Well, I wonder what hashtag the extreme gender feminists will come up with now? I reported earlier on the Trotskyite defense of Julian Assange , which frankly offered a brutal take-down of the feminist-left’s “legitimizing the suppression of nonconformists and political dissidents.” And now comes news that antiwar icon Daniel Ellsberg is dissing the rape allegations, on Twitter : Greg Mitchell at The Nation retweeted, and Melissa McEwan picked it up and ran with it, “The Thing Is, Rapists Lie “: I wonder if Ellsberg has also personally heard the accounts of Assange’s accusers, and found them unconvincing. I doubt it. I suspect that he just assumes that they would sound like liars, were he to speak to them, because Assange sounded sincere. And why would he not make that assumption? One of the key narratives of the rape culture is that false accusations are extremely common. ( They are not .) Or maybe he just assumes that rapists are easily identifiable, that he can suss out a rapist by talking to him. Unlike the stupid women who trust them, date them, marry them, work alongside them unawares. Until. It’s funny, ahem, how much implicit victim-blaming is embedded in the assertion to know a man has been wrongly accused. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what Assange or his accusers sound like to Ellsburg, or anyone else. Because sounding honest and being honest are often mutually exclusive concepts. And rapists are excellent liars. More at the link . This is a fascinating development. It’s hardly constroversial to suggest that Daniel Ellsberg is a far more iconic figure on the progressive left than is Michael Moore. But clearly his support for Assange has struck a nerve among hardline anti-rape culture feminists. And while Sady Doyle ‘s 15 minutes are up, no doubt we’ll be seeing another man-hating extremist take the baton. Seriously. How far will this go? Personally, I’m hoping to see Glenn Greenwald strapped to the stocks and lashed to a bloody pulp, although so far he’s stayed clear of the feminist backlash. He does have a new essay typically attacking the media’s ” pro-war agitprop ” during the Iraq war (via Memeorandum ). And linked there is another piece on WikiLeaks from Newsweek : ” Why Journalists Aren’t Standing Up for WikiLeaks .” But the big story is this soap opera of whiny feminist progressives who just can’t catch a break. And speaking of breaks: Julian Assange is trying to break governments. Feminists are crying over broken condoms. (But to be fair, it’s more complicated, for sure, but following the revolt of the violent femmes this last couple of weeks does feed the cynicism just a bit.)
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Daniel Ellsberg Defends Julian Assange Against ‘False and Slanderous’ Rape Allegations
From Chapter 4 in Melanie Phillips, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power: What have the issues of anthropogenic global warming, the war in Iraq, Israel and scientism got in common? Not a lot, you might think. But in fact a number of threads link them all. Most fundamentally, they involve the promotion of beliefs that purport to be unchallengeable truths but are in fact ideologies in which evidence is manipulated, twisted and distorted to support or “prove” their governing idea. All are therefore based on false or unsupported beliefs that are presented as axiomatically true. Moreover, because each assumes itself to be proclaiming the sole and exclusive truth, it cannot permit any challenge to itself. It has to maintain at all costs the integrity of the falsehood. So all challenges have to be resisted through coercive means. Knowledge is thus forced to give way to power. Reason is replaced by bullying, intimidation and the suppression of debate. This makes them all deeply regressive movements of thought, which corrode the most fundamental concept of the Western world. The principle characteristic of Western modernity is freedom of thought and expression and the ability to express dissent. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment ushered in the modern age by breaking the power of the church to control the terms of debate and punish heresy. Church and state were separated, and a space was created for individual freedom and the toleration of differences — the essence of liberal society.
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The Secular Inquisition
