The Persecution of Journalists and Whistleblowers

 Julian Assange has been dying in detention for over a decade, now in the horrid and terrible Belmarsh Prison, where access is too often limited.

His crime?  Publishing the details (a cockpit video) of how US military were shooting recklessly on Iraqi civilians.

That means, he was publishing what the public needed to know, and getting it from a whistleblower (Chelsea Manning).

Both are heroes to any reasonable thinking people!  Just not to fascist governments...

Well, now we have a new case of much information being released (and often little discussed by the media) showing basically that US Officials were lying to us about the War in Ukraine.

They were lying to us about Ukraine winning, about the extent of Russian casualties, involvement of US assets, and many other things.

I'm doubtful of whether the Air National Guardsman of current interest was the origin (but perhaps he could get access to them as a security technician...like Snowden for example...though Snowden was an NSA contractor not military).  Otherwise the CIA documents would not have been available to him.  They may have come from someone higher up.  In any case, what we have is not a security breach of information that needed to be secret.  It looks like information the public should have known.  It looks like whistleblowing.  And it's no wonder therefore that the media focuses on the 'perpetrator of the leak' rather than the damning (to "US Officials") contents.

Twitter heading down?

https://www.disconnect.blog/p/twitters-moment-of-truth-has-arrived?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I think Twitter had and still has a design which potentially makes for very lively and ideologically transparent view of the world.  You can see who thinks what and why, at a glance.

I still enjoy and view Twitter a lot.  It continues to be a way I most easily discover new things.  I won't say it has declined too much for me personally, except obviously the ads are now scraping the bottom of the barrel, as Paris Marx explains, a sign it's become unsustainable.  The people I miss most were mostly banned pre-Musk, though I have no use for Trump (whose ban is officially lifted now, but still spends his time elsewhere mostly).

Moving to video services like Instagram and TikTok means you have to endure hours of crap before you can get to the heart of what people actually think.  IOW, it puts everyone in their own Silo you have to be part of to understand at all.  And there's no easy way to understand anyone or anything else.  Ultimately they're not about ideas at all, only identity and branding.

Although they use it, I don't think the oligarchs and intelligence services that run the world want people to think or understand other people, only the dominant narrative they promote.

So losing Twitter is a loss for the people, a loss for thinking and ideas, and a win for oligarchy and authoritarian control.