Assange plans run for Australian Senate

[No Elephants]

Assange plans run for Australian Senate


Published: Feb. 18, 2013 at 4:32 PM

LONDON, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, said he wants to run for the Australian Senate.

Assange, in an interview with the Australian news outlet The Conversation, said the case against him in Sweden is "falling apart" and officials there should drop the charges. He has been charged with sexually assaulting two women, though Assange says the encounters were consensual.

Assange said once the charges are dropped he'll be able to leave the embassy, where he has lived exclusively after being granted protection for the last eight months.

After that, he will move back to his native Australia where plans have already been laid to create a WikiLeaks political party and run for a Senate seat against one of three Labor candidates in Victoria.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/02/18/Assange-plans-run-for-Australian-Senate/UPI-76481361223179/#ixzz2LIeheOrm



:popcorn:

[Enthusiast]

1. I hope he wins the election if he can run.

I believe in Assange.

[KarenRei]

2. I too believe in rape fugitives.

I also believe people shouldn't be encouraging them in sending the message, "Rape is such a minor, socially acceptable issue that you can ignore the charges indefinitely and go on with your life, and people will excuse it and continue to give you awards, interviews, and you can even become senator!"

[No Elephants]

3. You know for sure he was guilty and not railroaded?

Awesome powers, those.

Use them only for good.

[Enthusiast]

4. I believe the entire rape thing

was fabricated because Assange was revealing inconvenient truths. Under such circumstances he cannot answer the charges. Because just as the charges were trumped up, so will the investigation and subsequent trial be a crock of shit.

[No Elephants]

5. Ever wonder about things like this?

Someone registers in 2007 and racks up 4 posts in all that time.

Between 2007 and now, there were times when Assange's name was all over Op's on this board, drawing thousands of posts (not per thread, but the most of the threads filled up pretty good.)

Six years after sign up, a poster (moi) makes a post about Assange running for Senate in Australia. on a board that only a handful of people have used in months.

And that is enough motivation for the fifth post.

Whenever I notice something like that, I wonder.

It's kind of funny, too, since I put the popcorn icon in the OP. I don't think I have ever done that before. I thought it was silly to put it in, given the state of the board at this point, but, I did it anyway.

[Enthusiast]

6. Everywhere I've been on the net

there is someone that pops up, they're very angry about the Assange rape thing. I try to sympathize, considering perhaps, that they are victims of sexual abuse and just misunderstand the Assange accusations. But it is odd, these very angry responses popping up all the time. I suspect it is actually someone on the "inside" mostly looking out for U.S. secrecy and trying to damage Assange's credibility.

[No Elephants]

7. I wonder how they even know about a post at Du2 so quickly,

I used to post on a board that was mostly a small group of female internet friends, posting news stories, but mostly taling friend stuff that we had in common. I hesitate to say, but it's true: a lot of it had to do with stereotypically female things that we all had in common. supermarket items, kids, clothes, shoes, home decor, etc.

Post a story even tangentially relating to the Confederacy, though, and faster than you could say "armed insurrection" several thugs were posting on the board, defending everything, down to and including slavery, with the usual talking points. Those who identified their own gender self-identified as male.

I very much doubt they had been lurking until they finally saw a topioc that motivated them enough to post.


Similar things used to happen at DU2. I would notice it especially with, again, the Confederacy, and affirmative action. Oh, and guns.

Suddenly, you would have on one thread lots of folks who had registered years earlier than I had. Some of them had under a thousand posts. Some had not much over. None of them had post counts consistent with a long time DUer who was still hanging around. But, there they were, and in clusters, and very soon after the thread started. I would notice because, when I saw right leaning statements on the board, I would be more likely to check profiles.

I always wondered how the thread got to their attention so quickly.

[Enthusiast]

8. Wow!

They must have an alert type program of some sort. It might work like a search but alerts them when certain "issues" are triggered by key words like "Julian Assange".

One time when I was crusading in support of single payer health care, as I frequently did on the old DU2, someone popped up to tell me that we wouldn't even have health care without the insurance companies. This was obviously an employee of someone. They are out there by the thousands.

[No Elephants]

9. That is what I thought. I think on DU, some might post under different names.

Switching so that their most used name never got associated with unpopular postitions.

I don't think that was the case with my mostly female websites, though. I think that had to have been some kind of alert system. Or maybe a low tech possiblity could have been that one of the regulars at the site would go to some other website and alert the posters there. We did have a few posters I could envision doing something like that.