From my perspective it's because the constitution outlines law making as a power given to the legislative branch. To give regulatory agencies the ability to effectively create law by reinterpretation is clearly bad. But to let the courts give broad deference to the executive branch agencies, when challenged on it, is a clear violation of the separation of powers. Beyond that, it is just wrong, in my opinion, for unelected bureaucrats with vested personal interests in these issues to get deference over the people they serve.
Also because he was forced into pleading guilty for doing journalism. A great crime has been committed against Assange and I understand why he would do this. I would never ask him to spend another day in a small Ecuadorian embassy room with no living facilities or in a medieval torture cell in England... He has suffered more for the free people of the world than we have a right to ask for but this is not a just outcome.
He wasn't "doing journalism". WikiLeaks just posted a completely unevaluated firehose of data fed to it by whomever, which is why they were such an easy asset for Russian intelligence.
I agree they have no idea about journalism. I remember they had put a big pile of emails sent to some government agency in Turkey. It was all some people complaining about daily things, reporting issues in their cities etc (emails were not anonymized of course), They just dumped them and claimed they were exposing the corrupt government.
I'm not exactly disagreeing because it is a factual view. But there are some knotty issues that go a lot deeper.
1) The US was doing a lot of things wrong. Going off the 2011 cables [0] they were spying on various people they weren't meant to be, there were one or two things that look war crimes to me but who knows technically and a few gems like "Der Spiegel reported that one of the cables showed that the US had placed pressure on Germany not to pursue the 13 suspected CIA agents involved in the 2003 abduction of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen".
2) It wasn't obvious in that leak that the US was doing anything counter the interests of the US. But Assange isn't a US citizen and wasn't in the US at the time, so that isn't a reasonable standard to hold him to.
3) Even internally to the US though there is a reasonable argument that he was helpful. If US citizens don't have easy access to this sort of information, how are they supposed to effectively exercise democratic control on the government? People are going out and doing terrible things in their name which, arguably, are counterproductive and they would probably not want done. Accountability requires sunlight and they can't debate whether there is enough sunlight without people like Assange.
4) It turns out that the US does have a huge probably-illegal certainly-ill-advised spying program that was being sniffed out by leakers. The response to Assange seems likely to be part of a campaign to keep material information on such topics like that out of the public sphere.
I could somewhat follow you until (3). Throwing the confidants and allies under the bus for idle public curiosity is absolutely not an acceptable trade-off.
If I dig in to the Saudi Arabia section of wikipedia I get to "Diplomats claim that Saudi Arabian donors are the main funders of non-governmental armed groups like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)". That is a quintessential staunch US ally. It probably is acceptable to throw them under a bus, metaphorically speaking and it is more useful than mere idle curiosity be useful to have that sort of information in the public discourse. The spending and liberty-backsliding done in the name of terrorism has been material to date.
It might help you to follow the perspective if you consider it is plausible that the US's current diplomatic strategy is ineffective and needs pressure to reform. Especially after discounting the heft of their domestic economy. From what I've seen of the game theory, generally speaking best policy is to be scrupulously open and honest with very short bursts of sudden backstabbing when it makes overwhelming sense. The is, happily, a strategy that is highly compatible with radically transparent democracy.
There isn't a way to run this sort of institution without transparency. The incentives don't tend to work out.
Lets pick on the one I think is easy here - a Taliban source. The US spent 20 years in Afghanistan, wasted trillions, murdered almost a million. Opportunity costs even bigger than the needless waste of course.
How much is that Taliban source worth vs. greater transparency that could have ended the war earlier? The biggest problem was publicising which interest groups in the US government were responsible for prolonging the inevitable. Just keeping all meeting minutes on a website unredacted would have been a lot more valuable than having a source.
The tricky one is the Saudis. How much is a Saudi source worth vs. full transparency of voters into the US-Saudi relationship? The issue here is ... we can't debate that, the necessary knowledge is secret. But since large organisations are generally dysfunctional, and there is no reason to believe that the Saudi source is more valuable than more transparency into what is actually going on in the Middle East.
The issue to me is that secrecy makes democratic institutions ungovernable - they can't be assessed without full information and therefore voters can't even attempt to make rational decisions. Full transparency is probably more valuable than the net influence of secret sources [0]. The value of long-term secret sources is highly questionable. If there is a source or confidant in some foreign organisation you want to protect, give them a passport and set them up in Texas. Problem solved.
I'm struggling to figure out how wikileaks works as a russian intelligence asset in a way that somehow doesn't apply more aptly and openly to western media as a whole. Hell our entire elections are built around directly and indirectly paying media to run content ("ads").
There is no genuine concern here over some deep vulnerability our society has to russians or anyone because of wikileaks. Assange (nor snowden) caused any material harm remotely proportional to the blowback they've received since. This is about punishment for circumventing state-level controls and embarrassing the state. To think that Trump would somehow be more lenient on either is unthinkable—he's part of the same class of people that Clinton is that is most sensitive to the health of systems Assange threatens.
Oh, but it does, and that's also a problem. Key Western media, for instance the NYT, are seriously compromised due to being poster children for what's called 'MICE' (Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego): if the NYT, like all newspapers, is going broke in the age of the Internet, it's got all of that as vulnerabilities, especially Ego as it sees itself as the bulwark of truth, yet it can't pay its bills.
Enter Russian oligarchs, just like they bought up London, and then control the oligarchs by force when you can't simply direct them by shared ideology, and you've got pretty much the most powerful propaganda outlet you could possibly have, until you exploit it so heavily that you burn its former reputation to the ground. Which you do, because you yourself care nothing for its well-being: it's a tool for your political aims in fighting NATO and furthering your empire.
Sure, it applies to western media as a whole, from the bottom to the top.
If WWIII had stayed entirely in the infosphere, and Russia had not invaded Ukraine and tried to make good on their preparations, nobody would ever have known WWIII had been waged in the infosphere. That's how well it had been going. It ran aground when physical countries had to be annexed.
This is misinformation. Their policy was never to publish anything they could not verify, and the "asset for Russian intelligence" was only ever a DNC and US intelligence smear to discredit Wikileaks.
It's not just "DNC and US intelligence." Wikileaks tried to influence the 2017 election in France among other examples. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacronLeaks. This partially backfired when the dump of e-mails they published was found to contain russian-language messages.
That Wikileaks systematically favors the russian government, and never does anything contrary to the interests of the russian government, strongly suggests they are an asset of russia.
Tell me and be honest: is that link to a politically-motivated, unproven allegation that will be believable only to those who want to believe, because the "evidence" will be a rabbit warren of innuendo, emotionalism, question begging, circular citations, and talking head pundits assuring us all that they have seen the evidence and "it's extremely credible"? Because that's all the anti-Assange people have so far.
Exposing corruption mainly in the anglosphere is not some systematic error if that is what you do best and where most of tge organisation live and know people.
You could claim Wikileaks is a Thai or South African asset too on those preconditions.
That seems to be the majority opinion, at least in my experience, but I've always really liked it. Maybe because it reminds me of so many science fiction settings. I do think blending the buildings with plants goes a long way to making them look more hospitable.
For me the design always comes second, their sheer scale is what makes them amazing. Seeing them from the distance, thinking they're nearby, but then you just keep approaching and approaching and they keep getting bigger.
What this slideshow does perfectly is picture them from a POV perspective, nowadays you mostly see drone shots.
I completely agree with this. Have you ever noticed how very tall but narrow buildings (i.e. skyscrapers) are never as physically imposing as bulky, monolithic buildings that are as nearly as wide as they are tall?
The problem with brutalism is that it is literally inhuman - it creates an environment in which humans do not fit.
So in theory, nature could help, because humans feel that they fit in natural environments. But in practice, at least in the photos in the article, it doesn't work, because the nature doesn't look like it belongs there either. It looks either like weeds growing through cracks, or "tacked on", ineffectively trying to make you ignore the ugliness.
If I smash your car, is that violence or not? What if I take care to smash your car only so much that it will still be able carry you to work and back?
They definitely have a very hyper-capitalist definition of violence. It's sort of pathetic how much people somehow care about the property of the ruling classes that they will never own.
I never said anything like that so why are you implying that I am? Nice strawman bro, I'm not crying over things people say to me on the internet. Anyone who sees a mean comment on the internet that doesn't actually threaten or incite violence as violence is just as pathetic as people who think art they don't like on a wall is violence. Can you please argue against points I actually made, thank you.
I am not at all a hyper capitalist. I would even consider myself anti-capitalist.
But imposing your own preferred art on public commons is a (minor) form of violence, in any economic system. Especially when you do so with paints of questionable chemical composition, or with images/text that is likely to offend.
I would also say that doing the same thing even on your own property can be reprehensible, as long as it is visible to the public. Just because you own a house doesn't mean you should be able to make it look however you want on the outside, especially not in ways that are actively unpleasant to those of us that need to walk by it every day: we the public should have a say in how your private property looks. A most anti-capitalist position.
Think about it this way, if we all owned all public structures, then we all have equal rights to paint it just as much as you have the right to paint your own house. The graffiti artist has the right to paint it, you have the right to hate it. You have the right to paint something they hate, or paint over their stuff. Nobody should be being prosecuted by a higher power for a minor disagreement about artistic taste. Unless someone is full on painting swastika-ridden explicitly racist murals or sth of that nature, it's not violent. The only reason the ruling class wants you to think it's violent is because property is important to them as a source of power, and therefore must be god above all under this system.
No, this is completely wrong. If we own a public structure together, then neither of us has any right to change it except if we both agree to the change. You can't take individual actions on shared goods: you need a process of attaining the consensus of everyone involved (such as voting).
I wonder how you think this works in practice. Do you think the public structures we have and how they look are not just basically whatever aesthetic taste the people we elect have?
Sometimes councils put up several designs to be voted on by the public, but they will largely follow a bunch of design norms that will be whatever the architecture firms they hired think is trendy, for example.
And how many election programs even talk about artistic taste? That's not why we elect people, and making that an election point would be a distraction from real problems, so why not let society be and if people are more artistic in one area and make more public art, let them make it?
While I agree that public control of public buildings is relatively vague in modern times, it still exists to some extent. If a mayor wanted to tear down a beloved building and replaced with an ugly one (as judged by the esthetics of the public in the town), they would face significant backlash and may lose a future election based on that: people in certain places care a lot about the look of their town (and in others, only vaguely).
Even beyond electoral politics, many cities have public NGOs and other organizations that seek to shape this sort of thing from an early stage through various legal means (and sometimes even through civil disobedience, like tying themselves to a building to protect it). If they are broadly in line with the tastes of the people, they tend to thrive; if they are not, they will often die out.
And yes, in certain cities and towns, people actually like the way grafitti looks and are bothered when someone goes and whitewashes a beautifully painted wall. That's perfectly fine, and is a part of the culture and esthetics of that place (and here, destroying the art that people enjoy is an act of violence against the public and/or the artist). But it's also perfectly fine for other places to want neat walls with clean textures, and marring their beautiful walls with grafitti would be an act that goes against the public.
I concur that sounds really good. That's not how it works now though, which is why graffiti artists reclaim the space as the people that use it. Right now, the space is decided by people in power and with money. Rarely do we ever get real say about how it looks, and we never will. If we did own the public spaces and could make these decisions together, then I'd be down for that, and graffiti probably wouldn't be the same sort of subculture that it is.
not op but violence is traditionally defined as physical force to cause harm. but now there's financial violence and social media violence and here the message in the graffiti causes harm. eg die techy scum. it's not physically violent, but some think it's helpful to frame it as a non-physical violent act because of the expression of dislike for a particular community. it doesn't cause any grave harm, but everyone who walks by and sees it is affected by it.
Violence has always extended beyond pure physical force. Calling someone a slur to their face, or spitting in their food, or defacing their clothes or home (especially with hateful symbols) would be recognized as forms of violence at many times in history way before modern times. Holding someone at knife or gun point is also very clearly a violent act.
Yeah network vision was a disaster. I think in the market I helped built our average number of site touches was like 21 or 22 from construction complete to on-air. All the funds gathered from the high interest junk bond sale to fund NV was used very inefficiency because sprint lacked the expertise to not get taken for a ride by their vendors.
It was a shitshow, you'd have GD tell us a site was complete and show up and find no equipment or equipment on pallets. GD rather than the equipment vendors were the villains, it was subcontractor-o-rama, and no one was responsible for anything. There was one site I went to like six times to inventory non-existent equipment - never mind when they decided to preload the inventory but used the barcodes on the samsung gear that didnt match anything.. I escalated that to Ericsson and then Sprint directly (it mattered for ericsson, because they'd have failed ATLAS audits), about two weeks later all that vanished, and we got a tranche of tickets to go reinventory everything.
I also saw at least half a dozen sites, cut and in service still sitting on their pallets, such a mess.
Imagine for a moment you go off to the crusades, leave the barn to one group, the fields to another group, and leave the house to a third group, then gleave no one in charge and give them no way to communicate beyond the most informal means - and you're surprised everything is on fire upon your return?
In the end it did work once it was done, but it was only hell for the customer during deployment because it was deployed and cut in a hopscotch fashion, which would be fine, if you could roam from new back to old - there was a one way roam, from old to new, once on new, there was no path to roam back.
Yeah it depends on the market you were in. I helped build the WiMax network but it was built very quickly and in places it was built by people who didn't care very much.
It was all microwave back hauled so rain fade in stormy weather was absolutely a thing. Most of those were FCC licensed or should have been but I know of at least 1 market where they just never filed the paperwork to get the licenses and built it anyway.
I'm a former engineer at Sprint and I strongly disagree with this characterization. Sprint's goose was cooked but it was due to debt from selling junk bonds to build Network Vision at the time of the original LTE rollout. Their credit was ruined by that point from 30+ years of absolutely terrible and corrupt c-suite executives.
Marcello has a lot of faults but he didn't run Sprint into the ground. He is actually pretty smart and at that time we cut over a billion dollars out of the operating budget circa 2016/2017 iirc. It was an impossible position and it's really sad because it was a great old company in my estimation. T-Mobile is just the worst.
Yeah, I always thought the two primary factors here were the lost bet on WiMax (which probably cost a lot to build infrastructure for) and the Nextel aqui-merger causing a lot more friction than synergy.
I'd be a horrible businessman, because I really can't imagine keeping so much debt and simply being okay with it until its too late. I'd be considered a fool if I managed my personal finances like that, but that's the normal operation when managing millions or especially billions at a time.
The difference in between the two is a matter of trust. Maintaining a 1:1 peg with the USD requires that users trust that the dollar reserves actually exist. Presumably, Coinbase will be seen by many as a more trusted 3rd party than Tether.
Stable coins exist to solve the problem of moving money in and out of cryptocurrency introduced by KYC/AML. Bitcoin represents an attempt to create a system of censorship resistant transactions with an absolute minimum amount of counter-party risk. Outside of the open cryptocurrency context, its unclear if something like stable coins would be allowed to exist. Certainly when you go back in history and look at things like ecash or the liberty dollar the answer seems to be no.
Edit: clarification and wording