Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

[Jerky]

[quote="[url=http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=654456#p654456]
This is absolutely the Cold War anti-communism revived, except worse, more incoherent, perhaps even more dangerous because of the very high chaos factor and serious crisis of capitalism.[/quote]

That is an incredibly silly, a-historical load of crap. How old are you? 18, 19? If you're older, did you perhaps suffer a head injury that made you forget EVERYFUCKINGTHING that happened during the Cold War?!

Hey, did you know that Russia isn't communist anymore? I think you've got some reading to catch up on, Jack.

[quote="[url=http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=654456#p654456]
Really, the limited Western/liberal sympathy the Greeks got in 2015 was thanks to it still being early in the process of demonizing Putin. If that had happened today, you might even see Sanders felt forced to approve the idea that Athenians marching were influenced through Twitter in a Russian plot to undermine the beautiful EU and of course needed to be suppressed as a matter of Western security.[/quote]

You know why nobody said the Greek/EU crisis was caused by Russia, and why nobody believes such? Because there's NO FUCKING EVIDENCE FOR that. You complain about "ad hominem" attacks when you do the same damn thing yourself, but over hypothetical theoretical bullshit that you've pulled straight out of your own freaking butt!

J.

[JackRiddler]

.

Ah! So "NO FUCKING EVIDENCE" is a criterion, is it? Good. You know what there is no fucking evidence for? That:
- "Russia" hacked the Vermont electric grid.
- "Russia" runs or influences the entities on the "PropOrNot" list published by the Washington Post (then semi-retracted).
- "Russia" "hacked" U.S. election systems to change any results.
- Facebook ads and Twitter posts attributed to "Russia" swung votes in the 2016 election.
- The presence online of the Wikileaks archives of Clinton, DNC and Podesta e-mails affected results in the swing states in the 2016 general election.
- "Dissent" in American politics is the product of any intervention by "Russia."
- Anyone was caused to vote for Sanders because of activity by "Russia."
- Black Lives Matter and NoDAPL and other movements were motivated by activity from "Russia."
- "We are at war" according to Rob Reiner and Max Boot as voiced by Morgan Freeman.
- Catalonians voted for independence because of "Russia."
- Cambridge Analytica, which may have had a small effect on the 2016 election, is a "Russian" operation.
- The all-American present incarnation of the KKK, the NRA, is a "Russian" front.

And yet Americans have been subjected to each of these mostly preposterous claims over the last two years. And most of these claims are self-evidently distractions from huge fucking shit for which the actual responsibility lies with entities such as the DNC, the corporate media, the GOP state-level election fixers, or the permanent national security state. So, no, clearly, "NO FUCKING EVIDENCE" is not any kind of obstacle to preposterous claims regarding "Russian" influence over the West, or to using them on behalf of exonerating the actual villains behind the U.S. situation. There are many other claims like the above, also claims for which there is some logical basis, but also lack evidentiary presentation, such as those from the U.K. concerning the Skripal affair.

Now you want to line up with Pompeo and Brennan and General Alexander and Boris Johnson, fine. You may have reasons for doing so other than the authority of these men, fine. But don't give me bullshit!!!

.

[Jerky]

Okay.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree for now, and let time tell its tale.

J.

[Elvis]

Now you want to line up with Pompeo and Brennan and General Alexander and Boris Johnson, fine.

So many people unquestioningly accepting such significant U.S. military-intelligence assertions at face value may be a first at RI. The American PTB fear-factory "influence" machine has immeasurably greater effect on Americans' thoughts than Russia's or anyone else's efforts. And 'USPTB' neoliberalism has only improved its propaganda techniques (clumsy as they are sometimes) and they seem to be working rather well.

The only thing I personally fear about Russia is its response to persistent US stick-poking at the bear.

like it or not, this is the world we're in now, folks. Pretending like there's any way to prevent the Powers That Be from using the most advanced technologies available in their law enforcement efforts is pure intellectual masturbation at this point. Hell, I'm not even prepared to accept, as many here seem to, that them doing so is always and necessarily "a bad thing" quote/unquote.

But hey, that's me.

J.

For me, the "total information awareness" panopticon security state is necessarily always a bad thing.

Jerky might be right insofar as there's not much I can do about it, but I can't agree that dissent is "pure intellectual masturbation."

[Jerky]

Assange and his groupies backed wrong side
The Wikileaks founder persuaded his acolytes that the US was the enemy but it turned out to be Russia and Facebook

Pity the bien-pensants. Only five years ago, life was so simple. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were heroes, defending individual freedom and privacy against the depredations of overweening state power. Western intelligence agencies were the arch-villains, reckless and unaccountable snoopers. Nato was an anachronism and worries about Russia were strictly for scaremongers. Facebook was a nice way of sharing information and keeping up with your friends. Antisemitism was bad, and so was Israel.

Now everything looks more complicated. Mr Assange’s hosts at the Ecuadorean embassy in London have removed his internet access after he issued a series of tweets implicitly backing the Russian approach to the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury. Many of his fans had already lost patience, finding the Wikileaks founder divisive, duplicitous and sexist.

Mr Assange’s personal qualities aside, the self-professed whistleblowing organisation no longer looks like a bastion of integrity. Its reputation is tarnished by its role in smearing Hillary Clinton and in trying to help Donald Trump’s election campaign. Carelessness has not helped either: if you are going to leak secrets, you should do so carefully. Wikileaks has let slip personal details of people such as anti-Taliban activists in Afghanistan and crime correspondents for Russian news outlets whose only mistake was to trust western officials’ ability to keep their identities secure.

The Nato-bashing and Kremlin-loving camp used to be an almost wholly left-wing preserve. Uncomfortably for outfits such as the Trump-loathing Stop the War Coalition, their latest bedfellows are the US president’s most enthusiastic supporters. For people such as Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an admirable epitome of muscular state sovereignty, and military intervention in support of democracy and human rights is a waste of time.

Meanwhile, the liberal-minded types who regard the Trump administration with horror are engaged in a passionate if one-sided love affair with the intelligence and security services. Lefties cheer when James Clapper, the former American spy chief, denounces Mr Trump; they used to decry him for supposedly misleading Congress about the scope of the National Security Agency’s activities. In Britain the liberal left has stopped complaining about GCHQ. Instead it applauds our electronic spy agency’s diligent and comprehensive collection of material about the Kremlin’s cultivation of Mr Trump’s business empire and campaign, a picture so alarming that the agency’s director at the time, Robert Hannigan, flew to America to brief the Obama-era FBI.

It is the hawkish Republicans who think this was political overreach, and, rumour has it, insisted that Theresa May sack Mr Hannigan before her visit to the White House in January 2017. On the left, calls for tougher oversight of cops and spooks are forgotten; now the concern is that politicians may muzzle them. The same people who used to rally round Mr Snowden are now hoping that Robert Mueller’s investigation will bring down the president.

Facebook has emerged as a far bigger threat to privacy than anything the state can get up to, at least in western countries. The huge data heist perpetrated by Mr Snowden in 2013 did not reveal a single instance of interference by western intelligence agencies in public life. GCHQ is allowed to breach our privacy only when it can prove that its activities are necessary and proportionate; it does so under a formidable mixture of political, parliamentary and judicial oversight.

The constraints on Facebook are flimsy by comparison. The worries the Snowdenistas highlighted about the — theoretical — abuse of state power seem almost irrelevant given the way big technology companies really do hoover up details about the most intimate parts of our private lives and then sell them to make money. The combination of tradable data and precise targeting makes meddling in elections, whether by the Kremlin or by plutocrats, far easier.

To be fair to Mr Assange, he has long been a critic of the technology giants. So too has Mr Snowden, now a fugitive in Moscow. But given the problems we face in 2018 they and their supporters have mostly been firing at the wrong target. A fraction of the ire, and whistleblowing zeal, that they directed against the mythical big brother of the intelligence agencies might have helped tame the real problem of greedy and reckless technology companies. A less gullible attitude to Russia might have helped stiffen spines on that front too.

The contortions of the Labour Party over antisemitism reflect the same muddle-headedness. Israel, like the intelligence agencies, is open to criticism. But an obsessive focus on its real and imagined flaws not only distracts attention from far graver problems. It is a telling sign of a skewed political agenda that drifts into bigotry.

This is prompting (I hope) a much-needed rethink, particularly on the left, about the assumptions of the post-Cold War era. Convenient, kneejerk reflexes about goodies and baddies are not just inaccurate but dangerous. Racism, it turns out, is not just a problem on the far right. If you care about feminism and gay rights, you need to be ready to confront hardline Muslims who regard them as detestable. If you dislike imperialism you should lambast Russia for its treatment of ex-colonies such as Ukraine. If you want to defend democracy, you should be a grateful ally of our security and intelligence services. And, as Mr Assange should note as he skulks in his fetid squat, we should all remember that the rule of law is still the best guarantee of individual liberty.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/1665 ... ab5276195d

[Elvis]

Assange and his groupies backed wrong side

I stopped reading at "groupies."

Then my eye caught "Snowden" and I thought I'd have a closer look. It's worse than I imagined. It's disgusting. The first paragraph's snark sets the agenda:

Only five years ago, life was so simple. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were heroes, defending individual freedom and privacy against the depredations of overweening state power. Western intelligence agencies were the arch-villains, reckless and unaccountable snoopers. Nato was an anachronism and worries about Russia were strictly for scaremongers. Facebook was a nice way of sharing information and keeping up with your friends.

The paragraph is essentially a list, where weasel words do their work, and this one ends with a doozy:

Antisemitism was bad, and so was Israel.

The implication, of course, is that anyone who thinks that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden were or are heroes defending individual freedom and privacy against the depredations of overweening state power and that Western intelligence agencies are reckless and unaccountable snoopers also is antisemitic.

From this ugly opening alone, we know the rest of this essay will be a pretty thinly contrived attack piece on leakers while supporting the usual intel-MIC-neoliberal-neocon aims and means.

tweets implicitly backing the Russian approach to the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury

What does "approach" mean here, if anything? I know this is an opinion piece, not a news piece, but clarity would be good. The writer's complaint is that Assange holds a different opinion—by "backing" a Russian-something with Tweets. It's not like Assange sent money and armored vehicles.


Re Wikileaks:

Its reputation is tarnished by its role in smearing Hillary Clinton and in trying to help Donald Trump’s election campaign.

How did Wikileaks "smear" Clinton by releasing the emails? Assange didn't write the emails, Clinton/Podesta/DNC wrote the emails. In other words, Donald Trump was not Secretary of State. If the recently leaked Wikileaks messages are genuine and Assange specifically intended to help Trump in the election by leaking Clinton-related emails, that was a lousy motive but the leaks' effect on the election is doubtful and the emails needed to come out sooner rather than later. If Assange waited until after the election, Sean Hannity would accuse him of helping Clinton.

The same people who used to rally round Mr Snowden are now hoping that Robert Mueller’s investigation will bring down the president.

So?

the Snowdenistas

The wha...? Okay, Snowden bad. I keep forgetting.

Facebook has emerged as a far bigger threat to privacy than anything the state can get up to, at least in western countries.

This is another joke, right? And I love the "at least in western countries" part. teehee.

And the 'state can't get it up' part. giggle. Ah yes, the impotent state.

The huge data heist perpetrated by Mr Snowden in 2013 did not reveal a single instance of interference by western intelligence agencies in public life.

This is a factually incorrect strawman: Snowden worked for NSA, which does signals collection, and the documents are about signals collection but they do include "interference" techniques. That's just the NSA. When did the FBI, CIA and DIA and others stop "interfering"? Maybe never?


"Mr Assange and "Mr Snowden"...

and their supporters have mostly been firing at the wrong target. A fraction of the ire, and whistleblowing zeal, that they directed against the mythical big brother of the intelligence agencies might have helped tame the real problem of greedy and reckless technology companies.

Oh yes, please! Please look away from the mythical big brother of the intelligence agencies! Yes, yes! After all, it's mythical.

Got that? The surveillance state is a MYTH. The real problem is those greedy, reckless technology companies!...who, strangely, work with the altruistic, methodical—and impotent and mythical—surveillance state.

A less gullible attitude to Russia might have helped stiffen spines on that front too.

Double threat! Russia and Facebook are the ones who need oversight and accountability! The "Nato-bashing and Kremlin-loving camp" would have us oversee and demand accountability from a mythical entity! And that would be silly.

Racism, it turns out, is not just a problem on the far right. If you care about feminism and gay rights, you need to be ready to confront hardline Muslims who regard them as detestable. If you dislike imperialism you should lambast Russia for its treatment of ex-colonies such as Ukraine. If you want to defend democracy, you should be a grateful ally of our security and intelligence services.

Which is mythical. With a $50,000,000,000+ annual budget.

And, as Mr Assange should note as he skulks in his fetid squat, we should all remember that the rule of law is still the best guarantee of individual liberty.

This whole piece is all over the place, but the takeway seems to be Leaks bad. Government good. Surveillance state mythical.


Assange has paid a great price for releasing documents exposing many important crimes and misdeeds, and I do think he's a hero just for that. I wouldn't be surprised if he's gone mad confined in the small embassy space. Perhaps it's best he slips into irrelevance and Wikileaks continue without him. Bringing Snowden into this mix reveals it's really just about condemning leaks and loving your Big Brother.

[liminalOyster]

Clapper good. Snowden bad. Unreal.

[JackRiddler]

I'd say, Elvis, good! Article, very bad. Jerky, no clue what's wrong with you. We agree on a lot of things, but I have to wonder about your inconsistent application of logic. That article is extremely self-discrediting, if you're endorsing it.

[Marionumber1]

If you want to defend democracy, you should be a grateful ally of our security and intelligence services.

I am surprised that anyone could say this with a straight face. These are organizations whose entire purpose is to subvert democracy, civil liberties, and international law under the cloak of plausible deniability.

[seemslikeadream]

tell me who is supposed to investigate the crimes of trump....Kushner.....Flynn.....Manafort....Gates and BCCI 2.0 Cambridge Analytica?

AG Jeff Sessions?

[Marionumber1]

And who will investigate their own crimes? Themselves? Just because the intelligence services do sometimes catch real criminals like Trump's gang doesn't mean we should be their "grateful ally". That article is asking people to lie down and pretend that US intelligence agencies aren't themselves criminals on a massive scale. I'll gladly take the victories I can get, but in no way are they defenders of democracy, merely defenders of their ability to subvert democracy.

[seemslikeadream]

oh the republicans ARE investigating the FBI

the republican always loved the FBI ......until........

I never said "grateful ally"


I wasn't commenting on the article .....my question was just what it said nothing more

I know about FBI crimes

I'm a MIHOPer

I started the Boston Bombing thread ...

WHY IS THE FBI IGNORING BOMB-MAKER CONNECTED TO TSARNAEVS?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36259&hilit=boston+bombing

I know about Whitey Bulger ....Felix Sater is the Whitey Bulger of the trump mob


“Tell me who you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are.”

—Cervantes

Roger Stone
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=40914

[Belligerent Savant]

And who will investigate their own crimes? Themselves? Just because the intelligence services do sometimes catch real criminals like Trump's gang doesn't mean we should be their "grateful ally". That article is asking people to lie down and pretend that US intelligence agencies aren't themselves criminals on a massive scale. I'll gladly take the victories I can get, but in no way are they defenders of democracy, merely defenders of their ability to subvert democracy.

Quite right.

Let's not fall into the trap of assuming that whatever "investigations" are currently ongoing, at least as depicted to the populace, aren't riddled with smokescreens/misdirection/omissions, and may ultimately yield minimal substantive results.

In short, no agency is to be trusted at face value, and anything transmitted via their talking apparatus (MSM) should be scrutinized at all times. There was a time when this would have all been self-evident, but TRUMP FEVER has claimed many victims since 2016 -- a terrible affliction that enlarges blind spots and inspires fits of mania.

[Jerky]

I don't endorse the editorial I posted whole-heartedly, and flatly disagree with some of what he says, but I do think he's got both Assange and Snowden right on the money. I also think it's an important, sober, TRULY "conservative" addition to the ongoing conversation (while I, personally, am no conservative), and that it raises issues that are better dealt with than sputtered in impotent rage over.

Also, I think the simplistic "yeah right!" rage that it has provoked is somewhat of a case of protesting too much. SLAD's response to that age-old hippie "gotcha" question "Who watches the watchers" merits a better response than it's gotten.

It just struck me what I find so gross about the way some of you guys mock "liberals" for hoping elements of the State apparatus can pull us out of this terminal nose-dive of high crimes in which we currently find ourselves. It very much reminds me of those assholes who mock anti-police brutality demonstrators for calling the police when they're attacked by violent, racist assholes.

J.

[seemslikeadream]

Several members of the board, including Snowden, have grown disenchanted with WikiLeaks. Snowden has for some time considered it to have strayed far from its laudatory transparency and accountability missions,

“Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped,” Snowden tweeted. “But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” The mild rebuke drew a sharp response from Assange: “Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton.”

EXCLUSIVE: The Freedom of the Press Foundation has routed half a million dollars to WikiLeaks. But Julian Assange’s embrace of Trump split the group’s board, which includes Edward Snowden, and now it’s on the verge of a major break

The free press group’s impending split with Assange is a microcosm of a broader anxiety over him amongst his erstwhile allies, now that WikiLeaks has made common cause with extreme right-wing forces, principally Trump and Putin


“Suddenly the voice of WikiLeaks seemed to be all about questioning one candidate—Hillary Clinton.” When the group’s tone began to resemble that of Nazi publications’, a source said, “something is wrong”

Snowden, sources close to him tell The Daily Beast, has felt for a long time that Assange has taken WikiLeaks far from a positive, constructive vision of what Snowden believes WikiLeaks could—or should—be

“When the guy in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, who is normally of the extreme left, is echoing Nazi publications, something is wrong”

After the 2016 election, when Trump’s fortunes had clearly turned, WikiLeaks floated to Trump Jr. the trial balloon of convincing Australia to appoint Assange as its next U.S. ambassador


“This is the final mark of someone who’s in it for himself,” says journalist James Ball, who once worked for WikiLeaks, of Julian Assange. “He’s a sad man in a broom cupboard”

Barrett Brown

As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”

“Plainly,” he observed with bitterness, “the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.”

Brown had a visceral reaction to the news, first reported by The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks had been advising the Trump campaign. In a series of tweets and Facebook videos, Brown accused Assange of having compromised “the movement” to expose corporate and government wrongdoing by acting as a covert political operative.

Brown explained that he had defended WikiLeaks for releasing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, “because it was an appropriate thing for a transparency org to do.” But, he added, “working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting.”
It is not surprising that Brown felt personally betrayed by Assange, since, as he explained on Facebook Tuesday night, “I went to prison because of my support for WikiLeaks.” Specifically, Brown said, the charges against him were related to his role in “operations to identify and punish members of the government and members of private companies that had been exposed by Anonymous hackers of my acquaintance, via email hacks, as having conspired to go after Assange, to go after WikiLeaks.”

That sort of activism, dedicated to making public secret wrongdoing, Brown argued, is very different from “colluding with an authoritarian presidential campaign backed by actual Nazis while publicly denying it.”

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29320&p=647665&hilit=seemslikeadream#p647665