So nothing happened.
Yeah, no shit. What did you expect? The US to go “oh sorry, we’ll stop existing now”? The US empire won’t crumble after one embarrassing video. You can’t make the claim Assange/Wikileaks is a US asset just because their leaks didn’t lead to the collapse of the US or significant change.
It ties his mom. A kid hardly has influence on what parents do.
It is also not my goal to conclusively prove or even allege that Assange is a federal asset. Rather, I think there are enough worrying questions that should be made known more broadly
Please don’t do this. This is a right-wing tactic: “I’m not making any claims, I’m just asking questions.”
At the same time, the two leaks were not entirely damaging to the US government.
“Collateral murder” absolutely was damaging to the US government. It showed the callous disregard the US military had for (non-white) human life and it put them under a lot of scrutiny. It also helped a lot of “fence-sitters” take a side opposing the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The murderers were never prosecuted.
Because that’s US policy. Not prosecuting them was also a bad look for US govt.
Wikileaks, however, was never formed to build credibility around damaging the US or the West in general; it was purposely founded to go after the enemies of the US government.
What? This claim needs arguments.
confined to a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy with no possibilities of ever leaving — a golden prison.
“A golden prison.” lmao. As someone who has experienced prison, his freedom taken away, you can lock a person up in a 5-star resort for 10 years and I guarantee you that person will go crazy, experience negative mental and physical effects. When criminals commit crime, they expect and are ready for the consequences, Assange never expected to be prosecuted by thr US never having stepped foot on US soil.
I think Assange’s release signals a new chapter for Wikileaks
I assume part of the plea deal is that Assange will not engage in any similar activities that landed him in trouble the first time. And even if it wasn’t, if I were Assange, I’d probably take a loooooong break from it all and spend time with my family.
There is also a part I didn’t write into the article about how when he was a teen in the 70s his mom dated a cult leader for a few years who had some ties to MK Ultra edit: dated a cult member when Assange was very young,
How is that Assange’s fault?
You can be anything and a communist, however certain activities might result in internal/personal contradictions that will plague you and get worse over time. It will be up to you to resolve them, one way or another.
Im being hyperbolic, consider my framing of ‘billions’ to just mean ‘a country with aprox a billion+ people’
But that’s only 2 countries out of ~190. They are exceptions.
Its an anarchist strain of thought and it has a whole connation behind it with the term,
Lenin the anarchist.
he surely recongised the need to have a police force to defend the citizens of the revolution from bad actors
That’s two different things. “Police” and “a force to defend the citizens of the revolution” are two different things. That’s my whole point. In the Soviet Union you had the local militia
and then you had the NKVD.
So a “police” is a force than combines the two: “local policing” (stopping bar fights, getting drunk people off the street, investigating domestic violence) and then “state polcing” (fighting the enemies of the state). If you have one police with those wide powers, then that’s a recipe for disaster.
housing owned by the people living there is personal property, not private property
“owned”. If it’s “owned”, it’s not personal property, it’s private property. Personal property is owned by the State but given to you to use. That means after you die or no longer need it, it is taken from you and given to someone else. “Owned” implies that you can decide who to give it to and that your kids can inherit it.
How many citizens of AES countries have you spoken to to inform this opinion of yours? How many times have you interacted with AES cops even?
How many have you?
then you’re just some foreigner applying foreign principles to places that you don’t know or understand.
As opposed to you, The Great Understander and Knower? Should I make assumptions about you? You traveled to AES countries as a tourist and got treated nicely, because that’s how they treat tourists with money.
I was acting in good faith up till now
I confused you with Blursty, they said “You’re reeking off anarchist “thought”.” and you jumped into the same thread, so I thought it was you who had said that to me. I apologise.
It comes with ‘ACAB’, destroy all cops is a core princable; if not killing, abolishing all.
Would you agree to a year of re-educational labour for cops instead?
id call the police if I knew they wouldnt hurt them, which in a socialist society id have more confidence they wont, as they arent going to put them in prison, they are taking them home;
But are we talking about a hypothetical socialist society or AES? Because not all AES countries are the same, and AES countries have mixed levels of class consciousness.
Removed by mod
Cops in AES serve the state. The exists to subdue enemies and dangers to the socialist state and society.
The state police (like Stasi, for example in the DDR) subdue enemies of the state. Police are literally there to “clean up the streets”. How can you be ignorant of this difference?
over some American idealist who never has.
Is the American idealist in the room with us now? Or are you calling me an American idealist? Insults aren’t going to help your case. You are having a knee-jerk reaction to a difference of opinion. Grow up.
Are you implying that no socialist leaders ever wanted to be in power and all of them were just so nominated and begrudgingly accepted the position?
We’re not talking about just the “leaders”? Didn’t you say representatives? There’s many more elected positions in a socialist state than just “the leaders”. Also, “power” of leaders in socialist countries isn’t absolute. Those are anti-communist talking points. Do you think Stalin had absolute power? He was nominated/elected general-secretary, he didn’t say “I want to be general-secretary” and it was so. He also had to have his decisions approved, but that’s a different conversation.
should we be killing every cop there?
Who said anything about killing?
next time a stranger decides to drunkly stumble into my garden at 2am, they arent invading our house,
You said “garden”, but then imply they are invading your “house”. What if your garden was 10 acres, would you still call the cops on them?
they are just friends we havent met yet :)
If you don’t have a problem with cops, they serve your interests.
In a socialist society if you’re taking a nap somewhere, the police will give you a ride home.
And that’s how it should be. The police don’t need country-wide powers, 24/7 access to a criminal database or weapons to do this.
of course if someone is invading your home, they should still respond
Someone who takes a nap in your yard isn’t “invading your home”.
For most people, Haiti is a small island nation;
That’s not how it works. Just because “most people” think something that doesn’t make it true. An island nation is a country that comprises a whole island, or several islands. Iceland is an island nation, for example.
also we cant take micro-examples
They’re not “micro-examples”. Iceland has 176 cops per 100.000 inhabitants, while the European Union average is around 333. China has some 142. Does that mean Iceland is close to being socialist? Or is Iceland more socialist than the EU?
countries with billions of people.
What countries with billionS of people? China and India have about 1.5 billion each, and they’re exceptions.
Again just putting a different name tag on the police and giving them smaller juristictions doesnt make them not police
Someone should have told Lenin that.
what ACAB represents
ACAB represents that “all cops are bastards”, I don’t think anything is implied about what should replace them.
I mean id hope they would do that, do you want someone sleeping in your yard you dont know?
Sure, but that’s because I’m not scared of other workers and I don’t think people are icky.
You said “cops don’t protect private property in socialist states” but then you say “I hope they’d protect private property in a socialist state”, so which is it?
90% of people in China own a house, the need for people to sleep homelessly is all but eliminated over there.
Who said anything about “homelessness”? What if you’re drunk/tired and just need a place to rest your head for a few hours? Why do you think that anyone sleeping on the street is “homeless”?
Simply isn’t true of any cops I’ve encountered in AES countries.
OK? You don’t think cops in AES countries beat people up or throw them in jail? They just come with blankets and cocoa? If you need the country you “defend” to be perfect in your eyes for you to defend it, I have bad news for you. I can recognise negative aspects of a country and still defend it and say it is preferrable to another.
“Simply isn’t true that cops in AES countries beat people up and throw them in jail” lmao
Is Haiti not real to you?
Haiti isn’t a small “island nation”. Haiti is half of the island Hispaniola, the other half is the Dominican Republic. Dominica is an example of an “island nation”.
The DPRK has cops…
Do they? Or do they have a local “militia”?
Find me a society with anything close to what you have previously described.
The Soviet Union. I corrected myself in other posts, I was wrong to name them as an example of counter-revolutionary cops. Lenin abolished the police in the Soviet Union and replaced them with local “militias”. The difference was that these militia people didn’t have country-wide powers, they were tasked with their own city. This means that they couldn’t be shipped from one city to the next to “restore order”.
But you did? How are we discussing it if it’s not in the article?