This argument is completely nonsensical, this idea that who revealed the crime matters more than the actual crime.
What does it matter who "influenced" him, if the information was legit? And is it your opinion that none of this information should be released unless it covers all countries equally? Do you honestly think he should have thought, I can't reveal this crime until I find an equal Russian crime, for equality. What a wonderful, open world that would be! Utterly ridiculous.
This is the same stupidity as "Hunter's laptop". It allows the Idiocracy to dismiss anything because "the Russians!".
Because they may have influenced the timing and content of the leaks to further their own ends. Revealing sensitive information is not a neutral act. It has consequences far beyond the exposure of bad actors.
Again, the fundamental argument is that the bad actors still had time, chance and opportunity to own and be accountable for the misdeeds but chose to hide them instead. Any ability to influence the timing of the release is still a direct consequence of their underlying malfeasance.
I don't dispute that. But just because it is good to expose bad actors does not mean that any mode of exposing bad actors is an unalloyed good. The exposure of bad actors can (and usually does) have ancillary effects, and those ancillary effects can be bad. They can in some cases be bad enough that they are arguably worse than the original malfeasance of the exposed bad actors. Assange's release of Clinton's emails, for example, may well have swung the 2016 election in Trump's favor, but it would be a stretch to claim that the emails contained evidence of bad acts that merited this outcome.
Then maybe you shouldn't commit atrocities that can then be used against you. I already know the government of Russia is evil. They're not accountable to me. The American government, ostensibly, is. I want every single evil act they ever willingly partake in exposed with the maximum possible impact, because that's my tax dollars being used to murder people.
This “my tax dollars” argument is so facile. Does this mean then that your employer gets to control your actions because it’s their dollars funding your actions? The money changed hands - it’s the governments.
The underlying principle is the rule of law and the Constitution codifies the powers of the government with legislation codifying more details. That’s why the government is accountable to you, not because of your tax dollars. If you are a citizen who doesn’t need to pay any taxes, the government should be as equally accountable to you as to the very wealthy because of the rule of law and everyone being equal to it.
You should want transparency as a matter of the rule of law - you can’t know what laws are broken or what changes to the law need to be made if there isn’t transparency.
Again, we’re aligned on that. But the “ma taxes” argument is facile because for nearly 100 years there wasn’t even income tax so it was secondary taxes through purchases or tariffs. As for off duty codes, there usually aren’t any meaningful ones and they generally are very constrained by the legal system (eg they can’t punish you for political activity). It’s the same reason someone standing up to a politician and screaming “my taxes fund your salary” is blatantly incorrect. The economy is a circular dependent system. For example, government tax dollars pay corporations which then pay your salary which you then get taxed on. You’re over privileging your personal role in the economic system when you make this argument and then the next follow up argument is “well I pay more taxes than you so I should get more of a say than you in how government is run”. It’s a flawed premise that leads to all sorts of directly harmful lines of reasoning. Just argue that we’re a country based on the rule of law and no one is above that. That’s literally the founding principle of the country.
Again, I am not and have not said my taxes are the reason I do or should have a say over the behavior of the government. I'm saying my taxes are my personal connection to the actions of the government, that they are why I care, nothing else. The taxes are my emotional motivation to assert my Constitutional rights.
Your personal connection is the society you, your family, and your friends live in and voting in said democracy and participating to protect it. I’m not sure connecting money to emotions is a healthy endeavor.
Money is a proxy for life and time. If my money is used to hurt someone, that means the product of my time and my effort was used to hurt someone. That makes me angry.
It’s a tool. It’s an important tool no doubt. Perhaps the most important tool in our lives. And you have to know how to wield it appropriately. But do not mistake a tool that enables you to survive for the life itself. Would you get angry if someone used your hammer to kill someone? Or an even more representative analogy, you gave it away to someone, they gave it away to someone, & then that person used the hammer to kill someone. Would you be angry that it was “your” hammer? If yes, how do you define possession? If not, then consider that the hammer and money isn’t all that different here.
Nope, in this scenario you gifted a gun and then they sold it to someone who murdered someone. Because that’s what’s happening (ignoring that gifting is a poor analogy). You “gift” your taxes to the government who then pools your “gift” with all other “gifts” from people and businesses and other revenue streams and then “regifts” that to individual people that work for the government that then do the thing. In fact, your personal contribution to any single person’s salary is basically less than a penny. That’s a lot of guilt for a penny.
For consistency, you should then feel guilty that criminals use the roads we’ve built. After all that was government dollars used to create jobs infrastructure that murderers use to travel to kill their victim and to escape justice. And what about guns in the first place. Government tax dollars go to sustaining those gun manufacturers in the first place, otherwise we wouldn’t have guns for our military. Those guns are then used for murder and all sorts of bad things. And heck, the internet was created through government funding and many big tech companies make a lot of money from the government and that’s got a lot of crime and victimization that happens. So you should feel guilty about that too.
This argument is completely nonsensical, this idea that who revealed the crime matters more than the actual crime.
What does it matter who "influenced" him, if the information was legit? And is it your opinion that none of this information should be released unless it covers all countries equally? Do you honestly think he should have thought, I can't reveal this crime until I find an equal Russian crime, for equality. What a wonderful, open world that would be! Utterly ridiculous.
This is the same stupidity as "Hunter's laptop". It allows the Idiocracy to dismiss anything because "the Russians!".