shakenvac
23d ago
So he says. But neither he nor anyone in this thread has offered a coherent explanation for why going to Sweden placed him at risk of being thrown in a US prison cell.
When they fought the extradition attempt to Sweden in the UK courts his lawyers put forward no arguments as to why that might be a risk, they merely hinted.
shakenvac
25d ago
it could simply be that prosecutors like the attention they get from bringing cases against famous people.
I will agree this is plausible, but on the other hand the Swedish love prosecuting sex crimes. It's what gets them out of bed in the morning. They live for that shit. Swedish prosecutors don't need the accused to be famous to be dragging them over the coals for possible sex crimes - it's just what they do.
Plus, even if your theory is correct, there's no reason to believe that Sweden would have been particularly receptive to an extradition request from the Americans.
It can be reasonable to skip bail in the UAE, thereby committing a purely apolitical crime.
Sure, but the analogy only holds to the extent that you are willing to equivocate between blasphemy laws and sex crime laws.
Plus, if Assange had managed to flee to Ecuador proper then we wouldn't be having this conversation, but all he managed to do was flee to a room in an embassy. At that point it was completely viable for the UK to just wait him out. They didn't need to negotiate. Sure, the UK home sec could probably have made an exception and just dropped all charges and granted Assange asylum... But why the hell would he? Why give a break to a guy who is absolutely determined to become a national embarrassment and inviting those godawful UN rapporteurs to come and accuse the UK of humans rights violations because Assange would rather hole himself up in an embassy for the rest of his life rather than go attend a police interview in god damned Sweden of all places.
shakenvac
25d ago
Versus your standard that every court action involving a person of interest to the Americans is inherently corrupt? If I can't use plausibility as my basis to judge these things, then what basis can I use?
The theory that the Swedish charges were somehow trumped up by the CIA has one glaring problem: why bother? If the Americans wanted Assange, why bother getting him extradited from the UK to Sweden as an intermediate step? What's the advantage? Why not just request extradition from the UK directly?
If Assange goes along with the extradition to Sweden and then America tries to extradite from Sweden, then he gets to fight extradition in both Swedish and British courts, and he only has to be successful in one of them.
shakenvac
25d ago
Nothing you have said in your post has surprised me at all, and you have barely engaged with the points I have made. Your attempt to shame me by framing me as uninformed, while vaguely gesturing to the approximately zero factual errors in my post strikes me as an attempt at consensus building. Ironic, considering that you are trying to throw the lofty standards of The Motte in my face while breaking the spirit of its rules. Next time you think that someone may be wrong on The Motte, might I suggest that you spend less effort telling them off and more effort explaining in a specific way why you think they are wrong.
Anyway.
On to your points:
Look all the problems with the sexual assault case against Assange look this makes no sense that’s a bit weird etc etc etc.
Don’t care.
I mean, I don’t get your point. Are you trying to say Assange didn’t commit a crime in Sweden? Because that doesn’t contradict anything I have written. I am totally agnostic on the question of whether Assange committed some sexual crime in Sweden. What I am not agnostic about is that he was expected and required to present himself to the Swedish authorities so that they could conduct an investigation into whether a crime had been committed.
Are you trying to say that the accusations are so shaky that they couldn’t have been anything other than a bad faith attempt by the Swedes to get hold of Assange? Don’t agree there either. There was reason to believe that a crime had been committed, and it was up to the Swedish Police to determine if that was the case. That should pretty obviously involve an interview with the suspect. That the Swedish police wanted to talk to him strikes me as extremely, tediously normal.
And your narrative that this was all just a ruse still makes no sense to me! Why do you think that the Swedish would have been more receptive to a US extradition request than the UK? I’m not even asking for evidence, just some reasoning. And again, if he had been extradited to Sweden by the UK, then both Sweden and the UK would have had to agree to any follow up requests from the USA.
But anyway, this is all totally academic. Regardless of whether he broke the law in Sweden, he certainly broke the law in the UK by violating bail. He gave assurances to the British court that he would appear when summoned and on that basis he was granted bail. He then failed to appear. That’s a crime. For reasons that I have already mentioned, once he was (rightly) convicted under British law he had far fewer legal protections against extradition to the US than if he had just accepted extradition to Sweden in the first place.
He also offered to testify remotely from the embassy.
“What do you mean ‘a zoom call is not an appropriate venue for an interview under caution’? Don’t you know who I am?! I'm Julian Assange god damn it! Your petty ‘procedures’ are meaningless to me!”
I mean, the absolute gall! Can you imagine being pulled over for a warrant in America and telling the cop “I’m afraid being arrested doesn’t really work for me right now, but I’m totally willing to skype this out later.” Sorry Julian, but this isn’t a negotiation, you’re under arrest, get in the police car.
Assange and his lawyers made multiple offers to testify and participate in a trail as long as there were guarantees that he would not be immediately extradited to the US.
The assurances Assange wanted were totally impossible to give, as anyone familiar with, uh, law would understand. The Swedish can’t give someone blanket immunity from extradition. They have treaties. They are required to consider an extradition request from the US. The only assurances they could give Assange would have been the normal ones:
1 - We will not extradite you unless the crime you are accused of would also be a crime here in Sweden.
2 - We will not extradite you unless we are sufficiently certain that you will receive a fair trial.
3 - We will not extradite you unless we are sufficiently certain that you will be treated humanely.
These, of course, would not be enough for Assange. He’s special.
And now, he remains in custody in the UK, because nothing says ‘flight risk’ better than spending seven years holed up in an embassy after you were previously granted bail. Assange is sleeping in a bed fully of his own making.
shakenvac
26d ago
What your narrative doesn't explain is why the US is considering dropping charges now - assuming that they actually are considering that and it's not just another deception.
I'm not sure your timeline is correct - I thought the US maintained that there were no charges against Assange until he was arrested in the UK. I do agree that the USA absolutely wanted to get it's hands on Assange while lying through it's teeth that it didn't want him. I don't see that as a partisan issue. When the US put in it's extradition request 15 minutes after Assange was booted out of the Ecuadorian embassy the verb used was that the charges were 'unsealed', implying that they had been in place for some time.
But the idea that these Swedish charges were a trumped up excuse just to get him into the hands of the Americans doesn't pass the smell test for me. My impression is that the Swedish are not particularly sympathetic to the goals of the US intelligence or military community, are generally appalled by the state of the US justice/prison system, and are not particularly beholden to the US in a way that would make extradition especially likely. Certainly I think the Swedish were less likely to extradite Assange than the British, who notably have still not extradited him. Additionally, because of the way extradition law works, had he submitted to the European arrest warrant, and the US had then put in an extradition request, then both Sweden and the UK would have had to agree to the extradition to the US. He would have had twice the protection that he currently has. If he was worried that he couldn't trust the Europeans not to sell him out to the Americans, why was he even operating in Europe in the first place? His story just doesn't add up for me.
Finally, and I realise this isn't necessarily relevant to your points, I want to add that I have zero sympathy towards Assange. His game plan seems to have been to hole up in the embassy and then whinge about being a 'political prisoner' and 'held without trial' while doing everything in his power to avoid any trial, even on apolitical charges. 'Victim of psychological torture' - bollocks. He was just straight up a fugitive from justice and his prison sentence for breaching the UK bail act was fair and just. His argument was basically that in order to be safe from the evil machinations of the Americans, he had to be functionally immune to any part of the European justice system, which is obviously absurd. The man is a weasel, and the most surprising thing about this entire episode is that it took him seven whole years to wear out his welcome with the Ecuadorians.
shakenvac
1mo ago
Is it just because it's reinventing concentration/filtration camps
I think this. I mean, it's hardly even a reinvention - what you are describing is literally a concentration camp as used by the Spanish in Cuba, the British in the Boer War, and a dozen other places. Historically, the only nation that was ever able to pull something like that off without mass starvation was America with their Japanese internment camps. I very much doubt Israel could do anywhere near as well.
shakenvac
1mo ago
There are genetic variations among different populations, but this doesn't mean the categories of race are not socially constructed.
What word would you like people to use to describe genetic variations among different populations?
shakenvac
1mo ago
Yeah, absolutely. I feel pretty bad for the professor. She has basically lost her culture, her identity, her career and her raison d'etre all in one fell swoop. There aren't many crimes for which that would be an appropriate punishment. But at the same time, I'm definitely feeling a 'play idpol games, win idpol prizes' vibe. There's something delicious about being a grievance merchant, and then finding out that you were the grievance all along. I'm eating the popcorn, but I feel bad about it.
prestigious Indian Studies professorships should be reserved only for those who have passed an official blood test.
Unironically brilliant idea. Would have stopped this woman wasting a massive chunk of her life on something she was clearly genetically disqualified from. plus blood testing for jobs would be the ultimate mask off moment for the progressive left.
shakenvac
2mo ago
"deterministic history" is not a falsifiable, testable concept
This is a really interesting question. Is determinism falsifiable? that kind of feels like asking if trigonometry is falsifiable. Determinism is more theorem than theory, an exercise in hard logic rather than empirical data gathering. I think almost everyone would agree that the universe moves according to causality; that A leads to B leads to C, in a reliable, repeatable, (one might say deterministic) way. Determinism is merely the philosophy that you can extend that thinking from 'every part of the universe excepting the human brain' to 'every part of the universe'. In a dead universe, we would all be determinists.
I mean, what does the null hypothesis for determinism even look like? That causality is not true? That today we might mix 8 grams of oxygen and 1 gram of hydrogen and receive 9 grams of water, but tomorrow we might receive 15 grams? or that yesterday's water might spontaneously dissociate back into hydrogen and oxygen? Or perhaps into neon and feathers? Empiricism, the entire scientific method, is based on the truth of causality. If causality is false we have to throw pretty much everything out and just accept that we're all living in Plato's cave.
Or perhaps the null hypothesis is that causality is true everywhere... except the human brain. Not much of a null hypothesis, is it? Really feels like, if that's your theory, then determinism ought to be your null hypothesis.
shakenvac
2mo ago
I think it is a redefinition. What you are describing is something most people would call 'freedom of action', or possibly just 'freedom' - the ability of an agent to do what it wants to without external interference. But under this definition, we could say that a Roomba has free will - because it can do what it wants (clean floors), but a prisoner does not, because he is unable to do what he wants (leave prison). This is very much at odds with how most people would use the term.
I agree that agents can make decisions to perform actions to alter the world. What I don't agree is that an agent - any agent - had the capability to make a decision other than the one that it ended up making. This is what most people would mean when they talk about free will - it's the idea that your snitch could have decided not to tattle, which is something that determinism rejects. the choice to snitch appeared unforced, but it was in fact as deterministic as was my Roomba's 'choice' to hoover my floors every day at ten o'clock.
whatever computation our minds do, whether that happens on a material or spiritual level.
I think i know what you're getting at here, but for the avoidance of doubt, determinism denies the possibility of spiritual decision making. The deterministic argument is:
- in the universe, material interacts with material by way of deterministic causality
- the human mind/brain is part of the material universe
- therefore, the human mind/brain operates by deterministic causality.
shakenvac
2mo ago
Any logically coherent non-determinist explanation that meshes with our understanding of the universe, or even with not-yet understood parts of the universe.
I think you could do this with appeal to divinity, as per point 2 - 'god made us and wanted us to have free will so therefore we have free will' is logically difficult to refute - but as I said I think this runs into common sense objections, e.g. if we have souls then how can it be that brain damage can change our personality? Plus, most people I have had this debate with are atheists and so not able to lean on that.
shakenvac
2mo ago
I mean, its oppositional, but I don't think it's unfair. When you follow determinism to it's logical conclusion you come to realize that everything that an animal or human does is a product of their brain structure, their surroundings, their sensory inputs, etc. Essentially, the human brain is a computer, and like all computers (all physical things, really.) it is deterministic. So, you declare "there is no free will! everything is predetermined, even my very thoughts!" And you are correct.
But then, along comes a soft determinist to say "Aha! but if we redefine free will in such a way that it instead represents the preferences of one of these deterministic machines and it's ability to have agency in this universe then free will does exist!" Well okay, yeah, I suppose, but all this really is is sleight of hand. You've twisted the concept of 'free will' until it no longer represents what it did before you learned of determinism. I accept the logic, I don't accept that you've demonstrated anything profound. Under this paradigm, a computer that wants to contact a server, and succeeds, has free will. But we don't think of smartphones as having free will, for obvious reasons.
shakenvac
2mo ago
I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.
There's nothing to grasp. Materialistic free will, AKA soft determinism, is an extremely convoluted and complex (and ultimately sophistic) web of reasoning created by very intelligent people who found the (obvious) conclusions of hard determinism to be repugnant, and so use their brainpower to maneuver around it as best as they can. They do this mostly by fiddling with definitions until they have bamboozled themselves into believing that they have proved something. Once you have accepted determinism, free will cannot exist, not in the way one usually thinks of it. The only way you can get around the free will problem is to:
-
Reject determinism - I have never seen anyone do that successfully.
-
Posit the existence of a soul which is outside the currently understood laws of the universe - and there are too many commonsense objections to this that I cannot resolve.
Soft materialism is in a category of beliefs that I have labelled as 'so absurd only the very clever could convince themselves to believe it'
I'm not sure what you mean by "position discrimination", I said "positive discrimination" i.e. affirmative action, intentionally discriminating in favor of ethnic minorities. This does not appear to be legal in France.
Griggs v. Duke
Not familiar, but having looked at the Wikipedia page, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with positive discrimination. But, it would not surprise me if France had something similar Griggs v. Duke, in legislation or case law. It could also be that French employment law has protections which would make a Griggs v. Duke unnecessary; France has some of the strongest employee protections in the developed world, and America some of the weakest. Comparing this or that aspect of French law to this or that aspect of US law is all well and good, but you have to bear in mind that these laws are holistically connected to very different structures. A 1-on-1 comparison probably won't show much.
shakenvac
2mo ago
America, 1963.
One can argue that in current year the demand for racism outstrips the supply, and maybe you think that modern society's anti-racism is robust enough that we no longer need laws to make everyone behave... But it is trivially true that America did need those laws, Americans were (and to a lesser extent, still are) willing to discriminate against people based on race. It is also probably true that such laws have played a major role in America becoming a society that shunned racism.
I recently found out that France does not have anti-discrimination laws
This didn't seem right to me, a quick google search turned this up. maybe you are thinking of 'positive discrimination', which it appears France does not have.
Which characteristics are protected by [discrimination in the workplace] laws?
The characteristics protected are numerous: origin, sex, morals, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family situation or pregnancy, genetic characteristics, particular vulnerability resulting from economic hardship, true or supposed belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or an alleged race, political opinions, trade union activities, religion, last name, physical appearance, place of residence, ability to speak in a language other than French, bank domicile, health and loss of physical ability.
shakenvac
2mo ago
In such a world, the word 'trans' wouldn't even mean anything.
In a nutshell, the entire trans debate is 'Trans women are women (Y/N)'. If you could perfectly transition from a man to a woman in every measurable way, the only thing that would separate a 'trans' woman from the 'genuine article' would be that the trans woman would have memories of being a man. That doesn't seem particularly important.
Would anyone living hard in the trans debate still have a problem with it then?
You'll always be able to find someone that fits the bill, but they would be anti-technology, rather than anti-trans.
shakenvac
2mo ago
Seriously? Wow, that's comic book levels of contrivance. Like, if it was Mr. Freeze doing something like that then I could buy it.
I guess they were going for some kind of twist? 'haha check it out it was the scientists after all bet u didn't see that coming😏'?
shakenvac
2mo ago
He probably just killed himself. God knows he had plenty of reason to; his life was basically over. He had already tried to strangle himself two weeks earlier. I get that it looks sus what with all the video cameras not working etc but there is a very parsimonious explanation: jails are often run like shit. Fuckups are the rule, not the exception.
I don't really see what an assassination would accomplish either. The theory goes that some powerful somebody wanted to cover up their sex crimes, but between Ghislaine Maxwell, the victims, and the staff, surely there were and still are plenty of witnesses to whatever (and whoever) was going on.
shakenvac
3mo ago
It’s not European sanctions that are preventing US states from obtaining lethal injection drugs. Yes I’m aware that some states were getting the drugs from, I think, the Netherlands for a while before they blocked the export, but the idea that the US, a country of 330 million people with the largest pharmaceutical industry on the planet, can’t possibly internally source drugs to kill people is absurd. The point being that it isn’t Europeans causing problems for the American death sentence, it’s other Americans.
I suspect that Alabama moving to nitrogen hypoxia is about 1% to do with humane-ness and 99% to do with the fact that unlike controlled drugs, it’s impossible to prevent Alabama from acquiring Nitrogen.
I remember this documentary! I watched it only once, when it came out, so it must have left an impression.
Honestly this seems like a big nothing to me. Even if you consider that the article wasn't really fair (though it seems reasonably balanced) it's not really reasonable to expect the BBC to have a consistent journalistic line on a specific, previously hypothetical execution method. the UN and especially the EU are just straight up against the death penalty - you can't join the EU if you have it - their opinions are not defined by a 15 year old speculative documentary. Also, the implication that Alabama was in any way shape or form concerned with the opinions of Yurop when they adopted this policy is hilarious.
The 'someone' they interviewed in the documentary wasn't some random from a trailer park - it was Professor Robert Blecker, who was (apparently) an extremely prominent figure in the death penalty debate. seems like the documentary made some effort to find a steelman for the pro-death-penalty side, no? Yes, yes, I know, journalists are the enemy, they love to misrepresent. But nobody forced that (probably very media savvy) professor to go on the air and talk about how humane execution is stupid because murderers should suffer. That "bloodthirsty cruelty is the point." was literally his point.
Edit: based on the timeline found by @sodiummuffin I’m going to take back the next paragraph about Alabama fucking it up. The guy actually did hold his breath for about 2 mins, struggled for about 2 mins, then passed out and died.
And as for the execution itself, it's pretty simple. They just fucked it up. the execution took 25 minutes and apparently the execute-ee was struggling for most of that. the 'holding his breath' excuse doesn't pass the smell test. Unless the guy was an olympic freediver he would have been able to hold his breath for, like, three minutes, then pass out and die. you can't survive in a nitrogen-only atmosphere for 20+ minutes, it's just physically impossible. Probably they didn't secure the mask properly or something and left the guy breathing diluted atmosphere.
Anyway, Alabama: Good idea, poor execution, 5/10 do better next time.
Israel as a destabilising force is overblown. The Middle East is unstable because of poverty, despotism, the smartphone revolution, the resource curse, and good old fashioned regional rivalry. Today, Few Arabs with real power actually give a fuck about Palestinians, and of those that do, even fewer give enough of a fuck that they are willing to upset the apple cart over it. Normalisation of relations between Israel and its historical antagonists was well underway before 10/7, and will be well underway again in 18 months or so.
Once you get past the racial animus, all that Israel is doing is using military force to deal with an uppity subpopulation, something Arabic states think is totally reasonable.
shakenvac
3mo ago
One more that i've not seen anyone mention yet: men cheat to fuck, women cheat to upgrade.
When a man finds a mistress, he keeps it as secret for as long as he can. If and when the wife finds out, she files.
When a woman finds a mister, she keeps it a secret only for as long as necessary to set up an exit strategy. When she has one, she files.
Certainly not the only reason but a contributor at least.
I don't agree at all with your estimation of the value of an Orca, because you’re mixing two concepts – the intrinsic value of a non-human animal and the value of having a flourishing biosphere which have plenty of magnificent things like Orcas. No way I would sacrifice 10,000 Orcas for one human, but that's less about the inherent moral value of an Orca and more about the fact that they are endangered. In a world where Orca are as common as Cattle I wouldn’t think twice, but we don’t live in that world. If we value ocean wildlife - even if the reason is simply to give more utils to humans in the long term - then an Orca is a precious natural resource, not one to be squandered over something so commonplace as a human.
I’m not sure how many humans I would be willing to sacrifice in order to restore the world’s oceans to the state they were in 500 years ago, but it would be many, many thousands.
shakenvac
4mo ago
A bit of everything I'd say. Concentration of force is probably the most difficult thing for Ukraine right now; They don't have access to the quantity of troops that Russia has. They make up for the disparity with better morale, leadership, and training (in that order) but they are close to fully committed, and if they concentrate for an attack they risk a counterattack on a weaker part of the line. Planning isn't something that Ukraine is bad at by any means, but creating and executing a complex plan is far more difficult when you are actively maneuvering against an enemy which is continuously disrupting your plans and demanding of your resources to stop their plans. Ukraine also doesn't have access to all the combined arms tools that you would ideally want to launch a successful offensive - air cover, precision missiles, massive weight of artillery fire - tools which are not really as important to the defense.
This is why it's so advantageous to choose the time and the place of hostilities. If there is a truce, Russia can take it's sweet time rebuilding it's stockpiles, rebuilding a professional army (the sort you would need to push an offensive), making complex plans and organizing them and drilling their soldiers, and then restart the war when they are good and ready. Ideally with a spot of deception to prevent Ukraine from knowing when and where they will strike. Russia is currently incapable of mounting complex offensive operations, and I'm sure the Ukrainians would like to keep it that way.
Suspect, fine. 'Suspect' is reasonable. But 'suspect' alone is not sufficient reason to call bullshit. It's reason to dig, to sniff around, to raise an eyebrow, to build a case. But in the end, you still need to evaluate that case on its merits, not on the feeling of suspicion.
I've gathered a lot of downvotes on this subject. People here clearly disagree with me, but nobody has even taken a crack at the most basic question here - how does it benefit the feds to have Assange extradited to Sweden? That's a real obvious question that nobody seems interested in tackling.
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