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From the Law of Unintended Consequences:
Endurance couch-surfer and WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange has thanked US authorities for the banking blockade that made it hard to donate fiat currencies to his organisation, because it inadvertently enriched the organisation.
The blockade first appeared in 2010, after the United States expressed its ire at WikiLeaks' publication of diplomatic cables. Not long afterwards, Mastercard and Visa stopped processing donations sent to the site.
WikiLeaks sued and won against Visa, but the blockade persisted. The organisation therefore sought alternative funding including Bitcoin.
Which brings us to an Assange Tweet from Sunday, as follows.
My deepest thanks to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for pushing Visa, MasterCard, Payal, AmEx, Mooneybookers, et al, into erecting an illegal banking blockade against @WikiLeaks starting in 2010. It caused us to invest in Bitcoin -- with > 50000% return. pic.twitter.com/9i8D69yxLC
— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) October 14, 2017
> 50,000%?
(Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 16 2017, @04:14PM (22 children)
> the United States expressed its ire
No. The ire was from the powerful elites in the US, and their dupes, not the US as a whole. Just guessing, but wouldn't surprise me if the percentage of US citizens with a favorable impression of Wikileaks is 70 or more.
Elites covet more power. Knowledge is power, and they try to monopolize that. Wikileaks threatens their monopoly in that area. Paying or pressuring women to tempt the men behind such competition into screwing up, is one of the classic tools in their war chest. Then they have a somewhat credible accusation of sexual harassment, or possibly even rape, to work with. If that doesn't shut things down, they have other tools, such as making it difficult to fund a project by freezing accounts and assets. If that backfires, well, they can still try to take it to the public, sell people on the notion that it endangers national security.
They have a lot of power, lot of advantages, but they don't win them all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @04:25PM
It is quite common to say "the $COUNTRY did $ACTION" as short form of "the government of $COUNTRY did $ACTION". For example, if the United States signed a contract, then not every inhabitant of the United States put their signature on it, also not a majority of the inhabitants, and not even the governments of the individual states, or at least a majority of them. Indeed, the only one who actually signed it is the president.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday October 16 2017, @04:36PM (19 children)
It works well. I'm pretty sure most people in the US do call Assange, Snowden and Manning traitors...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @04:56PM
I guess its true then, the US is chock full of idiots :(
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday October 16 2017, @05:18PM (5 children)
Unfortunately, I would have to agree. The best responses I've seen are generally neutral regarding them. I don't usually talk much about the topic, but I've heard generally negative responses regarding them all. Some, very adamantly negative.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday October 16 2017, @05:52PM
Maybe you need a better class of friends.
Among my acquaintances (lots of them military) its about 50/50 on Snowden (the military people vehemently state they did not sign up and put their life on the line for the bastards in the TLAs). Military are less generous to Assange, but they essentially don't blame him, because the cat was already out of the bag by the time he got his hands on any leak worthy info.
Among my liberal friends I'd say more are negative on both, just because they both embarrassed Obama, but basically they don't understand the issues at all, so they simply parrot the party line.
I'd expect conservatives to be down on both those two, but surprisingly they could care less about Assange, and show mild condemnation of Snowden. Had he found refuge in any other country than Russia, they be in his camp.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 16 2017, @06:30PM
Well then let me be a strong dissenting voice on that one. Snowden is a hero. Manning also, but to a lesser extent. Assange I don't consider a hero, but I appreciate what he's doing with WikiLeaks.
That's not a surprise to anyone in the SN community who's seen (and remembered) my posts on Snowden and the NSA before. Snowden belongs on Mt. Rushmore. The NSA's people deserve life in supermax, or worse; they are traitors to America.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 16 2017, @07:30PM (1 child)
My experience, from inside, is that Assanage's esteem runs the gamut from traitor to patriot, and you can usually guess how someone will feel before bringing up him specifically.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:34AM
...a word typically associated with "My country, right or wrong".[1]
(Assange is an Aussie.)
[1] ...and most people leave off the last part:
"When right to be kept right, and when wrong to be put right." -- Senator Carl Schurz, 1899 (previously Secretary of the Interior)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday October 17 2017, @06:49AM
I think it is our luck that a man like Assange walks on the planet. Can we count the number of people who can actually stand up to a structure of power so old and so big it has gulped millions have people and has yet to take a burp, and all the while remaining under the ambit of law. What size of balls you need to continue marching forward when you can't even step outside of a house?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @05:35PM (1 child)
How would Assanage be a traitor actually? He isn't even an American. Even for Snowden it is a stretch, as he was a civilian contractor, plus the motivation an exposing anti-constitutional crimes committed by the alphabet soup would certainly make him more of a hero in my book. Manning though, that's probably open-shut case.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Monday October 16 2017, @07:33PM
How do you thing this matters for the american bison if the herd's alpha males [huffingtonpost.com] are mooing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 16 2017, @05:53PM (6 children)
We have a bunch of those morons here on this very site. Predictably it's the usual rogues' gallery of authoritarians, alt-right'ers, barely-closeted Neo-Nazis, and sociopaths.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 16 2017, @06:31PM (1 child)
They wish they could have been lizard people, but they didn't make the cut.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 16 2017, @07:32PM
Oh, but they know, or at least know of, several Lizard people who they aspire to be just like...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday October 16 2017, @10:44PM (3 children)
Who here is an authoritarian?
I'm not sure that anybody here is a sociopath, either...sociopaths have charisma.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @12:19AM
Well you fit the bill. It is a horrifying charisma, but it seems to charm the other trolls round here. If you're not a sociopath / psychopath at least to SOME degree then I think we need to roll back psychology to the 1300's and just throw you in the pit :D
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday October 17 2017, @02:01AM
Although I'm not a psychologist, I think it's fairly obvious to anyone with open eyes that J-Mo is one of these. I suspect very strongly VLM is too. Uzzard too, most likely, though he has a small kernel of human warmth that makes me wonder sometimes. Entropy for goddamn certain; he may actually be the single worst person on the site and that is stiff competition.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:40AM
Some do; others have inherited wealth.
It's what they lack that is the determining factor: empathy.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday October 16 2017, @06:24PM (2 children)
So the funny thing about that was that in 2010, conservatives in the US government hated Assange's guts (and Joe Lieberman showed that he's really a conservative despite being Al Gore's VP pick in 2000), while liberals loved his efforts to expose wrongdoing on the part of the US government. Fast forward to 2015, when Assange started posting stuff somehow acquired from the Democratic National Committee, and all of a sudden the same people calling him an award-winning journalistic hero started smearing him as a traitorous stooge for Russia (never mind that you can't be a traitor to a country that isn't your own).
It's almost like it's a question of whose secrets are being kept and whose secrets are not. They don't seem to understand the point: The way it's supposed to work is that what the government and public figures do are exposed to the public so the public can properly supervise their actions, while the actions of private individuals outside of the public sphere are supposed to be kept private.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 16 2017, @06:58PM
That happens when a society rejects integrity and principle. Everything is about tribe now, exactly as designed by The Powers That Be. It's impossible to work in common cause with someone from another tribe then.
If any tribe grows too powerful or should find itself situationally able to cause TPTB trouble, it's no problem. Simply start a schism within that tribe and they'll forget all about it because it's easier to attack the other tribe than to hold fast to a purpose and make a real difference.
And the now mini-tribes then have the perfect excuse for the moment when somebody has a lightbulb go on and asks, "Hey, weren't we gonna pin TPTB to the wall and force concessions?" The excuse will be, "Well, sure, we could have done something if not for the other tribe..."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 17 2017, @03:54AM
Nope. Lieberman is a radical.
That's the opposite of conservative.
This is a guy who thinks that rape victims shouldn't have access to the morning after pill.
The dude is stuck in the 19th Century.
That makes him Reactionary.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday October 17 2017, @01:47AM
For an especially vulgar illustration of your point, consider Podesta's tweets to Mr. Assange. https://mobile.twitter.com/johnpodesta/status/786988264985100288/photo/1 [twitter.com]
That's an elite saying, "fuck you peasant I'm eating lobster" to a man that risked everything to give us the facts. The DNC and Podesta are fucking disgusting.