I think what this is doing is causing many on the left to re-evaluate Assange, in particular whether or not they are willing to overlook some of his more unsavoury or dodgy personal qualities. His unwillingness to curate his dumps of information has always been problematic simply from the perspective of trying to locate what's actually important, and his conflation of curation with censorship is bizarre. But I certainly think I was too ready to look past the disclosure of some information back during the first major dumps because I took pleasure in the US being on the back foot. Personal information of low-level individuals was outright unnecessary; it contributed literally nothing to his objectives, while actively harming those it exposed.
I also find his failure to actually practice his own ideology of "radical transparency" to be a huge fucking red flag. The man's behaviour in the last four years has increasingly soured me towards him. I have always been profoundly uncomfortable with the rape allegations, which have been so poorly handled by both sides as to compound the situation of the women involved. And it must be said that exposing war crimes is a far cry from releasing data dumps that favour the goals of the more powerful authoritarian rulers of our time and may put in power an actual fascist - whether in active collusion or a happy convergence of objectives (I believe the latter). Putin may not be the most deplorable current dictator but Fuckknob McGee in Small Third World State lacks the global reach of Putin. And I am rather disturbed that some on the left now view Putin's Russia with more sympathy than they do with established Western democratic institutions. Fellow-travelling with the Soviet Union made more sense, and I suspect I would have done so in its early years had I been alive then. But nothing of Putin's Russia bears any resemblance to left-wing ideology.
My biggest critique, besides the unnecessary tiled album covers background, is the failure to maintain some continuity - a nod to the site's traditional blue should have been included.
