Consistent with many descriptions of what it was like to have Assange on one's sofa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le3jrp6LzjI

What a dominant way to handle that situation. Especially the rotted fruit.

Those people are so smarmy and pathetic that it's pretty laughable to hear them whine. Which, I guess, is the intended effect of the video.

The complaints are so underwhelming that you wonder if these people have ever been on a camping trip, or, dare I say, drank an entire beer in one evening.

It's like, you really have to wonder, what if he were so bold as to place a plastic yogurt cup in the recycle bin without rinsing it out first? Is he capable of such things? After watching that video, I just don't know anymore...

No one in this thread has said anything remotely like "The dude is a slob so fuck em, let him rot in solitary for 30 years". He can be a bad house guest and not deserve to rot in prison, right?

I think it's pretty clear to anyone even attempting to be objective that Assange has a "difficult personality". Even if you broadly approve of him, he's burned a lot of bridges and appears to have quite an ego.

I think a difficult personality is a necessity for the role he is performing. While a difficult personality absolutely is not and must not be a reason to condemn someone, the good such people perform doesn’t mean anyone should have to put up with their antisocial behaviour, nor that he in particular gets a free pass from the court processes which caused him to end up in the embassy in the first place.

Same rules for everyone. None of us are pure saints, and even those of us who are pure evil [1] should only be prosecuted for acts which one can reasonably believe them to be guilty of before a trial actually demonstrates the quality of the evidence.

[1] by which I mean dark triad personalities, not religious/utilitarian/etc. ethics.

If you’re going to live permanently as an un-paying guest in someone else’s building (in this case, the Ecuadorian embassy in London), it’s not a smart idea to be such “a slob” that your hosts are just waiting for an excuse to get rid of you and stop dealing with your bullshit.

Similarly, if you are a miserable guest when staying temporarily at a string of friends’ houses, you won’t keep having friends for very long.

You say guest as though he can just walk out the door anytime in the last 7 years. Will his real hosts let him catch a plane to Ecuador?

Terrible analogy.

Um, he could have just walked out the door anytime in the last 7 years.

Oh, you meant without facing the charges from Sweden? Why should he be free to not face them?

Well, maybe he should not have also offended (in the law and the colloquial sense) his „real“ hosts.

It’s almost as if no man is an island, and also Karma.

Or raped someone, for that matter.

*had consensual sex without a condom with, whose partner wanted to compel him to get an STD test, when a prosecutor with a chip on her shoulder and possibly a dollar bribe in her pocket turned it into what you now think it is. Or at least want us to believe.

I see no material difference in your description and the term rape. An agreement to have sex with a condom only is certainly not valid for condom-less sex. And your spurious accusation of bribery is just baffling.

Violently and forcibly penetrating someone against their will is a pretty big difference to not using a condom when previously asked to do so. Depending on the country, yes they're both rape by the legal definition, but it's absolutely worth clarifying.

No, it would be a small difference to some people, and it would be a big difference to others.

Just like being choked suddenly without consent would be delightful to some and horrifying to others.

It's not a matter of "which act is more violent". There are a class of acts which rise to the level of rape. This includes condom removal, forcible penetration, unforced penetration following clear withdrawal of consent, etc.

"Is it rape?" is not a matter of which of these different acts is considered most violent. The law doesn't establish a hierarchy. It's a bar. Either the act rises above the bar or not. It's a matter of whether parties explicitly gave consent, whether they explicitly withdrew consent, and which parties committed which acts under those circumstances.

It's important that it is a bar, so that people can know rationally whether they or others have crossed it. A hierarchy with "bad rape", "better rape" and "best rape" would not be a useful social contract.

One of those is recklessly exposing someone to the risk of an incurable disease, the other is doing the same thing with additional immediately visible damage.

I‘m sure he would have had to use violence, if his victim had not been asleep at the time.

What he was accused of doing violated, albeit by my not-qualified-in-law reading, multiple sections of the UK’s Sexual Offences Act 2003. As I recall, the judge in his case said something similar, and agreed to his extradition partly on that basis (although Wikipedia says there isn’t a requirement for double criminality in cases like this).

The fact that he is an asshole is clearly unimportant compared to what he achieved as a whistleblower. Clearly, I don't give a damn and nobody should.