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scart — FREE SPEECH NOW -Single
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Published: 2010-12-12 00:56:43 +0000 UTC; Views: 1073; Favourites: 19; Downloads: 18
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Description
Shooting the messenger (Julian Assange) is like breaking your phone: The bad news will still exist, all you will be doing is ensuring you don't hear it until it's too late to do anything.Free Speech applies not just in media but also in music, songs, art, poetry & activism. That which you don't stand up for, you will lose.
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Comments: 6
Yeah, good words. So hard to get the message across.
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I don't think shooting the messenger is an appropriate idiom in this case.
1) The "message" was delivered to someone else, not to the "shooter" as the expression states.
2) Even if it is wrong and we all disagree with actions taken against Assange, leaking restricted documents has legal precedent as a crime. It's more like shooting the guy who wants to tell everybody about the skeletons in your closet. They are still there, but you can actually protect yourself for a while by doing it, at least until the message gets out and people get wise.
3) Assange was arrested for a completely unrelated reason.
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Assange was arrested because some people out there still think that will stop wikileaks, and were scrabbling for anything to shut him up. As you pointed out in your second note, you could protect yourself for a while by silencing the messenger, unless the message is already out, which it is, so the beautiful thing is that the arrest of Assange won't change anything now. Wikileaks is here, most importantly it is here as an idea, and it's never going to go away.
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If that is what you believe, fair enough, but I don't think there is enough evidence available to say conclusively that anything like that is the case. I don't doubt that there is plenty of motive to shut him up, but I wouldn't be so quick and so adamant to suggest that he is innocent of the real crimes he's actually accused of committing. Saying that he was arrested for a different reason amounts to an outright dismissal of those charges.
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You're absolutely right, there are a lot of people that are dismissing the charges as false and are slagging the women involved. I don't want to do that. I believe the charges themselves are legitimate, and should be treated so. It's merely the timing that I question.
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