And while he’s “illegally detained” he’s getting conjugal visits from Pam Anderson. Somehow I doubt that will continue once he’s no longer a cause célèbre.
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I’m afraid I have zero sympathy, because he’s using his Anti-American Imperialism to escape from chargers of rape. He may have done some good with wikileaks, but he’s an egomanicial asshole.
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Yup.
Assange is an increasingly obvious part of the global far right.
White genocide bullshit in thin disguise.
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Our group was scheduled for must-have sexual harrassment training today, but too many people were exhausted and sick. When asked if it was canceled, my boss wrote, apparently from his deathbed, “is canx”.
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Assange is not a sock puppet, he’s a fully paid up member of the libertarian death cult. To me it looks similar but much more pitiable. I grew up with these guys, fellow travelers in technology and generational time. I guess they just decided to follow the Law of the Asshole rather than meet and talk to people who aren’t assholes. It’s not that hard; I managed it.
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Wuuuuuuuut???
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My guesses about what’s in the story:
Franken did a lot more than he let on and while he was in office
A good number of “family values” Republicans are gay and have hit on or molested staffers (this is based on a documentary I just watched)
There’s a whole lot more than 1 in 10 who do this. Journalist just be gettin’ the ball a rollin’.
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This is the article linked in the previously posted article about Congress’s system to address harassment claims. Looks like this office is busy despite being ineffective and secretive.
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I suspect Assange is not a nice person. Given what has happened to him it would be amazing if he was. The Scots justice system has a useful fourth verdict of “not proven”* and I think it applies in his case; the US “criminal justice system” which in some ways resembles that of Japan or Saudi Arabia means he can’t get a fair trial, so we’re in limbo. The UK has an extremely one sided extradition treaty with the US, both our Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary are idiots. So things won’t change.
However, this particular post is not of itself far right. The facts are there on the ground, the problem is how you interpret them.
If you are of a progressive persuasion you say “Ah, getting rid of paternalistic religions, reducing child mortality and giving women reproductive control naturally reduces the birthrate, which is a real positive. But the lack of younger people to do jobs then results in migration which, if handled properly, is also a net positive provided a number of those migrants eventually take their new skills and understanding back to benefit their original communities. If handled wrongly, we risk depriving developing societies of exactly the people they need to develop.”
If you’re of the far right you say “evil mooslims come to our country and then outbreed us so they can take over”.
If you read the entire thread, Assange is saying that the low replacement rate is depriving other countries of carers - because there are many care jobs that are being filled by young immigrant women at the age when they ought to be participating in their own societies. And he blames global capitalism.
When my mother was in a care home my father got to know the staff quite well, and was very aware that some of them had left behind families and children in, say, the Philippines in order to work in the UK. He was well aware that they did the work better than English people would have done, but was aware of the unfairness (and he has been out East for several years, so knows a bit about those societies).
It’s a complex and important problem which AGW will only exacerbate, and I don’t think Assange is pursuing any kind of right wing agenda. But I will listen to anyone who tells me I’m wrong.
Innocent, guilty, not proven, retrial.
I thought she was dead.
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I mean, it’s only been a white nationalist hallmark for decades to the point that the The Handmaid’s Tale used it as the excuse the theocratic government used to oppress women and racially purge Gilead.
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And the United States government used it, and racial theories, to restrict immigration starting in the late 19th century and escalating in the early 20th century. And MOST governments have inherited restrictions on certain groups immigrating, especially disabled people.
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This is going to become one of our longest threads, I think:
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Nope, quite alive. I sort of keep track of what she’s up to, in a totally non-stalkerish way. I find her a fascinating person.
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Maybe it’s just her career that’s dead.
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It wasn’t the justice system, it was being raised in a cult that treated women like shit, like blonde breeding pods. Did he do this particular crime? Or is it that he’s thrown in with the worst, most infantile daddy-figures (billionaire dictators) that gives him no slack from so many? And so much help from said dictators.
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Aaaaaand add Dustin Hoffman to the list. Three separate accusations now, apparently.
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Most people think, if they do at all, of the Quakers as being a progressive, egalitarian organisation. Yet I have seen a Quaker meeting not only accept an abuser but write a statement on his behalf for magistrates to read. What’s more, almost everybody at the meeting that did this was female. The meeting concerned was a subcommittee to which I, and a few others of similar views, was not invited.
The most extraordinary thing I find is that the culture can be so ingrained that apparently intelligent, well educated women - one of them a graduate of the same university I went to - can actually go beyond acquiescence to enabling.
Most of these women were the daughters of well off and quite powerful men.
Shortly after this incident, I left the Quakers because I realised that the real, fundamental problem is conservatism in the social sense, and religions tend to reinforce it. I am aware that at different places and different times things can be different - but one has to make a decision about one’s own place and time.
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It is a major problem in sociology. If you tell people the truth about what is happening, some of them will want to leave it alone, some will want to manage it, some will want to put a stop to it and some will want to misrepresent it to gain power.
So what do you do? Not try to understand what is going on? Only allow properly certified experts to comment - oh dear, we know where that goes (Nazi justice, Nazi racial science, the NKVD, control of who gets tenure in universities and so on.)
Psychology and medicine have a dirty past; lies about the intellectual and emotional inferiority of non-white people, supposed scientific medicine being used to justify racist ideas. Anthropology has worked until fairly recently on the basis that “we” - Westerners - went off to learn about the funny customs of non-white people (who it was hoped would, by their backwardness, also explain the fossil record of hominids.) Part of the problem is interpretation; if black Americans don’t do very well on IQ tests, perhaps it’s time to fix the IQ tests. If some Muslim tribes in Pakistan and Afghanistan act in a very patriarchal way, perhaps we should compare them to the strange Protestant tribes in the US South and identify the common elements.
But when it comes to straightforward facts like different reproductive rates in different ethnic groups, which also has real world consequences, surely we should be doing impact analysis not only on our own society but on those from which people are migrating? In Europe (and the UK is still in Europe, it’s on the Continental Shelf and not even the most idiotic Brexiter - which is a pretty extreme idiocy - is going to change that) we have laws against hate speech. They need to be enforced better, but at some point we have to tell people straight that our society constituted as it is will collapse without immigration, and stop the people who lie about it. We can’t do that without facts.
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