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Comment by boredguy8 | Hacker News Reader

A great interview. But as I read it, one section jumped out as verifiably odd.

  Back when we last did a survey, in February, there were a total of 33 million
  references on the Internet to the word "rape" in any context, from Helen of Troy
  to the Congo. If you search for "rape" and my name, there were just over 20
  million. In other words, perceptively, two-thirds of all rapes that have ever
  happened anywhere in the world, ever, have something to do with me.

Obviously, "back when we last did a survey" means anything done now "doesn't count", but: Googling "rape" returns 226M pages. Googling "'Julian Assange' 'rape'" returns 4.2M pages. Still an interestingly high number ("'Kobe Bryant' 'rape'" returns 1.6M pages; "'Roman Polanski' 'rape'" is 4.5M), but not the two-thirds number he uses. I think that's what feeds the "ego" accusations.

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Actually doing the same search on google.co.uk returns 32 million for 'rape' and 5.5 million for 'rape assange'. Its still not what he says - but much closer.

Google's results are context dependent, varying based on your location and based on your user profile.

Also, Google's ranking is very complex and takes into account such things as the article's publishing date, if it can be inferred. I'm also sure they are also returning results based on recent trends. So it isn't unlikely that at some point Google returned 20 million results on him, given that he was in the center of world wide news after those leaks.

And while I think his statistic is flawed, 4.2 million pages is still a freakishly huge number. It's also obvious that authorities and the world don't give a crap about him allegedly raping somebody and the probability of him being framed is too high considering how he pissed so many governments and institutions that are above the law.

We live in a world where democracy and transparency are slowly becoming fairy-tales that we'll tell our children, just like parents at some point tell their kids that they won't die (after the child understands the concept and starts crying) ... pretty sad really.

It saddens me a little bit that this is the current top post on this subject. I have no problem with pedantic fact checking, but it is hardly the most pertinent issue in the interview.

My post is hardly pedantic fact checking. The intro talks about how many consider Assange a "megalomaniac" and he seems bewildered by the suggestion. My point clearly suggests that thinking 2/3rds of the time people talk about rape they're talking about you suggests an over-inflated sense of self-importance. (Also, for what it's worth: roughly 90% of what he says can't be fact checked. One thing that is close to verifiable is demonstrably false, though twelvechairs offers an explanation that's closer to his made-up numbers. That's pretty central to the topic of Assange, though I leave that as an implication for the reader.)

And "Mendax" doesn't mean "nobly untruthful" in Latin. It just means "a liar." I don't know Latin, so it took me 87 seconds to check this.

These are insignificant points. But somehow I feel they reflect negatively on the credibility of Assange, Rolling Stone, and Michael Hastings. As they say in Latin, "falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus."

(Not that this reflects positively on the credibility of the State Department, the New York Times, or the Swedish sex police...)

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