POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Assange, Privacy and Rape

In the process of excoriating Naomi Wolf for her argument that rape allegations against Julian Assange are obviously a trumped up attempt at punishing him for the WikiLeaks, Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon says something eminently sane:

But just because a story smells a little off, that doesn't make it completely rotten. It shouldn't anyway -- unless you're Wolf, who, in a snippy open letter to Interpol this week, decided Assange had been a victim of "the dating police," because he'd been "accused of having consensual sex with two women." Actually, among other things, one of the alleged victims accused him of having decidedly nonconsensual sex with her while she was asleep, and the other has accused him of "using his body weight to hold [her] down in a sexual manner."

Oh no, not our Julian! Instead of considering the veracity of the claims, Wolf quickly pieced together a tale in which "both alleged victims are upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first," a drama of "what appears to be personal injured feelings." Or maybe not, given that the charges arose when one of the alleged victims contacted the other, and the two compared their apparently very similar stories. They have also retained the same counsel.

In short, it would come as no surprise that Assange is persona non grata with various intelligence agencies and their governments, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he's not a douchebag.

For the past couple of weeks, we have watched the left intelligentsia argue that governments that they don't like have no right to private correspondence. At the same time, we are fully aware from our time blogging on the internet that, in cases where people with the correct opinions are involved, there is an absolute right to privacy. Anyone who doesn't have the correct opinions who's outed a particularly nasty troll has learned that it's so. Indeed, you can point people toward a publicly available bit of information on the tubez, and discover that your behavior is shockingly beyond the pale, even though classified documents relating to matters of national security are, to use the Plame expression, Fair Game.

The Obama Administration had plenty of warning that Assange and company were going to spill a vast array of classified intelligence, and its response was tepid, to say the least. After the dump, an Italian diplomat, with Italian hyperbole, chose to call the leaks the 9/11 of international diplomacy. My reactions were a bit more like Claire Berlinski's, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe that everyone involved, up to and including MSM outlets who gleefully dumped the material, in stark contrast to the way they treated the East Anglia Climategate material, ought to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Do I demonstrate my own duplicity regarding the East Anglia leaks by saying so? Not really, in my opinion, because the East Anglia leakers were motivated not only by the systematic fraud that was going on inside the institution, but also by the institution's open disdain for information requests to which they were under legal obligation to respond. What we can say without fear of error is that the Administration has expended a great deal more time, money and effort suppressing access to Obama's school records than it did trying to deal with the leaks, as newly minted Supreme Court Justice Kagan can confirm, whether or not she personally represented Obama or did so merely through her office.

Hayden and other Sixties radicals have copped to the fact that one of the principal attractions to guys of Sixties radicalism was easy access to chicks, whose provision of Free Love might or might not be voluntarily offered to The Cause. No matter how valid your beef, it would have been uncool to go to the pigs. And we see the same dynamics among the starry-eyed who troop off to represent the righteous Palestinian cause, only to discover the omerta imposed by fellow leftists in the wake of violation and even forced marriage to their abusers.

That stuff's no more newsworthy than the Pigfrauds.

Regarding privacy issues, Jerry Wilson has a stimulating post about employees' and potential employees' online lives.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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