International Politics

Italy is not entirely previously. They're next.

BIG PIGS?

Belgium?

which is the wrong thing to happen

Wow, now they're playing it rough. The domain name provider has withdrawn service to wikileaks.org. So the website is inaccessible. This is just rude and embarrassing. "They're winning, and free press is not" is what is everywhere now on Twitter and Facebook. This is extremely sad.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/ … servic.php

Assange is also reported to be arrested soon (he is in the UK), according to Scotland Yard.

What the fuck!

It died already i am afraid. Short- span, short-lived, fast-food entertainment; this is what people want these days. Blood, sweet and tears.

Not sure if his intentions are only good. In fact, a lot of interviews show him as a kind of attention whore.

While it makes sense to show things like American-killed journalists in Iraq, some of the stuff related to killed civilians and things like that.

And then again come things like the cables that Wikileaks leaked recently. First thing is that at a certain point of time (25 years? 50 years?) those things get *automatically* declassified as a rule. American Department of State releases the diplomatic correspondence in the public domain. Most recent release was until, if I'm not mistaken, 1979. What is the *political* aim of that? Sometimes they actually give away INFORMANT names and that's actually stupid.

Confidentiality of information is a *basic* way of ruling any country in this world. Some data must be sensitive. An intelligence example. What if Wikileaks showed some CIA files and were stupid enough to give away the *names* and *pseudonims* of the American espionage network in Russia? What if we suddenly learnt that America knew Putin has, say, cancer, before the Russian public does? What does it give us? If an espionage network gets exposed by a whistleblower, then it's not just a case of being transparent and open about your policy. People simply die. And I am not only talking about intelligence officers posing as official diplomats (any "military attache" is 99% an intelligence officer, not to mention official CIA or FBI - which deals with counter-intelligence in America - cells in the embassies, they're there, officially), because they are protected by international rights and all that can happen is simply being expelled from the country. I am talking about agents, Russians, Chinese working and handled by those intelligence officers (yes, an "agent" is a term used *only* for locals spying on their own country for another country, a CIA worker dealing with the agents is called "case officer"). Another thing is discretion. Nobody can express their opinions about somebody, because it can get leaked? Diplomats are people too and if they think that there is something wrong with say Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Donald Tusk or Nicolas Sarkozy, they are entitled to confidentially tell that to their superiors.

Assange's answer to people saying that he is endangering human lives defends himself that nobody got killed because of the leaks. Well, maybe they got lucky that nobody did. Not every leak can do that, but some DO put human lives in jeopardy.

Nor do I

Neither do I, they can all go rot in hell!

Interesting story but apart from that, it's excellent in telling the story with visuals. Start scrolling and discover!
http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/201 … china-sea/

Yeah, it's unbelievable. But this means this is what America wants, for some reason. Is this the moment where an empire falls.

I hope Europe leaves USA behind and works better together in the future.

I don't understand this at all. As far as I recall, all my US friends on Facebook are abhorrent of Donald Trump and strongly oppose him as a human being.

But here we are, biting our nails down to the quick because of the closeness of the numbers.

I can only assume that either the voting system in the US is so broken that the views of the majority of Americans are not reflected by the system, or my Facebook friends are so not representative of Americans as a whole that the majority US opinion of Trump is not reflected by my friends.

Yes, Facebook is an echo chamber. I don't think I have any Trump supporters among my 1000-ish friends there (thank God!). So I'm well aware there's a deep, dark undercurrent of Americans outside my personal realm that support Trump. I've been watching a lot of documentaries to get a better grasp of these millions of 'disenfranchised' people.

I feel sorry for the US, of course (especially if they re-elect Trump, but also because of their great polarization), but I'm kinda egoistic too, and wondering about all the consequences it will possibly have for my own country and my own life.

And yes, the US election system has been broken for a long time. I wonder if we'll see the day when they have direct voting rather than this silly nonsense with electoral colleges, so that the actual number of votes reflect who's elected. Probably not in my lifetime.

I'd love it if someone crunched the numbers and figured out just how many millions of dollars worth of productivity was lost because of this damn election.

Biden is going to get about as many votes as I had expected. I figured he would surpass Obama's record from 2008. But I'm astonished that Trump is also going to get something like 8-9 million more votes than he did in 2016 - like where is he picking up this support from? Who didn't support him in 2016 and then decided after four years of sheer chaos and a criminally mismanaged pandemic "yeah, actually, he's not so bad after all"?

At least the turnout was high. That's an unambiguously good thing no matter your political persuasion.