[ExI] > Taiwan is standing strong

Mon Mar 16 15:45:09 UTC 2020

I propose extending open season thru today.  The resulting discussion has been useful and helpful methinks.

> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2020 7:30 AM
Subject: Re: [ExI] > Taiwan is standing strong

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 8:34 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

>… if you read the Mueller report and not a summary of it made by Trump stooge William Barr you'd have evidence of it too…

> I see.  So you read the report and found the evidence in there, but refuse to share it with us?

>…For God's sake Spike, it doesn't take a genius to put two and two together!

Not asking for algebra John.  Show us something from this report that I didn’t read and don’t intend to, but you did.

>… The Russians hacked the Democratic Committee on July 27 2016 just a few hours after Trump said in a televised speech “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”…

But WikiLeaks didn’t publish Clinton’s email.  A Chinese news agency claimed they had them, but we still haven’t seen any of it.

>… Well Donald Trump sure cared who won and had a strong opinion about WikiLeaks, he said more than once "I love WikiLeaks"…

OK so we have two nearly indistinguishable mainstream parties.  One leader claims to love WikiLeaks.  The other leader may have threatened (in jest of course) to murder Assange with a drone.  And yet we attribute some mysterious political motive?  Is that really necessary?  Could it be that Assange was mildly annoyed with Clinton for something or other, and had no particular interest in two nearly-indistinguishable parties in the one issue he cares about: openness.  

John do you see any significant difference between the two mainstream parties in the area of openness and government secrecy?  I see little difference between them in their approaches to balancing the budget: both appear to have accepted the notion of eventual US government bankruptcy and default, with neither having credible plan when that day comes.  

I don’t accept your notion that borrowing can continue forever either.  Sooner or later, those credit cards will be maxed out.  Then what? 

>…Every intelligence agency in the country says Vladimir Putin's goons illegally hacked into the Email account of the Democratic National Committee and stole their Emails…

Whenever I hear that I want to ask how it was that the server was set up such that it had no fail-safe against such hacking.  Why don’t those goons hack into far more valuable servers, such as our major corporations? 

I did see a number of red flags.  We had an IT team where I used to work, where they intentionally rotated IT people around so that they didn’t become too buddy-ish.  The IT people watched each other, and there were fail-safes against anyone trying to download email.  There was auto-archiving, there were notifications to the IT team of outgoing signals, they defeated I/O devices on the servers and hobbled the bandwidth on the data-lines, there were a lot of stuff they did which they didn’t tell us about.

But one political party, I can’t recall which, hired an extended family to do their IT, and this family had ties to a foreign country.  Both of those would be red-flags.  They set up a system without external oversight or inspectors, red flag.  High bandwidth cable, red flag.  The IT lead travelled a lot to Pakistan and may have been accessing the server from there, possible red flag.  They caught the IT lead at the airport with a suitcase full of cash with a one-way ticket to Pakistan, possible red flag.

I haven’t heard if the Russians hacked into the Libertarian party server.  I think they just had the two mainstream parties, whose spending habits are so similar, they are nearly indistinguishable.  It looks to me like the party to blame here are the careless IT people.  By the time it got to Assange, the information had already leaked.

>…Spike, please don't put words in my mouth. What I said was that Assange's actions will result in the death of thousands and perhaps millions of people and I stand by every word of that statement…

Have you any evidence of that notion?

>…Assange … must have known nobody would perform more incompetently in a crises than Donald Trump…

Evidence please?  How would he know that?

> He publishes stuff people post to him. 

>…No publisher publishes everything anybody sends them, and most publishers publish stuff that the authors want published…

Evidence?

>…And although it received far less publicity the fact is the Republican National Committee was also hacked by Vladimir Putin's goons…

Evidence?  Was the Libertarian party server hacked?  Does the technology exist to prevent downloading the entire server remotely?

 > Openness is a good thing.

>…So let's see Trump's tax records for the last 20 years…

Sure, let’s do that.  But as soon as we do, any American may refuse to file a tax return on the 5th amendment.

>…Nothing in those Emails that were stolen by Russia and published by WikiLeaks revealed anything illegal or even particularly immoral…

This comment contradicts your argument that Assange contributed to the outcome of the election.

>… Those Emails just contains embarrassing office gossip of the type you'll see in any large organization like a presidential campaign; staffer X thinks staffer Y is a jerk and staffer Z thought his boss looked stupid when she said that thing in her speech last night…

I fail to see how that comment is compatible with Assange’s actions contributing to the death of thousands or millions.  Trivial office gossip killed thousand or millions now?  Do break down this line of reasoning step by step please, without calling on deities.

>…In short there was nothing in them that was newsworthy and the only reason to publish them would be if you wanted to make one side look worse than the other…

I didn’t read them.  I know no one who did.  Did you?  I don’t even recall seeing a quote from the WikiLeaks material.  

Assange’s diabolical plot failed apparently.  We have no interest in office gossip.

What I did see are the leaked quotes from the top FBI people on Twitter.  That has had an enormous impact on our political system and continues to this day, that “insurance policy” in “Andy’s office” business written by Page and Strzok.  But Assange didn’t publish that.  The people who did publicize that are running free to this day, even after their diabolical plot to slay millions with a virus.

>…What the hell does his nationality have to do with the price of eggs?! I'm not a lawyer so I don't know for certain if Assange's actions violated Australian or American law or not…

Australia isn’t prosecuting him.  Sweden threatened to, for an unrelated charge, which sounded to me like he refused to pay a coupla harlots. Assange isn’t subject to US law, which would exonerate him anyway under the Article 1 of the constitution.  If the US prosecuted him for (somehow) influencing an election, then any commentary in our mainstream news which could influence an election becomes illegal.

>… but I do know for certain that what Assange did, and what Pulitzer and Hearst did, was immoral, and unwise, and hypocritical, and as it turned out deadly…

I agree Americans Hearst and Pulitzer were war mongers, and this was reprehensible.  I don’t see that Assange was trying to start a war or profit from one.  I don’t see him as responsible for covid deaths.  Do take us through it step by step without referencing theoretical deities or commenting on the goodness thereof.

 >> I don’t recall a word about Julian Assange.

>…Well I sure recall Julian Assange. And in the next few months if I'm gasping for breath but can't be put on a respirator because all the hospitals are clogged up with millions of people who are even sicker than I am then you can be certain Julian Assange will still be in my thoughts.  John K Clark

This chain of reasoning from WikiLeaks to covid is tenuous indeed.  I see no clear connection.  What I see is a guy whose passion is speaking the truth to power by publishing their words publicly at every opportunity, with the eventual goal of reducing that power.  I get that.

John, you now have the option of social distancing, which is the very best way to avoid covid.  My family and I are doing that, and it works.  I recommend that over any alternative which would have you cursing Julian Assange with your last gasp of breath.

spike

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