[tenbino]

People don’t care because he’s “a bad guy”.

That’s where we’ve got to.

Trouble is people aren’t brought up with an understanding of how things should be in a fair and just society. They’re brought up with some mucky mixed up perception that the world is some mashup of Hollywood and what the media says.

There’s no moral compass for society any more.

My personal take is he’s some sort of weird Russian asset and he’s a net negative for our way of life but I still think he deserves the full protection of the law at every single stage. He shouldn’t be sold out and abandoned by society.

It sounds twee but my mother brought me up to care about other people, the less well off and to care about what’s right and justice for all. I think “we’ll theres an awful lot of people in this world who didn’t have my mother. What did they learn?”

[shadowprofile77]

>there's no moral compass for society anymore

What? And there was more of such a compass a century ago when lynchings were much more common for "racial defilements"? Or two centuries ago when slaves were considered bad by the general public for escaping from the brutality of ownership? Or perhaps 600 years ago when witch burning was remarkably common in much of Europe?

Not criticizing your defense of Assange (his treatment really is deplorable, petty and cruel), but This phrase has never been anything less than absurd, and particularly so is to claim it of today's society in comparison to some mythical past morality..

[Chris2048]

> witch burning was remarkably common in much of Europe

Is that a moral issue, or one of knowledge / technologies?

You can only go on the best information you have, and many theistic beliefs are currently acceptable in the modern world despite being no less plausible than a belief in witches.

[shadowprofile77]

A common mistake of modern humans is to presuppose that people from earlier times were somehow less capable of thinking than we are today. No evidence suggests that this was the case. They could be just as rational, they just knew less upon which to base their notions of reason. Even in a 16th century context, it was not hard to see that a lot of supposedly real witch burning was repressive control politics masquerading behind imposed superstitious strictures of morality around women, just taken to murderous degrees.

More basically: if your morality means decisions to justify or reject the torture and killing of another person, then you'd better set some damn high criteria for whether your information is complete enough.

Even medieval humans understood a surprising amount of this. A Book I highly recommend that demonstrates as much: "The Faithful executioner: Life and death, Honor and Shame in the turbulent 16th century" by Joel F. Harrington. It records a lifetime of personal observations through diary entries from a public executioner in the Germanic city of Bamburg during these times. and gives wonderful insights into how well even those charged with the job of killing could reason about the dirty ambiguity of what they were doing.

[tenbino]

The fact that society isn’t perfect doesn’t dispel my point.

It’s easy to dispel any argument by hand waving and saying “but look at all these other problems therefore you’re wrong!”

I stand by the assertion that 60/70 years ago western society had a more unified sense of what is right and wrong.

No doubt there were some major missing elements of that but the point stands.

[shadowprofile77]

A "unified sense" of right and wrong was often exactly the problem with many societies in history, because they often fall into absolutism and simplistic notions of morality. I'd call our more nuanced and diverse views of what's moral in today's society an improvement, not the opposite.

If anything, a case like Assange's just 60 years ago would have much more easily been condemned as simple treason and with wide U.S public approval of either a long prison sentence or the death penalty, on the grounds of then much more prevalent and simplistic "patriotic" sentiments in society. Today, there's far more divergent debate on this that is exactly why so many across internet and media defend his actions despite this despicable rigidness from the court.

[watwut]

> I stand by the assertion that 60/70 years ago western society had a more unified sense of what is right and wrong.

That would be 1950-1960. Speaking of America, Montgomery bus boycott started in 1955. Which took a year and started whole civil war movement. President Nixon’s red-baiting campaigns were at exactly that time too.

In Europe, IRA started their border campaign in 1956.

And that is just me going from top of head.

[dogma1138]

Continental Europe during the post world period until the late 80’s had terrorist bombings, political assassination, dictatorships and plenty of other crap going around, I’m really not sure what level of understanding people have of history these days.

70 years ago was just after Europe decided to murder millions of Jews, Roma, Gays and a bunch of other groups.

[watwut]

> I’m really not sure what level of understanding people have of history these days.

People go by what they gathered from movies and what their older relatives talk about.

[dogma1138]

Yeah I don’t know, Portugal was a dictatorship until the coup in 1974 which ended the Estado Novo regime and the colonial wars Portugal was waging in Africa, ffs you had European powers conducting outright massacres in Africa in the 70’s still.

And somehow today its feels that everyone thinking that the European Union was formed on Tuesday following the pyramids and its been the bastion of human rights and civilization since.

[arethuza]

"60/70 years ago western society had a more unified sense of what is right and wrong."

I'd agree that 60/70 years ago Western countries certainly thought they were right and other people were wrong.

[lwkl]

Are there people that think he is a bad guy?

At least where I live I didn‘t hear anyone say that.

Maybe this is different in the US. It‘s more like our government doesn’t say anything because of US imperialism. And most people don‘t know about him or think this outcome is expected if you dare to mess with the US.

It looks more like pessimism to me. And it‘s to be expected. The US foreign policy was always inhumane. It knows no moral boundaries as long as it serves the economic interest of their corporations. Not that other countries are better in that regard.

[luckylion]

> Are there people that think he is a bad guy?

Yeah, there are. I know people I generally find reasonable that consider him a traitor, and they're not even American. I think a lot of use have grown up on US culture and propaganda and it permeates our societies to the point of identification with the US, so Assange or Snowden are considered bad guys to a lot of people. It seems to me that it's primarily for pragmatic reasons: "We" profit from crimes, leaking information about those crimes reduces our profit from it, ergo leaking it is treason against us.

[ben_w]

I agree. I’m of the opinion that he is a bad person, yet this does not prevent me from saying the USA case against him feels political, nor does it prevent me from listening when the UN condemns the UK’s treatment of him or an international lawyer association condemning the process against him.

[marcinzm]

You're looking at history through rose colored glasses. Societal justice in the past meant basically "protect those in power, burn everyone else on sight." If you weren't part of the ruling group (be it by race, gender, ideology, etc.) then you had very few protections.

[gadders]

Do you think he's a bad guy? Leaving aside rape allegations, I would say his Wikileaks activity seems to be fairly harmful to both sides.

The Bradley Manning and other leaks probably hurt the Republican Bush government, and the Clinton Campaign leaks appear to have hurt the Democrats.

He may be a "bad guy" but he seems politically neutral.

[Chris2048]

Let me say that Trump is a swaggering, incompetent. Let me also say that I am unsure about how much more I should dislike him on the basis that most of what I know about Trump comes from the media.

Stuff like this demonstrates the media is used to sway public opinion via manufactured narratives; its a bit like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: If I see clear manipulations if the things I know, I should distrust the same publications in those topics of which I am less familiar, or have no secondary source. The smear of sex-crime allegations, and invocation of the Russian/foreign power boogieman are a suspiciously strong part of the "political establishment" modus operandi.

As such, I'm apprehensive to hate someone for such allegations, b/c I don't know how much I'm being led. Sadly, this suspicious, and willing to give a high benefit-of-doubt to a person like Trump will get me branded a mindless supporter by anti-Trump people primed to believe in the "MAGA crowd" stereotype.

We should all suspect the political theatre, and attempt to figure out the script.