Reading that letter it seems that Jon was being accused of... nothing in particular? I'm not even sure what he could refute. There's no accusations of consent violations. There's really only the one phrase - "sexually harass and victimize women" - but without examples that just sounds like a pot shot. Especially given that they identify a "systematic pattern", which is apparently a pattern with no specific examples of wrongdoing.
And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men. Especially when it comes to their interactions with women. And I believe these women probably had plenty of valid complaints, in part because I know very well how aggressive, oblivious and entitled a lot of men can be, and how many "normal" interactions between men and women do involve consent violations, if not assault or worse. So given what I know about the dangers women face routinely, and the vague and mild allegations in this letter, I'd guess like the biggest crime he committed was being another guy who's god awful at dealing with women, dating and sex.
Thanks for that. Everything in that letter is, unfortunately, upsettingly, fairly common. But I'd want him out of my life and professional settings too if that's the way he was acting.
throwaway290 · 20m ago
Not nothing in particular... it seems very rapey by the original letter.
And none of that was shown false. It looks like all that the court said was "no evidence was provided". What's absolutely crazy is that he himself did not say it not happen. He just said "evidence was false"...
Duh imagine being a victim there and providing "evidence". It looks like any text messages would be all fine and all the stuff would be IRL (IF it is true).
It's clear as mud.
unsupp0rted · 15m ago
> And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men.
It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society
standardUser · 1m ago
I imagine if you'd had the countless conversations I have had with women over the years about men and intimacy, you wouldn't find this amazing in the least.
sho_hn · 11m ago
> It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society
I'd say it's an OK stance to take (e.g., based on past experience) if one of the conclusions you take from it is that it calls for a process that isn't similarly biased. If you recognize and acknowledge your own bias, you should be able to critically challenge it and/or be interested in neutral fact-finding, due process, and so on.
For myself, I'd say it's less general distrust of men and more the observation that many situations in society greatly favor men in their power dynamics and make it more probable for men to misbehave, i.e. given the option.
No comments yet
nkrisc · 5h ago
Pretty frightening, really. These kinds of experience have absolutely though subtly changed how I interact with people. Particularly, as a man, with women and children.
Once my parents were visiting me and we took my kids to a playground. While there, my dad noticed a girl sitting on the ground crying, and seemed to be hurt. He looked for a moment to see if anyone was coming, and then went over to her and asked if she was alright, if she needed help, and where her parents were. He didn't get a clear response from her so he started walking around to the various adults around the playground inquiring if the hurt girl crying was theirs. Finally he got to one group of women and after asking one of them said something along the lines of, "yeah, I saw you over there bothering her" in an accusatory tone. Seeing where it was going, he put his hands up and just walked away without saying another word. The girl remained there crying, alone.
It was actually kind of a scary because later that day I realized how in that moment that woman, who my dad had never met before, could probably have destroyed his life right then and there if she wanted to.
These days, in the back of my mind I'm always considering how my actions, particularly towards women and children, could be misconstrued. When I'm at the playground with my kids, I don't talk to kids I don't know, at all, for any reason, even if they talk to me. I just smile and make myself busy with my own kids.
firefax · 1m ago
The correct response is to stand your ground and say "No, I'm trying to connect a hurt child with their parents. Are you their parent? If not, we'll cut this favor short and just call child services".
Then do it. Call 911, say there's an injured, unattended child at the playground, and you're getting a hostile response from folks as you try to locate the guardian so you'd appreciate it if a social worker collected the kid until the parents can be found.
There is nothing illegal about speaking to a child, and when you soft play people like this you empower them. Let them have to show a cop a DL to get their kid out a squad car to learn their lesson if they can't handle polite help.
(Also, what is this narrative around HN about being accused of nefariousness at playgrounds? I used to eat my lunch at one near me because it was the only park with a trash can nearby and I didn't want to lug my trash back to my apartment before going on my way towards the city -- nobody ever said a word to me aside from asking for a ball if it rolled over.)
usui · 5h ago
Wow, sounds like that person's brain has fried itself if it jumps to conclusions like that. Which region or general area do you live? What has happened to common sense in the community?
nkrisc · 5h ago
It’s just anti-social people being anti-social, but now they have the internet to use against you.
Suburban East Coast US.
wffurr · 5h ago
That is a real shame. I have had almost exclusively positive interactions with the other parents and kids at the playground. Maybe a different culture where you are.
Aurornis · 4h ago
> I have had almost exclusively positive interactions with the other parents and kids at the playground.
These stories were all over Reddit for years. I remember a thread asking for examples of things Reddit led them to believe that weren’t true, and the top voted comment was that Reddit made them think that going to the playground as a lone dad would cause women to view them as a predator. In reality, going to the playground as a dad in most places is a non-event. It’s common for dads to be there alone with their kids. When I go, it’s a mix of moms and dads and we all talk and interact.
Yet to a non-parent reading Reddit it seemed like going to the park as a dad was asking for trouble. The story was repeated so often.
I’m sure these events do happen some times. When it does, I wouldn’t be surprised if the accuser was reading their own Reddit equivalent social media website where stories about men being creeps at the playground get passed around as fact. To them, it’s just how they see the world working because they’ve heard it repeated so often.
jibolash · 4h ago
The problem here is the asymmetric nature of outcomes. The vast majority of these types of interactions will be positive, but it only takes 1 to ruin someone's life or reputation, that forces over-correction in behavior
nkrisc · 5h ago
Honestly it’s rare, it’s not normal. But it’s also so scary I just won’t risk it, however small the risk. You can’t tell which strangers are crazy.
My wife, on the other hand, is the parent who will go over and play with all the children while the parents are on their phones. But she’s a woman, so it’s different.
kylebenzle · 4h ago
The problem is that if anyone at any time feels like they're just annoyed with you or don't want you around anymore they can make an accusation, completely unfounded, that will destroy your life.
The problem is is that a lot of guys walking around that haven't had it happen to them assume it hasn't happened to them because they've been doing everything right when really you've just been lucky so far.
matheusmoreira · 4h ago
It's not just you. Men in general are realizing the risks and are changing their behavior and environment in order to protect themselves from accusations. Everything from ensuring witnesses are always present to simply not interacting at all.
sho_hn · 4m ago
To be fair, victim-blaming has always been a risk women have had to contend with, the novelty is mostly that perhaps men are now exposed to it as well.
anal_reactor · 4h ago
I grew up in a small village. Such towns place social cohesion above all. As a child I thought that as long as I am right, I'd be able to reason my way out of everything. But I learned that in a crowd shit can go from 0 to 11 very fast, which is why I have a deep fear of people, and especially crowds. When you're there with one person you might have a slim chance of reasoning with them, but crowds behave unpredictably, emotionally, and violently. They almost always follow the most charismatic leader, not the most logical one. The older I get, the more I hate people and the more disgusted I am with them. I understand why so many old people are bitter cunts. I want to make it until retirement and then move far away from everyone else, just me and my internet connection. I want to gain financial independence so that I don't need to rely on people's petty games to make a living.
I still try to find those few people around me who aren't garbage, but it's a tough job.
RigelKentaurus · 36m ago
While my fear of crowds may not be as strong as yours, I see your point of view. In most situations, it doesn't take a lot for a crowd to become a mob.
dttze · 3h ago
If you think everyone around you is garbage, you might want to reflect on yourself.
anal_reactor · 3h ago
I did. I genuinely did. After a few years of thinking I'm at fault, I realized that's not the case.
jjtheblunt · 1h ago
> It was actually kind of a scary because later that day I realized how in that moment that woman, who my dad had never met before, could probably have destroyed his life right then and there if she wanted to.
I know what you mean, but he could also have said "fuck off, lady; that's a kid crying, so grow up" and thereby have made clear he was worried about the kid, not some creeper who she hoped to have just told off.
unsupp0rted · 12m ago
She has vastly more power than he has. With one sentence she could have him arrested or at least temporarily detained for nothing.
Just one comment thread up there's a person rushing to believe her and distrust the dad:
> "And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men."
^ from the other comment thread above this one
RigelKentaurus · 4m ago
Man, this was hard to read. Irrespective of what actually happened, this found-guilty-by-popular-opinion mentality is a corrosive evil, and it's been worsened by social media. Hard to believe that this community just ignored "innocent until proven guilty" so casually.
I used to naively believe that people are generally good. I still believe that but with a major qualifier. There are some truly toxic people out there who are seriously mentally fucked up and don't hesitate to screw with others' lives. They seem normal and nice at first, but if you look closely enough, you see the trail they have left behind.
sho_hn · 1m ago
I think one of the reasons communities like Scala's are susceptible to this pattern is that they have some characteristics of a movement and compete for attention with other movements, so there's a knee-jerk response to protect the movement and all the effort put into it from being associated with bad stuff. Most signatories to this letter were likely erring on the side of protecting their community, at the risk of an individuals' fate.
This is something to recognize in our communities and counter-act with process and mature leadership if needed.
(I'm also discussing this neutral to the actual issue, which I don't know much about and haven't made my mind up on.)
figassis · 5h ago
Not excusing anyone who jumps at judgement, but this illustrates the importance of protecting the integrity of due process. People have over time seem many cases of due process being corrupted by money, power or just incompetence. Many times it has happened to them. Due process is often opaque, complex and lengthy so they decided to bring that in-house and make their own judgements.
I have learned to fight the instinct to judge because many times I judged very very sure of my conclusions, only to find put some time later how completely wrong I was. It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong. As a rule I try never to make a decision on the same day I receive information. You'd be surprised how much your opinion can change once you digest your info.
ZpJuUuNaQ5 · 5h ago
>People have over time seem many cases of due process being corrupted by money, power or just incompetence. Many times it has happened to them. Due process is often opaque, complex and lengthy so they decided to bring that in-house and make their own judgements.
I doubt that's the case here. People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
netsharc · 1h ago
> People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
My theory is that people do it (hey I do it too) to get the kick of "look at that piece of shit, I'm glad compared to them I'm a better/smarter/etc person.".
kayodelycaon · 5h ago
Fighting the instinct to judge is really important.
Both my father and I have excellent “gut feelings” to the point that “I hate being right” is the family motto.
It would be so easy to believe I’m always right in my judgement of people. But I’m extremely wrong at least 5% of the time.
If nothing else, that 5% helps me learn to read people better. If I didn’t reserve judgment, that 5% would quickly become 50%.
rpdillon · 5h ago
> It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong.
This is such an important idea to me. We all really only live in our own lives, and even if we read and talk to others endlessly, it's very hard to learn the full scope of the world and others' struggles. So there's some hubris to thinking that you fully understand things and can judge them absolutely.
Not saying there's no right and wrong, just that maybe reserving judgment has its place. I mostly think about this to coach myself, but I think it has use for others as well.
huhkerrf · 5h ago
Things seem to have cooled down on the cancellation front since the peak fever of 2020 and 2021, so I don't see it as much anymore. But for a while, the rejoinder of the cancellers was always, "well, he can just find a different job" or "he got a different job, cancelled yeah right."
As if the job was all that mattered.
We are social creatures. Shunning and ostracism have a significant impact, even when happening by people we don't know, especially when it's a pile-on.
I'm not saying there's never a reason to shun someone. If people do something terrible, cut ties with them. I don't think that's what a lot of this is, though. If it was, it wouldn't happen on such flimsy evidence and it wouldn't happen to people others don't even know.
Most cancellations are a blood letting, where people are trying to feel powerful and the cancelled (or even the wronged) don't really matter.
huhkerrf · 5h ago
That's also why, generally, apologies don't matter. Go look at an apology of a "cancelled" person.
How many replies are about how the apology sounds hollow, or how a PR person must have written it?
exasperaited · 5h ago
It's surely not your contention that said apologies sound hollow because there is nothing really to apologise for and therefore it is inherently untrue?
There are some challenges with media-based apologies because they can only be done at all through media PR systems, of course, and there's an impact therefore on the shape and style of an apology that Marshall McLuhan might have written about if he were still here.
So there's an element of apology fatigue that will prompt some of those replies.
But even then, apologies that sound hollow or sound written by PR generally are somewhat hollow or written with help from, or experience of, PR. Usually the PR of a law firm, right?
It is wholly possible to apologise in ways that do not have those qualities, and wholly possible for people to recognise them.
huhkerrf · 4h ago
>It's surely not your contention that said apologies sound hollow because there is nothing really to apologise for and therefore it is inherently untrue?
I can not understand at all how you got that from my message.
As for the rest of what you're saying. Yes, there's a way to apologize in a way that don't have those qualities, and it's apologizing directly to the people you've wronged, if you have. Apologizing to a faceless group is pointless.
exasperaited · 4h ago
> Apologizing to a faceless group is pointless.
Well... it might be at least pragmatic. Apologising to the wider community for wronging a member of the community is normal; it's also expected.
And I guess apologising to one's audience for not being who they think you are is essentially, the same thing, just with a parasocial twist.
Parasocial "communities" exist (fandoms) and they do rather complicate things.
exasperaited · 4h ago
That's why it was a question.
ElectricSpoon · 5h ago
On the flip side of cancellation, I wonder how much people cancelling are hurting themselves by sticking to retaliation.
Go read about the psychology of forgiveness. There are some pros to "letting it go", when appropriate.
archagon · 48s ago
Well, maybe women who’ve been sexually harassed for most of their lives, and who couldn’t even feel safe at their own community events, were fed up with “letting it go.”
(Caveat: I have no idea what happened with this particular person.)
Eisenstein · 5h ago
I absolutely do not agree with public pile-ons, social media hysteria, or understandable mistakes leading to cancellation. Everyone should be able to make mistakes and learn from them -- that is incredibly important.
But shame is also incredibly important in that it causes self-policing of social norms. There is no way that society would work if everyone just did things that benefited them with no regard to others, in ways that weren't actively harmful but just annoying. That's why we have norms and enforce them with shame. If this gets broken down because people use shaming inappropriately then it will be used as a reason to do away with shaming completely. We see this trend happening and its continuation can only lead to bad outcomes.
scrozart · 3h ago
Agreed. Additionally, negative sanctions have been part of human life since the beginning. Anyone who has raised a child or pet understands this.
This discussion of far more nuanced than many of the comments in this post address. It's true people are often swiftly found guilty in the public eye without due process - see most true crime - but it's also true such sanctions have their place.
cyanydeez · 5h ago
Sure, if you ignore the federal government of the united states.
siva7 · 5h ago
> Things seem to have cooled down on the cancellation front since the peak fever of 2020 and 2021, so I don't see it as much anymore. But for a while, the rejoinder of the cancellers was always, "well, he can just find a different job" or "he got a different job, cancelled yeah right."
Thank god society got more mature since then and didn't participate in imagine some kind of doxing app for this purpose :)
Aurornis · 5h ago
I do not know anything about this author’s situation and won’t pretend to, but I did watch a sexual misconduct accusation play out in person once. The speed at which everyone assumed the story was true and turned against the accused was basically instant.
However there were some key details about the accusation that didn’t add up. The accuser tried changing the details of the story once they realized others were noticing the problems with the claims. It also became clear that the accuser had an ulterior motive and stood to benefit from the accused being ostracized. The accuser also had developed a habit of lying and manipulation, which others slowly began to share as additional information.
This was enough to make the situation fall apart among people who knew the details. However, word spread quickly and even years later there are countless people who only remember the initial accusation. Many avoided the accused just to be safe. The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It remains one of the weirdest social situations I’ve seen play out. Like watching someone drop a nuclear bomb on another person’s social life and then seeing how powerless they were to defend against it. In this case it didn’t extend to jobs or career. Their close social circle stuck with them. However I can still run into people years later who think the person is a creep because they heard something about him from a friend of a friend and it stuck with them.
> The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It's what happens when we see people as stand-ins for their group, but we can't see the individual behind it.
wulfstan · 5h ago
I have no idea who is telling the truth in this situation, and unless you are the person who has been accused or those who are the alleged victims, neither do you. For situations like this where the allegations fall short of criminal misconduct, a thorough process run by someone independent of the situation needs to a) to evaluate the claims made b) determine whether they are justified c) issue a clear and open report on what took place for the benefit of the community involved. As far as I can tell no investigation has been carried out to verify or falsify claims made by the individuals concerned.
But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women, and if what these women say is true, it would be utterly unsurprising to me. The High Court judgement in this situation is a civil matter; nobody has been "cleared" of anything.
>you can form your own judgement about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on
Therein lies the danger. An outsider with little knowledge cannot make a good judgement. Their judgement will be based on intangibles, such as "something similar happened to somebody I know, so I tend to believe X's account over Y's account".
But that's not proof, or evidence, or anything really. It's just naked bias from a different situation applied to an unrelated one. Saying "history is replete with examples" is exactly that. If that is going to be used as a metric, then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women carries with it a high degree of risk. No matter how you behave, a single accusation from somebody willing to lie or exaggerate--for whatever reason--will be supported and amplified using this same historical rationale.
wulfstan · 4h ago
I do not accept that this is "naked bias".
If the accusations are true, then this is yet another example of a pattern of behaviour played out so regularly, across cultures, centuries and communities, that it is boringly predictable: "Senior community member, almost always a man, sexually exploits vulnerable women seeking acceptance into that community."
When a possible situation arises you should investigate it and, if there is reasonable evidence that it is true, do what you can to stamp it out and ensure it stops happening.
deltarholamda · 3h ago
In Jon Pretty's case, if his account is true, it wasn't investigated. It was simply decided in a court of public opinion, quite possibly because of the historical metric you brought up.
The only way you can ensure that it stops happening is strict segregation by sex, but I don't think that's what you'd want.
throwaway290 · 42m ago
If this was done bayesian style we could say the priors are man taking advantage of woman. 9 cases out of 10 if there is a rape case you can assume the perp is male and if you don't you are like a born yesterday idiot. And if you're a woman it's super important to keep it in mind, like you think of getting into elevator alone with a random man you should think about actual statistics than "let's not pre judge people".
With wrong cancellation it's different because it's not an urgent situation and people should not ruin someone's life randomly. It would be stupid to force us to think "really there's a 50/50 chance if the rapist is that man or that woman" but if you say "there's a 50/50 chance if the guy is a creep or that woman is scheming something" then it can be not that wrong (depending on country)
It's not as easy as some people make it out to be to create a believable story about abusive behavior.
> then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women
You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees.
If you do, then yeah maybe you need to think twice about that, and maybe that's not such a bad thing?
deltarholamda · 3h ago
>You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees.
"He exhibited problematic behavior. He touched me inappropriately. He cornered me in an elevator. He used demeaning language and made me feel unworthy."
Zero sex involved, and these accusations can be completely true or untrue, depending on undefinable intangibles and individual interpretations.
ryandrake · 43m ago
I know someone who was written up at work for what (after the investigation) amounted to "brief, unwanted eye contact" with a co-worker. It's kind of a minefield and casual, innocent behavior can easily be misinterpreted.
stickfigure · 39m ago
All of those things are far worse than having (consensual) sex with your mentees.
deltarholamda · 8m ago
What if "he cornered me in the elevator" was actually "he talked to me while we were alone together in the elevator, but I have background trauma that made this extremely uncomfortable for me".
That's the point I was trying to make. One person's interpretation can be wildly different than another's interpretation of the same event. If we are going to assign preference to the interpretation that is the most damaging to both parties involved--she is traumatized, he is fired--then perhaps it is better to completely separate the sexes.
netcan · 5h ago
Well... unfortunately the world does not come equipped with a "figure out the truth and report back" button.
We have some truth-discovering methods... but they are hard, expensive, and often return empty handed. Science. Courts. Fact finding commitees. Etc.
So... you can't have that. What we have is heresy, and a "how to act" dilemma in circumstances where truth isn't known and will not be known.
Im going to encourage you not to form your own opinion on who is lying. Read the accusations of you want.. but don't pretend you are in a position to judge... only to execute.
ghusto · 4h ago
> I have no idea who is telling the truth in this situation, and unless you are the person who has been accused or those who are the alleged victims, neither do you
Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
> But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women
And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
maeln · 4h ago
> > I have no idea who is telling the truth in this situation, and unless you are the person who has been accused or those who are the alleged victims, neither do you
> Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
A fair-as-possible process that is only fair if you have enough money to afford a lawyer, the time to fight for your case, are not part of a community that has been systematically discriminated against by the people enforcing the process, that the laws are in your favor, that you are not victim of a difficult to prove crime, ...
I will never advocate for vigilante justice, but let's not kid ourselves, the justice system has many, many flaws and bias, and acting as if it should be the only source of truth, and that no personal judgment should be made without, is very naïve.
ghusto · 3h ago
At no point was I insinuating that the justice system isn't flawed. It's heavily flawed, for all to see.
The alternative however, is unjustifiable. Mob law is worse than no law.
akoboldfrying · 4h ago
The justice system is pretty terrible, but it's still better than mob justice.
> and that no personal judgment should be made without
I think it's fine to make personal judgements about things that have little impact on other people. For things that have a big impact, a more formal approach is called for. I think TFA makes a strong case that the impact here is big.
maeln · 3h ago
> The justice system is pretty terrible, but it's still better than mob justice.
Absolutely, but there is a space between mob justice and the legal system. Most community do self police in some form or another. It is also far from perfect, and mistakes happen just like in the other system. But it is a middle ground between the heavier burden of proof and long process used by the legal system, and the lack of usually any proof and visceral reaction of mob mentality.
Member of a community usually have more information about the other member of the community, which inform their judgment. They have also more at stakes.
> I think it's fine to make personal judgements about things that have little impact on other people. For things that have a big impact, a more formal approach is called for. I think TFA makes a strong case that the impact here is big.
If we choose to believe him. If we choose to believe the accuser, then we could reason that by "exposing" him they may have prevented other victim. Something a long and legal process might not have prevented.
I am not saying this is the case. I know personally neither the accuser nor the accused, and have no real way to make an informed decision in this case.
akoboldfrying · 3h ago
> But it is a middle ground between the heavier burden of proof and long process used by the legal system, and the lack of usually any proof and visceral reaction of mob mentality.
Where do you see the line between community self-policing and mob justice? I agree that community members often have information about each other, but I think it's often low-grade and commingled with vague popularity and "office politics". I interpreted the situation in TFA to be that many people signed the letter who had little information either way.
>> I think TFA makes a strong case that the impact here is big.
> If we choose to believe him.
Here I was only talking about the impact it had on him, not whether or not he was guilty of something. I think we can believe that it had a big impact on him. Or do you suspect that he is exaggerating for effect?
myvoiceismypass · 4h ago
> now history is replete with examples
Super curious what the stats are that support a statement like this. Scale matters with everything.
wulfstan · 4h ago
No - and in fact in my view this is the core problem with these kinds of situations - there isn't a long established process validating a set of accusations, that if true, fall short of criminality but should result in your exclusion from a community.
Individual communities have to establish ground rules for these sorts of things to protect the vulnerable.
> And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
I do not accept that this happens with nearly the regularity that people, usually men, claim it does. To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways.
By way of example, 1 in 100 rape accusations MADE TO THE POLICE in the UK leads to a charge being made against the accused. That is what we as a society are up against, and why we have to take creepy, exploitative behaviour that falls short of criminality so seriously.
mattbee · 4h ago
> No - and in fact in my view this is the core problem with these kinds of situations - there isn't a long established process validating a set of accusations, that if true, fall short of criminality but should result in your exclusion from a community.
> Individual communities have to establish ground rules for these sorts of things to protect the vulnerable.
You can never sue anyone for ostracizing you from an open community, or for the consequences of that ostracism. There's no limit on who global communities might choose to ostracize. It's so fundamental to how we group together; you always have to know the norms.
British law is famously friendly to wealthy litigants, and the High Court for awarding ruinous damages. The OP took an opportunity to sue four signatories who (from my understanding of the court order) put their name to harmful allegations that they didn't know the truth of. The four defendants paid £20,000 in costs and damages.
Unfortunately for the OP, the ostracism clearly still stands, and despite going to the High Court to sue for libel, the first-hand reports of his conduct are still online.
I don't see this as a lesson in the terrifyingly and unpredictable consequences of Cancellation - seems like more "don't shit where you eat".
antisthenes · 1h ago
> I do not accept that this happens with nearly the regularity that people, usually men, claim it does.
That you chose to ignore inconvenient facts that do not fit your narrative is only _your_ problem, no one else's.
Figure out how to remedy this lapse in judgment, then come back to the conversation.
akoboldfrying · 3h ago
You seem to think that the fact that
> 1 in 100 rape accusations MADE TO THE POLICE in the UK leads to a charge being made against the accused
backs up your claim that
> To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways
But this is not the case at all, unless you intended "these kinds of accusations" to mean both making formal charges and writing accusatory blog posts -- but the whole reason for this article is to point out the massive amount of damage that the latter can do at almost no cost to the accuser. Absent further evidence, it's clear that in this particular case, the two accusers' lives were not at all "torn apart" by making these life-destroying accusations -- do you agree?
wulfstan · 3h ago
> But this is not the case at all, unless you intended "these kinds of accusations" to mean both making formal charges and writing accusatory blog posts -- but the whole reason for this article is to point out the massive amount of damage that the latter can do at almost no cost to the accuser. Absent further evidence, it's clear that in this particular case, the two accusers' lives were not at all "torn apart" by making these life-destroying accusations -- do you agree?
Absolutely not! Assume the alleged victims are telling the truth, and read their statements again, carefully. Do they sound to you like people whose lives weren't torn apart by the experience? They needed counselling, therapy, time off work. These sound to me like traumatised people. You can argue that what they had to deal with wasn't "as bad" as what the accused had to deal with, but I don't accept that women make public accusations of sexual exploitation casually without any personal consequences, and certainly not in this case.
The "1 in 100" statistic is to remind people of a few things: firstly, knowing that you will have to expose your sex life to the police and there is only a very small probability that anything will actually be done about it, some women are still brave enough to try, and secondly, that underneath these 1 in 100 accusations are many others who just cannot bring themselves to the point of talking to the police about what they have experienced.
I think we should give women who make these accusations the benefit of the doubt while establishing the facts, acknowledging that coming forward to raise your voice about these things is extremely difficult. If men can by and large rape women - commit a crime against them - with relatively little risk of successful prosecution, then I think it's pretty obvious that non-criminal sexual exploitation is even less likely to have any consequences for the perpetrator.
akoboldfrying · 2h ago
> Do they sound to you like people whose lives weren't torn apart by the experience?
I was talking about the experience of making the accusation, not the (clearly harrowing if true) experiences they had leading up to that.
I remind you that almost the entire community immediately sided with them, despite the person they accused being prominent in the community.
wulfstan · 2h ago
I'm afraid I don't accept that you can split this into "experiencing something traumatic" and "making the accusation that you have experienced something traumatic".
The claim that "almost the entire community immediately sided with them" is accepting the accused's account of what happened in favour of the accusers. At least one of the victims started to raise concerns in the community several years beforehand and their concerns were not taken seriously:
"I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building a reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the community. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions taken."
I'd also be very, very deeply skeptical that two public claims were the only claims made. We should bear that in mind. If the accusations are true, the public ones are usually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
praptak · 5h ago
Maybe both sides are telling the truth. I mean that this fragment:
"It was like reading a fiction about me concocted from benign fragments of reality, transplanted into new context to make them sound abominable."
makes it sound like the accusations weren't based on totally made up facts. It was rather a biased (is the author's view) interpretation thereof.
bagacrap · 3h ago
Not saying I know the truth here, but you are falling for the oldest trick in the book. Effective lies always work in little tidbits of truth (as externally known/validated by the audience).
lotyrin · 1h ago
What evidence do you have that anyone here is lying? Given my priors I am inclined to believe everyone involved here is a reliable reporter of their lived experience, just their lived experiences of the same events are wildly different.
If you are claiming it's more likely that these women are lying because they want to punish men for the crime of being men than it is likely that everyone here is a victim of a culture that encourages men to behave this way and pressures women to accept it silently you're delusional or acting in bad faith.
praptak · 2h ago
I hadn't even read the original accusations when I wrote this, just this fragment, so I don't think I got exposed to any tricks by the accusers (except maybe indirectly by the author).
I am only saying that even the person being accused does not directly confront the accusers about any facts.
37824912238 · 4h ago
The thing is, /both people are telling the truth!/ If you read their accounts, they're not especially contradictory. It's not as if she's saying, "he raped me" and he's saying, "no I didn't."
It's somewhat subjective, but if you read between the lines, it's clear, and sad all around:
pretty.direct is borderline incel, incapable of forming meaningful romantic relationships. But he's not being malicious -- in his view, he's acting in good faith, trying to at least get some consensual action.
yifanxing is young and not yet sure how to exist in the world. She believes what people tell her.
They had sex, as humans do. She was friendly with him for a time thereafter, but eventually came to regret the act, and then came to see herself as a victim.
This was understandably unforseen by him, and the whole episode, though unfortunate, is not really worth all the anguish it has caused everyone.
wulfstan · 4h ago
If both people are telling the truth, then it sounds like you're saying that although very sad, a community "gatekeeper" sexually exploiting a vulnerable newcomer is just part of life and we should move past it.
I'm not sure I agree with this, and I think we can and should do better.
37824912238 · 2h ago
Where exactly is the "sexual exploitation" part? He didn't blackmail her, he didn't force her, he didn't offer her favors/status in return for sex. She was not a child, she made her decisions, she regretted them. Yes, there's a power imbalance, but it's not as if this was some sort of Bill Cosby type of situation.
lotyrin · 1h ago
I'm not sure if you can't see the power imbalance posed here, or if you just can't see it as a problem, but I don't really care. You need to improve.
Too many people (of all genders) see the value that men provide to their potential sex partners as being status and power, and therefore they believe that men should seek to acquire status and power and use these things to bargain for sex.
This leads to all kinds of shitty problems like the potential (I don't want to assert that the proposed situation in this comment thread is the actual ground truth) miscommunication we're seeing here where a man has done what society expects of him and a woman comes to be abused and we can't even agree if that's a bad thing. We focus on her "regret" as if consent were ever possible in such a lopsided situation and she's retracted it after the fact.
When people talk about the rape culture, this is exactly what they mean. If you see no problems here, you're lost in it.
sixo · 46m ago
Based only on this comment thread—because I have no interest in adjudicating the actual dispute here—I see in your post, for about the 1000th time in my life the motte-and-bailey of "prosecuting rape culture" playing out.
There is almost certainly a "crime" which pretty.direct is guilty of: a failure to uphold a responsibility that accompanies his power and status in the community, which you are describing. If accused of that crime in an appropriate "court", he would almost certainly be able to recognize the part of the harm that was his responsibility, and would hopefully make appropriate amends, or at least would learn not to repeat the harm.
At the same time: this is not what happened; it's almost never what happens, because the impulse to make such harms seen and known and to force the person who caused them to take responsibility is not really an instinct for justice, and is unable to see with any grace, and almost always overreaches.
Instead what happens is an often overreach of the instinct to make things right, which leads to a punishment (the complete destruction of a life, with no appeal) far exceeding that which a clear-eyed judge would deem appropriate to the actual crime, which is closer to: learning not to repeat the harm; recognizing his responsibility. Note that it is an "overreach" in the sense that it exceeds what the hurt person actually wants—usually to be seen, to be feel heard, to feel safe, and to feel that others in comparable cases are safe. Destroying a life doesn't actually accomplish this, and also produces no learning at all in either the defendant or in any other onlookers.
What tends to happen is:
- when men within rape culture repeatedly get away with things, the prosecutions grow more fervent, to the point where they regularly overreach
- when such overreaches get out of control, there's a backlash, discrediting such prosecutions in future cases of all degrees. (This is where we are now.) But then this lets the men get away with all kinds of things, and prevents any of them from ever learning from their errors.
A feedback loop. The way out is for "justice to be served"—for such cases to be resolved fairly, such that neither the defense or prosecution is left with the feeling they were treated unfairly, which is what drives the feedback loop. Historically it has almost always been the prosecution (broadly, the women) who were treated unfairly, but to treat the defense (the men) unjustly also fails to serve the end of justice and, in the long run, serves no one. Apparently that is what has happened in this case.
lotyrin · 16m ago
Everyone is part of rape culture, the same way that everyone is part of racism. I am not trying to point out certain people as criminal but rather certain behaviors and ideas as perpetuating the situation and others as being disruptive to it.
The antidote to the cycle you describe is to do as I have done, to point out people acting in bad faith and for people with privilege to hold other people with privilege accountable. We must create consequences for bad behavior but it's more important that we must create consequences for the people that promote or condone the behavior.
I actually dislike when professional circles or other social groups "solve" the problem they create by permanently exiling individuals in the way of "cancellation" because in many ways the cancelled individual is also a victim of the culture of the group. It's often a performative way to be seen not to have whatever problem the individual exemplifies without addressing how that person came to be an example. It also, from a game-theoretical point of view removes any incentive for those individuals to improve. The individual may not understand that they've done anything wrong, because the culture clearly expects and promotes this behavior. I feel neurodivergent people in particular are likely to fall into the trap because they'll interpret the rules as shown to them by the cultures of oppression they exist in and then not read the room that while the way people behave suggests the behavior is overtly permitted, "everyone knows" it's actually horrible and you're supposed to be covert about it to not get caught.
37824912238 · 52m ago
> I'm not sure if you can't see the power imbalance
:) Did you read the part of my comment where I said, "Yes, there's a power imbalance..." ?
> as if consent were ever possible
To say that she could not consent is to infantilize her. At the age of 21, we are responsible for our own decisions and their consequences.
lotyrin · 28m ago
I did miss that, I suppose I should have said "underestimate the effect of the power imbalance" then. But you've made it clear you do understand but don't care.
You actually think it's justified for an older man to recruit a younger woman, hold his influence in a professional community over her head, suggest that they share a hotel room (making her feel bad for trying to invite a chaperone), suggest that she become intoxicated, and suggest that they have sex? Simply because she accepts this slow erosion of her boundaries and autonomy?
Anyone who seeks to be accommodating and accepting by default, who harbors doubts about the intent of others is "responsible for the consequences"? This exact attitude is why women are choosing to default to assuming malice on the part of men, so they don't fall into traps like this. It's extremely ironic when men hold both positions of "they went along with it so it's not my fault" and "it's not fair that women don't trust men".
What are your boundaries for what constitutes inappropriate behavior here? Merely the law? Do you not understand that people can decide to create consequences in their social communities that go beyond what is prescribed by law? Law provides free speech but doesn't provide consequence-free speech. That you've chosen a throwaway here is telling, knowing your comments here would have consequences if you were to associate them with your public figure.
Consent must be enthusiastic and sober. I'm sorry for men who've never had a woman be excited to have sex with them and who feel that a kind of begrudging intoxicated acceptance is the closest they'll ever get to that. If you're in that category I suggest sex work is significantly more ethical (and less effort).
ofjcihen · 3h ago
If you’re reading this and wondering what the outcome was I implore you to go read the authors Twitter about it.
There was in fact a judgement.
OldfieldFund · 2h ago
can you tell us? Twitter is difficult to navigate.
ofjcihen · 2h ago
A Statement
I am a Scala developer and speaker who was cancelled three years ago.
Yesterday I attended the High Court in London to hear an apology from several prominent members of the Scala community for making untrue claims about me on 27 April 2021. I sued them for libel, and they admitted fault and settled, paying me costs and damages.
Their allegations were sensational and squalid, but unfounded. Their source was the resentment of one woman following a relationship in 2018, which I ended against her wishes. She fabricated or was offered an alternative narrative, which developed into claims of a pattern of behaviour, and culminated in the defendants' publication of an open letter, which they now agree is defamatory.
In two years of legal action, the defendants never presented any evidence to support their allegations, and admitted in court that they had no proper reason to make them. They have given undertakings to the court not to publish further or similar defamatory statements, or have anyone else do so on their behalf.
No signatory contacted me about the allegations before publication. I received no warning, and had no knowledge of the claims' substance. I only discovered what I was accused of at the same time as I learned of my indefinite exclusion from the community; at the same time everyone else found out. I had no opportunity to defend myself. It is no coincidence that the absence of due process led tp an abject injustice.
The experience of cancellation and enduring the online hysteria was traumatic, I responded by withdrawing from the life I knew. Its consequences hurt me and people close to me, and have been immiserating.
My employment opportunities were obliterated. My charitable and educational projects, and my small business, could not continue.
Despite my transferable skills, the allegations were a transferrable red flag recognised across programming communities and industries, and I have barely earned a living since. It has taken two years of legal action to receive fair scrutiny in a forum reliant on facts.
The apology came from four people who signed the Open Letter who live in a special jurisdiction (the UK) where the burden of proof for libel is on the defense. The costs and damages were £20,000.
This exposes the narrator as unreliable. When I first read that paragraph, I read it as implying that a court judged the veracity of the women's claims. It seems deliberately constructed to provide that impression.
In fact the court judgement is merely an acknowledgement that the UK defenders can't possibly prove the truth of the accusations and therefore they fold. Whether or not you prefer the UK system or the US system (which requires the plaintiff to prove falsehood), there's no vindication here. I feel lied to.
OldfieldFund · 1h ago
Much appreciated!
postexitus · 5h ago
The high court judgement is against part of the lynch mob, not the original accusers. Given their original statements are still up, I would assume they are still behind their words and neither the judgement nor his side of the story invalidates their experiences.
Pxtl · 5h ago
What court judgement? In TFA he says they settled.
Wait, the people who settled are signatories? Neither are the original women who made allegations against him? The post said "people in my jurisdiction" but it didn't click until now that this meant that he never formally challenged the original allegations. I guess that makes sense with the difficulty if international lawsuits... but still, it means his accusers have never actually been challenged in court.
stickfigure · 20m ago
It appears this was filed in Britain. The UK has famously expansive libel laws that place the burden of proof on the defense.
I wouldn't read much into the settlement.
cbeach · 5h ago
If the women in question had gone to the actual courts, rather than the Scala community, they might have had an opportunity to see justice (assuming their allegations are true). But because they chose to make very public accusations that were widely circulated, they have now denied themselves the opportunity to use the legal system, because they have prejudiced the process.
I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
aidenn0 · 3h ago
What specific advice would you give young women in such a situation?
>I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
Are you suggesting that if Pretty were found liable for sexual harassment against two different women that he would not have also faced similar negative social outcomes?
cbeach · 3h ago
> What specific advice would you give young women in such a situation?
If you have been sexually harrassed, don't blog about it, report it to the correct authorities.
The Government is literally campaigning against people to stop prejudicing the judicial process via social media:
Everyone who hopes to seek justice needs to read this advice
> Are you suggesting that if Pretty were found liable for sexual harassment against two different women that he would not have also faced similar negative social outcomes?
My point is that the legal system might have weighed up the evidence and considered this case inadmissable, or ruled in Jon's favour. In which case he would have been exonerated in public view by the authorities, and he might have been able to piece his life back together. As it stands, he is in an awful limbo situation where hearsay prevents him getting any gainful employment.
aidenn0 · 2h ago
1. From what I've read, the majority of the alleged behaviors happened outside the UK (Germany and USA from a quick glance).
2. It's unclear to me that any of the behavior alleged to have happened in the US (where the accusers reside) is considered criminal behavior in the US. The usual remediation in the US for sexual harassment is civil, so there are no authorities to contact.
the_real_cher · 4h ago
Maybe there's mismatched expectations of a women going alone to hotel rooms with the men they later accuse of assault.
The man gets the wrong idea that the woman is interested in sleeping with him, whereas the woman just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room.
hollerith · 4h ago
Most women can tell fairly easily when the man they are talking to is sexually attracted to them (and signs of attraction is something almost all women watch for whenever they talk to a man they don't know very well).
If the man then invites the woman to a hotel room, 99.9% of women will strongly assume that the man is trying to advance a sexual agenda if the most likely alternative motivation for the invitation is that the man "just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room."
anonymars · 4h ago
Is that how you would characterize the situation as described by one of the women?
(Yet, perhaps that type of mismatched set of assumptions is at the core of this situation in the first place)
> In our conversations, he also mentioned a few times where he helped other women to attend conferences that they otherwise couldn’t have attended by sharing Airbnbs with them to reduce their travel costs. He asked if I wanted to share an Airbnb on my trip to the Typelevel conference in Berlin. He also mentioned that he planned to invite others. As a student with limited financial resources, I accepted the tempting offer and felt grateful that, once again, he helped me. At first, he mentioned that I could invite others to join our Airbnb. Having attended only two conferences, I did not know many people at the time. When I thought of a person to invite, he stopped me and asked if I was not feeling comfortable sleeping in the same apartment as him, and if I was trying to get a chaperone for us. I felt bad that I made him feel untrusted and stopped asking others to join.
hollerith · 4h ago
I read the parent of the comment I replied to, but I didn't read the OP, and maybe everyone who writes a comment should read the OP.
Having not read the OP (still), I believe that most women -- most extremely young women even -- would expect a sexual advance in the situation described in your quote.
I'm not commenting in any way on whether the man deserves any consequences that might have befallen him for any sexual advance or sexual behavior after having made the invitation described in your quote.
I'm commenting only on, "Maybe there's mismatched expectations," which I (still, after reading your quote, and not having read the OP) consider quite unlikely.
the_real_cher · 3h ago
> When I thought of a person to invite, he stopped me and asked if I was not feeling comfortable sleeping in the same apartment as him, and if I was trying to get a chaperone for us.
I mean I got red flags just from reading this.
anonymars · 2h ago
I agree with you. But it started quite differently, didn't it?
arp242 · 4h ago
> it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women
Which doesn't really say anything about this specific scenario. History is also replete with theft, arson, and murder but that doesn't mean it's a good argument when accusing a specific person of a specific instance of theft.
Two things can be true at the same time:
- many women have been, and continue to be, sexually abused and often fail to get justice, and
- sometimes some accusations are made by bad faith actors and/or confused people
are not in conflict. They can both be true at the same time.
I also have no idea who is telling the truth here; just saying that "these things happen" is not really an argument here.
Actually, because these things actually do happen makes the accusations so powerful. History is also replete with false accusations; remember the whole "Satanic panic" from the 80s and 90s where everyone and their dog was engaging in sexual Satanic rituals? Or QAnon today.
mil22 · 5h ago
Ultimately, this reflects just terribly on the Scala community and every individual who signed the open letter, including Brian Clapper himself and over 300 others. You can read the full list of names here: https://scala-open-letter.github.io/
Having been in a similar situation myself as a teenager, it is truly abhorrent how quickly people are willing to jump to conclusions against someone based on the most limited information, and without giving the accused any chance to tell their side of the story or defend themselves. Not even a single one of my so-called friends asked me what happened, and almost all of them disappeared from my life permanently.
What I learned from the experience was that none of the people who jumped on the cancel bandwagon had ever been worth even a second of my time. It was their loss, and I became much more careful about who I choose as friends after that.
I can certainly say that if I encounter any of the 300+ individuals listed in the letter in my personal or professional lives, I will be giving them a very wide berth indeed.
DanielVZ · 5h ago
I once had a friend that was cancelled by an ex-girlfriend for petty and political reasons. I knew it was false because I had been present in most of the situations she described to cancel him and her story was full of lies. She was also a distant friend and her only comment was “I know why I do what I do”, which was pretty weird.
My friend was devastated, he had to stop going to his classes and feared that nobody would hire him, professors would hate him (since students already did), and that his life had ended. I spoke with him and assured him that wasn’t the case but to be honest I wasn’t sure either.
I don’t know the details but one year later she was suspended for a year for falsely accusing him, my friend graduated and promptly found a job.
All this to say I’m awfully scared now of the risk of my interactions with women being used in the future as a false narrative to cancel me. I’m happily married and due to life stuff I do have to interact with young girls and women. Because of this I try to be as distant as I can and limit any interaction that doesn’t involve multiple other adults.
I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
boston_clone · 1h ago
How can "political reasons" be false? I can imagine a lot of political reasons for a woman to "cancel" a man, especially if they're misogynist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or transphobic, but the vagueness of your anecdote is suspect.
> I don’t know the details but [...]
> I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
I'm sorry to hear that you've seemingly adapted your life based on someone else's "petty" experience with an ex-girlfriend, as you put it. Do you feel that this is a healthy and realistic way to live, though? Do you drive a car, walk around your neighborhood, or eat meat?
Depending on what kind of person you are, there are plenty more serious and realistic risks that getting randomly cancelled by your social circle.
gwd · 1h ago
I remember reading an essay once saying that the real power of superheroes -- and the most unrealistic one -- was certainty. In most of our superhero stories, there's never any question who the bad guy is or what needs to happen to them; there's only a question of how to have enough power to defeat them.
But in the real world, life is uncertain. And bad people take advantage of that fact: Bad men take advantage of the uncertainty to assault women with impunity. And bad women take advantage of the uncertainty to make false accusations.
The rest of us are stuck trying to do the best we can. But certainly the best we can includes more than what the author describes here. There's a reason that in court you have a right to give your side of the story, and to confront your accusers: the law has thousands of years of experience dealing with this sort of thing.
clarionbell · 5h ago
I do hope that some members of the mob will reflect and repent. That they will be more hesitant next time. But unfortunately, I have a feeling that they are mostly going to double down.
Real monsters are walking free of consequence, while innocents are ruined. Society is so obsessed with moral puritanism, and completely blind to the absurd corruption at the top.
If all that energy expended on cancelling people was instead used on genuine political action, we wouldn't be in the trouble we are now at. If more people were reasonable at the time and didn't jump to conclusions, they would still have the high ground. Instead they became the boy who cried wolf.
y-curious · 5h ago
The members of the mob are thus because they seek to avoid reflection on their actual lives. I don't think there will be much learning; We will see them at the next mass movement.
Cthulhu_ · 4h ago
I dunno if they will; it can be a case where "if you're not for us, you're against us", that is, what would the consequence have been for people not signing it? Or what if they retract their signature? There will be people out there tracking and logging all of the signers and their actions.
jphoward · 6h ago
At the bottom it references a GitHub where people have previously added signatures against Jon Pretty - and now the maintainer says "NOTE: This repo is closed. Do not open issues; they will be summarily closed and ignored." - i.e. telling people they shouldn't even TRY to amend their signatures.
Regardless of what you think of Jon Pretty, how is this justifiable? Telling people they can't unsupport something because you're not open to issues, but also not removing it?!
bsuvc · 5h ago
> Telling people they can't unsupport something
Yes.
I have no involvement in this drama (it's the first I've heard of it actually), but signing your name to something matters.
Choose carefully what/who you support.
A repo owner is not obligated to accept contributions.
All of those people are free to create their own repo, post on social media, or write an article recanting their support if they choose to do so.
djrj477dhsnv · 5h ago
He's not "obligated" to do anything but it's still immoral to abandon maintenence of something like that. If he can't be bothered to maintain it, then he should delete it.
fmajid · 2h ago
I don’t know if the allegations against Jon Pretty were valid or not, but those who piled on against him can’t escape accountability for mob behavior (assuming Pretty was innocent) if it becomes embarrassing. At most they can say “I supported this but no longer do”, not expunge all traces.
Cthulhu_ · 4h ago
> If he can't be bothered to maintain it, then he should delete it.
Not necessarily, plenty of projects have been put in an archive state because they are 'finished', superseded, forked, etc. This isn't code nor a living document, it was a one-off operation.
lelanthran · 5h ago
> He's not "obligated" to do anything but it's still immoral to abandon maintenence of something like that. If he can't be bothered to maintain it, then he should delete it.
Morality is subjective (that's why we have courts; which don't respect the individual and differing moralities of the parties involved, it has its own moral bar, for better or worse).
In this case, I feel it is more moral to record all the members of the mob. Maybe this would cause them to think twice before joining the next mob.
I mean, if we are going to have witch-hunt mobs, then the lesser evil is to not allow anonymous mobbers.
henryaj · 3h ago
It's interesting looking at the messages of recent commits of people removing their names:
- Upon reflection, I don't think this letter was the right approach for this situation. Although I cannot retract my initial decision to sign it, I would appreciate having my signature removed from the document.
- We had good intentions and reasons for concern, but there was no due process, and the consequences of that can be awful. Please accept my withdrawal.
- The goal of providing safe spaces is laudable and necessary, but I expected to see further process outcomes from this effort. Perhaps some sort of SIP or scalarum iustitiae processus.
- I no longer believe the way this letter was the right way of dealing with the situation. And while I cannot undo signing it, I would like to request removing my signature.
netruk44 · 5h ago
FWIW that statement (“do not open issues”) was added over one year ago, but the owner has also approved pull requests removing names as recently as 8 months ago.
So I think pull requests are still accepted, but issues are not.
readthenotes1 · 6h ago
It seems pretty justifiable to me so that people can't erase their misdeeds.
Good apologies require more than memory-holing an injurious attack.
jphoward · 5h ago
Yeah but because it's a GitHub repo is has an inherent audit trail for that, so it's not really erasing misdeeds... indeed it highlights those people in diffs!
sho_hn · 27m ago
If you're interested in a vaguely similar case, I found the situation of somewhat-famous video game writer Chris Avellone interesting to follow.
He's worked on some games I enjoyed in my youth (Planescape: Torment is probably the most well known, considered a genre classic) and my reaction to his cancellation was roughly something like "ah crap, another one of my heroes turns out to be a bad egg". The narrative of famous men abusing their end of a power dynamic is generally easy to believe, etc.
As a result, he lost his employment, contracts and so on as well.
But this one had an aftermath a couple of years later. He wrote some elaborate/lengthy pieces defending himself (which struck me as plausible and even convincing, but then I had to keep in mind he's an expert writer) and initiated legal proceedings -- that he eventually won, resulting in a public statement by the accusers that the events they accused him of never took place. I think his posts make for interesting reading.
His career seems to have resumed recently, five years after the accusations were made public.
Even so, if you look at internet comment threads on recent news of his new game involvement, there's a persistent meme that he paid for this statement in the form of a "seven-figure settlement", which is a curious misreading because the seven-figure sum was paid to him by the accusers to make up for damages.
Sadly, the case of another writer I sometimes liked (Warren Ellis; I enjoyed Transmetropolitan back in the day) is rather grim in comparison.
dsign · 5h ago
Oh yes, that most tried and tested way of destroying people by accusing them of having improper sex. Remember Julian Assange anyone? And what about the Middle Ages and all the burned people? Remember that time Philip IV of France accused the Knights Templar of having sex with each other, in order to cancel them :-) ? That was a good one, though I'm sure Philip had state reasons in addition to a drunken stupor.
I can't comment on this particular case, other than by acknowledging that, sadly, this won't be the first or last mobbing. I hope that Pretty does well and that the people who rushed to condemn him never again get laid.
blueflow · 6h ago
To prevent things like these from happen again, you should never believe allegations of sexual misconduct. Refuse to bother about this, redirect people to the police and courts, let them do the job. Don't be like these people who put their signature on those letters - be a good person. The justice system exists for a reason.
anonzzzies · 5h ago
The people who start the cancellation should also face punishment imho. I think it's very weird you can ruin someone's life and get away with it. If they had something, go to the police. This should be immediately liable.
Ekaros · 1h ago
I think some sort of registry is in order. Like sexual offenders. One that mandates that anyone on it has to start all of their interactions with other people by stating that they are registered offender. This then allows taking necessary actions to protect from false allegations.
Cthulhu_ · 5h ago
I mean it is libel / defamation, but as the author describes, getting justice takes a long time and is very expensive, and that's assuming you even know who made the claims and they live in the same country as you.
Besides, there may not be a criminal case / the police may do nothing. One of the accusers only came forward three years after the end of the two-year relationship; it's not unheard of for someone to realise that what happened was wrong years much later, at which point the police is less likely to do anything because any physical evidence will be gone by then, and it's one person's words against another's.
anonzzzies · 5h ago
I am only referring to getting some sort of lynch mob together to do this in public should be liable. The rest can be investigated etc; if you have two ex's (?) saying you are a predator or whatnot, that's fine, but doing so in public, contacting people you know, making 'open letters' in the background should simply be an immediate police visit and investigation possibly resulting in fines or jail. As this case is, from that perspective not hard; even if the guy turns out to be a serial rapist; that's a separate point; you cannot (well should not be able to) organise lynch mobs to deal with it.
throw310822 · 5h ago
I know this is an unpopular take, but if it takes you years to "understand" that something was wrong, probably it wasn't wrong enough for a public accusation.
Cthulhu_ · 4h ago
No actually, it would be; I'm going to pull the "think of the children" card, most victims of CSA don't fully understand what is happening, that it's wrong, and what they should do, especially not in a family setting. This is why a lot of these cases, including the Epstein case or the church cases, take years if not decades to be fully understood and action to be taken on it.
The #metoo movement gave victims the push, visibility and protections they needed to stop hiding their abuse / protecting their abusers, sometimes decades after it happens.
throw310822 · 3h ago
> most victims of CSA don't fully understand what is happening
Most victims of CSA are minors. No wait: all of them. CSA is a crime precisely because the victims are not able to understand what happens to them and not able to react appropriately. That's the distinction between minors and adults.
anonzzzies · 5h ago
It doesn't matter anyway; it's a case for the police. Like all the Epstein shit around Stallman/Minsky stuff; it's simply not up to the crowds to do this. If there is actually something it has to be proven in court and otherwise stfu.
xrisk · 5h ago
1) This argument works only if the justice system is effective, which is not the case everywhere in the world
2) A lot of sexual misconduct happens behind closed doors and is (I would imagine. IANAL) difficult to prosecute. I’m not saying that one should believe everything at face value but if multiple people make such allegations it’s more likely than not that such allegations have weight.
3) Not all sexual misconduct is “illegal”. But it doesn’t mean that communities should not attempt to censor people who engage in problematic behavior.
lelanthran · 5h ago
> 3) Not all sexual misconduct is “illegal”. But it doesn’t mean that communities should not attempt to censor people who engage in problematic behavior.
With all respect, that's nonsense. Where do you draw the line? Your morals? My morals? The victim's morals?
This is why we have a justice system, so that there is one place where you can say "that is wrong" and "that is right".
Forming a mob because "well, that person didn't akshually commit a crime, but we don't like the way they think about sex" is a primitive and regressive viewpoint.
The correct way would be to petition to make a law against whatever act you don't like. Not to say "let's leave it legal and instead simply punish the person".
No one should be facing a societal punishment without due process.
contagiousflow · 1h ago
I would recommend you asking the women in your life what they think.
satisfice · 49m ago
well said!
Pxtl · 5h ago
If you really feel that way, you should leave hacker news. The moderation here is quite firm. I can't post more than a few times a day because of Dang rate-limiting my account because of engaging in flamewars. It's not like I broke any laws, but it's their site.
Especially in countries where "free speech" means I can basically say anything I want short of defamation, no matter how hateful, profane, sexually inappropriate, or otherwise offensive, it only makes sense that a community should go beyond the limits of the law to maintain a non-toxic environment.
lelanthran · 4h ago
> If you really feel that way, you should leave hacker news. The moderation here is quite firm.
You need to explain what you mean by "that way", because I did not express any opinion on speech, free or otherwise.
Your comment sounds like a pre-prepared one, for any occasion that someone is performing wrongthink.
xrisk · 5h ago
It’s for (often implicit) communities to decide; communities whose members share a certain set of norms.
Further, legality does not imply correctness.
For example, it’s probably legal to call somebody a transphobic slur in many parts of the world but to suggest that trans people shouldn’t attempt to avoid or “cancel” such people is ridiculous.
And if you sincerely think that the only acceptable action to take is make a petition to change the law, I would suggest you go out and touch some grass. The law doesn’t work that way.
AlexandrB · 5h ago
> It’s for (often implicit) communities to decide; communities whose members share a certain set of norms.
This sounds great in theory - where "community" means the small town that you live in. In practice, "community" often means "terminally online social media users", and many of the members of this "community" have little interest in looking for context, facts, or the truth and are instead invested in pushing their worldview or just getting a rage boner.
How much of the online "community" was all-in on the narrative that she was trying to take the teens' bike until more information came to light?
xrisk · 4h ago
> I’m not saying that one should believe everything at face value
lelanthran · 4h ago
> For example, it’s probably legal to call somebody a transphobic slur in many parts of the world but to suggest that trans people shouldn’t attempt to avoid or “cancel” such people is ridiculous.
That's not what we're talking about here, are we? We're talking about a public dogpiling.
And, TBH, your example is a poor one; while it's not illegal to slur/slander someone, there are legal remedies that dont' involve a global request to followers of a specific ideology to pile on.
Avoid people you don't like? Certainly. Join a campaign to ostracise someone you never met and never knew existed until your ideologues extended an invitation to mob them does not leave you on the right side of history.
exasperaited · 5h ago
> With all respect, that's nonsense.
It's not at all. The law doesn't cover all forms of community or personal misconduct, sexual or otherwise.
And everyone -- especially businesses in Silicon Valley -- understands this.
bombcar · 5h ago
Exactly. Sexual relations between adults is rarely illegal but most people have issues with it between subordinates and leaders in a company, etc. Often documented in company policy or other things, so it’s against a rule, but not illegal.
Same with various forms of cheating - adultery is illegal in some states; but not all. And even then rarely prosecuted.
lelanthran · 4h ago
> Often documented in company policy or other things, so it’s against a rule, but not illegal.
Yes, and those rules are enforceable contracts with penalties for breaking clauses in those contracts.
I want to know why, if those penalties are insufficient, is it better to join a mob than to petition the parties drawing up those contracts for stiffer penalties.
wulfstan · 5h ago
This is exactly right. Criminality is a very high bar! There are many behaviours that fall well short of criminality that we shouldn't accept in communities.
mil22 · 5h ago
The logical consequence of this would be that all it takes to destroy someone's reputation is collusion between just two people who decide to make false allegations against someone. That is, frankly, ridiculous. Inadequacy of the justice system and the difficulty of prosecuting cases where there is a lack of (or in this case, no) evidence, doesn't justify abrogating the principle of "innocent until proven guilty."
xienze · 4h ago
> A lot of sexual misconduct happens behind closed doors and is (I would imagine. IANAL) difficult to prosecute.
Well that’s why so many cases are civil and not criminal. The bar is much lower (“preponderance of evidence” versus “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt”). A man can be accused of some sexual act that occurred decades ago without any substantive information like what day it happened on, and if a jury says “well I believe her”, it’s a wrap.
mathiaspoint · 5h ago
Maybe unmarried people of opposite sexes just need to not be alone together and if they violate that rule they give up their right to seek any kind of "justice." There might be no peaceful alternative to that.
xienze · 4h ago
Does anyone remember how much mocking Mike Pence received over his personal rule to never be alone with a woman other than his wife? Very wise, as it turns out.
nyc_data_geek1 · 5h ago
Except, in many cases the police and courts shield and enable abuse for years or decades, oftentimes at scale. So in reality, this approach is effectively one that silences victims and enables abusers.
jksflkjl3jk3 · 5h ago
Then the focus should be on reforming the police and courts, not on pivoting to vigilante justice.
bn-l · 5h ago
Right but now you potentially create two victims. One who is at the mercy of no system and the other at the mercy of a flawed system. At least the flawed system has a process for when it gets things wrong.
blueflow · 5h ago
... commenting on a case of abusive allegations.
delecti · 5h ago
The #metoo movement was in response to decades (centuries? millennia?) of abuse being basically unaddressable. It's totally fair to call it an overcorrection, but a correction was still needed. Are abusive accusations okay? Of course not, but there are far few stories of abusive accusations than accused with many accusers. Reverting to never believing accusers is just the status quo throughout human history, which is what metoo was an overcorrection to. It's just kicking the can.
exasperaited · 5h ago
This is one of those things that is obviously true but goes a pale grey and fades away from view because people are uncomfortable being confronted with obvious truth.
Peritract · 5h ago
I don't think it is fair to call #metoo an overcorrection. An overcorrection would imply the pendulum swung too far in the other direction, and it just didn't.
There was one high-profile trial, of a man who was definitely guilty. A bunch of other accused people faced zero consequences. In total, the #metoo movement raised awareness and was dwarfed by its own backlash.
An overcorrection would be what people fear-monger about: men arrested for innocently holding doors open, etc. None of that happened.
derektank · 5h ago
There are many sub-criminal behaviors that should lead you to reconsider whether you want to affiliate with someone, personally or professionally.
The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.
exasperaited · 5h ago
> The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.
Yes -- additionally there's also the situation where they try repeatedly to act collectively on this for themselves but the individual in question (or a compromised individual) has power over the resulting action, right?
I think it worth considering that many, if not most, of these "cancellations" occur long after serious attempts have been made to privately act that have been thwarted, often by commercial interests.
derektank · 5h ago
Sure. As I thought my first sentence made clear, I fully support anyone publicly airing allegations of wrongdoing and attempting to sway the opinion of others in doing so. It is sometimes the only way to meaningfully change a situation that can't be handled by the courts or private institutions.
What I object to is the social dynamics of cancellation, where people feel compelled to e.g. sign an open letter, lest they themselves be viewed as siding with the accused, without fully considering the claims and counter-claims for themselves. I also object to creating a false sense of urgency, in order to to encourage this behavior.
exasperaited · 4h ago
Yes -- I do think there is a lesson about the pile-on.
A few years back I criticised someone (without naming them) online (since the egregious, thoughtless conduct itself was online) and triggered something of a pile-on that I thought was a bit too much.
Subsequently I realised that I had under-read the situation myself, and the conduct wasn't simply thoughtless at all, it was repeated, self-interested and very calculated; people finding that out was actually the accelerant of the pile-on.
So I wasn't really so guilty of it after all. But I definitely witnessed what you talk about -- the "you're with us or with them" of it all, the social compulsion to join the pile-on.
I will probably still openly criticise people if I think it is very merited, but any criticism needs to be tempered with as much of an antidote for a simple pile-on as it can.
matheusmoreira · 4h ago
So who wants to "affiliate" with people who are prone to ruining other people's lives on a whim based on unfounded accusations that not rarely turn out to be false?
Maybe there should be a public list of slanderers, defamers, mob justice participants and cancellers in general so we can all avoid them like the massive liabilities they are.
cedws · 5h ago
Leaving justice to the courts is common sense. Innocent until proven guilty.
schnable · 5h ago
Unfortunately, it is not common sense. Innocent until proven guilty is a very modern concept and still not practiced in much of the world. Human nature is tribal, we trust (or don't want to contradict) members of our groups, and we get a kind of a rush from "othering" people and ostracizing them, especially in a mob.
It takes work to protect the integrity of our justice system. This applies to the members within it and for those outside of it--neither should sacrifice or attack its credibility for short term political or personal gain. It also requires proper education that focuses on the good, not just the failings.
Ylpertnodi · 5h ago
Looking at several DNA cases - guilty, until proven innocent.
cedws · 4h ago
Can you explain?
Peritract · 5h ago
What about when the courts don't do the job?
A lot of people are understandably low on trust for a legal system that doesn't do anything about multiple highly-public sexual offenders.
lelanthran · 5h ago
> What about when the courts don't do the job?
Well, then you'd presumably fall back onto the old witch hunt; plenty of puritanical mobs are still around to say something like "What about when the courts don't do the job".
Good thing we don't live in those unenlightened days, eh?
Peritract · 5h ago
MLK famously said 'a riot is the language of the unheard'; if you want people to avoid social pressure (note: not a lynch mob -- no physical harm), you have to give them a better, fairer alternative.
A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.
lelanthran · 5h ago
Doesn't matter how you dress it up, persecuting someone on the basis of absolutely no evidence other than victim testimony is, for all practical purposes, the modern equivalent of pointing at the witch and shrieking.
> A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.
They have no valid reasons. No system is perfect. Claiming that the system getting it wrong 1 out of every 1000 times is a valid reason is just stupid; no system is perfect.
Peritract · 5h ago
There was a system for the witch trials as well; the accusations were just the starting point for the sham trials, torture, and executions. Are you okay with that because it was a system, even if imperfect?
Our justice system doesn't fail 1 in a 1000 times, particularly when talking about sex crimes. It fails far more frequently than that, given the prevalence of sexual assault and the rarity of convictions [1]. Additionally, there's an aspect that justice must be seen to be done: high profile repeat offenders walking free damages confidence in the system out of proportion to their frequency.
As above, if you want people to use a system, the system has to work.
> Are you okay with that because it was a system, even if imperfect?
What makes you think I'm okay with the current system? Upthread I even said "if you are unhappy with the way things are, petition to change them instead of mobbing".
Just because I hold the opinion that evidence matters does not mean that I am a bad person.
Peritract · 3h ago
I haven't said I think you're a bad person; it's bold to accuse someone of a misreading based on your own misreading.
People aren't required to only critique a system using the tools that system provides; progress is often made when people step outside of the system (e.g. Rosa Parks) rather than quietly accepting it. There's evidence for that in countless civil rights campaigns.
etchalon · 5h ago
There are a good number of what many would consider heinous behaviors that are not crimes. Even if our current system of justice worked perfectly, we would still be left with a basket of people who no one wanted to be associated with, but whom had, legally at least, "done nothing wrong."
Peritract · 5h ago
Do you have a solution to that that doesn't involve limiting freedom of association and speech?
msgodel · 5h ago
Alternatively you could identify the minority of people who tend to start riots and exclude them from society since they're almost always outsiders who resent being outsiders.
trelane · 4h ago
"Do the job" depends a lot on what the facts are. Unfortunately, unless you were actually there, you can't know perfectly.
It's a matrix: a perfect system would always punish the guilty and refuse to punish the innocent.
Without perfect information, you have to choose: will you bias the outcome punish the innocent, or to not punish the guilty?
catapart · 5h ago
Truly naive to think that the legal system that is currently shielding an offender as nefarious as Epstein is the place to turn to for reasonable treatment of sexual abuse victims.
Not saying people should leap to letter signing, but it also misses the mark to suggest that the US legal system will resolve the issues these kinds of actions cause.
RamblingCTO · 5h ago
who said anything about the US? the article isn't even talking about the US?
I did. In response to the thread starter, who made a generalized statement.
If I've missed an implication that limited their suggestion to specific regions, them I'm happy to retract. But what I'm seeing is a general suggestion, so I've extrapolated that out and tried to apply it to a hypothetical where the advice might be appropriate.
Feels like maybe you've assumed that the thread starter was scoping the suggestion to the regions where this offense occurred. Again, I don't see that implication in the text, but I feel like it's an entirely reasonable assumption. That being the case, I don't fault anyone for thinking only in those terms. But I also don't think I was out of line to engage with the thread starters points in the way that I did.
RamblingCTO · 5h ago
sorry, my response was a bit too heated. I toned it down. lot's going on. you're right and it is fair to scope it further, it's a valid talking point.
Peritract · 5h ago
The UK justice system has its own issues, and its own high-profile offenders without consequences. I'm not as familiar with Germany, but I imagine it has the same.
RamblingCTO · 5h ago
absolutely. I'm just annoyed by the US centricism here. courts, lawyers, and the executive branch are all just people. it's not a never failing machine and it will never be one. just because there are instances of neglect doesnt mean the whole system is bogus imho.
I'd even argue that it's more that the system isn't protected enough against people in power misusing it.
exasperaited · 5h ago
And yet it's the same (usually politically-aligned) interests who say:
- "the BBC let this person get away with this for years" and also "cancel culture has to stop",
- "there's too much filth on the internet" and "don't you dare demand I tell you my age",
- or the most complex and culturally nuanced one: "children are being groomed" but "she's 18 now, she's an adult and she can make up her own mind about posing nude in a tabloid".
As difficult as it is, any invitation to treat a subject with less nuance is better considered misbegotten until scrutinised much, much further.
wulfstan · 5h ago
Criminality is a very, very high bar for removing people from a community for misbehaviour, and much sexual misconduct isn't criminal. I don't think "leaving things to the police" is good advice in situations where a vulnerable minority group needs to be protected from predatory behaviour.
In this situation you have an accusation of misconduct made by 1) young 2) women 3) new to a community 4) who don't speak English well. These are all big red vulnerability flags.
I would ensure that every accusation of this nature is treated with respect and investigated by a trusted authority figure in a given community.
bloak · 5h ago
Leaving criminal stuff to the police and courts sounds sensible but "misconduct" isn't usually criminal.
EDIT: Though I'm not suggesting people should sign letters about people they don't know based on allegations by other people they don't know.
squigz · 2h ago
Believing the justice system is perfect and ignoring the countless failures of the justice system to punish sexual assault is pretty naive.
msgodel · 5h ago
I think the correct thing to do is to punish accusers of provably false allegations as harshly as the accused would be.
You might say "this will have a chilling effect on legitimate accusations" and you might be right, but the situation is bad enough now that it's created a pretty extreme chilling effect on socialization in general.
EDIT: I don't normally do this but argue your point. If you continue playing games like down voting very reasonable ideas that you disagree with eventually all of us are going to come together and leave you out of the discussion entirely.
jimjimwii · 5h ago
This is how its done in many non western societies: if you allege something, you better have the receipts to back it up or face similar consequences.
runako · 5h ago
> punish accusers of provably false allegations as harshly as the accused would be.
Are you aware that here you are arguing for criminal sanctions on the order of 10 years in prison, for writing a letter?
You probably should expand on that.
Edit: some people seem to be okay with this notion! Would love to hear thoughts on how stiff criminal penalties for what is in the end expressing are at all compatible with societies that claim to value free speech.
Note that the author of the post does not present any proof that the allegations are false. Similarly, the other side likely cannot prove its allegations are true. So we are here discussing long prison sentences for unprovable opinions. I would love to hear how people justify that.
purkka · 4h ago
> Are you aware that here you are arguing for criminal sanctions on the order of 10 years in prison, for writing a letter?
It's about writing a letter that can result in someone else receiving criminal sanctions on the order of 10 years in prison, when that someone might not have even written a letter.
Provably false is essential here.
runako · 4h ago
> Provably false
As far as I can tell, nobody has offered (or likely can offer) proof of anything on either side and yet people are talking about long prison sentences for speech.
mathiaspoint · 5h ago
That sounds about right. Playing games with this needs to be frightening or you'll have people abusing it which is not only bad for innocent people who are accused but also discredits legitimate complaints. It's impractical for everyone to "believe all women" if half of them are lying for sport.
ofjcihen · 5h ago
Writing a letter for malicious reasons that had a very predictable outcome for an apparently innocent man*
You can downplay any action by breaking it down to its foundations and stating it that way.
runako · 4h ago
> very predictable outcome for an apparently innocent man
None of this is obviously accurate. More to the point, no court can adjudicate the "predictable outcome" of a letter or whether the reasons were malicious.
ofjcihen · 3h ago
They actually can, and have.
In fact, that’s a fundamental facet of a libel claim.
msgodel · 4h ago
Yes that is precisely what I meant.
Free speech is not the same as freedom to falsely accuse. Libel is absolutely illegal and has been since before the US was a country. Allowing things like this to happen means men and women formally socializing with eachother except in really limited or alternatively psychopathic ways isn't practical. It needs to stop and the only possibilities are
a) Just exclude women entirely like we used to.
b) Punish them very harshly for lying.
I think most people would be more upset by a than b. I hope the feminists and egalitarians realize that this is the pro feminism argument as the only practical alternative is to return to a formally patriarchal society. If people can't appreciate the point I'm making then I suppose we'll end going with a which is unfortunate. Everyone who doesn't will eventually be cancelled by the same group of people they're aiming to support.
runako · 4h ago
We already have legal remedies for libel and defamation, I am not suggesting we remove those remedies.
What is being discussed here is adding harsh criminal liability ultimately for expressing opinions, since we know that two people can experience the same event in very different ways.
api · 5h ago
When the law isn’t doing its job, that’s when the citizens will decide to form a posse and grab pitchforks.
… and it usually ends badly when this happens. One kind of injustice is replaced by another. But this is what people will do.
Epstein? Jimmy Savile? The massive and still ongoing sex abuse scandals in not just the Catholic Church but many faiths? Those are high profile ones but there are so many examples of people getting away with sex abuse for years and years with dozens or even hundreds of victims. The wealthier, more powerful, or more famous and “loved” the abuser, the longer they can get away with it.
I remember back in college being personally shocked at how many women I dated who had been raped or at least harassed in disgusting ways, as children or adults. It was like half. They told me the details and I had no reason to disbelieve them. I’ve since heard many similar and worse things from people I know.
Part of why lynch mobs are so easy to form around allegations of sexual harassment and abuse is that it's so incredibly common. The allegations are easily believed.
exasperaited · 5h ago
You're basically saying at least one of these things here and you don't seem to know you are saying it:
- If it's not something you can at least sue over or is not illegal, it's not misconduct we should care about.
- If no one was at least prepared to sue, we should all just let it be.
I think perhaps you don't understand that quite a lot of persistent unwanted behaviour never rises to that standard (or perhaps no individual victim was willing to put their head above the parapet).
Anyone who has worked in education can tell you about someone whose unwanted behaviour escaped scrutiny for decades because each individual incident had enough deniability. I have never worked in education and I can identify at least two such cases from my own experiences. (Very likely a third, and there is no way that third person would ever have seen any kind of censure for what they were doing, because it was so deniable and because their victims would not even have classified themselves as victims)
There are plenty of occasions where a community quietly agreeing that someone's behaviour is unacceptable has kept them from a situation where the harms they cause can escalate.
blueflow · 5h ago
Your argument goes both ways - slander is also misconduct.
exasperaited · 4h ago
It's not really both ways, it's the same way, but yes. Usually communities deal with slander by themselves long before it becomes necessary for someone to take it to a court, and the bar needs to be quite high to take it to court (even in the UK where our laws are famously somewhat upside down on this topic)
watwut · 5h ago
It is important to punish victims of sexual harassments every time they talk about what happened to them. /s
And you know full well that the whole range of sexual harassments is entirely legal.
matheusmoreira · 5h ago
Why are you being downvoted? You're right.
etchalon · 5h ago
There is no other crime where we'd "refuse to believe" the allegations, at least in a social context.
If someone was accused of murder, or theft, in most cases, social stigma would be part of that. An admittedly sometimes unfair, but baseline thing we're gonna do as humans to protect ourselves.
If your child was at a preschool, and a teacher was accused (but not convicted) of molestation, you wouldn't "be a good person and wait for the justice system to sort it out". You'd either demand the teacher be fired, or you'd take your kid out of the school.
Tade0 · 5h ago
But we're not at a preschool.
Main issue with investigating child abuse is that the victim's account is unreliable as they might not yet even have the language to describe some things, so we err on the side of caution.
In an environment where all participants are adults it makes sense to at least ask the alleged perpetrator if they're guilty and analyse their reaction.
There was a notorious case in my corner of the world where a locally famous YouTuber was accused by his ex of sexual abuse. He lost a significant number of followers and of course revenue so he took her to court and won, as her story didn't add up.
Undeterred, she continued, but with increasingly wild accusations and even attempting to rope in other people.
I occasionally see a new post about this drama and it serves as a remainder that some people are just out to destroy others.
kayodelycaon · 5h ago
Unfortunately, this kind of thing isn’t exactly new. I nearly ended up in jail in high school because of an accusation. The only thing that stopped the school police officer from dragging me out the door in handcuffs was me knowing the principal of the school.
He was able to figure out where the rumor came from. I’d bumped into a girl during gym class and since I was a sheltered Christian kid new to public school, I didn’t know “second base” had another meaning.
I’ve also had a friend who struggled with depression kill himself after there was an accusation of him having illegal images. I don’t know if it was true. I just knew I couldn’t mourn his death while everyone I knew was celebrating it.
I also know a friend who stopped doing foster care after a child with a long history of compulsive lying and false accusations accused them of sexual abuse and CPS believed the child.
justinhj · 5h ago
I remember following this story, and finding it a remarkable case study in mob justice. If you search for Scala on this site you will find it is still among the top 5 stories on the topic and nearly all the comments assume guilt and berate the author.
Similarly, r/scala condemned Jon and when the defending testimonials from his female friends were posted there they were removed.
> The Defendants accept that they have never had any evidence to support the allegations apart from the two unverified claims published in coordination with the Open Letter. They were never in a position to make any informed judgement on the truth of the allegations, and did not seek clarification on any of the allegations from the Claimant.
He won £5,000 plus costs.
[edit - the defendants here appear to be signatories of the open letter]
justinhj · 4h ago
Worth reflecting on how the average opinion on this story compares to the collective mobbing that occurred at the time
Oof. So much opportunistic grandstanding and virtue signaling in the comments there. I read for 5 minutes and didn't find even a single comment that expressed any uncertainty about the truth or accuracy of the allegations.
In general I think this was quite a reasonable comment section. I see a lot of "damn this sounds awful" (and it does), discussion about the general phenomenon of sexual harassment (which is obviously real) rather than that specific case, and some uncertainty about what actually happened. I don't see much "this guy should be jailed immediately" in the top comments. I certainly wouldn't call it a mob and I don't see anything that deserves to labelled as insincere virtue signaling.
ryanackley · 5h ago
I have mixed feelings. Cancel culture sucks. I think it's root is a culture of indulging in righteous indignation based on very one-sided information.
Even if the allegations are true, his life should not have been ruined over this.
On the other hand, when I read the accusers' accounts someone else linked in the comments, they sound credible. It fits behavior patterns we've all seen before.
I don't know who to believe.
mil22 · 5h ago
A lot of works of fiction sound credible. Are you going to believe those?
You don't have all the information. You weren't there. You don't even know the people personally. You are not in a position to make any judgement either way.
Something sounding credible doesn't make it true. It doesn't automatically make it false, either. You don't have to believe the accuser or the accused. The only thing any of us should do is mind our own business.
ryanackley · 4h ago
Thanks for the lecture. How does it relate to the comment I made? Sorry, it's not clear to me.
I didn't personally participate in cancelling this person. In fact, I agreed with the point he made in the article. I'm just not sure he didn't do it.
Are you saying I shouldn't have an opinion on that part?
mil22 · 4h ago
You can have whatever opinion you want, but don't confuse "sounds credible" with evidence. From the sidelines, you don't know enough to judge either way. Saying "I don't know" is the only accurate position. Everything beyond that is just speculation - and speculation is exactly what keeps cancel culture alive.
OldfieldFund · 2h ago
The same with OP's post.
So far, I see that this post caused quite a few forks, the opposite of what the author asked for.
I don't have a solution.
I think as a man who runs conferences you shouldn't sleep with people who attend them. Or any other things like that, for that matter.
Should you be cancelled for that? No. But humans are humans.
There is no solution to this. Courts are also wrong all the time (look at OJ) and victims of SA almost never see justice.
The answer is: we don't know the truth.
thelittlenag · 1h ago
My comment here is a very narrow one. In general I agree with your sentiment and thoughts, so please don't misread me. There is one nit I need to pick, however.
There is a subtle, but worthwhile, difference between "plausible" and "credible". Lots of stories are plausible. Few are credible.
In emotion laden cases like this we tend to want to believe stories we already agree with, or have some investment in. I'm no exception to that.
We need to not be misled by what is plausible, or confuse that with what is credible.
zarzavat · 5h ago
To paraphrase an Internet aphorism, don't have personal relationships with mentally unsound people. There are many ways to ruin someone's life, cancellation is but one of them.
If someone really wants to ruin your life, they will find a way. The most effective way to avoid that is to screen your partners aggressively.
y-curious · 5h ago
The aphorism you're referring to, is it "don't commit your code to an unstable repository"?
Yes, being policed by the mob is terrible.
djrj477dhsnv · 5h ago
And this is why I always prefer anonymity, whether it's in online discussions, contributing code, or even casual dating.
Otherwise one mistake or the malignant intent of another can cause irreparable damage to my personal reputation.
augustk · 3h ago
If it is all lies, what could be the incentive for the women to make up a story like this?
Brutal. I’m not sure which way the truth on this lies but the reality is this not the way to go about it. Brian Clapper needs some accountability in this, I’d like to hear why he isn’t backing down or removing the repo.
xivzgrev · 3h ago
I recently read a helpful Quora post on cancellation
Basically, while it's totally fair to hold people accountable, it needs to work both ways.
Additionally, there's a line between boycotting someone (your collective actions) vs attacking others for supporting. If you didn't like what a musician did, you and others could stop buying their albums. That's different than issuing death threats to radio stations that play that musicians music.
So in this case, we seem to have
-one sided accountability, a coordinated effort around one side of facts
-a boycott vs attack. The open letter makes it clear that only the signatories will be engaging in these actions. Others (such as organizations that employed him) are requested to cut ties but not threatened
So I would say this is only a partial "cancel". It would have been better if he could have "had his day in court" before he was thoroughly condemned, though I'm not sure how.
redeyedtreefrog · 5h ago
I don't get why he is so determined to stick with Scala. It's just a programming language. The Scala community is forever going to hold extremely negative associations for him. For someone with his level of experience and motivation it presumably wouldn't be too hard to switch to Rust or something. Some people will still reject him out of hand due to his googleable name, but I still feel like he'd be happier and better off leaving.
thelittlenag · 1h ago
Jon has addressed this elsewhere, but the gist of the argument, as I understand it, is that he hasn't worked professionally in any other ecosystem or language. So leaving Scala is tantamount to abandoning his entirely professional experience (20+ years!), skill set, and all open source contributions, and then restarting from scratch in a new ecosystem. All without any guarantee that the allegations around him won't just follow him. Its a really tough position to be in.
jjmarr · 5h ago
Cancellation is never about justice. It's always about status.
Many rapists and abusers do not face social ostracism because they contribute more than they take away.
Many people are ostracized because they do not contribute enough in proportion to accusations.
Justice is the idea we can ignore social status, but this is only ensured by due process, because following a consistent set of rules removes status from the equation.
benterix · 3h ago
I remember the story of RMS. In her cancellation piece, Selam Gano equalled RMS with Epstein. Many media outlets repeated false accusations. Some of them are still online (Gano finally deleted her piece). For example, Vice says[0]:
Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As ‘Entirely Willing’
Which is 100% false.
Another false one[1]:
...Richard Stallman, who defended Jeffrey Epstein...
This is even worse as it is pure fabrication.
Did Gano ever apologized? Did any of these media outlets even thought about apologizing and making up for everything RMS had to go? It's really, really sad.
I've followed the initial controversy when it began. Changed my view on cancellations forever.
A really sad story, but also a cautionary tale.
ofjcihen · 5h ago
What ended up being the reason for the false allegations if I can ask?
Like, why did they really get together and do this to this poor guy?
Edit: From the downvotes I’m guessing this isn’t actually resolved? This is the first I’m hearing about this saga.
piker · 5h ago
> a charitable foundation to promote Functional Programming in Africa
Niche
rikafurude21 · 5h ago
> And in that one moment, I lost most of the life I knew. I offered my resignation from my developer advocacy job because it became untenable and it was damaging my employer, even though we both knew there was no cause to terminate my employment.
So he just left his job for no reason? This seems compeletely self-inflicted. The following paragraphs are about he "had to" drop various projects - Why would you just drop everything?
zwily · 5h ago
The reason is listed in the second half of the block you quoted.
Artoooooor · 5h ago
I am so enraged when allegations alone cause some people to act as if they were conviction. All these people should now restore all lost things bit by bit. Lost money, job, experience, health, contacts, opinion of all people that they managed to break. Acting based solely on accusations is acting in bad, not good faith.
bravesoul2 · 5h ago
Surprised he cant get a job. Just forget about these idiot friends doing the right thing, and cease and desist Github etc. get all the shit taken down then get a job cranking out Scala.
SG- · 5h ago
I'm having a hard time focusing on read this article because of how the 'f' font looks like.
king_magic · 5h ago
cancellation often doesn’t feel that much conceptually different from cultural revolution struggle sessions.
Pxtl · 5h ago
> My legal action continued for more than a year after this, as I looked for opportunities to conclude it without incurring unaffordable costs, or revealing to my opponents that I was in financial trouble. The risk of default lingered over me. We reached a settlement in my favor in early 2024, avoiding an expensive court hearing by a few days. However, this compromise meant that I missed the chance for my case to be scrutinized in court.
So from the outside we have no way of knowing who is telling the truth.
trelane · 3h ago
> the outside we have no way of knowing who is telling the truth.
Yes, exactly.
His life was upended because he was assumed guilty until proven innocent. Even here in the threads.
etchalon · 5h ago
I'm not seeing anything in the post with any legal resolution or "proof" the accusations were false. Whatever case he had was settled out-of-court. It doesn't seem like the accusing parties were asked or agreed to take any action retracting their claims.
So, as observers, what we're left with is two people accusing someone of something and the accused saying they're innocent.
netcan · 5h ago
>as observers, what we're left with is two people accusing someone of something and the accused saying they're innocent.
This is the point though, isnt it. He's writing a retrospective about the impact of public condemnation and ostracization as a result of such proof-less, process-less accusations.
Neither the accusation nor the denial come with proof. This is not exactly about what should we do in this circumstance. Its about what peiple did fo in these circumstances.
You can doubt his innocence. But... and this is the crucial point... this post is not attempting to punish the accusers. So to me... normal rules apply. Assumption of good faith and honesty, to some extent, apply.
If I read the other side's story, then I'd probably read it from the same perspective.
That's ok... because we aren't hanging someone at the end of this conversation. If we are, different standards apply.
lelanthran · 5h ago
> I'm not seeing anything in the post with any legal resolution or "proof" the accusations were false.
You don't need to prove accusations of criminal conduct false. The onus is on the accusers to prove the allegations true.
> It doesn't seem like the accusing parties were asked or agreed to take any action retracting their claims.
In theory there are punitive measures for false accusations, in practice no one ever bothers with them.
netcan · 5h ago
This is not a courtroom. Not even a pseudo-court of public opinion.
There's a difference between listening to someone's story and assuming truthfulness... and joining a mob going after someone.
He's not naming his accusers or asking the reader to go after them.
exizt88 · 5h ago
If the accusers had evidence, they would have surely provided it to the defendants in the defamation case.
That doesn't appear to involve the accusers at all - the consent order is against 4 signatories of the open letter, and merely states that they didn't have proof of the accusers claims?
wulfstan · 5h ago
Yes; that is correct. They are admitting they made an accusation without evidence or an investigation to support the claim. This is a civil matter and says absolutely nothing about the truth or otherwise of the claims made.
maeln · 5h ago
Arguably, the open letter was the most damaging (since it was the one who ostracize them from the scala community). And I guess he sued the signee who were in the same country (UK from what I understand). Suing people cross-country is a mightmare.
verelo · 5h ago
The closing remarks by the defendants seem to be what the parent comment is looking for.
etchalon · 5h ago
It's not.
cbeach · 6h ago
This is an account of the impact of "mob justice" within the Scala community, which Jon Pretty faced in 2021, and devastated his career and mental health.
At the time I was taken aback at the lack of due process, and how one-sided accounts from ex-girlfriends could be used to destroy a man.
Now, years later his story still chills me and makes me sad about the divided and sinister state of the Scala programming language community.
No comments yet
anonymars · 5h ago
Sorry this isn't related to the content (because I'm having difficulty reading it), but is it just me or is this font absolutely atrocious? It's way too thin in the best case, and omits the horizontal lines (e, A) in the worst case
Edit: okay, vastly different experience on phone vs desktop. Looks normal enough on the monitor except, as someone points out, the weird f and j
Paul-Craft · 5h ago
I don't see anything outrageous about it other than the lowercase 'f' and 'j', which are quite annoying.
Hendrikto · 5h ago
Lowercase “h” and “s” are also very strange.
Paul-Craft · 5h ago
They're a little different, as are some of the numerals, but I don't find them nearly as distracting as "f" and "j."
Hendrikto · 5h ago
Absolutely. I normally don’t care much about fonts, but this one is so weird it is actually hard to read.
Reading that letter it seems that Jon was being accused of... nothing in particular? I'm not even sure what he could refute. There's no accusations of consent violations. There's really only the one phrase - "sexually harass and victimize women" - but without examples that just sounds like a pot shot. Especially given that they identify a "systematic pattern", which is apparently a pattern with no specific examples of wrongdoing.
And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men. Especially when it comes to their interactions with women. And I believe these women probably had plenty of valid complaints, in part because I know very well how aggressive, oblivious and entitled a lot of men can be, and how many "normal" interactions between men and women do involve consent violations, if not assault or worse. So given what I know about the dangers women face routinely, and the vague and mild allegations in this letter, I'd guess like the biggest crime he committed was being another guy who's god awful at dealing with women, dating and sex.
Unless there is more that I don't know about.
And none of that was shown false. It looks like all that the court said was "no evidence was provided". What's absolutely crazy is that he himself did not say it not happen. He just said "evidence was false"...
Duh imagine being a victim there and providing "evidence". It looks like any text messages would be all fine and all the stuff would be IRL (IF it is true).
It's clear as mud.
It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society
I'd say it's an OK stance to take (e.g., based on past experience) if one of the conclusions you take from it is that it calls for a process that isn't similarly biased. If you recognize and acknowledge your own bias, you should be able to critically challenge it and/or be interested in neutral fact-finding, due process, and so on.
For myself, I'd say it's less general distrust of men and more the observation that many situations in society greatly favor men in their power dynamics and make it more probable for men to misbehave, i.e. given the option.
No comments yet
Once my parents were visiting me and we took my kids to a playground. While there, my dad noticed a girl sitting on the ground crying, and seemed to be hurt. He looked for a moment to see if anyone was coming, and then went over to her and asked if she was alright, if she needed help, and where her parents were. He didn't get a clear response from her so he started walking around to the various adults around the playground inquiring if the hurt girl crying was theirs. Finally he got to one group of women and after asking one of them said something along the lines of, "yeah, I saw you over there bothering her" in an accusatory tone. Seeing where it was going, he put his hands up and just walked away without saying another word. The girl remained there crying, alone.
It was actually kind of a scary because later that day I realized how in that moment that woman, who my dad had never met before, could probably have destroyed his life right then and there if she wanted to.
These days, in the back of my mind I'm always considering how my actions, particularly towards women and children, could be misconstrued. When I'm at the playground with my kids, I don't talk to kids I don't know, at all, for any reason, even if they talk to me. I just smile and make myself busy with my own kids.
Then do it. Call 911, say there's an injured, unattended child at the playground, and you're getting a hostile response from folks as you try to locate the guardian so you'd appreciate it if a social worker collected the kid until the parents can be found.
There is nothing illegal about speaking to a child, and when you soft play people like this you empower them. Let them have to show a cop a DL to get their kid out a squad car to learn their lesson if they can't handle polite help.
(Also, what is this narrative around HN about being accused of nefariousness at playgrounds? I used to eat my lunch at one near me because it was the only park with a trash can nearby and I didn't want to lug my trash back to my apartment before going on my way towards the city -- nobody ever said a word to me aside from asking for a ball if it rolled over.)
Suburban East Coast US.
These stories were all over Reddit for years. I remember a thread asking for examples of things Reddit led them to believe that weren’t true, and the top voted comment was that Reddit made them think that going to the playground as a lone dad would cause women to view them as a predator. In reality, going to the playground as a dad in most places is a non-event. It’s common for dads to be there alone with their kids. When I go, it’s a mix of moms and dads and we all talk and interact.
Yet to a non-parent reading Reddit it seemed like going to the park as a dad was asking for trouble. The story was repeated so often.
I’m sure these events do happen some times. When it does, I wouldn’t be surprised if the accuser was reading their own Reddit equivalent social media website where stories about men being creeps at the playground get passed around as fact. To them, it’s just how they see the world working because they’ve heard it repeated so often.
My wife, on the other hand, is the parent who will go over and play with all the children while the parents are on their phones. But she’s a woman, so it’s different.
The problem is is that a lot of guys walking around that haven't had it happen to them assume it hasn't happened to them because they've been doing everything right when really you've just been lucky so far.
I still try to find those few people around me who aren't garbage, but it's a tough job.
I know what you mean, but he could also have said "fuck off, lady; that's a kid crying, so grow up" and thereby have made clear he was worried about the kid, not some creeper who she hoped to have just told off.
Just one comment thread up there's a person rushing to believe her and distrust the dad:
> "And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men."
^ from the other comment thread above this one
I used to naively believe that people are generally good. I still believe that but with a major qualifier. There are some truly toxic people out there who are seriously mentally fucked up and don't hesitate to screw with others' lives. They seem normal and nice at first, but if you look closely enough, you see the trail they have left behind.
This is something to recognize in our communities and counter-act with process and mature leadership if needed.
(I'm also discussing this neutral to the actual issue, which I don't know much about and haven't made my mind up on.)
I have learned to fight the instinct to judge because many times I judged very very sure of my conclusions, only to find put some time later how completely wrong I was. It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong. As a rule I try never to make a decision on the same day I receive information. You'd be surprised how much your opinion can change once you digest your info.
I doubt that's the case here. People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
My theory is that people do it (hey I do it too) to get the kick of "look at that piece of shit, I'm glad compared to them I'm a better/smarter/etc person.".
Both my father and I have excellent “gut feelings” to the point that “I hate being right” is the family motto.
It would be so easy to believe I’m always right in my judgement of people. But I’m extremely wrong at least 5% of the time.
If nothing else, that 5% helps me learn to read people better. If I didn’t reserve judgment, that 5% would quickly become 50%.
This is such an important idea to me. We all really only live in our own lives, and even if we read and talk to others endlessly, it's very hard to learn the full scope of the world and others' struggles. So there's some hubris to thinking that you fully understand things and can judge them absolutely.
Not saying there's no right and wrong, just that maybe reserving judgment has its place. I mostly think about this to coach myself, but I think it has use for others as well.
As if the job was all that mattered.
We are social creatures. Shunning and ostracism have a significant impact, even when happening by people we don't know, especially when it's a pile-on.
I'm not saying there's never a reason to shun someone. If people do something terrible, cut ties with them. I don't think that's what a lot of this is, though. If it was, it wouldn't happen on such flimsy evidence and it wouldn't happen to people others don't even know.
Most cancellations are a blood letting, where people are trying to feel powerful and the cancelled (or even the wronged) don't really matter.
How many replies are about how the apology sounds hollow, or how a PR person must have written it?
There are some challenges with media-based apologies because they can only be done at all through media PR systems, of course, and there's an impact therefore on the shape and style of an apology that Marshall McLuhan might have written about if he were still here.
So there's an element of apology fatigue that will prompt some of those replies.
But even then, apologies that sound hollow or sound written by PR generally are somewhat hollow or written with help from, or experience of, PR. Usually the PR of a law firm, right?
It is wholly possible to apologise in ways that do not have those qualities, and wholly possible for people to recognise them.
I can not understand at all how you got that from my message.
As for the rest of what you're saying. Yes, there's a way to apologize in a way that don't have those qualities, and it's apologizing directly to the people you've wronged, if you have. Apologizing to a faceless group is pointless.
Well... it might be at least pragmatic. Apologising to the wider community for wronging a member of the community is normal; it's also expected.
And I guess apologising to one's audience for not being who they think you are is essentially, the same thing, just with a parasocial twist.
Parasocial "communities" exist (fandoms) and they do rather complicate things.
Go read about the psychology of forgiveness. There are some pros to "letting it go", when appropriate.
(Caveat: I have no idea what happened with this particular person.)
But shame is also incredibly important in that it causes self-policing of social norms. There is no way that society would work if everyone just did things that benefited them with no regard to others, in ways that weren't actively harmful but just annoying. That's why we have norms and enforce them with shame. If this gets broken down because people use shaming inappropriately then it will be used as a reason to do away with shaming completely. We see this trend happening and its continuation can only lead to bad outcomes.
This discussion of far more nuanced than many of the comments in this post address. It's true people are often swiftly found guilty in the public eye without due process - see most true crime - but it's also true such sanctions have their place.
Thank god society got more mature since then and didn't participate in imagine some kind of doxing app for this purpose :)
However there were some key details about the accusation that didn’t add up. The accuser tried changing the details of the story once they realized others were noticing the problems with the claims. It also became clear that the accuser had an ulterior motive and stood to benefit from the accused being ostracized. The accuser also had developed a habit of lying and manipulation, which others slowly began to share as additional information.
This was enough to make the situation fall apart among people who knew the details. However, word spread quickly and even years later there are countless people who only remember the initial accusation. Many avoided the accused just to be safe. The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It remains one of the weirdest social situations I’ve seen play out. Like watching someone drop a nuclear bomb on another person’s social life and then seeing how powerless they were to defend against it. In this case it didn’t extend to jobs or career. Their close social circle stuck with them. However I can still run into people years later who think the person is a creep because they heard something about him from a friend of a friend and it stuck with them.
It's what happens when we see people as stand-ins for their group, but we can't see the individual behind it.
But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women, and if what these women say is true, it would be utterly unsurprising to me. The High Court judgement in this situation is a civil matter; nobody has been "cleared" of anything.
In the absence of an investigation, you can read the original statements made by the women who made the accusations of wrongdoing [here](https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...) and [here](https://killnicole.github.io/statement/), and you can form your own opinion about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on.
EDIT: s/judgement/opinion/
Therein lies the danger. An outsider with little knowledge cannot make a good judgement. Their judgement will be based on intangibles, such as "something similar happened to somebody I know, so I tend to believe X's account over Y's account".
But that's not proof, or evidence, or anything really. It's just naked bias from a different situation applied to an unrelated one. Saying "history is replete with examples" is exactly that. If that is going to be used as a metric, then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women carries with it a high degree of risk. No matter how you behave, a single accusation from somebody willing to lie or exaggerate--for whatever reason--will be supported and amplified using this same historical rationale.
If the accusations are true, then this is yet another example of a pattern of behaviour played out so regularly, across cultures, centuries and communities, that it is boringly predictable: "Senior community member, almost always a man, sexually exploits vulnerable women seeking acceptance into that community."
When a possible situation arises you should investigate it and, if there is reasonable evidence that it is true, do what you can to stamp it out and ensure it stops happening.
The only way you can ensure that it stops happening is strict segregation by sex, but I don't think that's what you'd want.
With wrong cancellation it's different because it's not an urgent situation and people should not ruin someone's life randomly. It would be stupid to force us to think "really there's a 50/50 chance if the rapist is that man or that woman" but if you say "there's a 50/50 chance if the guy is a creep or that woman is scheming something" then it can be not that wrong (depending on country)
But in this case it's not even clear it's wrong. This is the original letter https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara... and it was not shown false. All that the courts said was "no evidence was provided".
> then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women
You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees. If you do, then yeah maybe you need to think twice about that, and maybe that's not such a bad thing?
"He exhibited problematic behavior. He touched me inappropriately. He cornered me in an elevator. He used demeaning language and made me feel unworthy."
Zero sex involved, and these accusations can be completely true or untrue, depending on undefinable intangibles and individual interpretations.
That's the point I was trying to make. One person's interpretation can be wildly different than another's interpretation of the same event. If we are going to assign preference to the interpretation that is the most damaging to both parties involved--she is traumatized, he is fired--then perhaps it is better to completely separate the sexes.
We have some truth-discovering methods... but they are hard, expensive, and often return empty handed. Science. Courts. Fact finding commitees. Etc.
So... you can't have that. What we have is heresy, and a "how to act" dilemma in circumstances where truth isn't known and will not be known.
Im going to encourage you not to form your own opinion on who is lying. Read the accusations of you want.. but don't pretend you are in a position to judge... only to execute.
Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
> But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women
And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
> Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
A fair-as-possible process that is only fair if you have enough money to afford a lawyer, the time to fight for your case, are not part of a community that has been systematically discriminated against by the people enforcing the process, that the laws are in your favor, that you are not victim of a difficult to prove crime, ...
I will never advocate for vigilante justice, but let's not kid ourselves, the justice system has many, many flaws and bias, and acting as if it should be the only source of truth, and that no personal judgment should be made without, is very naïve.
The alternative however, is unjustifiable. Mob law is worse than no law.
> and that no personal judgment should be made without
I think it's fine to make personal judgements about things that have little impact on other people. For things that have a big impact, a more formal approach is called for. I think TFA makes a strong case that the impact here is big.
Absolutely, but there is a space between mob justice and the legal system. Most community do self police in some form or another. It is also far from perfect, and mistakes happen just like in the other system. But it is a middle ground between the heavier burden of proof and long process used by the legal system, and the lack of usually any proof and visceral reaction of mob mentality.
Member of a community usually have more information about the other member of the community, which inform their judgment. They have also more at stakes.
> I think it's fine to make personal judgements about things that have little impact on other people. For things that have a big impact, a more formal approach is called for. I think TFA makes a strong case that the impact here is big.
If we choose to believe him. If we choose to believe the accuser, then we could reason that by "exposing" him they may have prevented other victim. Something a long and legal process might not have prevented. I am not saying this is the case. I know personally neither the accuser nor the accused, and have no real way to make an informed decision in this case.
Where do you see the line between community self-policing and mob justice? I agree that community members often have information about each other, but I think it's often low-grade and commingled with vague popularity and "office politics". I interpreted the situation in TFA to be that many people signed the letter who had little information either way.
>> I think TFA makes a strong case that the impact here is big.
> If we choose to believe him.
Here I was only talking about the impact it had on him, not whether or not he was guilty of something. I think we can believe that it had a big impact on him. Or do you suspect that he is exaggerating for effect?
Super curious what the stats are that support a statement like this. Scale matters with everything.
Individual communities have to establish ground rules for these sorts of things to protect the vulnerable.
> And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
I do not accept that this happens with nearly the regularity that people, usually men, claim it does. To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways.
By way of example, 1 in 100 rape accusations MADE TO THE POLICE in the UK leads to a charge being made against the accused. That is what we as a society are up against, and why we have to take creepy, exploitative behaviour that falls short of criminality so seriously.
You can never sue anyone for ostracizing you from an open community, or for the consequences of that ostracism. There's no limit on who global communities might choose to ostracize. It's so fundamental to how we group together; you always have to know the norms.
British law is famously friendly to wealthy litigants, and the High Court for awarding ruinous damages. The OP took an opportunity to sue four signatories who (from my understanding of the court order) put their name to harmful allegations that they didn't know the truth of. The four defendants paid £20,000 in costs and damages.
Unfortunately for the OP, the ostracism clearly still stands, and despite going to the High Court to sue for libel, the first-hand reports of his conduct are still online.
I don't see this as a lesson in the terrifyingly and unpredictable consequences of Cancellation - seems like more "don't shit where you eat".
That you chose to ignore inconvenient facts that do not fit your narrative is only _your_ problem, no one else's.
Figure out how to remedy this lapse in judgment, then come back to the conversation.
> 1 in 100 rape accusations MADE TO THE POLICE in the UK leads to a charge being made against the accused
backs up your claim that
> To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways
But this is not the case at all, unless you intended "these kinds of accusations" to mean both making formal charges and writing accusatory blog posts -- but the whole reason for this article is to point out the massive amount of damage that the latter can do at almost no cost to the accuser. Absent further evidence, it's clear that in this particular case, the two accusers' lives were not at all "torn apart" by making these life-destroying accusations -- do you agree?
Absolutely not! Assume the alleged victims are telling the truth, and read their statements again, carefully. Do they sound to you like people whose lives weren't torn apart by the experience? They needed counselling, therapy, time off work. These sound to me like traumatised people. You can argue that what they had to deal with wasn't "as bad" as what the accused had to deal with, but I don't accept that women make public accusations of sexual exploitation casually without any personal consequences, and certainly not in this case.
The "1 in 100" statistic is to remind people of a few things: firstly, knowing that you will have to expose your sex life to the police and there is only a very small probability that anything will actually be done about it, some women are still brave enough to try, and secondly, that underneath these 1 in 100 accusations are many others who just cannot bring themselves to the point of talking to the police about what they have experienced.
I think we should give women who make these accusations the benefit of the doubt while establishing the facts, acknowledging that coming forward to raise your voice about these things is extremely difficult. If men can by and large rape women - commit a crime against them - with relatively little risk of successful prosecution, then I think it's pretty obvious that non-criminal sexual exploitation is even less likely to have any consequences for the perpetrator.
I was talking about the experience of making the accusation, not the (clearly harrowing if true) experiences they had leading up to that.
I remind you that almost the entire community immediately sided with them, despite the person they accused being prominent in the community.
The claim that "almost the entire community immediately sided with them" is accepting the accused's account of what happened in favour of the accusers. At least one of the victims started to raise concerns in the community several years beforehand and their concerns were not taken seriously:
"I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building a reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the community. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions taken."
I'd also be very, very deeply skeptical that two public claims were the only claims made. We should bear that in mind. If the accusations are true, the public ones are usually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
"It was like reading a fiction about me concocted from benign fragments of reality, transplanted into new context to make them sound abominable."
makes it sound like the accusations weren't based on totally made up facts. It was rather a biased (is the author's view) interpretation thereof.
If you are claiming it's more likely that these women are lying because they want to punish men for the crime of being men than it is likely that everyone here is a victim of a culture that encourages men to behave this way and pressures women to accept it silently you're delusional or acting in bad faith.
I am only saying that even the person being accused does not directly confront the accusers about any facts.
It's somewhat subjective, but if you read between the lines, it's clear, and sad all around:
pretty.direct is borderline incel, incapable of forming meaningful romantic relationships. But he's not being malicious -- in his view, he's acting in good faith, trying to at least get some consensual action.
yifanxing is young and not yet sure how to exist in the world. She believes what people tell her.
They had sex, as humans do. She was friendly with him for a time thereafter, but eventually came to regret the act, and then came to see herself as a victim.
This was understandably unforseen by him, and the whole episode, though unfortunate, is not really worth all the anguish it has caused everyone.
I'm not sure I agree with this, and I think we can and should do better.
Too many people (of all genders) see the value that men provide to their potential sex partners as being status and power, and therefore they believe that men should seek to acquire status and power and use these things to bargain for sex.
This leads to all kinds of shitty problems like the potential (I don't want to assert that the proposed situation in this comment thread is the actual ground truth) miscommunication we're seeing here where a man has done what society expects of him and a woman comes to be abused and we can't even agree if that's a bad thing. We focus on her "regret" as if consent were ever possible in such a lopsided situation and she's retracted it after the fact.
When people talk about the rape culture, this is exactly what they mean. If you see no problems here, you're lost in it.
There is almost certainly a "crime" which pretty.direct is guilty of: a failure to uphold a responsibility that accompanies his power and status in the community, which you are describing. If accused of that crime in an appropriate "court", he would almost certainly be able to recognize the part of the harm that was his responsibility, and would hopefully make appropriate amends, or at least would learn not to repeat the harm.
At the same time: this is not what happened; it's almost never what happens, because the impulse to make such harms seen and known and to force the person who caused them to take responsibility is not really an instinct for justice, and is unable to see with any grace, and almost always overreaches.
Instead what happens is an often overreach of the instinct to make things right, which leads to a punishment (the complete destruction of a life, with no appeal) far exceeding that which a clear-eyed judge would deem appropriate to the actual crime, which is closer to: learning not to repeat the harm; recognizing his responsibility. Note that it is an "overreach" in the sense that it exceeds what the hurt person actually wants—usually to be seen, to be feel heard, to feel safe, and to feel that others in comparable cases are safe. Destroying a life doesn't actually accomplish this, and also produces no learning at all in either the defendant or in any other onlookers.
What tends to happen is:
- when men within rape culture repeatedly get away with things, the prosecutions grow more fervent, to the point where they regularly overreach
- when such overreaches get out of control, there's a backlash, discrediting such prosecutions in future cases of all degrees. (This is where we are now.) But then this lets the men get away with all kinds of things, and prevents any of them from ever learning from their errors.
A feedback loop. The way out is for "justice to be served"—for such cases to be resolved fairly, such that neither the defense or prosecution is left with the feeling they were treated unfairly, which is what drives the feedback loop. Historically it has almost always been the prosecution (broadly, the women) who were treated unfairly, but to treat the defense (the men) unjustly also fails to serve the end of justice and, in the long run, serves no one. Apparently that is what has happened in this case.
The antidote to the cycle you describe is to do as I have done, to point out people acting in bad faith and for people with privilege to hold other people with privilege accountable. We must create consequences for bad behavior but it's more important that we must create consequences for the people that promote or condone the behavior.
I actually dislike when professional circles or other social groups "solve" the problem they create by permanently exiling individuals in the way of "cancellation" because in many ways the cancelled individual is also a victim of the culture of the group. It's often a performative way to be seen not to have whatever problem the individual exemplifies without addressing how that person came to be an example. It also, from a game-theoretical point of view removes any incentive for those individuals to improve. The individual may not understand that they've done anything wrong, because the culture clearly expects and promotes this behavior. I feel neurodivergent people in particular are likely to fall into the trap because they'll interpret the rules as shown to them by the cultures of oppression they exist in and then not read the room that while the way people behave suggests the behavior is overtly permitted, "everyone knows" it's actually horrible and you're supposed to be covert about it to not get caught.
:) Did you read the part of my comment where I said, "Yes, there's a power imbalance..." ?
> as if consent were ever possible
To say that she could not consent is to infantilize her. At the age of 21, we are responsible for our own decisions and their consequences.
You actually think it's justified for an older man to recruit a younger woman, hold his influence in a professional community over her head, suggest that they share a hotel room (making her feel bad for trying to invite a chaperone), suggest that she become intoxicated, and suggest that they have sex? Simply because she accepts this slow erosion of her boundaries and autonomy?
Anyone who seeks to be accommodating and accepting by default, who harbors doubts about the intent of others is "responsible for the consequences"? This exact attitude is why women are choosing to default to assuming malice on the part of men, so they don't fall into traps like this. It's extremely ironic when men hold both positions of "they went along with it so it's not my fault" and "it's not fair that women don't trust men".
What are your boundaries for what constitutes inappropriate behavior here? Merely the law? Do you not understand that people can decide to create consequences in their social communities that go beyond what is prescribed by law? Law provides free speech but doesn't provide consequence-free speech. That you've chosen a throwaway here is telling, knowing your comments here would have consequences if you were to associate them with your public figure.
Consent must be enthusiastic and sober. I'm sorry for men who've never had a woman be excited to have sex with them and who feel that a kind of begrudging intoxicated acceptance is the closest they'll ever get to that. If you're in that category I suggest sex work is significantly more ethical (and less effort).
There was in fact a judgement.
The apology came from four people who signed the Open Letter who live in a special jurisdiction (the UK) where the burden of proof for libel is on the defense. The costs and damages were £20,000.
This exposes the narrator as unreliable. When I first read that paragraph, I read it as implying that a court judged the veracity of the women's claims. It seems deliberately constructed to provide that impression.
In fact the court judgement is merely an acknowledgement that the UK defenders can't possibly prove the truth of the accusations and therefore they fold. Whether or not you prefer the UK system or the US system (which requires the plaintiff to prove falsehood), there's no vindication here. I feel lied to.
I wouldn't read much into the settlement.
I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
>I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
Are you suggesting that if Pretty were found liable for sexual harassment against two different women that he would not have also faced similar negative social outcomes?
If you have been sexually harrassed, don't blog about it, report it to the correct authorities.
The Government is literally campaigning against people to stop prejudicing the judicial process via social media:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/attorney-general-launches...
Everyone who hopes to seek justice needs to read this advice
> Are you suggesting that if Pretty were found liable for sexual harassment against two different women that he would not have also faced similar negative social outcomes?
My point is that the legal system might have weighed up the evidence and considered this case inadmissable, or ruled in Jon's favour. In which case he would have been exonerated in public view by the authorities, and he might have been able to piece his life back together. As it stands, he is in an awful limbo situation where hearsay prevents him getting any gainful employment.
2. It's unclear to me that any of the behavior alleged to have happened in the US (where the accusers reside) is considered criminal behavior in the US. The usual remediation in the US for sexual harassment is civil, so there are no authorities to contact.
The man gets the wrong idea that the woman is interested in sleeping with him, whereas the woman just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room.
If the man then invites the woman to a hotel room, 99.9% of women will strongly assume that the man is trying to advance a sexual agenda if the most likely alternative motivation for the invitation is that the man "just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room."
(Yet, perhaps that type of mismatched set of assumptions is at the core of this situation in the first place)
> In our conversations, he also mentioned a few times where he helped other women to attend conferences that they otherwise couldn’t have attended by sharing Airbnbs with them to reduce their travel costs. He asked if I wanted to share an Airbnb on my trip to the Typelevel conference in Berlin. He also mentioned that he planned to invite others. As a student with limited financial resources, I accepted the tempting offer and felt grateful that, once again, he helped me. At first, he mentioned that I could invite others to join our Airbnb. Having attended only two conferences, I did not know many people at the time. When I thought of a person to invite, he stopped me and asked if I was not feeling comfortable sleeping in the same apartment as him, and if I was trying to get a chaperone for us. I felt bad that I made him feel untrusted and stopped asking others to join.
Having not read the OP (still), I believe that most women -- most extremely young women even -- would expect a sexual advance in the situation described in your quote.
I'm not commenting in any way on whether the man deserves any consequences that might have befallen him for any sexual advance or sexual behavior after having made the invitation described in your quote.
I'm commenting only on, "Maybe there's mismatched expectations," which I (still, after reading your quote, and not having read the OP) consider quite unlikely.
I mean I got red flags just from reading this.
Which doesn't really say anything about this specific scenario. History is also replete with theft, arson, and murder but that doesn't mean it's a good argument when accusing a specific person of a specific instance of theft.
Two things can be true at the same time:
- many women have been, and continue to be, sexually abused and often fail to get justice, and
- sometimes some accusations are made by bad faith actors and/or confused people
are not in conflict. They can both be true at the same time.
I also have no idea who is telling the truth here; just saying that "these things happen" is not really an argument here.
Actually, because these things actually do happen makes the accusations so powerful. History is also replete with false accusations; remember the whole "Satanic panic" from the 80s and 90s where everyone and their dog was engaging in sexual Satanic rituals? Or QAnon today.
Having been in a similar situation myself as a teenager, it is truly abhorrent how quickly people are willing to jump to conclusions against someone based on the most limited information, and without giving the accused any chance to tell their side of the story or defend themselves. Not even a single one of my so-called friends asked me what happened, and almost all of them disappeared from my life permanently.
What I learned from the experience was that none of the people who jumped on the cancel bandwagon had ever been worth even a second of my time. It was their loss, and I became much more careful about who I choose as friends after that.
I can certainly say that if I encounter any of the 300+ individuals listed in the letter in my personal or professional lives, I will be giving them a very wide berth indeed.
My friend was devastated, he had to stop going to his classes and feared that nobody would hire him, professors would hate him (since students already did), and that his life had ended. I spoke with him and assured him that wasn’t the case but to be honest I wasn’t sure either.
I don’t know the details but one year later she was suspended for a year for falsely accusing him, my friend graduated and promptly found a job.
All this to say I’m awfully scared now of the risk of my interactions with women being used in the future as a false narrative to cancel me. I’m happily married and due to life stuff I do have to interact with young girls and women. Because of this I try to be as distant as I can and limit any interaction that doesn’t involve multiple other adults.
I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
> I don’t know the details but [...]
> I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
I'm sorry to hear that you've seemingly adapted your life based on someone else's "petty" experience with an ex-girlfriend, as you put it. Do you feel that this is a healthy and realistic way to live, though? Do you drive a car, walk around your neighborhood, or eat meat?
Depending on what kind of person you are, there are plenty more serious and realistic risks that getting randomly cancelled by your social circle.
But in the real world, life is uncertain. And bad people take advantage of that fact: Bad men take advantage of the uncertainty to assault women with impunity. And bad women take advantage of the uncertainty to make false accusations.
The rest of us are stuck trying to do the best we can. But certainly the best we can includes more than what the author describes here. There's a reason that in court you have a right to give your side of the story, and to confront your accusers: the law has thousands of years of experience dealing with this sort of thing.
Real monsters are walking free of consequence, while innocents are ruined. Society is so obsessed with moral puritanism, and completely blind to the absurd corruption at the top.
If all that energy expended on cancelling people was instead used on genuine political action, we wouldn't be in the trouble we are now at. If more people were reasonable at the time and didn't jump to conclusions, they would still have the high ground. Instead they became the boy who cried wolf.
Regardless of what you think of Jon Pretty, how is this justifiable? Telling people they can't unsupport something because you're not open to issues, but also not removing it?!
Yes.
I have no involvement in this drama (it's the first I've heard of it actually), but signing your name to something matters.
Choose carefully what/who you support.
A repo owner is not obligated to accept contributions.
All of those people are free to create their own repo, post on social media, or write an article recanting their support if they choose to do so.
Not necessarily, plenty of projects have been put in an archive state because they are 'finished', superseded, forked, etc. This isn't code nor a living document, it was a one-off operation.
Morality is subjective (that's why we have courts; which don't respect the individual and differing moralities of the parties involved, it has its own moral bar, for better or worse).
In this case, I feel it is more moral to record all the members of the mob. Maybe this would cause them to think twice before joining the next mob.
I mean, if we are going to have witch-hunt mobs, then the lesser evil is to not allow anonymous mobbers.
- Upon reflection, I don't think this letter was the right approach for this situation. Although I cannot retract my initial decision to sign it, I would appreciate having my signature removed from the document.
- We had good intentions and reasons for concern, but there was no due process, and the consequences of that can be awful. Please accept my withdrawal.
- The goal of providing safe spaces is laudable and necessary, but I expected to see further process outcomes from this effort. Perhaps some sort of SIP or scalarum iustitiae processus.
- I no longer believe the way this letter was the right way of dealing with the situation. And while I cannot undo signing it, I would like to request removing my signature.
So I think pull requests are still accepted, but issues are not.
Good apologies require more than memory-holing an injurious attack.
He's worked on some games I enjoyed in my youth (Planescape: Torment is probably the most well known, considered a genre classic) and my reaction to his cancellation was roughly something like "ah crap, another one of my heroes turns out to be a bad egg". The narrative of famous men abusing their end of a power dynamic is generally easy to believe, etc.
As a result, he lost his employment, contracts and so on as well.
But this one had an aftermath a couple of years later. He wrote some elaborate/lengthy pieces defending himself (which struck me as plausible and even convincing, but then I had to keep in mind he's an expert writer) and initiated legal proceedings -- that he eventually won, resulting in a public statement by the accusers that the events they accused him of never took place. I think his posts make for interesting reading.
His career seems to have resumed recently, five years after the accusations were made public.
Even so, if you look at internet comment threads on recent news of his new game involvement, there's a persistent meme that he paid for this statement in the form of a "seven-figure settlement", which is a curious misreading because the seven-figure sum was paid to him by the accusers to make up for damages.
Sadly, the case of another writer I sometimes liked (Warren Ellis; I enjoyed Transmetropolitan back in the day) is rather grim in comparison.
I can't comment on this particular case, other than by acknowledging that, sadly, this won't be the first or last mobbing. I hope that Pretty does well and that the people who rushed to condemn him never again get laid.
Besides, there may not be a criminal case / the police may do nothing. One of the accusers only came forward three years after the end of the two-year relationship; it's not unheard of for someone to realise that what happened was wrong years much later, at which point the police is less likely to do anything because any physical evidence will be gone by then, and it's one person's words against another's.
The #metoo movement gave victims the push, visibility and protections they needed to stop hiding their abuse / protecting their abusers, sometimes decades after it happens.
Most victims of CSA are minors. No wait: all of them. CSA is a crime precisely because the victims are not able to understand what happens to them and not able to react appropriately. That's the distinction between minors and adults.
2) A lot of sexual misconduct happens behind closed doors and is (I would imagine. IANAL) difficult to prosecute. I’m not saying that one should believe everything at face value but if multiple people make such allegations it’s more likely than not that such allegations have weight.
3) Not all sexual misconduct is “illegal”. But it doesn’t mean that communities should not attempt to censor people who engage in problematic behavior.
With all respect, that's nonsense. Where do you draw the line? Your morals? My morals? The victim's morals?
This is why we have a justice system, so that there is one place where you can say "that is wrong" and "that is right".
Forming a mob because "well, that person didn't akshually commit a crime, but we don't like the way they think about sex" is a primitive and regressive viewpoint.
The correct way would be to petition to make a law against whatever act you don't like. Not to say "let's leave it legal and instead simply punish the person".
No one should be facing a societal punishment without due process.
Especially in countries where "free speech" means I can basically say anything I want short of defamation, no matter how hateful, profane, sexually inappropriate, or otherwise offensive, it only makes sense that a community should go beyond the limits of the law to maintain a non-toxic environment.
You need to explain what you mean by "that way", because I did not express any opinion on speech, free or otherwise.
Your comment sounds like a pre-prepared one, for any occasion that someone is performing wrongthink.
Further, legality does not imply correctness.
For example, it’s probably legal to call somebody a transphobic slur in many parts of the world but to suggest that trans people shouldn’t attempt to avoid or “cancel” such people is ridiculous.
And if you sincerely think that the only acceptable action to take is make a petition to change the law, I would suggest you go out and touch some grass. The law doesn’t work that way.
This sounds great in theory - where "community" means the small town that you live in. In practice, "community" often means "terminally online social media users", and many of the members of this "community" have little interest in looking for context, facts, or the truth and are instead invested in pushing their worldview or just getting a rage boner.
Edit: A great example of this in action was the "bike Karen" incident: https://archive.is/j0Yr8
How much of the online "community" was all-in on the narrative that she was trying to take the teens' bike until more information came to light?
That's not what we're talking about here, are we? We're talking about a public dogpiling.
And, TBH, your example is a poor one; while it's not illegal to slur/slander someone, there are legal remedies that dont' involve a global request to followers of a specific ideology to pile on.
Avoid people you don't like? Certainly. Join a campaign to ostracise someone you never met and never knew existed until your ideologues extended an invitation to mob them does not leave you on the right side of history.
It's not at all. The law doesn't cover all forms of community or personal misconduct, sexual or otherwise.
And everyone -- especially businesses in Silicon Valley -- understands this.
Same with various forms of cheating - adultery is illegal in some states; but not all. And even then rarely prosecuted.
Yes, and those rules are enforceable contracts with penalties for breaking clauses in those contracts.
I want to know why, if those penalties are insufficient, is it better to join a mob than to petition the parties drawing up those contracts for stiffer penalties.
Well that’s why so many cases are civil and not criminal. The bar is much lower (“preponderance of evidence” versus “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt”). A man can be accused of some sexual act that occurred decades ago without any substantive information like what day it happened on, and if a jury says “well I believe her”, it’s a wrap.
There was one high-profile trial, of a man who was definitely guilty. A bunch of other accused people faced zero consequences. In total, the #metoo movement raised awareness and was dwarfed by its own backlash.
An overcorrection would be what people fear-monger about: men arrested for innocently holding doors open, etc. None of that happened.
The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.
Yes -- additionally there's also the situation where they try repeatedly to act collectively on this for themselves but the individual in question (or a compromised individual) has power over the resulting action, right?
I think it worth considering that many, if not most, of these "cancellations" occur long after serious attempts have been made to privately act that have been thwarted, often by commercial interests.
What I object to is the social dynamics of cancellation, where people feel compelled to e.g. sign an open letter, lest they themselves be viewed as siding with the accused, without fully considering the claims and counter-claims for themselves. I also object to creating a false sense of urgency, in order to to encourage this behavior.
A few years back I criticised someone (without naming them) online (since the egregious, thoughtless conduct itself was online) and triggered something of a pile-on that I thought was a bit too much.
Subsequently I realised that I had under-read the situation myself, and the conduct wasn't simply thoughtless at all, it was repeated, self-interested and very calculated; people finding that out was actually the accelerant of the pile-on.
So I wasn't really so guilty of it after all. But I definitely witnessed what you talk about -- the "you're with us or with them" of it all, the social compulsion to join the pile-on.
I will probably still openly criticise people if I think it is very merited, but any criticism needs to be tempered with as much of an antidote for a simple pile-on as it can.
Maybe there should be a public list of slanderers, defamers, mob justice participants and cancellers in general so we can all avoid them like the massive liabilities they are.
It takes work to protect the integrity of our justice system. This applies to the members within it and for those outside of it--neither should sacrifice or attack its credibility for short term political or personal gain. It also requires proper education that focuses on the good, not just the failings.
A lot of people are understandably low on trust for a legal system that doesn't do anything about multiple highly-public sexual offenders.
Well, then you'd presumably fall back onto the old witch hunt; plenty of puritanical mobs are still around to say something like "What about when the courts don't do the job".
Good thing we don't live in those unenlightened days, eh?
A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.
> A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.
They have no valid reasons. No system is perfect. Claiming that the system getting it wrong 1 out of every 1000 times is a valid reason is just stupid; no system is perfect.
Our justice system doesn't fail 1 in a 1000 times, particularly when talking about sex crimes. It fails far more frequently than that, given the prevalence of sexual assault and the rarity of convictions [1]. Additionally, there's an aspect that justice must be seen to be done: high profile repeat offenders walking free damages confidence in the system out of proportion to their frequency.
As above, if you want people to use a system, the system has to work.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/07/the-s...
What makes you think I'm okay with the current system? Upthread I even said "if you are unhappy with the way things are, petition to change them instead of mobbing".
Just because I hold the opinion that evidence matters does not mean that I am a bad person.
People aren't required to only critique a system using the tools that system provides; progress is often made when people step outside of the system (e.g. Rosa Parks) rather than quietly accepting it. There's evidence for that in countless civil rights campaigns.
It's a matrix: a perfect system would always punish the guilty and refuse to punish the innocent.
Without perfect information, you have to choose: will you bias the outcome punish the innocent, or to not punish the guilty?
Not saying people should leap to letter signing, but it also misses the mark to suggest that the US legal system will resolve the issues these kinds of actions cause.
it seems that the author lives in Germany and that he went to court in Britain: https://pretty.direct/consentorder.pdf
If I've missed an implication that limited their suggestion to specific regions, them I'm happy to retract. But what I'm seeing is a general suggestion, so I've extrapolated that out and tried to apply it to a hypothetical where the advice might be appropriate.
Feels like maybe you've assumed that the thread starter was scoping the suggestion to the regions where this offense occurred. Again, I don't see that implication in the text, but I feel like it's an entirely reasonable assumption. That being the case, I don't fault anyone for thinking only in those terms. But I also don't think I was out of line to engage with the thread starters points in the way that I did.
- "the BBC let this person get away with this for years" and also "cancel culture has to stop",
- "there's too much filth on the internet" and "don't you dare demand I tell you my age",
- or the most complex and culturally nuanced one: "children are being groomed" but "she's 18 now, she's an adult and she can make up her own mind about posing nude in a tabloid".
As difficult as it is, any invitation to treat a subject with less nuance is better considered misbegotten until scrutinised much, much further.
In this situation you have an accusation of misconduct made by 1) young 2) women 3) new to a community 4) who don't speak English well. These are all big red vulnerability flags.
I would ensure that every accusation of this nature is treated with respect and investigated by a trusted authority figure in a given community.
EDIT: Though I'm not suggesting people should sign letters about people they don't know based on allegations by other people they don't know.
You might say "this will have a chilling effect on legitimate accusations" and you might be right, but the situation is bad enough now that it's created a pretty extreme chilling effect on socialization in general.
EDIT: I don't normally do this but argue your point. If you continue playing games like down voting very reasonable ideas that you disagree with eventually all of us are going to come together and leave you out of the discussion entirely.
Are you aware that here you are arguing for criminal sanctions on the order of 10 years in prison, for writing a letter?
You probably should expand on that.
Edit: some people seem to be okay with this notion! Would love to hear thoughts on how stiff criminal penalties for what is in the end expressing are at all compatible with societies that claim to value free speech.
Note that the author of the post does not present any proof that the allegations are false. Similarly, the other side likely cannot prove its allegations are true. So we are here discussing long prison sentences for unprovable opinions. I would love to hear how people justify that.
It's about writing a letter that can result in someone else receiving criminal sanctions on the order of 10 years in prison, when that someone might not have even written a letter.
Provably false is essential here.
As far as I can tell, nobody has offered (or likely can offer) proof of anything on either side and yet people are talking about long prison sentences for speech.
You can downplay any action by breaking it down to its foundations and stating it that way.
None of this is obviously accurate. More to the point, no court can adjudicate the "predictable outcome" of a letter or whether the reasons were malicious.
In fact, that’s a fundamental facet of a libel claim.
Free speech is not the same as freedom to falsely accuse. Libel is absolutely illegal and has been since before the US was a country. Allowing things like this to happen means men and women formally socializing with eachother except in really limited or alternatively psychopathic ways isn't practical. It needs to stop and the only possibilities are
a) Just exclude women entirely like we used to.
b) Punish them very harshly for lying.
I think most people would be more upset by a than b. I hope the feminists and egalitarians realize that this is the pro feminism argument as the only practical alternative is to return to a formally patriarchal society. If people can't appreciate the point I'm making then I suppose we'll end going with a which is unfortunate. Everyone who doesn't will eventually be cancelled by the same group of people they're aiming to support.
What is being discussed here is adding harsh criminal liability ultimately for expressing opinions, since we know that two people can experience the same event in very different ways.
… and it usually ends badly when this happens. One kind of injustice is replaced by another. But this is what people will do.
Epstein? Jimmy Savile? The massive and still ongoing sex abuse scandals in not just the Catholic Church but many faiths? Those are high profile ones but there are so many examples of people getting away with sex abuse for years and years with dozens or even hundreds of victims. The wealthier, more powerful, or more famous and “loved” the abuser, the longer they can get away with it.
I remember back in college being personally shocked at how many women I dated who had been raped or at least harassed in disgusting ways, as children or adults. It was like half. They told me the details and I had no reason to disbelieve them. I’ve since heard many similar and worse things from people I know.
Part of why lynch mobs are so easy to form around allegations of sexual harassment and abuse is that it's so incredibly common. The allegations are easily believed.
- If it's not something you can at least sue over or is not illegal, it's not misconduct we should care about.
- If no one was at least prepared to sue, we should all just let it be.
I think perhaps you don't understand that quite a lot of persistent unwanted behaviour never rises to that standard (or perhaps no individual victim was willing to put their head above the parapet).
Anyone who has worked in education can tell you about someone whose unwanted behaviour escaped scrutiny for decades because each individual incident had enough deniability. I have never worked in education and I can identify at least two such cases from my own experiences. (Very likely a third, and there is no way that third person would ever have seen any kind of censure for what they were doing, because it was so deniable and because their victims would not even have classified themselves as victims)
There are plenty of occasions where a community quietly agreeing that someone's behaviour is unacceptable has kept them from a situation where the harms they cause can escalate.
And you know full well that the whole range of sexual harassments is entirely legal.
If someone was accused of murder, or theft, in most cases, social stigma would be part of that. An admittedly sometimes unfair, but baseline thing we're gonna do as humans to protect ourselves.
If your child was at a preschool, and a teacher was accused (but not convicted) of molestation, you wouldn't "be a good person and wait for the justice system to sort it out". You'd either demand the teacher be fired, or you'd take your kid out of the school.
Main issue with investigating child abuse is that the victim's account is unreliable as they might not yet even have the language to describe some things, so we err on the side of caution.
In an environment where all participants are adults it makes sense to at least ask the alleged perpetrator if they're guilty and analyse their reaction.
There was a notorious case in my corner of the world where a locally famous YouTuber was accused by his ex of sexual abuse. He lost a significant number of followers and of course revenue so he took her to court and won, as her story didn't add up.
Undeterred, she continued, but with increasingly wild accusations and even attempting to rope in other people.
I occasionally see a new post about this drama and it serves as a remainder that some people are just out to destroy others.
He was able to figure out where the rumor came from. I’d bumped into a girl during gym class and since I was a sheltered Christian kid new to public school, I didn’t know “second base” had another meaning.
I’ve also had a friend who struggled with depression kill himself after there was an accusation of him having illegal images. I don’t know if it was true. I just knew I couldn’t mourn his death while everyone I knew was celebrating it.
I also know a friend who stopped doing foster care after a child with a long history of compulsive lying and false accusations accused them of sexual abuse and CPS believed the child.
Similarly, r/scala condemned Jon and when the defending testimonials from his female friends were posted there they were removed.
> The Defendants accept that they have never had any evidence to support the allegations apart from the two unverified claims published in coordination with the Open Letter. They were never in a position to make any informed judgement on the truth of the allegations, and did not seek clarification on any of the allegations from the Claimant.
He won £5,000 plus costs.
[edit - the defendants here appear to be signatories of the open letter]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961482
In general I think this was quite a reasonable comment section. I see a lot of "damn this sounds awful" (and it does), discussion about the general phenomenon of sexual harassment (which is obviously real) rather than that specific case, and some uncertainty about what actually happened. I don't see much "this guy should be jailed immediately" in the top comments. I certainly wouldn't call it a mob and I don't see anything that deserves to labelled as insincere virtue signaling.
Even if the allegations are true, his life should not have been ruined over this.
On the other hand, when I read the accusers' accounts someone else linked in the comments, they sound credible. It fits behavior patterns we've all seen before.
I don't know who to believe.
You don't have all the information. You weren't there. You don't even know the people personally. You are not in a position to make any judgement either way.
Something sounding credible doesn't make it true. It doesn't automatically make it false, either. You don't have to believe the accuser or the accused. The only thing any of us should do is mind our own business.
I didn't personally participate in cancelling this person. In fact, I agreed with the point he made in the article. I'm just not sure he didn't do it.
Are you saying I shouldn't have an opinion on that part?
So far, I see that this post caused quite a few forks, the opposite of what the author asked for.
I don't have a solution.
I think as a man who runs conferences you shouldn't sleep with people who attend them. Or any other things like that, for that matter.
Should you be cancelled for that? No. But humans are humans.
There is no solution to this. Courts are also wrong all the time (look at OJ) and victims of SA almost never see justice.
The answer is: we don't know the truth.
There is a subtle, but worthwhile, difference between "plausible" and "credible". Lots of stories are plausible. Few are credible.
In emotion laden cases like this we tend to want to believe stories we already agree with, or have some investment in. I'm no exception to that.
We need to not be misled by what is plausible, or confuse that with what is credible.
If someone really wants to ruin your life, they will find a way. The most effective way to avoid that is to screen your partners aggressively.
Yes, being policed by the mob is terrible.
Otherwise one mistake or the malignant intent of another can cause irreparable damage to my personal reputation.
https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...
Basically, while it's totally fair to hold people accountable, it needs to work both ways.
Additionally, there's a line between boycotting someone (your collective actions) vs attacking others for supporting. If you didn't like what a musician did, you and others could stop buying their albums. That's different than issuing death threats to radio stations that play that musicians music.
So in this case, we seem to have -one sided accountability, a coordinated effort around one side of facts -a boycott vs attack. The open letter makes it clear that only the signatories will be engaging in these actions. Others (such as organizations that employed him) are requested to cut ties but not threatened
So I would say this is only a partial "cancel". It would have been better if he could have "had his day in court" before he was thoroughly condemned, though I'm not sure how.
Many rapists and abusers do not face social ostracism because they contribute more than they take away.
Many people are ostracized because they do not contribute enough in proportion to accusations.
Justice is the idea we can ignore social status, but this is only ensured by due process, because following a consistent set of rules removes status from the equation.
Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As ‘Entirely Willing’
Which is 100% false. Another false one[1]:
...Richard Stallman, who defended Jeffrey Epstein...
This is even worse as it is pure fabrication.
Did Gano ever apologized? Did any of these media outlets even thought about apologizing and making up for everything RMS had to go? It's really, really sad.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/famed-computer-scientist-ric...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/computer-scientist-richard...
A really sad story, but also a cautionary tale.
Like, why did they really get together and do this to this poor guy?
Edit: From the downvotes I’m guessing this isn’t actually resolved? This is the first I’m hearing about this saga.
Niche
So he just left his job for no reason? This seems compeletely self-inflicted. The following paragraphs are about he "had to" drop various projects - Why would you just drop everything?
So from the outside we have no way of knowing who is telling the truth.
Yes, exactly.
His life was upended because he was assumed guilty until proven innocent. Even here in the threads.
So, as observers, what we're left with is two people accusing someone of something and the accused saying they're innocent.
This is the point though, isnt it. He's writing a retrospective about the impact of public condemnation and ostracization as a result of such proof-less, process-less accusations.
Neither the accusation nor the denial come with proof. This is not exactly about what should we do in this circumstance. Its about what peiple did fo in these circumstances.
You can doubt his innocence. But... and this is the crucial point... this post is not attempting to punish the accusers. So to me... normal rules apply. Assumption of good faith and honesty, to some extent, apply.
If I read the other side's story, then I'd probably read it from the same perspective.
That's ok... because we aren't hanging someone at the end of this conversation. If we are, different standards apply.
You don't need to prove accusations of criminal conduct false. The onus is on the accusers to prove the allegations true.
> It doesn't seem like the accusing parties were asked or agreed to take any action retracting their claims.
In theory there are punitive measures for false accusations, in practice no one ever bothers with them.
There's a difference between listening to someone's story and assuming truthfulness... and joining a mob going after someone.
He's not naming his accusers or asking the reader to go after them.
OK, now prove you didn’t.
At the time I was taken aback at the lack of due process, and how one-sided accounts from ex-girlfriends could be used to destroy a man.
Now, years later his story still chills me and makes me sad about the divided and sinister state of the Scala programming language community.
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Edit: okay, vastly different experience on phone vs desktop. Looks normal enough on the monitor except, as someone points out, the weird f and j