Well, Assange does stir emotions in many. That makes him such a hard topic to discuss, even if from a (human and press) rights perspective, the whole thing is pretty cut-and-dry.

Indeed. Assange is an asshole. A lot of people that have tried working with have conformed that. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been successfully smeared (he has), or that hes contribution to journalism should be ignored (it shouldn’t)

> Assange is an asshole.

The smear campaign continues to be successful even in people who consciously know it was all lies.

The human psyche is pretty "amazing".

Some people are assholes. Some people are smeared with crimes worse then “being an asshole”. Julian Assange can belong to the intersection of the two.

Not everything bad ever said about Assange is a lie.

Assange isn't an asshole. Assange is a victim of torture.

False dichotomy. And being a victim of torture can in no way be defended by "he's an asshole."

When being or not being an asshole became something of importance regarding the issues at stake? The dichotomy might be false but you're missing the whole point.

I don’t see “being an asshole” to be the issue at stake here at all.

It is for sure an issue for people that are trying to work with him. It is understandable that people bring it up when conversation revolve around him. But it is completely irrelevant when we are talking about his contributions to journalism being censored.

The people smearing Assange frankly come across as the asshole to me. Assange may not be the most pleasant person ever, I have no idea since I've never met the guy. But an asshole calling someone else an asshole makes the allegation lack any real credibility

for some reason, a LOT of people here do not like assange/wikileaks anymore. which is super weird imho.

I suspect it's a result of the apparent politicization of Wikileaks. When it first appeared it seemed fairly neutral, but that neutrality appears to have vanished somewhere along the line.

>When it first appeared it seemed fairly neutral, but that neutrality appears to have vanished somewhere along the line.

Wikileaks has always been as neutral as reasonably possible, given that it consists of human journalists and their human sources, not emotionless impartial machines. They have an excellent accuracy rate. The only thing that changed is that their honest reporting became embarrassing to wealthy and powerful people closely associated with the Democratic party. The DNC leadership loved Wikileaks' reporting on governmental malfeasance prior to late 2008. What changed in late 2008 was not Wikileaks' demonstrated neutrality towards reporting on governmental malfeasance, but the color of the lawn signs of the victorious president.

I suspect there's also some deep resentment from the traditional J-school cohort, who have spent over a decade being embarrassed by outsider Assange and his colleagues. Wikileaks has consistently make them look like obedient stenographers to the powerful, not principled journalists willing to speak truth to power. Wikileaks has publicly exposed many in the media as being too afraid to break real stories for fear of government legal pressure and a reduction in corporate advertising dollars. Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing don't advertise their military hardware on the cable news networks because they're trying to sell cruise missiles and fighter jets to the folks at home. They do it to hold something over the cable news networks' execs' heads when embarrassing stories might come to light.

Combine the collective resentment of the leadership of both major American political parties and their connected donors, the national security apparatus, the military-industrial complex, and every mainstream journalist who's getting scooped by an Australian ex-black-hat and his friends who (gasp!) never even attended Columbia, and we end up with a vicious and unfounded anti-wikileaks narrative festering within the politically-acceptable conversation today.

> Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing [...] advertise their military hardware on the cable news networks

I had no idea that was happening. Sounds like American television is getting pretty wacky.

It's been like that for at least 15 years.

but wikileaks was always political.

i mean, we all remember collateral murder and the amount of stuff leaked re: gwb and the iraq war.

Wikileaks has always been a political project, why would you expect anything else from the left-wing anarchist CCC crowd that runs it?

Not really.

"Tell a lie enough times and people will believe it".

Sadly, that's still true. Even in people who consciously know that it was all lies. That's the human mind for ya.

The last US presidential election cycle really soured public opinion on Assange.

After the Hillary email leaks, Democratic Party rhetoric turned against Assange. Many in the party hold him culpable for Trump's election.

I don't know if he was favoring one party or the other (as some Democrats purport), or if he was a Russian mouthpiece, or if he was just leaking the information that came to him unbeknownst to the state actors at play.

He lost a lot of the goodwill he built, and that put him in a very dangerous spot.

wikileaks published the DNC emails which harmed the DNC and Hillary in particular. It was a factor in low turnout and Hillary's loss. Since then wikileaks has been associated with Russia / Putin / Trump (bad). The collateral damage era has been mostly forgotten.

"harmed" seems like an odd choice of words. The leaks made public a lot of exceedingly unflattering facts (and perhaps illegalities) that put the DNC and Clinton in a very different light. AFAIK, few or none of those facts has been refuted. To me, it looks like the leaks were a great public service.

(I have not much doubt that one could find a similar cesspool on the RNC side.)

The effect of the leaks would have been rather minor if all involved would have just issued a mea culpa and fired the head of the DNC outright. Instead, it felt like they just told us all to suck it up.

That was a pretty "clever" part in the smear campaign.

First declare him a "rapist". But that didn't cut it.

So they made him a "Trumpist". And many people still believe it up to this day.

"they" did?

So emails and conversations that show the Trump campaign and family communicating with Assange over leaks and timings were ... what ... smear?

* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...

* https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/14/563996442...

* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-campaign...

> On Oct. 3, WikiLeaks, writing a day before it was set to announce the release of hacked Democratic emails, wrote to Trump Jr.: "Hiya. It'd be great if you guys could comment on /push this story."

Yeah. Can't imagine why he might be considered a "Trumpist"...

What's interesting is, many of the same people who criticize the leaks for hurting Hillary's chances would also applaud the leaks for demonstrating DNC bias against Bernie.

I would assume some associating it with Trump is behind it.

I wouldn't call it weird.

The whole Russia deal and him taking sides is something many can not ignore.

Although, that's kinda what you (read: Clinton) can expect from someone she helped maneuver into a corner...

Can you? Why? It's not like it helped him much to align himself with Russia (or Putins politics and world views) or did it? It didn't even help him to help Trump get elected by leaking this stuff at the right moment in time and it's not like Trump couldn't help him out (see Roger Stone or Flynn soon).

He projected himself as an Anarchist once. The independence in persona. This independence was what brought him trust. He lost all that. He did not lose that because the USA wanted to see him in jail. Snowden is still a respectable person for example.

If that ever really happened the way it was presented.

He presented himself at least on twitter this way.

I think one reason for the "Assange is an asshole" hate is that there are many people all over the West who love and believe in the USA as a unequalled force for good, and they are filled with resentment towards Assange for destroying that belief.

They can't deny the terrible acts perpetrated by the US, so they try to reclaim some moral superiority by accepting and repeating the completely unsubstantiated (and in some cases, ridiculous) smears against Assange.

Probably because every time this comes up, it's the same one guy making asburdist claims like Assange's completely self-enforced time in the Ecuadorean embassy was illegal detention by the UK government.

The "same one guy" is one way of describing Nils Melzer, here's another:

> The problem for the propaganda system targeting Assange is that Melzer is not just someone blogging on the internet; he is the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. In addition, he is a professor of international law at the University of Glasgow and holds the Human Rights Chair at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights in Switzerland, where he has been teaching since 2009, including as the Swiss Chair of International Humanitarian Law (2011–2013). Melzer even speaks fluent Swedish. In other words, it is hard to imagine anyone better qualified to comment on the Assange case.

- https://www.medialens.org/2020/burned-at-the-stake-the-un-sp...

You might want to address the issue that his claims are absurdist nonsense rather than his CV.

That's your opinion. If you're aware of who Melzer is and his credentials (calling him "same one guy" suggested you weren't), maybe onus should be on you to explain why you think Melzer's claims are absurd. Have you read/watched interviews with him where he's answered many questions about the Assange arrest and detention?

For something to be self-enforced, doesn't one have to be able to walk away freely if one so chooses?

Not if there's a warrant out for your arrest, no.

No idea if its "the same guy", but this is a link to an interview with the UN special rapporteur on torture about his investigation into Assange.

That doesn’t sound too different from many prisons. Is it not detention if it’s “easy” to escape?

Yeah, the threat of being illegally and immorally extradited and potentially facing a death penalty and being stripped of human rights really makes his asylum "self enforced"

Plausible.

More likely mindless people who are still bitter about the DNC being full of scumbags and getting called out for it

It is downvoted because Assange became the enemy of many people in the so-called American "left".

Which is bizarre, Assange just hates the US in general. Of course he’d want the least competent people running the country.

He’s much further left than any US democrats.

Saying he hates the US is really unfounded and you're perpetuating fake news