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Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems
oxide7 (1013325) writes "In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to Western companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet's future that has only gathered force subsequently. Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views."
His main points, as I understand them:
1) Eric Schmidt is getting involved in politics, and is becoming influential.
2) Google doesn't always follow "do no evil" but fanboys love Google anyway
3) Google is getting involved in government more than is healthy.
He has some other rambles about the Bilderbergs, and how the governments are secretly controlling world events, but his main points seam reasonable enough.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
He's not in England. He's in Ecuador. The embassy is their sovereign soil, by international treaty. If the English police set foot in there to deport him to Sweden (as they would do if he left), that's an invastion of their territory.
He's not in England. He's in Ecuador.
No he isn't. He is in the Ecuadorian embassy, in London, England.
The embassy is their sovereign soil, by international treaty.
No it isn't.
Contrary to popular belief, diplomatic missions do not enjoy full extraterritorial status and are not sovereign territory of the represented state.
If the English police set foot in there to deport him to Sweden (as they would do if he left), that's an invastion of their territory.
No it isn't.
It would break a very important international treaty though, and likely
lead to lots of diplomatic problems.
Depends how you measure "liberty". For example, a random US citizen in the US has seven times the chance of being incarcerated as a random Chinese citizen in China. China has also dragged more people out of abject poverty in the last 40yrs than the rest of the world combined.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm still lost on why Sweden, of all places, is more likely to deport Assange to the US than England is.
Why else are they going to such extraordinary lengths to obtain him? There are no charges, and Sweden refuses to question him in the UK.
The UK is spending millions of pounds on a case where even the allegations do not add up to anything that would be a crime in the UK.
If you think Assange has no cause for fear, read this:
In December 2001 Swedish police ... two Egyptians who had been seeking asylum in Sweden. The police took them to Bromma airport in Stockholm, and then stood aside as masked alleged CIA operatives cut their clothes from their bodies, inserted drugged suppositories in their anuses, and dressed them in diapers and overalls, handcuffed and chained them and put them on an executive jet with American registration N379P. They were flown to Egypt, where they were imprisoned, beaten, and tortured
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
I've grown up in Europe and spent time in the US, Australia, China, and a bunch of other places, thinking about where I wanted to settle down. You're right, sometimes it's easier to see things from the outside, and while there are lots of nice things about Australia, socio-economic constraints are worse than in the US, as is the support for civil liberties and individual rights.
Of course, we know now that McCarthy did not engage in "witch hunts" at all. There really were communists in the State Department, and they really did mean to use their position to overthrow the government. Sorry to have to make you re-write your history like that, but inconvenient facts must be accepted. Or is that one of those nitpicky rules for the little people that never applies to ourselves?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!