Okay, I'll humour you and assume he's totally a rapist on the run. Yes, and? How is this relevant to adults talking about something that affects billions of people?
Whether Assange is legally a rapist depends on two things. First, which country's legal definition of rape is relevant (e.g., Sweden's might not be the same as yours, e.g. if you think that it is not rape to get sex on some false premise but Sweden does). Second, what the facts of the case are - but Assange does not submit to the legal process in Sweden so this really hasn't been evaluated.
The issue isn't that people are assuming "he's totally a rapist on the run" but rather that he refuses to allow a legitimate judicial process to evaluate that. Well, OK, but simply avoiding judicial process does not mean you are already proven innocent.
That is not "the issue", that is "an issue". And to bring it up in this context is a red herring. Oh yeah, it technically has to do with the law so blah blah blah.... NO.
Oh, and I actually do think that was kind of fucked up, if the allegiations are true, I don't shrug that off at all; but this matters only for drinking beer or giving him the hand of my daughter in marriage or something, not for talking politics, where, to me, he clearly has "the heart in the right spot".
Did you seriously just tell me to keep my focus on the topic at hand while simultaneously throwing in a dig by calling me a child?
Also I'm not sure if you've been paying attention (I have, and have been talking about it, a lot), but the scope has been scaled significantly farther back from "billions of people" over the past couple of days, by all the companies and the NSA themselves, into the FISA courts that we've already known about that don't affect "billions of people".
You assume those people, like you, don't care about and are not affected by the world they live in. I'm not free until everybody is, I'm being spied on and tortured as long as just one innocent person is. I agree that this also applies to rape and everything else, but it's still a subject on its own.
I'm being spied on and tortured as long as just one innocent person is
You're not really, any more than I'm being blown up by terrorists as long as one innocent person is. LEt's face it, 'X affects us all' is a stupid argument when it comes to justifying security theater in response to terrorism, and it's also a stupid argument when it comes to revolution theater in response to (entirely unsurprising) application of big-data analytics to surveillance.
What exactly did I argue for with my statement of solidarity and mutual responsibility (to which YOUR personal outlook and abilities are completely irrelevant), other than for the priority of caring about the work of Wikileaks, and not so much about the private life (and private crimes) of Assange?
And how does wether something is "surprising" enter into any of this? Oh, and big data, too, huh? What is this, bullshit bingo?
Nowhere. I'm just throwing out my own opinion, same as you are. I don't regard this as a zero-sum conversation in which only one of us can be right, but at the same I am also a bit skeptical about the emotional appeal of your argument (from solidarity) because that sentiment is rarely consistent enough to be relied upon.
People in the US have been constantly told that "we" were attacked. If applicable, the assertion that a person who doesn't live in NYC and/or didn't know anybody who died was not affected by 9-11 receives a chilly response.
