Assange's original theory was that WL would create a "secrecy tax", making life difficult for evil orgs that had to keep secrets. But as far as I can tell, WL ended up damaging regular orgs more than evil ones. Because:

- minor scandals within regular orgs created large damage because the members have high ethical standards. While the members of evil orgs didn't care how corrupt their leadership was.

- evil orgs were more effective at keeping secrets, so most leaks were from non-evil orgs that didn't think they had much to hide.

That these second-order effects would end up dominating the first-order effects Assange intended wasn't obvious in advance, so I don't blame the guy for not foreseeing it. But at this point, we have to consider the "leaks in general are good" theory thoroughly discredited.

This depends on your own subjective view of which organizations are evil, and which aren't.

WikiLeaks' biggest document dumps were about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about American diplomacy around the world. The latter also revealed countless local scandals that were big news in different countries (for example, about corruption in Tunisia, which helped spark the Arab Spring).

I don't see any credible argument for the idea that WikiLeaks did more harm than good. What decisively turned American liberals against WikiLeaks was the publication of the DNC emails, which revealed a real scandal (the DNC trying to stack things against Bernie Sanders during the primaries) that had real consequences (the head of the DNC having to resign). American liberals turned against WikiLeaks for that largely partisan reason (the fact that Democrats were desperate for scapegoats after their election loss to Trump made the backlash against WikiLeaks even worse), while American conservatives wouldn't like an organization that leaks American state secrets anyways, so Wikileaks was left with no support in the US.

It's actually amazing that more transparency did more harm than good.

Essentially, the evil groups weaponized the tool of transparency.

Do you have an example of a 'minor scandal' with a regular org?

It's not America that causes these types of problems, its our banking military industrial complex.

Let me be clear - I'm not blaming American's per se ( though they do share some of the blame - the idea that America can do no wrong because it's America, is surprisingly pervasive even among highly educated people ).

I think it's quite clear that democracy is failing in the US - why else would you have father and son or husband and wife as presidents or almost presidents.

Clearly the statistical chance of them being the best on merit is quite slim.

So yes there is institutional capture.

It's not all bad though - the US is very dynamic country, there is a chance of change.

I wonder wether a democracy should make intervention wills. As in, if i ever go below this or that treshold, i want democratic neighbours to restore the nation.

Or have a backUp Voting system, that if people do not show up to a vote in full majority autorestores a constitution.

The US Constitution does sort of have a back-up voting system in that it allows a supermajority of states to convene a new constitutional convention and rewrite the document however they like.

Imagine a constitution under git history, having a hard reset to a previous "tag", by majority absent vote to uphold it.

But the same thing happens in sports.

In basketball, Dell Curry led to Seth Curry and Steph Curry, and the latter just broke the 3-point record. That's merit.

Eh?

You think George W Bush inherited the 'good at being president' genes from his father?

And how do you explain Hilary?

In my view what George W inherited was power and connections.

Countries were power is inherited, rather than earned aren't typically viewed as democracies.

Americans compare politics to sports all the time, and it's bizarre.

I get it - we have only two teams that are really allowed to participate. Decisions all boil down to 'our team wins' or 'their team wins' 99% of the time. Like basketball, or football, or baseball, or tennis, etc.

But the notion that W and Hillary earned their positions on merit, like Steph Curry did, is astounding. That's hilarious that anyone can say that with a straight face. Hillary was the second most detested politician in America, second only to Trump - who she deliberately elevated for that exact reason.

Many people dislike moralizing egomaniacs that view themselves above pedestrian norms and ethics.

Not sure what you are referring to?

Yep he is different.

But I see the main difference as him having oodles of integrity and courage, in contrast to going for the quiet life in the middle of the herd.

A lot of the accusations that have been thrown at him frankly don't bear detailed examination - the whole assault thing, the idea that he put US operative lives at risk, the idea he was in cahoots with the Russians, the idea he was active in hacking rather than being a journalist receiving information from a source.

In my view, this is all mud thrown to dehumanise him, so nobody complains when he is effectively tortured and imprisoned for life for telling the uncomfortable truth.