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Have you considered that Assange's supporters don't think he is pro-fascist or that he hates the US? Why don't you try justifying those points instead of just calling everyone here pro-fascist like it's so obvious?

The truth doesn't require them to believe in it. Their support for Russian Military intellience operations including Wikileaks is support for an authoritaritarian war against Europe and US with the goal of overthrowing our liberal democracies.

I understand that the anarcho-hacker types hate all governments and have been tricked through cheap propaganda into thinking Wikileaks is a non-nation-state actor that is on their side of radical-whatever, but the fact is is that Wikileaks is military intelligence and supporting it is supporting that military, regardless of your personal opinion.

I accept the downvotes proudly because standing up for liberal democracies in the west against these outrageous agit-prop attacks has become extremely unpopular.

One wonders if the Wikileaks lovers live in a country like Russia and experience authoritarianism first hand, or if they simply have been indoctrinated to hate liberal western democracies.

Take for example say a British citizen who falls for ISIS propaganda and goes to Syria to join a terrorist organization. They swear that the U.S. and U.K. are evil and that their radicalization is the result of their honest opinion and search for truth. Do we label them as terrorists because of their views and actions, or do we say "well you THOUGHT you were doing good, so no harm no foul!"

Would you please stop using HN for ideological and nationalistic battle? It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interesting that you did not post this critical comment on the parent I replied to, who began the ideological and nationalistic battle.

I would hazard a guess that you agree with his ideology and euro-nationalism and disagree with mine, so when he BEGAN this discussion, you had nothing to say, but when I defend the liberal democracies of the west against attack and invasion, THEN it becomes a problem.

Just an interesting observation as to WHICH ideology you chose to chastise (the one replying) and which you did not (the genesis of the discussion).

People often say that when they break the site guidelines and we scold them, unless we carefully balance the scales of scolding, and even then sometimes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19635096). It's impossible to balance them perfectly in any case, because the threads are too big for us to read them all.

If you're genuinely concerned about this, you won't have trouble finding plenty of scoldings of commenters you disagree with by looking through https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang and https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb. We don't much care about people's political alignments when they break the site guidelines. People think we are, but this is mostly a function of their own political alignment, especially when they feel passionately about it.

From our perspective the important thing to understand is that someone else breaking the site guidelines (or just being wrong) doesn't make it ok to break them yourself. This isn't a personal point or a political one. It applies to all of us.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> The truth doesn't require them to believe in it.

Then why are you posting here? Just so you can sit on your high horse knowing that you're right and everyone else is wrong? Or are you actually trying to inform your peers about something that's important to you? Because you are doing a pretty bad job of the latter with your tactless accusatory posts which contain no substantive arguments.

Honestly, either side of this argument feels like attempts at manipulation to me.

The end result is that it is becoming harder to trust any statement, not really what we want either.

>The end result is that it is becoming harder to trust any statement, not really what we want either.

This is a tactic in itself. I can't find the details behind it, but the act of so much misinformation at once that helps drowned out more factual news while simultaneously making it so that you don't believe what you're reading. It's not a new tactic, but it's well used.

I think you may be referring to Gish Gallop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

There is a nice exploration of this in the Adam Curtis documentary Hypernormalisation

Ironically, it's a famous Russian propaganda tactic that is in heavy use in Russian propaganda and the subsequently nearly identical Wikileaks propaganda that follows. This tactic played heavily with Russia's troll farms on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. It also played heavily in Wikileaks propaganda on twitter and other platforms.

For me to be accused of the exact evil that Wikileaks uses to manipulate its readers is very ironic, but this kind of dishonest "projection" of accusing the other side of committing your own crimes is precisely the standard operating procedure for far-right propaganda.

Calling a mere website "a weapon of war" is a little overstated I think.

Since Assange will probably be claiming the journalist exemption I’m not sure why he should be treated differently than William Randolph Hearst’s crew or Judith Miller at the NYT if you want something more current.

Newspapers have been weapons of war. It's not whether it's a "mere" website or not, but rather how widely its publications are spread and how credulous people are of them.

In the case of Wikileaks, it directly influenced the most consequential presidential election since FDR.

are you calling me a fascist right?

I'm neither right nor left and maintain that both camps are equally deluded. I don't hate the US - I want the US to succeed! Very much so!

But it's not going to succeed by telling Americans that all is fine and they are doing a great job not considering the mess that they create in the world (since decades). I am obviously upset about the US but it's not out of hate but because of disappointment. They have always acted like a role model for how "freedom and individuality" is the corner stone of a happy society - some might say they "pressed their liberal views onto the world". I am very much bought into that ideology so it stinks and hurts even more so when I get to watch their actual hypocrisy play out as it does right now. It's like being in a relationship with a toxic souse that says one thing and makes you believe in the overall message and then stabs you in the back.

I like watching Friends, How I met your mother, and other US cultural things and feel a stronger bond to their culture than to my own home country (which whatever they produce now is an poor American knock-off). So calling me an American hating fascist or right-winger is a bit too quick I think.

Stop killing Muslims, and stop putting your poor and minorities into prisons, educate your stupid and give them health insurance, and we'll be best friends again. Hopefully then _together_ (!) we can tackle real problems such as climate change. Sounds a lot more rewarding than going for war to make a few puppet masters richer.