> Does the US government have some special natural right to toy with the lives of Afghans that Assange does not have?

Your argument appears to boil down to the idea that two wrongs make a right.

Obviously there is more nuance than that. If police kill an active school shooter, is your response “Tsk, tsk, two wrongs don’t make a right”?

In your analogy, Assange publicly outing Afgan translators is equivalent to police killing an active school shooter? Maybe I am misunderstanding.

The argument is simply that the ultimate responsibility falls on the entity that created the problem, and so it is inherently not symmetric. Whereas you made the assumption that two "wrongs" are symmetric and so have equal moral status. Another standard way for explaining this is that when judging something, one ought to account for the actual power dynamics between the conflicting parties. The problem is, prejudice, classism, and bigotry tend to distort what people think and perceive as the actual power dynamics, hence long and controversial news threads like these.

I really appreciate your reply. I learned a lot already. It might be best if I didn't reply, but I can't seem to help myself.

> Another standard way for explaining this is that when judging something, one ought to account for the actual power dynamics between the conflicting parties.

I was ready to get all riled up in response, thinking that Assange had much more power here than the Afgan translators.

> The problem is, prejudice, classism, and bigotry tend to distort what people think and perceive as the actual power dynamics, hence long and controversial news threads like these.

I am settled down now. Yeah, this is not an easy, I appreciate anyone identifying the complexity.

This seems like some real mental gymnastics. Not sure how true the above is, but your argument has some serious holes.

Does the bad entity that is doing bad things have a right to do bad things? No

Does a man exposing the bad entity have a right to do bad things? Also no

I suspect even the vast majority of decision makers in the US government wouldn't have a conversation like that. And even if they somehow did, how does that change how one should feel about what Assange said? "Well, he was psychopathically toying with people's lives, but so do other people."

Assange seemed virtuous at first but it appears he pivoted into an agenda-driven propagandist after Wikileaks grew more successful and he realized what could be done with it.

His "agenda" was exposing the crimes being committed by the United States in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. That's a completely legitimate and even noble agenda for a journalist to have.

Neither you nor the other first-order responses seem to acknowledge that the two actions are not exactly independent - it's not like the US government did a bad thing, and then Assange went and did a completely unrelated bad thing. The problem (as also hinted at in kevinventullo's response to a different subthread) is that the USG set up a situation in which anyone revealing their misdeeds would basically have to reveal the identities of the translators, or at least pay a great cost (in effort, credibility (as they no longer can release quite "original documents") and possibly liability (if the "editorialising" can be spun by lawyers somehow)) to not do so. The situation is thus a lot more similar to someone shooting the hostage (except of course in this case the hostage was not even actually shot!) along with the terrorist that took it and was threatening to blow up the building, then someone shooting a random person because they are a psychopath.