We haven't posted on this yet, but other people have!
- Some thoughts on “sex by surprise”
- C’mon, we can do this acting like grown-ups thing
- Still More Questions About Why Wikileaks Hasn’t Trended On Twitter
- Julian Assange: Condoms, Rape, and “Sex By Surprise”
– “Withdrawal of consent gets even trickier. It’s an obvious enough concept for feminist thinkers who have spent more than 10 minutes considering the realities of sex and sexual assault: If you consent to sex but then at some point during sex withdraw that consent by telling your partner to stop, your partner should stop, and if your partner doesn’t stop then that’s assault.”
– “I don’t know if Julian Assange is guilty, of course, but I’m deeply disturbed by the people who aren’t content with suggesting that Interpol is politicizing a crime that shouldn’t be politicized, but instead slurring the victims with the usual course of rape apologist tactics, including accusing a victim of the high crime of being a “radical feminist”. “
– “This chart tracks Sundays and Wikileaks over the last 180 days, with each term’s volume drawn to scale. The red spires? Wikileaks. The blue dust at the base of those spires? Sundays. The tiny blue uptick in the lower left hand corner of the chart has had Sundays trending for more than twelve hours today, while Wikileaks has been completely dark since August.
What the hell is going on here?”
– “And that’s another thing — the phrasing of the second quote from the Assange lawyer. According to the Times accounts, both women initially consented to sex, but withdrew consent when a condom broke or was removed. If that’s the case, then the lawyer’s gloss — that the “consent … to sex … has been confirmed” — is technically accurate but fundamentally dishonest. If someone consents to sex with you, then asks you to stop, and you don’t stop, that’s rape.”
Phillip Adams had a segment on LNL tonight about the death threats against Assange and also against himself as one of the members of the Wikileaks advisory board, as well as his own perspective on the arrest warrant etc. Audio only, no transcript.
Piece about Wikileaks not trending on Twitter (from Assange to Bieber in one graph…) — I can’t vouch for the correctness of it, but it seems entirely plausible.
Angus (in the third link in my post) analyses that quite thoroughly, although he has no definite answers. Like many, he would find it astonishing if Twitter really were actually censoring the hashtag, but obviously something is borked.
Twitter changed their algorithm for trending topics recently, and the fact that #wikilieaks isn’t trending despite the sheer volume of tweets using that hashtag could just mean that they got something badly wrong when they did their tweaking, and it took a topic as big as this to make it blindingly obvious.
They’ll have to be quite transparent about identifying the bug/glitch when they fix it though, or else they’ll lose a lot of credibility.
Some commentary from geek feminists who support the Wikileaks project:
Leigh Honeywell: On sex and consent
Liz Henry: Feminism, Assange rape charges, free speech, and Wikileaks
I just found this commentator (Swedish, law student, living in Glasgow), through one of the links you posted above, and she has several posts on this issue, and seems very well informed.
Thanks for this round up — I’ve found it very difficult to get a clear picture of what’s been going on, and these were really good.
I particularly liked Amanda Marcotte’s piece. While I very much doubt that Assange would have been arrested yesterday were it NOT for the US Embassy Cables (it does seem to be part of a plan to get him extradited to the United States, where he will be tried retroactively for breaking laws that currently don’t exist), this has no bearing on the veracity of the rape accusations against him. The real point to be made here is that rape should ALWAYS be taken seriously — regardless of whether the accused is Julian Assange or Bob the Mediocre Accountant.
via @clembastow:
Kate Harding at Salon – ‘The rush to smear Assange’s rape accuser’: http://shar.es/XrZND
If the Daily Mail had a head it must be close to exploding right now, with having to decide between making a villain out of a radical lefty activist or a feminist rape victim.
Orlando — it’s a serious news story, so they always have the option of ignoring it for celebrity gossip.
Besides, they seem to have taken a third aprroach: “wealthy politicians and journalists are the real heroes.”
Ugh, LP is full of fail on the issue of consensual sex and revoking/withdrawing consent.
Someone is seriously arguing that allowing oneself to be temporarily placated/mollified after saying NoStopStopStop and the other party not stopping is a legally valid form of retroactive consent. Hey, I only did first year law, but that seems wrong on my understanding. If it’s not wrong then it damned well should be.
Just dropped in LP to read about JA being a “powerless victim of psychic rape” in the final comment, didn’t bother scrolling up any further.
This is the thing – it is totally possible for Assange to simultaneously be a dedicated champion of transparent democracy and be also a man who assaults women by not abiding by the agreed parameters of a sexual encounter. That the orchestrated political persecution of him is so appalling a violation of the ideal of free speech should be independent of whether the allegations of sexual assault have substance, because the spurious linkage trivialises both important matters, but a great many powerful people have decided to muddy the waters.
But back to the situation as it seems to have unfolded, and all those who are thinking that a few days of not screeching accusations at/about Assange means that nothing must have “really” happened in the first place: if someone causes me harm and tells me it was an accident, I might initially accept that and intend to forgive, and try to treat that person courteously in subsequent social situations. If I later come to doubt the “accident” explanation, if I come to understand that the harm to me was fully intended and probably planned, then that forgiveness evaporates, and if I have legal redress open to me regarding the harm I would be within my rights to take it.
Damn Tigtog, that was the very point I was just coming on here to make – it is possible he is both things. I think it is right that he go to Sweden and face their legal system in response to the accusations made that he raped two women. At the same time his arrest warrant for Sweden should not be an excuse for the US to grab him for their own reasons. The two issues should not be conflated.
Apparently I’m the thought police and would send men to jail for even thinking about sex. Just so you know.
I find it ludicrous the conflation of US interests and Swedish interests: the odds of Assange being extradited to the US are so much lower from Sweden than from Great Britain, that except for the run to negatively portray women, any person of sense should see that there could be no reason for US interest in the matter.
Gah, that was douchelicious. That commenter used to be relatively OK – can’t imagine what’s got into him lately.
Oh and this:
Stupid trivial issues affecting a good % of 52% of the population, should never have got a run.
I haven’t been able to go near LP for nearly 2 days now. Just can’t face the complainant-slagging.
Fortunately a couple of the regular blokes are being reasonable and calling them on their crap. I think Kim and Anna are working pretty hard on moderating too. But the attitudes that come out. OMG.
Yes, Anna and Kim have been doing sterling work. I was feeling too cranky to wade in beyond my early contributions, so I just kept out of their way.
(eta) also, I was unable to access the site for most of the weekend due to DNS weirdnesses, which was probably a good thing.