Yes, that was the article I read. I'm glad you link to it, so hat people can read it and see that Young's accusations are a bit more than what you make them out to be. Also from the article:
In a posting to the nettime mailing list, Young added:
"The free stuff is meant [to] lure volunteers and promote high-profile public service, lipsticked with risk, with the enterprise funded by selling costly material sold on the black market of worldwide spying in the tradition of public benefit ops, ID, spies and ever more spies. No better customers for illicit information that [sic] those with depthless pockets.
"Soros and the Kochs have their lesser-known Internet promoters backing Wikileaks generously. And they expect good return on their investment, not just the freebies used to attract attention."
Writing last month, Young shared his disgust at Wikileaks' similar tactics to advertising-supported or state-supported media - which Young claims cannot be trusted by definition.
"Wikileaks lies as much as the media, indeed, exactly in the advertising format of the media. Its consumers like it for that very reason. It rides the wave of imaginary disgust with MSM and governments, but it has not modified the formula of braggardy and drama essential to capture eyeballs and through eyeballs, minds and hearts."
I have read the stories. Yet again you accuse me of being uninformed, and call me a dipwad.
You present this timeline: Women do not want to press charges (so how does anyone know what happened?) Overzealous prosecutor "forced the issue." (How? What "Issue" is being forced? How did the prosecutor know?) Later, a lawyer convinced the women to press charges. (Wait, didn't you JUST claim the prosecutor did that? How did said lawyer know about the case if the women never pressed charges?)
Finally, you add in a non sequitur implication that these charges must have come at the behest of the USA.
That's all pretty damn muddled in my book, sorry if that hurts your feelings.
One of them, anyhow. The one who took the original documents, not the diplomatic cables. But Julian Assange is specifically protected by the same American law that protected the New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers. There is simply no way we can arrest him.
He claims he was asked to head wikileaks, but turned them down when he heard their fund-raising plans included pimping out the information to the highest bidder.
Thank you. It never ceases to amaze me how black and white most people's thinking is: "Julian is either a hero, or he isn't. There is no way he can be a hero in one respect, and a villain in another." Which is odd, because if we look at ourselves honestly, I think we'd have to agree we all have a bit of hero and a bit of villain in us.
Most of humanity appears to thoroughly enjoy the pastime of hero worship. This seems to be widespread enough that we might want to investigate whether there is some evolutionary advantage to it. Maybe kissing ass provides some sort of inoculation against disease.
Where? You could link to the tweets, if they exist. From what I understand, the second woman did behave a bit like a groupie, but the first woman did not.
If this had happened in America, you might have a point. But this happened in Sweden, which recently enacted some fairly strict and harsh anti-rape laws. Commentators quipped that when the laws passed, men would need to get specific consent in writing before having sex. Mr. Assange is not being treated any differently than anyone else in Sweden.
If you were paying attention, the women DID NOT want to press charges. It was an overzealous prosecutor who forced the issue. Later, a lawyer ($$$$$$$$) convinced the women to press charges.
Certainly, it is possible that he is a rapist, but it is surely suspicious considering how mad the USA is at him and their leverage around the world.
What sources are you basing this on? Who was the prosecutor, and how did the prosecutor know that these women did not want to report a rape if the rape was never reported? How could a prosecutor force the issue and then a lawyer convince the women to press charges? Which was it? You accuse me of not paying attention, but then present a very muddled set of allegations.
So arrest the people who took the documents. We have a law in this country specifically protecting the right to publish documents even if they were obtained illegally. Remember the Pentagon Papers? If it was legal to publish those, it is legal for Assange to publish the documents he received.
Uh, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here. You do realize that Assange did not take any documents from government offices, right?
I'm not taking sides on the rape thing yet. Let the women have their day in court. They claim they gave consent for sex with a condom, but that he broke or took the condom off, and would not stop when they asked him too. In most places, including the States, if a person gives consent and then withdraws it, there is no longer consent. As far as I know there is no "blue balls" clause letting you finish even if she says no halfway through.
Also, groupies? Really? You really want to go there, smearing the women with a derogatory name like that? Even if you had something to back up your claim that they are, it's just tasteless and crass. And yes, that is exactly the sort of thing that INTERPOL is there for, he is not in Sweden anymore. From what I understand, Sweden has rape laws that are very protective of the victim and categorize certain things as rape that we might not. It is their right as a sovereign nation to set their own laws.
Assange will not be extradited to the US. He will not be charged with a crime in the US, because he never committed a crime here, despite the worst wishes of many in the White House and our spineless media. Even if he were extradited, he would have to finish his trial in Sweden and serve any sentence there first. The Swedish prosecutor claims that it is common for rape cases in Sweden to be dropped and reopened (Cue the conspiracy theorists yelling, "They WOULD say that!")
But as I mentioned, I withhold judgment on this. It is entirely possible that Julian Assange is both a champion of transparency AND a rapist. I'm far more interested in the charges leveled by John Young of Cryptome, that he is a mercenary selling access to unredacted source documents to the highest bidder on the black market.
So all those posters above defending Mr. Borker are not libertarians? Obviously not, because No True Libertarian would defend something like this. Except they do. And your sig gives us a clue as to why they do.
Your sig is quite telling. All libertarians feel superior to others. They feel that in a libertarian system, they would be highly rewarded for their excellence. Libertarians are authoritarian at heart. They do not want government interfering with their ability to force others to recognize their superiority. Libertarians believe the strong have a moral right to profit off of the weak. Like all authoritarians, they worship power. They do not want an egalitarian society where "all men are created equal." They want a society where the weak do not have access to justice. Just like the defenders of Mr. Borker, they will always ask the victim "Is this REALLY a problem? Why didn't you protect yourself? Why didn't you perform due diligence? Why did you let yourself be taken advantage of? What's wrong with YOU?"
The desire for libertarianism is founded on the belief that the weak are the natural prey of the strong.
Is ANYTHING really a problem for libertarians, except "government regulations?" You demonstrate the utter moral bankruptcy of libertarian ideals. "You're not the boss of me" is not a valid political system, it is the cry of a selfish child.
Yes, this is a problem. Many people here have demonstrated how and why, and given you evidence that it is a problem. The article gives evidence that it is a problem. And yet you continue to ask "Is this really a problem?" This is the heart of libertarian "justice." No laws or regulations detailing what constitutes harm. In each case, the victim must prove harm, but the libertarians will always blame the victim, saying "Is this really a problem?" and "If this is a problem, it is YOUR problem." Libertarians will claim the victim should have known better, they should have protected themselves, they should just shut up and shop elsewhere.
This is because libertarians are at heart authoritarian. They believe they are better than others. They believe that the superior have a natural right to profit from the inferior. Protecting the victim is going against nature. The victim was weak, the abuser was strong, the abuser won and the victim lost, and now, a bunch of inferior little people are going to band together to try to subvert nature and punish the strong? Outrageous!
Libertarians will never believe any evidence that the strong profiting off of the weak is a problem because to them, it is not a problem. To them, the core assumption is flawed. The strong should profit off of the weak. Anything else is unnatural. Not that they will ever come right out and say that, it will always be cloaked in some other argument. They know that most others do not share their authoritarian beliefs. In Libertopia, when you are victimized, the authoritarians will always be there to ask, "Is this really a problem? Didn't you bring this on yourself?"
Oddly enough, our per capita GDP has gone up. We are not 'slipping' if by slipping you mean going backward. At least not in terms of overall productivity. What has happened is that all the increases in GDP have gone to the top 10%, so the rest of us have not moved forward, and in fact, the poorest twenty percent has fallen behind. It is outright class warfare, and the owning class is winning.
You seem to be looking at the robber baron era through the great depression, then mysteriously skipping fifty years or so when more worker friendly government regulations and programs like the new deal gave workers more power to negotiate, and corporations were forced to act more responsibly.
I'm not up on these sorts of things, it does look quite spectacular though. Does anyone know what kind of effects we might have seen on Earth if this had been directly towards us?
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave! Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
That depends on how close they come. If they come close, they have a direct, measurable effect on all sorts of things, like power lines, which are essentially giant antenna. CMEs in the past have caused massive blackouts.
While this is a nice theory, nothing in my experience seems to bear out your conclusions. By your theory, corporations should become less sociopathic over time. I've seen just the opposite. For your theory to really work, all workers would have to have the realistic option of leaving any employer that demonstrates sociopathic behavior, at any time. The elites have done everything in their power to ensure that as many working class people are as desperate as possible, and unable to effectively resist sociopathic actions by their employers. Also, it seems to me that capitalism, as a system, seems supremely uninterested in anything but the short term.
In fact, I would postulate an alternative hypothesis, that in any area dominated by sociopaths, even non-sociopaths must adopt sociopathic behaviors to compete.
10" is too large? I think you need a bit more exercise. Crawl out of your basement, see the light of the world outside your monitor, use the muscles not on your arms/hands/fingers and jaws
Yes, please do not use your jaws, everyone knows Honeycombs tear the shit out of the roof of your mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that was the article I read. I'm glad you link to it, so hat people can read it and see that Young's accusations are a bit more than what you make them out to be. Also from the article:
In a posting to the nettime mailing list, Young added:
"The free stuff is meant [to] lure volunteers and promote high-profile public service, lipsticked with risk, with the enterprise funded by selling costly material sold on the black market of worldwide spying in the tradition of public benefit ops, ID, spies and ever more spies. No better customers for illicit information that [sic] those with depthless pockets.
"Soros and the Kochs have their lesser-known Internet promoters backing Wikileaks generously. And they expect good return on their investment, not just the freebies used to attract attention."
Writing last month, Young shared his disgust at Wikileaks' similar tactics to advertising-supported or state-supported media - which Young claims cannot be trusted by definition.
"Wikileaks lies as much as the media, indeed, exactly in the advertising format of the media. Its consumers like it for that very reason. It rides the wave of imaginary disgust with MSM and governments, but it has not modified the formula of braggardy and drama essential to capture eyeballs and through eyeballs, minds and hearts."
I'm exaggerating, am I?
Sweden has batshit insane anti-rape laws, yes.
That was pretty much the general critique of Sweden's new anti-rape laws, yes.
I have read the stories. Yet again you accuse me of being uninformed, and call me a dipwad.
You present this timeline:
Women do not want to press charges (so how does anyone know what happened?)
Overzealous prosecutor "forced the issue." (How? What "Issue" is being forced? How did the prosecutor know?)
Later, a lawyer convinced the women to press charges. (Wait, didn't you JUST claim the prosecutor did that? How did said lawyer know about the case if the women never pressed charges?)
Finally, you add in a non sequitur implication that these charges must have come at the behest of the USA.
That's all pretty damn muddled in my book, sorry if that hurts your feelings.
So arrest the people who took the documents.
And we did.
One of them, anyhow. The one who took the original documents, not the diplomatic cables. But Julian Assange is specifically protected by the same American law that protected the New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers. There is simply no way we can arrest him.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/cryptome_on_wikileaks/
He claims he was asked to head wikileaks, but turned them down when he heard their fund-raising plans included pimping out the information to the highest bidder.
Thank you. It never ceases to amaze me how black and white most people's thinking is: "Julian is either a hero, or he isn't. There is no way he can be a hero in one respect, and a villain in another." Which is odd, because if we look at ourselves honestly, I think we'd have to agree we all have a bit of hero and a bit of villain in us.
Most of humanity appears to thoroughly enjoy the pastime of hero worship. This seems to be widespread enough that we might want to investigate whether there is some evolutionary advantage to it. Maybe kissing ass provides some sort of inoculation against disease.
Where? You could link to the tweets, if they exist. From what I understand, the second woman did behave a bit like a groupie, but the first woman did not.
If this had happened in America, you might have a point. But this happened in Sweden, which recently enacted some fairly strict and harsh anti-rape laws. Commentators quipped that when the laws passed, men would need to get specific consent in writing before having sex. Mr. Assange is not being treated any differently than anyone else in Sweden.
If you were paying attention, the women DID NOT want to press charges. It was an overzealous prosecutor who forced the issue. Later, a lawyer ($$$$$$$$) convinced the women to press charges.
Certainly, it is possible that he is a rapist, but it is surely suspicious considering how mad the USA is at him and their leverage around the world.
What sources are you basing this on? Who was the prosecutor, and how did the prosecutor know that these women did not want to report a rape if the rape was never reported? How could a prosecutor force the issue and then a lawyer convince the women to press charges? Which was it? You accuse me of not paying attention, but then present a very muddled set of allegations.
So arrest the people who took the documents. We have a law in this country specifically protecting the right to publish documents even if they were obtained illegally. Remember the Pentagon Papers? If it was legal to publish those, it is legal for Assange to publish the documents he received.
Uh, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here. You do realize that Assange did not take any documents from government offices, right?
I'm not taking sides on the rape thing yet. Let the women have their day in court. They claim they gave consent for sex with a condom, but that he broke or took the condom off, and would not stop when they asked him too. In most places, including the States, if a person gives consent and then withdraws it, there is no longer consent. As far as I know there is no "blue balls" clause letting you finish even if she says no halfway through.
Also, groupies? Really? You really want to go there, smearing the women with a derogatory name like that? Even if you had something to back up your claim that they are, it's just tasteless and crass. And yes, that is exactly the sort of thing that INTERPOL is there for, he is not in Sweden anymore. From what I understand, Sweden has rape laws that are very protective of the victim and categorize certain things as rape that we might not. It is their right as a sovereign nation to set their own laws.
Assange will not be extradited to the US. He will not be charged with a crime in the US, because he never committed a crime here, despite the worst wishes of many in the White House and our spineless media. Even if he were extradited, he would have to finish his trial in Sweden and serve any sentence there first. The Swedish prosecutor claims that it is common for rape cases in Sweden to be dropped and reopened (Cue the conspiracy theorists yelling, "They WOULD say that!")
But as I mentioned, I withhold judgment on this. It is entirely possible that Julian Assange is both a champion of transparency AND a rapist. I'm far more interested in the charges leveled by John Young of Cryptome, that he is a mercenary selling access to unredacted source documents to the highest bidder on the black market.
So all those posters above defending Mr. Borker are not libertarians? Obviously not, because No True Libertarian would defend something like this. Except they do. And your sig gives us a clue as to why they do.
Your sig is quite telling. All libertarians feel superior to others. They feel that in a libertarian system, they would be highly rewarded for their excellence. Libertarians are authoritarian at heart. They do not want government interfering with their ability to force others to recognize their superiority. Libertarians believe the strong have a moral right to profit off of the weak. Like all authoritarians, they worship power. They do not want an egalitarian society where "all men are created equal." They want a society where the weak do not have access to justice. Just like the defenders of Mr. Borker, they will always ask the victim "Is this REALLY a problem? Why didn't you protect yourself? Why didn't you perform due diligence? Why did you let yourself be taken advantage of? What's wrong with YOU?"
The desire for libertarianism is founded on the belief that the weak are the natural prey of the strong.
Is ANYTHING really a problem for libertarians, except "government regulations?" You demonstrate the utter moral bankruptcy of libertarian ideals. "You're not the boss of me" is not a valid political system, it is the cry of a selfish child.
Yes, this is a problem. Many people here have demonstrated how and why, and given you evidence that it is a problem. The article gives evidence that it is a problem. And yet you continue to ask "Is this really a problem?" This is the heart of libertarian "justice." No laws or regulations detailing what constitutes harm. In each case, the victim must prove harm, but the libertarians will always blame the victim, saying "Is this really a problem?" and "If this is a problem, it is YOUR problem." Libertarians will claim the victim should have known better, they should have protected themselves, they should just shut up and shop elsewhere.
This is because libertarians are at heart authoritarian. They believe they are better than others. They believe that the superior have a natural right to profit from the inferior. Protecting the victim is going against nature. The victim was weak, the abuser was strong, the abuser won and the victim lost, and now, a bunch of inferior little people are going to band together to try to subvert nature and punish the strong? Outrageous!
Libertarians will never believe any evidence that the strong profiting off of the weak is a problem because to them, it is not a problem. To them, the core assumption is flawed. The strong should profit off of the weak. Anything else is unnatural. Not that they will ever come right out and say that, it will always be cloaked in some other argument. They know that most others do not share their authoritarian beliefs. In Libertopia, when you are victimized, the authoritarians will always be there to ask, "Is this really a problem? Didn't you bring this on yourself?"
Oddly enough, our per capita GDP has gone up. We are not 'slipping' if by slipping you mean going backward. At least not in terms of overall productivity. What has happened is that all the increases in GDP have gone to the top 10%, so the rest of us have not moved forward, and in fact, the poorest twenty percent has fallen behind. It is outright class warfare, and the owning class is winning.
You seem to be looking at the robber baron era through the great depression, then mysteriously skipping fifty years or so when more worker friendly government regulations and programs like the new deal gave workers more power to negotiate, and corporations were forced to act more responsibly.
I'm not up on these sorts of things, it does look quite spectacular though. Does anyone know what kind of effects we might have seen on Earth if this had been directly towards us?
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
That depends on how close they come. If they come close, they have a direct, measurable effect on all sorts of things, like power lines, which are essentially giant antenna. CMEs in the past have caused massive blackouts.
Sun says, "Oh, SNAP!"
While this is a nice theory, nothing in my experience seems to bear out your conclusions. By your theory, corporations should become less sociopathic over time. I've seen just the opposite. For your theory to really work, all workers would have to have the realistic option of leaving any employer that demonstrates sociopathic behavior, at any time. The elites have done everything in their power to ensure that as many working class people are as desperate as possible, and unable to effectively resist sociopathic actions by their employers. Also, it seems to me that capitalism, as a system, seems supremely uninterested in anything but the short term.
In fact, I would postulate an alternative hypothesis, that in any area dominated by sociopaths, even non-sociopaths must adopt sociopathic behaviors to compete.
10" is too large? I think you need a bit more exercise. Crawl out of your basement, see the light of the world outside your monitor, use the muscles not on your arms/hands/fingers and jaws
Yes, please do not use your jaws, everyone knows Honeycombs tear the shit out of the roof of your mouth.
No. Somolia is not a word. And Somalia is not a first world country. What point were you trying to make?
Ah, so you are building a plane from plans that have already been tested and approved by the FAA. My point, I think.
As far as force projection capabilities go, no one can come close to us. For instance, China has one aircraft carrier.