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TinTower posted:Congratulations for reading justice4assange.com. Critical thinking is hard! Your post reminded me that there were some rumors that Assange had been compromised and/or assassinated last week. I never found out the source of those rumors. Can anyone point to some information about that? Or is it just the November rumors re-kindled?
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Jan 18, 2017 20:40
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Party Plane Jones posted:Question is, is her dishonorable discharge going to follow her past the name change (is her name even changed legally yet?) It's not like she's an ordinary private figure. Every publicized detail of Chelsea Manning's life, from the leak to the discharge to the suicide watch, will follow her forever. Doesn't really matter if the dd214 is correct.
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Jan 18, 2017 21:03
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Putting aside Manning being transgender, I still don't quite understand why so many conservative citizens have a hate-on for an anti-government whistleblower. If you already distrust the government, shouldn't someone who not only verifies that the government is untrustworthy, but also provides evidence supporting this be an ally, if not a hero?
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Jan 18, 2017 21:06
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But ARE TROOPS  are the ones you gotta get your guns ready to defend against during The Purge, right? I'm probably getting my factions confused, but... if you think you need small arms to defend against unconstitutional enforcement of martial law and the final erection of a tyrannical despot, then the people you're prepared to kill are state and federal troops.
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Jan 18, 2017 21:11
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bag em and tag em posted:No. Are troops are the good boys. Liberals have a whole other secret army ready to kick in your door. I... what? evilweasel posted:This is probably why they're all obsessed with the UN's black helicopters and secret storm troopers. Oh, of course. This army.
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Jan 18, 2017 21:14
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bag em and tag em posted:Let the cognitive dissonance flow through you and wash away your doubts. I know I probably hold some similarly absurd beliefs that I simply just don't recognize as this batshit when considered side by side, yet... it's hard for me to figure out this perspective. Obama's now commuted more sentences than any previous president. He's granted the relief of presidential clemency to 1,597 people. Yet his administration has prosecuted 8 cases for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act. Only 4 cases were prosecuted under that law before Obama took office. Though he promised more protections for whistleblowers in his '08 campaign, passed the 2012 Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, and issued Presidential Policy Directive 19, which extended more protections to intelligence personnel, his 8 years seem to have been unusually brutal in terms of persecuting leaks. What really exacerbates the sense of this heavy-handedness is how unevenly those leaks were punished. Ranking insiders seem to have been shielded (Petraeus, anyone?), but nobodies like Snowden and Manning are publicly sacrificed. I don't know that the 8 years of this administration (if you can really say it's 8 continuous years of one administration, sitting president and veep aside) have actually been harder on whistleblowers, and I don't know if there's a reliable way to measure that, but it sure seems that way. It never feels good to look at your government and see a commitment to protecting wrong-doers by punishing people who thought they were doing the right thing by publicizing misdeeds. I don't expect anything better from the Trump administration or any future administration, but it's also just insulting to see an administration receive eight years of having it both ways -- talking about transparency and justice while delivering little of either. If I've got a beef with President Obama, that's the heart of it. welp that's my story, thanks
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Jan 18, 2017 21:32
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Main Paineframe posted:You're confusing two different types of whistleblowing here, and the distinction is really, really important. There are whistleblowers who circumvent the normal chain of command and report suspected misconduct to a higher authority within the government, and there are whistleblowers who believe that something the government is doing is morally wrong and leak it openly to the public. The Whistleblower Protection Act, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, PPD-19, and other whistleblower protection laws only protect the first kind of whistleblowing - they're meant to protect whistleblowers from being retaliated against by their superiors for reporting problems and misconduct to their supervisors' bosses. There isn't any US law, as far as I'm aware, that protects the second type of whistleblowing - as far as the US government is concerned, going public with classified information is always unacceptable. And honestly, that makes a lot of sense from the government's perspective. If secrecy laws stop applying as soon as someone who looks at the material feels it shouldn't be secret, then secrecy laws might as well not exist. Nobodies get cracked down on harder because there are over four million people with security clearances, which means it's a lot harder to keep watch on the nobodies than the top rankers, so the government makes examples of them because it knows there's no way it can handle a wave of copycat crimes. Thanks for taking the time to clarify. Those are big distinctions.
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Jan 18, 2017 23:49
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