Dang. I knew the "blaming the victim" card was going to be played soon enough, but I didn't imagine we'd be getting rape analogies already. It won't do a particle of good, but I'd like to encourage people *not* to march inexorably down his road. The analogy is fundamentally flawed, and to have brought it up at all is to distort the discussion just about as badly as mention of Nazis famously does.
We are not putting Slim on trial. We are not denying her all reasonable support. What we are doing is questioning the propriety of *inappropriate* forms of support, forms which seem to be continuously requested/demanded/imposed by Slim's too-fervent supporters. We are wondering whether those forms of alleged support are (a) effective at all, and (b) perhaps more damaging to the project than the damages they seek to address.
To pursue the analogy I just suggested was a bad idea: it's one thing if a rape victim is herself put on trial, or blamed (explicitly or implicitly) for having "asked for it". That's reprehensible and wrong.
But suppose the rape victim insists that the name of her rapist never be mentioned by anyone in any context. Suppose she insists that the name of the clubs of which her rapist is a member also never be mentioned. Suppose she insists that no one else be allowed to join those clubs. Suppose that when someone questions the necessity or practicality or effectiveness of these increasingly extreme "remedies", that the victim and her sycophants accuse the questioner of failing to properly support the victim. Suppose that when someone asks, "Was she raped?", the question is stricken from the public record as if it had never been asked.
If every demand (no matter what) of the victim must be acceded to, if to question any of them is grounds for being branded as callous or unsupportive, where does it end?
I'm sure I'll be accused of being viciously unsympathetic for having asked these questions at all. I will assert (not that it will do any good) that I am not trying to blame the victim here, and that I would like to give the victim all due sympathy for the grievous wrongs she has indeed suffered. But my sympathy is not irrational. Being sympathetic does not mean that the victim gets to place arbitrary demands on the entire rest of the world and expect them to be accepted as reasonable and appropriate recompense for her injuries. Being sympathetic does not mean knee-jerk agreement that in any dispute over the appropriateness of a remedy, the victim is always right and anyone who disagrees is automatically an unsympathetic victim-blaming jerk. Being sympathetic does not mean encouraging the victim to continue to play the victim forever. Healthy victims put their tragedies behind them, and truly sympathetic people encourage and help them to do this.