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Democrats 2020

Derec said:
Jason Harvestdancer said:
Get back to me when he's not pushing the silly Russia narrative and wants to end the persecution of Assange.
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As far as I know, Assange helped Manning hack into some government servers. Why should he not be prosecuted for that?
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A woman holds up her husband's phone and says "I read your messages, you're having affairs with three women and one man." He responds with "How dare you snoop at my phone!"

How dare Assange post evidence of the crimes of the US government! The nerve of him! And he received that information from someone else who wasn't supposed to share that information! If you're going to post evidence of government wrong-doing, you should only use official US government press releases!
 
Jason Harvestdancer said:
Derec said:
Jason Harvestdancer said:
Get back to me when he's not pushing the silly Russia narrative and wants to end the persecution of Assange.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, Assange helped Manning hack into some government servers. Why should he not be prosecuted for that?
Click to expand...

A woman holds up her husband's phone and says "I read your messages, you're having affairs with three women and one man." He responds with "How dare you snoop at my phone!"

How dare Assange post evidence of the crimes of the US government! The nerve of him! And he received that information from someone else who wasn't supposed to share that information! If you're going to post evidence of government wrong-doing, you should only use official US government press releases!
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My problem with Assange is that he has a real soft spot for Trump and dictators. All he does is find dirt on democracies. He never criticized Putin, North Korea, or China! He has an agenda. He's become the opposite of what he claims to hate: he's a menace to open societies.
 
Jason Harvestdancer said:
Get back to me when he's not pushing the silly Russia narrative and wants to end the persecution of Assange.
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I will, and you're not wrong that his silence on Assange is a big problem. But I am more comfortable giving his silence on that issue a tentative pass than I am with Tulsi's ties to Hindu nationalism, her support for drone strikes, and all of her awful and disturbingly recent positions on gay rights, abortion rights, and torture.

Tulsi Gabbard is not anti-war

In May 2017, Gabbard announced on her website that she had recently stopped accepting money from several industries, including the defense sector — but by that point, she had already pocketed over $115,000 from arms dealers in just her first four years in Congress.

“Regular contributions from companies including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and BAE Systems poured in between 2012 (the year she was first elected) and 2016,” HuffPost reported.

The relationship isn’t unidirectional, either. In one of her first acts as a congresswoman, Gabbard broke with the Democratic Party to support a GOP funding bill because, as she explained at the time, “it provides important funds for our men and women serving overseas [and] our military-related jobs in Hawaii.”

She has stated on numerous occasions that she supports expanding the use of drone strikes against military opponents, and, in 2014, refused to rule out the idea of using torture on suspected terrorists. Gabbard also spoke out vehemently against the Iran nuclear deal when it was first proposed by President Obama.

Her hawkish foreign policy stance has earned praise from Republicans and placed her in the company of neoconservative figures like Dick Cheney and and Bill Kristol. The associations aren’t by happenstance—she’s been invited to events held by right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and frequently appears on right-wing news networks like Fox News.

In a 2016 interview, Gabbard told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald that “when it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk.”
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And specifically on Russia, good lord:

When Russia launched its brutal bombing campaign on September 30, 2015, Gabbard tweeted her support for the bloody offensive, writing: “Bad enough U.S. has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.”

She followed up the next day with a tweet condemning President Obama and praising Putin: “Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did.”
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It is nice to see Democrats finally coming around on drone strikes. From 2009 to 2016 they were much loved.

Yang has some foreign policy principles, but nothing firm. His position boils down to "not that anything we did was wrong, just that we did it ineffectively and without good leadership."

The analogy to the woman finding out about her husbands affairs is good, but it can be improved.

So a third party cracked the phone's password. The husband said that the information about the affairs was Top Secret so her even knowing about the affairs was wrong, not just that she found out about it by snooping. There, that completes the analogy.
 
Jason Harvestdancer said:
Yang has some foreign policy principles, but nothing firm. His position boils down to "not that anything we did was wrong, just that we did it ineffectively and without good leadership."
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Have you read the page I linked to?

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/foreign-policy-first-principles/

Yang said:
Over the past several decades, we have engaged in conflicts that have cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. These misadventures have destabilized parts of the world, made enemies of allies, and resulted in untold human suffering, both for our brave soldiers and civilians of other countries.
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Yang said:
Sign a repeal to the AUMF, returning the authority to declare war to Congress, and refuse to engage in anything other than emergency military activity without the express consent of Congress.
Regularly audit the Department of Defense.
Focus our federal budget on fixing problems at home instead of spending trillions of dollars abroad.
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Why is that worse than Gabbard's?
At any rate, her energy policy would have seriously bad consequences for foreign policy (including conflicts, probably) in the future.
 
PyramidHead said:
I will, and you're not wrong that his silence on Assange is a big problem.
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Assange is not somebody that should be supported.
Breaking down the hacking case against Julian Assange
Wired said:
The indictment—which you can read in full below—centers on an incident nine years ago ago, when Assange allegedly told his source, then Army private Chelsea Manning, that he would help crack a password that would have given her deeper access to the military computers from which she was leaking classified material to WikiLeaks.

"On or about March 8, 2010, Assange agreed to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense Computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communica*tions," the indictment reads, referring to the Pentagon's SIPRNet network of computers that store classified information.

That brief alleged offer of active assistance from Assange may be all the US government needs to charge him not as a journalist recipient of Manning's leaks, but as a coconspirator with Manning in the theft of Pentagon data.
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But I am more comfortable giving his silence on that issue a tentative pass than I am with Tulsi's ties to Hindu nationalism,
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Can you be more specific?

her support for drone strikes,
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What's wrong with drone strikes? Should for example Jihadi John not have been droned?

Of course we need to strive to minimize collateral damage, but there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater!

and all of her awful and disturbingly recent positions on gay rights, abortion rights, and torture.
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Or science (she opposes the Thirty Meter Telescope), energy (she opposes nuclear, fracking and pipelines).
 
Jason Harvestdancer said:
It is nice to see Democrats finally coming around on drone strikes. From 2009 to 2016 they were much loved.
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Again, what's wrong with drone strikes?

So a third party cracked the phone's password. The husband said that the information about the affairs was Top Secret so her even knowing about the affairs was wrong, not just that she found out about it by snooping. There, that completes the analogy.
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If you hack somebody's phone you can be prosecuted even if you are married to the person and really, really think you want to know what's on the other person's phone..
 
Jason Harvestdancer said:
Which is worse though, that she read the top secret information on his phone or that he has three female and one male sex partner?
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His body, his choice. Consensual sex is not a crime. Adultery is not a crime. Hacking is.

And you have not answered my question about what's wrong with droning terrorists and other enemies of the United States?
 
J842P said:
JohnG said:
That analogy isn’t even close.
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It absolutely is. Assange and Manning are heroes for what they did.
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Assange is cherry picking. When he released stolen emails from Russian operatives, that was pretty much the game for him. He has always seemed a bit more interested in exposing the west, than say people in a large Vodka loving nation which makes the corruption in the west look like charity.

I'm not losing sleep over Manning and I think Snowden is an actual patriot, but Assange... he isn't a hero. He has an agenda.
 
angelo said:
Assange's agenda is to expose the hypocrisy of the holier than thous of the world. i don't see a problem with that.
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And the release of stolen internal emails regarding how the DNC felt about a non-Democrat winning the primaries was exposing what hypocrisy? Where are the emails about the RNC coordinated effort to keep Trump from getting the nomination?
 
Derec said:
Jason Harvestdancer said:
Which is worse though, that she read the top secret information on his phone or that he has three female and one male sex partner?
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His body, his choice. Consensual sex is not a crime. Adultery is not a crime. Hacking is.
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True, which is probably where the analogy breaks down and people called it faulty. What the husband did, while wrong, is not actually a crime. What Assange and Manning exposed is the Collateral Murder video, which is a crime on the part of those in the video.

Derec said:
And you have not answered my question about what's wrong with droning terrorists and other enemies of the United States?
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Only if they are actually enemies of the United States, which really is not as clearly established at the more hawkish among us want to claim. As the Collateral Murder video shows, not everyone the US uses military force on is actually a threat to and enemy of the US.

And THAT is the real reason people hate Assange. Not everyone the US uses military force on is actually a threat and enemy. How dare he.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
angelo said:
Assange's agenda is to expose the hypocrisy of the holier than thous of the world. i don't see a problem with that.
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And the release of stolen internal emails regarding how the DNC felt about a non-Democrat winning the primaries was exposing what hypocrisy? Where are the emails about the RNC coordinated effort to keep Trump from getting the nomination?
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Assange didn't do no such thing. Wasn't it the FBI that released her emails?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fbi-recovers-deleted-hillary-emails
 
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