I Have No Words... The Rape Threads Meet The Authoritarian Threads...

[struggle4progress]

49. The man seems to have had sex with two different women within the space of several days and seems

to have offended both of them enough by his treatment that they filed a police complaint

Within a week or so, Assange suddenly left Sweden when the authorities contacted his lawyer seeking a second interview with him. The recorded impression of the magistrate at Belmarsh, in questioning the lawyer regarding the details of that, was that Assange's lawyer was evasive and dishonest

Assange then launched a campaign through his close friends, such as the totalitarian anti-semite who goes by the pseudonym "Israel Shamir," to portray the women as part of a covert CIA scheme to entrap him. The conspiracy theories pushed in public by Assange and in lawyers thereafter become so unhinged that they did not dare to argue those theories during the subsequent UK extradition hearings, for fear of being laughed out of court should the contrary testimony of their own witnesses be thrown back in their faces. I have no idea whether the man would be found guilty under Swedish law, but in four separate proceedings at three levels of the UK courts, the courts found he was wanted in Sweden for proseciution on sexual assault allegations and ordered his extradition, at which point Assange neglected his remaining appeals and jumped bail, stiffing his supporters of substantial sums

The impression is that the man is a histrionic and immature cad. Whether or not he is a cad, of course, does not prove or disprove the sexual allegations, nor does it determine whether or not he might have done something useful here or there

But attention to facts, and the development of careful analyses based on actual facts, is critical for leftists, as well as for liberals or progressives, if we want to win any of the important struggles ahead of us. The reality is that Assange is not a friend of the left (he describes himself as a free market libertarian); he is not a friend of those who want to democratize society (his friend "Israel Shamir" used some of the Wikileaks cables to help bolster a dictator); he is not a friend of those concerned about climate change (he has taken credit for release of the so-called "Climategate" used by rightwingers to create a carefully-timed phony scandal that scuttled international progress on carbon emissions) ...

Again, of course, whether or not I regard him as a friend, has no bearing on the sexual allegations, nor does it determine whether he might ever have done anything usefu

But he and his lawyers spread extraordinarily silly conspiracy theories, that prevent people from thinking clearly. And \it's not fine with me when people coordinate to spread bullshizz that accomplishes nothing but fugging up people's thinking