I received a rather interesting alert, on a troubling topic, upon my return from the last of my finals, and so, kindly from Spilt Milk, via Anomic Entropy, a friend of mine and sister; the unkindly tale of another man puttering along in the footsteps of Julian Assange. For the delicate of ears, I will avoid going into much detail of this kind of assault, or offense. Suffice to say that Michael Moore is quite willing to forgive the serious crimes of patriarchal arrogance and the narcissistic supremacy personality which Julian Assange possesses, and indeed make light of the entire situation.
In doing this, of course, he slanders some of the most prominent feminists and anti-war activists in Sweden, and for those who may think, "well, they are likely of the extreme left anyway", let us consider the simple old tale, oft-repeated in many cultures, of the boast of great Kings, such as to make their land safe for a woman to walk from end to end naked carrying a bag of gold. The circumstances of the victim of a wrong are irrelevant, and are always irrelevant, and shall always be irrelevant. The corollary to that, after all, is what is a woman doing walking from one end of the country to another nude while carrying such valuables? The answer is that itself is part of the point: No matter what someone does or who they are, the law must be evenly applied. This is the actual rationale of hate crimes legislation, for that matter; all it does is transfer jurisdiction to the federal courts so that the bias of local courts, with narrower values and greater likelihood for personal involvement in a case, can be eliminated from the consideration. All so that the absolute principle of justice be upheld.
As an extension, though, it shows that the male's respect for his female ideological counterparts is virtually nonexistant. Homosexual men despise homosexual women in many cases, and black women had not inconsiderable difficulties in rising to any kind of power in the civil rights movement. This general maxim continues, that even when an ideology espouses gender equality, men are not really interested in adhering to it, and will tend, no matter how notionally enlightened, to see the women around them as their inferiors or toys.
In the case of Michael Moore, a loathesome individual in all respects, his shamelessness in the advance of his ideological cause which is revealed in his documentaries is also present in his misogynist inclinations. As he has no respect for the truth, he has no respect for even his own beliefs. This is rather the point of Julian Assange, however: As I have observed, the man acts out of a desire for fame, a daring joust to write his name on the books of history... He is basically narcissistic, and he enables countless defenders, precisely because those men wish they had the courage to act out their own narcissistic fantasies. And inevitably in the time of man bound up in this "I against the world" mythos, which extends to the left as well as to the notionally more anti-collectivist right, but is found primarily in men (and is why Ayn Rand so viciously hated her own sex, and despised lesbians as natural communists, but more on that another time).
It is, in this case, what leads to the rape defence. The ideal heroic Lone Man reduces women to props in his view of the world, because the entire world is just props in his ideology. This means, of course, that men like Michael Moore who don't have the courage to really break the law or confront the authorities to push their ideological agendas, lust as much over the power of objectification that Assange has gained over the world by resisting punishment for his crimes for so long, as much as they lust over the narcissistic feeling of power and totality of control he has displayed. The possession and control of the women around such a man are naturally part of his self-imagined apotheosis of total objectification, and proceeds accordingly. It therefore suffices to say that Michael Moore has merely made clear that he wishes he had the "courage" and perfect levels of self-absorption which would allow him, too, to rape women and yet be surrounded by defenders. He does not, and all he can do is defend the man who represents his ideal.
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