Wired State

Assange Circus Moving to Ecuador

So the Assange circus is moving to Ecuador now -- this small Latin American country strutting around with pompous hatred of the United States is going to take in the pro-Kremlin anarchist.

"No one is going to terrorize us," President Correa of Ecuador tweeted, believing that "the great powers" are going to now gang up on him. Yeah, he's just going to terrorize his own independent media (read what CPJ has to say at the bottom of this news article about his own lack of press freedom) , and Assange and his buddies are just going to go on terrorizing liberal democratic states and supporting oppressors like the Kremlin (Assange has a gig with the Kremlin's foreign propaganda TV station, RT).

My guess is that the UK is not going to storm the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. David Cameron is not Maggie Thatcher and Assange is not the Falklands. My guess is that while the bobbies are sleeping, some daring Ecuadoreans supported by daring, er, Icelanders or something are going to spirit Assange out of the Embassy in a disguise -- perhaps he'll have to dye his albino-white hair -- and get him through...the Chunnel...or something...to France...or someplace, and then smugly and triumphantly announce that he is in Quito. There, Assange can set up shop as the Mosquito of Quito and continue to jab at the US and receive lefty pilgrims to His Openness.

I think this is what will likely happen because I think the UK doesn't really want to get involved and undermine the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity which has international consequences then for undermining the notion as a whole.  They will become clutched up among themselves and dither whether they look bad storming a little embassy of a poor Latin American country and "suppressing press freedom" by making Assange go to Sweden to face questioning about his sexcapades.

The US and the UK have an extradition treaty and the UK could have long ago -- years ago, because this has been going on for some time -- extradited Assange to the US. But the US doesn't have a warrant, and may not have a case. It's one thing to try Bradley Manning for a clear-cut case of aiding the enemy in a military court, but it's harder to put together even a foreign espionage case and then try to try it on US soil. It it were easy, it would be done by now. It involves showing that Assange has a direct relationship to Manning's theft of the cables or other thefts that took place of previous Wikileaks. Of course there is a direct relationship between Assange and Manning and that's illustrated not only by the Wired chat logs supplied by the informant Lamo, but proven by other information the military investigators have found on Manning's computer that came out at court hearings. There may be more we haven't heard about.

But whatever it is, the essential truth of their collaboration and connivance may not be so easily convertible to a trial truth, which has to be "beyond a reasonable doubt" and meet other rules of procedure.

I suspect if the US had a case against Assange that was really airtight, it would have been brought by now. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but remember WikiLeaks took place in November 2010, and it's now August 2012.

And the US not being able to make a case under the "progressive" Obama Administration may not mean that it can't be made at all, or that it may not be made under a possible Romney Administration, or that -- most importantly -- that the destructive acts of Assange somehow aren't wrong, or are somehow justified. They are wrong and they are not justified.

I'm all for making the moral and political condemnation of Assange because far from whistleblowing or uncovering "war crimes," he petulantly and childishly caused needless and pointless and major damage to a liberal democratic government and huge harm to its informants merely because his tiny anarcho-techno-communist views cause him to vehemently hate and despise something larger and more liberal and democratic than himself. He is a cramped and sulking sectarian.

That truly is what it is all about. It is not about "openness" or "freedom" or we'd see more natural openness from Assange and his comrades themselves, and we'd see them ally themselves with more natural allies of freedom than Hezbollah and Putin. It really is just that simple. Liberals trip over their own feet trying to justify WikiLeaks, but there is no liberal justification of WikiLeaks, only a radical, anarchist and destructive one, and that is not a way to run a civil society. The nature of the society that you get with these Bolshevik methods matters, and I'm having none of it. Your press freedom is not harmed if a destructive anarchist is questioned about harming some women, truly. Your press freedom and freedom of expression are not harmed by the prosecution of a soldier for dumping classified cables on the Internet. WikiLeaks, as the First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams put it simply, is not press. It is a source. It's actions are not about press freedom; they are about the crime of hacking.

There is no higher cause served by these acts that justifies impunity.

As for the sex case in Sweden, it's a mystery to Americans, who don't have such laws, even in really politically-correct settings, that work in quite this way. Yet I'm a big believer in the wisdom of the feminist Andrea Dworkin. She pointed out, in the date-rape debate, that the punishment for a co-ed who gets drunk and takes a frat boy to her dorm shouldn't be rape, it should only be a hangover.

And the punishment for the Swedish women who had the poor judgement to take Assange to their beds should merely be a smelly bedroom, not sex without a condom. (Bill Keller has reported that Assange smells, aside from everything else.) I see no reason whatsoever that Sweden would be any likely than the UK to send Assange to the US on an extradition reques, given that the US has not produced a warrant. That's why the left has been so perniciously tendentious on this claim -- there's not one whit of difference. The sex charges are not likely to materialize after all this time and the left's severe vilification of the poor women who had the misfortune to get entangled with Assange -- which has shamefully included even charges that they are anti-Cuban CIA operatives! -- will be ugly to watch.

Then what? Back to Australia? Is that what Assange really fears?

Michael Moore and other addled brains are claiming that Assange has exposed American "war crimes". As I explain in this long polemic with Jacob Appelbaum, it's not a war crime, however regrettable and awful these killings and woundings are, and however misguided the US invasion of Iraq is. Notice that neither of the wars that WikiLeaks "exposed" are over, or have been affected by their exposures one whit. The US left Iraq, and the terrorists continue to kill Iraqi civilians in large numbers, just as they killed 100,000 civilians while we were there, because this is about Islamist terrorism supported by Iran and Syria, not about some US "imperialist war." Obama has probably done more to wind down the war in Afghanistan with the targeted assassination of Osama bin Ladn and the plan to withdraw troops than WikiLeaks could even approximate, and that war won't be over, either, as the Taliban and its friends will go on killing civilians in large numbers because it's about terrorism and fundamentalist Islamic warlords, not conventional war. There isn't any more conventional war. WikiLeaks is a 19th century anachronism, like such war. It is like Lenin releasing the European cables on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, and comes from the same Bolshevik playbook. Yes, Western liberal governments are flawed and even commit crimes. Bolsheviks are no better; they are far worse.

Assange's gyrations since WikiLeaks broke -- as he writes his book with a million-dollar advance -- have only been about "the propaganda of the deed" and the circus of minority politics. Even the lefty UK press, which has been burned by him, is unimpressed.

Perhaps Cameron will surprise us. Perhaps he will have special troops willing to brave the throngs of anarchists and leftists and liberal sympathizers who will ring around the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, piously throwing themselves forward as "witnesses" and "human shields".

But I do think the UK is going to avoid looking bad or taking the risk that gunfire might lead to an unfortunate tragedy and let Assange slip away. Perhaps the UK or the US might retaliate later by cutting aid and trade with Ecuador, which isn't trivial.

Ecuador mainly exports immigrants and lives on their remittances. Its considerable aid from the US is under review right now and it may be impacted adversely by its silly grand-standing over this nefarious net nerd.

But one of its main exports is bananas. Perhaps Assange can start a banana-chip empire and Starbucks can try to get us all to buy overpriced freely-traded organic liberation banana chips.

 

The Myth of Net Civics

Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Beekman Center has a post up questioning the faddish popularity of "crowd-funding," asking whether fund-raising for public projects through your networks can really replace the proper function of government taxaction.

I totally agree that crowdfunding cannot replace civic projects that the government should be funding -- and funding through the democratic process of elections and then appointments and allocations of funding to public works. Ethan's vision for government is never quite articulated, but it seems to be a kind of socialist centrism levened by Soros private funding of progressive nonprofits -- the real debate, of course, is what kind of government and how much taxation.

I reject the civic crowdfunding notions for other reasons than Ethan, however, because I'm concerned about elite leftist and socialist cadres using the accelatorating and amplifying power of social networks to inflict their views on society when they are not elected and not democratic.

Oh, you say, isn't that what America is all about, the conflicting interests of a zillion special interest groups, nonprofits, civic projects, etc? Well, sure, but sometimes we drill down and find it's really only about Soros or the Koch brothers, you know? Doesn't anybody realize that many of the vaunted Kick-starter campaigns in the millions benefit from anonymous rich guys in Silicon Valley, not just thousands of bike messengers building aps donating $5?

Big projects like a streetcar or the Low-line are projects that don't get supported for all kinds of reasons, and some of them good, i.e. not only due to evil special corporate interests "buying government," etc. Maybe not everyone wants the noise and traffic in their area. Maybe not everyone thinks it's sustainable to build big projects underneath Manhattan. While the process to get projects funded and built is "bureaucratic," it is also, at the end of the day, democratic, tied to a democratic voting system. The "vote" of the "net-roots" with its millions of signatures or millions of "crowd-funded" dollars can appear very large and powerful, but it is not a fair vote of the real public.

As flawed as representative government is -- and the tekkies usually find it completely "broken" -- it's still a hell of a lot better than rule by coders and cadres via social media with only one "progressive" perspective. That has to be opposed.

Why should I have endless noise, construction, expense, displacement of business, etc. through something like the Low-line just becuse a handful of hipsters have a huge network that means maybe Jeff Bezos can buy something cool? This is the problem -- the O'Reilly-ification of civic spaces as he and others like him get their hands on the "civic stack" of apps and then go further, to urban projects they find "awesome."

It might seem "awesome" and all about "direct democracy" to some if local kickstarted projects get funded across national and international networks this way, but it is not about authentic democracy, it is only about democratic centralism.

There's also the very real problem that Kickstarter is terribly elitist. It's a closed club. The founders vet and pick the projects they will display for funding and decide which ones get promoted for more funding. There is criticism that they also hide the failures. This is perfectly acceptable behaviour in a nonprofit or private foundation with boards of trustees and fiscal responsibility and filers of 990 tax returns. They can pick and chose their projects -- and the answer if you don't like them is to publicly protest, start another nonprofit, or complain to the government about their tax exemption if they are politicized.

But Kickstarter affects to be "the crowd" or "the people" with this notion of "crowd-funding". It isn't -- it's just elite networks in a netocracy -- but it covers itself with that mantle of "public-ness" -- and without the transparency and accountability of a private foundation (donations can be anonymous and there are no by-laws or procedures or minutes of any meetings deciding what projects to do).

It's not just that wealthy neighbourhoods where hipsters live would get favoured over poor (and not yet cool) neighbourhoods, or formerly middle-class neighbourhoods now declining and becoming uncool.

It's that the cadres get to decide everything, and that's not democratic or fair. The outcome is predictable -- just like it is with the "civic apps" in New York City with all the hustling of the hipsters -- apps for finding bars, designated drivers and condoms, but not apps for finding toilets, safe parks or farmers' markets.

Ethan's list of concerns works to solve the problem of forcing government to be more "progressive" and take on the burdens of "progress". But it undermines democracy and pluralism of different contending political forces and thus is not out of touch with the real world where the Republican Party and even the Tea Party go on existing and organizing. Ethan blithely lauds the Black Panthers' programs of providing child nutrition and education, without subjecting this to any critique as typical patronizing and ward-heeling, or noting the really serious problem of rapes, murders, and drug dealing in the history of the Black Panthers.  I'd also want a second opinion as to whether the radical Black Panthers are really providing programs that aren't provided by the government -- which today provides enormous numbers of social programs via nonprofits in New York City, for example -- or whether they are pursuing a political agenda with tendentious claims. I'd also prefer to get social services, as flawed as they are, from elected governments, and not radical and destructive movements like Occupy Wall Street, whose communal table's health certificate is not just "pending" but absent altogether.

The idea of letting crowdfunding be the design and not the implementation is that it takes the steam out of the notion of crowdfunding bringing actual projects to real fruition that the funders themselves can use, and leaves it -- again -- in elite virtuality. If a streetcar project misses its million-dollar marks and makes $3600, it never has to justify itself with authentic democracy and real public critique, it can just slip into the netherworld of "design."

The idea of having leveraging of existing opportunities, i.e. to get more participation from Latinos, does make sense and in fact follows the example of historical philanthropy in America, which is more about enabling individuals to pursue opportunities rather than become dependent, and enhancing rather than replacing government.

The movement of crowd-sourcing, civic apps, etc. is really a political movement trying to take power outside of democratic channels, masquerading as "the public". It most certainly is not the public.

Then there is the problem of Ethan's blithe Obamaism -- worrying about the "gotcha" that rightly came when the president said "small business successes depends, in part, on government-funded intrastructure" -- a socialist fantasy that implies that the state is prior and public funds are prior, and that they don't in fact derive their funds and legitimacy *first* from people's entrepreneurship and labor.

First people make businesses and make a profit and hire workers, *then* people pay taxes, you know? That's not a page out of Ayn Rand but ordinary liberal democracy and the free enterprise system. The government *comes from* people paying taxes. It's not as if the revenue pool the Obama Administration sits on has no history and comes from the sky. If small business then uses water, roads, public education for workers, etc. it's because it has *first* generated revenue and *then* paid taxes. There's something terribly skewed and scary about "progressives" not getting these basic truths to start with and respecting them organically.

There's also a basic mythology of scare tactics here on the left. Michael Ignatieff writes in a revie of Michael Sanders' book The Price of Everything  that the wealthy rent the wombs of poor Indian women to have babies. Yet the overwhelming majority of people still have their own babies, and this exploitation of Indian women is surely an exoticism (if it's some huge offshore trafficking scheme I haven't heard of, let's see the credible human rights report).

Here's the reality that Internet "progressives" can't seem to grasp.

Last time I checked, I could walk or ride a bike for miles on the Hi-Line walkway on the West Side or the Stuyvesant Cove on the East Side, go to play ball or picnic in nice parks in fact free of garbage or needles; swim on public beaches; go to the library and take out for free the books available or order reserves from other libraries. I could go to free public lectures and movies. My children go to school for free and pay a quarter for lunch; all around me are kids who take out even tens of thousands of dollars of city school loans with little expectation that they will pay them back or even stay in college.

The "progressive" beliefs on display in blogs like this behaving as if the rich have taxed themselves only to provide sidewalks in their gated communities and left poor people in slums lets me know that they don't live down here with the rest of us -- all day long, we walk on public sidewalks and use public services that come out of our taxes. When was the last time the Kick-starter hipsters went to the public library instead of downloading books on their Kindles or went to a public park to the sprinklers with their children instead of to their apartment complex gym?

In fact, if it comes to it, I will be treated in a public emergency room without payment up front, and even as an immigrant I can expect a minimal old age pension and health care. If any politician seeks to change any of these runaway costs, he'll be accused of "social Darwinism".

Rapid, light-weight groups depend on the time and resources of somebody and therefore are paid for somewhere by someone -- Soros? And the enlightened "self-interest" is just that -- selfish, without any debate about what is really enlightened.

The problem with the netocracy is that they are merely like that wealthy community taxing itself for the sidewalks the poor will be discouraged from walking on, but merely having displaced their community to an attenuated network where they martial the resources of their class to make political warfare on localities. It's all the worst features of Citizens United that the left imagines are practiced by the right.

Ethan invokes the campaigns against SOPA/PIPA and Komen, which for him, with his politics,  illustrate lovely "social change". Social change is always about other people changing, you know?

But these hate campaigns represent very troublesome erosions of democracy and freedom for others. The ugly vilification of a Komen that had the misfortunate to publicly debate among themselves the question of using money they themselves had raised for breast cancer on abortions is downright scary. It means only the "progressives" get to "crowd-fund" and other nonprofits can't do as they wish with regular tax-deductible donations. It means that any flash mob can bully any self-organized civic group in society and force them to do their political bidding. We're seeing the same now with the Boy Scouts and Chick-fil-A -- there is no awareness on the left that civil society depends on the First Amendment and the ability of groups to ensure that some other group's freedom of association doesn't trump their own -- and their own freedom of expression.

The left seems to think that if another group in society has opinions and law activities they don't like, they get to harass them on Twitter until their CEO resigns or their VP of marketing dies of a heart attack.

SOPA-PIPA didn't come to a vote; Google-funded and Mitch-Kapor funded lobbies flashmobbed Congress and called it civics. Geeks and hipsters are obviously pleased with this flexing of their social muscle, but it is only that -- it is not pluralistic democracy with democratic voting.]

Can these ideals be restored? I imagine once the right picks up more steam using the same social media tools for their own political campaigns and "crowd-funding" that we will see more appreciation of them on the left.