Do you remember when the decision of the 2011 grand jury was revealed? If they kept it secret to scare Assange, that’s still a pretty outrageous form of press intimidation.

Thanks. Yeah, I think I heard about this jury, but only that its deliberation was secret, and I never found out what was decided. When the indictment was unsealed, I assumed it was the revelation of this Jury’s decision.

You’re right, it was during the Trump administration. For some reason I thought the first indictment had been made and then sealed during Obama’s tenure. Trump’s attack was a major escalation.

I don’t see any reference to a Grand Jury in the linked article, and I can’t find anything in Google about “assange grand jury 2010”. Are you thinking about this section?

Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

It seems to indicate that they didn’t even bother to assemble a grand jury, which is even better for Obama.

the Grand Jury that was impaneled to look at Assange during the Obama years chose not to prosecute because they couldn’t disentangle other media outlets

One of us is confused; the history I remember is that the Grand Jury decided to prosecute not just once in a sealed indictment, but then added further controversial charges in a second indictment.

There were some very deluded people during the Trump years who thought Assange would get special treatment for his vendetta against Hillary Clinton helping to get Trump elected. But you nailed it right on the head – killing press freedoms and not paying debts are even bigger parts of Donald’s brand than gaudy letters on the sides of buildings.

But don’t get it twisted. Then Secretary of State Clinton went hard against Assange, and it did look bad for press freedoms in the US. You have to remember the State Department did not take press freedom seriously at all, abusing the espionage act left and right. They put more journalists sources in prison than any other previous president. They went after journalists families, like when they detained Glenn Greenwald’s partner in Heathrow. That should always be remembered as part of Barack Obama’s legacy.

The Trump “Fake News” era was absolutely devastating to journalism, so it’s easy to see Obama’s administration through rose tinted glasses. But it’s important to remember the damage they did that contributed to where we are today.

Fascists everywhere disappointed that antifascism is still protected speech in the United States.

Russia is still the world’s #2 arms exporter. Using supply domestically means that less can be exported, and more importantly, demonstrably under performing compared to western offering reduces demand.

There’s the real strategic concern that escalating too quickly will have nuclear repercussions. But the deeper reasons are visible if you view most governments as military industrial corporations stacked under a trenchcoat. The true motivator is that the longer the war continues, the more money will flow from their respective tax payers into their pockets. They don’t care about Ukrainian lives, they don’t care about Russian lives. The popular support for the war and lack of domestic casualties means they get to ply their trade of death, and they come out smelling like roses. Opposing Russian colonialism is a noble cause, but the nobility belongs to those who are dying in the foxholes, not the warmongers who are squeezing this crisis to get more capital.

Western leaders don’t want Ukraine to win. They want Russia to lose. A quick cauterized wound is less damaging than a slow bleed out. Total bankruptcy of the Russian war machine is the objective, the economic elimination of their primary trade competitor.

Sometimes people’s message is different from their words. Please don’t tell me not to say it like it is. And please don’t try and shame the oppressed for not being civil to oppressors.

The lesson to be learned from Daryl Davis is that bigots should be ostracized, ignored, and de-platformed. Once their movement has been defanged and members isolated to their anti-social groups, you can more safely reach out to those groups to deprogram the people on the margins, if that’s what you want to do with your life.

The story would be very different if the KKK still held social and political power. A black man who didn’t support the KKK’s mission attending a KKK rally would not last very long. No one should give these people a platform, or treat them civilly when they’re spreading their brain worms in civil society.

I don’t think he’s trying to amend for past misdeeds – I think he’s just trying to live his life. If we lived in a restorative justice society instead of a punitive one, I’d have different expectations of him. We are a society ruled by war criminals who have never seen a day of prison. Things are hard enough for people who’ve survived incarceration, it’s a shitty thing to throw his past at him. Especially since the people who tend to do it are acting in bad faith, and whose actual beef is that he’s not simping for genocidal dictators.

If Beehaw made a dime every time a .ML tankie invaded a post to slander socialists, they’d have more money than Facebook.

A lot of these people are small operators; most don’t have storefronts, some sell online, and a few through farmers’ markets.

This is part of a movement astroturfed by Gab and Truth Social to create a market for goods and services that caters to trumpist producers and consumers. None of these businesses are capable of growing past their trumpist market. When they make enough capital to get noticed by journalists, their growth is going to crater like MyPillow due to the political backlash.

Here’s an example vendor. She’s going to be making overpriced unhygienic peanut butter in her kitchen for less than minimum wage and taking advantage of her children’s free labor until they all burn out. If by some miracle she got the capital to buy the machines needed to make peanut butter to USDA standards and at scale, a proper boycott of her distributors would bring it all down.

They’re rubes, offering their depressed labor to their cult leaders in order to take a small chip out of a corporation’s bottom line. The Budweiser boycott is a great example of this - when a culture war exercise got out of hand, Republican thought leaders shut it down to avoid hurting one of their major donors. They make them think they’re going to build a thriving business, but the masters will throw them aside if the corporations pay the appropriate bribes.

Is that what it seems to you? I don’t see that statement in any of my replies to you. And yet I keep correcting your false readings of my statements with further explanation. Are you trolling me?

If you can’t convince people to vote in mass, how are you going to convince them to protest or strike?

I agree. If you convince people that voting is the path to political change, you play into the elite’s hands; but if people are politically engaged enough to protest and strike, voting is an afterthought.

I’m not advocating some violent minority storm congress. I’m saying if enough people agree on change and organize, they can make the edicts of politicians irrelevant. I wasn’t referring to the Jan 6 coup attempt; I was talking about the historical revolutions against autocrats that replaced them with republican systems. The more democratic a system, the less violence it needs to use to rule; and less violence is likely to come back on it during a revolution towards a more progressive system.

I’m not saying marches alone, obviously; I mean mass mobilization, and all the tactics that makes possible. It’s always nice to have politicians that concede earlier; but it’s not a “need” type of thing. In the past, when people couldn’t move politicians, they raised guillotines. The people always come first, and the minute the leaders of a movement sell out the rank and file for access and clout, they’re playing the wrong game. If you think your political responsibility ends at the ballot box, you’re part of the problem.

As an anarchist, I’d like to repurpose a comment I made a while back to connect with people who are genuinely surprised and disappointed by this development.

Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement’s demands. It wasn’t sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements’ economic and social power. It’s a common trope that revolutionary groups’ sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as ‘more pliable obstacles.’ For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don’t know how to work the system.

Politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians’ potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.

The most effective method of creating change will always be in the street.

What a garbage person.

This isn’t some random twitter user; it was posted by the National Guard of Ukraine, and officially identified as an Azov soldier. It’s a pretty fucking fascist thing to do, but if you think this is the first and only indication that Azov is fascist, you haven’t been paying attention. I bring it up because it’s one of the many ways Azov is undermining resistance against Putin’s fascists: creating propaganda that alienates Ukraine’s Muslim allies.