There's a lot of comments making arguments that were basically discredited decades ago, and people have got tired of having to rebut them every single time and gone straight to the downvoting.

Hacker news voters seem to have got a lot less tolerant of this kind of tired regressive culture war stuff lately. But this article is still on the way to being flagged off the front page. There are certain subjects this site is just not capable of having a mature, informed discussion of.

Before posting opinions, one should verify them against "Hacker News Tired and Discredited Wrongthink Opinions Directory".

Edit: As it seems, the rule applies to this comment too. Dear reader, if you feel uncomfortable are offended by this comment, you are the problem.

Those two lines of logic don't go together. If in your opinion it's a big mistake to believe they're rational, you are saying they're not being rational. There's no neutrality there.

You can assume that there is unknown information being acted upon. Unless there's proof otherwise that the protest is lying you infact can and should assume it's authenticity. Or at the least not be involved without clear knowledge.

> No, if it's one person leveling an accusation and there is no corroborating evidence (either physical or more witnesses), it's not enough.

Whether it is sufficient evidence is a different question than whether it is evidence. It's certainly difficult for nothing other than a victim's testimony contradicted by the accused with no other direct evidence to meet the criminal standard for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but it's equally certainly less difficult for it to meet the civil standard of preponderance of the evidence that would be applicable in court for sexual harassment claims, and for lots of other human actions, action based on evidence with a lower threshold than preponderance of the evidence for any single offense may be reasonable.

I mean I'm not saying give ultimate judicial authority to any accuser. Just that we should be able to respect our peers' opinions as being worth something more than "not at all". Granted, I should have perhaps made that clearer rather than slipping into rhetoric.

> either physical or more witnesses

This makes rape un-prosecutable.

I'm not saying it's the only evidence required but just that it counts > 0. I don't think that should be particularly controversial.

Particularly when you get many people saying the same thing independently, in a social context rather different to that of Salem in 1693.

>That's how we got the Salem witch trials and why mere accusations aren't usually enough.

That's how plenty of hard-working, innocent, Americans got blackballed and had their careers ruined by McCarthyism.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities resulted in many things, but the Hollywood Blacklist alone was something like 150 names of almost entirely innocent people. Those people couldn't get work because someone accused each of them of being communists, often with zero evidence.

Yeah, for determining which of six strangers in a lineup is the one who mugged you in a dark alley. IDing someone who harassed you at work seems easier.

Most other evidence is necessarily less reliable than eyewitness evidence since it relies on eyewitness evidence to attest for it's provenance.