[ExI] pussy riot case

[Charlie Stross]

On 20 Aug 2012, at 00:21, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> It more and more looks like a perfect storm of a narcissist with a posse of professional paranoids meeting a career bureaucrat completely untrained in how to handle escalation or explaining the finer point of the Swedish system.

Yes, this.

However ...

> The fact that he seems to have behaved like a cad triggered some of the nastier sides of the legal system, where political correctness goes hand in hand with puritanism. The charges are not trumped up, it is just that in most countries the law would have shrugged: "sorry, ladies, that's life". Here it overreacted instead. This is why Ny is so tenacious: it is a matter of *principle*... and her continued career.

It's somewhat worse than that. The allegations against Assange would be enough to see him on trial for rape if they'd been made in the UK, and if the police took them seriously.[1] Whether he's *guilty* is another matter, because rape, when it isn't a violent attack committed by a total stranger[2], is a problematic offense to prove. But they're serious enough to tick the boxes for "extradite to Sweden" in the UK.

On the basis of his public actions I'm pretty certain that Assange has narcissistic tendencies, if not a full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. And he wouldn't be the first young-ish male to get a taste of international rock-star grade fame and go wild, overstepping the bounds of the permissible. See, for example, any number of rock stars (dodgy sex, excessive drugs, smashing up hotel rooms ...). Fame does weird things to your neurohormonal axis and it can take years to adapt to it and learn how not to be a dick. (Which puts a whole new -- and scary -- spotlight on Warhol's quip about how, "in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes" ...)


-- Charlie

[1] This is a sore point, and the London Metropolitan Police are about to launch into yet another investigation into why their rape unit isn't producing convictions, or indeed investigating reported crimes ...

[2] Which is to say, most of the time.