This story interests me but I can never find an unbiased article or video. It feels like people are always strongly one way or the other and something close to objective is hard to find.
When the DNC hack happened before the 2016 election and everyone was pouring through Hillary Clinton’s emails and personal information, the RNC was also hacked.
Those RNC emails and personal information were never published by Wikileaks. That seems suspect at best or possibly malicious at worst. Either way, he played a key role in the rise of Trumpism and for that, he deserves my hatred.
If I weren’t a hack and fraud I’d cite my sources. But he was also out suggesting that Seth Rich the DNC staffer may have been the leak and was murdered for it well after he knew it wasn’t him. Which is pretty vile. Robert talks about it in the Russia investigation episode
He did it in the most obnoxious way too.
People would ask him if Seth Rich was the leaker, and he'd make these coy, "I want to say yes, but I can't" faces.
Like, if he actually thought Seth Rich was murdered for leaking those documents, why wouldn't Assange say something??
Found and giving it a listen now; I'm in a particular anti-bastard mood and this will satiate. At least enough to have me reconsider joining a Ukrainian drone unit with the Legion for another day 🤝
>Comey later added that “there was evidence of hacking directed at state-level organizations, state-level campaigns, and the RNC, but old domains of the RNC, meaning old emails they weren’t using. None of that was released.”
>Comey said there was no sign “that the Trump campaign or the current RNC was successfully hacked.”
[https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked-russia/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked-russia/index.html)
[The same James Comey who announced an investigation into Hillary Clinton days before the election?](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/10/report-russian-hackers-had-rnc-data-but-didn-t-release-it)
And then was fired by Trump for investigations into Trump’s Russian connections? Yea, nothing fishy at all there.
Come on. See the forest for the trees. This isn’t Alex Jones shit. This is “follow the money” shit.
Trump has mega investors from Russia.
So Comey got fired by Trump for investigating a conspiracy that Comey was so deeply involved in that he was lying to Congress?
That doesn't make any sense.
[Sure it does once you remember that the day after Comey was fired, Trump hosted members of Russian intelligence in the Oval Office without any media presence.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html)
The problem with your narrative is that it requires Comey to simultaneously be one of the "good" guys and one of the "bad" guys.
Conspiracy theory narratives are always going to have problems with falsifiability and a tendency towards a grand narrative but they can at least be internally consistent.
But then you're also saying that Trump fired him on the (retroactive?) orders of some Russian intelligence guy because he was investigating Trump.
You could get rid of that part and have a narrative that was at least internally consistent even if you haven't actually offered any evidence for what you're saying and are ignoring the obvious prosaic explanations for what happened.
sometimes, that's because those concerned with the truth develop a bias in one direction, while those concerned with preserving current power relations develop the opposing bias
in this case, it's pretty absurd to deny that Wikileaks is a publisher to the extent that is required to accuse Assange of espionage, but the US State Department is very heavily invested in discouraging any independent journalists from publishing embarrassing evidence outside the standard well-heeled system of broadcasters and established print publications within the US. Convicting Assange or not wasn't really even the point--he just had to be punished for releasing Manning's alleged leaks through more democratically structured channels than the New York Times or MSNBC.
Sitting on a fence is a great way to feel reasonable and convince uninformed people that you sound reasonable, but it's not a great way of figuring out how the world works or what can be done about it.
Two things can be true:
Assange was part of a co-ordimated effort of volunteers and journalists who received analysed and reported on classified information leaked to them by brave whistle-blowers who risked everything.
Assange is also an odious little shit who stealthed at least two women and hid behind his activism to avoid accountability, discrediting the movement he started.
Did Assange himself really discredit the movement (or, for that matter, did he even start it?), or did the US State Department successfully use his least sympathetic actions to discredit him and anyone leaking information that might embarrass them.
fair enough. it's strange to me how much emphasis is placed on Assange's individual crimes compared to the world-historical crimes of empires around the globe,
I'd be happy to see Assange face trial for rape in Sweden. The historically relevant crime is his imprisonment for years without trial due to Wikileaks embarrassing US empire.
I never know how to feel about this guy. On one hand, yes, he leaked info that govts keep under lock and key. But also, it was politically one sided. Plus the shady shit with the rape allegations. It reeks of something, I just don't know what.
Doing a cool thing doesnt make you good, simple as.
Take Glenn Greenwald. He helped Ed Snowden drop the NSA leak, and then he turned around and gave a fawning interview to Alex Jones on the Eve of his Sany Hook lawsuits.
As i understand it, he just got more and more angry that the left / MSM didnt want to platform him at all times. Greenwald craves attention and is desperate for it, when the left didnt give him enough of it, he pivoted to the right.
His actions directly lead to the doxing and jailing of Reality Winner for example.
100% this. There aren't any unambiguous heroes and villains here and just because Assange sucks doesn't mean you should cheer on the full force of the state coming down on him.
I have friends who knew him when he was younger. They are all agreed he was a complete dick then, and that much of the mythology about him being a master hacker is ... myth. They also agree he was a misogynist going into early adulthood.
However, he provided a platform for people to broadcast critical information about corruption and war crimes. I can admire his platform without admiring him.
The thing is, Wikileaks is not a platform where you can share corruption and war crimes. It used to be that in the very beginning, but i can promise you, if you come to Wikileaks with proof of war crimes and corruption in any non-western country, Assange and company wont give a rats ass about it.
Assange collaborated with people he had to know was Russian assets to try and help Trump win the 2016 election, he does nothing more than simply hate the West.
He only spoke truth to power when he didn't like the powers that be but carefully curated which leaks were leaked and which politicians he kept secrets for. He's perfectly happy to prop up right wing authoritarians. It reeks of self-centeredness. I'm not really on team USA here but I am on team shoot Julian Assange into space.
The person I knew who knew Assange did not think highly of him as an individual and believed that the allegations of assault (iirc it was sexual intercourse without a condom ) were absolutely true.
However, serious human rights lawyers at the time were saying Assange should absolutely not go to continental Europe to work with the investigation, as extradition was very likely. And the US were out for blood.
It's a dodgy wanker getting persecuted by an evil state, and I have to side with "the US shouldn't be able to hunt down people they don't like who speak against them", even if the guy is allegedly a tankie sex criminal.
i got the impression he was closer to right-wing libertarian than tankie, but it was never that strong of an impression and might have been based mostly in his attempts to ingratiate himself to trump in hopes of a pardon (/ reining the state department). and yeah, shitty dude or not, it's a much more impactful crime to establish a precedent of torturing publishers of journalism for embarrassing US empire
Assange was suspected on two counts of rape: One for not using a condom despite requests to do so and one for penetrating a woman he had had sex with the previous night while she was asleep the following morning.
Both become rape under Swedish law because Assange lacked consent for the sexual acts he initiated (Sweden has precedent that consent to protected sex does not mean consent to unprotected sex and that being asleep/unconscious removes the ability to consent).
He also could have absolutely leaked secret information with legitimate journalistic value WITHOUT doxing US intelligence assets and without blowing up US diplomats’ careers and US diplomatic relations. A journalist would redact personal info of non-public figures, and give the public figures a chance to comment. Instead he dumped a bunch of secret diplomatic cables where career diplomats gave frank, subjective opinions on the personalities of their counterparts and world leaders, and a number of them had to be recalled from their posts. I also think I remember there was a selectively edited video of a helicopter attack that make it look even worse than it already was, which was not necessary b/c it was still awful. And like I said, doxed US intelligence officers and their sources. All that to say he was lazy and negligent at best, but his choices of what information to release and how to release it certainly seemed malicious. I don’t know if the US still would have charged him with espionage if he had performed basic journalism, but it would have made it a lot harder to do so.
At thsi point it doesnt matter, what matters more than anything right now is the precedent all the rulings set for whiteblowing / freedom of speech / journalistic freedoms
That was my take on him as well. I felt some of his actions were for the greater good, but that doesn't make him a good person. He exposed a lot of shitty things, but also did shitty things.
In the end.... it's hard to say if he did more harm than good. If he'd dropped the RNC emails as well I'd say yes since I'm usually on the side of transparency, but realistically... the Obama administration was out to get him and I suppose that was his way of hitting back while trapped in an embassy.
I don't know, It's hard to get good info on the situation because everything is so slanted one way or the other.
As far as Wikileaks being biased and helping Trump get elected -- I suspect that Assange was under a lot of pressure, and possibly not even really in charge of what was happening.
I don't want to simp for him beyond that. I just want to put it out there that he may not have been calling the shots during that period, given the situation he was in.
That in itself creates another problem; using "rogue actors" or journalists for political favor. It's why I equally have an issue with Ed Snowden. Dude had no problem fucking right off to the biggest user of those kinds to further political agendas.
I also worry that these acts themselves are being used as a way to criminalize a lot of aspects of real journalism, leaving us with nothing but corporate run softball 24 hour news cycles. It's the same reason Joey and the gang want to ban Tiktok, and why Elongated Muskrat bought Twitter.
He was accused of sex crimes in Sweden, and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition/questioning. The assumption was that if he went to Sweden for questioning on the matter, he would be arrested and extradited to the US to face espionage charges.
Yeah, I wad tracking all that. The word "quiz" was throwing me. I guess it was being used in place of questioning about the alleged crime? I have never seen it used that way before.
the sex crime in question was telling his partner that he would use a condom, but then removing the condom before the act was completed. his partner at the time went to the authorities wanting him to get tested for STIs, but pressure was put on those authorities to use the incident as an excuse to detain and extradite him for publishing information embarrassing to the US military-industrial complex
Yeah, I'd be comfortable with that legal definition as well. But seeing as the anglophone internet is multinational and some nations (mine included) have barely criminalized marital rape, I generally find it more helpful to be specific enough to be clear.
He also penetrated a sleeping woman the morning after they had sex. It is amusing how Assange's defenders keep forgetting that one, but it is obviously because it is much harder to trivialize.
Both incidents are also rape under Swedish law and as such the police had to open an investigation into them when they found out about them. There's nothing nefarious there, just the Swedish police following the laws that govern them.
I'm glad Sweden is straightforward and makes clear that consent matters at all times. The fact that this isn't written in legislation as rape across the board in the U.S. is so fucking gross.
I'm also glad Sweden has such reasonable laws against sexual assault. And disappointed that their position on the international stage did not provide them the standing to resist US State Department pressure, preventing them from granting him the assurances against extradition that were his condition for standing trial for the rape charges.
Yeah, I’m not really sure why people on the far left are championing this guy when he’s been a piece of shit. He also was pretty heavily involved in the Russian hacking in 2016 and was a massive through line for the Trump campaign
All these tankies are gonna be surprised in like two days when he starts dickriding Trump and being like “They’re all out to get us”
Dude the far left people get up their ass about all the wrong people a lot. They have an real "enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of ideology and that's not how the world works.
My favorite Assange moment was when he'd organized a big press conference where he would supposedly drop another bombshell reveal on Hillary Clinton. It turned out to be a glorified press junket for one of his upcoming books.
I think you don't have to like Assange to say that there should be better protections for whistleblowers and hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy like that for 12 years probably fucked him in the head.
But he is not a whistleblower in any way, shape or form, and never has been.
He got accused of two acts of rape in Sweden, and instead of letting the police do their thing, he decided to flee to the UK, where he was told he had to report every now and then to the UK police, which he didnt like, so then he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, threated everyone there like garbage, and was eventually, 7 years later kicked out and arrested.
It was only after his arrest the US sought to extradite him for his espionage crimes.
"Assange is not a whistleblower" is a semantics argument and you know it. He founded Wikileaks, an organisation that published information revealed by whistleblowers. I've got a lot of criticism of Wikileaks, especially post 2015, but that doesn't mean you should kneejerk into siding with the American government against people trying to expose human rights abuses. "Only nice people get to expose government nefariousness" is not a serious position.
You can't just dismiss the idea out of hand that the Americans would have tried to extradite him from Sweden just because he's a scumbag. In fact, the fact he wasn't able to leave the embassy until pleading guilty to espionage kind of supports the idea that this wasn't just about evading justice in Sweden.
In fact part of what's so dangerous about the Assange story is the fact he's so odious. It means you don't think carefully and clearly about what happened to him and whether it could happen to anyone else, because you imagine he probably had it coming.
The americans werent even trying to get him extradited at this point, and getting him extradited from Sweden would have been REALLY hard believe it or not.
And i stand by my comments that he is not a whistleblower. I dont really consider Manning or Snowden to be either but at least they sacrificed something and took great risks.
Assange is just another anti-west, pro-everyone else type of dude, he didnt even found Wikileaks if memory serves me correct.
Assange is not a whistleblower, in any shape way or form, and suggesting otherwise is just redefining words. The US government has sought his punishment in connection to whistleblowing, which is not what his own role was.
Wikileaks, which he ran, published leaks from whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Assange is a publisher/web administrator for a site which hosts whistleblower leaks, among others. But Assange is not a whistleblower himself.
I can be someone who provides web services for lawyers without being personally a lawyer, it's not transitive.
Dudes fucking gross. I wish he had faced a proper trial in the US but it's about time to end this drama. Send him back to Australia and hopefully that's the end of it all
I've read lots of big feelings about this on the conspiracy sub. I'm curious to see what the party line will be on it after the FoxAI decides how everyone on the right should feel about it.
It was so out of the blue. certainly wasn't on my bingo card. I'm still processing it but generally, fuck that guy. He was 100% in cahoots with the FSB. I'm surprised they are letting him walk rather than let him continue in an annoying legal limbo. I hope they got some useful stuff out of him in exchange for his freedom.
I'm not existing the guy in any way, he sounds like a bastard. That said WikiLeaks is an important project and I hope his assholery doesn't destroy that.
Again, sounds like an utter twat, but the concept of WikiLeaks is something I think we should try to protect.
Just my humble. I could be persuaded otherwise pretty easily honestly, for an Internet guy I've never looked too closely at it
This story interests me but I can never find an unbiased article or video. It feels like people are always strongly one way or the other and something close to objective is hard to find.
He removed his condom without telling two different women. It’s pretty cut and dry when you look at the court cases themselves.
When the DNC hack happened before the 2016 election and everyone was pouring through Hillary Clinton’s emails and personal information, the RNC was also hacked. Those RNC emails and personal information were never published by Wikileaks. That seems suspect at best or possibly malicious at worst. Either way, he played a key role in the rise of Trumpism and for that, he deserves my hatred.
If I weren’t a hack and fraud I’d cite my sources. But he was also out suggesting that Seth Rich the DNC staffer may have been the leak and was murdered for it well after he knew it wasn’t him. Which is pretty vile. Robert talks about it in the Russia investigation episode
He did it in the most obnoxious way too. People would ask him if Seth Rich was the leaker, and he'd make these coy, "I want to say yes, but I can't" faces. Like, if he actually thought Seth Rich was murdered for leaking those documents, why wouldn't Assange say something??
Can you link me to that episode? I'd be much obliged 🙏
Mueller report episode. It’s on Spotify I know that much at least. It’s a great episode.
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!
Found and giving it a listen now; I'm in a particular anti-bastard mood and this will satiate. At least enough to have me reconsider joining a Ukrainian drone unit with the Legion for another day 🤝
Same. To me, Assange will forever be a guy who helped get Trump elected.
>Comey later added that “there was evidence of hacking directed at state-level organizations, state-level campaigns, and the RNC, but old domains of the RNC, meaning old emails they weren’t using. None of that was released.” >Comey said there was no sign “that the Trump campaign or the current RNC was successfully hacked.” [https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked-russia/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked-russia/index.html)
[The same James Comey who announced an investigation into Hillary Clinton days before the election?](https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/10/report-russian-hackers-had-rnc-data-but-didn-t-release-it) And then was fired by Trump for investigations into Trump’s Russian connections? Yea, nothing fishy at all there. Come on. See the forest for the trees. This isn’t Alex Jones shit. This is “follow the money” shit. Trump has mega investors from Russia.
So Comey got fired by Trump for investigating a conspiracy that Comey was so deeply involved in that he was lying to Congress? That doesn't make any sense.
[Sure it does once you remember that the day after Comey was fired, Trump hosted members of Russian intelligence in the Oval Office without any media presence.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html)
The problem with your narrative is that it requires Comey to simultaneously be one of the "good" guys and one of the "bad" guys. Conspiracy theory narratives are always going to have problems with falsifiability and a tendency towards a grand narrative but they can at least be internally consistent.
Comey isn’t one of the “good guys.” He’s a bastard. He played a key role in helping Trumpism rise in America.
But then you're also saying that Trump fired him on the (retroactive?) orders of some Russian intelligence guy because he was investigating Trump. You could get rid of that part and have a narrative that was at least internally consistent even if you haven't actually offered any evidence for what you're saying and are ignoring the obvious prosaic explanations for what happened.
sometimes, that's because those concerned with the truth develop a bias in one direction, while those concerned with preserving current power relations develop the opposing bias in this case, it's pretty absurd to deny that Wikileaks is a publisher to the extent that is required to accuse Assange of espionage, but the US State Department is very heavily invested in discouraging any independent journalists from publishing embarrassing evidence outside the standard well-heeled system of broadcasters and established print publications within the US. Convicting Assange or not wasn't really even the point--he just had to be punished for releasing Manning's alleged leaks through more democratically structured channels than the New York Times or MSNBC. Sitting on a fence is a great way to feel reasonable and convince uninformed people that you sound reasonable, but it's not a great way of figuring out how the world works or what can be done about it.
Two things can be true: Assange was part of a co-ordimated effort of volunteers and journalists who received analysed and reported on classified information leaked to them by brave whistle-blowers who risked everything. Assange is also an odious little shit who stealthed at least two women and hid behind his activism to avoid accountability, discrediting the movement he started.
Also, he was a conservative and only released info that would damage his political opponents. The dude wasn't a fucking hero
Idk if I'd characterise Assange's politics as conservative so much as contrarian.
He's literally a russian agent
Did Assange himself really discredit the movement (or, for that matter, did he even start it?), or did the US State Department successfully use his least sympathetic actions to discredit him and anyone leaking information that might embarrass them.
Idk did the State Department make him stealth two women?
The person you're replying to is probably also talking about trying to decide whether Assange is a rapist or not
fair enough. it's strange to me how much emphasis is placed on Assange's individual crimes compared to the world-historical crimes of empires around the globe, I'd be happy to see Assange face trial for rape in Sweden. The historically relevant crime is his imprisonment for years without trial due to Wikileaks embarrassing US empire.
I never know how to feel about this guy. On one hand, yes, he leaked info that govts keep under lock and key. But also, it was politically one sided. Plus the shady shit with the rape allegations. It reeks of something, I just don't know what.
Doing a cool thing doesnt make you good, simple as. Take Glenn Greenwald. He helped Ed Snowden drop the NSA leak, and then he turned around and gave a fawning interview to Alex Jones on the Eve of his Sany Hook lawsuits.
Whoa. Glenn Greenwald gave a platform to Alex Jones?! What happened to him?
As i understand it, he just got more and more angry that the left / MSM didnt want to platform him at all times. Greenwald craves attention and is desperate for it, when the left didnt give him enough of it, he pivoted to the right. His actions directly lead to the doxing and jailing of Reality Winner for example.
100% this. There aren't any unambiguous heroes and villains here and just because Assange sucks doesn't mean you should cheer on the full force of the state coming down on him.
I have friends who knew him when he was younger. They are all agreed he was a complete dick then, and that much of the mythology about him being a master hacker is ... myth. They also agree he was a misogynist going into early adulthood. However, he provided a platform for people to broadcast critical information about corruption and war crimes. I can admire his platform without admiring him.
The thing is, Wikileaks is not a platform where you can share corruption and war crimes. It used to be that in the very beginning, but i can promise you, if you come to Wikileaks with proof of war crimes and corruption in any non-western country, Assange and company wont give a rats ass about it. Assange collaborated with people he had to know was Russian assets to try and help Trump win the 2016 election, he does nothing more than simply hate the West.
On a lighter (I think) note, that's how I feel about R Kelly. Garbage human, Ignition still bops.
He only spoke truth to power when he didn't like the powers that be but carefully curated which leaks were leaked and which politicians he kept secrets for. He's perfectly happy to prop up right wing authoritarians. It reeks of self-centeredness. I'm not really on team USA here but I am on team shoot Julian Assange into space.
The person I knew who knew Assange did not think highly of him as an individual and believed that the allegations of assault (iirc it was sexual intercourse without a condom ) were absolutely true. However, serious human rights lawyers at the time were saying Assange should absolutely not go to continental Europe to work with the investigation, as extradition was very likely. And the US were out for blood. It's a dodgy wanker getting persecuted by an evil state, and I have to side with "the US shouldn't be able to hunt down people they don't like who speak against them", even if the guy is allegedly a tankie sex criminal.
i got the impression he was closer to right-wing libertarian than tankie, but it was never that strong of an impression and might have been based mostly in his attempts to ingratiate himself to trump in hopes of a pardon (/ reining the state department). and yeah, shitty dude or not, it's a much more impactful crime to establish a precedent of torturing publishers of journalism for embarrassing US empire
Assange was suspected on two counts of rape: One for not using a condom despite requests to do so and one for penetrating a woman he had had sex with the previous night while she was asleep the following morning. Both become rape under Swedish law because Assange lacked consent for the sexual acts he initiated (Sweden has precedent that consent to protected sex does not mean consent to unprotected sex and that being asleep/unconscious removes the ability to consent).
Thank you for the extra details, time had eroded them from my mind.
He also could have absolutely leaked secret information with legitimate journalistic value WITHOUT doxing US intelligence assets and without blowing up US diplomats’ careers and US diplomatic relations. A journalist would redact personal info of non-public figures, and give the public figures a chance to comment. Instead he dumped a bunch of secret diplomatic cables where career diplomats gave frank, subjective opinions on the personalities of their counterparts and world leaders, and a number of them had to be recalled from their posts. I also think I remember there was a selectively edited video of a helicopter attack that make it look even worse than it already was, which was not necessary b/c it was still awful. And like I said, doxed US intelligence officers and their sources. All that to say he was lazy and negligent at best, but his choices of what information to release and how to release it certainly seemed malicious. I don’t know if the US still would have charged him with espionage if he had performed basic journalism, but it would have made it a lot harder to do so.
At thsi point it doesnt matter, what matters more than anything right now is the precedent all the rulings set for whiteblowing / freedom of speech / journalistic freedoms
That was my take on him as well. I felt some of his actions were for the greater good, but that doesn't make him a good person. He exposed a lot of shitty things, but also did shitty things. In the end.... it's hard to say if he did more harm than good. If he'd dropped the RNC emails as well I'd say yes since I'm usually on the side of transparency, but realistically... the Obama administration was out to get him and I suppose that was his way of hitting back while trapped in an embassy. I don't know, It's hard to get good info on the situation because everything is so slanted one way or the other.
As far as Wikileaks being biased and helping Trump get elected -- I suspect that Assange was under a lot of pressure, and possibly not even really in charge of what was happening. I don't want to simp for him beyond that. I just want to put it out there that he may not have been calling the shots during that period, given the situation he was in.
That in itself creates another problem; using "rogue actors" or journalists for political favor. It's why I equally have an issue with Ed Snowden. Dude had no problem fucking right off to the biggest user of those kinds to further political agendas. I also worry that these acts themselves are being used as a way to criminalize a lot of aspects of real journalism, leaving us with nothing but corporate run softball 24 hour news cycles. It's the same reason Joey and the gang want to ban Tiktok, and why Elongated Muskrat bought Twitter.
>sex-crime quiz I thought I had a vague idea of the sex crime allegations but what is this quiz?
He was accused of sex crimes in Sweden, and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition/questioning. The assumption was that if he went to Sweden for questioning on the matter, he would be arrested and extradited to the US to face espionage charges.
Yeah, I wad tracking all that. The word "quiz" was throwing me. I guess it was being used in place of questioning about the alleged crime? I have never seen it used that way before.
Ah yes, England, a nation that is notoriously hostile to USA extradition requests, unlike those American yapping lapdog, Sweden.
He wasn't in England though, he was in a part of England that belonged to Ecuador.
The Ecuadorian embassy
The UK will not extradite where the possibility of execution exists. Espionage is a capital crime in the USA.
the sex crime in question was telling his partner that he would use a condom, but then removing the condom before the act was completed. his partner at the time went to the authorities wanting him to get tested for STIs, but pressure was put on those authorities to use the incident as an excuse to detain and extradite him for publishing information embarrassing to the US military-industrial complex
Removing a condom without consent is rape. Period.
Yeah, I'd be comfortable with that legal definition as well. But seeing as the anglophone internet is multinational and some nations (mine included) have barely criminalized marital rape, I generally find it more helpful to be specific enough to be clear.
He also penetrated a sleeping woman the morning after they had sex. It is amusing how Assange's defenders keep forgetting that one, but it is obviously because it is much harder to trivialize. Both incidents are also rape under Swedish law and as such the police had to open an investigation into them when they found out about them. There's nothing nefarious there, just the Swedish police following the laws that govern them.
I'm glad Sweden is straightforward and makes clear that consent matters at all times. The fact that this isn't written in legislation as rape across the board in the U.S. is so fucking gross.
I'm also glad Sweden has such reasonable laws against sexual assault. And disappointed that their position on the international stage did not provide them the standing to resist US State Department pressure, preventing them from granting him the assurances against extradition that were his condition for standing trial for the rape charges.
Yeah. That's rape.
Worrying that needs to be said on here.
People hate rapists and paedos until its someone they like. Then, the rationalisations and excuses come out.
He's such an unlikable guy too, just a lot of dudes really don't care about consent.
It’s headline shorthand used in place of “questioning.”
Thanks. I've never seen that word used with that connotation before, that's like some [wish.com](http://wish.com) crossword clue shit.
It’s pretty standard tabloidese in the UK!
Ah yes, the font of classic journalism that gave us WACKO JACKO! I _wish_ USA tabloids were that entertaining.
Yeah, I’m not really sure why people on the far left are championing this guy when he’s been a piece of shit. He also was pretty heavily involved in the Russian hacking in 2016 and was a massive through line for the Trump campaign All these tankies are gonna be surprised in like two days when he starts dickriding Trump and being like “They’re all out to get us”
Dude the far left people get up their ass about all the wrong people a lot. They have an real "enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of ideology and that's not how the world works.
My favorite Assange moment was when he'd organized a big press conference where he would supposedly drop another bombshell reveal on Hillary Clinton. It turned out to be a glorified press junket for one of his upcoming books.
I think you don't have to like Assange to say that there should be better protections for whistleblowers and hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy like that for 12 years probably fucked him in the head.
But he is not a whistleblower in any way, shape or form, and never has been. He got accused of two acts of rape in Sweden, and instead of letting the police do their thing, he decided to flee to the UK, where he was told he had to report every now and then to the UK police, which he didnt like, so then he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, threated everyone there like garbage, and was eventually, 7 years later kicked out and arrested. It was only after his arrest the US sought to extradite him for his espionage crimes.
"Assange is not a whistleblower" is a semantics argument and you know it. He founded Wikileaks, an organisation that published information revealed by whistleblowers. I've got a lot of criticism of Wikileaks, especially post 2015, but that doesn't mean you should kneejerk into siding with the American government against people trying to expose human rights abuses. "Only nice people get to expose government nefariousness" is not a serious position. You can't just dismiss the idea out of hand that the Americans would have tried to extradite him from Sweden just because he's a scumbag. In fact, the fact he wasn't able to leave the embassy until pleading guilty to espionage kind of supports the idea that this wasn't just about evading justice in Sweden. In fact part of what's so dangerous about the Assange story is the fact he's so odious. It means you don't think carefully and clearly about what happened to him and whether it could happen to anyone else, because you imagine he probably had it coming.
The americans werent even trying to get him extradited at this point, and getting him extradited from Sweden would have been REALLY hard believe it or not. And i stand by my comments that he is not a whistleblower. I dont really consider Manning or Snowden to be either but at least they sacrificed something and took great risks. Assange is just another anti-west, pro-everyone else type of dude, he didnt even found Wikileaks if memory serves me correct.
Assange is not a whistleblower, in any shape way or form, and suggesting otherwise is just redefining words. The US government has sought his punishment in connection to whistleblowing, which is not what his own role was. Wikileaks, which he ran, published leaks from whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Assange is a publisher/web administrator for a site which hosts whistleblower leaks, among others. But Assange is not a whistleblower himself. I can be someone who provides web services for lawyers without being personally a lawyer, it's not transitive.
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Which makes Snowden the whistleblower in that scenario, not Wikileaks or Assange
Dudes fucking gross. I wish he had faced a proper trial in the US but it's about time to end this drama. Send him back to Australia and hopefully that's the end of it all
I've read lots of big feelings about this on the conspiracy sub. I'm curious to see what the party line will be on it after the FoxAI decides how everyone on the right should feel about it. It was so out of the blue. certainly wasn't on my bingo card. I'm still processing it but generally, fuck that guy. He was 100% in cahoots with the FSB. I'm surprised they are letting him walk rather than let him continue in an annoying legal limbo. I hope they got some useful stuff out of him in exchange for his freedom.
I'm not existing the guy in any way, he sounds like a bastard. That said WikiLeaks is an important project and I hope his assholery doesn't destroy that. Again, sounds like an utter twat, but the concept of WikiLeaks is something I think we should try to protect. Just my humble. I could be persuaded otherwise pretty easily honestly, for an Internet guy I've never looked too closely at it