Leo Frank?

I don't think Assange and Frank have a lot in common, but Frank's case comes to mind when I think of unfair persecution. Could be what you're thinking of, too.

I don't think it was Leo Frank. Thanks, Hugh, this is a good wiki for me to read.

I know that Assange's lawyer compares the Swedish prosecutor to Stalin's secret police chief. That's not it. There was another comparison that I cannot remember.

Someone that was witch-hunted. Someone persecuted in history. I thought it was Oliver something, but it is not. Oh well. It's not important.

It's not the Dreyfuss Affair, is it?

I will say that as a result of all this I've gone from thinking Julian Assange was intriguing and potentially kind of cool to thinking he's a big, egoistic jerk.

Oliver Plunkett?
Wikipedia link

One of the Hollywood Ten?

No, not the Hollywood Ten or Oliver Plunkett. It could have been something about the Stasi, or the Stalin comment, and I invented something else in my mind. Maybe it was something about McCarthy. I don't think so, though. I thought I heard a first and last name and it wasn't McCarthy.

I will say that as a result of all this I've gone from thinking Julian Assange was intriguing and potentially kind of cool to thinking he's a big, egoistic jerk.

Yes, I feel the same way. Since I first heard of WikiLeaks, I was like, yay transparency. Now, I'm not so sure about his motives. Still, I don't know enough about him, or WikiLeaks, to make any kind of considered opinion.

thinking he's a big, egoistic jerk.

Why? Because he had sex? Because he hasn't turned himself in?

Because he seems like a big, egoistic jerk.

This New Yorker piece from last June gives a little bit more of a profile.

I've gone from thinking Julian Assange was intriguing and potentially kind of cool to thinking he's a big, egoistic jerk.

I feel like this pretty much happens with anyone who looks for that much time in the spotlight. That said, I'm glad this whole project exists, whether the guy is a jerk or not.

Arbuckle? Or I may just be mentally stuck in the 1920s.

Doing big important things and being a big egoistic jerk often tend to go together.

Not that I know enough about the guy to have a well founded opinion in this particular instance.

Yeah, I think that's somewhat true. I'm no expert on him either, but he does really seem to seek the focus. Also, I'm of two minds about the project. Just heard a story tonight about how some of the documents in the recent release (just as one example) talk about the fears of the Mexican government that they are nearing the total loss of control over some specific states and cities where drug gangs have nearly taken over. I can't help but think of how the clear knowledge that the Mexican Army and state forces are that near to collapse in those areas will impact the drug gangs' sense of their own liberty to continue recruiting into the drug trade, raping, murdering, etc. This crusade for open information, in my mind, isn't an unimitigated good. There are certainly people who will be negatively impacted who might not have been without this obsession with wide attention to publication.

Oh, the leaks will certainly lead to the deaths of informants and the imprisonment of good people. Probably have already.

I think the WikiLeaks people are pretty happy having this ego-wacky putative leader getting most of the scrutiny. I wonder if distraction might not be his sole purpose.

I think it's pretty sweet how they're getting no coverage at all in our favorite autocracies, though. Our Chinese trading cronies and Arab oil pimps would probably love to castigate US diplomats and whip up some anti-American fervor in the street, but these leaks contain way too many facts about their own countries. Releasing them to the masses might well backfire. Ha ha! Fuck!

Maybe you are thinking of Mario Savio.

It's strange how Wikileaks is playing out much differently than fiction, like Shockwave Rider, for instance. That was a different premise than Wikileaks.

I've been a longtime believer in what is called the interelite conflict theory of political scandals. Danius Maximus (as he was introduced at a couple of Seattle meetups), one of my colleagues in political research, postulated that the content of political scandals is really just business as usual dragged out into the daylight because of an ongoing power struggle between elites.

The classic example in Seattle was the pinball scandals of the late 1960s which only got into play because of a struggle between the liberal (metro/Nixon) and conservative (unincorporated areas/Goldwater/Reagan) factions of the Republican Party.

In other words, the content of the scandal isn't what makes it happen, but rather the context of a power struggle inside the establishment that allows the dirty laundry to be waved around in public. This has considerable explanatory power since the many instances where things get covered up or buried -- there's nobody around to profit by leveraging the wrongdoers out of power.

So the current situation with Wikileaks is interesting because it suggests that there isn't any real power struggle going on over foreign policy - it's getting smoothed over because there isn't any underlying disagreement.

Personally, I've got mixed feelings about mucking around in diplomatic matters. The possibilities of making things worse seem so much greater than making things better.

I wonder if distraction might not be his sole purpose.

Interesting theory, believable.

the content of political scandals is really just business as usual dragged out into the daylight because of an ongoing power struggle between elites.

Seems entirely reasonable. Thanks for this very interesting perspective. With a much less sophisticated understanding, that's kind of what my gut feeling was - that there was something odd about these revelations, because they are so heterogenous and aren't really prompted by anything at stake. When an enterprising journalist digs something up, or a dissatisfied person in the power structure disseminates something, yes, there is usually a reason for its significance; it reflects something acute, burning its way to the surface. With this, WikiLeaks just kind of gathers stuff in batches without regard to significance, so there is all this information but no real sense of what to do with it, since there is no major organizing struggle or issue at hand to resolve.

I've got mixed feelings about mucking around in diplomatic matters. The possibilities of making things worse seem so much greater than making things better.

I've come to agree.