Maybe you should follow your own advice - your numbers are wildly inflated (can easily be checked at Wikipedia), Ukrainians weren't the only ones in USSR who were starving to death and they were part of USSR leadership as any other nation there (with Stalin being Georgian). And frankly, idea that you're going to judge who is fit to comment is highly delusional.
Hillary Clinton inquired about murdering him with a drone. I'm sure many others were thinking it or saying it. And America has had other people (including its own citizens) executed outside the judicial system.
Everybody is doing that. Even here on the HN you'll get shadow banned - couple of weeks ago whole thread that someone else started just disappeared. I become aware of that only when searching for my own message from that thread. It was semi-controversial issue but nothing in that thread (at least at the time I saw its content for the last time) warranted that. Basically what I'm seeing as a HN is just a view that someone else curates.
You mean you want US to be even more jingoistic? It won't be an easy task for sure as I'm reading propaganda pieces almost every day for a last few years in a places that earlier were almost politics free (ars technica, hn...) - regular new sites not to mention.
If it requires fighting a war that has been "hidden" it's pretty jingoistic. Especially given the hand-waving everyone does here to call China a despotic autocratic regime despite the US having more prisoners overall and per-capita, and let's not even begin to compare foreign policies. Which country has overthrown more democratically elected governments? I've lived in several impacted by the US.
>China a despotic autocratic regime despite the US having more prisoners overall and per-capita
You A) don't know that, because stats coming out of China aren't to be trusted and executions and disappearances are common B) are conveniently ignoring the well documented reeducation/concentration camps where the only crime is being a Muslim minority.
China is modern day Nazi Germany, they're not even really communist, they have government controlled corporations and operate in a capitalist system. In many ways they're fascist and even revere Hitler in their school teachings. Taiwan at least has socialized healthcare, in China you have to pay for it. If they are "communist" they're doing a shit job of it.
Why would he do any time at all? Because the people who actually should be doing time are the people in power so they are somehow immune?
Also, Chelsea could transition to a woman without prison too. The fact that they ended/will end in prison while people who actually committed crimes that these two (and Snowden) exposed speaks volumes about how fundamentally different USA is.
A whole paragraph dedicated to how anonymous internet commenters could be fake spin delivery vehicles, then the suggestion that Assange has been charged with "a relatively minor criminal offence", completely eliding a bunch of politically-motivated now-dismissed sexual assault charges that were the actual impetus for him to hide in a foreign embassy for years.
It'd be one thing if he was hiding from a "5 year max" charge of "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
> "completely eliding a bunch of politically-motivated now-dismissed sexual assault charges that were the actual impetus for him to hide in a foreign embassy for years"
Isn't this the total opposite of what Assange and his supporters were saying? He was claiming that we wasn't avoiding the sexual offence EAW, but hiding in the embassy because of the US indictment, to which the Swedish allegations were (he claimed) somehow connected.
The evidence revealed during the US case has basically shown that the Obama DOJ in fact had decided against prosecuting him, so at the time this UK->Sweden->USA scheme could never have happened because there wasn't, at that point, a US indictment (ignoring that fact it made no sense when he could have always simply gone UK->USA).
Yep. The Assange story that he was totally willing to answer to the rape charges but had to flee to a country that wouldn't extradite him to the US for something else isn't really helped by him being extradited by the "safe" country for charges filed years later after a change of government. I'm not convinced of the merits of the DOJ case against Assange either technically or politically, but its notable how many other people publicly known to have been involved in the dissemination of the Collateral Murder video have continued to do investigative journalism without having charges of any sort filed against them, never mind two separate Wikileaks supporters accusing them of sex offences ...
Julian Assange getting away with his sexual assault of a woman due to his politics is very reminiscent of how Donald Trump avoids blame for his sexual crimes through the lens of politics. Very smart tool to ensure you can never be guilty of anything and your supporters will deny any wrongdoing as politically motivated. It's no surprise that Assanage and Trumps people communicated and coordinated, as these devious tactics sure look familiar.
Reminds me of Assange's "Seth Rich" gamble, how he supercharged a heinous conspiracy theory on behalf of fake news purely to earn political approval and gain loyalty from folks who, like you, will not do their homework to validate the claims they make.
>It'd be one thing if he was hiding from the charge "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers", but despite your comment clearly implying that this was the case, it's not.
Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up, and I think either evidence of ignorance (you thought the US was extraditing him for his sexual crimes in Sweden ...?) or malfeasance (you know it was espionage, but you brought this up to muddy the waters intentionally).
>I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor, but what a weird coincidence.
It's always cute when people try to repeat your lines back to you as a weak "gotcha" but completely fail. You're not going to make that accusation because I'm obviously not.
I will accuse you of being a victim of fake news and implicit supporter of sexual violence though.
>Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related [...] I think either evidence of ignorance (you thought the US was extraditing him for his sexual crimes in Sweden ...?) or malfeasance (you know it was espionage, but you brought this up to muddy the waters intentionally).
No, that's not true. It's easily shown that Assange's first charges were laid in Sweden in November 2010 [0]. He was granted political asylum in Ecuador's British embassy precisely because it was so clear that the charges weren't about sexual assault but rather about his involvement in leaking things. The Yanks were still investigating him at this time [1][2], and didn't lay charges until years afterwards [3], in 2018.
Since you've accused me of being a victim of fake news, I assume you've got the Real Truth hidden away. You've got actual reasons to claim the things you've claimed, which AFAICT are just lies, right? You're not just muddying the waters intentionally?
> Julian Assange getting away with his sexual assault of a woman due to his politics
This is far from an accurate representation of the events. You seem consistently misinformed on key points. Perhaps you should do some more research before spreading that misinformation further.
> Julian's sexual assault crimes have nothing to do with the United States or his extradition here, as the original charges were espionage related. It's a red herring for you to bring it up,
You are the one who brought it up. Assange faces up to 5 years for the "assistance in attempting to crack a password hash" and up to 170 years for the crimes he is being charged with under the espionage act.
> I'm not going to accuse you of being a political actor,
Then don't bring it up, it doesn't add to the discussion.
> he is charged with a relatively minor criminal offense stemming from his assistance in attempting to crack a password hash to gain unauthorized access to military computers
That was only the first charge he was indicted on.
> Imagine hiding from a 5 year max sentence for 10 years.
Assange currently faces up to 170 years in prison.
He was hiding from a one of the worlds largest perpetrators of targeted assassination, one which we know has debated assassinating him at its highest levels.
> As for Reality, she really could not have transitioned in Russia and China regardless of prison, that was the point you missed.
You seem to be confused. Reality Winner did not change genders and was not working for the military when she leaked documents to the Intercept.
> I do think that the idea of classification and state secrets have merit
Just because there is merit to the idea doesn't mean that everything that gets classified deserves that classification, nor does it mean that the government doesn't use that classification infrastructure to hide things that the American public needs to know about. The prosecution of Assange absolutely represents an unacceptable expansion of the USA'a ability to suppress such information.
Sure, I clearly remember how Bush Jr. along Cheney, Powel and Rumsfeld went to court and were imprisoned for life for all the misery they inflicted. Oh, wait...
We also didn't put FDR in prison for the misery he caused the Germans or Japanese. I don't recall FDR asking their permission to invade or bomb them. And we didn't put Truman into prison for the misery he caused the Koreans. FDR's actions killed more innocent civilians than the Iraq War did. That's not whataboutism or misdirection, I plainly dislike Bush & Co., they're all monsters. The US should not have invaded Iraq, it wasn't in the US self-interest to do so, it was a wildly irrational choice. And yet the context is a lot more complex than you're suggesting.
Saddam is gone. Iraq is a fledgling democracy, which was unthinkable 25 years ago, and their oil output is persistently near record highs.
Iraq has a GDP per capita higher than Indonesia, the Philippines, Jordan, Egypt. And not far from South Africa or Paraguay. It's not a total disaster at present, they legitimately have a chance to build something there in the coming decades.
These two things are simultaneously true: Iraq's future prospects are better because the US invaded, and the US should not have invaded.
The Korean War involved dramatically more misery than Iraq did. Millions of people died in just a few years. Ask the South Koreans if they would prefer that the Kim family were ruling over them while they exist in absolute poverty today.
Isn't it just fascinating how today nobody dares to proclaim that the US should have left North Korea to conquer and rule South Korea, that that would have been the obvious better outcome vs the misery they went through for decades after the war. No, people wouldn't dare to say that, but they'll say it about Iraq, because it's a convenient stick to beat the US with. If Iraq's fortunes improve in the coming decades, those same people will go largely silent on the matter and the narrative will be modified (go back and read how the narrative on the Korean War changed across the decades as South Korea's situation radically improved).
The people of Iraq have a chance to chart their own course democratically. The US doesn't rule Iraq, we didn't take their oil, we didn't annex their territory. We lost two trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to stop them from killing eachother in a religious war. The situation in Iraq is very far from perfect, so what, the lack of perfection isn't a valid counter argument; the situation in South Korea after the Korean War was very very far from perfect for decades.
Even the US was a basketcase for decades after its founding. It was held together by a string, ultimately culminating in a very bloody civil war as well.
It took decades for South Korea to build up the structures necessary to sustain itself as a democracy and lift the standard of living of its people. They were still poor as recently as the early 1980s. Why is it that people think Iraq should have been instantly transformed into a mecca? That's a level of expectation nobody would dare apply to any other similar context. As though the end of Saddam's rule was somehow going to be soft and fluffy, rather than involving misery. There was no other scenario than to go through misery given the sectarian split in Iraq and the way Iraq was being ruled, it was always going to prompt a civil war.
The issue is that the US was involved. It's an easy point that can be used to hit the US with.
How can I be sure of that? Well, simple, consider the alternative. The opposite position is: condemn the people of Iraq to living under Saddam and his sadistic family (or the equivalent). I'll note that was a minority political group oppressing and torturing a far larger majority group through a brutal totalitarian system with zero human rights. Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that? I'd challenge someone to dare to say that right now and then back it up as the better alternative to the present (that's not what would happen of course; a person will instead proclaim a fantasy scenario of fluffy bunnies and utopia where glorious happiness and peace would shine from the sky magically and all the conflicting groups in Iraq would hold a love-in and Saddam would have just willingly retired as dictator-for-life and then there would have been no civil war in the aftermath and instead it would have been an organic gentle process).
I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better if the US hadn't rescued South Korea from being enslaved by North Korea's Kim Dynasty. Because that's exactly what people so often openly proclaim about the Iraq situation, including its majority Shia and minority Kurds who were brutalized by Saddam.
The US shouldn't have gotten involved in Iraq, it should have never invaded Iraq. However the prospects for the people of Iraq are not worse today than they were under Saddam's reign of terror. And it's entirely an intellectual con that Iraq was supposedly stable under Saddam (one of the few arguments frequently thrown out in support of the Saddam scenario). Iraq was extraordinarily unstable under Saddam, which is why he had to constantly murder and purge people. When you have actual stability you don't have to slaughter and torture people; Saddam had to do that constantly to prevent his system from collapsing due to its inherent instability.
Why did we owe the Iraqis thousands of our soldiers lives and a couple trillion dollars? You morally justified all this by concluding we improved the situation of Iraqis? What currency is their oil sold in? What companies discover and drill for it? I bet most are subsidiaries of Western corps. I did a google, looks like it's Exxon and Schlumberger International getting 96 new wells as of June 2021 (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/exxonmobil-basrah-oil-ink-de...)
"Condemn the Iraqi people to go back to that?"
I condemn them to figure out their own future, do what's necessary and proper to attain it - whether it be suffer under Saddam or overthrow him is for the Iraqi people to decide. Not American politicians and intelligence services you seem to be a sycophant for.
"I'd like to see someone stand up and proclaim it would have been better..."
False choice, get better at your moral justifications. Going to address the way the US public was lied into the Iraq Pillaging? You compare the Pillaging of Iraq with the Korean War - one had an aggressor (KPA crossed the line a thing that actually happened to instigate the war) and we had obligations to the First Republic of Korea. The US had and has no obligations to the Iraqi people, we just lied about Iraq and Saddam's relation to terrorists so the American ruling class could do it's thing.
I can't get passed this post boiling down to "we shouldn't have gone, but we did and Iraq is better for it" You completely fail to address the opportunity costs involved from the US side. Who are you trying to convince with this moral justification for invading Iraq, yourself?
I'll chop a hand off if Iraq becomes anything like South Korea before 2100.
The problem with the theme that the US went in to 'save' countries under a repressive state is that it's simply untrue. Why would the US just go in to save people? Given its war crimes exposed by Assange and its crimes against its own people by Snowden, it's clear the US doesn't operate with angelic purposes. There is always an economic and idealogical benefit to the US when the US invades or goes to war. Whether that's to benefit senator's private war industry, or to install a US-friendly puppet, history shows us it's definitely not due to pure altruism.
"A copy of the loan contract reviewed by NPR shows that if Montenegro is not able to repay China's state-owned Export-Import Bank on time, the bank then has the right to seize land inside Montenegro"
Do EU contracts contain that sort of language? China knew they would never get paid back on this loan and made specifically to extract political and diplomatic concessions when the inevitable renegotiation happens.
Furthermore China requires Chines state owned companies get the contracts for doing the work, so much of the money the lend out comes straight back to them.
As shown by Greece, the European Union in fact seizes wages from minimum salary workers. I don't care if a mall where I shop is owned by a French Corporation or a Chinese Corporation. But I do care if a foreigner entity comes and seizes part of my salary.
You don't care if a foreign power controls a mall - but that is not the same as controlling ports / other infrastructure.
You can tax every person's salary by ramping up fees at the ports, or destroy all the malls in the country via the port.
I'm not saying it's a bad deal or a good deal - I don't know enough about all the effects.. but there isn't much difference in taking some money from a paycheck and making everything you buy with said paycheck more expensive for example.
Read about the austerity packages enforced by the EU in Greece over the last decade. Raised taxes, lowered tax brackets, restricted withdrawal of money from bank accounts, slashed pensions, cut bonuses and overtime, and on and on. Devastated Greece for years.
Don't be silly - Belarus is a sovereign state, they control their airspace and they had every right to land that plane down. Assange made US looked stupid in that incident while Lukashenko made Protasevich looked stupid yesterday.
btw nobody sane is believing that US wouldn't force to land plane flying over US with Snowden in it - but Snowden isn't that stupid I guess.
This is about might, not right. Both the US and Belarusian governments are obviously able and willing to kidnap people, that doesn't mean they have that right.
Sovereignty is likewise about might and not right. They are sovereign because they can do things like this. Anyone who can reliably do things like this in given area is sovereign, but that doesn't mean that anyone has the right to do things like this. Might does not make right.
A said 'right' in the sense that they are free to do it like any other state - Lukashenko isn't nice guy at all but he didn't do anything unusual here - shooting that plane down would be extraordinary, but forcing it to land isn't significantly different than crap that was brought down on Assange or Snowden.
I'm not saying either instance was right - I'm saying they are quite different kinds of wrong.
The Snowden story is plausible - but it's still hypothetical. And of course the same international community (of US allies) that would resist extraditing Snowden today, would protest if the US forced a plane between two other countries and full of their citizens to land in the US.
All that aside: the focus shouldn't be taken away from the fact that the real crime is arresting an opposition journalist/activist.
US allies kept CIA black sites on their territory without raising a voice (I guess they were very happy to prove their usefulness to the big boss), I certainly doubt they would protest for landing a plane for a few hours.
US bombs landed on Croatian Serbs on multiple occasions thus enabling ethnic cleansing. But no biggie, what's small ethnic cleansing between NATO friends?
