One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party.
It's hard to put a finger on just how much the current form of western democracy differs from the 18th century ideal of western democracy. Let this concretize it: Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade in jail indefinitely on fictitious charges and virtually nobody cares. Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
"Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?
> "[...] support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party"
Wikileaks released all of Clinton's/DNC/Podesta email at a timing chosen specifically to inflict damage on the campaign of one party, and in concordance with the other party.
I think you are mischaracterizing why Julian Assange has lost support. He has not lost support because of exposing corruption in any political parties, he's lost support because its become clear he works with Russian intelligence services.
People have leaked data on Russian corruption to WikiLeaks, which went unpublished. His leaks coincide with what is politically favorable to Russia, not with making all information free to the world.
> One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party.
There are many instances of this, and the corporate media does this on both sides of the aisle. Of course, there's one dominant one at the moment. There's a heavy-handed corporate media attempt to squeeze out compliance - from biased stories (that are later proven false) from mainstream outlets as the most serious, to the cover of Vogue as the most silly.
What's disturbing is that if you point this out to people, what happens? Ah hah, they discovered someone on the other side of the political aisle. Their enemies. Again, this is true for both parties.
Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore.
> "Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?
I'd say that the focus on party loyalty is more a feature of authoritarian parties in general and not fascism specifically.
If there's any single tenet that can be called central to fascism (a debatable premise), it's probably the idea that "the nation" can reattain its former glory by forcefully purging various forms of "degeneracy" and thereby becoming "pure".
The really startling thing is ... considering how effective this technique is with the internet it must have been nearly flawless prior to about 2015 when most of the world didn't have access to the internet.
What we're seeing isn't so much an elite group controlling the narrative as an elite group who used to be able to control the narrative and now can't patch over the rough spots.
Assuming that the Internet only became significantly effective in media when direct acceess to it exceeded 50% of the global population ... makes little sense. It needen't even be considered where 50% of, say, advanced media markets have Internet access.
What's necessary is for Internet connectivity to be high enough that other media gatekeepers are ineffective, and that's a threshold which was all but certainly crossed somewhere between the 1990s and early 2000s. With other nontraditional media channels (samizdat printing presses, pirate radio, 'Zine culture, and the like), there were pretty big holes in the mainstream media monopoly even earlier, though perhaps not quite at mass media level.
(Interestingly, if you go further back, there was enough diversity in mainstream media that a single unitary media culture didn't exist. It's helpful to realise that this mass-media culture was a largely novel development of the 1950s, much commented on at the time.)
That said: media control, expressed as the ability to promote and suppress specific narratives, is as old as speech. Methods exist and have varied, but distraction, taboo, blacklisting, and access control (that is, denying personal access to reporters or publications which don't toe the official or blessed line) are key mechanisms.
In today's mobile social Internet age, distraction, trust attacks, firehose, and that old classic, the Big Lie, are still effective methods of media control.
It's not an elite group, it's a character in the collective unconscious. Or to put it another way it's a stable set of interacting memes that tilt the conversation based upon their preferences.
Let's not kid ourselves, outside of a vanishingly small minority of people who consume independent or leftist media this is not a story. The rough spots are still only rough at a microscopic scale.
2015? In the big picture there's hardly any difference in active internet users in the countries involved compared to today. In Scandinavia in 2015 it was already at around 96% and I'm guessing UK and US wasn't that far behind.
Edit: Looked it up. UK was close to those numbers in 2015 too. The US was far behind though. But that hasn't changed much since so it doesn't really matter in this context.
I don't think Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson is a "key witness" in the claims against Assange. He might be A witness, but I very much doubt the charges rely on his testimony. As far as the media goes, most people don't care about Assange as much as the conspiracy crowd. And some of the comments here are verging on very conspiratorial.
Casually thrown into the article is this rather startling claim:
> Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks.
Is these any evidence backing up this claim of what would essentially be an act of (cyber)war against a NATO ally?
The Stundin article they are quoting has the source, it's
Ögmundur Jónasson, who was Iceland's minister of interior at the time.
Also ... maybe there is a problem with censored news in the US. Because outside the US mainstream media reporting on the latest "US intelligence caught spying on everyone again" is as common as the latest "Russia caught mistreating dissident artist" story.
The U.S. does sort of have a habit of treating NATO allies as such publicly while privately violating their sovereignty and treating them as vassal states or something so I wouldn’t really be surprised. There are regularly stories of us getting caught spying on allies etc
Perhaps this wasn't covered by the American media, but PRISM didn't just target American citizens. In most of the world, especially in "allied" nations, the controversy was about America spying on their supposed allies, especially Merkel's phone, much more than it was about some known-shady government agency monitoring phone calls.
An FBI DDoS against the USA's allies is nothing out of the ordinary. Russia, the EU, the USA, everyone is waging cyberwar against each other. Nobody wins if actual, physical, violent war is declared, so nobody admits anything.
When it comes to national security, America is not an ally that can be trusted. Just look at the sabotage the US government is applying to the European gas pipeline to Russia; afraid of losing control over the European power market, the US government is doing everything in its power to stop its allies letting them make their own decisions about the power grid when it doesn't benefit themselves. I'm no fan of Russia, its government, and I'm not exactly happy with the added influence Moscow gains over Europe with this project, but America's actions show that their government is just as bad when it comes to national sovereignty of its allies.
For many western countries, America doesn't need to very trustworthy or reliable; the bar is "better than trusting Russia or China", and that's a pretty damn low bar to set. Many of these countries are no better themselves, of course, and they would do the exact same thing if they'd have the power and influence the American government has.
It's discussed quite a bit in Manufacturing Consent, with many many examples given - in those days, the U.S. war with Iraq featuring prominently in examples of how broadcast and print media behaved.
Keep in mind this is just my opinion, not a statement of fact, as I do not have any inside details.
The notion of neutral or unbiased media is a little strange IMHO; they're a for profit corporation, for one. The media has an agenda and it's usually to please the particular political party they favor.
In this specific scenario, I don't think it's too hard to identify. Assange embarrassed key members of a certain American political party and likely cost them an entire election. It's one of those scenarios where if you don't conform you will be silenced.
a simpler explanation would be that many people simply don't care that much about the Assange case at the moment, and this is just a development or such, nothing conclusive. were the case to be completely dropped in court due to this, I think it would make the news.
Isn't that arguing that MSM report what people want to know as opposed to people knowing what the MSM report? It's hard to know about something MSM doesn't report.
Also he testified to one thing, waited for the case to be closed, then said something else to the media. His media statements could easily be self serving (I have no idea what his motivations are) as they are not under oath they have no bearing on the case. The case which was already adjudicated in Assange's favor. It's entirely moot.
Nobody cared until the media made them care in the first place, to build anti-Wikileaks and anti-Assange sentiment. Awful convenient that they stop talking about him the moment there’s concrete evidence that the whole thing was a setup.
> Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks. In reality, the approach was a ruse to fool Iceland into cooperation in an attempt to entrap Assange.
> the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks
What's really stunning that this statement does not seem like just a wildly crazy accusation.
I'm a Canadian and the CIA has literally kidnapped innocent people off the streets of my city and tortured them to insanity, it's far from the worst that could happen.
You can see topics trending in right media (this was) and compare to the left media. I tend to send friends of either affinity topics from the other, my own effort to bring people together... or at least understand each other (have the same facts).
The daily mail owned metro is described as "left media" while RT is shoved in the same category as fox news.
They should really categorize by more fine grained biases and allegiances. E.g. WaPo to the US military industrial complex, RT to putin, CNBC to the DNC, Fox to RNC/Rupert Murdoch, BBC to the tories, Metro to lord rothermere.
Another serious gap in coverage, and response to the revelations, is any hint of discipline for the FBI agents and prosecutors who spun the tissue of lies, or even questions about why there isn't any.
They’ll go full throttle on something like WMDs, border crisis, lab leak cover ups, etc., but also be complicit in burying things like the new border crisis (which appear worse than Trumps) this witness recanting, etc., when it doesn’t fit a narrative.
It’s concerning because there has to be some agenda somewhere for things to switch on and off like this.
Russia is the biggest threat, no, China is the biggest threat. Oh, no Trump said that, they’re not. But now they’re the biggest again.
It’s not “pelosi” it’s not the Congress, it’s most likely what people derisively call the deep state. Unelected bureaucrats with inertial agendas that filter down to the media.
I can’t imagine the media running with this 24x7 to make up for their previous bias and asking for forgiveness and demanding the government come correct.
USA news media has always been biased. They used to be biased toward what would sell more papers, e.g. "Remember the Maine!" They still have that bias to some degree, but the overriding bias now that ownership rules have been scrapped is to report the interests of the five or six rich assholes who own most of our media. Since allied rich assholes control the military-industrial complex, we're constantly told to fear and murder brown people on the other side of the globe. Anyone, like Assange, who offers rational alternatives to that racist fear is sure to be the continual victim of biased reporting.
I'm not sure the media is complicit more-so than they are being manipulated by what they like / need: money; just as US corporations and through them the US government is being manipulated by what they need by China.
We'll let you sell in our market as long as you sign away all your IP is the same as we'll let you in on presidential press meetings as long as you'll say nice things.
Also, all those "anonymous" sources from "intelligence agencies" are information / propaganda plants. The CIA doesn't leak very often unintentionally, when it does, people get tortured (Manning / Assange) and/or exiled (Snowden).
From what I can tell from the article, this witness testified about hacking MP's. Was this the same witness that said Assange was-- at least attempting-- to provide support to Chelsea Manning hacking passwords?
In the article they talk about right wing propaganda but after admitting the huge amount of resources Obama used to catch Assange, using nefarious means.
It is not the right, it is not the left, it is power. Power (anybody in power) does not like anybody criticizing them. In the US, in China or everywhere in the world.
The US has a big War industry and infrastructure, that is a power on their own. It tells presidents what to do and not the other way.
[+] [-] nickysielicki|4 years ago|reply
It's hard to put a finger on just how much the current form of western democracy differs from the 18th century ideal of western democracy. Let this concretize it: Global western "democracy" conspires to put the single most hard-hitting journalist of the past decade in jail indefinitely on fictitious charges and virtually nobody cares. Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Do most Americans even know who Julian Assange is?
"Fascism" gets thrown around a lot and I know it feels a bit overplayed, and I'm not saying we're there yet, but when most people are apathetic and the remainder form their opinion based entirely on their political faction, it's hard for me to believe that fascism isn't inevitable. After all, what is fascism about if it's not 'party firmly over principle'?
[+] [-] sailingparrot|4 years ago|reply
Wikileaks released all of Clinton's/DNC/Podesta email at a timing chosen specifically to inflict damage on the campaign of one party, and in concordance with the other party.
Wikileaks became partisan, not the public.
[+] [-] chronicsunshine|4 years ago|reply
People have leaked data on Russian corruption to WikiLeaks, which went unpublished. His leaks coincide with what is politically favorable to Russia, not with making all information free to the world.
To the downvoters: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia...
Maybe provide some feedback, so I can understand why you disagree with me?
[+] [-] mancerayder|4 years ago|reply
There are many instances of this, and the corporate media does this on both sides of the aisle. Of course, there's one dominant one at the moment. There's a heavy-handed corporate media attempt to squeeze out compliance - from biased stories (that are later proven false) from mainstream outlets as the most serious, to the cover of Vogue as the most silly.
What's disturbing is that if you point this out to people, what happens? Ah hah, they discovered someone on the other side of the political aisle. Their enemies. Again, this is true for both parties.
Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore.
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|4 years ago|reply
I'd say that the focus on party loyalty is more a feature of authoritarian parties in general and not fascism specifically.
If there's any single tenet that can be called central to fascism (a debatable premise), it's probably the idea that "the nation" can reattain its former glory by forcefully purging various forms of "degeneracy" and thereby becoming "pure".
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
What we're seeing isn't so much an elite group controlling the narrative as an elite group who used to be able to control the narrative and now can't patch over the rough spots.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
What's necessary is for Internet connectivity to be high enough that other media gatekeepers are ineffective, and that's a threshold which was all but certainly crossed somewhere between the 1990s and early 2000s. With other nontraditional media channels (samizdat printing presses, pirate radio, 'Zine culture, and the like), there were pretty big holes in the mainstream media monopoly even earlier, though perhaps not quite at mass media level.
(Interestingly, if you go further back, there was enough diversity in mainstream media that a single unitary media culture didn't exist. It's helpful to realise that this mass-media culture was a largely novel development of the 1950s, much commented on at the time.)
That said: media control, expressed as the ability to promote and suppress specific narratives, is as old as speech. Methods exist and have varied, but distraction, taboo, blacklisting, and access control (that is, denying personal access to reporters or publications which don't toe the official or blessed line) are key mechanisms.
In today's mobile social Internet age, distraction, trust attacks, firehose, and that old classic, the Big Lie, are still effective methods of media control.
[+] [-] sudosysgen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plutonorm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idiotsecant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] a0-prw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaiPlusPlus|4 years ago|reply
I can't tell if you're being facetious or not...
[+] [-] Dah00n|4 years ago|reply
Edit: Looked it up. UK was close to those numbers in 2015 too. The US was far behind though. But that hasn't changed much since so it doesn't really matter in this context.
[+] [-] WoahNoun|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpoacher|4 years ago|reply
~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko
[+] [-] Clewza313|4 years ago|reply
> Meanwhile, the FBI were allegedly complicit in DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks on the websites of several Iceland government institutions. The FBI had then approached Icelandic authorities, promising to assist them in preventing any future such attacks.
Is these any evidence backing up this claim of what would essentially be an act of (cyber)war against a NATO ally?
[+] [-] Joeri|4 years ago|reply
They injected malware into belgium’s core telecommunication infrastructure: https://theintercept.com/2014/12/13/belgacom-hack-gchq-insid...
They spied on angela merkel’s calls and texts: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-us-reportedly-spied...
[+] [-] freshhawk|4 years ago|reply
Also ... maybe there is a problem with censored news in the US. Because outside the US mainstream media reporting on the latest "US intelligence caught spying on everyone again" is as common as the latest "Russia caught mistreating dissident artist" story.
[+] [-] alwayseasy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrsj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|4 years ago|reply
An FBI DDoS against the USA's allies is nothing out of the ordinary. Russia, the EU, the USA, everyone is waging cyberwar against each other. Nobody wins if actual, physical, violent war is declared, so nobody admits anything.
When it comes to national security, America is not an ally that can be trusted. Just look at the sabotage the US government is applying to the European gas pipeline to Russia; afraid of losing control over the European power market, the US government is doing everything in its power to stop its allies letting them make their own decisions about the power grid when it doesn't benefit themselves. I'm no fan of Russia, its government, and I'm not exactly happy with the added influence Moscow gains over Europe with this project, but America's actions show that their government is just as bad when it comes to national sovereignty of its allies.
For many western countries, America doesn't need to very trustworthy or reliable; the bar is "better than trusting Russia or China", and that's a pretty damn low bar to set. Many of these countries are no better themselves, of course, and they would do the exact same thing if they'd have the power and influence the American government has.
[+] [-] briefcomment|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianhawes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinkestek|4 years ago|reply
I've recognized this happening but I have never had a word for it until now.
[+] [-] mancerayder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CookieMon|4 years ago|reply
* Lying by omission - the passive omission of relevant information.
* Paltering - active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression.
But knowbody will know what you mean if you use the word paltering, so "by omission" would still be the go-to phrase.
[+] [-] exabrial|4 years ago|reply
The notion of neutral or unbiased media is a little strange IMHO; they're a for profit corporation, for one. The media has an agenda and it's usually to please the particular political party they favor.
In this specific scenario, I don't think it's too hard to identify. Assange embarrassed key members of a certain American political party and likely cost them an entire election. It's one of those scenarios where if you don't conform you will be silenced.
[+] [-] raziel2p|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dah00n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrsj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f1refly|4 years ago|reply
The FBI is a criminal organisation.
[+] [-] canada_dry|4 years ago|reply
What's really stunning that this statement does not seem like just a wildly crazy accusation.
[+] [-] sudosysgen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lettergram|4 years ago|reply
https://ground.news/
You can see topics trending in right media (this was) and compare to the left media. I tend to send friends of either affinity topics from the other, my own effort to bring people together... or at least understand each other (have the same facts).
[+] [-] pydry|4 years ago|reply
The daily mail owned metro is described as "left media" while RT is shoved in the same category as fox news.
They should really categorize by more fine grained biases and allegiances. E.g. WaPo to the US military industrial complex, RT to putin, CNBC to the DNC, Fox to RNC/Rupert Murdoch, BBC to the tories, Metro to lord rothermere.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ncmncm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mc32|4 years ago|reply
They’ll go full throttle on something like WMDs, border crisis, lab leak cover ups, etc., but also be complicit in burying things like the new border crisis (which appear worse than Trumps) this witness recanting, etc., when it doesn’t fit a narrative.
It’s concerning because there has to be some agenda somewhere for things to switch on and off like this.
Russia is the biggest threat, no, China is the biggest threat. Oh, no Trump said that, they’re not. But now they’re the biggest again.
It’s not “pelosi” it’s not the Congress, it’s most likely what people derisively call the deep state. Unelected bureaucrats with inertial agendas that filter down to the media.
I can’t imagine the media running with this 24x7 to make up for their previous bias and asking for forgiveness and demanding the government come correct.
[+] [-] jessaustin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Clubber|4 years ago|reply
We'll let you sell in our market as long as you sign away all your IP is the same as we'll let you in on presidential press meetings as long as you'll say nice things.
Also, all those "anonymous" sources from "intelligence agencies" are information / propaganda plants. The CIA doesn't leak very often unintentionally, when it does, people get tortured (Manning / Assange) and/or exiled (Snowden).
[+] [-] failwhaleshark|4 years ago|reply
Everyone has biases.
Is whether someone has the integrity to recognize and air them, while reporting matters of import that go against their own views/agenda.
[+] [-] the_optimist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m1117|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bumbada|4 years ago|reply
It is not the right, it is not the left, it is power. Power (anybody in power) does not like anybody criticizing them. In the US, in China or everywhere in the world.
The US has a big War industry and infrastructure, that is a power on their own. It tells presidents what to do and not the other way.