Originally published at: Assange extradition approved by UK government | Boing Boing
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It’s been a while since we’ve had occasion to hear from the Assange fanbois. Here we go…
[I just realised that Assange and Musk like to brag about their gratuitous couch-surfing lifestyles. Is that a thing for fanbois in general?]
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The Glenn Greenwalds of the world like to say how terrible all this is, because Assange is a “journalist.” He’s not. He specialized in publishing illegally obtained materials. Snowden’s leaks were quite revelatory, although a good bit of what NSA did had become public already through other channels. However, Chelsea Manning’s leaks included a great deal of diplomatic traffic, which arguably served no one’s interests by being made public. Finally, the leak of Podesta’s emails just before the 2016 election may have tilted the results in Trump’s favor, although a large part of the content was actually not in any way newsworthy. It is also notable that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian hackers. Assange functioned as a Russian tool, leaking the information they wanted leaked without revealing the source.
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If I have to pick a side here, I’m reluctantly Team Assange. My interest in seeing an allegedly horrible person get some kind of comeuppance is vastly outweighed by my desire not to see supposedly-democratic governments conspire to punish those who embarrass them.
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Great, so can we finally decouple the assessment of Assange’s character from taking a position on the deeply dodgy and vengeful actions of the US and british states, who had been embarrassed by the revelation of their involvement in torture, murder of civilians and systematic spying on the rest of the world.
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damn. U.S. politicians/media will make a hellish hash of this human hot potato. He was so much better off for everyone in the tender quieter care of the British authorities. Can we send you something trumpy in tit4tat? (“Already got Bojo for that, mate”)
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Assange is a dick who should serve time for sexual assault (I think that is the charge)
It is absurd to be brought up on espionage charges.
Not sure how I feel about the idea of him serving time for the wrong thing = justice for what he should serve time for.
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This ignores Assange’s post-Manning behavior. Releasing hacked documents with the goal of hurting a specific candidate and releasing the source code of CIA hacking tools did harm greater than mere embarrassment.
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If he weren’t also an active tool (or useful idiot) of Russian intelligence services, he would have a better claim to the “journalist/whistleblower” title.
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Have you seen our current (UK) Govt? They are incapable of shame.
Any spite comes directly from their soul - it’s not a reaction to anything.
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Please apply some rigor behind your statements. There has never been such a charge, only a desire for questioning in Swedish territory, with strong risk of immediate extradition to US should he had stepped foot there.
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Yeah, no. If you think Assange was at a greater risk of extration to US from Sweden than he was in the UK, you are either ignorant or seriously misinformed. It’s a self-serving narrative spun by Assange.
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Ad hominem. No charge.
This seems rather insulting to Swedes. Why would Sweden be so cooperative with the US? Sweden is not a US puppet state.
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It’s only now joining NATO, mainly because of the Russian dictator that Assange played the stooge for. It would have been a lot harder for the U.S. to extradite him from Sweden than it has been from the UK (which hasn’t been a simple process, either).
If he’d faced justice for his alleged sexual assaults in Sweden he would have likely spent a few years in prison there and then continued wandering the world through whatever countries would still allow him in. He wouldn’t be anything close to the martyr that he and his fans like to portray him as, just another creepy and entitled rapey techie.
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Yes, he actively worked with Putin’s Russia to put a fascist in power.
If Assange and Wikileaks were really about holding the powerful accountable then it seems absolutely incredible that they wouldn’t have a single major leak about Trump, his business dealings or his administration. Four years of the most corrupt and leak-prone administration in memory and Wikileaks gave us bupkis. Hell, even Access Hollywood did a better job holding that clown’s feet to the fire.
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