My Julian Assange story is that we got him to walk back support for Gamergate by threatening to cancel his book launch party, and then after the party he walked back his walk back. I have never forgotten the flexibility of his convictions outside the public eye.
He sucks so hard. He badly wants people to think of him as being WikiLeaks but he's only the face of WikiLeaks cause he chased away all the good people who used to be involved in it, mostly by being a giant turd
When the Guardian published the first lot of Wikileaks cables they also ran a profile of Assange with a tone of "He's a good-looking rebel who plays by his own rules" and I couldn't shake the feeling that was a condition of them being given the cables. It made the whole thing feel like promo for him
Why bring that up today?
"Whatever you think about Assange, the fact is he was imprisoned for one reason: he exposed a bloody war crime committed by US troops against unarmed Iraqi civilians."
Maybe if you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all
I do not think "If you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all" is really appropriate here. Calling out bad things does not make you excempt from criticism for the bad things you've done bsky.app/profile/andr...
No tolerance at all for anyone portraying Assange, an admitted rapist, Gamergate advocate, Ron/Rand Paul supporter, and Putin lickspittle who may have tipped the 2016 election in Trump's favour, as a hero.
He has sometimes been on the right side by accident, but he's a reprehensible human being.
Also a hilarious thing to say about Assange, whose whole persona was "I'm a hero because I say things that aren't nice but are true" lol
Obv a lot of that was just myth making self aggrandizement but the people defending him in this fashion believe it! Lol
You are free to assert that as a "fact", but that doesn't make it a fact.
The exposing of US war crimes was done by WikiLeaks, which is not the same as being done by Assange. Why was he in charge of WikiLeaks at the time? Because he drove everyone else involved away then ruined the platform.
If you think exposing war crimes is good, and I certainly do, then Assange is someone worth loathing, which I certainly do. Nobody is more responsible for the demise of WikiLeaks. But don't take my word for it, just do like two seconds of research into the feelings of literally anyone involved.
all i know for sure is that he has come across as a total asshole in every piece of media i have ever seen with him in it, even those that were meant to make the public sympathetic to him.
Discovering a while back that we knew people who knew people who knew him in Australia back when he was just a creep hacker who made holes in his condoms and hearing just how low their opinion of him was has made all this feel extra grubby
