Julian Assange Rolling Stone interview

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118

by libraryatnight • 15 years ago

162 32 15 years ago

nekitamo• 15 years ago

I found his comment about Swedish prisons to be interesting. From what I've heard and read, Swedish prisons (and Scandinavian ones in general) are some of the most mild in the world.

gahahaha• 15 years ago

I think he answers your question: "That's because in 47 percent of cases, prisoners in Sweden are held incommunicado."

I've read (in comments on blogs, so apply grain of salt) that the prosecutor in Sweden has requested that he be held in detention incommunicado, and that this is normal practice in Sweden for foreigners awaiting trial. And then the Swedes can slowly, slowly prepare for a trial and he can perhaps disappear for 1 year.

olavk• 15 years ago

I know Denmark has been critized by human-rights groups for overusing solitary confinement.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

I believe you're just thinking about "Norway prisons" not "Scandinavian prisons". It's probably just Norway that has those prisons in some kind of natural reservations.

anonymousDan• 15 years ago

Amazing guy. I'd be interested to here a more nuanced discussion with him about when it is or isn't justifiable to keep something secret.

redthrowaway3• 15 years ago

I think he missed an opportunity, there. One of the stickiest claims against Wikileaks, at least among the tech crowd, is that they stand for radical transparency and believe government should hold no secrets. I would have liked him to expound on exactly what secrets the government can or should keep, as it seems fairly central to their mission. By not doing so, I think he allowed the narrative put forth by his critics to retain dominance.

streptomycin• 15 years ago

What's missing from this question/answer?

> Do you think governments should be allowed to keep some secrets?

> This is a question that is much more interesting than the answer. In some cases – tracking down organized crime, say – government officials have an obligation to keep their investigations secret at the moment that they are performing them. Similarly, a doctor has an obligation to keep information about your medical records secret under most circumstances. This is a question about obligations. It is absurd to suggest that simply because a police officer may have the obligation to keep secret certain information relating to an investigation, that the entire world also must be subject to a coercive force.

I don't think you can get much more specific than that. It's a fuzzy issue.

twelvechairs3• 15 years ago

I think the key quote from the article relating to this is "Legitimate authority is important. All human systems require authority, but authority must be granted as a result of the informed consent of the governed. Presently, the consent, if there is any, is not informed, and therefore it's not legitimate."

Steer2• 15 years ago

I would be extremely interested to find the source of Assange's idea that the prisons in Sweden are the worst in Europe. I've tried searching http://www.ipcaworldwide.org/, but perhaps my Google-skills are failing me.

I'm probably not objective since I am from Sweden, but his description is very far from my perception of the Swedish judicial system. I don't agree with every verdict I read about, but I guess that would be the case in which ever country I lived in. In general it seems quite fair to me.

My guess is that Assange will be cleared of all charges or worst case senteced to a conditional sentence if he ever stands trial (which will not necessarily happen even). It seem to me that he is a man of dubious moral standards regarding women (trying to have sex with someone without a condom when they explicitly wanted to use a condom), but that will generally not make you go to prison (and probably rightfully so).

I'm a bit depressed that his behavior has damaged Wikileaks and their cause which is important.

edit: Would appreciate a comment from people down-voting me.

redthrowaway3• 15 years ago

So, based on two unanswered, unsupported, and unproven allegations, you are willing to claim that "he is a man of dubious moral standards", and that this behaviour has hurt Wikileaks?

Are you not slightly more disturbed by the clear political machinations behind the case?

Steer2• 15 years ago

As I wrote; that's the way it -seem- to me. I'm convinced that he will get a fair trial in Sweden and I don't understand why it would be reasonable to think that he should not be interrogated by the Swedish police when accused of a crime (whether guilty or not). Remember that it has still not been decided if he should be tried for the crime he is accused of or not, that is why they are trying to get him extradited to Sweden.

And no, I don't see any "clear political machinations" in this case, I see a horny dude who doesn't like to use a condom. I'm sorry if this is a too simple of an explanation for your taste. I could be wrong of course.

If there were any political reasons for this I'm quite sure that they could have framed him for something more grave and produced obvious evidence.

ugh2• 15 years ago

“… clear political machinations behind the case?”

Don’t be ridiculous.

zerostar07• 15 years ago

Kind of weird to see a Swede confusing sex with politics, especially since we're only talking about allegations. If he's found to be a rapist, fair, let's call him despicable, but until now he has held up to high standards even by endangering his life.

boredguy82• 15 years ago

A great interview. But as I read it, one section jumped out as verifiably odd.

  Back when we last did a survey, in February, there were a total of 33 million
  references on the Internet to the word "rape" in any context, from Helen of Troy
  to the Congo. If you search for "rape" and my name, there were just over 20
  million. In other words, perceptively, two-thirds of all rapes that have ever
  happened anywhere in the world, ever, have something to do with me.

Obviously, "back when we last did a survey" means anything done now "doesn't count", but: Googling "rape" returns 226M pages. Googling "'Julian Assange' 'rape'" returns 4.2M pages. Still an interestingly high number ("'Kobe Bryant' 'rape'" returns 1.6M pages; "'Roman Polanski' 'rape'" is 4.5M), but not the two-thirds number he uses. I think that's what feeds the "ego" accusations.

twelvechairs3• 15 years ago

Actually doing the same search on google.co.uk returns 32 million for 'rape' and 5.5 million for 'rape assange'. Its still not what he says - but much closer.

te_chris• 15 years ago

It saddens me a little bit that this is the current top post on this subject. I have no problem with pedantic fact checking, but it is hardly the most pertinent issue in the interview.

boredguy82• 15 years ago

My post is hardly pedantic fact checking. The intro talks about how many consider Assange a "megalomaniac" and he seems bewildered by the suggestion. My point clearly suggests that thinking 2/3rds of the time people talk about rape they're talking about you suggests an over-inflated sense of self-importance. (Also, for what it's worth: roughly 90% of what he says can't be fact checked. One thing that is close to verifiable is demonstrably false, though twelvechairs offers an explanation that's closer to his made-up numbers. That's pretty central to the topic of Assange, though I leave that as an implication for the reader.)

bad_user• 15 years ago

Google's results are context dependent, varying based on your location and based on your user profile.

Also, Google's ranking is very complex and takes into account such things as the article's publishing date, if it can be inferred. I'm also sure they are also returning results based on recent trends. So it isn't unlikely that at some point Google returned 20 million results on him, given that he was in the center of world wide news after those leaks.

And while I think his statistic is flawed, 4.2 million pages is still a freakishly huge number. It's also obvious that authorities and the world don't give a crap about him allegedly raping somebody and the probability of him being framed is too high considering how he pissed so many governments and institutions that are above the law.

We live in a world where democracy and transparency are slowly becoming fairy-tales that we'll tell our children, just like parents at some point tell their kids that they won't die (after the child understands the concept and starts crying) ... pretty sad really.

moldbug• 15 years ago

And "Mendax" doesn't mean "nobly untruthful" in Latin. It just means "a liar." I don't know Latin, so it took me 87 seconds to check this.

These are insignificant points. But somehow I feel they reflect negatively on the credibility of Assange, Rolling Stone, and Michael Hastings. As they say in Latin, "falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus."

(Not that this reflects positively on the credibility of the State Department, the New York Times, or the Swedish sex police...)

Julian Assange Rolling Stone interview

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