally good advice.
    I'm religious because the parable of the good Samaritan was spoken two thousand years ago and a lot of people still aren't with it. Until people realise that the person who would help you in a pinch is your neighbor and the blood relative who wouldn't is not, we have a whole bunch of people who are more than 2,000 years behind on the news. Yes, there are older books that say much the same, and it shows up in Indian traditions, arts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and so on. I've read a lot of them and like the idea there just as much.
    I'm religious because 'sin' really does look like it's 100% omnipresent in human beings of normal mental capacity, over about the age of 2 1/2 at best, and I think that things that are absolutely, always, 100% fundamental phenomina for a certain class of entities need an especially deep and appropriate explanation, in the same way that the problem of black-body radiation was a strong clue to the way things work in physics and I'm glad Max Planck followed through on that. I don't particularly claim to be a Christian, or not just one, but one area where I particularly respect the mainstream Christian churches is they have taken the fact that EVERYONE of normally sound mind fails to live up to the best within them, has quite justified regrets and moral failings and can't always keep their promises, even ones they make to themselves, and realized that says something quite fundamental about reality.
    I'm religious because St. Paul gave a good evidence based argument for belief in life after death in Corinthians and why people's faith should be based on such evidence and how he wouldn't advocate such a radical thing as life after death upon just blind faith. Yeah, I know the bible doesn't always live up to such a standard, and Paul himself didn't always say things I agree with or admire and could really be a bit of a jerk sometimes, but that argument stands even now and people have debated and elaborated it for 2,000 years, and I still haven't heard anybody logically refute it.
    I'm religious because there's a mathematical proof of the existence of God, by Kurt Godel none-the-less, and his math looks good.
    I'm spiritual because of personal experience, and that exceeds any particular religious practice. If you haven't had Gnosis, go ahead and be an Agnostic, it really won't hurt anything, least of all yourself.

     

    --
    Who is John Cabal?
  8. Re:Try claiming "Death to the Great Satan". by houghi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm religious because I think the advice in the Sermon on the Mount is generally good advice.

    So you take parts that you like and ignore parts that you do not like? For that you do not have to be religious. You can do that without religion.

    Here an interesting read: Even If I DID Believe ...

    Part of the text below. Read it all on the link above.

    If I had undeniable proof of the existence of Yahweh, aka Jehovah, aka Adonai, aka El Shaddai, aka Yahweh Elohim, the father of Jesus and the ancient leader of the Semitic peoples, I still would not worship the bastard. If an angel appeared to me and removed my appendectomy scar so I could never deny the reality of divine power, I still would not be a Christian. My primary reason for not being a Christian or Jew has nothing to do with my lack of belief in their god. My primary reason is that the Bible is a disgusting book describing the behavior of a god without the morality of an average high school student.

    That God does what he wants, when he wants, without even an attempt at self-justification, and all for what reason? According to Paul, all for his own greater glory. Oh, how charming. For his own glory he condemns billions to eternal torment, drowns millions of innocent beasts and thousands of children, orders the slaughter of entire cities down to the last man, woman, and child, creates a race that he knows is flawed and will hurt itself (so that in their pain they can worship him better), refuses to deal with any other god on a friendly basis, restricts the normal expression of the sexual function, rains doom on those who dare to try to be as knowledgable as he is, and so on.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  9. Re:War rules .. by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well we won't know until the USA stops stirring up shit and being the pit bull of the ruling class now will we? i think gen Butler's speech is aproporiate as it shows just how fucking long this shit has been going on. This is a speech from the 1930s based on his experiences AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY so this shit has been going on for a looooonnnnggg time folks.

    "I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

    Sound familiar? Change the locations and it could have been written last year, the ONLY thing that changes is the location and which corp profits, that's all.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  10. Re:How is that legal? by Cederic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But will they actually do something? Can they do anything?

    Can a nuclear power do anything? Yes, I think we can.

    Whether we would is a more interesting question. It would however rapidly become dangerous to be American in the UK.