> "I was openly accused of damaging my country's reputation by talking about corruption,"
I have seen this at a smaller scale in several companies. Human resources will negate any wrong doing of abusive upper management to avoid "damaging the company". As, many good employees leave the company, lack motivation or passive-aggressively sabotage projects the company suffers massive damage, losses opportunities and money.
The people protecting corruption or abuse are not all evil, none of them is in moral high-ground, thou. But, it is the way companies are designed to reward personal loyalty to upper-management what makes the so prone to corruption and inefficiencies.
Design a company, or a country, that rewards loyalty to the company - not to the managers or rulers - and it will be extremely successful.
Meanwhile we are stuck in a situation that even assassination takes a long time to untangle and have an effect. It could be worse, at least we know what happened and we are free to talk about it. Improvement takes one step at at time.
Secrecy - and its many forms, such as (but not limited to) ignorance, subterfuge, deceit, etc. - is the root of all corruption. Societies and institutions, groups of people which keep secrets, are fundamentally corrupt. You cannot deceive and be dishonest when the truth is available for all and sundry.
You can freely be dishonest, and weaponise that dishonesty, and thus profit from it, in conditions where secrecy is elevated as a norm. The nations with the greatest secrets are also the most corrupt.
This is such utter nonsense. How can any honest intellectual consider this to be anything other than the result of a calculated agitprop campaign by the utterly corrupt US military industrial complex ..
Assange is not a Russian agent, and Wikileaks is not a Russian operation, and never was. It just so happens that the majority of dire, desperate corruption that Wikileaks revealed, was indeed committed by Western entities. This does not mean that Russia doesn't have its problems - but it has not committed war crimes and other very real crimes against humanity at anything near the scale of the criminal Western war coalition and the member 5-eyes nations.
Please, inform yourself as to the nature of the very real agitprop campaign that has been waged against Wikileaks, and in so doing - have the courage to see Assange for the hero he really is.
> “The problem with the Trump campaign,” Assange said at the time, “is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day.”
That seems really reasonable. Beyond the obvious thing that seems not to been mentioned; you can't publish what you don't have.
Separate to that FP note themselves in this very article the concrete support for exactly what Wikileaks claimed. The previously published trove was published later in full, elsewhere to zero interest, including zero interest from FP. Beyond some anti-Assange spin seen here. The author of this piece doesn't have their heart in it though, do they? They want us to know all that so wrote it quite clearly for everyone to see.
But yeah, spin it all to something nefarious because the existence of Wikileaks is kryptonite for corruption so everyone needs to unite against it. /s
Oh and Biden is a racist, misogynist, corrupt, senile idiot. Just like Donald. Congratulations democracy. But make sure you don't notice that because failure to pick a party and see no evil in it means you're a Russian asset. Just ask Hilary.
You are absolutely correct - people whose personal identities are highly dependent on associating with the untouchable West will have a much harder time accepting the truth of Wikileaks immensely valuable, important contribution to modern discourse over the nature of the West's coalition of the willing/5-eyes criminal state than those who do not have an American/UK/British/Canadian/NZ/etc national identity that will be bruised by the revelations of their nations' absolute, evil corruption, war crimes and real crimes against humanity.
I agree that there are ways in which loyalty manifests itself in positive ways for society and/or civilization as a whole, but I wonder whether or not unbounded loyalty to anything always comes with negatives.
I'm not sure what you're arguing. Rewarding loyalty to the company typically takes the form of profit sharing, wherein employees would be incentivized to ignore management abuse (for instance) because they know raising the alarm will detract from the company's profits and, thus, their own profits.
Are you advocating for profit sharing/wealth redistribution in a really indirect way?
> Are you advocating for profit sharing/wealth redistribution in a really indirect way?
Why not? I would support mandatory stock options based on the number of employees. In reality though, I think it would be defeated by creative accounting just like taxation.
How would stock options change anything in that regard? If you blow the whistle, the price decreases and your options are worth less money. You still have incentive to keep your mouth shut.
Salary is a maximally derisked profit sharing scheme. You get much less money that you could've earned in times of company's success, in exchange for a stable income even if the company is not successful.
It feels like we’re splitting hairs a little. In the context of my comment on the parent, profit and revenue are the same thing. After all, if you share 100% of your profit in another sense your company makes no profit at the end of the year.
The point is: once your livelihood depends on being part of an organisation, your judgement about that org can’t be completely impartial.
Another way to reward loyalty to ethically challenged manager: promotion, more interesting projects, public praise, not abusing you like the others and so on.
I have seen this at a smaller scale in several companies. Human resources will negate any wrong doing of abusive upper management to avoid "damaging the company". As, many good employees leave the company, lack motivation or passive-aggressively sabotage projects the company suffers massive damage, losses opportunities and money.
The people protecting corruption or abuse are not all evil, none of them is in moral high-ground, thou. But, it is the way companies are designed to reward personal loyalty to upper-management what makes the so prone to corruption and inefficiencies.
Design a company, or a country, that rewards loyalty to the company - not to the managers or rulers - and it will be extremely successful.
Meanwhile we are stuck in a situation that even assassination takes a long time to untangle and have an effect. It could be worse, at least we know what happened and we are free to talk about it. Improvement takes one step at at time.