The right-wingers have one point though: Liberals usually work incrementally.
Tell them to stick that point to the end of their wedge and shove it up their own asses. "Liberals work incrementally", riiight, "hey, make the tax cuts temporary *wink*wink*". Bunch of hyprocritical... grrr...
Yeah, like there are only two two kinds of people in this country... and there are just as many on the "American Left" who will happily and blindly lap up what their "leaders" tell them to.
There's almost no Left in the U.S.A., "right of center" seems like it's the Left only to those at the extreme Right.
companies are FREE to tack on whatever fees they want.
Companies? You mean, like, government-chartered corporations? A free market wouldn't have these artificial liability-limiting entities:)
The free market is an imaginary ideal - not something that ever really existed.
The free market has always existed, it's known as the "black" market. You can get anything, cheap, on the black market, but anything may not be what you thought you paid for; buyer beware!
If you think that someone can after-the-fact decide that, actually, they didn't want to fuck around with that guy after all, and that makes him a rapist, I hope you or someone you love is actually raped someday
For the record, I agree with the logic behind Anon's hate, but I, for one, just want the troll to die; I don't wish rape on the troll's acquaintances.
Not surprised, but did they aid in obtaining them? I got the impression they aided in publishing, but that Manning obtained them all on his own.
There is reason to believe that Assange provided Manning with instructions and a means to submit the documents. He had nothing to do with actually getting them. This wasn't a case of "Here, Wikileaks, have these documents." It was more like "Wikileaks, help me submit these." The government is operating under the assumption that Manning didn't submit the documents like everyone else and wait for Wikileaks to find it. Rather, Wikileaks knew what was coming and helped Manning submit them. This is in contrast to an oft cited example, the Pentagon Papers, where Daniel Elsberg handed them documents without the journalists knowing what it was.
Dude, however modded you down should check themselves in rehad.
I considered the possibility, but it didn't look like that was the case.
Are you drunk?
I believe firmly in allowing people to play the devils advocate or to admit to understanding the reasoning of those we otherwise call unreasonable. I just don't see a lot of that going on.
Or you're just really bad at spotting it. Seriously, I've just had a look again, he's definitely not endorsing the government's position.
Think for a second on what Mr. Mannings goal was... informing the public. Now think of how easily it would be for a foreign security agency or even a terrorist sympathizer to achieve the same level of clearance.
Very difficult: Bradley Manning is a true patriot, that's how he cleared the security screening. If they test for possible traitors, he passed because he always intended to serve his country.
He is trying to restate, the official excuse for why wikileaks is considered to have engaged in criminal activities, as his own opinion.
What you think of people who for some reason needs to pretend to think for themselves when they verbatime restate official statements, I will let you decide.
You are trying to restate his opinion, that means YOU believe the excuse that he restated, does it? Of course you don't, and neither does he. He was explaining the situation and how people are interpreting it, and you go "omfg he must believe that!".
ATTENTION EVERYONE: learn the gorram difference between explaining a position and believing that position! Come on! It's...it's not that hard, all you have to do is read with your eyes open instead of jumping to the first flammable strawman conclusion you can infer. Try it, for a change.
Look at the signatories on this page, and tell me with a straight face that none of them have held public office.
George Bush could do it. The man can say any lie with not only a straight face, but a look of total empathic trust. It's a skill he picked up back when he was an alcoholic, and it served him very well in business and politics. Just saying: Some people are schemers, some people are sellers.
In the first case, she withdrew consent during. In the second case, the other woman was asleep and therefore could not consent.
Claims? Remember? You're talking about this as if It Happened With Certainty.
Isn't that so very interesting. So, very.
The actions afterwards are irrelevant.
They are certainly not!
If a domestic abuse victim stays with his or her attacker, does their black eye suddenly disappear?
Now you're implying this was similar to violent domestic abuse, fanfuckingtastic, you biased fuck.
The rest of your post is based on a misunderstanding of the law and how the justice system works, with questioning of the accused almost always occurring prior to the bringing of formal charges, and is thus moot.
9 days of solitary confinement (torture) always occurring, huh?
As to me thinking that the U.S. government is the good guys, no such thing. I just don't think they are competent enough to orchestrate this.
They can orchestrate a golf game on the moon... on. the. moon.
Personally, I'm not sure why Julian Assange is still walking around.
Because they're sophisticated enough to understand that creating a martyr is not the way to neutralize a popular ideological opponent; there are better ways.
You can attack their reputation, you can lock them up on trumped up charges, you can subject them to stresses that would break any man's will, all of it to turn them into something people will look down on with disgust. If you nail them to a cross in their prime, they could still be talked about two thousand years later. If you gun them down in south america, their face could still be on t-shirts decades later. You learn from your mistakes, you evolve.
The U.S. is not a blundering buffoon, it's a slick con man. Reexamine your assumptions, you may see events that you thought were stupid were actually Machiavellian, if you just realize that the stated goal is not the real goal.
In this instance, the goal isn't to protect Swedish women from the evils of unwanted semen, the goal is to neutralize a disruptive agent. The actions don't fit the stated goal, so you must infer the real goals from what would fit these circumstances. Check the facts, see which is most likely.
There is reason to believe that the U.S. government would be harrassing Julian Assange. However, reasonable people can conclude that they are not doing so in this particular case since the Swedish government has sufficient motive to be after him all on their own.
Nope. No reasonable people can come to that conclusion: only people's who's judgment is clouded by their feelings.
They are not going after him all on their own; they had him and let him go; someone in the capital reopened the case just when the cables started going public. That's one hell of a coincidence to dismiss.
You have to allow yourself a huge bias to think the Swedes are more likely to be motivated independently to act against Assange than to allow that the government that as been putting pressure on all fronts on Assange has put pressure on that front too.
You want to be stickler for "beyond a reasonable doubt" when it comes to the culpability of the U.S.? You should want proof beyonf a reasonable doubt that the Swedes are autonomous in this action.
Read. the fucking. cables. THIS is the documented behavior of the U.S., it's not a hypothetical "they could do this someday", it's a very real "they've been doing this over and over for years". Pressuring other countries behind the scene, in secret.
No longer in secret, which is why they're so pissed: You might stop systematically assuming that the U.S. doesn't do what they do. They want you to keep that warm fuzzy feeling you have about them being Good Guys TM, that feeling that blinds you to the VERY CLEAR signs of their involvement.
in Sweden if the woman withdraws consent during the act it is still considered rape, with prision terms.
The point of contention is not the swedish law, but whether the consent was actually withdrawn and the credibility of the womens' statement. The women seem to have continued their relationship with Assange, despite the rape and condom-break incident, which makes their claims sound a bit dubious.
And? Their credibility should be judged by a jury, at trial.
A trial? There hasn't been any charges yet! 9 days in solitary, but no charges.
Credibility? I don't see any.
So, because Assange has been held by British police, therefore two Swedish women have no credibility?
You can't withdraw your consent more than a week after the sex happened (she kept letting him live with her for a week and said she never was afraid of him), that's why the complaint was dismissed in less than 24h, because it wasn't credible.
It was such a nice pretext though, they couldn't let it go to waste...
It's not about the claims, the claims are just a red herring for police action and legal delays. There is no credibility in the claims because the response is completely disproportional to the claims. No one ever got pursued like this over such claims before. Those governments are not doing this because they believe the claims, they're using the claims as an excuse.
And Swedish authorities don't even believe the claims: They haven't even laid any formal charges. They just want to ask him questions. They didn't want to ask him questions when he was in the country, they told him it was ok to leave the country, and then they wanted him jailed in the U.K. right when the cables started going public?
No credibility.
I thought Slashdot was supposed to be home to logical thinkers.
I've known for a long time that slashdot is full of illogical dullards like you.
The evidence supports the suspicion that the U.S. is involved, but not the certainty.
Well, you're a stickler for "beyond any reasonable doubts", can't fault you for that.
But what I see is Bart Simpson saying "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything". I know Bart did it even if I haven't found the hard evidence yet.
Go ahead and find me a fighting game that doesn't have split screen (lookin forward to Marvel vs. Capcom 3 BTW).
Fighting games don't have split-screen, they have same-screen multiplayer.
Not to undo your point or anything, but War of the Monsters on PS2 had split screen until you got up close and personal, where the screen would merge while you're fighting and split again if someone ran away or got thrown.
You have successfully made the case for this being unusual. However, you have failed to show how this means that the U.S. is playing a role.
Joe Lieberman stating that the U.S. intends to seek extradition from the U.K. shows the U.S. is an active participant in this kangaroo court. The fact that the accusations occurred right when he was seeking asylum in Sweden to protect himself from the United States who have been getting more and more rabid about denying him freedom of the press, and that the accusations were cited as reason to deny him residency in Sweden add to my conviction. I think the U.S. representative made it confidentially clear that it would be best for Sweden if they were to find a reason to keep that guy from getting their protection. And now they're milking it so he can be held while the U.S. figures out some loophole with which to extradite him to their torture chambers.
But if you want actual proof, then no, that's not been leaked yet. Sometimes gotta wait decades for the truth to come out, go read the leaked cables, and declassified CIA docs, it's full of this type of behavior. It's not hypothetical that the U.S. government acts this way, it's a document pattern of behavior; they've been caught with their pants down and they're after the guy who told everyone.
There's even some evidence that these women didn't really press charges even after they found out about each other until _after_ someone in the prosecutor's office started pushing them.
What were they doing in the prosecutor's office in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
The right-wingers have one point though:
Liberals usually work incrementally.
Tell them to stick that point to the end of their wedge and shove it up their own asses. "Liberals work incrementally", riiight, "hey, make the tax cuts temporary *wink*wink*". Bunch of hyprocritical... grrr...
Yeah, like there are only two two kinds of people in this country ... and there are just as many on the "American Left" who will happily and blindly lap up what their "leaders" tell them to.
There's almost no Left in the U.S.A., "right of center" seems like it's the Left only to those at the extreme Right.
Whenever someone disagrees with you, it must be because they are badly misinformed.
Nah, sometime they're just flat out stupid.
companies are FREE to tack on whatever fees they want.
Companies? You mean, like, government-chartered corporations? A free market wouldn't have these artificial liability-limiting entities :)
The free market is an imaginary ideal - not something that ever really existed.
The free market has always existed, it's known as the "black" market.
You can get anything, cheap, on the black market, but anything may not be what you thought you paid for; buyer beware!
If you think that someone can after-the-fact decide that, actually, they didn't want to fuck around with that guy after all, and that makes him a rapist, I hope you or someone you love is actually raped someday
For the record, I agree with the logic behind Anon's hate, but I, for one, just want the troll to die; I don't wish rape on the troll's acquaintances.
Not surprised, but did they aid in obtaining them? I got the impression they aided in publishing, but that Manning obtained them all on his own.
There is reason to believe that Assange provided Manning with instructions and a means to submit the documents. He had nothing to do with actually getting them. This wasn't a case of "Here, Wikileaks, have these documents." It was more like "Wikileaks, help me submit these." The government is operating under the assumption that Manning didn't submit the documents like everyone else and wait for Wikileaks to find it. Rather, Wikileaks knew what was coming and helped Manning submit them. This is in contrast to an oft cited example, the Pentagon Papers, where Daniel Elsberg handed them documents without the journalists knowing what it was.
Dude, however modded you down should check themselves in rehad.
I considered the possibility, but it didn't look like that was the case.
Are you drunk?
I believe firmly in allowing people to play the devils advocate or to admit to understanding the reasoning of those we otherwise call unreasonable. I just don't see a lot of that going on.
Or you're just really bad at spotting it. Seriously, I've just had a look again, he's definitely not endorsing the government's position.
Sarah Palin could pull it off. No, I'm super serial!
Miss Congeniality? Sure, you betcha!
As for TFA, THIS, this is what the CIA is doing with taxpayer dollars?
They're in the business of keeping secrets, those guys are in the business of exposing secrets, they'd better keep an eye on 'em...
Life is that simple sonny boy when the law gets involved.
And they won't stop screwing you when you say "no" either.
Nothing is simple when the law gets involved.
Think for a second on what Mr. Mannings goal was... informing the public. Now think of how easily it would be for a foreign security agency or even a terrorist sympathizer to achieve the same level of clearance.
Very difficult: Bradley Manning is a true patriot, that's how he cleared the security screening. If they test for possible traitors, he passed because he always intended to serve his country.
He is trying to restate, the official excuse for why wikileaks is considered to have engaged in criminal activities, as his own opinion.
What you think of people who for some reason needs to pretend to think for themselves when they verbatime restate official statements, I will let you decide.
You are trying to restate his opinion, that means YOU believe the excuse that he restated, does it?
Of course you don't, and neither does he.
He was explaining the situation and how people are interpreting it, and you go "omfg he must believe that!".
ATTENTION EVERYONE: learn the gorram difference between explaining a position and believing that position! Come on! It's...it's not that hard, all you have to do is read with your eyes open instead of jumping to the first flammable strawman conclusion you can infer. Try it, for a change.
There actually is a company in the Langley area called Counter Intelligence that does this. You occasionally see their van driving around.
That's what they WANT you to believe!
Look at the signatories on this page, and tell me with a straight face that none of them have held public office.
George Bush could do it. The man can say any lie with not only a straight face, but a look of total empathic trust. It's a skill he picked up back when he was an alcoholic, and it served him very well in business and politics. Just saying: Some people are schemers, some people are sellers.
Window's dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways, reduced hardware costs
[citation needed]
In the first case, she withdrew consent during. In the second case, the other woman was asleep and therefore could not consent.
Claims? Remember? You're talking about this as if It Happened With Certainty.
Isn't that so very interesting. So, very.
The actions afterwards are irrelevant.
They are certainly not!
If a domestic abuse victim stays with his or her attacker, does their black eye suddenly disappear?
Now you're implying this was similar to violent domestic abuse, fanfuckingtastic, you biased fuck.
The rest of your post is based on a misunderstanding of the law and how the justice system works, with questioning of the accused almost always occurring prior to the bringing of formal charges, and is thus moot.
9 days of solitary confinement (torture) always occurring, huh?
Eat shit and die.
As to me thinking that the U.S. government is the good guys, no such thing. I just don't think they are competent enough to orchestrate this.
They can orchestrate a golf game on the moon... on. the. moon.
Personally, I'm not sure why Julian Assange is still walking around.
Because they're sophisticated enough to understand that creating a martyr is not the way to neutralize a popular ideological opponent; there are better ways.
You can attack their reputation, you can lock them up on trumped up charges, you can subject them to stresses that would break any man's will, all of it to turn them into something people will look down on with disgust.
If you nail them to a cross in their prime, they could still be talked about two thousand years later. If you gun them down in south america, their face could still be on t-shirts decades later.
You learn from your mistakes, you evolve.
The U.S. is not a blundering buffoon, it's a slick con man. Reexamine your assumptions, you may see events that you thought were stupid were actually Machiavellian, if you just realize that the stated goal is not the real goal.
In this instance, the goal isn't to protect Swedish women from the evils of unwanted semen, the goal is to neutralize a disruptive agent. The actions don't fit the stated goal, so you must infer the real goals from what would fit these circumstances. Check the facts, see which is most likely.
Suggested reading: The Art of War.
Can we stop posting every bit wikileaks minutiae and get back to real news for nerds?
wikileaks almost has nothing to do with tech anyways, and this tidbit is almost certainly not stuff that matters.
Can we report on more ways to help Wikileaks please?
Can you stop feeding the trolls?
Every thread has a troll in it saying "this is not news for nerd/stuff that matters", they should simply be routinely downmodded and ignored.
There is reason to believe that the U.S. government would be harrassing Julian Assange. However, reasonable people can conclude that they are not doing so in this particular case since the Swedish government has sufficient motive to be after him all on their own.
Nope. No reasonable people can come to that conclusion: only people's who's judgment is clouded by their feelings.
They are not going after him all on their own; they had him and let him go; someone in the capital reopened the case just when the cables started going public. That's one hell of a coincidence to dismiss.
You have to allow yourself a huge bias to think the Swedes are more likely to be motivated independently to act against Assange than to allow that the government that as been putting pressure on all fronts on Assange has put pressure on that front too.
You want to be stickler for "beyond a reasonable doubt" when it comes to the culpability of the U.S.? You should want proof beyonf a reasonable doubt that the Swedes are autonomous in this action.
Read. the fucking. cables. THIS is the documented behavior of the U.S., it's not a hypothetical "they could do this someday", it's a very real "they've been doing this over and over for years". Pressuring other countries behind the scene, in secret.
No longer in secret, which is why they're so pissed: You might stop systematically assuming that the U.S. doesn't do what they do.
They want you to keep that warm fuzzy feeling you have about them being Good Guys TM, that feeling that blinds you to the VERY CLEAR signs of their involvement.
in Sweden if the woman withdraws consent during the act it is still considered rape, with prision terms.
The point of contention is not the swedish law, but whether the consent was actually withdrawn and the credibility of the womens' statement. The women seem to have continued their relationship with Assange, despite the rape and condom-break incident, which makes their claims sound a bit dubious.
And? Their credibility should be judged by a jury, at trial.
A trial? There hasn't been any charges yet!
9 days in solitary, but no charges.
Credibility? I don't see any.
So, because Assange has been held by British police, therefore two Swedish women have no credibility?
You can't withdraw your consent more than a week after the sex happened (she kept letting him live with her for a week and said she never was afraid of him), that's why the complaint was dismissed in less than 24h, because it wasn't credible.
It was such a nice pretext though, they couldn't let it go to waste...
It's not about the claims, the claims are just a red herring for police action and legal delays. There is no credibility in the claims because the response is completely disproportional to the claims. No one ever got pursued like this over such claims before. Those governments are not doing this because they believe the claims, they're using the claims as an excuse.
And Swedish authorities don't even believe the claims: They haven't even laid any formal charges. They just want to ask him questions. They didn't want to ask him questions when he was in the country, they told him it was ok to leave the country, and then they wanted him jailed in the U.K. right when the cables started going public?
No credibility.
I thought Slashdot was supposed to be home to logical thinkers.
I've known for a long time that slashdot is full of illogical dullards like you.
The evidence supports the suspicion that the U.S. is involved, but not the certainty.
Well, you're a stickler for "beyond any reasonable doubts", can't fault you for that.
But what I see is Bart Simpson saying "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything". I know Bart did it even if I haven't found the hard evidence yet.
Go ahead and find me a fighting game that doesn't have split screen (lookin forward to Marvel vs. Capcom 3 BTW).
Fighting games don't have split-screen, they have same-screen multiplayer.
Not to undo your point or anything, but War of the Monsters on PS2 had split screen until you got up close and personal, where the screen would merge while you're fighting and split again if someone ran away or got thrown.
You have successfully made the case for this being unusual. However, you have failed to show how this means that the U.S. is playing a role.
Joe Lieberman stating that the U.S. intends to seek extradition from the U.K. shows the U.S. is an active participant in this kangaroo court. The fact that the accusations occurred right when he was seeking asylum in Sweden to protect himself from the United States who have been getting more and more rabid about denying him freedom of the press, and that the accusations were cited as reason to deny him residency in Sweden add to my conviction. I think the U.S. representative made it confidentially clear that it would be best for Sweden if they were to find a reason to keep that guy from getting their protection. And now they're milking it so he can be held while the U.S. figures out some loophole with which to extradite him to their torture chambers.
But if you want actual proof, then no, that's not been leaked yet. Sometimes gotta wait decades for the truth to come out, go read the leaked cables, and declassified CIA docs, it's full of this type of behavior. It's not hypothetical that the U.S. government acts this way, it's a document pattern of behavior; they've been caught with their pants down and they're after the guy who told everyone.
The various police forces are expected to make mistakes on occasion
Letting the guy making the complaint define for you what is the law is more than a mistake, it's a philosophical aberration.
Sometimes "Oops" just doesn't cut it.
You just have to resort to "9-11".
Or "think of the children", whichever seems more appropriate.
There's even some evidence that these women didn't really press charges even after they found out about each other until _after_ someone in the prosecutor's office started pushing them.
What were they doing in the prosecutor's office in the first place?