Julian Assange dragged from Ecuador's embassy in London and arrested

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It would be important to remember that Donna Brazile then admitted that she found no actual evidence of the primaries being rigged.

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And also important to remember that others saw things differently.

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Heather Gautney is the author of Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement (Verso) and an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University. She has served as a policy fellow and advisor to Senator Sanders, and was the Vermont representative to the Democratic Party Platform Committee.

She might have a point, but it’s not any kind of surprise that someone on the Sanders team thinks the primaries should be run differently.

Was Assange trying to get Bernie Sanders elected? Is that what people are saying?

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I think what they’re trying to say is that he got Trump elected.

Anyway, seems to me that what he did do was help reveal how the DNC got Clinton nominated, by preventing Sanders from being nominated.

And it’s not any kind of surprise that Clinton supporters think they’re fine just the way they are.

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Is it worth rewatching Babylon 5 in 2019? I only saw parts of it back when it first aired.

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Um. Difficult for me say. I still watch a show now and then.

Yes. Maybe not season 5 as they rushed the overall story to an end on season 4 as they were pretty sure it was not going to get renewed. But overall a good series.

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Sure. But I wanted to make clear that the whole “2016 primaries were rigged!” is not a cut-and-dry, noncontroversial, accepted-as-a-fact-by-everyone-reasonable thing, but rather a pretty contentious claim. :slight_smile:

Yes. The special effects haven’t aged very well (partly because they were pushing the envelope of CGI at the time, and nothing shows its age like the cutting-edge stuff, partly because IIRC for the DVD version, they had lost the original footage and had to use second-hand stuff), and both S1 and S5 are not the show at its best, but overall, it’s still worth watching. B5 is a classic of SF television for very good reasons.

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You’d better tell that to Donna Brazile. She was head of the DNC and said the primary was rigged.

I’ll take her word on it.

Donna Brazile might’ve flip flopped on her statement that the DNC cheated Sanders, but I think that’s just Gish Gallop after somebody reminded her on which side her bread is buttered.

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Well, I think we all learned where Assange’s bread was buttered after he promised a big drop of Russia leaks and that turned into a talk show on Russia Today.

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So you believe Brazile when she supports your beliefs, but not when she contradicts them?

Edit: Why am I arguing about this anyway? 2016 is past, gone, ancient history. We should focus on the present-day situation with Assange.

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For fuck’s sake; this derail needs to be split into another topic, already.

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Wait, don’t various people claim that Assange’s actions had something or other to do with the 2016 election? And that he’s a good guy because of that? Or wait, a bad guy because of it? :thinking:

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The derail is in framing it as a debate about whether Hillary Clinton is evil or not.

What it has to do with Assange specifically is that he only released negative info about the Democrats, while Trump was sitting there whistling and smiling. TrumpLeaks would have been fascinating, I bet.

It’s hard to paint it as some idealistic mission of total information transparency.

Yelling at Hillary Clinton is probably fun, but it lets Assange off the hook for dressing up what looks like political dirty-trickery as neutral info-sharing.

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Oh, I see. And what dirt did he Assange have on Trump that he didn’t release?

It’s moving up on my list. I never saw much of it when it was first on, but every time I see a little clip somebody posts here, it looks better and better. My library has the DVDs; I think it’s going to happen.

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Sounds like how Pelosi (and Obama, and a bunch of other Neolibs) said we should “deal” with the War Crimes of ex-President Cheney (and his spokesperson Bush Jr)

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You’re inviting me to speculate details about an event that didn’t happen? I have no idea what he had but didn’t say about Trump. He hasn’t leaked anything about him, so maybe Trump is pure and innocent?

We do know how Assange felt about Clinton.

People also forget that Assange started an Australian political party, from his embassy room, and that he’s never drawn a line between political activism and journalism. It’s great to preserve basic journalistic protections from encroachment by authoritarians, but that doesn’t cover straight-up politicking, and working with authoritarians.

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