Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Chomsky is flat-out wrong about the way the Swedish justice system works.

You're arguing the letter of the law, Nathan, which really has nothing to do with what everybody's talking about.

I'm trying (to no apparent avail because most people have already made up their minds on whether or not they want to spend their political energies fellating this tiresome person) to explain why the Swedish authorities could not, in fact, have done what people like Chomsky are arguing they ought to have done.

you either 'get it' or you don't, my buddy.  you're naive and idealistic and live largely inside your own head -- submission to anything but that which is imaginary eludes you.

I can't stop laughing. You sure you want to be the one in the firing chamber telling others that they live in their own heads, Tweed? You think I consider 'naive' and 'idealistic' insults? Seriously? Do you know me at all? I own The Little Prince in three different languages and have watched Simoun five times, for God's sake. What is it exactly that you want me to 'submit' to, the idea that one can and should get away with sex crimes if one has enough brain-dead college students with blown-out septa and news-hungry aging activists convinced that one is somehow individually essential for The Revolution? Because the world would be a hell of a lot better off if that way of thinking were imaginary, buster.

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.

Rafael Correa should know better and I'm disappointed in him. I'm saying this about a man who even before this was probably my least favorite South American leader who isn't dear Sebastian down in Valparaiso.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

if I provoke, I hit a nerve -- I succeed.

I'm honestly and deeply pissed off and I'm quite proud of my resulting post in terms of English composition. Well done.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

Oh, believe me, I as a Christian am far from universally opposed to the idea of using perceived exemplars from a half-remembered past as symbols. It's partially what the study of history is inherently about; I've become convinced, for instance, of my inability to completely 'reconstruct' and 'know' the writer I'm studying, who's only been dead for about half as long as she was alive in the first place.

What I think is perverse is when this is applied to every aspect of a person in a whitewashing manner. Augustine and Patrick and Julian (the late-medieval English one!) and all the other saints, and Bodhidharma and the other teachers and patriarchs, were idealized partially through of a narrative of recognizing and working with or through flaws. That may not always come across in popular piety but it was always part of the received understanding. I don't think the modern process of secular canonization (from the Left or otherwise, but I'm more familiar with it from the Left because I'm, broadly speaking, on the Left) has the same capacity to accommodate that recognition of flaws, and I also think it lacks the discernment to separate the flawed but admirable (I'd include for instance Victor Jara in this category, although I'd be hesitant to include certain elements of the government he supported) from those who are just personally godawful, no matter whose uncomfortable secrets they're publishing on the Internet.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Thank you, Tweed. I doubt it'll staunch my key concerns but I'll make sure to peruse it at some point this evening.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

With respect to you as well, opebo, I actually have extreme emotional responses about most things, I just don't usually unload about them unless I'm in the zone, so to speak, and the way this was being talked about put me in said zone.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Or perhaps to them rape charges are a bigger issue than the putative wellbeing of one particular individual who has delusions of grandeur about his having pissed off the US government.

Yeah, as I said, different priorities.  They, like you, can't see the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is the fact that we've got people supporting a sleazy sex addict's attempts to flee Swedish justice, of all justices, because they like (their perceptions of) his political beliefs.

I think that's unfair to opebo.  He would probably support Assange's attempts to flee rape charges even if he didn't like his political beliefs.

I don't think even opebo would consider himself, individually, to constitute 'the bigger picture'.

What I'm saying here is that I don't think opebo would consider Assange to be a sleazy sex addict, nor what he's accused of to be something that he should be prosecuted for, regardless of what Assange's political beliefs are.  Remember, we're dealing with someone who thought Polanski was guilty of nothing more than bad judgment.

Oh, I know that, I just don't think that his personal considerations regarding that are the 'bigger picture' that he's talking about.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yeah, the bigger picture I'm talking about is simply that the marauding hegemon is at least in some sense a threat to or having an effect on us - one weedy guy's sexual behavior, however bad, really is an irrelevancy from 99.9% of the population's perspective.

I agree with you insofar as that, in an ideal world, state treatment of Assange's escapades wouldn't have to be handled in any manner more public or consuming of resources than treatment of anybody else's. We just (obviously) disagree on what that treatment should be, and on whether or not that ship has irrevocably sailed due to the nature of the situation.