The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Your Daily Julian Assange Update: The Left’s ‘Mind-Bending Contradictions’

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 11 Comments

Instapundit linked the Hot Air headline — “Anti-Americans vs. feminists: The Leftist meltdown over Assange” — which more concisely captures the contradictions than does the Daily Mail the headline, “Fancy that! The Left is at war with itself over Mr WikiLeaks.”

The backstory: A few days ago, the Guardian — Britain’s leading newspaper of the Left — shocked its readers, who had become accustomed to the paper’s heroification of WikiLeaks found Julian Assange, by publishing a lengthy report on the rape accusations against Assange in Sweden. Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips attempts to explain this under-the-bus treatment:

[T]he whole world-view of the Left rests upon its iron-clad conviction that America is a global conspiracy of evil from which all bad things ultimately emanate.
So the Left knew for a certainty that the rape charges were false and that Assange was a martyr. . . .
To understand why there is such an ear-splitting screeching of brakes from The Guardian, it is necessary to consider the mind-bending contradictions of what passes for thinking on the Left.
For it believes certain things as articles of faith which cannot be denied. One is that America is a force for bad in the world and so can never be anything other than guilty. Another is that all men are potential rapists, and so can never be anything other than guilty. . . .

So, when confronted with this head-exploding cognitive dissonance, what does an American-hating feminist need most? A scapegoat:

Got raped? It’s your own fault, you filthy whore.

This is the headline on a blog post by Anna Tarkov, who adds: “I’d like to hear some explanations now on why anyone should ever read another word this disgusting misogynist ever pens. I know I won’t.”

The “disgusting misogynist”? That would be me.

It’s important to note that, just five days earlier, Tarkov was posting video of Assange defending WikiLeaks, a post she headlined: “The method is transparency. The goal is justice.”

So she’s not angry at Assange, the accused rapist. No, she is angry at me, for having said that women who hook up with assholes are victims of their own stupidity. And therefore no word I write should ever be read by anyone ever again, because apparently nothing is more important to Anna Tarkov than her freedom to hook up with assholes.

Melanie Phillips helpfully makes a key point about the nature of the charges against Assange:

The fact remains, however, that we don’t know the truth of these accusations against Assange. To make a judgment about what happens between the sheets after consensual sexual activity has started is extremely difficult, since all there is to go on is the word of the accuser and of the accused. . . .

It’s a he-said/she-said situation, and how did Assange’s victims get themselves into that predicament? By hooking up with an asshole.

If you hook up with an asshole and expect him to behave like a gentleman . . . I give up. In what alternative universe am I a “misogynist” for pointing out the erroneous judgment involved in that decision? As I said in response to Amanda Marcotte, “this is like saying I’m in favor of third-degree burns if I warn children not to play with fire.”

So the feminists are jumping up and down shouting names at me — the convenient right-wing scapegoat — which is infinitely easier for them than confronting the possibility that their worldview is flawed.


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Category: Crime, Feminism, WikiLeaks

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