I think the difference with John vs. Assange is that Assange seemed a lot more willing to take political sides/positions, whereas John was more neutral. I have visited Cryptome on/off for something like 25 years now. I have never once got the impression that he is the type of person who would selectively leak information out of political considerations.
He says that, but what do you call being aggressive and hostile to allies -- i.e. threatening military force to take the Panama Canal and Greenland -- while aligning with Russia and China, who play the long game and will pretend to be friendly until the moment they see an opening and take it?
The most genuinely good person I've known, my wife's very devout grandmother, who belonged to the United Church of Christ and whose husband was a preacher for a United Methodist Church, never once went out of her way to proselytize (in my presence at least.) That's not to say she wouldn't talk about God or her beliefs if it was somehow directly relevant to a conversation, but I never saw her trying to "spread the word" just to do so. She emphasized caring for others and the "love your neighbor as yourself," part. Her favorite scripture was the story of the Good Samaritan and that was what she requested to be read at her funeral. She didn't spend time talking about what Jesus wanted, or trying to convince you to believe, she set the example by living it.
The unfortunate part is, in my 38 years of existence, she is possibly the first "real" Christian I've known: Christian through her acts, not just her words. In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus bases judgment not on religious rituals or verbal professions of faith, but on acts of compassion towards others: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the unclothed, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. This seems to emphasize practical love and concern for the vulnerable as true evidence of discipleship, rather than one's ability to proselytize.
Isn't the most important part of the New Testament the Gospels and almost everything that comes after is more about institutional Christianity? Acts, describing the spread of Christianity after Jesus' ascension, with little new information about his teachings. Epistles focus primarily on doctrine, ethics, and church organization rather than Jesus' words and actions. Revelations...well I'll leave that to others to interpret.
If Christianity is built around Jesus, shouldn't his teachings and words be the focus rather than the institution of Christianity itself? I don't think there is anything wrong with proselytizing per se, it's obviously critical to ensuring the survival and expansion of any belief system and from an evolutionary standpoint, ideas that encourage their own reproduction tend to thrive. But it seems misguided to focus on spreading the faith rather than doing all the things Jesus says you should do.
It would indeed be hard to convince me Trump has not committed crimes, considering a jury found that he had and the whole, "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck," thing. Tony Accardo ran the Chicago Outfit for 4-5 decades and never spent a single day in jail. I don't think most people would agree that because he was never convicted (or even charged), he was not committing crimes.
If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
Subjective interpretation is very fundamental to being human and the way our minds work, but the underlying physical reality -- the wavelengths of light reflecting off the shirt -- can be measured objectively. A physicist might say that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, which can be measured and tested.
Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.
Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.
If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.
This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.
I learned this the hard way when I was homeless at 17-18 years old in the middle of Wyoming winters. I had at least had my old Grand Cherokee to sleep in the trunk space, but not enough money for gas to run the heater. I'd pile all my clothes on top of me, but there were always patches where the cold got through and I'd spend so many nights just shaking from the cold. Spent the Christmas of 2004 this way. You are also correct that when it would be sunny (but still cold) the next day, it was an awesome experience. Almost like a ray of hope, as cliche as that sounds. It's crazy what having sunlight can do to improve your mood. That's one reason I loved living in SF later on, there were so many sunny days and I also wasn't homeless lol.