Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Nemesis6 on December 03, 2010, 04:25:29 pm
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Apparently having consensual sex in Sweden without a condom is punishable by a term of imprisonment of a minimum of two years for rape. That is the basis for a reinstitution of rape charges against WikiLeaks figurehead Julian Assange that is destined to make Sweden and its justice system the laughing stock of the world and dramatically damage its reputation as a model of modernity.
Sweden’s Public Prosecutor’s Office was embarrassed in August this year when it leaked to the media that it was seeking to arrest Assange for rape, then on the same day withdrew the arrest warrant because in its own words there was “no evidence”. The damage to Assange’s reputation is incalculable. More than three quarters of internet references to his name refer to rape. Now, three months on and three prosecutors later, the Swedes seem to be clear on their basis to proceed. Consensual sex that started out with a condom ended up without one, ergo, the sex was not consensual.
For three months Assange had been waiting in vain to hear whether media statements by and for the two female “victims” that there was no fear or violence were going to be embellished so the charges might be carried forward due to greater seriousness. Such statements would stop a rape charge in any Western country dead in its tracks. Rape is a crime of violence, duress or deception. You can rape someone by deluding them into thinking you are someone else or by drugging them or by reason of their young age but essentially it’s a crime of violence.
The women here are near to and over 30 and have international experience, some of it working in Swedish government embassies. There is no suggestion of drugs nor identity concealment. Far from it. Both women boasted of their celebrity connection to Assange after the events that they would now see him destroyed for.
That further evidence hasn’t been confected to make the charges less absurd does Sweden no credit because it has no choice in the matter. The phenomena of social networking through the internet and mobile phones constrains Swedish authorities from augmenting the evidence against Assange because it would look even less credible in the face of tweets by Anna Ardin and SMS texts by Sofia Wilén boasting of their respective conquests after the “crimes”.
In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the “crime” and tweeted to her followers that she is with the “the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”. Go on the internet and see for yourself. That Ardin has sought unsuccessfully to delete these exculpatory tweets from the public record should be a matter of grave concern. That she has published on the internet a guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends ever graver. The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Niether Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of rape.
But then neither Arden nor Wilén complained to the police but rather “sought advice”, a technique in Sweden enabling citizens to avoid just punishment for making false complaints. They sought advice together, having collaborated and irrevocably tainted each other’s evidence beforehand. Their SMS texts to each other show a plan to contact the Swedish newspaper Expressen beforehand in order to maximise the damage to Assange. They belong to the same political group and attended a public lecture given by Assange and organised by them. You can see Wilén on the YouTube video of the event even now.
Of course, their celebrity lawyer Claes Borgström was questioned as to how the women themselves could be essentially contradicting the legal characterisation of Swedish prosecutors; a crime of non-consent by consent. Borgström’s answer is emblematic of how divorced from reality this matter is. “They (the women) are not jurists”. You need a law degree to know whether you have been r-ped or not in Sweden. In the context of such double think, the question of how the Swedish authorities propose to deal with victims who neither saw themselves as such nor acted as such is easily answered: You’re not a Swedish lawyer so you wouldn’t understand anyway. The consent of both women to sex with Assange has been confirmed by prosecutors.
Proposed reforms of Swedish rape laws would introduce a test of whether the unequal power relations between the parties might void the sincerely expressed consent of one party. In this case, presumably, the politically active Ardin, with experience fielding gender equity complaints as a gender equity officer at Uppsala University, had her will suborned by Assange’s celebrity. The prosecutor coming as she does from a prosecution “Development Unit” could achieve this broadening of the law during Assange’s trial so he can be convicted of a crime that didn’t exist at the time he allegedly committed it. She would need to. There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along.
A great deal more damning evidence is yet to be revealed about what passes for legal process in Sweden, such as Assange’s lawyers having not received a single official document until November 18, 2010 (and then in Swedish language contrary to European Law) and having to learn about the status of investigations through prosecution media announcements but make no mistake: it is not Julian Assange that is on trial here but Sweden and its reputation as a modern and model country with rules of law.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/02/when-it-comes-to-assange-r-pe-case-the-swedes-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/
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They're just mad because a moose bit them. :p
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Wow. What the hell is the Swedish government doing?
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Wow. What the hell is the Swedish government doing?
Taking bribes, failing.
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In China it is illegal to have more than one child...
...In Sweden, it is illegal to procreate.
:lol:
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In Soviet Russia, condom breaks you!
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I suppose that's the loophole, you have to use the condom... But if you break it, there you go.
:P
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Crap, I was hoping these charges were legit and they'd be able to ring up that asshat for something. Guess it's up to the State Department now. :p
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Given that the article almost seems to be insinuating that the law was changed so as to prosecute Assange, no, you should not hope that said charges were legit. That's corruption of the worst kind - chaging the law so as to suit the temporary purposes of the government. And in turn, everyone else suffers.
What they should do, if they really want Assange gone, is leak some sensitive information pertaining to Russia in his name. Then they can get the KGB to kill him in an unhuman and nefarious manner. If nothing else, it's a great story to tell at the Gates.
:lol:
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Sweden’s Public Prosecutor’s Office was embarrassed in August this year when it leaked to the media that it was seeking to arrest Assange for rape
(http://www.hexellent.com/files/80/trollface.jpg)
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IF I SEE THAT ****ING TROLL ONE MORE TIME....!
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Given that the article almost seems to be insinuating that the law was changed so as to prosecute Assange, no, you should not hope that said charges were legit. That's corruption of the worst kind - chaging the law so as to suit the temporary purposes of the government. And in turn, everyone else suffers.
What they should do, if they really want Assange gone, is leak some sensitive information pertaining to Russia in his name. Then they can get the KGB to kill him in an unhuman and nefarious manner. If nothing else, it's a great story to tell at the Gates.
:lol:
Didn't the Russians kill some ex-pat in England via alpha-radiation poisoning by putting polonium in his tea? That's pretty inhumane and nefarious. It is also like something from a James Bond movie now that I think about it.
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In other news, Wikileaks got their DNS hosting pulled.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11907641
Most interesting was this quote from the DNS company responsible.
It said the domain wikileaks.org had become the target of "multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks".
"These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites," it said.
"Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider," it added.
Am I missing something or have EveryDNS.net just said that Wikileaks deserved the downtime for being stupid enough to have expected EveryDNS to have done their job? :p
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www.wikileaks.ch
:ha:
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www.wikileaks.ch
:ha:
(http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/3653/blanksp23.jpg)
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Given that the article almost seems to be insinuating that the law was changed so as to prosecute Assange, no, you should not hope that said charges were legit. That's corruption of the worst kind - chaging the law so as to suit the temporary purposes of the government. And in turn, everyone else suffers.
What they should do, if they really want Assange gone, is leak some sensitive information pertaining to Russia in his name. Then they can get the KGB to kill him in an unhuman and nefarious manner. If nothing else, it's a great story to tell at the Gates.
:lol:
Didn't the Russians kill some ex-pat in England via alpha-radiation poisoning by putting polonium in his tea? That's pretty inhumane and nefarious. It is also like something from a James Bond movie now that I think about it.
They stabbed one guy with a poisoned umbrella.
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If it is silly but works, it's not silly.
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Yeah, but there's just something humiliating about being killed like you were a plot device in a James Bond movie.
"We could just shoot you, but we think you need to die in a more complex and contrived manner just so we can prove how eeeeviil we are." :lol:
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I suppose it's still better than an exploding cigar...
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Given that the article almost seems to be insinuating that the law was changed so as to prosecute Assange, no, you should not hope that said charges were legit. That's corruption of the worst kind - chaging the law so as to suit the temporary purposes of the government. And in turn, everyone else suffers.
No, I meant that I hoped the charges against him were legitimate enough to throw his ass in jail; I didn't know anything about the absurdity of the prosecution itself until this thread was made. I just want to see the guy busted for something, since he's a general grade-A douche****.
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I'm going to say that murderous plots are inherently evil, but this is the sort of thing where a government intelligence agency ultimately will be more effective than a crackpot plan to arrest the man for something, where that something has the likelihood of amounting to a trumped-up by-law akin to "no smoking on a curb Tuesday morning." The danger is then that you accidentally may make a martyr where you don't want one. Then again, martyrs are typically not wanted by the prosecuting party.
And I wonder, considering all the information he's leaked about the US... Where does he stand on the CIA's hitlist?
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If he stood anywhere, he'd be dead. You don't mess with the CIA. :nervous: :shaking:
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Well, I think it's quite clear he has made a clear stance that he's willing to release information which is damaging to the US government and not consider the repercussions of those actions.
Perhaps on some level, actions such as these will make governments be more accountable for their behavior, but over the short term, he's putting a lot of people at risk. As such, I think it's only a matter of time before he gets a knife in the back.
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If he stood anywhere, he'd be dead. You don't mess with the CIA. :nervous: :shaking:
Tell that to Castro!
The CIA is notorious for being really bad at killing people.
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Perhaps on some level, actions such as these will make governments be more accountable for their behavior, but over the short term, he's putting a lot of people at risk. As such, I think it's only a matter of time before he gets a knife in the back.
I agree, there's got to be at least one country out of the whole bunch he's affected that's capable of doing it. :P
EDIT: Seems Wikileaks are in a bit more trouble. (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/wikileaks-faces-donations-blow-as-it-fights-for-survival/story-fn3dxity-1225965828864)
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Perhaps on some level, actions such as these will make governments be more accountable for their behavior, but over the short term, he's putting a lot of people at risk. As such, I think it's only a matter of time before he gets a knife in the back.
(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_aKebXIe9evs/S_XHQX1F9SI/AAAAAAAAAO0/ZdS3vYmXeNQ/s1600/Gentlemen.jpg)
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If he stood anywhere, he'd be dead. You don't mess with the CIA. :nervous: :shaking:
Tell that to Castro!
The CIA is notorious for being really bad at killing people.
that's just because the only ones you know about are the ones that failed. (http://209.85.48.8/html/emoticons/ninja.gif)
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Tell that to Castro!
The CIA is notorious for being really bad at killing people.
Next you're going to be telling me that Delta is worse than SAS because you don't know of any Delta operations.
(Also, he's not a head of state, though if he has any sense he's got security like one by now.)
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Assange is addicted to the limelight in my opinion, possibly suffering from the 'Conspiracy mentality' that seems to be becoming more common these days, but, that said, when you have seen the documents he has, there's a chance he has reason to be.
The rape charges, though, are a deliberate attempt to defame him from the looks of things, and the constant attacks on Wikileaks are actually doing more to promote these cables than reduce the impact, the inefficiency of the methods used to deal with the whole thing is quite laughable because it seems to be actually be helping to promote their existence. Most people are of the opinion, with a large percentage of these cables of 'So, tell me something I don't know....', but these rather half-arsed attempts at silencing them makes them seem more sinister than they are.
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that's just because the only ones you know about are the ones that failed. (http://209.85.48.8/html/emoticons/ninja.gif)
They tried over 600 times to kill Castro. That alone has to be dragging their average through the floor. They'd need at least another 3 Kennedy's just to nullify that. :p
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They've probably been trying to kill him like they were James Bond villains. I don't know why they couldn't just infiltrate a guy with a sniper rifle into Cuba and just ventilate the back of his head.
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They tried over 600 times to kill Castro. That alone has to be dragging their average through the floor. They'd need at least another 3 Kennedy's just to nullify that. :p
I laughed. :yes:
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They've probably been trying to kill him like they were James Bond villains. I don't know why they couldn't just infiltrate a guy with a sniper rifle into Cuba and just ventilate the back of his head.
You think they haven't tried that?
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Yea we did before they were stupid and took assassinations out of the game plan.
On a side note I wonder if it's possible to mount a gyro-stabilized 50cal sniper rifle on a drone.......
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They've probably been trying to kill him like they were James Bond villains. I don't know why they couldn't just infiltrate a guy with a sniper rifle into Cuba and just ventilate the back of his head.
You think they haven't tried that?
So, we actually tried just shooting him? How the hell did that fail? "Just shoot the bastard" is a foolproof plan.
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They've probably been trying to kill him like they were James Bond villains. I don't know why they couldn't just infiltrate a guy with a sniper rifle into Cuba and just ventilate the back of his head.
You think they haven't tried that?
So, we actually tried just shooting him? How the hell did that fail? "Just shoot the bastard" is a foolproof plan.
Reagan would like a word with you!
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Furthermore, tell that to Rasputin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin).
:shaking:
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So, we actually tried just shooting him? How the hell did that fail? "Just shoot the bastard" is a foolproof plan.
His security was too good. That's why they switched over to the stupid ideas. They figured that they needed to do something so dumb that Castro's guards wouldn't be looking for it.
You didn't think the CIA started with plans involving the contents of the ACME catalogue did you? :p
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This is the CIA. Nothing is impossible.
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US has always been better at leveling things than being subtle, to be fair.
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If he stood anywhere, he'd be dead. You don't mess with the CIA. :nervous: :shaking:
Tell that to Castro!
The CIA is notorious for being really bad at killing people.
DONT **** WITH ME Battuta I KNOW WHEN YOUR LYING
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US has always been better at leveling things than being subtle, to be fair.
HEY! They're LIBERATORS; It's what they DO! Look, you can't crack an omelette, without making an egg! A few innocent people dying, for the greater good... not that big of a deal! :)
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US has always been better at leveling things than being subtle, to be fair.
NSA says hi.
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Found some interesting links about the currently evolving case:
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/one-of-julian-assanges-sex-offense.html (http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/one-of-julian-assanges-sex-offense.html)
http://progressivealaska.blogspot.com/2010/08/strangest-blog-thread-yet-on-swedish.html (http://progressivealaska.blogspot.com/2010/08/strangest-blog-thread-yet-on-swedish.html)
Anna Ardin, a notorious radical known in Sweden for her feminism views on how men achieve social dominance through sex, has been known to be bent on revenge. On January Ardin posted a blog entry on ‘7 Steps to Legal Revenge by Anna Ardin’, which included a statement, I’ve been thinking about some revenge over the last few days… An article on the blog can be read here
If these accusations are correct, then the case seriously questions whether such actions are to be considered rape. And if no rape occurred, then there is no legal case against Assange. IANAL, but using the court system (using nothing but ad hominem attacks) as a basis for personal revenge/vendettas without legal precedent seems wrong to me. Also from what I've seen on the internet, a few feminists are not pleased by her actions...
http://www.inmalafide.com/2010/12/03/julian-assange-was-accused-of-rape-by-anna-ardin-a-radical-feminist-who-was-out-for-revenge/ (http://www.inmalafide.com/2010/12/03/julian-assange-was-accused-of-rape-by-anna-ardin-a-radical-feminist-who-was-out-for-revenge/)
Julian Assange’s rape accusers are nothing more than lying feminist slags. The name “Anna Ardin” must go down with Crystal Gail Mangum and Katelyn Faber in the Hall of Girls Who Cried Rape. We must make the definitive case as to how feminists have destroyed modern society by making it easy for mentally disturbed groupies to make false rape accusations because their feeeeeeelings were hurt.
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ugh, that blog has no idea what a feminist is
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Unfortunately, the word Feminist seems to be more and more closely related to 'Female Chauvenist' :( It's a pity since, as you say, they are completly different things.
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i kinda think that feminism does go a bit too far in some cases. i think i would have to frown on any feminist organization that would support these women in their exploitation of the legal system.
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The thing is, Feminism was originally about equality, but nowadays the movement is becoming more and more infiltrated with chauvenism, the concept that men are worse than women, rather than women are the equal of men, and the meaning of the word has been bastardised because of it.
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Citation needed, otherwise you're just talking about your perspective.
If anything that view was far, far more prevalent during earlier waves of feminism.
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The earliest waves of Feminism, as far as I am aware, was the post-war fight for equality where women refused to leave the factories and return to the kitchens. That was very much a fight for equality.
If I may quote the Cambridge Dictionary:
the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way, or the set of activities intended to achieve this state
Nowadays, as the article above suggests, the word 'Feminist' is becoming more and more synonymous with a more aggressive, anti-male agenda.
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That was the first wave. Second wave was probably the high mark of female chauvinism. Third wave is a backlash against second wave.
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Maybe infiltrated was the wrong word to use, possibly 'associated' would be clearer with regards to my meaning.
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That would be a better choice of words.
Nowadays, as the article above suggests, the word 'Feminist' is becoming more and more synonymous with a more aggressive, anti-male agenda.
Maybe in the public eye, but this an erroneous perception, largely due to second wave ideals when you had people harping about a lesbian world and women ushering in an age of peace.
As it turned out women in positions of power were every bit as bloody-minded as men.
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Oh, I know that, I was part of the Thatcher generation.
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I've never understood why the law allows the victim of a rape anonymity but not the accused. It leads to a ridiculous dichotomy of power where someone can falsely claim rape and ruin someone's life without much danger of repercussion.
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I've never understood why the law allows the victim of a rape anonymity but not the accused. It leads to a ridiculous dichotomy of power where someone can falsely claim rape and ruin someone's life without much danger of repercussion.
But that is more or less the case with pretty much every false accusation, isn't it? :confused: We're supposed to be evolved enough as a society to honor presumption of innocence. (We usually don't, but we're supposed to).
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With most false accusations the name of the victim is released which means that people can look into the past history of the victim too. For instance, the fact that this particular person has made accusations of sexual molestation in the past as well as the post about how to get revenge means that people aren't taking the accusation that seriously.
If people weren't able to check up as easily there would be a lot more people believing the story regardless of whether the case ever came to trial or not. Let's face it, if you're out to destroy someone's life you don't need a trial to do it. In fact if the media will help you but making accusations then it's probably better if their isn't a trial to prove that your entire story was fabricated.
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and it helps if the collective of all Western, Asian, and Middle Eastern national governments want you shut up.
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I've never understood why the law allows the victim of a rape anonymity but not the accused. It leads to a ridiculous dichotomy of power where someone can falsely claim rape and ruin someone's life without much danger of repercussion.
I believe the idea is to increase the reporting rates for rape, because as they stand, they are not good (most rapes/sexual assaults, IIRC, are not reported). The rationale goes that because being sexually assaulted is so traumatizing and embarrassing, most victims won't report it if they know the news will be widely spread (as happens when the case is tried). If they are given anonymity, this factor is mitigated, which hopefully leads to more actual rapes being reported. Whether it actually works in practice, I'm not sure (I haven't seen any studies on this).
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I'm not complaining about the victims getting it. I'm complaining that the accused doesn't also get it.
For instance this case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Leslie_%28television_presenter%29#Rape_allegations) was very famous in the UK, as was this one (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2988208.stm).
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Misunderstood you, sorry. Yeah, you have a point there. I suppose it's so people can know who's a rapist, but that information should probably be released after conviction, not before.