Comments on: UPDATED (12/24) On Being A Man*: NEW COLUMN: Extradited! Why Assange Fears Being ‘Epsteined’ https://barelyablog.com/extradited-why-assange-fears-being-epsteined/ by ilana mercer Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:29:09 +0000 hourly 1 By: Ilana Mercer https://barelyablog.com/extradited-why-assange-fears-being-epsteined/comment-page-1/#comment-29178 Sat, 25 Dec 2021 07:38:52 +0000 https://barelyablog.com/?p=156549#comment-29178 Yes, you make good points, Nicholas. I thought you were an old soul just from your writing here, content and style. It transpires that you are a young man. It’s not a fun time to be young, traditional, principled, deep-thinking. There is a raw honesty in you—especially in your ability to be vulnerable, to share vulnerabilities. This makes you an honorable, strong young man. I suspect you will always find your way; uphold, honor and attach yourself to the right principles and the right people. I don’t see you turning your back on that which is good and noble. I, moreover, completely accept the validity of the constraints you highlight as to why we compromise with forces that beat us down. I once advised young men in high-tech that if one is especially bright, and does not need to become a Microsoft, Facebook, Apple drone — don’t. If you stay within these cesspools—you might have an interesting professional life, as you will play with the latest, fanciest, most exciting gadgets and toys—but they will take your mind, your manhood, and before you know you it, you will regard The Firm as your Family; your prime identity. The university, your particular habitat, is easier to hate and to resist. It will be interesting hearing more.
Merry Christmas and thanks for your generous, honest, insightful contribution to these pixelated pages of mine.

]]> By: Nicholas https://barelyablog.com/extradited-why-assange-fears-being-epsteined/comment-page-1/#comment-29174 Sat, 25 Dec 2021 04:49:57 +0000 https://barelyablog.com/?p=156549#comment-29174 These are bracing words, Mrs. Mercer, even if one does not greet them happily. One is overwhelmed to the point of fatalism by the apparent inevitability of Assange’s extradition after all these years. At least history will be obliged to treat him more honorably than our current-day stenographers for power.

To your broader point: I would like to think that my heuristic has been consistent, that I have always obeyed my internal code of ethics—but more likely I have had the luxury never to be seriously tested in my commitments at this young stage if life. And my professional habitus (academia) involves a litany of infinitesimal compromises and ritual humiliations in the face of a vast, impersonal bureaucracy. It is no coincidence that the universities have produced an entire class of supine and opportunistic men, the fact of which makes me increasingly disinclined to continue in academia, lest I morph imperceptibly into one of them…

Why do you suppose that most men today have abdicated their honour? I would tentatively argue that, in direct proportion as the intermediary functions of society have been absorbed upward into the ever-expanding “therapeutic-administrative” state, in tandem with the diffusion of organic communities into global ones, modern society has divested men of any tangible responsibilities or means of self-sufficiency; while at the same the structural incentives for trading in one’s principles have only increased as men become more dependent on the system for material and social capital. It’s a vicious cycle downwards into abject submission.

But this hardly exhausts the scope of the problem. I would be very curious for your fuller thoughts.

Have a very Merry Christmas, with the hope of better things to come in the New Year!

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