I didn't see Grammar Nazis when I read this article. I misread "gaffes" as "giraffes", and thus pictured that "grammar gaffes have invaded the office", which is quite an amusing thought when you try to envision it, especially the commotion when they walk in through the lobby yelling at everyone who ends a sentence with a preposition. My grammar giraffes might have been German nonetheless though because they were wearing kaiser helmets and spoke with a German accent. Come to think of it, now when I picture them they're wearing Nazi armbands around their legs and are sentencing office workers who confuse "lose" and "loose" to labor camps where they'll toil in the sun picking acacia leaves.
Mal: Ain't no way in the 'Verse they could find that compartment. Even if they were lookin' for it. Zoe: Why not? Mal: 'Cause?
I don't think there's anyone in the verse who would defend the grammatical correctness of the sentence "'Cause?". But given the choice between that and an equivalent, more grammatically correct sentence (something like "It is an assumption of mine which I haven't really thought through but which I nonetheless believe."), I'd choose "'Cause?".
As someone who spends a good portion of my waking hours brutally bungling Icelandic grammar, I'd say that the ability of listeners to tolerate grammar mistakes is pretty high.;) It's not always disdain that causes a person to use bad grammar. Sometimes there are actually good reasons.
On that note, it'd probably be easier to write an Icelandic grammar checker, at least to help make sure you're matching number, case, gender, strength, tense, person, etc correctly on all your words. As a downside, given that not everyone agrees on what the proper declension of everything is...
And apparently you learned to do so in Wayside School.
- Woman A invites him to have sex.
Not what the accusation states. Accusation says he starts ripping off her clothes, she tries to put them back on, he rips them off again, then pins her down and tries to force sex without a condom, and she consents under duress only if he'll use one. The fact that you claim to have read the article and believe what you wrote is incredible.
- He stays one week in Woman A house and she never asks him to leave.
Flatly contradicted by the accusations, which state that *he* says she never asked him, but *she* says she asked him to leave and wouldn't, told her friends he wouldn't leave, started sleeping on her couch to get away from him, and ultimately moved out of her own apartment until he left to get away with him. Undoubtedly these claims have been investigated by the police as they're verifiable.
- He advances over her in the morning.
Otherwise known as "he starts fucking her while she's asleep". In violation of the terms she had set out the previous night, but it'd be rape even if he was using one.
- After some insistence she asks him if he has no HIV. - He says he does not. - She concedes.
Probably the most extreme example of your imagination going wild when "reading" the accusations. He is *inside of her* while she was asleep, without a condom when she wakes up and then says "you better not have HIV".
What part of, "She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. " was tricky for you to understand? The fact that it's made of words?
Did Assange get charged whilst I wasn't looking? I thought they were still at the questioning stage.
They cannot legally file charges in absentia. See the Fairtrials primer on the Assange case.
which means no conclusions are reachable and very likely means, there is no case.
By that logic, there is essentially never a case for rape.
You, FYI, have not seen the evidence that's been gathered on this case. The Swedish prosecutors office and the British courts have. And the prosecutor's office wants to file charges and two British courts deemed the charges credible. So why should anyone take your assessment over theirs?
which she herself admits doing willingly for a week ... many years later ... she relutanctly agrees to have unprotected sex with him, after he assures her he didn't have HIV.
How on Earth can you claim to have read the article? That's like reading an article on the JFK assassination and coming to the conclusion that JFK shot himself from the book depository.
You know, half this debate would disappear from Slashdot if people would just take the time to read the actual accusations instead of parroting the echobox and Assange's lawyers.
They absolutely are not "ridiculous and obviously manufactured" unless you have some sort of psychic powers I'm unaware of. And *even if* a government is out to get someone, that's *still* not an excuse to be handing "get out of jail free" cards for rape.
The Swedish legal system wants to charge him. Swedish law requires him to be on Swedish soil to be charged. What's confusing about this?
And furthermore, since when is a "skype chat" the same as a police interrogation, and since when do suspects get to dictate the terms of their interrogation?
Sorry, but that is 100% false and pure victim smearing. And there is no such charge as "sex by surprise". The charge they want to try him for (well, one of the four) is "mindre grov våldtäkt" ("minor rape" - literally, "less than major rape"), but had it happened in the UK it would simply be prosecuted as "rape". Which isn't speculation; that's what the British lower court determined and what the high court upheld. The total maximum penalty is 4 years jail time.
The term "sex by surprise" comes from Assange's attorney pushing a literal translation of the term "överraskningssex", which is not a charge, just a description (and while "överraskning" means "surprise", "överraskningssex" still means "rape").
Since the Swedes have allowed the US to use extraordinary rendition against at least one individual in Sweden in the past
So have the British, and have even led joint extraordinary rendition efforts. The British are far more of a US lapdog than Sweden. Even Google recognizes this - start typing anything about "Britain" and "lapdog" and you get suggested searches about Britain being America's lapdog.
Beyond that, this is being done through the European Arrest Warrant system. To reextradite Assange would require both Swedish *and* British consent, in contrast to just British consent as it stands now. Unless you think one of the most high profile accused persons on Earth right now is just going to disappear.
I can understand someone deciding that having already been examined, and given permission to leave because no charges were going to be laid after answering all the questions put to him, he might decide he doesn't see why he should have to go through that whole process again.
First off, people suspected of crimes don't get to pick and choose what cooperation they want to have with the police without repercussions. Multiple questionings are not only not unusual, but they're pretty much standard. And there's nothing at all unusual about one investigator deciding that there's not enough evidence to push charges at a particular moment in time and a different investigator deciding, at that some different moment in time, that there is. The reports are that he had promised to come back, and even if he hadn't, Sweden had every reason in the world to suspect that he planned to come back because he had just applied for permanent residency there. To reiterate, he had applied for permanent residency somewhere, but as soon as there were criminal accusations against him, he hightailed it out of town to avoid them.
Then we have the various questions about why the 2 women raised the whole issue in the first place and their (to me at least) somewhat suspicious behavior
Ah, yes, the obligatory victim smearing. Please elaborate after reading the actual accusations,
plus the fact that one of them has had some connection to the CIA in the past (if that is true).
This one is the most absurd of them all. The source is a Counterpunch article, which begins with casting Assange as Neo, hero of The Matrix, that... now try to follow this...
1) She published anti-Castro articles... 2) In a magazine... 3) Run by a group in Sweden... 4) Which according to some professor in Oslo... 5) Is funded by another group in Sweden... 6) Which is connected with a Cuban organization... 7) Which is led by a guy... 8) Who a Wordpress blog post says is a CIA agent.
And then this:
1) She has "interacted"... 2) (No source)... 3) With a cuban feminist organization... 4)... of women, repeatedly praised and defended by Amnesty International, who protest the jailing of their husbands by going to church dressed in white... 5a) Because it "gets money" from the US government... 5b) (No source)... 6b) And because someone who bombed a plane... 7) Walked next to Gloria Estefan when she supported the group in Miami.
I wish I was kidding - check out the article yourself, that's where this tripe started.
I am not defending him mind you,
Yes you are. That's precisely what you're doing, without hardly even looking into the situation. Take a look at your post. You even accused someone who is charging someone with raping them of being a CIA plant witho
I don't think there's any question *why* he's hiding. I think his logic train is running down a track that ends right after the next tunnel, but there's no question that the train is there. But we shouldn't be cheering him on for doing so. We need to support the rule of law.
Sömuleiðis. En ég er að minnsta kosti nýbúi:) Nú er ég að horfa á svo falleg ský að líða hjá í himninum yfir fjöllunum í gegnum glugann. Svo dásamlegt.
Gallop never should have led with a graph of just positive approvals; at least net approvals (my first set of numbers). But you're right, I should have scaled each set of approval numbers individually by those who didn't respond and then gotten a new difference, instead of scaling the difference. That yields:
Anyway, the basic point is that absolute approval rates are skewed by A) omitting the disapproval rates, and B) the response rate for positive/negative views.
In the former case, it's akin to saying in a poll where country A gets 30% approval and 70% disapproval while country B gets 29% approval and 0% disapproval, that country A is more popular.
Even with the former case taken into account, without the response rate taken into account, it's akin to saying in a poll where country A 60% approval and 40% disapproval, and country B gets 19% approval and 0% disapproval, that country A is more popular, even though there's not a single person who disapproved of country B.
Right. It's not like he's wanted for rape by the legal system of a first world country with an extradition request approved and the accusations deemed credible by two courts of a second first-world country.
Iraq Body Count is one of the lowest estimates out there. There are three peer-reviewed studies on it (IBC is not among them): the Iraq Family Health Survey, the Lancet survey, and the Opinion Research Business survey. The Lancet's value of 655k dead by June 2006 (601k from violence, and of those, 181k from the coalition and 276k where the killer was unknown) is the middle one of the three. They also have had the most feedback on the paper and the best sampling, so if anyone is going to cite just one work on the subject, it should probably be them.
If he's guilty then let him be charged and tried etc
Glad to see we're in agreement on this one. Step one, in accordance with Swedish law, he needs to stop running and hand himself over for extradition to the country so that he can be charged on Swedish soil.
Plus, the whole point of bail is to stop a person from trying to run off and avoid trial/punishment, and bail is set high or altogether denied if the person is deemed a high flight risk to do that.
I think even Assange's biggest defenders would have to concede that he's demonstrated about as big of a flight risk as you can get.
I've written about this before several times, so I don't want to have to write it all again; here's a link instead.
And, FYI, according to the charges, the first woman told friends at the party that same night about the "violent" sex with Assange and that she didn't feel safe, then subsequently moved out of her own apartment until he left. The second woman freaked out immediately after Assange started having unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping (something she hadn't even done with her boyfriend of 2 1/2 years). They only brought *charges* after talking.
It took me about three months before I was able to simply use the word "rape" for what happened to me. It moved from "an unwanted sexual experience" to "some of my friends tell me I should call it rape" to "rape or something like that" before I could accept just using the term. You don't want to see yourself as a victim and you don't want to empower the perpetrator. You just want to try to forget it and move on. It's only when it becomes obvious that you can't just do that that you have to face up to it. I'm still trying to deal with some of the effects, like a fear of saying no (because if you don't say no, you can't be raped... I know, that's messed up, but I'm trying to get past it, and I'm doing better).
People have often berated me for not reporting it (like most rape victims), on the grounds that he is free and could well do it again. But that's easy to say from your ivory tower (sadly, I in the past once did the same thing to a rape victim, something I now really regret). The last thing you want is to have to relive it and have people accuse you of being a liar, a slut, etc; you just want to get on with your life and not think about it. However, if I had talked to someone a couple days after it happened and found that the same guy had just done the same thing to another girl... I don't know how that would have my altered course of actions, but it definitely would have affected me.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see Grammar Nazis when I read this article. I misread "gaffes" as "giraffes", and thus pictured that "grammar gaffes have invaded the office", which is quite an amusing thought when you try to envision it, especially the commotion when they walk in through the lobby yelling at everyone who ends a sentence with a preposition. My grammar giraffes might have been German nonetheless though because they were wearing kaiser helmets and spoke with a German accent. Come to think of it, now when I picture them they're wearing Nazi armbands around their legs and are sentencing office workers who confuse "lose" and "loose" to labor camps where they'll toil in the sun picking acacia leaves.
Quite true. Example from Firefly:
I don't think there's anyone in the verse who would defend the grammatical correctness of the sentence "'Cause?". But given the choice between that and an equivalent, more grammatically correct sentence (something like "It is an assumption of mine which I haven't really thought through but which I nonetheless believe."), I'd choose "'Cause?".
As someone who spends a good portion of my waking hours brutally bungling Icelandic grammar, I'd say that the ability of listeners to tolerate grammar mistakes is pretty high. ;) It's not always disdain that causes a person to use bad grammar. Sometimes there are actually good reasons.
On that note, it'd probably be easier to write an Icelandic grammar checker, at least to help make sure you're matching number, case, gender, strength, tense, person, etc correctly on all your words. As a downside, given that not everyone agrees on what the proper declension of everything is...
And apparently you learned to do so in Wayside School.
Not what the accusation states. Accusation says he starts ripping off her clothes, she tries to put them back on, he rips them off again, then pins her down and tries to force sex without a condom, and she consents under duress only if he'll use one. The fact that you claim to have read the article and believe what you wrote is incredible.
Flatly contradicted by the accusations, which state that *he* says she never asked him, but *she* says she asked him to leave and wouldn't, told her friends he wouldn't leave, started sleeping on her couch to get away from him, and ultimately moved out of her own apartment until he left to get away with him. Undoubtedly these claims have been investigated by the police as they're verifiable.
Otherwise known as "he starts fucking her while she's asleep". In violation of the terms she had set out the previous night, but it'd be rape even if he was using one.
Probably the most extreme example of your imagination going wild when "reading" the accusations. He is *inside of her* while she was asleep, without a condom when she wakes up and then says "you better not have HIV".
What part of, "She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. " was tricky for you to understand? The fact that it's made of words?
Did Assange get charged whilst I wasn't looking? I thought they were still at the questioning stage.
They cannot legally file charges in absentia. See the Fairtrials primer on the Assange case.
which means no conclusions are reachable and very likely means, there is no case.
By that logic, there is essentially never a case for rape.
You, FYI, have not seen the evidence that's been gathered on this case. The Swedish prosecutors office and the British courts have. And the prosecutor's office wants to file charges and two British courts deemed the charges credible. So why should anyone take your assessment over theirs?
which she herself admits doing willingly for a week ... many years later ... she relutanctly agrees to have unprotected sex with him, after he assures her he didn't have HIV.
How on Earth can you claim to have read the article? That's like reading an article on the JFK assassination and coming to the conclusion that JFK shot himself from the book depository.
Which are...? I provided an article detailing the accusations, care to provide anything other than "I'm Swedish"?
Julian, calm down, it's going to be all right.
You are greatly distorting the accusations.
You know, half this debate would disappear from Slashdot if people would just take the time to read the actual accusations instead of parroting the echobox and Assange's lawyers.
They absolutely are not "ridiculous and obviously manufactured" unless you have some sort of psychic powers I'm unaware of. And *even if* a government is out to get someone, that's *still* not an excuse to be handing "get out of jail free" cards for rape.
The Swedish legal system wants to charge him. Swedish law requires him to be on Swedish soil to be charged. What's confusing about this?
And furthermore, since when is a "skype chat" the same as a police interrogation, and since when do suspects get to dictate the terms of their interrogation?
Sorry, but that is 100% false and pure victim smearing. And there is no such charge as "sex by surprise". The charge they want to try him for (well, one of the four) is "mindre grov våldtäkt" ("minor rape" - literally, "less than major rape"), but had it happened in the UK it would simply be prosecuted as "rape". Which isn't speculation; that's what the British lower court determined and what the high court upheld. The total maximum penalty is 4 years jail time.
The term "sex by surprise" comes from Assange's attorney pushing a literal translation of the term "överraskningssex", which is not a charge, just a description (and while "överraskning" means "surprise", "överraskningssex" still means "rape").
So have the British, and have even led joint extraordinary rendition efforts. The British are far more of a US lapdog than Sweden. Even Google recognizes this - start typing anything about "Britain" and "lapdog" and you get suggested searches about Britain being America's lapdog.
Beyond that, this is being done through the European Arrest Warrant system. To reextradite Assange would require both Swedish *and* British consent, in contrast to just British consent as it stands now. Unless you think one of the most high profile accused persons on Earth right now is just going to disappear.
First off, people suspected of crimes don't get to pick and choose what cooperation they want to have with the police without repercussions. Multiple questionings are not only not unusual, but they're pretty much standard. And there's nothing at all unusual about one investigator deciding that there's not enough evidence to push charges at a particular moment in time and a different investigator deciding, at that some different moment in time, that there is. The reports are that he had promised to come back, and even if he hadn't, Sweden had every reason in the world to suspect that he planned to come back because he had just applied for permanent residency there. To reiterate, he had applied for permanent residency somewhere, but as soon as there were criminal accusations against him, he hightailed it out of town to avoid them.
Ah, yes, the obligatory victim smearing. Please elaborate after reading the actual accusations,
plus the fact that one of them has had some connection to the CIA in the past (if that is true).
This one is the most absurd of them all. The source is a Counterpunch article, which begins with casting Assange as Neo, hero of The Matrix, that... now try to follow this...
1) She published anti-Castro articles...
2) In a magazine...
3) Run by a group in Sweden...
4) Which according to some professor in Oslo...
5) Is funded by another group in Sweden...
6) Which is connected with a Cuban organization...
7) Which is led by a guy...
8) Who a Wordpress blog post says is a CIA agent.
And then this:
1) She has "interacted"... ... of women, repeatedly praised and defended by Amnesty International, who protest the jailing of their husbands by going to church dressed in white...
2) (No source)...
3) With a cuban feminist organization...
4)
5a) Because it "gets money" from the US government...
5b) (No source)...
6b) And because someone who bombed a plane...
7) Walked next to Gloria Estefan when she supported the group in Miami.
I wish I was kidding - check out the article yourself, that's where this tripe started.
Yes you are. That's precisely what you're doing, without hardly even looking into the situation. Take a look at your post. You even accused someone who is charging someone with raping them of being a CIA plant witho
I don't think there's any question *why* he's hiding. I think his logic train is running down a track that ends right after the next tunnel, but there's no question that the train is there. But we shouldn't be cheering him on for doing so. We need to support the rule of law.
But we have the 1st or 2nd highest birth rate in Europe, so that number went up to 13 while you were posting. Wait, we're up to 14 now...
Sömuleiðis. En ég er að minnsta kosti nýbúi :) Nú er ég að horfa á svo falleg ský að líða hjá í himninum yfir fjöllunum í gegnum glugann. Svo dásamlegt.
Ég mun verða ríkisborgari einhvern dag.
Gallop never should have led with a graph of just positive approvals; at least net approvals (my first set of numbers). But you're right, I should have scaled each set of approval numbers individually by those who didn't respond and then gotten a new difference, instead of scaling the difference. That yields:
Germany: 40%
Japan: 32%
US: 31%
France: 28%
UK: 21%
China: 7%
Russia: -7%
Anyway, the basic point is that absolute approval rates are skewed by A) omitting the disapproval rates, and B) the response rate for positive/negative views.
In the former case, it's akin to saying in a poll where country A gets 30% approval and 70% disapproval while country B gets 29% approval and 0% disapproval, that country A is more popular.
Even with the former case taken into account, without the response rate taken into account, it's akin to saying in a poll where country A 60% approval and 40% disapproval, and country B gets 19% approval and 0% disapproval, that country A is more popular, even though there's not a single person who disapproved of country B.
Right. It's not like he's wanted for rape by the legal system of a first world country with an extradition request approved and the accusations deemed credible by two courts of a second first-world country.
And if that doesn't work, they're going to tattle to Syria's mom.
Iraq Body Count is one of the lowest estimates out there. There are three peer-reviewed studies on it (IBC is not among them): the Iraq Family Health Survey, the Lancet survey, and the Opinion Research Business survey. The Lancet's value of 655k dead by June 2006 (601k from violence, and of those, 181k from the coalition and 276k where the killer was unknown) is the middle one of the three. They also have had the most feedback on the paper and the best sampling, so if anyone is going to cite just one work on the subject, it should probably be them.
Glad to see we're in agreement on this one. Step one, in accordance with Swedish law, he needs to stop running and hand himself over for extradition to the country so that he can be charged on Swedish soil.
And they say that the Titanic was sunk by someone named Iceberg! Clearly the world zionist conspiracy is afoot!
Plus, the whole point of bail is to stop a person from trying to run off and avoid trial/punishment, and bail is set high or altogether denied if the person is deemed a high flight risk to do that.
I think even Assange's biggest defenders would have to concede that he's demonstrated about as big of a flight risk as you can get.
Heyrðu, (th)ú sagði "we" - ertu kannski Íslendingur? :) Ég bý í Kópavogi.
I've written about this before several times, so I don't want to have to write it all again; here's a link instead.
And, FYI, according to the charges, the first woman told friends at the party that same night about the "violent" sex with Assange and that she didn't feel safe, then subsequently moved out of her own apartment until he left. The second woman freaked out immediately after Assange started having unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping (something she hadn't even done with her boyfriend of 2 1/2 years). They only brought *charges* after talking.
It took me about three months before I was able to simply use the word "rape" for what happened to me. It moved from "an unwanted sexual experience" to "some of my friends tell me I should call it rape" to "rape or something like that" before I could accept just using the term. You don't want to see yourself as a victim and you don't want to empower the perpetrator. You just want to try to forget it and move on. It's only when it becomes obvious that you can't just do that that you have to face up to it. I'm still trying to deal with some of the effects, like a fear of saying no (because if you don't say no, you can't be raped... I know, that's messed up, but I'm trying to get past it, and I'm doing better).
People have often berated me for not reporting it (like most rape victims), on the grounds that he is free and could well do it again. But that's easy to say from your ivory tower (sadly, I in the past once did the same thing to a rape victim, something I now really regret). The last thing you want is to have to relive it and have people accuse you of being a liar, a slut, etc; you just want to get on with your life and not think about it. However, if I had talked to someone a couple days after it happened and found that the same guy had just done the same thing to another girl... I don't know how that would have my altered course of actions, but it definitely would have affected me.