A petard was an early gunpowder weapon, usually an iron cooking pot filled with black power, that was manually placed against a wall or gate in order to blow a hole in the obstacle. Today, we would call it a breaching charge.
Given the inconstancies of pre-industrial gunpowder and fuses, placing and lighting a petard was a risky business for the combat engineers of the era. Many times, they found themselves “hoisted” into the air and eternity by a prematurely detonating petard. That is why the phrase, “Hoisted by one’s own petard,” entered the language to mean being undone by one’s own weapon or actions.
This is why I find it incredibly funny that the current leftwing hero du jour has been arrested for violating a ridiculously broad definition of rape that rabidly misandrogynistic leftists foisted upon Sweden.
I mean it is seriously funny. I don’t even think there is an Internet acronym to express how karmically hilarious I find this situation.
Why can’t leftists understand that the violence-based power of the state is a blunt and dangerous instrument? Leftists always seek to invest power in the state in order to dominate and control their self-perceived cultural, social and political competitors. Why do they never learn that eventually that power will be turned against leftists themselves?
For example, take gerrymandering: Back in the ’80s, leftists got the courts to sign off on upending nearly two centuries of laws preventing gerrymandering, because the leftists saw gerrymandering based on race as a way of creating large numbers of districts custom-designed to elect leftists. Unfortunately, it took non-leftists about five minutes to figure out they could use the exact same laws to concentrate leftwing voters in a small number of districts, thus giving non-leftists a serious representational advantage. Worse, at the time, anti-gerrymandering traditionalists had warned leftists (and argued in court) that bringing back gerrymandering would have exactly that consequence.
Likewise, non-leftists have warned for years that the increasingly broad and vague definitions of sex crimes exposed men to “lawfare” attacks from unprincipled women while doing little to protect real victims. Now we have a crystal-clear and prominent case of exactly the kind of abuse of law that non-leftists warned about.
I think it is clear from the facts available that Assange is guilty of nothing more than being a man-slut who has been exploiting his international fame to get laid as many times by as many women as he can. He’s just a self-indulgent prick who treats women like objects and he uses adoring leftwing crowds as hunting grounds to rack up his conquests.
The most likely scenario is that two women had sex within him because they were essentially political groupies who wanted to screw someone famous. When they each found out that they were not his one-and-only, they decided to get revenge using Sweden’s ridiculous laws.
But wait, couldn’t this all be a sinister CIA plot? Man, I wish. Imagine how great it would be that the CIA had the reach and competence to pull something like this off. Imagine subverting Sweden! Hell, we couldn’t get them on board against the Nazis or Soviets and they’ve been sneering down at us from their self-imagined moral superiority for the last 70 years while selling weapons to anyone with a checkbook, no questions asked. Yet we just snapped our fingers and got them to file trumped-up misdemeanor charges against some little terrorist enabler. I can only dream we could pull that off.
However, the important lesson here is this: Even if the CIA did successfully target Assange they couldn’t have done so if idiot leftists hadn’t fashioned the law the CIA used as its weapon. If Sweden had never been so dumb as to invest so much broad and vague power in the state, the CIA could never have used that power to trip up Assange is the first place.
If the left had never cobbled together their crappy little petard and never placed it against the imaginary walls of the “patriarchy,” it would have never existed to hoist their current heartthrob into the clink. They chose to use the violence-based power of the state to address increasingly minor episodes in the battle of the sexes until it reached the point that they criminalized being a promiscuous jerk (and there are a lot of leftwing promiscuous jerks). They never considered how such power could be turned against them. They never learn that state power is inherently dangerous and unpredictable, and therefore should never be used save when absolutely necessary.
I like to think that some leftists somewhere will learn a lesson from this episode but history suggests that few if any will.
“Why do they never learn that eventually that power will be turned against leftists themselves?”…perhaps because—despite their common self-image as intellectuals—many if not most leftists have little facility in abstract thinking.
[I personally blame having seen a Swedish Scenes from a Marriage for my divorce 35 years later :)]
About charges against Assange for not properly using a nasty condom and (gasp) holding down a women during coitus: what’s to say but that we’ve come a long way, baby, in sanctioning the lack of barriers between the sexes.
“Sanction” is one of those tricky words.
“Liberalism” is, too.
I am snickering also … It’s just one of those things. From this distance, he just doesn’t seem like he would be a knock-your-socks-off-to-the-next-room considerate and expert lover, either.
I was participating in a scientific conference where as a group we were given a tour of the Stockholm City Hall, where it was pointed out that the Nobel Prize is awarded.
As we stood before a mural/mozaic of the Spirit of Stockholm, it was explained to us that the founding of Stockholm was marked by the passing of a city ordinance (a city ordinance, no less!) outlawing rape. I guess I processed that as the transition from being Vikings to becoming proper Scandinavians.
That spirit of progressive thinking extends to Madison, Wisconsin, where I drive to work behind Madison Metro buses sporting the “Get consent, every time!” billboard, featuring a pair of young college-aged would-be lovers, a kind of geeky glasses-wearing guy facing a rather reticent-looking gal with downcast eyes (dude, I want to advise, that babe is just not that “in” to you — get her a Safe Ride home and move on), with a long-necked beer bottle in the background — you see, improper sex involves the use of alcohol. Whatever law they have in Sweden that has Mr. Assange in trouble, with respect to getting spoken consent “every step of the way”, I am certain the Madison Common Council would like to enact it as a City Ordinance. It brought glory to Swedish people in Stockholm, why not for the Swedish Diaspora in the American heartland?
So who are these “rabidly misandrogynistic leftists” who foist thing in Sweden? My heritage is from the Slavic German Diaspora, and being of German heritage, I believe in social order. Swedes are kind of remote cousins to Germans, and I am thinking for whatever image outsiders have about Swedish sexual permissiveness, Swedes have their own ideas regarding social order that need no foisting from ultra-feminist lefties.
I know as much about the law in Sweden as Mr. Assange’s hapless lawyers, but let us say that Swedish law permits in some way sex between consenting strangers but requires the practice of “safe sex”, and is particularly strict about, say, some dude getting consent by promising “to use protection” and then charging ahead, not doing so. Here is America we may say (as in England), “big deal, mate with crows — lay crow’s eggs” or something to that effect, but we are talking about Sweden here, and don’t people in Sweden have the sovereign right to write their own laws to conform to their own customs?
The karmic consequence to all of this is that Mr. Assange is in trouble for being a cad, which is not a crime in the Anglosphere but is considered a serious crime in Sweden, and Mr. Assange got himself into that trouble by considering himself beyond the law, the same attitude that made him notorious with Wikileaks. Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t the long arm of the Shin Bet, the CIA, and MI-5 (or is it MI-6?), and maybe, just maybe, this isn’t leftie feminism run amuck. Maybe this is a principle of not having sex with strangers in not-your-own-country because they have their own sense of social order “over there.”
“Why can’t leftists understand that the violence-based power of the state is a blunt and dangerous instrument? Leftists always seek to invest power in the state in order to dominate and control their self-perceived cultural, social and political competitors. Why do they never learn that eventually that power will be turned against leftists themselves? ”
Why can’t rightists understand this? What is to prevent a liberal president from ordering the FBI use Patriot Act powers to spy on Tea Party members’ electronic communications? No judge has to approve the wire taps, and some of those tea party members were talking secession – they could be secret jihadist terrorists trying to weaken the US. What is to prevent that president from locking up tea party members as “material witnesses”, as happened to some Muslims in the US after 9/11. No charges, no lawyer, no phone calls, no hearing. The government just locks you up until it decides it doesn’t need you any more. These things happened under a conservative administration that claimed that it could do whatever it wanted to anyone it wanted, all in the name of protecting America.
Stuhlman,
What is to prevent a liberal president from ordering the FBI use Patriot Act powers to spy on Tea Party members’ electronic communications? No judge has to approve the wire taps,…
You really need to read the actual Patriot Act. It does not legalize either warrantless wiretaps nor detention without trial for American citizens.
What is to prevent that president from locking up tea party members as “material witnesses”,…
No member of the executive from a cop to the President can lock someone up as a material witnesses. Material witnesses are held by the authority of the courts. This is a traditional power and has nothing to do with the Patriot Act.
No charges, no lawyer, no phone calls, no hearing.
That never happened. As noted, it requires a court order to hold someone as a material witness.
However, despite your hysteria, you do illustrate the key difference between conservatives and leftists in America. Conservatives seek to direct state power against violent external threats whereas leftist seek to direct state power against non-violent Americans. Conservatives direct state power against small numbers of individuals, leftists seek to direct state power against virtually everyone. The number of Americans realistically affected by the Patriot Act number in the thousands at most (so far it’s a few hundred after nearly a decade.) The number of American affected by leftists laws number in the hundreds of millions.
The “rape” laws are a good example. They seek to criminalize dishonest but non-violent behavior. They seek to inject the state into a situation wherein there is no evidence save two people’s word. Most importantly, the law applies to every single adult in the jurisdiction.
Leftists is a war against Americans themselves. Leftists see Americans as a people needing elitist control and shaping. To this end, they attempt to use the law to micromanage everything we do. Ironically, in the past you could at least rely on the left to leave your sex life alone but now they won’t even leave us that.
Legal excesses in matters of defense are tolerable because their scope is restricted and historically they have caused little long term loss of freedom. Excesses in everyday matters are much more dangerous because they have no restriction of scope and historically they are the pathway to tyranny.
Julian Assange, the Tucker Max of the Left.
The phrase “hoist with his own petard”originated with Shakespeare, apparently soon after the word entered use in English.