Wait, I know about the top-down reopening of the case, but do we know for a fact that the original accusations were kosher, or is this just presumption of innocence for the girls?
(I mean, presumption of innocence is important and too often [the word escapes me... only imperfectly/partially given to] would-be sex offenders. On the grounds that we are judging some random girls it should apply; OTOH on the grounds that we are forming an overall character judgment of Assange... this matters if it gets to a jury trial, for example.)
[Edit: I plead guilty on the count of using a casual-conversation "girls" in a more serious discussion where it can be legitimately challenged as being implicitly dismissive. Elsewhere I stand my ground, although it's better developed/explained downthread.]
If someone raped a non-random woman that you were close to and respectful of, would it be reasonable for you to draw a character inference of her rapist?
Would the accused rapist fleeing the jurisdiction to avoid prosecution make you asses his character more positively?
Would you suggest to or feel that a non-random woman that she take one for the team because her rapist is a counter-culture celebrity?
There’s a line between taking the version of the accused and the version of the accuser. In any crime situation. Many factors, including evidence, determine where this line lies.
In sex crimes where the victims are women, current mores bias it toward “believing the victims”. Whether this is not appropriate is a digression I don’t want to entertain here. Everywhere there are baseline scenarios and sex crimes with female victims have that element. For the effects of this discussion I’m willing to take that as a given.
That said, there are other variables at play. Parent comment was questioning the legitimacy of the entire process, including the reopening by top-down orders of a case that had been already dismissed.
We’re either willing or unwilling to lend credence to the narrative that something about this whole situation is manipulated toward getting Assange, a notorious fly in the soup of major powers with the capacity to pull a bogus extradition off. Skepticism of this narrative is not unwarranted; it has certain elements typical of conspiracy theories.
But: if we do co-sign this narrative, then as of this very moment Assange is about to face unjust trial in the US. In the face of that, we have to consider the character judgments his accusers will be able to sell to the courts.
OTOH the “random girls” have much less to lose in this whole situation if we bias our understanding of the original sex accusations in favor of Assange, considering that the case had already been dismissed and they’ve been kept anonymous enough that they’re unlikely to experience any ongoing life disruption.
The whole matter is made of uncertainties. To bias one’s subjective assessment in one direction is not to believe it wholesale. But overall the shades of gray matter dramatically.
It's a weird line between accusing the... humans who accused him of false testimony and accusing Assange of serious (however "lesser") sex crimes. But since the integrity of the whole Swedish judicial process (which was too eager to deport him rather throwing the letter of the law at him) is being questioned -- in this thread in particular -- we need to be careful about the character judgement of Assange we're building up to.
There's a new lingo on reddit that I find useful -- "to cosign". I can't, with the information I have (which is not "all the information" neither "all the information well-informed folks have") cosign on the idea that the original accusations were true. It has real implications on the outcome of a trial by jury. I couldn't sleep with that.
Of course, there's a lot I don't know, and my "cosigning" is irrelevant in practice. (But I like the idea of mock-cosigning as an epistemic constraint on these online debates which are also irrelevant for the most part.)
(I mean, presumption of innocence is important and too often [the word escapes me... only imperfectly/partially given to] would-be sex offenders. On the grounds that we are judging some random girls it should apply; OTOH on the grounds that we are forming an overall character judgment of Assange... this matters if it gets to a jury trial, for example.)
[Edit: I plead guilty on the count of using a casual-conversation "girls" in a more serious discussion where it can be legitimately challenged as being implicitly dismissive. Elsewhere I stand my ground, although it's better developed/explained downthread.]