Friday, April 12, 2019

Julian Assange, hero and villain

Julian Assange, hero and villain
Excerpt: To argue that Assange, even when the things that WikiLeaks drew attention to were otherwise worthy of public attention, was a force for justice or peace is ludicrous. He was and remains an utterly lawless actor, a delusional, childish narcissist whose policy of absolute disclosure would, if taken to its logical conclusion, undermine and eventually destroy the security of every nation. His now-discredited wisdom belongs to the naïve early era of the internet, the too-long period when we blithely assumed that Google was a neat free service for looking up baseball stats rather than an insidious monopoly. Too many Democrats pretended otherwise before 2016. Far too many right-wingers changed their minds after WikiLeaks posted internal emails from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign that showed, among other things, clear evidence that her team had colluded with the Democratic National Committee against poor Bernie Sanders. This came as a surprise to no one, but it proved incredibly embarrassing for her. It also served as the occasion for a joke that many excitable liberals still claim as evidence of the conspiracy theory about collusion between his own campaign and the Russian government.

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