@Five - eviltoast
  • 89 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • You’re right, it was during the Trump administration. For some reason I thought the first indictment had been made and then sealed during Obama’s tenure. Trump’s attack was a major escalation.

    I don’t see any reference to a Grand Jury in the linked article, and I can’t find anything in Google about “assange grand jury 2010”. Are you thinking about this section?

    Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

    It seems to indicate that they didn’t even bother to assemble a grand jury, which is even better for Obama.



  • There were some very deluded people during the Trump years who thought Assange would get special treatment for his vendetta against Hillary Clinton helping to get Trump elected. But you nailed it right on the head – killing press freedoms and not paying debts are even bigger parts of Donald’s brand than gaudy letters on the sides of buildings.

    But don’t get it twisted. Then Secretary of State Clinton went hard against Assange, and it did look bad for press freedoms in the US. You have to remember the State Department did not take press freedom seriously at all, abusing the espionage act left and right. They put more journalists sources in prison than any other previous president. They went after journalists families, like when they detained Glenn Greenwald’s partner in Heathrow. That should always be remembered as part of Barack Obama’s legacy.

    The Trump “Fake News” era was absolutely devastating to journalism, so it’s easy to see Obama’s administration through rose tinted glasses. But it’s important to remember the damage they did that contributed to where we are today.


















  • The lesson to be learned from Daryl Davis is that bigots should be ostracized, ignored, and de-platformed. Once their movement has been defanged and members isolated to their anti-social groups, you can more safely reach out to those groups to deprogram the people on the margins, if that’s what you want to do with your life.

    The story would be very different if the KKK still held social and political power. A black man who didn’t support the KKK’s mission attending a KKK rally would not last very long. No one should give these people a platform, or treat them civilly when they’re spreading their brain worms in civil society.





  • I don’t think he’s trying to amend for past misdeeds – I think he’s just trying to live his life. If we lived in a restorative justice society instead of a punitive one, I’d have different expectations of him. We are a society ruled by war criminals who have never seen a day of prison. Things are hard enough for people who’ve survived incarceration, it’s a shitty thing to throw his past at him. Especially since the people who tend to do it are acting in bad faith, and whose actual beef is that he’s not simping for genocidal dictators.