Assuming there is solid evidence that Manning did what he is accused of, he should have been charged with disclosing classified information and punished according to the written laws. Instead, he was locked away in solitary for several months, and subjected to extra degrading treatment, in order to either break him or convince him to implicate Assange or some other desired target. This is the behavior of police states, not decent countries.

As with most whistleblowing cases, with Manning’s leaks (always assuming they were his–I don’t automatically trust guilt by anonymous leak or press release), no US official will suffer any serious consequences for having serious wrongdoing revealed–paying for child prostitutes for Afghan warlords, murdering people trying to rescue dying wounded people (and nailing their kids, too), pressuring foreign governments to suppress invetigations into US torture and kidnapping programs, all those are forgivable missteps, perhaps a little embarrassing, but certainly nothing to get upset about. But leaking that information so that the American people can find out about it–that’s the serious crime here. And it’s the only one that will be punished.

Nobody who leaks highly classified stuff to the press selectively to manipulate press coverage will face any legal consequences. And of course, only a dirty fucking hippie would expect people to be punished for running a massive torture program all across the globe, or a massive domestic spying program here at home. I mean, those things are illegal in the narrow, quaint sense of being violations of the written law, but they’re not serious crimes, like revealing the names of some US informants or embarrassing some US diplomats.

There are legitimate uses of secrecy as well as illegitimate ones.

You have to love the people who fancy themselves “liberals” who let the mask slip every once in a while, exposing the authoritarian bigot underneath for all to see.

It’d probably make his head explode to find out that many middle class blacks are actually moving back to the South precisely because it’s more politically and economically free than many of the states their ancestors fled to are today.

I would like to think that most people could be reasonable enough to understand the difference between releasing documents you know show a pattern of criminal/unethical behavior and simply burning the entire contents of a SMB share to a DVD and throwing it up on a torrent.

I’m in favor of legalizing it. Let Americans choose for themselves. It’s not what it seems though. Online poker especially is more than just playing poker. There are powerful edges some people use including software that tracks players’ decisions and habits and software that tries to predict unseen cards by trying to figure out the poker site’s “random number generator.” Way too much room for people to win with a bigger advantage over the average player than just skill.

You have to love the people who fancy themselves “liberals” who let the mask slip every once in a while, exposing the authoritarian bigot underneath for all to see.

“The nine Jews remaining in Baghdad must leave because their names appeared in a WikiLeaks cable, an Anglican priest in the Iraqi capital said.”

Boy, THAT wasn’t hard, was it?

I think Manning’s real crime was that he embarrassed politicians.

In terms of why they are actually prosecuting him, I would have to agree. If he was only a high-ranking Democrat, he could have done that and been congratulated for it…

That’s not to say he SHOULDN’T be prosecuted for it, mind you, but I’d certainly put a good number of other people higher on the “needs prosecution” list. His superiors, for one easy example – hello, he sat and burned CDs of secret files and took them home for HOW long?!?

Are you suggesting the posted video was “selectively edited to make the protesters look like idiots”?

#1 | Dave Krueger | October 10th, 2011 at 10:36 am
Online gambling and the perils of prohibition.

I’m only a little more than half way through the Ken Burns documentary, but so far it seems like the implication is that prohibition didn’t work mostly because they didn’t fund it sufficiently and hire enough law enforcement.

I watched the whole thing and that’s not what I got from it. To me the take home message was that there were too many people willing to get around the law, even cops and politicians. Whenever you have a situation like that prohibition will not work at all.

A major cultural factor in all this is the relative strength of their family structures. Latino families are generally in pretty good shape, including (and maybe especially Mexican and Mexican-American familes. Most East Asian families are also in good shape, and combine that with a very low level of cultural violence generally.

Black family structures are in terrible shape, having been stomped on repeatedly by the initial slave-grab out of Africa, and then slavery, and then housing and economic discrimination, welfare laws rigged to split up families, the “War On (Some) Drugs” and other horrors. Their corresponding murder rates are horrific.

The stereotype of the “violent Mexican” is simply false, unless billions of dollars of cocaine traffic is spliced in, and at that point any human on earth could turn violent…

Of course there are. But none of these will show up on video selectively edited to make the protesters look like idiots.

Guys like Barry are one reason I love buying music online.

And of course there’s John Hodgman’s rant against condescending nerds: “Thank you pudgy neck beard counter guy for cluing me into Philip K. Dick AGAIN!. What’s the matter? Out of Confederacy of Dunces this week?”

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-august-16-2011/borders-goes-out-of-business?xrs=share_copy

Reminds me of dozens of protests I’ve been to over the last 30 years. I could watch vids like this for hours…except for the rage it creates on me.