[wnight]

In terms of being anti-rape, it's all you're doing, jumping up and down and telling us how against rape you are. Do you understand what a straw man is? Yes, Julian Assange needs to be handled like anyone else accused of a serious crime. That's all he wants. Quit trying to imply otherwise, as if he is somehow getting an easier time of this than a random person would.

What you are trying very hard to miss is that Assange is available for questioning. He pretty much always has been. Sweden doesn't want to question him or they would have, they want him in custody and don't want to state charges.

As for being a rapist yourself, you keep speaking in possibility. And you're still a possible rapist. You mean to speak in probability. But you fail the understand that normal probability (of charges being false, or the purpose of his arrest being limited to those charges) can't be assumed when there's obvious evidence of the circumstances being abnormal.

Your political ideals may be miles from a Fox News broadcast but your rhetorical techniques aren't that different.

[Tyrannosaurs]

Elsewhere in this thread I've actually implied he has a harder time of this. Cases like this show that investigators seem to get more interested when they have a higher profile target, a known figure, they want their 15 minutes of fame. I really don't believe he has it easier than everyone else, I think he has a far harder time of it, but I don't think that excuses his actions.

But being handled as a normal person means that he doesn't get to dictate terms to the police about how and where he'll be questioned. If he were a witness then maybe but he's not, he's a suspect being questioned for the second time. People talk about him not having been charged but if you read the UK appeals court judgement they say that the claim he's not been charged is a semantic distinction based on specifics of the Swedish legal system and that it is clear that "legal proceedings have begun against him".

Under those circumstances I don't think it would be normal or reasonable to allow him to dictate the terms under which he's questioned.

My intent in using possibility as opposed to probability is simply not not prejudge his guilt or innocence because I don't think anyone at this point has the evidence to do that.

I do believe that there is a case to be answered (I believe that's close to certain given the number of legal appeals and judges in the UK that have examined the question and the various objections) but all the evidence hasn't been heard so I don't want to start assessing likely guilt. If you have a greater level of certainty one way or another for whatever reason I have no issue with that, but I say possible because I think that's the most appropriate description at this point from what I've read and heard.

The ultimate problem is that the whole thing is messy. It's messy because rape investigations always are, it's messy because of Wikileaks and what may or may not happen as a result of that, it's messy because both of those are highly charged situations, it's messy because Assange is a complex figure and it's messy because of his actions and the ill considered actions of at least four governments have only made things worse.

The rhetoric it's a function of the medium where we all just pick up on the bits we disagree with rather than writing long form balanced pieces on the whole thing. If that's what you're interested in then this isn't a bad approximation of my view: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/16/julian-a... though there are issues with it (specifically the fact that it doesn't mention that the Swedes have handed over people to the US in the past in ways that were, to put it mildly, troubling).

The main reason I have banged on about the rape position is that it's something that a lot of people seem to be willing to discard almost completely, in some cases to the point of misogyny (to be clear that's not an accusation I'm levelling at you).

My rhetoric may be wound up but I could say the same about discussions of me as a potential rapist (just one example among several I could pick from your original post), a suggestion which even hypothetically is clearly charged enough to likely override any clarity it offers and I'd venture given it's personal nature is beyond anything I said. Dare I say that it's a touch Fox News?

Unpleasant as these things are, it's part of the medium. Hastily banged out messages, only picking up the bits you have specific issue with, little time to consider subtlety. At least we have an excuse, unlike Fox.