Is this Be Kind to Rapists Day? Because I didn’t get someone a card.
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There are just too many holidays to keep up with now-a-days… be kind to rapist day, May the Fourth be with you, Pi Day, Talk like a pirate day… I can’t keep up!
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Does FTD deliver flowers to prison? Or is it too late?
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Seems like every day lately 
.
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The initial investigation was in August 2010: for rape, in the original Swedish, and in the official record.
https://www.aklagare.se/en/news-and-press/media/the-assange-matter/chronology/
You’re quoting a now-dated article (not the lawyer) describing an opening statement in December 2010, for an extradition trial in the UK that decided it was for an offence equivalent to UK sexual assault. That article also says the original investigation was for a rape complaint.
Can we please stop saying that the original investigation wasn’t for rape?
I offer this in the hope it moves the conversation forward from a repeated falsehood. I don’t think conversation is helped by someone repeating the same provable untruth, over and over. I don’t expect anyone to know what the outcome would be of a trial that hasn’t happened, but saying the complainants must have been fine and weren’t even complaining about sexual assault is some dodgy victim-blaming shit in the face of everything they’ve had to put up with to make (and re-make) their complaints.
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Wait, rapists to to prison? What utopia do you live in, cause I’m heading there! 
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Citizens arrest?
There’s one militia I could get behind.
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Full of women, arrest rapists and throwing them in a make shift jail.
That’s one militia I might join!
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You’re officer material!
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I’m only following the leader here, General!
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This is a history nugget about this topic really, and skip it if you like…
The reason Assange apologists especially love quoting material from December 2010 news articles is that, at the time, the main source of material about the case was a single victim-blaming article from the Daily Mail. It was an article that completely relied on one leaked redacted police report that the Daily Mail acquired about the investigation.
The most important thing to know about the report they were leaked, was that the redacted material (not available to the Mail), was all the direct testimony about the alleged assaults. Basically it was all the non-assault activity of the complainants and Assange. If you read this version of the report, you would wonder what anyone was complaining about. It was irresponsible for the Mail to build a story around it, but there you go.
This is where a lot of the myths like “it was only about a STD test” and “they didn’t describe any assaults” came from. A tabloid article that built their story around a report that didn’t describe the actual alleged crimes.
What makes this pertinent to this thread, is that in an actual Swedish trial, the court will be weighing testimony that no internet speculator has ever read in any newspaper article That’s why confident pronouncements that the women never said something, or only meant something else, are basic hogwash.
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Hey - at least we’re willing to wait for a trial before a verdict. You’re just jumping right to one without giving the women a fair chance to make their case.
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It’s not personal, you were just contradicting the legal historical record when you said the original investigation wasn’t about “rape”. That had nothing to do with your quote, and it was a single mistake of basic historical fact, not opinion.
Everyone makes these kinds of mistakes, and I hope you have a happy day.
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No. You’re just wrong. Get over it.
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Holy shit.
Ok, full disclosure. I spent a year as the Director of Technology Operations for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit responsible for Wikipedia. I managed the entire operations team, literally the folks manning the servers, security, and infrastructure for them, including being physically present in both existing and then-future datacenters used by the foundation (and by extension, Wikipedia itself).
This quoted statement above about CIA control (or any third-party organizational control) of any aspect of Wikipedia is unmitigated horseshit.
Thank you.
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Thanks for the link to the Swedish chronology, that’s very clear and informative (this issue aside).
I imagine the UK law is a great deal like Canadian law (I have a lot of reasons to imagine that) and they probably won’t extradite someone unless the crime the person committed would also be a crime in the UK. They aren’t going to extradite someone to Uganda to be tried for gay sex. So it makes total sense that Assange could be arrested for rape in Sweden and extradited because what he did was sexual assault in the UK.
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I think that’s the relevant bit. Swedish legislation seems to include a lot of things that other jurisdictions would classify as ‘mere’ sexual assault as ‘rape’ but they’re all things that any reasonable jurisdiction would consider a crime of some kind these days.
Whether there are grounds to bring a criminal prosecution against him is something an investigation would determine. Whether he’s actually guilty, would be determined in a trial.
As his supporters in this thread have pointed out (even if that wasn’t quite the point they think they’re making) - if he’d cooperated with the investigation even to the xtent of allowing himself to be interviewed with legal representation, the whole thing might well have been dropped ages ago.
By refusing and making a high-profile fuss about it, he’s pretty much guaranteed that the Swedish prosecutors will continue to try to investigate.
Which of course guarantees that he and his supporters will kick up a fuss about how it’s all a ploy to extradite him to the US.
Except that as plenty of people have pointed out, the UK will happily extradite people to the US (we have a whole extradition treaty which essentially says we have to except in limited circumstances) so why he thought he’d be safer in the UK than in Sweden, I have no idea.
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It is 2019, not 2010. It’s not airy theory anymore. The US has proven in physical reality that they can just request him directly from the UK. They away could.
I’m mystified that anyone could think Sweden asking for him in 2019 has anything to do with getting him to the US.
It’s like a Scientology-level tenet of faith at this point for some people.
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Well, I suppose it suits all sorts of people to foster that narrative. After all, Sweden is just a piddly little nothing country and can’t have any interests or decisions of their own…it must all be to do with the allmighty United States.
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