Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador

[Antonio the Sixth]

I feel like a weird, self-contradictory pansy, when I say that I agree with both Eternal Cynic and Gustaf/Al/Nathan. Rape is completely awful and it shouldn't be trivialized and misogyny is completely gross around here; yet it's also fairly obvious he's being pursued so stringently for clearly political reasons and that it simply pisses some people off when nations the West doesn't like do things the West constantly do.

So there, I posted to say that I agree with everybody except Tweed and Opebo. That contributes nothing and yet I wanted to post it anyway.

You are not the only one feeling this way.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Anything that befalls Julian Assange he has brought upon himself with his execrable and cowardly behavior. It's not even so much about the fact that he's a sleazy pervert any more as it about his belief that he is above the law and above anybody's moral standards but his own, which seem to run to 'that which gets my dick wet and/or my face in the newspapers'--such theatrically, giving speeches from balconies! Oh, he's a regular Wallenberg. But that isn't what reality is, is it? That's not the reality of the streets or the reality of the Cross or the reality of anything at all except the pathological need to have some sort of hipster messiah to sublimate fantasies of escape that people are too stupid and uncreative to deal with in any way that's actually constructive or does anybody except Julian Assange's penis which can do no wrong any lick of good. This is exactly why I hate the New Left. It's why my own political attitudes have become more, shall we say, antipositivist and, dare I say, YES! in some ways crypto-theocratic over the years, and whatever one may think that that's worth I'm proud of not being a bog standard Chomskyite or Occupy-type if legitimizing this sort of megalomania and obsession with the sad odysseys of entirely justly persecuted slimeballs is what that leads to.

This is truth.  The Left has this horrible infantile tendency to lionize and venerate anyone who fights the same people they dislike, turning that figure into a hero, a saint, and, inevitably and always, a martyr.  The modern hard Left has more hagiography going on than the Venerable Bede published in a lifetime, and you can tell they're hungering for Assange to die a horrible death so they can pin him up with Trotsky and Che Guevara on their "martyrs in the heroic struggle" Tumblr background while continuing to not actually do anything other than talk about their masturbatory fantasies of life "after the revolution," when suddenly scarcity, hunger, and unemployment will magically disappear.  Assange's sins will, nay, must be pardoned, just like the Trotskyites have forgotten the Kronstadt Mutiny when Trotsky murdered the sailors who helped make the Revolution a reality in the first place, because the idea of Assange is more important to them than Assange the man is.

Please avoid generalizations like this.

Other than that, I entirely agree.