There are many thousands of people imprisoned in Uzbekistan alone who should not be imprisoned and who suffer much worse conditions than even the genuine horrors of Wandsworth being visited on Julian Assange. But the Assange case has implications for ever deteriorating Western freedoms which should not be overlooked.
Then there are many war criminals who ought to be in jail and who are not. Most prominent of these are Bush, Blair, Cheney, Straw and their crew. A minor figurewho ought to be in jail is Anna Ardin. Here are two tweets she published after being “raped” by Julian Assange:
‘Julian wants to go to a crayfish party, anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow? #fb’
‘Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing! #fb’
She subsequently deleted and tried to expunge those. I doff my hat to Rixstep:
http://rixstep.com/1/20101001,01.shtml
For another avowed feminist trying to bring Assange down, analyse the use of language in this article by the Guardian’s useless Helen Piddle. For a worm like her to use words like bizarre and raggle-taggle in relation to John Pilger really defies rationality.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/08/julian-assange-celebrity-supporters
“you can block that image and the page loads much faster.”
— Clark
Woohoo! works a treat.
BTW, Sarah Palin has called Assange unAmerican. You couldn’t make it up.
Tony_opmoc, yes, the techs that keep the ‘net running will most likely oppose ‘net censorship at the technical level. However, the companies that employ them will probably go with the governments. Management probably don’t know how to configure stuff; maybe the techs should just lie to them.
Alan – it is as I suspected. You won’t answer my questions, nor apologise for your incivility. I presume therefore you are here just to disrupt, which is hardly constructive.
I regularly tackle religious extremism (anno), given up on anti-semites (several of them banned) and I’ve regularly commented against misogyny (jimmygiro). Your attempt to paint the whole of this blog as women haters or “loopy religious fundamentalists and their apologists” is as bad as Larry’s suggestion that everyone is an anti-semite or a 9/11 theorist. It just ain’t so, even if you want it to be.
Still, I guess your approach is easier than actually talking to people, and discussing things in detail. That takes time and patience. But, like Larry, I think you could engage and disagree intelligently if you tried.
US politicians, Sarah Palin and Michael Huckabee ought to have Interpol warrants issued against them for incitement to terrorism and incitement to murder.
Jon, excellent post at 2:06pm (in relation to my views on the matter, anyway). Yes, I think if Alan is saying that he disagrees with what Wikileaks has done and agrees with the official view, it would be useful for him simply to say so and then explain why.
I think that Alan does have a point, though, wrt misogyny in that there have been manifestations of misogyny on this thread. I think that such manifestations – with which I, and I’m sure you and many others hereabouts, disagree (and I share technicolour’s frustration on this) – actually help imperialism, both directly and indirectly by discrediting anyone who expresses support for Wikileaks’ actions. This surely serves the interests of those who would like to have such leaks shut-down forever.
I agree with you, Jon (and in this respect with the author of the article Alan pasted; I should say again that if we all started to paste all the articles to which we link, this website would become barely readable) that these are two entirely separate issues and the attempt to conflate is precisely what must be avoided.
It is in essence a great distraction from the central issue here, which is the prosecution of industrial war and the subterfuges which form part of that process.
You’re absolutely right, Jon. I really don’t have the time or patience to discuss in detail. And I can’t really remember who’s a misogynist or an anti-semite on this blog, but I know there’s a fair few out there.
As for Wikileaks. I have no real feelings either way. Just amused by some people’s tendency on this site to believe that someone you agree with politically must be an angel personally (and vice versa).
Equally amused by all the others who think he’s a member of Mossad.
But on another tack, can I just say:
Nick Clegg, Dick Head!
CheebaCow at December 9, 2010 12:24 PM
Great post – absolutely so.
20,000 students estimated to be in vicinity of HoC. Being kettled and batoned. Mounted police (at least 20) have made charges at the students. It is getting nasty as the riot police press and press and it gets dark.
The kettling is being called
‘containment’ by Scotland Yard. Sky are referring to the students as anarchists!
Live on Freeview 80 and 82. The fascists drone on in the HoC on Ch 81. So far one LD junior Scottish minister Mike Crockart will vote against and will therefore resign his post.
“slut shaming and misogyny”:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/09/nobody-gains-from-misogynist-defence-of-assange
“In a twist to the story it has emerged that Amazon, which last week refused to host Wikileaks, is selling a Kindle version of the documents Wikileaks has leaked”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11957367
I agree, Alan at 4:30pm, but well, somebody does gain and that is those who have power. But you see this is typical of the way power works. They’ll incinerate hundreds of thousands of people of all genders without even a second thought, they’ll happily help their pals in the elite global social classes rob people of billions of pounds/dollars and of their jobs, houses and security.
Then these same liars, robbers and murderers will attempt to focus discussion around their allegation that someone key in the oppositional grouping who has embarrassed them somehow (by possibly allowing mass exposure of some of their internal communications) has done something unrelatedly criminal and certain to being down approbation – something like rape, child porn.
And they know that the champagne journalists – many of whom seem to be related by blood or marriage to one another and nearly all of whom are in thrall to Big Money and set the parameters for discourse so that left, right and centre mean nothing – will lap it up and will enjoy focusing on this narrowly-defined (i.e. defined by sexual relations and not by pay differentials, the fact that war kills women, civilian men and children primarily and so on) form of gender politics. Like identity politics (with its increasingly narrowly-defined set of concerns), this narrow, ‘Hollywoody’ form of gender politics – it could be termed and has been termed ‘bourgeois feminism’ – conveniently replaced economic critique sometime during, surprise, surprise, the 1980s. Focussing on this because means that the, the champagne journalists, do not have critique the industrial mass murder in which those in power engage and from which they derives their power.
LOIC is a botnet tool that you can download and install. It is being used for DDOS attacks upon PayPal, Amazon, and other companies that have let down WikiLeaks.
‘Ms Thierault [of Sophos Ltd] said downloading and installing the LOIC attack tool was very risky.
“No-one should download unknown code on to their system,” she said. “You’re giving access to your computer to a complete stranger.”‘
Hey, I thought unverifiable code was the norm on commercially available computers? Sophos are saying that’s not good now? And it isn’t “unknown code” anyway; they’ve published the source code.
The other side of the coin of this dynamic is represented by someone like the obnoxious broadcaster/ celebrity Jeremy Clarkson, who is a sort of right-wing populist British shock-jock, or Robert Kilroy-Silk (the same).
But the important thing to keep in mind is that, just like the ‘controversies’ thrown-up by reality TV (eg. racism in Big Brother) it is all theatre, it is all distraction and spectacle, it all serves imperial interests.
Clark,
Its essentially like providing a utility service – like water or gas down pipes or electricity down wires – except its Worldwide.
Providing the customer pays the bills he remains connected, even if someone along the connection path doesn’t like his politics. The only thing that will stop him getting the services he is paying for, is if he gets arrested and ends up in jail.
The US Governement or any Government for that matter who attempts to control the data flow will have very limited success unless they destroy the total physical infrastructure – which in itself would be extra-ordinarily difficult – because the entire design was based on the concept of maintaining communications during a nuclear war. This only goes to show the US Military have actually done something useful since WWII.
Also conectivity is so good, that it doesn’t matter a toss where business servers are physically located providing they are secure and have direct access to the core network backbone.
All that mass of “dark” fibre that was prematurely built over 10 years ago is lighting up. Small UK companies are picking up new business all over the World – even from Australia.
How the Fuck can the US stop that? The more they try the more business they will lose.
Why risk having your company servers based in the US, when there are a bunch of raving nutter’s in the US Government threatening to disrupt it – or cut you off?
Much safer to be based in the UK?
Well that’s what Julian Assange thought until yesterday – but maybe he has still got his “get out of jail free card” stuffed in his back pocket.
Tony
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/09/nobody-gains-from-misogynist-defence-of-assange
There’s nothing misogynist about attacking misandrist Swedish rape law.
But men would certainly benefit from less anti male law of the type they have in Sweden.
On the other hand it does look like these feminazis are getting worried now that their little anti male schemes are getting so much exposure. There have been quite a few articles of this nature in the Guardian and Independent in recent days.
The very reason there are so many more cases of false rape allegations in Sweden as against the other Scandinavian countries is precisely because it’s so easy in Sweden to make false allegations without penalty. So easy indeed that one of Assange’s accusers openly advocated and explained how to make false allegations against any boyfriend you were pissed off with for other reasons.
The feminazis have only themselves to blame. Like all fascists they just push their luck too far and suddenly it blows up in their face.
Maybe instead of gasing on here we need to do something practical. The students need help; their lives are about to be stuffed with no hope of getting mortgages with a mountain of debt and as a consequence little hope of starting families.
They’re actually doing something and being beaten up and charged at by the police. Surely we’re not too far from Tiananmen Square.
Clark, I wouldn’t run any denial of service system on your own connection, even if you trust the source code. It’s probably illegal to operate, and of course it hits your ISP with a larger operating bill, even though you don’t also have a grudge against them.
Many years ago I operated a similar thing against spammer websites from my home adsl connection. At that time its legality was probably less clear, and in any case spammers are not legally powerful people (unlike Paypal, Visa et al). But it would have racked up bills unfairly along the intermediate paths, so I stopped doing it.
Ruth: “Surely we’re not too far from Tiananmen Square.”
I’m much closer to Tiananmen Square than you are. But if you’re thinking of going down to help them out I think they’re actually at Parliament Square.
Jon: “Clark, I wouldn’t run any denial of service system on your own connection, even if you trust the source code. It’s probably illegal to operate,”
According to Wikipedia:
“In the Police and Justice Act 2006, the United Kingdom specifically outlawed denial-of-service attacks and set a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison”
“The feminazis have only themselves to blame. Like all fascists they just push their luck too far and suddenly it blows up in their face.”
FemiNazis!!!!!!1!
Jon, neither would I, but Sophos do seem to be ramping up the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
Penny Liddle :”the uncomfortable truth is that sometimes good guys rape”.
Liddle is just a hack whose output doesn’t amount anything lke a considered view, but I would posit the above quotation points to her having some fairly serious problems of her own, in terms of how she views the opposite sex.
Ruth,
My daughter can’t afford to go to them, she’s stacking shelves so she can afford to pay for some heating – but her boyfriend will probably be there – he’s a nutter who just loves this kind of thing.
And anyway when are the OAP riots scheduled for? We’ve got more to complain about than the bloody students.
Not only are they stealing our pensions (particularly the womens) by raising the retirement age – which is totally outrageous as the pensions have been paid for with an agreed contract – 60 for women 65 for men. They are also planning further massive cuts to company pensions. Not only that, they are seriously trying to bump us all off by paying incentives to doctors to prescribe bloody anti-cholesterol drugs – amongst others, that we don’t need and which have been proven to lower life expectancy.
All this stuff about our country can’t afford it is a load of bollocks. Its just that the bastards have nicked all the bloody money.
How come we could afford a Free NHS, Free Education – the bloody works just after WWII when we really were completely bankrupt and had to rebuild everything.
Its all a massive depopulation scam. These twats are literally committing mass genocide by multiple methods and its all completely unnecessary.
Tony
@angrysoba – thanks, interesting. I’m pleased that my action against spammers was prior to 2006, and that for boring technical reasons, while it probably cost them a few hundred gigabytes of wasted bandwidth per person, it wasn’t actually a DDoS. So I don’t think plod will want to talk to me about it 🙂
Compromat or fake compromat? Nobody here knows, unless Craig Murray knows and if he knows he’s not telling.
See Anna Ardin, one of the complainants, who sometimes calls herself Bernardin, has gone to Israel to mediate as a Christian between Jews and Palestinians. About as totally bloody futile as it would have been to have the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem mediate between Nazis and Jews.
Oh and Anna’s no longer cooperating with Swedish police. So it looks as though St. Julian will soon be released to wild public acclaim. Yeah give him the Nobel Peace Prize, he surely deserves it every bit as much as the President of Assassination, Inc. or weatherman Al Gore.
Interesting though, despite all the revelations, not one US politician has resigned, not one US soldier, diplomat or bureaucrat has resigned, no one US alliance has been revised, not one single aspect of US foreign policy has been altered.
But there’s one thing that’ll change. There’ll be legislation to assure tighter surveillance and control of the internet. So like the pathetic underpants bomber, who brought X-ray scanners to every American airport, Wikilkeaks has accomplished something.
The unironic use of meaningless neologisms like ‘feminazis’ and (from another recent thread) ‘Sato-Zionists’ (or variations and mutations of these), apart from rendering a certain hyperbolic hilarity to the discourse, merely debase any rational critiques of, respectively, feminism(s) and Zionism.
We could engage in a sort of Leftist Fringe-Group Pythonesque competition to invent the most all-inclusive and insulting quasi-political insult of all time… ‘Lilithite-Beelzebubbian Shitebag’ being the first (and rather meek) one, in pseudo-Aramaic… but really, life’s too short.
“The students need help; their lives are about to be stuffed with no hope of getting mortgages with a mountain of debt and as a consequence little hope of starting families.”
Ruth, you’re under a terrible misconception: that post-secondary education actually matters.
In fact, it’s a near total scam (a) that keeps young adults out of the job market for anything up to a dozen years, thereby masking Britain’s industrial decline and loss of decent employment opportunities, (b) provides employment for tens of thousands of second, third-, fourth- and fifth-rate, mostly lazy, lib-left academics who provide students with totally crap role models, and (c) provides students not with an education but a diploma of competence in the universal discipline of Multiple Choice.
The huge increase in tuition is a excellent thing. If people have to pay the full cost of the crap the universities offer, fewer will be gulled into a bad bargain. They should take the cash they’ll save and start a business.
And Tony’s exactly right: “Its all a massive depopulation scam. These twats are literally committing mass genocide.” First a girl’s gotta get a higher education, then she’s gotta pay off her student loans, then she’s gotta get the down payment on a house, and then — menopause.
But don’t worry, There’s plenty of people in Africa, the ME and Asia who’ll come to Britain and work in the healthcare industry or whatever looking after the old bastards who own the place now. They don’t mind doing this because they know that their own children will end up owning the place. They already own half of Leicester, once the most prosperous industrial town in Britain, and soon they’ll own most of London.
But I suppose any white folks left will get used to Sharia law in time.
Penny Liddle :”the uncomfortable truth is that sometimes good guys rape”.
Why do these feminazis insist on using the term rape, when neither woman claimed rape nor did they want him even charged with rape? All the younger one wanted was that he take an aids test. This case is being pursued by a Swedish prosecutor who merely wants to talk to him. Even she hasn’t charged him with anything.
This is all purely political, and even if it has nothing to do with US politics it has a lot to do with internal Swedish politics and efforts there to extend their rape law.
The younger woman was told by the Swedish prosecutor that it was not for her to decide whether she was raped or not. Since she is not a jurist she can’t make the decision. Nanny Ny the Swedish prosecutor will decide whether she was raped or not.
No wonder the younger woman no longer wants to have anything to do with the “investigation”.
That’s how barmy feminazism becomes if you let it. Good riddance Harriet Halfwit and her ilk.
But beware all the other dangerous halfwits still out there wittering on about issues they know nothing about but even if they did, so little ability to logically think through the issues involved.
Step forward Penny Liddle et al.
That’s not Alfred posting as LOL is it?
“Frequently the term misogynist is used in a looser sense as a term of derision to describe anyone who holds an unpopular or distasteful view about women as a group. A man who considers himself “a great lover of women,” therefore, might somewhat paradoxically be termed a misogynist by those who consider his treatment of women sexist.”
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Misogynist
“Hey, I love women.”
Oddly enough, Alan, the men I’ve seen/heard say that tend to prefer them horizontal and mute. I rather suspect Alfred is like that too.