My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
yifanxing.medium.com
yifanxing.medium.com
This girl was feeling uncomfortable and crying but at the same time "didn't think those behaviors were problematic". I can't help but wonder if her parents never sat her down and discussed situations like this and, I get it. That's a really uncomfortable conversation to have with your child. It is, however, an important one.
This doesn't just apply to girls by the way. We parents need to be telling our sons what kind of behavior is and isn't acceptable. It's not enough to expect them to figure it out. Who are they figuring it out from if not us? Probably other inexperienced boys.
Please don't rush to put words in my mouth by thinking I am suggesting the guy in the article is innocent of the accusations. I'm making no commentary on either party from this article. That's for the courts to decide should one or both parties choose to take that course of action.
I'm simply saying it is important that parents overcome their discomfort around discussions of sex with their children so that the children can make informed decisions.
If two adults get together, fly together, get a room together, drink wine together, have relations... Then we're supposed to say that consent can't be given because the woman is drunk. But they're both drunk. Isn't it essentially the patriarchy to say that a woman can't make that choice? Like if they're equals and they're both drunk, why do we blame the men?
Because they aren't really equals? Isn't that what we're fighting against? We blame the men for not ignoring the wishes of the woman while drunk. It's a little bit chauvinistic to think the men know better isn't it?
Which is the very thing feminism was fighting AGAINST - having men make decisions for you. Then we blame men, say they need to do better.
That seems ridiculous.
Mate, no. This applies to men, women, nonbinary folks, non-human animals, etc. Literally any living thing. If you don't consent, anyone having sex with you is wrong. It's wrong if a man tries to have sex with a drunk, non-consenting person, and it's wrong if a women tries to have sex with a drunk, non-consenting person.
This is the _opposite_ of making a decision for someone. It's recognizing that they kind of _can't_ make a decision, so you simply do nothing.
They were consenting adults, both well within their senses? Or was she like unconscious and he's an absolute monster?
A story that paints him as responsible for everything including her feelings.
Blaming behaviors are a marker of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.
I'm obviously not qualified to diagnose either party, but a lot of the content of her article blames him for things he's not responsible for and that are completely out of his control.
Furthermore, it seems the worst he's guilty of is being interested in having consensual sex with her. Whereas she's interested in destroying his livelihood and career.
Ya from an armchair this does seem like classic narcissistic abuse. Mentor public figure in a position of power. Blame and gaslight the victim when confronted. Then shame the victim when she comes forward with her story.
So neither of them would classify, in this story?
So it was just two consenting adults, and the part about wine was... Flavor text, essentially? Unless she was saying she was unconscious and I missed it.
I thought the implication there was essentially that she couldn't give consent, which is a rape accusation - that's very serious. But it doesn't sound like either of them would pass the bar for inability to give consent?
Unless I read it wrong.
The above commenter is insinuating that society applies a double standard here: that if an intoxicated man and woman have sex, the former is considered a perpetrator while the latter is considered a victim. That is incorrect, both are treated equally in the eyes of the law. This scenario doesn't happen because if two people had sex at least one was sober enough to decide to have sex. This situation where two people are intoxicated to the point where they are incapable of consenting have sex cannot occur.
Here's the actual law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
> A policy that, in the evaluation of complaints in the disciplinary process, it shall not be a valid excuse that the accused believed that the complainant affirmatively consented to the sexual activity if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that the complainant was unable to consent to the sexual activity under any of the following circumstances:
> The complainant was incapacitated due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication, so that the complainant could not understand the fact, nature, or extent of the sexual activity.
When someone goes along with something but ends up feeling uncomfortable or even resentful about it, they can talk about it with the other party. And that party should acknowledge it. They may have meant no harm or even be surprised or feel hurt, but a decent person would consider the other's feelings and admit they may have had poor judgement. This Jon Pretty guy allegedly has a pattern of maneuvering women into vulnerable positions, inappropriately bragging about his "conquests" and from what multiple sources confirm shows a bunch of telltale signs of an emotional abuser and manipulator. It wasn't one instance of them being drunk, it was an extensive period of pushing boundaries, coercion and probably gaslighting.
You'll always hear questions along these lines. "Why did she stay around him if she was uncomfortable/mistreated/abused?" "Why did she wait so long to talk about it if it bothered her so much?" "Why didn't she collect proof?" "Why didn't she just say no?" These questions interpret the situation as far too simple. Abusers are great at creating doubt. They do something wrong, they make their victims feel as equal accomplices. Good and fun times are alternated with bad ones. They don't outright break the law or force someone but will push boundaries and wear someone down repeatedly to get their way despite the discomfort of the other.
That's why it's so hard for a victim to come forward. It's exactly because everyone says "well you didn't set hard boundaries, did you?" It's because maybe no crime was committed according to the letter of the law so they don't feel like they really have a case to make. It's because the victim initially feels like they share as much responsibility or it's their own fault and they should have known better. Abusers are great at walking that line where they get what they want while still maintaining plausible deniability, making it impossible to fully dismiss the argument that the other person is responsible too. It lets them justify their actions to themselves and others, believing it was as much the agency of the other party as their own. Meanwhile they're constantly using a position of power and a victim's weaknesses to manufacture precisely the situation they want.
They call them predators for a reason. It's cause they seek out prey. They know what to look for in a potential target. Don't blame a victim for being possibly naive, inexperienced or easy to sway when those were exactly the preconditions to be taken advantage of. It doesn't justify someone doing just that.
The man is expected to be the adult.
I cannot believe this guy doesn't know that what he's doing is wrong.
We should identify and mitigate high potential threats by public warning, ostracism or legal action. Overcorrect if necessary.
Hell no, that’s what all our legal systems are not about and there are also provisions against this sort of zealotry.
And rightly so, it’s such a historically proven road to hell and unintended consequences.
You're getting older and obviously you're interested in sex. Being sexual is a healthy and normal part of being human. Know that I support you if you are gay, straight, non-binary, binary, etc... I love you because you are you and that will never change.
As your father, it is important to me that you are a kind and caring person. Kindness comes in many forms, many of which are obvious. Such as lending your arm to an elderly woman trying cross a busy, snow-covered street, for example. Kindness is also being generous to and patient with your partner before, during, and after sex. It is being aware of their needs and desires as well as what they don't like.
To that end; nobody, and I mean nobody, should be forced to have sex. If your partner doesn't clearly consent to having sex with you then it is forced. To do otherwise is an act of violence--the opposite of kindness. If you are unsure about whether your partner wants to have sex then they don't.
It is my sincerest hope that one day you find someone who you will fall in love with and who will fall in love with you. When you do, you will find that kindness plays an important role in that. Because sometimes that person will treat you poorly. They will be angry, short, and disrespectful to you. And you will do the same to them. That is part of being in a healthy relationship. It's unpleasant but it's how we grow. One thing I have learned in the years spent with your mother is that returning such anger and disrespect with kindness goes a long way towards developing a deep and lasting bond with one another.
Know that I am always available to you if you have any questions about sex, or any other subject for that matter. I know it's uncomfortable to talk about this right now. It is for me too. But it will get easier the more we talk about it so come to me anytime you feel you need to."
I am lucky to have a mother who never hid the harsher realities of life from me; She taught me how to understand what "no" means, because it's easy for horny young boys growing up to hear "no" as "No, I want you to try harder" or "No, I am a good girl and I do not want to look like a slut by giving in", so, she said "no means no because the risk of hurting her is much higher than the reward of getting your way".
I don't want to blame the media for putting this in our heads, because it _is_ a real thing (that women are sometimes bashful and may expect men to be a bit more pushy to show that they are serious) but because it's so nuanced and difficult it's better to play it safe, because you really _need_ to be _looking_ for the nuance and looking out for clues they're not into it and I don't think people (especially men) understand that.
And even then it's not a given that we're taught to look for it; and even if we are: it takes time even if you _do_ look for it, it's MUCH better to play it safe.
Anyway, my point is, parents don't _necessarily_ teach men or women what consent actually means, the media doesn't help.
A good example, of course, is: Silence is not consent. Which is a very difficult concept to grasp given that it leads to weird thoughts about "it's not romantic to ask if she wants to have sex" but it's not just about not asking, it's about looking for non-verbal cues which could be easily missed if you're aroused.
And an abused boy could well become an abuser in the future. Sad but true
Are you talking sexual abuse? If so, then references please.
There are a lot of ways that abuse goes down the generations. For example girls who were abused are more likely to get together with abusive men as adults. But I've encountered zero evidence that victims of pedophiles are particularly likely to become pedophiles themselves when they grow up.
I have personal reasons to be interested in the topic, so I spent a lot of time at one point looking for evidence that sexually abused boys were likely to become sexual abusers as adults. I have concluded that such evidence both doesn't exist, and it isn't true. Had I known that when I was younger, I could have avoided a whole lot of guilt and self-hatred.
for example here https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72050039.pdf https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2082860/
but both of the studies says that the self reports are questionable.
First of all, we all rework our childhood memories to better fit our adult personas. Depressed people talk about all of the terrible things that happened to them as kids which make them depressed now. Happy people, all of the happy things that happened that make them happy now. A gay man might talk about wearing dresses and playing with dolls that made him gay.
But attempts to corroborate current stories with past events (the gold standard being longitudinal studies) find that none of that is true. Happy and depressed people have the usual mix of happy and sad childhood events, they just remember them selectively. The gay man's twin brother says maybe he wore a dress once, and has made a mountain out of a molehill. And so on.
Pedophiles are even worse. Pedophiles have the problem that they fall in love with children, and have to gaslight themselves into believing that they do no harm by having sex with the child. Under this pressure, pedophiles make up memories out of whole cloth.
However in general, we have not found any correlation between what actually happened to you before puberty, and who you wind up sexually attracted to after. We can't predict whether you'll be straight. Whether you'll be gay. Or whether you'll be a pedophile. Which means that if you were the unfortunate target of a pedophile, there is no particular reason to believe that have anything other than the 1% risk that every boy does of growing up into one.
To expand on this the two reasons for this myth are abusers tend to lie about their childhoods to gain sympathy. And basically there are a bunch of confounds that both increase the likelihood you will be abused and that you will be an abuser but there's no real causation.
But I think we should also be teaching boys and men how not to be victims. Both sexes can be abusers, and we spend almost no time teaching boys and men how to recognize and escape abusive situations.
I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence.
I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.
Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.
I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.
When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and their decision was not respected, come get me.
I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that I told them they were wrong.
This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.
Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as something funny in movies. I treated it as no laughing matter.
If you want children to understand consent and respect, the best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street, not a one-sided privilege.
We've also taught a similar one in "your body, your choice." I can confirm some folks look at us sideways when we agree with our kids choice to not hug or kiss.
If there is one thing I'd want my kids to know it is how to establish and confidently hold a boundary.
Did you ever deal with an instance where your kids started telling you "no" in response to demands you felt were reasonable, twisting your original explanations to use against you, for things like eating, cleaning up or hygiene? How did you reconcile the difference?
For eating, I made healthy foods available that they liked. This worked really well. One son has two conditions that can land a child in in-house hospital treatment for aversion to eating and he never had issues like that.
For trying new foods, they had to try it, not finish it. I never made them do things like clean their plate. Instead, I planned ahead for how much I expected people to eat at the meal.
I always had a good reason for what I was asking and it very rarely came to "because I said so." On the rare occasions where it did hit that point, they went along with it because it was rare, so they were convinced I had a good reason even if I couldn't get them to understand it.
I have one major rule - if I give an absolute command, it must be obeyed immediately without question. In exchange, I promise to do it very rarely and explain my reasons as the earliest possible convenience. This has helped in situations where it wasn’t practical for me to physically drag them - get out of the way of the car, come towards me NOW and away from that crumbling cliff. Stuff like that.
Most other things fall into place just by showing by example. Show interest in their homework, talk excitedly about science, etc, they do their best in school.
As a parent of teenagers... omg, yes. LOL. I think it's as much because they're teenagers preparing to leave the nest as much as anything.
That doesn't mean the teen years didn't have some bumps. The worst of that was cleared up by explaining to my children that they were being flooded with hormones and a side effect of high levels of testosterone is aggression and anger.
So if they were feeling very, very angry, it wasn't because they were being subjected to extreme injustice they had never before seen. It was because they were hormonal.
That conversation ended with the punchline "You're problem is called testosterone, not my bitch mother." which caused everyone to crack up.
After that I occasionally would say "You sound like an icky, hormone soaked teenager." And my son would say "I am an icky hormone soaked teenager" and he would try to tone down whatever made me say that and I would try to cut him some slack for being hormone soaked and not entirely in control of his big, fat mouth because of it.
Different kinds of families, I guess =)
We should stop treating "tell folks not to have 'unacceptable' sex" as if it's a foolproof solution to all social problems. It just isn't.
In case you didn't notice, there is a pattern, very often, the aggressor is in a relative position of power.
People with power feel free to abuse people with less power, simply because they've learned that most of the time they can get away with it.
Exactly. The conclusion is simple, yet challenging to implement: don't have sex outside of marriage. For girls and women: don't have casual relationships with men. Problem solved.
Of course it does. Marriage means responsibilities and protects rights, and no one night stands. Just because abuse happens in some marriages does not mean that we should leave sexual relationships to happen adhoc. Limiting sexual relationships to contracts (marriage, not prostitution) is the solution that has worked forever basically. The widespread of STDs, not to mention children out of wedlock, not to mention the mental tolls that come out of easy relationships is already documented, and the society is paying the price.
The incident in very article you're replying to would have been avoided had there been no casual interaction with the man, let alone sleeping with him in the same room.
> your point is clearly proven wrong by and large.
Quite the contrary. We're already seeing the effects on conservative societies that have "westernized", and normalized sex outside of marriage. The effects have been catastrophic to say the least at every level: mental, societal, familial, health, financial. The society in its entirety is paying the toll.
What your logic straight dictates is that the solution to our freedom and dignity being stolen is to not have freedom and dignity in the first place.
You speak of mental toll. Do you understand the mental toll of being locked with your abuser in the same house and your abuser also having the support of the "society"? The mental toll of being devoid of any alternatives in the first place? The toll of being degraded and considered inferior and subservient to the other half of the population? Do you understand how much society pays because kids are grown up in such environments?
You speak of "Westernization" as if treating women as humans is a strange new counter-society idea. You got it backwards honey. Islam placing women below men and denying the freedoms and dignity of a human being, with the seal of approval of allah himself, with a small a, is the abnormal and perverse thing in human civilization.
You ask why I assume you are a Muslim? Only a Muslim would write such hateful things towards women. Even the misogynists of the other places and religions would not be able to write the things you did with a straight face and with such confidence.
May Islam die so that women can live.
That is why I was explicit in my request that people not put words in my mouth or read between the lines.
However, to suggest I'm blaming the victim is the epitome of putting words in my mouth and I soundly reject that suggestion as nothing short of offensive. I have done no such thing, nor would I ever.
I respectfully ask that you retract any such suggestion.
There will always be Jon's and worse than Jon's out there in the world. They are to blame indeed. But what are you going to do about it? How are you going to protect yourself and others?
Taking measures for protection does not mean you are to blame.
This isn’t to play down the experiences of women at all, but it can be easy to forget that this happens to men too
Given the current culture, it can be even harder for men to come forward with their stories, and even less likely for them to be believed
As a plus, I think making sure to teach boys what is and isn’t acceptable to happen to them could help to teach them how to treat others
I think that otherwise, if it’s “don’t rape” for boys, and “don’t let people rape you” for girls, then it’s almost like marking each gender out solely as potential abusers and potential victims, which surely couldn’t be a good thing
1. Alcohol is the number one date rape drug and it's problematic in part because men tend to have a much higher tolerance than women.
2. Date rape frequently involves two people from different cultures with different social expectations. This often fosters terrible misunderstandings.
3. It's always problematic to "try a case" in the court of public opinion. Probably better to try to use a piece like this as a jumping off point for general discussion of the problem space and not an attempt to determine what "really" happened in this instance.
4. It's good to think about what women can do differently to try to protect themselves. Trying to talk about that is not, per se, blaming the victim anymore than it is blaming the victim to say "It's a bad neighborhood. Make sure you lock your car."
5. When someone is a habitual offender and genuinely a predator, their victim can do all the right things and still get assaulted.
6. Whether a woman did or did not do all the right things, a man choosing to assault her is still on him, just like you are still a thief even if someone failed to lock their car.
Your comments on tricky topics tend to lean more toward actionables, rather than the perpetual rehashing same arguments the rest of this comment section is filled with.
I've got some guesses about what this might mean, but I haven't studied this, and don't have any personal experience here.
In such cases, they may even feel entitled to have you and get very mad if you try to tell them no.
People from very conservative cultures tend to wildly misinterpret the actions of women from more liberated and empowered cultures. Her behavior may be viewed as promiscuous or as leading him on when she's doing no such thing.
Some cultures expect a man to have to pursue a woman pretty hard before she says "yes." I read one article where a man from such a culture was sort of frustrated or disappointed when his lady from another culture gave it up too easily in his view. He wasn't happy at not having to "work for it."
You don't have to be different nationalities to experience cross cultural misunderstandings. Americans come in a variety of religious persuasions, ethnicities, etc.
https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
Its kind of weird that this hairsplitting curiosity about consent always comes up exclusively in the context of rape and not other crimes with the same “without consent” rule, like battery (particularly since rape is, ina sense, just battery where the “harmful or offensive touching” element involves specific configurations of genital contact.)
But its actually pretty simple: if the other party didn’t actively intend for the specific interaction to occur, there was no consent. All the other things people ask about (except to the extent that they involve factors that legally either negate consent if known to or caused by the other party or which create a legal incapacity to consent independent of knowledge of the other party, which can include intoxication , youth, threats of violence, and other factors) tend to be things that play more of a role in the practical ability to convince a jury one way or the other than the ground truth of whether the offense occurred.
the crime or tort of unconsented physical contact with another person, even where the contact is not violent but merely menacing or offensive.
Most people hear of that only in the form of assault and battery. I always have to look it up because my mind wants to say "That phrase repeats itself. Surely, battery means being battered."
As for when is it legally rape? That depends a lot on the jurisdiction. Different places have different laws and there is lots of debate about the merits of some of those laws.
edit: Why am I downvoted? This is a real question. Sorry for my european ignorance.
If you really want to know how to reach meaningful consent with a sexual partner, investigating the details of "exactly where does the law draw that line" isn't especially useful and it's hard to try to reply to such a question in a constructive fashion that doesn't implicitly suggest ugly things about the motive of the asker, so trying to reply seemed like an unwise choice.
My wife is a relationship and dating coach, and so it sparks my interest where the law draws the line.
I know from my wife, that nowadays men can approach women (on dates etc.) is to first ask for interactions, like "Can I place my hand on your leg", or "Is it OK if I kiss you". That way to have an explicit consent in all interactions. But there is this other aspect, where most women prefer a "real man that takes initiative", and so the spontaneous kiss might become dangerous if the man is very bad at reading the woman.
My question is basically where the law draws the line, in interactions that can be very complex. But as others responded, it seems up to the jury to decide if something was wrong or not.
P.S.: By the way thank you for giving the best comment in this threat at the top. I'm the father of 1 boy and 3 girls, and your advice is very clear and actionable.
I worry much more about how to ensure that things go right.
The problem with wondering where the law draws the line is that if you look for guilt, it's easy to find it. It's easy to take offense, to escalate offense, to dig your grave deeper.
I worry much more about cultural trends. Laws are written by people and interpreted by people. The same law that twenty years ago was used one way can morph into something else. What was once a protection can become a cudgel.
The law is certainly needed. But this problem won't be solved with laws and court cases.
It will be solved with mutual respect and civil discourse, which is why I chose to reply to you.
Thank you for pleasantly surprising me with this comment. I was about 90 percent certain I was making a terrible mistake and would regret replying.
I chose to bet a certain way, knowing the odds were long against it going well but it was the only bet with some hope of furthering civility rather than deepening the yawning chasm that so often stands between us and a better world.
It isn't weird at all. There is no reasonable expectations of getting consent for battery outside of very specific scenarios.
I don't know about Germany or the US, but Poland has (a) fairly strict anti-rape laws, and (b) a number of cases presented in media, where the court's final opinion was something along the lines of "meh, what's the big deal?".
I'm not sure that this is a general characterisation (might be) but certainly illustrates the law vs. decision maker split.
From what I can gather in the instances of other crimes, the same is true in e.g. US. You cannot shoot unarmed people running away from you, but then courts let people get away with it.
At the end of the day, the main sniff test, only somewhat moderated by law, seems to be "does this look like rape to me".
because the current title actually sounds like it's the whole commnity, but the blog is about a specific guy.
---
second I really do not understand, how other people can be so horrible. he basically abused her in a moment where she was really really desperate and I think such a thing is really really bad.
It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do anything. If the community is allowing it to happen, then the community is as much at fault as the sick individual doing the abuse.
well around 2017-2019 I was active in scala aswell (more on the playframework side tough) and I dind't even knew about him until I read the blog. you know just because there are members from scalacenter and lightbend does not mean that the community as a whole wanted to have something to do with somebody like him. You know there are thousands of people going to ScalaDays every year, it's highly unlikely that the majority of the scala community would be happy about the guys behavior and it's also highly unlikely that the majority of people in the scala community knew about the guys behavior.
> In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned me to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn’t the only person who told me that.
> 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.
About using the word "community", the first paragraph of the open letter explains why it's relevant:
"We, the undersigned, have become aware that, for some time, Jon Pretty has abused his position of privilege and stature within the Scala community to sexually harass and victimize women. He has used the community’s conferences to target women who are new to the Scala community, offering mentorship, access, and other forms of support, and then abusing the trust that he has established."
From my outsider's vantage point I remember thinking something felt off about Jon's interactions/role in those stories. It was gut wrenching reading the article this AM realizing what was really going on.
That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason. While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise the archetype of high-status men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author? Likely. A way to mobilize support? Certainly. But the method can be abused. Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent. Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
My brother was a victim of a vicious smear by a female colleague, who falsely accused him of stalking her as a result of him calling her out one day for stealing his project and presenting it while he was traveling to the funeral of his wife's grandfather. He was able to show video footage of him picking up his son and daughter at a daycare the very moment the woman claimed he was at her house, but by then, the HR department couldn't turn back, and he was fired. (He was later sent a large gift basket by several of his coworkers who had heard from someone in HR that the charges were false, but "optics" were the reason they had to move forward with his termination.)
Most people let bullies get away with it because even stepping in as a third party means standing up to a bully. It can be scary, but even if there's no real risk it's still a fucking pain in the ass. Who wants to get into a mud slinging competition with a predator? Or get a harassment lawsuit? If someone is willing to harass other people this way, they will certainly harass you this way.
I tried fighting injustices in court, it often doesn't work and you just end up wasting money.
I would have rather spent the money on a guy with a wrench.
Not to mention that this took place while traveling to a foreign country.
Edit: I'm assuming that folks disagreeing with this post have had nothing but success with reporting sexual harassment and assault to police departments, foreign and domestic... Because the alternative assumption is a lot less charitable.
In the original #metoo Hollywood case it's that the whole culture was/is rotten and has been for decades. There's no other recourse because the culture normalizes "casting couch" type stuff. That's where the term comes from after all.
There was some cyber-bullying (for lack of a better word) going on. My relative called law-enforcement, then was referred to the FBI. A case was filed and was told they would circle back on it to collect details. They never called back. My relative was never able to make contact with them about it again.
Completely ignored. I can't remember the details, but it wasn't just a "you're fat and ugly" type of bullying. But it was a real safety issue for a member of the community. Law enforcement completely failed in this case.
Now what?
I despise the "public court". The internet and viral online comments deciding who's innocent and who's guilty. (the man during the US capitol riots who lost his job because he was seen in a photo holding a black woman. Turns out, he was actually saving her life! But the "public court" announced him as guilty and they went after him, contacting his employer, people saying awful things about him online. https://kfor.com/news/washington-dc-bureau/white-man-seen-in... )
But on the flip side... what do you do when law enforcement completely fails?
We need private police and a new legal system
To be clear: what I was responding to the comment that said only “contact law enforcement”. I was merely pointing out that “contact[ing] law encoforcement” is not a silver bullet.
But I was also mourning that the alternative (the court of public opinions? Is that the right phrase?) also has its problems. Sometimes it feels like we have no options.
I was not commenting on the OP’s experience.
It achieves little.
Time to name the company.
The narrative that is widely believed is that "the cost of making an accusation is so high that nobody would do it, so automatically believe accusers" and they pretend that there is no cost to being accused.
It's an oversimplification and ignores the game theory involved in these things.
I still shout "rapist owned" each time i pass his business, as do my brother and my father, my sister privately shared her story with his daughter on facebook last year (his daughter is one year younger than my sister, the creep), basically destroying their relationship, and the cooking school my sister went to directly called all female student and ex-student to tell them to avoid his restaurant. I also scraped social networks (only public data, nothing illegal) for his activities two years ago but only found business contacts. Each of them still received a nice email though.
I will move back next month, so i will continue my shouting campaign harder after the pandemic end and hope his business can't survive covid. Since his restaurant will be between my place and the place i keep my boat, i'm pretty sure i can be successful.
JPKab's point was that pursuing justice would be very costly to his brother (assuming that he didn't win). I can't see how pursuing justice is costly to your sister (my condolences!). There is a low chance of success in both of those pursuits.
Clearly the original crime is costly in both cases, much more so in the case of your sister!
My father managed a mom & pop shoe store in the 80s. That Company got its start distributing through small local shoe stores, and as soon as they started making big bucks, began treating the local stores like garbage. Throughout my childhood, we were banned from buying or wearing their, as you accurately put it, overpriced, low quality crap.
The court of public opinion still thinks that the riots in Kenosha were justified (the actual courts heard and saw real evidence that determined that Mr. Blake was indeed sexually assualting his ex and was indeed reaching for a knife when he was shot). The court of public opinion thought that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified because they thought Saddam helped OBL. The recent case of the teenage girl shot in Columbus featured the Court of Public Opinion weighing in that the girl should have been allowed to stab the other girl pinned against that car, and the cop should have "shot her in the leg", which any expert on use of force would immediately explain would not have worked. Why? Because the public as a whole is filled with smart individuals, but an an aggregate level are a bunch of moronic lemmings, like all large groups of people are.
Again you're making some bigger point only you seem to be hearing but spell it out for me and for everyone else.
The alleged crimes are difficult to prove in general, but in this case the victim seems to have been only visiting the country where the crime occurred. And didn't fully understand what had happened contemporaneously. I would hope she approaches the appropriate criminal authorities to report, and I would hope something is done, but without local knowledge of how these reports are handled in Berlin, I would expect it to mostly be written down somewhere and no further action taken.
Speaking out in a public way like this helps others who experienced the same pattern of behavior to recognize it, and possibly share similar experiences to the point where a criminal investigation may be started, if relevant. It also may help put people who might be exposed to similar behavior in the future on notice, so they can attempt to avoid it, or report it as it happens, if it happens in the future.
We used to have a process to figure out what happened and make a judgement after the facts have been laid out.
What we get now is emotional responses to outrageous headlines and mobs ready to crucify the accused.
What a farce.
When was this? In your living memory? Was that time before or after Emmet Till was murdered by a lynch mob?
Libel and slander laws are also real. If someone is actually making a false accusation, there's already legal ways to deal with it.
suing can cost money, time, effort, and may not able to necessarily clear your name even if you won.
I still shout "rapist owned" each time i pass his business, as do my brother and my father, my sister privately shared her story with his daughter on facebook last year (his daughter is one year younger than my sister, the creep), basically destroying their relationship, and the cooking school my sister went to directly called all female student and ex-student to tell them to avoid his restaurant. I also scraped social networks (only public data, nothing illegal) for his activities two years ago but only found business contacts. Each of them still received a nice email though.
I will move back next month, so i will continue my shouting campaign harder after the pandemic end and hope his business can't survive covid. Since his restaurant will be between my place and the place i keep my boat, i'm pretty sure i can be successful.
-----------
Honestly i can't say i will ever stop stalking him even if he had to sell his business. I'm thinking of sending him accusing emails on temp email accounts (scripted of course, my sister got herself back in one piece after a year and a half, and i even think she is now way stronger than she used to, i won't waste that much time for him).
In general I don't like it as well because it could lead to abuse as we just read - but that's also not always black or white. In some cases it could be real romance or attraction between two adults, even if one has a higher status than the other (that's of course not what happened in this story! I'm just saying it could be consensual, even if the "high status" person uses his status just to get sex. Movie stars and rock stars do the same thing.
“Imagine that you were convicted of murder but, unlike John Wayne Gacy, you were innocent.”
Seriously what is the point of comments like this? False convictions are real and very very bad, but I know very few social justice advocates who are opposed to locking up serial killers. Likewise, the existence of unscrupulous people who make false accusations of sexual assault/etc is a real problem. But that’s a very shitty excuse to trash every public accusation - especially when in practice it is the public accusation that leads to more victims speaking out.
More to the point: Jon Pretty is a notable public figure who has been credibly accused of extremely toxic and disgusting behavior towards large portions of the Scala community. At least some of this behavior is clearly not illegal, merely dangerous and profoundly unethical[1]. Therefore the court of public opinion is the only court that has solid jurisdiction, so to speak.
[1] That said: some of the accusations and the large number of alleged victims merit a criminal investigation.
Conviction means someone made an accusation at a legal level, then it was considered worthy by police, then by a country's prosecution service, then by a jury, and then (probably) by an appeals court too. Under normal circumstances, that's a bar infinitely higher than, "I'm claiming to have a story about someone."
People who are abused are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
edit: removed specific gender
edit2: I'm not trying to be inflammatory here. This is a phenomenon that I've noticed over the years.
The barrier and punishment for coming forward as a victim of sexual abuse, rape or harassment is great indeed. Questioning every case is ignorance of existing laws setup to handle any false accusations.
There's a lot of factors. How much will it cost? How much publicity will it generate and is that worse than just letting it go? What is the standard of proof that must be met and are they confident they can prove that it's a false statement? What are the consequences if they somehow fail to meet that burden? Etc.
Also, how did the left become the party of "if he's in the courtroom he must be guilty of something"?
If someone wants to clear their name, go to court and sue for slander. If it's two people's word against each other, I'll believe the victim every time since there's such a high cost of coming forward and slander laws exist.
EDIT Since I'm now throttled...
I'm saying that coming forward either means:
1. Something really happened to you.
2. You're breaking the law and can be punished.
High stakes, no? Which is one of the many reasons false accusations are exceedingly rare if not non-existent.
I will always believe the victim unless the perpetrator wins a libel case. It's the legal mechanism for fighting back.
Not the person to whom you're replying, but the presumption of innocence means this exactly. If you are accused of a crime, you are presumed innocent until it can be proven you're not.
The sword cuts both ways.
Except it doesn't, because if you're in the news for {serious crime} and later clear your name, your reputation is still probably trashed. There is no real mechanism for recovery in the modern panopticon. Lowering standards of evidence required for conviction (to basically nothing, if some people are taken seriously) is such a kludgy, cumbersome hack to solve this problem that it shocks me that people present it seriously. It's utopian thinking.
The "existing laws setup to handle any false allegations" exist only for accusations made in the court system.
It's amazing to me how little thought people like you have behind your beliefs. You basically just regurgitate what you heard from your college electives with zero mindfulness or introspection.
This is wrong though.
> Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, lawyers and filing lawsuits might be expensive, prohibitively so?
Indeed, and reporting a crime, and ensuring it is handled appropriately by a police force is also exceedingly costly, though perhaps not financially.
Significant portions of your post violate the HN guidelines.
By the way, I see no reason a woman or a trans person could not make this statement.
I think people grossly exaggerate this. We have libel and slander laws. Individual companies aside, entire communities of people aren't that stupid. In my opinion, this is a really pessimistic view of people and also not based in reality in my experience.
At the end of the day, we need to be able to listen to victims. The amount of fake accusers compared to real victims is microscopic.
"And people who are accused are damned, period."
Not really. There are literally countless examples of accusations/allegations and nothing happening to people for whatever reason, usually influence/popularity.
He didn't move to Portland randomly. He's the most liberal of the liberal. Just remember that you almost never hear media coverage of accusations that turn out to be false. You just hear about the accusations when they are first made. Do you think the coverage of the Duke Lacrosse case was equally high after the accusations were proven to be fabricated?
Yeah, but think about how those work. (IANAL).
If I can convince enough people that you are an awful person, I can ruin your reputation. As a recourse, you can sue me for defamation. But once you do that, we’ve switched sides—now I am the defendant and you are the accuser. Unlike a criminal defendant, the defendant in the court of public opinion never enjoys a presumption of innocence. Instead, he has to carry that burden of proof through a civil lawsuit just to clear his name.
> Individual companies aside, entire communities of people aren't that stupid.
If that’s true, why bother with courts of law in the first case? If the mob is capable of adjudicating questions of guilt or innocence, we’re wasting a lot of money on lawyers as a society.
I don't understand what those laws have to do with this? As if they somehow protect a potentially innocent party from incorrect accusations? At what point would an accusation such as the one in the blog post even constitute as libel/slander?
I think you've got the phenomenon backwards: when people are skeptical of a murder accusation or an alleged robbery, it's accepted as part of normal discourse. But showing skepticism of allegations of sexual impropriety is not.
But when several people stand up to make accusations, and there's a bunch of corroboration, it's hard to wonder if skeptics are skeptical out of bad faith, even subconsciously. I'm not sure we've passed this threshold with Pretty, but two accusations, as well as some others corroborating parts of the stories, is starting to look pretty compelling.
I'm curious to know what Pretty's response will be, but I think he already has a steep uphill climb.
> What followed was an on-and-off long-distance relationship in late 2015-2017. He visited me on his terms when it was convenient for his nomadic lifestyle. I quickly grew to feel isolated and objectified by him. As a non-native English speaker, I often felt manipulated, but I found it hard to articulate why. He wanted to constantly monitor my activities. He habitually criticized my lifestyle choices and diminished my self-esteem.
Pretty only wanted casual sex at his convenience, and his relationship with Vic left her feeling criticized. A bad boyfriend? Sure. A sex crime? Not even remotely. Yifan's allegation that Pretty had sex with her when she was drunk comes closer, but she's still vague about it.
I don't think Pretty really has much of a hill to climb. I believe the allegations, but at the same time I believe Pretty is innocent of any crime. He probably seeks out inexperienced women, and presents greater commitment than he really harbors. Scummy? Yeah. Criminal? No. Worthy of ostracism? Maybe, but I'd want to hear his side of the story first.
OP points out that we have criminal courts for a reason - he's not comparing this scenario with an actual conviction after a trial with presumed innocence. In your analogy, it would have to be common for people to be fired from their jobs (and blackballed from entire industries) on the strength of a murder accusation that hasn't even been presented to the police, much less been through a trial.
You attempt to draw a connection, but it's a false analogy out of the gate.
Like everyone, they were certainly biased toward assuming his guilt in the run-up to the trial.
No system is perfect, and humans are fallible. But that's kinda the underlying issue with this entire discussion: if she had gone to the authorities (especially if only years after the incident in question, and also consider that the incident happened in a different country), would there be any legal remedy here? I think it's pretty likely that nothing material would have come of that.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me and juries are explicitly picked so they aren’t familiar with cases before trial. If a potential juror knew of Gacy, they would be excluded.
based on what his public info shows about his location this medium post (and the ensuing public outrage) cops in that country will have to press charges (in case they haven't been pressed already).
There is a high chance he is a flight risk so they will book him, _unless_:
- he is actually a passport holder of that country (doesn't seem the case), and
- has a proper address registered as is law, (many Brits don't care since British law doesn't require it)
- has a strong social family network in that country, (unlikely)
- has a job in that country (contracting/freelancing doesn't count here)
What I'm getting at is that this is a very serious allegation that _will_ result in hard time if convicted but also until he actually gets his day in court! But for that to happen she needs to do more than a Medium post (make a statement with the cops which can be scary but shouldn't be if she actually brings a lawyer). In case she doesn't then it needs to be considered a character assassination which itself is a felony. In any case posting such a piece is legally risky for her and if she would have bothered getting a lawyer, they most certainly would have advised her against it. The best option for her would be to go through the court system of where he is currently located.
Most other options have a high risk of this going nowhere (cost + extradition etc) and even give more room for speculation and he-said-she-said which shouldn't (imho) be the goal of the metoo movement and indeed it should be called out for mob-justice.
Another commenter mentions somewhere here that the specific thing that happened may not have been illegal in Germany then (but is now). I don't know how to verify that as I don't speak German.
This happened several years ago; there is no physical evidence that remains. This, as you allude to, is a he-said-she-said situation. I assume there are emails/texts/etc. that might speak to Pretty's poor character and ill intent, but that's not much. In the US this would almost certainly not be enough for a conviction. Maybe it would be in Germany or the UK, but I suspect not.
Agree that she may have opened herself up to legal liability (at least an accusation of libel or defamation). As I recall, in the UK it is harder than in the US to defend oneself in court against accusations of libel.
It is possible, though, that Pretty might be dissuaded from bringing any legal action because doing so will only draw more attention to his bad behavior, and could result in a worse situation for him than just going and hiding under a rock for a few years.
not needed, she has plenty of people who can coroborate her story and even somebody who stepped forward as another victim. impossible to ignore under German law.
> Maybe it would be in Germany or the UK, but I suspect not.
it is most certainly prosecuted in Germany as I've indicated. I can't promise he'll get a conviction but he certainly would get his time in "U-Haft" given he presents a flight risk.
I agree that the chances of Pretty having the stomache to come after her with libel charges are remote. But if what she says is the truth then she shouldn't have anything to fear. She has people who said this happened to them too and others who saw things. It would all be very hard to ignore.
“...there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason”
John Wayne Gacy was convicted in a court via the criminal justice system. As a society, we have chosen this as our mechanism for adjudicating these types of accusations, and that mechanism has evolved certain safeguards over time. It’s not perfect, but it is a far fairer venue to be tried in than the “court of public opinion”. That’s not an insignificant point, and you’re glossing over it entirely.
This idea that individuals aren’t allowed to publicly criticize the actions of public figures, or report on their own experiences with public figures, is so painfully stupid that I find it astonishing that you are arguing in good faith. This is not something you would actually believe in other contexts (say, if a CEO is accused of verbal abuse).
Then maybe you should step back and consider the possibility that you are misunderstanding the point and arguing with a straw man. I never at any point said that “individuals aren’t allowed to publicly criticize the actions of public figures”, and I don’t think you’re acting in good faith by interpreting me as such.
I’m not saying the court of public opinion is the wrong venue for this sort of thing; I’m saying the court of public opinion is, by any reasonable standard, a kangaroo court, and we should exercise much more caution and skepticism toward its judgments than we exercise towards the judgments made by a court of law. Keeping this caution in mind is, in fact, what distinguishes a measured application of social/professional sanction from outright “mob justice”.
“A clown can get away with murder.” —John Wayne Gacy
John Wayne Gacy, often called the "Killer Clown," was one of the worst serial killers in U.S. history, raping and murdering at least 33 young male victims.
https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/john-wayne-gacy
John Waters hangs one of John Wayne Gacy's infamous clown paintings on the wall of his guest room, so his guests never stay too long.
Politically Incorrect with John Waters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7zFp7CaJqE&ab_channel=lurie...
Chilling paintings by ‘killer clown’ John Wayne Gacy expected to sell for £7,000 each
https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/09/chilling-paintings-by-killer-...
You already assume he is guilty ?
In this case a Chinese woman living in the USA apparently got raped in Germany 3 years ago. To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do with her report?
I hate the court of public opinion as much or more as the next guy. But if this is a real pattern and he is as practiced as it sounds, after 10-20 women come forth then I'll be very confident that the crime is real. And there is also a chance that we can hit a critical mass where law enforcement somewhere may take an interest after all.
I agree with you that ideally this would go to the police first and they would actually act. But in the real world, she picked one of the best of the bad options available to her.
Well, that's not strictly true. At least the official advice in the UK is that even if the crime happened elsewhere you should still report it locally, then the case should be forwarded to the authorities in the country where it allegedly happened.
https://www.helpforvictims.co.uk/content/Q1.htm#:~:text=You%....
No idea how/if that would work in US, but in general you should be able to report it locally.
That's what an embassy is for... they help deal with these situation.
>And there is also a chance that we can hit a critical mass where law enforcement somewhere may take an interest after all.
Don't complain that a law enforcement agency doesn't do anything if they're never made aware of the problem.
Actually, it’s kind of hilarious when I put it this way... you’re the one selectively looking at the data to justify inaction.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than...
Did you just cite Washington Post as an authoritative source?
Have you ever worked with an embassy? I have, it's no picnic even in the best of circumstances (lost passport). It takes time to setup such an appointment and you are expecting a young college student to have the wherewithal to navigate that all while being on a budget and having their current lodging with the aggressor.
You are expecting an abused person to do everything right in a foreign county while currently staying with their abuser.
Don't blame a sexual abuse victim for not doing everything right and by the books.
If someone is wronged, there is a process is most countries, especially western ones. They, as a victim, need to start the process in some way to make sure justice happens. None of it is secretive. No one, ever, should make anyone feel powerless to do so.
"To do everything right"? Did they go to the police? That's basic step one. Why are you making this seem so difficult? I'm really failing to understand how that's so difficult when you're an adult traveling the world. Your narrative makes future victims think it's not an option. Don't you get how incredibly harmful that is? Then, when you're traveling, your embassy is where you go if something criminal has happened to you. That's another basic to know, or in all seriousness, you shouldn't be an international traveler. This new age society is making people unable to have agency in their own lives to take any action. Yes, you're not going to John Wick problems. But holy shit, a majority of the world has a criminal justice process. Stop pushing a narrative that victims should just wallow in depression instead of pushing for justice. Making blog posts isn't the answer and will only let it happen more often.
If it's anything like the UK (and I suspect it is), they'll likely take it seriously. For example, see the police's reaction here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/mt1kw4/withd...
If she got robbed, on the other hand, or she reported something like this ten years ago, they'd probably say "meh we are busy, here's your crime reference number now go away".
Meanwhile in the USA we literally have enough untested rape kits to fill a small city. According to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rape-kits-are-sit... at least 100,000. (Nobody is really tracking the numbers well, so it is probably more than that.)
Technically the legal system could do the same in her case.
We haven't come as far as you're making it out to be.
I actually regret convincing her to go to the hospital and the police as all it did was increase the amount of trauma she experienced.
You can start telling me how much things have changed after the police take rape seriously enough to actually process physical evidence of reported crimes.
I would not take Julian Assange's situation as indicative of anything other than that Assange made powerful enemies.
I agree with everything else in your post except for the description of events as "rape". According to the story she wrote, they had sex when she was drunk, and she thought for months after the fact that the sex had been consensual. To me it sounds like sexual abuse / exploitation, not rape. (Unless you're making the pedantic argument that having sex with an intoxicated person is always rape, in which case 2 intoxicated persons having sex would mean that both persons rape each other.)
It is rape to have sex with a woman who didn't want it and told you not to. She describes exactly that happening later in the conference. Yes, she tried to convince herself that it was consensual. And he tried to convince her of the same. But that is also a common pattern for rape, both her attempt to deny it and his to gaslight her.
Interestingly in surveys, the portion of women who describe having had an encounter meeting the definition of rape has held fairly steady over the decades. But the portion of women who self-describe that as rape has steadily risen. Then really jumped in 2018. Given that fact I find it interesting that he seems to target women from cultures that haven't internalized "no means no" as a standard. Cultures where it is easier for the man to do what he wants, then convince her that he didn't rape her.
Nope, the article doesn't contain such claims.
> It is rape to have sex with a woman who didn't want it and told you not to.
Yes it is.
> She describes exactly that happening later in the conference.
No, she does not.
> Yes, she tried to convince herself that it was consensual. And he tried to convince her of the same. But that is also a common pattern for rape, both her attempt to deny it and his to gaslight her.
Two people have sex. Both people come out thinking the sex was consensual. Both people think for months that the sex was consensual. Then the woman changes her mind. Boom! Rape! Welcome to 2021. (To be perfectly clear, I am making fun of your comment, I am not making fun of OP. OP at no point referred to the events as rape, it is only you and other internet commentors who are dead set on using the "rape" label here.)
> Interestingly in surveys, the portion of women who describe having had an encounter meeting the definition of rape has held fairly steady over the decades. But the portion of women who self-describe that as rape has steadily risen. Then really jumped in 2018.
Peculiar indeed! Might it have something to do with the "definition of rape" becoming wider and wider every year? It used to mean a very specific thing, but nowadays it means a lot of things.
It’s also interesting that this scenario would have probably been more unlikely in the past. Before the “sexual revolution”, an educated woman would never sleep alone in the same house as an unmarried man, for fear of her “honour” being maligned. That set of cultural values had its (massive) problems, but in some scenarios it actually worked better than the current one, effectively forcing women to avoid dangerous situations.
Also, this could have been resolved if this was reported in timely manner, not years after. She is a victim, however her followup actions are neither correct nor proper.
You're concerned that this is stacked against you, but the courts are stacked against the victims. So it doesn't really suffice to decry the one problem without addressing the other.
So perhaps you can see what it looks like to many women when you say, "Hey, I'm sorry this happened to you, but this bad thing happened to my brother, so _shrug_". Did your brother go to the courts and police to address these issues? It may been unlawful termination.
There is a large domain of behavior that is either nebulously legal or difficult to prosecute but which makes our communities much, much worse. It's counterproductive to tell the people victimized by that to stop talking about it. The solution is to go forward and find ways to set up our communities to protect people. And that can't mean just asking victims to accept that.
How can that be known? Why do you presume that someone is a harasser or rapist if they weren't convicted?
I know literally dozens of stories like that, and maybe a handful where the harasser or rapist was punished at all. Of those, even fewer where they were convicted of a crime.
The majority of these cases the victim isn't public in their accusation, there's no argument that they're trying to gain something or hurt someone else. So by comparing the data that is presumably more honest, that people make in private, to that in public, we can assume that most instances of harassment go unpunished.
Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.
Think about what evidence would it take for you to be convinced consent was absent, beyond a reasonable doubt; and how would you provide that evidence if you were a victim in the situation in the article.
On the other hand, many false rape accusations are fabricated with completely made up details. Depending on the details, it can be easy to prove the accused (or the accuser) wasn't in the place claimed, or other details don't fit.
If so, what form would that evidence take?
If not, you're really arguing based on faith, not evidence, right?
What the linked article is talking about, though, does not seem to be „rape” as defined by a criminal code, so all this rape discussion hardly applies.
Nevertheless, one can be a creepy disgusting asshole and still not do things which are illegal, technically speaking.
That is a HUGE percent of false accusations! On the high end that's 1 in 10! In the middle, it's 1 in 20. That's a LOT.
A more commonly cited figure is 10%, which comes from the clearance rate of DNA testing kits. i.e. someone accuses a man of rape, there is DNA and it exonerates him. So this is an absolute lower bound because a lot of rape accusations are a bit like this article: "we had sex a bunch of times consensually, and then also when it wasn't". You can't disprove that with DNA evidence but it can still be a false accusation.
Back in the 90s when this stuff was less politicised there was a somewhat rigorous study that put the true figure at around 50% [1]. It gave pie charts of the reasons for the false accusations and other interesting bits of data. This figure causes people to freak out these days due to the "believe the victim" mentality you can see above, where there is a deliberate conflation between accusations of rape and actual rapes, so it gets attacked a lot, but modern scholarship hardly investigates the question of false reporting rates for rape unless the authors already decided their conclusion before doing the research (you can sometimes see admissions of this in the study's discussion sections). The 50% figure has some other support: when interviewed anonymously police workers, both male and female, tend to pick this figure when asked to estimate the false reporting rate.
The low prosecution success rate is usually painted these days as an obvious flaw of the justice system, but that's identity politics. When you drill into it in detail and ask OK, where do these prosecutions go, and why are they dropped, or why do they fail to win in court, the answer is: because a LOT of rape allegations are not only false but clearly false. For example, because the complainant goes to the police and admits they made it up, or because they are clearly high on drugs when making the accusation and rescind it when sober. Even if you engage in some mental gymnastics to assume rescinding an accusation is never valid, it doesn't matter. It's really hard to win in court when the "victim" themselves are claiming they're not really a victim at all.
[1] https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...
If an accusation only has effect if it's proven in court, there will be few of them.
If you can destroy someone's life by a mere accusation, false accusations will be very common. Also, just a threat of such an accusation will be very powerful.
I think we can all agree that the accusers in the Salem witch trials couldn't have been telling the truth, unless they were hallucinating (there's a theory that lysergic acid in grain could have caused hallucinations, but its weak and not proven).
Let's just agree that none of the women executed in Salem were actually practicing black magic. Why were there so many accusers claiming they were? I mean, false accusations are "exceedingly rare" and accusers "gain nothing".
Yeah, people in the 18-35 demographic, to quote Bill Maher, "are the favored advertising demo because they're gullible." They don't know anything about human nature either.
The article cited[0] is a review of analysis from ~1980 to 2005. If you restrict yourself to only analysis that don't count cases involving alcohol as false reports, the number drops to 2-3%.
The article also notes that false reports are usually different from real reports, important among these facts is that false reports are often attention seeking, and so are examples of what society thinks rape "should" look like (violent, anonymous) as opposed to what it often is (ambiguous and often by someone the victim knows and trusts). As such, the percent of false rape accusations where a particular individual is accused of the crime are likely even lower than this 2-3% number.
> but it’s much more important that the innocent are not wrongfully punished
This depends. It's much less morally cut and dry than you claim.
[0]: https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018-...
Also no it’s pretty cut and dry: if you punish someone who is innocent under ANY circumstance without reviewing the case under a very critical eye you might as well throw out the justice system entirely, break out the torches and pitchforks and start gathering wood for the witch burning.
Why are you taking a particular stand here about a person who probably did a thing that's much worse than the average thing that results in extrajudicial punishment, has so far received absolutely zero consequences, and is unlikely to receive many beyond his decision to no longer speak at conferences? Like why die on this hill when there are so many other forms of worse extrajudicial punishment that happen every day?
Car break-ins outnumber car thefts by several orders of magnitude. Assaults outnumber murders by probably a similiar amount.
I'd be very suspicious if there was a class of crime where any large fraction of instances result in higher level charges being brought. Especially with how plea deals work.
>between 2-8% worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.
If 2% of the time cops fired their weapons it blew up in their hand or 2% of car crashes resulted in a fatality it would be an outrage.
2-8% is huge when you're talking about people's lives being permanently altered for the worse.
If anything the worries are under-blown. But then again, when compared to the rest of the court system (not that long ago they were framing random minorities in order to close cases) and prosecution process 2-8% might not be that bad.
What are these imperfect measures? How imperfect are they?
> Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions
We can measure the numerator here: it’s the number of felony rape convictions. But how do we measure the denominator? In some rape trials, the central question of fact is whether a rape occurred at all, or if the sexual encounter was consensual. If a rape trial leads to acquittal based on reasonable doubt over that question, is that alleged rape included in the denominator or not?
> Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false.
So here’s a different question. If 2-8% of rape “complaints” are false, then clearly we aren’t counting these false accusations in the denominator for the 1% figure, are we? But what do we do with the cases we can’t determine with certainty either way?
One way of interpreting these numbers might be:
* 92-98% of rape accusations are not provably false.
* 1% of the remaining accusations are provably true. 1% of 98% is still roughly 1%, so we’ll round to 1% of all rape accusations are provably true.
* 91-97% of rape accusations can’t be proven.
Does this make sense? A 90% acquittal rate for rape cases? That seems way out of line with other criminal justice statistics. So at some point we’re including accusations that never even result in charges being filed due to lack of evidence, and possibly accusations that are never brought to the criminal justice system in the first place. In either case, this vast majority of cases is legally indeterminate: neither conclusively proven to be rapes committed by a specific suspect, nor conclusively proven to be false accusations.
Surely, there is a much lower burden of proof for this statistical methodology deciding that a rape occurred than there is for a court of law to determine that a particular rapist is guilty of rape. By what standard do you jump to the conclusion that the criminal justice system should lower the necessary burden of proof to incarcerate someone, and not that this statistical methodology should perhaps raise the burden of proof it requires? To be blunt, do you seriously think the American criminal justice system doesn’t incarcerate enough people?
Complaints is the key here. Obviously, we can't say much about the incidents that don't go reported. If one looks at the conviction rate for rape complaints it's around 2%. So if we take the lower estimate for false complaints, it still means that only 4% of cases are provable one way or the other, and that those which are have a 50/50 chance of being true or false complaints. (I'm looking at '92 stats, at a glance it appears the the rates for both rape and false rape convictions have risen a fair bit since then).
Interestingly, a 2% conviction rate is on par with that of robbery.
https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2017/07/how-often-do-rape-...
Not prosecuted != not provable. Not provable != false.
Fair enough. Only 4% are known to be provable.
>Not provable != false
I neither claimed nor implied this. My point could be summed up as not provable != true.
And if not, doesn't that imply you also agree (to an extent) that trials/law enforcement on heavily politicized cases have the potential to be totally mismanaged and end in injustice?
He's lucky he was a wealthy celebrity or he wouldn't have gotten the full protection that the courts supposedly afford to the accused.
Ah, that pesky presumption of innocence getting in the way of our 100% conviction rate. /s
"The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.".
First, its a poor place and topic for sarcasm (it just an observation, i'm not against it, i do have good friends like that) but more than that, GP actually adressed the point you're trying to highlight in his first sentence.
Huh? Have you ever heard of the Central Park Five? Google "Central Park Five" and you'll have a more enlightened view!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case
>From the outset the case was a topic of national interest, with the commentary on social issues evolving as the details emerged. Initially, the case led to public discourse about New York City's perceived lawlessness, criminal behavior by youths, and violence toward women. After the exonerations, it became a high-profile example of racial profiling, discrimination, and inequality in the media and legal system. All five defendants subsequently sued the City of New York for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination and emotional distress; the City settled the suit in 2014 for $41 million.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-central-park-five/convictio...
>On December 19, 2002, Justice Charles J. Tejada of the Supreme Court of the State of New York granted a motion to vacate the thirteen-year-old convections in the infamous case. He did so based on new evidence: a shocking confession from a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, and a positive DNA match to back it up. A year later, the men filed civil lawsuits against the City of New York, and the police officers and prosecutors who had worked toward their conviction. In 2014, they settled that civil case for $41 million dollars. Despite their exoneration, the police and prosecutors involved in the case maintain that they were guilty of the crime.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-48609693
>Five black and Hispanic boys, aged between 14 and 16, would be found guilty and jailed for the crime.
>They became known as the Central Park Five.
>But they never committed the crime.
[...]
>The role of Donald Trump
>New York in the 80s and 90s was much more dangerous than it is today.
>Race relations were strained - especially when it came to the police.
>Meanwhile, Donald Trump - then a New York property mogul - seemed convinced the teens were guilty.
>He spent a reported $85,000 (around £138,000 today) on four full-page adverts in New York newspapers titled: "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!".
>He wrote: "I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them."
>In an interview with CNN at the time, he said: "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."
"In its January 2003 Armstrong Report, the panel "did not dispute the legal necessity of setting aside the convictions of the five defendants based on the new DNA evidence that Mr. Reyes had raped the jogger."[103] But it disputed acceptance of Reyes's claim that he alone had raped the jogger.[103][104] It said there was "nothing but his uncorroborated word" that he acted alone.[103] Armstrong said the panel believed "the word of a serial rapist killer is not something to be heavily relied upon."[103]
The report concluded that the five men whose convictions had been vacated had "most likely" participated in the beating and rape of the jogger and that the "most likely scenario" was that "both the defendants and Reyes assaulted her, perhaps successively."[103] The report said Reyes had most likely "either joined in the attack as it was ending or waited until the defendants had moved on to their next victims before descending upon her himself, raping her and inflicting upon her the brutal injuries that almost caused her death."[103]"
Check these two quotes from the same wikipedia page[0]:
>In addition, his [Reyes's] DNA matched the DNA evidence at the scene, confirming that he was the sole source of the semen found in and on the victim "to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people".
>DNA analysis of the strands of hair found on the clothing of two of the defendants, conducted with advanced technology not available at the time of their trial, established that the hair did not belong to the victim, despite what the prosecution had testified to at trial
The second one circumstantially supports that the defendants weren't involved, but the first one pretty much proves that the defendants weren't at the scene. Unless you want to claim that the defendants fully sanitized the victim after they assaulted her, leaving no traces of their DNA on or inside of her. I haven't heard that being claimed anywhere on the wikipedia page though.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case#Assai...
In any case, prosecutors were well aware the defendants were innocent. Once they saw the crime scene it was apparent that there was just one assailant.
However, they had a big problem. How could they find the actual rapist? They had five innocent defendants in custody and it would embarrassing to everyone to just let them out. So, prosecutors framed them for the rape.
You think the City just handed over tens of millions of dollars because settling would be cheaper then going to trial?
And cities often settle lawsuits regardless of guilt to avoid the costs of going to trial as well as the risks of public backlash. Notably in this specific case, the decision to settle was a political decision after DeBlasio was elected mayor.
I assure you, if that was the case, there would be a lot more multi-millionaires in NYC because the local police play it pretty fast 'n loose with the civil rights of citizens.
And again, the City didn't hand over forty-million to get rid of a nuisance lawsuit. They have lawyers on staff -- it would probably cost under a million dollars for the city to go to trial.
Rape convictions are so abysmally low that there's been a lot of rethinking in feminist circles as to whether the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard -- or even the presumption of innocence -- is fair or just. Some countries have been looking for ways to ameliorate this. For example, in thr USA, college date rape is such a problem that universities are required to investigate accusations of sexual harassment or assault and discipline offenders based on the looser preponderance standard, or be found in violation of Title IX by the federal Department of Education.
So it seems we’re pretty good at convicting rapists, it’s the arresting that we’re bad at. And since RAINN [1] estimates that only 230/1000 are reported to police and of those only 43 lead to arrest and 9 to prosecution. If the ratios stay the same, then if we reported every rape then convictions would increase 4x.
[0] Table 21, as of 2009 https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fdluc09.pdf [1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fdluc09.pdf
With that said, creeps like this continue to proliferate because the courts only do anything in very rare cases (Cosby or other serial abusers). It typically only hurts people who were abused, not helps - it can take years to go through court, and in this situation because it's across borders there's likely no court to file with.
People come forward in blog posts because it's often their only reasonable way to try to hold someone accountable and warn other potential victims.
> men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women
Wouldn't "programming communities" be one of the worst places for a true predator? There are so few women compared to men here. I would think most predators would choose the modeling or acting industry; where this type of behavior is almost expected...
An interesting thought. Under this model, (and I realize that this is a post-facto realization, but what can we do?) we would expect to see significantly more reports of predator behavior in these less competitive niches than the objective number of predators would imply, because the predators in them are less skilled at hiding their predation than predators in the more prey-rich environments.
I feel like you made your own point with the story about your brother. Everyone below is ready to boycott the company which you basically named already.
Even for fairly straightforward sexual assault case in a liberal jurisdiction with witnesses I've watched a friend struggle with members of the justice system verbally insulting and degrading them as they try to obtain justice for themselves.
Having seen all that when I see a post like this I understand why the author did not go to court, and don't question it. If we took the time to actually fix the courts I'd be much more skeptical of claims that had not been presented to law enforcement.
I feel for people like your brother who are victims of people abusing the trend, but as long as our justice system fails victims so horribly I think this is the least bad solution available.
Also, can you clarify what you mean by "verbally insulting and degrading them"? It's possible you just mean the lawyer is accusing them of lying... which is what you do when you think a person is lying. The accused does have a presumption of innocence, and the accuser may need to be cross examined under some reasonable amount of emotional stress to see if their behavior under stress reveals that they are lying. There's not really any way around this other than "well, we'll just assume they're telling the truth and anyone they accuse is guilty" which is a far worse solution in my opinion.
I'm confused that you think this is something I can prove through citations. The way we adjudicate whether someone is a victim is through the courts, my claim is the courts do a bad job of this. There are only two things I can think to poinnt you at:
1. The numerous written accounts online of women attempting to get justice and being stonewalled. Some of the more famous cases during the beginning of the #metoo era showed this.
2. I can say that the lived experience of every woman I know to have gone through the courts found it unnecessarily degrading (n~=20) and while I believe all of them, only a quarter (n~=5) received a guilty verdict. I know far more women who did not go through the process due to stories from women they know.
I'm personally convinced, if you're not I understand but am not ready to expend the energy digging up cases to try and convince you.
> can you clarify what you mean by "verbally insulting and degrading them"
Literal slurs, misogynistic generalizations about women being temptresses, stereotypically horrible questions such as "were you asking for it?"
Nobody is asking for near 100% conviction rates.
In the UK there are about 150,000 rapes per year. Police record about 60,000 crimes. CPS prosecutes fewer than 5,000 cases. Courts convict fewer than 2,000 people.
Rape is a very serious crime. A less than 2% conviction rate is failing the victims.
It makes sense to also have social justice systems that are lower burden of proof and have lesser consequences. Especially for crimes that are difficult to prosecute and have low visibility.
I know it's not quite the same, and an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure- but there's this narrative that a person who is falsely accused is utterly powerless before the power of any angry woman willing to yell "perv", and that's just false.
It's far easier to obtain justice when you are falsely accused, then when you have been assaulted - but HN threads on the subject are predominantly full of arguments about how awful the falsely accused have it.
He certainly COULD have sued for slander, but the cost of the lawsuit and retaining a lawyer, and for him, the emotional toll, was too high.
And I completely understand that there is a huge toll for accusers as well.
I think, depending on the venue, that the process can be very traumatic for accusers with real claims, and also accused who are targeted by false accusations. The colleague who accused him was a woman who his coworkers had warned him "not to cross" because she was "a total sociopath" according to his other team members. One of them even told him "you should have listened to me" after he was terminated.
It's interesting how poorly most coders understand the realities of human nature. People aren't devils, but they aren't angels either.
I just really resent the fact that any attempt at injecting nuance into these kinds of conversations brings out attacks from the un-nuanced, tribalists who reduce everything down to bumper sticker slogans and identity groups. It's disgusting and reminds me of the sectarian conflicts I've witnessed in other nations.
This is exactly what the author of the blog post is doing: warning other people about this person.
As a straight, white man: False accusations of sexual assault are extremely rare, but they do happen. It's not a zero probability event.
I guess my response is, right now there's a nonzero chance of someone assaulting someone else, and then a nonzero chance they'll away with it. And there's a nonzero chance of someone making a false accusation and another nonzero chance of them getting away with it. We as a society have to weigh the likelihood of each of these four things occurring.
All experience (and you can look this up) is that sexual assault is perpetrated relatively frequently, and people frequently aren't held accountable in the criminal justice system, for a variety of reasons. OTOH the evidence is that false accusations are vanishingly rare in comparison.
So we should just...keep this in mind, is all, before saying that this kind of public statement is counterproductive. Maybe it protects someone from him, or maybe it protects someone from someone like him. Sure, I'd like him to be in jail, but maybe in the flawed system we live with today, the best we can hope for is he's kicked out of the Scala community. Maybe that would be productive?
No-one is entitled to maintain a positive reputation just because they've yet to be convicted in a criminal court. One can be a creepy sex-pest without that behavior rising the level of criminality, and one should not be surprised if rumors of such behavior get around.
For those who feel they are being slandered, there is a law of defamation and a civil courts system for a reason. At least there, the burden of proof is only balance of probabilities.
When accusations like this come out, organizations with a stake in the outcome should act with integrity to find the truth and respond to it. Witch hunts are never a good idea. But the fact that some men may be falsely accused doesn’t mean women shouldn’t speak up when they have experiences like this. Ironically, many (if not most) women who don’t speak up publicly end up being gaslighted and marginalized by the very same kinds of corporate entities who were willing to throw your brother under the bus for optics. By the same token, it’s often a last ditch attempt to get some help after all other avenues have failed.
When a woman is sexually assaulted, you tell them to use the justice system. You stick to this despite other folks telling you the chances of conviction are low. You don’t want people to make public accusations.
And yet you, in this thread, have no problem making accusations against Nike for wrongful termination. Why not use the legal system to pursue this? You answer that too - low chance of success apparently.
Within a few minutes you’ve done exactly what you’re asking OP not to do.
If you come to my home and act in a way that my family and other guests find offensive, we're not going to invite you back. We're also not going to try to prosecute you.
There is a huge set of behaviors that are not criminal nor civil offenses, but still things that if experienced would likely lead people to want to avoid you, not hire you, not work with you etc.
The author did not claim that Mr. Pretty broke any laws. She doesn't call for any legal consequences. There's no basis for suggesting that the story needs to be judged by a legal system.
And that just rams the point home: often the justice system doesn't help, and actively hurts. If he'd brought suit against his former employer for terminating him, even if he won, he would have gained a reputation in his field for being litigious toward employers, and that would have greatly hurt his future employment prospects.
So maybe, just maybe, there are reasons the justice system isn't going to work so well in this situation either.
I think it's very brave of this woman to write such an article, and warn future victims about this person. So in that sense, such articles NEED to be written. Who knows how many young girls she saved from the same experience.
A word of advice for new people in OSS. You do not need to go to conferences to be successful in the field. Many of the developers who actually write code do not attend conferences.
On the other hand, people who want to associate themselves with the work of others, narcissists, activists of all kinds, parasites and a lot more are to be found in the conference circuits. There are some legit people as well but you'll also find them online where the work happens.
If this is even remotely true I hope he suffers enormous consequences including being persecuted.
How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse? How?
Read the comments in this thread six hours from now and you'll understand.
On the one hand I want people to be able to to speak their minds but on the other hand this guy might be a sexual predator at best and a serial rapist at worst. and he is getting away with it!
I for one am glad there is someone to stand up for him - it makes it very easy to tell who wants to cherrypick and debate semantics due to their own biases.
It's quite simple, really.
You know that phenomenon you see here on HN with big names like Steve Jobs or RMS, or Elon Musk? The phenomenon where people give them a pass for being disgusting, abusive assholes because "he's a genius/luminary/visionary" or because "his contributions to $thing are so great"?
It's the same phenomenon with people like Jon Pretty.
The phenomenon behind why these people get a pass is the same, even if their behavior is different.
None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).
He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero.
I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.
With him (hopefully) going away, this will have no impact at all on the development of Scala or related projects, apart from saving slots at upcoming Scala conferences.
So it's definitely not the same phenomenon as RMS or Elon.
>None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).
>He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero.
>I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.
Change just a handful of words and this exactly describes Stallman. I think my description is more apt than you might think.
I guarantee you that someone will post in this thread, if they haven't already, that she should know better than to get an airbnb with a man she doesn't know well. No, this isn't her fault. The dude should not have abused her.
You may be right, but you also have to agree that some people will pause before judging definite rape for described situation where girl accepts invitation to sleep in the same airbnb, without anybody else, with single guy, bringing bottle of wine, not mentioning she did not give consent, feeling bad afterwards. From that description it's really difficult to pass rape judgement - maybe it was, maybe not, what we know is that it was creepy at least for her.
None of those things even remotely imply consent for a sexual advance. Those are all things that should be fine for anyone of any gender to do together without there being fear of a sexual assault.
Anyone who looks at that list and thinks that it's ok to have unwanted sexual intercourse because they happened to have a bottle of wine in an AirBNB I'm not sure I want to associate with.
Insisting doesn't mean doing it, does it?
It's unfortunately ambiguous.
And furthermore, "not saying no" is not the bar for consent. An enthusiastic, unambiguous yes is the bar for consent. Not giving consent is the default, assumed position until that yes arrives.
As an thought experiment try to think that your husband/wife does those things with somebody (accepts invitation to sleep in the same airbnb, without anybody else, with single opposite sex, bringing bottle of wine) - would you be worried? And if yes, why? Is it not even remotely possible that somebody would feel weird about their partner doing it?
It says "there was another time that he insisted ..." which unfortunatelly forms ambiguous sentence, it's not clear if it happened or he just insisted and that's it.
Later paragraph reads "I maintained friendship with him for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it was all consensual ...".
I'm not a lawyer but the case of "being convinced of consent" at one time and after few months changing mind about the situation and realising it was not a consent makes an interesting case.
The above is not comment on the allegations in the post, any more than if everyone followed the above basic principle we would not have to deal with disturbing stories such as this one. It is important that stories such as this one are told but perhaps with the names left out.
That the author met this person in a professional setting is beside the point. It would be just as serious if it happened at a hobby event.
Being aware of how this affects human relationships is neither unrealistic nor unhelpful. It is something to take seriously and talk about in groups where it could arise.
The number one golden rule of professionalism: never f--- at the factory. Don't make advances. Don't even flirt.
You can't honestly demand both that people be disconnected from their coworkers and that they make work be 90% of their life. One part has to give (preferably the latter part).
> if everyone followed the above basic principle we would not have to deal with disturbing stories such as this one
This guy would still be a predator and a rapist, and he would still be doing similar things to people. Wishing that people were robots and were able to completely separate themselves emotionally from people they meet in situations in which they share a common interest is an exercise in futility. It's simply not how people work.
This sidetrack is basically victim blaming with extra steps.
The construction used by the author indicates that it happened. That's how the term is used.
Do you actually believe that or are you just making stuff up? If the author had actually been raped-while-screaming-no-stop, I'm pretty sure they would have explicitly said so. This article is extremely well articulated and thought out, I'm pretty sure that would be explicitly in the article if it happened. To me the "insisted" line in the article sounds like there was an event where the man was being an asshole and trying to have sex, and the woman said no, and they didn't have sex at that time (or the woman changed their mind, said yes, and then they did have sex).
>The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her
That is quite different from the question of whether what happened was rape. (EDIT: To make it clear, if it did happen as the author writes, then I totally agree that it was rape. This is completely distinct from the question of the author's intent to make the claim that she was raped. The word does not occur in her piece.)
If you want to support the student, you either organize another student for them to share accomodations, or connect them to one of the travel grants for that conference.
If you have a boss/employee relationship, or a mentor/mentee relationship, or a professor/student relationship, you need to tread extra carefully around consent. One party in those relationships holds incredible power over the other, and can coerce the weaker party into things they may not be comfortable doing.
Likewise, enabling someone to attend a conference they would not otherwise be able to financially afford creates a possibility of coercion . It's not always coercive, but it needs to be handled delicately and appropriately. In the author's situation, if she refused, there was a chance she was thrown out onto the streets of Berlin at who knows what hour, with no money/luggage, and maybe no ability to speak the local language.
So yeah, sharing an AirBNB isn't necessarily bad, but in this case specifically it appears to be predatory.
Let's turn it around. You are a respected figure in a community. You are aware, and have read on HN threads like this, how there are terrible women who smear men with baseless, yet career-ending allegations of sexual advances or worse. In what situation are you comfortable with that risk to your career? There is only one such situation: where you are the predator, and you have groomed a naive victim.
As a professional, you have no business sharing accommodation, of any kind, with a person of the opposite gender (or the same gender if that is your sexual preference). Frankly unless you are very good friends, not anyone at all.
He's just a creep, they are pretty common, confident outgoing girls will turn down a creep every weekend. Does not warrant public shaming. I'd be pissed if some girl i texted "Wanna get it ;-8" on tinder, in a blizzard of hormones, three years back, decides to public and destroy my career. I'd be pissed and it wouldn't be fair. That said i'm glad she did, because he sounds like a complete tool. The perpetual conference go'er crowd is full of weirdos.
- https://killnicole.github.io/statement/ (edit i see she has added it to the article itself)
- https://twitter.com/brianclapper/status/1387115214064193537?...
- https://twitter.com/adelbertchang/status/1387090351626723329...
there seems to be some coordination here, as this came out pretty much at the same time. https://typelevel.org/blog/2021/04/27/community-safety.html
Yifan also linked to this piece on What You Can Do: https://hypatia.ca/2014/08/05/what-you-can-do/
I personally only slightly increase the probability of something being true when multiple accusers come forward. I still want to see proof.
What if a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together and decided to ruin your life with accusations?
Every case is different and should be judged on the merit of testimony of those involved and actual evidence.
Due process and presumption of innocence are good things.
Always believing accusers isn't a good principle. It enables and emboldens abusers not acting in good faith, especially people with narcissistic and borderline personality disorders
I re-read the article to try to figure out what this "specific case" actually might be.
Two people engaged in a consensual physical relations. She was not happy with the outcome.
At the time, she "did not blame him for what happened, and didn't think those behaviors were problematic at the time. ... I maintained friendship with him for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it was all consensual."
So, only months/years later does she decide she's a victim.
She absolves herself of all responsibility ("There was nothing [I did] to cause this"). Yet, she brought wine to dinner with her mentor, drinks until she's hammered while her partner does not drink (Who does that? Other than alcoholics?). Somehow, every decision she makes is his fault.
90% of the article is about her feelings and his responsibility for them. She feels entitled that he show her "remorse, sympathy, and guilt."
She repeatedly accuses him of gaslighting, when it seems more accurate to say they had different recollections or expectations.
She quotes “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.” implying he is evil and she is an avenging vigilante.
"I am not trying to convince anyone of anything." This is disingenuous. I think this her way of saying "This is my story, therefore I do not need to provide proof of anything."
"by speaking up, I can take my stolen power back." It's not obvious how her "power" was stolen. Maybe what she really means is, "I feel powerful by destroying his career."
Mature adults learn from uncomfortable experiences and move on. Emotional infants wallow in life-long self-pity and construct elaborate fantasies to support their victimhood.
--
Any woman.
Can take down any man.
At any time.
With a word.
- An Empowered FeministYou really came out of the woodwork to defend this guy and shame the accuser. Zero posts in months then a flurry here. Gross.
An unsubstantiated accusation should not result in someone's life being ruined.
It seems like you are resorting to an ad hominem attack to discredit an opinion you don't like.
You are using cancel-culture tactics to defend cancel-culture itself.
This just pretty much does not happen without reason, and I think it is safe to say that if it did, you are probably a terrible person.
That's not a safe assumption at all.
Innocent until proven guilty and all that jazz, but there will be assumptions nonetheless..
I would love to know what these women stand to gain by humiliating themselves if it is all made up.
narcissism, absolution of responsibility, validation, attention
oh c'mon, it's insanely naive, let's dont try to push narration that those things do not happen
Edit: since I wasn't clear, I am looking for examples of when this has happened to you, or your friend, or anyone that you have heard of...
Edit 2: also by "pretty much" does not happen, I don't mean never happens. But I think the rate at which it happens is probably a rounding error, and I think a lot of people would rather just say "oh well they could be lying" before even bothering to read what they have to say.
I'm sorry, I do not see the same likelihood of collusion in this case of intelligent women who had no relation to each other. I am not saying it is impossible, but I have a hard time seeing it.
Projared was fortunate enough to posses the mental fortitude and evidence needed to clear his name. Others in a similar position might not be as lucky.
These are grown intelligent women with no connection.
I'm not saying it's impossible they are lying, just improbable.
This just pretty much does not happen without reason, and I think it is safe to say that if it did, you are probably a terrible person.
Cops work together, therefor they collude...
If you are in high school, and all the girls are teenagers and are in school together, they also may collude..
I'm sorry, I do not see the same likelihood of collusion in this case of intelligent women who had no relation to each other.
Also, it seems fairly presumptive to assume that ex-partners are intelligent. And to assume that intelligent people don't do crazy things(see: Lisa Nowak)
Or you associate with or are attracted to terrible people
TL;DR guy was falsely accused of rape and then harassed for a year regarding the incident with the help of university professors at Columbia.
I don't know about "a bunch of your ex-girlfriends" but never say never...
Eventually I learned that she claimed I was touching her daughter and was cheating on her with her coworker (whom I had never even met). I tried to defend myself but it was too late.
Today she has been married and divorced twice, and I have zero contact with any of those involved. I only know her status because Facebook doesn't stop sending me update email despite deactivating that account years ago.
Point is, the whisper network is powerful, and doesn't give a shit about reality.
It's a shame your ex made up lies about you, that probably happens a lot.
It is worth pointing out that you are trying to make a point with this story, and you are the only one telling it, and I'm supposed to take you on your word that this actually happened..
Yet here we have multiple adult grown adult women, unrelated to each other yet similar (minorities, poor, vulnerable), trying to make their point with 3x the "backing", and so many want to call them liars immediately.
It's funny in a sad way.
A coordinated release in my opinion reinforces the statement.
Edit: as I see some people have trouble connecting the dots.
You should strive for evidence and truth.
"If a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together to assassinate your character..." you are probably attracted to extremely destructive relationships. You might be confusing drama with passion.
Or maybe it's all a grand conspiracy, in which case let's follow the money and see that it leads... nowhere.
Email threads were started where one person collected everyone's recollection of the events, who was there, and what happened. Every response lined up perfectly with each other. I don't think anyone explicitly coordinated their accusations, but knowing there were multiple other accusers certainly made the accusers feel more comfortable and correct in their accusations.
I was presented with the evidence, literal written testimony of 11 people who I considered my friends at the time. I was given an ultimatum to admit it or be kicked out of the group. I said I wouldn't admit it. I started looking at each person's recollection.
You know what actually happened, that all 11 people missed? There were actually 13 people in the group that day. The 13th person, that absolutely everyone forgot about, was a person who didn't normally attend the group. He is 6'10" and 350 lbs. Hard to miss. But everyone forgot about him. I called him up, put him on speaker phone in front of everyone, and asked him "Did you eat <food item> last time we hung out?" His response "yes". I then asked him "Did you throw the wrapper on the ground?" His response "yes".
I asked my friends if that settled the matter, and everyone still believed that I was the litterer. So I stopped hanging out with them.
Nobody was vindictive at the start. But they were all so confident of their own recollections that they became vindictive when I said that they weren't remembering things correctly.
There's power in number, but not in this particular case and context.
Thanks for sharing your story.
meanwhile you're probably just normal person
How did "somebody" manage to do that?
I hear your sort of response a lot, but it's mostly from people who won't change their mind no matter what (and will continue to move the goalposts as more evidence comes to light), or set the bar so high that it's basically impossible to provide the proof they want.
Given his situation (see my other comment[1] on why) she could have made his situation much (I repeat MUCH MUCH) worse than what she did. I wouldn't want to know the amount of abuse she now gets because of it and in the months (if not years to come).
no, have you?
I do know people in the system so I'm quite familiar with how they work (and what is lore from the US and Hollywood that people assume vs how it works). Germany isn't some Banana Republic, so she actually gets a professional (even she shows up without a lawyer) walking her through these things.
> It can be incredibly dehumanizing
so you do have personal experience with it how this works in Germany? Do tell me, is it more dehumanizing than going on social media and knowing that you will be hunted by misogynists for the next couple of years so you won't ever get closure and need to hope that the mood of the mob doesn't go against you one day (because you have no legal ground to stand on)? I hardly think so.
This isn't proof, it is evidence, but I think that would help a bit. Even if party A and party B disagree about something that happened, if party A says stop contacting me, and party B continues to do so, that is wrong enough in itself.
This lady seems to have her head screwed on. Her post doesn't seem to me like she's trying to cause a witch hunt and it seems like she's sharing her story in a logical and sensible manner.
I'll gladly read the post from another woman defending John Pretty, but I doubt that's going to be forthcoming.
I don't agree.
She did not set her boundaries. She did not effectively communicate boundaries. She did not enforce boundaries.
When she doesn't get the outcome she wants, she turns to blame rather than introspection.
This is clear cut victim blaming.
Accacin suggests that sharing a plausible story is proof of wrongdoing. I don't think so. I'm ignorant. Accacin is ignorant. Everybody on this thread is ignorant of the facts.
I'm saying that Jon Pretty shouldn't have his livelihood and career destroyed by ignorant people and an accuser who admits to having her own set of issues.
I'm merely saying that I believe what she's saying, and as I've not got the power to arrest, it's perfectly okay for me not to require more proof than a general feeling of her honesty.
It's even more important when one person is in a position of power and when there's an inherent element of trust (teacher, mentor, etc.) because it's going to be much more complicated for a person to set appropriate boundaries and feel like they can say no to them.
This is someone they looked up to and respected!
This is horrifying if it did happen but I don't know Yifan and I don't know Jon Pretty nor the trustworthiness of either.
It's disturbing to see HN readers jump to conclusions so quickly without proper evidence. If we continue to reduce our capacity for assessment of a situation to individual anecdotal accounts what kind of world will we live in 5 years from now?
Sharing these things often feels like (and IS) the _only_ thing a victim can do to maintain even a shred of their personhood or agency. If we take that away, we are telling victims of horrific abuse to pick up the pieces of their lives alone, and quietly. That is not how one heals, and it will exacerbate a chilling system of victim shaming that leads to untold anguish.
In a court of law it is certainly more straight forward and less risky than on social media: go to the police, make a statement and get a lawyer, then get those people who sent out tweets in support and also came out with similar stories or to coroborate go on record. In this specific case the damage she could (and still can) do to him and get real justice is pretty massive.
[0] https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085/ph...
Especially for men.
Edit: This is an honest question by the way. Thanks to those who did provide some examples.
I do not think that's applicable here. I think this woman was coerced into nonconsensual sex.
In the same hypothetical where character assassinations can be organized and bring someone down with false accusations, the same can be true of defending someone as well. Multiple people coordinating by speaking in defense of someone against accusations are just as possible.
I'd even speculate and say there's more instances of coordinated defense happening more often than false accusations, as powerful people being protected from accusations is what started MeToo
"Mean Girls" (five high school girls make up sexual assault allegations that they later admit were "because we didn't like him", school then did nothing to punish the girls): https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2018/10/15/A...
If all of your exes and close associates hate you enough to coordinate a life ruining operation, then it's quite probable that you were abusive in some capacity.
> Sometimes character assassination is coordinated.
Yes, you are right. But look at the other side too. How else do a group of people with no proof retaliate against an abuser but through character assassination ?
I’ll give these victims the benefit of the doubt.
I could maybe, maybe believe a well-known political figure might be the target of that kind of coordinated attack. But basically a thousandth of a percent of the population has even heard of Jon Pretty. What benefit exists for the group of accusers? An extra spot for a presentation at a Scala conference?
People make this claim like it's common sense but I so rarely see even anecdotes backing it up. (Let alone data)
I've seen a variant of it once. This is my anecdote for false coordinated character assassination. There's a community called Get Off My Internet, which I believe is mostly women, who will do coordinated character assassinations, usually of other women. I've run into them by employing people they target. What happens is a lot of them post in a message board about how their target is a pedophile and fraud and embezzler. Then a few others will email me, the employer, helpfully noting how they've respected me for years, want to protect me and just happened to google my new employee. It's bullshit and so, so gross.
But... there's also this other pattern where victims of real abusers will form a whisper network ahead of time. As I understand it, the whisper network is partly for safety and partly for sanity. The sanity is "am I overreacting to an honest mistake?" Seeing it as a pattern makes it more clear that it's intentional. And then for safety, there's a lot of perceived and probably real reputational downside to speaking up. And since it's hard to prove a lot of the accusations, having multiple reports makes the case more compelling, i.e. safer from a reputation standpoint.
So that's why a report like this might feel coordinated. Of course it is. It's just too hard to make this sort of report without talking to people first and then by talking to people you end up discovering a lot of other victims.
I was close to one of these whisper networks, that Lightspeed VC. I'd heard from one victim two years beforehand. She didn't want to say anything because all she really wanted was to avoid him and complete her next fundraise. She took that company public. A lot of this "women are making this stuff up" fear is based on the idea that they get something out of it. This founder was afraid of the opposite, that doing something would botch her raise.
I'm close to another emerging whisper network right now and it's the same thing. "Is this safe? Will people believe me? He's done it to other people and will probably doing it to more people right now. But if I speak up will I put my career and business in jeopardy?"
Sure, in some theoretical perfect world it would be great to have a legal system that could easily and fairly render verdicts. But since we don't have this, what other choice do victims have than to band together to at least warn other people away from dangerous people?
That sounds like a community failure, not just One Bad Guy.
If Yifan has any issue with Jon, she shall resolve the issue in court.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-po...
In an ideal world, the criminal justice system works. In the real world, it's a patchwork system that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/09/17...
So this is why we see women continue to post these stories. Her story is backed up by other women.
I believe her.
Meta: I don't know how to make the justice system work better in a case like this. The presumption of innocence is critical and I don't want a system easily abused by false accusers, but it's also clear that predators can take advantage of the presumption of innocence. Even if she had gone to police at the time, ultimately she would have to convince them it wasn't consensual.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/how-cops-respond-to...
Edit 2: found this paper from 2012 written by a police organization that talks about the complexities of dealing with sexual assault in the criminal justice system:
https://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Critical_Issues_Seri...
A quote from the conclusion: Rape is the most underreported of crime, because rape victims find it so difficult under the best of circumstances to report it to the police. But it’s made worse when victims say they were interrogated by the police as though they were criminals. Or they are disbelieved and threatened with lie detector tests, or essentially are blamed for the conduct of perpetrators.
Reading the paper, false accusations are barely discussed. The paper spends a lot more time talking about police not believing victims ("unfounding").
This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a guy who stole your wallet.
We don't trust victims of crimes to dole out punishments. Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances, proportional response, all that.
So I believe her, but I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution. I'd much rather see her go to court and get a conviction.
This is just revenge.
That's the ideal, but in the real world justice is pretty lacking.
What other action would you suggest she take, right now? What authorities should she go to? Does she need to get on a plane back to Germany and file a police report three years after the fact? Another commenter noted that this specific thing might not even have been illegal in Germany when it happened (but is now).
Even if there is no legal remedy, is this the sort of thing that we want to continue to happen in our technical communities? If not (and I seriously hope not), then what do we do to neutralize these sorts of people?
So what's the alternative? She just shuts up, gets no closure, and we allow a serial manipulator and probably rapist to keep trolling the Scala community for new, vulnerable victims?
Nobody has shot John Pretty.
I don't understand how "justice" says that Yifan has to lie or pretend that she hasn't gone through a traumatic experience. Writing a blog post is not equivalent to shooting someone. Someone truthfully and honestly describing their own life experience is not violence.
And if nothing else, surely she has the right to warn other women and let them make their own decisions about how to calibrate their risk around John.
> I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution.
I'm not always thrilled with public shaming, but to argue that people shouldn't be able to speak about their experiences, or that people shouldn't be able to choose who they associate with, or that people shouldn't be able to warn each other about abusers -- that is also a very slippery slope. Especially in a world where the vast majority of rape cases are never reported or prosecuted.
It's just such an extreme position to say that people even just talking about abusers is "revenge". It's like arguing that because courts sometimes convict innocent people that we should abolish all laws. There is a middle ground between attacking someone for a poorly phrased 10-year-old tweet, and arguing that people shouldn't be talking about personal experiences they've had with sexual harassment/rape.
Sexual assault covers a wide range of unwanted behaviors—up to but not including penetration—that are attempted or completed against a victim's will or when a victim cannot consent because of age, disability, or the influence of alcohol or drugs. Sexual assault may involve actual or threatened physical force, use of weapons, coercion, intimidation, or pressure and may include: ...
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/overview-rape-and-sexual...
Sexual coercion is unwanted sexual activity that happens when you are pressured, tricked, threatened, or forced in a nonphysical way. Coercion can make you think you owe sex to someone. It might be from someone who has power over you, like a teacher, landlord, or a boss. No person is ever required to have sex with someone else.
https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/other-...
To prove it beyond reasonable doubt would require a level of evidence that is simply not present here. And in the UK, a suspect is only charged with a crime in 1.4% of reported cases[0]. This is why its so sickening when people gloat that some defendant in a sexual abuse case was found not guilty; it really doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime.
But even though the criminal justice system is not cut out for this kind of thing, that doesn't mean we have no other recourse. The reason the standard for evidence is so high is because the system would otherwise be vulnerable to abuse, and the consequences of wrongful conviction (loss of liberty or even execution) are so grave. Whether or not you agree that this very high standard is justified (I don't), it is clear that the consequences of publicly calling out this behaviour are less serious. Social ostracisation within a very specific community isn't such a big deal, but the direct benefits (protecting women through awareness) may be almost as good.
Whether or not you agree with the above, it's definitely an issue we need to think about. All it takes is someone close to you going through this to realise that the pre-MeToo system is inadequate. This new one isn't ideal, but it's a million times better. If you can think of a way to make things better then I want to hear it.
The allegations are serious. If the author believes she was drunk and did not consent to unprotected sex and taken advantage of that should be reported to the police and the courts due to the seriousness, it’s rape.
The title is damaging “in the Scala community” it tarnishes a programming language and individuals who use the language due to the act of one person. The language is dieing with dramas among 1-2 specific people out of thousands.
No one in the right mind would condone the allegations or the perpetrator and sounds like at least one incident a matter for the police.
The allegations are against an individual and the ScalaCenter handling, not the community. The blog post lists individual people in the community who supported the author. I do wish the title wasn’t as click bait or more specific to the perpetrators as it is damaging, killing a really interesting industry and technology.
I hope the author finds the peace and justice they deserve from sharing this. The public naming and shaming will have serious repercussions for the accused.
The writing is like a story that is missing pages. Surely the law needs to be involved here?
Something always felt off about him.
Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero. None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).
He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero. He wanted to be perceived as someone influential, but simply didn't have the technical level for it, nor put the effort in.
I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.
With him (hopefully) going away, this will have no impact at all on the development of Scala or related projects, apart from saving slots at upcoming Scala conferences.
This has very little to do with Scala and everything to do with the darkside of the conference scene. Getting involved with conferences at the level she did introduces travel - drugs - drinking - partying with somewhat like minded young people. The culture at the top can be about money, stars and groupies but it revolves around power. Those in charge decide who speak. Those who speak can get opportunity and money. Money buys speaker slots.
Conferences are an anti pattern to programming.
https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085
> I've been aware for some time that a short relationship I had with another Scala developer in 2018, which is the subject of a blog post published today, was being discussed increasingly widely within the Scala community. A second post relating to an earlier, two-year relationship has also been published today.
> While I have no desire to discuss my private life in public, both posts contain several falsehoods, and I strongly reject their characterizations of me.
> I have always believed in unbiased kindness towards others, and given the relatively few women using Scala, plus my role as a prominent figure within the Scala community, I have gone out of my way to be as welcoming as possible to newcomers. This kindness extends to everyone in the community. And at the conferences I frequently attend or organize, I always try to make myself approachable and supportive.
> Through this openness, and over the last few years, during which time the Scala community has been the main focus of most of my activities, I have formed many friendships which have developed both at conferences and online. In the last decade, a tiny number of these proceeded, over a period of weeks or months, to become romantic relationships. They did so gradually, and with the full consent and cooperation of all parties.
> I have no doubt that both women who have published posts today were hurt when our relationships ended. So was I. But the nature of relationships is that many of them do end, and that does not always happen amicably. However, I stand by how I behaved during both relationships, and after they ended. The suggestions that I acted improperly are false or, at best, misinterpretations of my intent. I am happy to be independently scrutinised on any of the points raised.
> The nature of the claims that have been made is serious, and I do not discount that. But they are one-sided, retrospective revisions of the history of those relationships, which have evolved over the last three years.
> Nevertheless, given the open letter against me, I feel that regardless of the baselessness of these claims, it would not be appropriate for me to continue to participate at Scala conferences, so I shall no longer do so.
> I do not intend to discuss this matter further in public.
> - Jon Pretty
(OCR'd with tesseract)
These public callouts which occupy the area between keeping silent and taking legal action are like antibodies marking a potentially dangerous cell.
So for months, the victim herself was convinced it was consensual, but I, the reader, in the space of a few paragraphs, am supposed be convinced that it wasn't?
If I imagine this sentence prefixed with "Your Honor", I can see it not going very well for the plaintiff.
“Just be cool” is such an abusive and manipulative behavior I’m flummoxed at how it’s lasted this long as socially acceptable.
I turned off the flags on the post when I first saw it (before it made the front page) but it has gone through a couple of different phases since then.
Open letter of support for community members targeted by Jon Pretty
https://github.com/scala-open-letter/scala-open-letter.githu...
this is a community realizing that John Pretty is a predator and deciding that they don't want a predator in a position of power
frankly, it's weird as hell for you to be confusing those two things
do you think after those posts his scala/programming/whatever he's doing career won't suffer? he's dead in many professional circles regardless if he's jail material or not.
no, a lynching is an extra-legal murder by a mob.
Please don’t assume everyone is a US citizen.
I'm not defending the guy specifically; I have no idea whether he's a guilty scumbag or a persecuted innocent. But even jerks deserve a certain amount of due process before punishment. Maybe she's the scumbag? I don't know, and neither do you.
Not really, it seems like cancel culture, did you even read this letter?
The part where people are saying they've become aware of several independent, substantiated accusations against Pretty?
The part where they state that sexual assault is unacceptable?
The part where they demand that Pretty stop this behavior, and that communities put stronger code of conducts in place to specifically call out preying on/sexually assaulting members of that community as unacceptable?
Refusing to associate with Pretty, who they believe is an sexual abuser?
Which part of that is 'a bit like a public lynching'? I want you to be specific, because waving your hand loosely at a document and being like, "Well I dunno, but this seems like an execution designed to drive fear into a community" is not only wildly inappropriate but also rhetorically hollow.
This part seems over the top. You go down this road and you end up in some foss hell. Later you find out someone who abused someone checked in code in linux. You can't use windows or a mac because of jobs and gates and you are back on a c64 until you realize what a bad person Jack was and you end up on OS/2.
I guess those who signed want to use an unmaintained version?
I get that people want to do something. Maybe conferences are not the best avenue for the community to meet safely. Providing gender safe housing would go a long way to having a more successful conference if successful means less rapes.
---
I think you are very uncharitably reading that comment. There's a difference between, "This person checked some code into a repo" and "this person is the maintainer of a project".
And I think that it's reasonable for people to hold the stance of, "I don't want to run this person's code because I believe they are a serial abuser" and to clearly state why. If other repos see that, maybe they decide to take on that stance, maybe they don't.
They encourage others to consider doing the same, but the don't demand them.
Even thought I disagree with the group who signed the document I will still use whatever they maintain if it makes sense for my project.
We further resolve that:
We will not support the efforts of any party in the Scala community that provides a platform to Mr. Pretty. That includes, but is not limited to, boycotting events the party organizes and refusing to buy any product or service the party offers.
We will not attend any conference or user group meeting organized or attended by Mr. Pretty.
We will not attend any conference or user group meeting that does not have a code of conduct that is both specific (it must not allow predatory sexual advances in professional spaces) and actionable (it must provide a safe and accessible reporting mechanism for people who have been targeted).
We will not use or promote any software artifacts that are maintained by Mr. Pretty.
On a human level, how can you be so concerned that there's an outside chance that the accused is completely innocent, and at the same time, ignore the fact that in all likelihood, another human was exploited and raped?
Yes, there is a criminal justice system, and yes "innocent until proven guilty" is an important part of it, but it's clearly unable to handle cases such as these. If that's not obvious, you must not be paying close enough attention.
https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085?s=...
The public doesn't have the tools to properly investigate the accusations.
It is impossible for anyone but the parties involved (and maybe not even them) to know what really happened.
This woman could have gone to the police. She could have gone to one of the many support organisations for rape victims here in Berlin or in the US. She could have gone to the police even years later, which would have opened the possiblity of an official investigation. Instead she chooses to publicly write about it, without first even trying to take the legal route.
We are now at that point on HN.
But I can't really consider him a rapist, I read her statement, I read his.
She repeatedly shows she was unsure about her feeling, she doubted herself, she even remained friends for several months. Having sex with a drunk stranger is pretty lame, but all of these things make me believe she did not explicitly refused, she probably went along, internally horrified but externally somewhat willing.
I don't know what I would do if many years after, someone called me out publicly by claiming they did not consent, I would certainly feel sorry I hurt someone, but I would not consider myself a rapist and would treat myself like one.
he was in a high position of power and used that to set up situations that were dubious at best. if he even did like 25% of what was claimed he deserves whatever is coming. it's like the boss having questionable relationships w/ his employees then turning around and hiding behind the "it was consensual so that's that!" without understanding the fucking power dynamics.
This is rape is it not? Whoever this guy is, in my opinion this case should get in front of the judges. I can't imagine what the author of the story have gone through.
She ended up crying and panicking. That generally isn't the outcome of a consensual relationship.
If 2 people are intoxicated and have sex, do they both rape each other? If one person holds more power than the other, while both are intoxicated, is it just a one-way rape? Or is it still a two-way rape, where one person just "rapes a bit more" and the other person "rapes a bit less"? What if the person who had power ends up regretting sex afterwards and cries, does it "turn the tables" and cause the rapist to suddenly become the victim of rape, after the fact?
Yes, she was drunk. Yes, she later regretted having sex. These things alone do not mean that rape was committed. As far as I can tell, she is not referring to the events as "rape", so maybe you shouldn't either.
Can you point to where I used that word?
Sure! I'm particularly referring to this exchange upstream. First, mirekrusin says:
> Rape is doing it, not insisting, I think.
...And then you respond to this comment in a way that indicates that rape occurred:
> Sex was had while she did not consent, she mentions in the fifth paragraph.
Here is a direct link to your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961759
> She was not in a position to give consent there [...]
Of course she was. If all the stated facts in her account are true, then Pretty was behaving like an asshole (In setting her up and then trying to get in her knickers). But she was absolutely in a position to consent. Otherwise you make it very easy for people to shed responsibility. Being in a shitty position doesn't absolve you from bad decisions.
> She ended up crying and panicking.
If that's true, Petty should have stopped right there and then. Pretty much an asshole otherwise.
That said; that's _her_ side of the story and while I'm not _not_ believing her, I'm also not making any judgement on Pretty.
You absolutely can be told you consented, and trust that person's word, and realize later that no, actually you had not. It's just convenient for the abuser for you to believe you had.
There has to be a line drawn somewhere when you start talking about hardcore felony level criminal accusations though. Should anyone who's ever had an (at the time) consensual intimate encounter then have cart blanche to hold accusations of rape over you for the rest of your life?
I mean just picture this guy's POV for a moment. You think you had a consensual relationship with someone, who then continued having friendly relations with you for months afterwards. Then out of nowhere you're being called a rapist on the internet. I get that the guy is a total creep. But it's absolutely terrifying to think that being in a crappy relationship can land you in prison now.
If you want to pursue that relationship, it can be done, but not carelessly. This isn't a situation where a one night stand went awkwardly, there are several additional factors here.
I think this situation is stretching the word "power". There's a social power imbalance, sure - but nobody acts shocked when sports figures and rock stars sleep with groupies. Hell, they write autobiographies. We don't live in a caste system where people with X popularity can only sleep with other Xers.
She didn't work for the guy nor did her career or finances depend on him. He wasn't a VC lording (someone else's) money over her. She was a naive young adult new in town and the guy was an (extremely) minor celebrity. People have hooked up for far worse reasons. If the guy was simply a better date we wouldn't be talking about this.
This is what makes me really dislike this story.
The use of power to extort sexual favors is topic that needs serious discussion. But occurrences like these where there is so much gray just waters down the conversation to "She said, he said".
So much in her post just insinuates that is wasn't his behavior at the time she was having problems with but his later actions towards her. Nothing in this accounting is about power dynamics. It is about shitty behavior by a stupid guy.
> I did not blame him for what happened, and didn’t think those behaviors were problematic at the time, because it didn’t even cross my mind that he would do anything that I wasn’t comfortable with.
Stuff like that doesn't really help. So - she was okay with it until she wasn't anymore?
This just sucks.
She is and was an adult woman. Can I not expect her to know, in the typical case, whether she does or does not consent to sex? And I'm not talking about "He got me drunk and then forced sex when I couldn't consent" - obviously that would be rape, but it seems like you should realize that when you sober up, not months or years later.
And it doesn't take a Rasputin-like figure to be an abuser. Plenty of people are taken advantage of and taught to believe things they later realize were abusive, even in relatively short situations. Pretty held all the power here -- he controlled where she was staying, he helped her get to the conference, she was intoxicated, she believe he was her mentor, she believe he had the ability to get her industry connections, etc.
Coercing someone into sex that they later realize wasn't consensual (once they are free from that person's influence) doesn't mean she was lying in the moment or is somehow "discovering" something now.
> Can I not expect her to know, in the typical case, whether she does or does not consent to sex?
Adult humans (because I think this can happen to men too), can absolutely be caught off guard and be "unsure" about whether they are consenting to sex. Not everyone is wired the same, and not everyone is able to make a quick snap judgement. Not everyone is fully able to say no when pressured.
Furthermore, grappling with the question, "Was I just raped/sexually abused?" is really, really challenging. What does that do to your identity? Are you forever a victim? Are you going to have to out yourself and someone else? Will you forever be the target of the public's pity? Are you going to have that stigma attached to you when you want to enter relationships in the future? That's a LOT to put on someone, and many, many victims choose to try and believe that things were consensual, because it seems easier that facing the realization they were abused.
The power Pretty holds here is pretty minor. He's helping her get into conferences and mentoring her. He "controlled where she was staying" in the sense that he made the reservation for their AirBnB. He's not confiscating her passport, she isn't destitute. She could've gotten another hotel, hostel, AirBnB. To be clear, I am not saying "She didn't get another room and so deserves to be raped" but I am saying that his "power" in this regard is pretty minor - just because someone is paying for your room that shouldn't make it impossible for you to say "No" to them.
A big part of why it is morally and legally wrong to have sex with children is that children aren't mature enough to make decisions about sex. Children cannot consent. You seem to be suggesting that a similar standard applies to this adult woman - she can't know if she consented to a sexual encounter or not. To me, that implies you are suggesting it should be illegal to have sex with this woman - after all, she apparently can't tell if she consented or not.
Because brains aren't just bundles of logical interpreters that fully understand what they are experiencing all the time. There are many, many reasons why we may rationalize some behavior in the moment. Why do victims of cons sometimes defend the con artists for significant periods of time after they leave? Why do humans hold out hope for lost loved ones, when the evidence is clear they've passed away?
Emotionally charged topics take a long time for our minds to process sometimes. Sometimes we need help from others to put our thoughts in order or to gain perspective. Maybe she never asked herself, "Why was I crying?" until a therapist said, "Why were you crying?" We're all wired different, and we have to allow for some flexibility in how were perceive and react to events -- especially traumatic events.
> To me, that implies you are suggesting it should be illegal to have sex with this woman - after all, she apparently can't tell if she consented or not.
Come on, that's a clear strawman. I'm happy to disagree with you about this and discuss it, but that whole paragraph feels needlessly out of line.
If she doesn't know whether she genuinely consents to sex or not, then how is it morally acceptable to have sex with her? You might be raping her. If she can reevaluate consent decisions in the future, that implies they are not certain in the present. It seems straightforward to say that if you are uncertain about whether someone consents to sex you shouldn't have sex with them.
If this is a strawman I genuinely don't see it. I think it is the logical consequence of accepting mutable consent and it is part of why I don't accept that - or at least why I hesitate to accept mutable consent.
What does consent mean to you? Not saying no? Or an enthusiastic yes?
I've had plenty of sex I wasn't super enthusiastic about but I wouldn't consider any of those exes rapists because I didn't say no.
When you're in a relationship for years not all of the sex is super enthusiastic. There were times when I had sex because I didn't want to hurt their feelings or they traveled a distance to see me.
And I'm sure there were times when my partner wasn't that in the mood and had sex with me for reasons besides they really wanted to have sex at that moment.
Personally outside of established relationships I always waited for the other person to make the first move because I was always so terrified of kissing someone who didn't want to kissed.
But talking with plenty of men and women over my life the majority of sex does not involve an unambiguous yes.
An unconscious person can't say no, but no one would agree they are consenting. What about someone intoxicated or under the influence? What about someone who is scared? Where does "I'd rather not", or "If I have to" fit? (Both of those seem to imply not consenting to me.)
Whereas a yes provides an unambiguous signal.
> Personally outside of established relationships I always waited for the other person to make the first move because I was always so terrified of kissing someone who didn't want to kissed.
I've moved to asking, "Can I kiss you?" or "Can I hug you?" before making a move like that. Simple, brief, and once you have an answer you forget it was even asked.
Should we be teaching people to just lay their quietly if a sexual encounter is starting they don't want to be a part of and hopefully the other party will ask them for their consent at some point?
> I've moved to asking, "Can I kiss you?" or "Can I hug you?" before making a move like that. Simple, brief, and once you have an answer you forget it was even asked.
Can I kiss you, can I touch your thigh, I can tough your boob over the shirt, can I tough your genitals over the pants, you can touch my genital under my pants but over my underwear. If each sexual escalation requires consent that's a lot of question asking and responses for a typical sex act. And maybe that how the world should work, but it's definitely not how the world is working right now.
Thing is, this is all a nonissue if your partner is enthusiastically into having sex with you.
So maybe more mutually fulfilling romps and less "well it was borderline but I did it anyway."
The problem is enthusiasm varies wildly. There are people I know whose sex would never be described as enthusiastic. There are lots of mild mannered anxious lovers out there. And I could see how it would be difficult for someone to judge the exact level of enthusiasm in a new lover.
This is incredibly difficult to do, especially when you are young.
First, having the help and the time of someone who is known and respected in the community can already make you feel like you are imposing but also grateful for their generosity, especially if there are career implications (in your mind).
Second, when you are coming from a different culture, there may already be some battling of own (perceived) “inferiority” due to being an immigrant.
Third, when the person is “saving” you when you are in a situation of stress, the act of paying for a room is a lot more than just that.
Finally, the exact financial aspect of things can make it seem like you “owe” something.
I can picture my college self having a lot of trouble saying no in a situation like this. My current self would have no issues. In my own case, age and experience are very much factors that I would add as a fifth point.
Women often feel confused about the detail of their own consent after date rape or acquaintance rape. This is true in part because most people imagine rape is some kind of violent assault by a total stranger conking them on the head and dragging them into an alleyway.
They don't expect to have to ask themselves how much alcohol is too much alcohol for me to have been consenting? Did he or did he not intentionally get me drunk for the purpose of impairing my judgement?
Did he or did he not lie to me and maneuver me into staying alone with him in an Airbnb in the name of "helping" me? Since he did, in fact, help me get to this conference, does that somehow negate his bad actions or something?
Etc.
People expect rape to be some obvious, easily identifiable crime and it's often not.
I once saw a question posted to the internet where the woman was like "I know I need to drink less..." when a colleague plied her with alcohol until she couldn't stand up anymore and then took her to his hotel room. She felt she had been unfaithful to her boyfriend and internet strangers had to tell her "Girl, you were raped, not unfaithful."
Hopefully women are clearer than that "in the typical case." Presumably, "the typical case" isn't actually rape.
But what she described is very normal for anyone who has been treated abusively not by some random stranger at gun point but by someone insinuating themselves into their lives and claiming to be a friend who just wants to help, etc. Even without the detail of sex, people often agonize over what they did wrong, whether or not they "owe" someone who intentionally shafted them etc when they were supposed to be friends, business partners, etc.
People who know ahead of time how this works are much less vulnerable to such predators and can still get shafted. Predators typically seek to place themselves in a position of trust and to operate under a cloak of plausible deniability. They actively seek to obfuscate their real intentions and then act all hurt if you question their intentions, etc.
It's very hard to sort something like that out.
They expect that because rape carries enormous jail penalties, because it's got a clear legal definition and because as the extremely low successful prosecution rate shows, most juries are not actually willing to send a man to jail for a decade on the basis of claims like "He invited me to his room, I brought a bottle of wine, we had sex and for months we were still friends because I told everyone I agreed, but now I changed my mind". That is not rape, and if she was claiming it was, she'd be making a false allegation of rape, which would be very serious.
This pretty simple concept has been relentlessly attacked for decades now by a rather nasty form of feminist activist who isn't satisfied with the standard definition of rape and who have been trying to change it to something more like this: "Rape is whatever a woman says it is". But they want the jail penalties to remain. That's dystopian and no honest person can support it, but sadly, many years of aggressive activism have resulted in the legal system being steadily chipped away when it comes to men and accusations of rape. That's why in the UK just a few years ago it was discovered there had been a massive set of miscarriages of justice, where men had been falsely accused of rape and sent to prison when evidence the women was lying was withheld from the defense. It happened because the woman in charge of the CPS had the mentality of "the victim must always be believed", leading to a collapse in standards. Many innocent men were jailed and their lives were ruined. Now one MP is campaigning to change the law to ban the form of evidence that was used to get the men released.
Honestly, I went into this article with an open mind. There are plenty of nerdy guys at programming conferences who don't know how to handle women. But this essay leaves a very bitter taste. As other commenters observe, she appears to be defining sexual harassment as "it means whatever I want it to mean at any later time", which is not something that can ever be fair to men.
The main problem is that it wasn't all that long ago that a woman couldn't attend a conference, agree to stay at an Airbnb with an unrelated man to whom she wasn't married, etc.
We are in a lot of new territory and still trying to sort out a lot of questions that simply didn't come up a generation or two back.
These questions are all too often being sorted out the hard way: By having things go wrong and having people who are upset about what happened air their grievances because they don't know what else to do to try to sort their lives and get everything back on track.
You know there's a fairly large community of people that are convinced that they were abducted by aliens?
There's also a community of people that are convinced they have had a past life and know the intimate details of it. They don't suffer from schizophrenia, they literally just have false memories.
In the end it shouldn't be about what party X subjectively felt or what they felt afterwards. It should be about what party X actually portrayed and communicated at the time of the encounter. If they legitimately consented and weren't intoxicated but deep down were thinking "I don't want this", then that sucks for them but no crime was committed and the counterparty isn't culpable.
I'm talking generally, not about the specific allegation in question.
No, “consent” is, like “intent” on the other side, a mental state rather than an action: it is the active desire for the act.
An ambiguous and enthusiastic yes is outward evidence of consent, though, and it tends to be the kind of evidence without which (or at least, some similarly very clear sign) we would tend not to infer consent to other acts where consent negates criminality, like battery.
Human communication is complicated and complex and error prone. Combine it with sexuality and you have a mess.
There must be room for error and for dialogue. Humans are not binary machines. We're probabilistic ones.
Yeah, if I beat someone up and they didn’t explicitly agree or explicitly ask me not to pummel them, no one is going to hem and haw about whether or not it was battery or whether it wasn’t because of secret unexpressed consent.
But no, when the issue is battery-that-involves-sexual-penetration, *which legally had the same basic “without consent” factor (except that there tend to be more factors which explicitly negate or make the alleged victim legally incapable of consent), suddenly lots of people have a radically different view.
Just painting this as a simplistic "powerful male predator abuses helpless little female" does not help to move society forward one bit.
It would have been strange to me.
But I was recently victim of emotional abuse by someone I admired and trusted. And it is not strange to me anymore.
Abusers are sophisticated. Trust is a complex thing.
No, this is not strange at all. Psychology is a non-falsifiable "science" with foundational literature that is littered with reproducibility scandals.
Psychological therapists are roughly as scientific as tarot card readers, and this woman's therapist had a full three years of time to gaslight her memories.
It's certainly possible that Pretty did what he's accused of. But any time you hear "years" and "therapist" in the context of an abuse allegation, be skeptical. The entire field is pure charlatanry.
After reading above and then seeing the part about "insisting" I feel there was more behind this statement. The author's circumstances was also very easy to be taken advantage of. I'm not woman but my guess is there probably is shock involved in situations like this. People are not acting in reasonable ways when in shock..
I know nothing about this other than this one article, but I do know someone who committed suicide after a false rape accusation that stuck even after the accuser admitted to making it all up.
That being said, he’s already said he’s not going to be saying much on the matter.
Seems like she is naive and got seduced by someone, nothing crazy
Why always portraying womens as weak people, c'mon
In the past, if a man had a dalliance with with a woman and she got pregnant, he was expected to marry her.
Now we expect women to have to be responsible for their own decisions the way men are, but women are generally more emotionally vulnerable than men, due to their more compassionate and less aggressive personalities, and are more easily manipulated as a result.
Therefore it may be up to men to not abuse that.
This was the assumption in place in the past, which is why young women often had chaperones present during close interactions with men, and why the 'marriage if pregnancy' responsibility was placed on men.
We've tried the 'rawr girl power, women can do everything men can do' culture, and the result is scores of women being used and taken advantage of because they were not capable, emotionally/temperamentally, to be their own advocate in sex and dating interactions.
I base it on the prevalence of stories like this, where a woman ostensibly consents to sexual advances and later regrets it and feels she had be abused.
The issue is not consent. The issue is vulnerability. Women are generally more vulnerable to advances from men and more likely to consent to an interaction when it's not in their best interest, than men would be, due to well documented physiological and psychological differences between the sexes.
I don't even think it's the most plausible explanation. Social pressure and upbringing are large factors in human behavior and it takes time to make society-wide changes.
I'm assuming women are more compassionate and less aggressive, which makes women less competent in competitive settings where self-advocacy is important, and more competent in scenarios requiring cooperation and caretaking, like child-rearing.
Whether these differences are inherent to female biology, or a result of deeply ingrained structures of human culture that mold girls in their upbringing is orthogonal to my premise. But as it happens, there is overwhelming/definitive evidence that much of these differences are biological in origin, and noting that is not misogynistic.
We do not make the world better by deceiving ourselves about it. An accurate model of the world is needed before any positive changes for it can be formulated. A positive but inaccurate vision of the world does not result in actions that improve the world.
So you've just pulled it out of thin air. What I figured. It's just victim blaming through misogynistic prejudices.
And I did the opposite of victim blaming. I stated that even a woman's consent does not absolve men of responsibility for women suffering poor outcomes as a result of the interaction.
You mischaracterized my comment to an extreme degree, without even bothering to understand, let alone contend with, the points raised.
Attitudes like this are not conducive to constructively discussing complex social issues. They lead to the forwarding of certain propositions being avoided, out of a fear of eliciting exactly the kind of response you provided, which increases the possibility that society will settle on a faulty model of the situation, and thereby not institute changes that improve it.
I didn't write that women are "more emotional". I wrote they are generally "more emotionally vulnerable".
It's irresponsible to make extremely harsh accusations against someone when the analysis that the accusation is based on is sloppy and low-effort.
And as an aside, claiming that women are generally more emotional wouldn't be misogynistic, any more than noting that men are generally more aggressive is misandrist. There is nothing sexist about claiming general psychological differences between the sexes.
Your accusations are extreme mischaracterizations, and the basis of your dismissal of my argument is based on a weak/entirely-ideological heuristic.
Adults can "read between the lines". Putting all your statements together draws a perfectly clear misogynistic narrative. No amount of deflection by trying to rebrand each point individually will make that go anyway.
There is no misogynistic narrative between the lines. That misogynists would exploit the facts I am presenting to push their narrative does not make me uttering those facts misogynistic.
We cannot avoid certain ideas and discussions out of fear that bad people will incorporate them into the narrative they use to push their agenda. Their narrative has to be countered by presenting factual arguments, not by avoidance of discussion and suppression of facts.
How surprising, I wonder why.
> Opinion polls don't tell us what the truth is about anything except opinions.
If you honestly believe that there's some sort of objective "exactly here is the line, don't cross it!" I feel bad for you.
> the facts I am presenting
Facts? It was a blatantly fact-free reply with your subjective "takes"; - "maybe the old times was better because I think women can't handle this new reality".
It's surprising to you that someone did not fulfil a request from a random person on the internet who has been rude and angry toward them, while mischaractering their statements, to post their argument in another forum?
I even gave you a reason why it would be pointless, and yet you insist on making this passive aggressive accusation.
>>Facts? It was a blatantly fact-free reply with your subjective "takes";
I made an argument based on objective facts. If you'd like to discuss my argument, or whether the claims it is premised on are factually correct, we could do that, but your tone and attitude suggest you cannot entertain the possibility that my argument could be right, and that instead you'll just provide more caustic and sarcastic quips.
If you think your first reply was based on objective facts you're delusional. It's full of your subjective assumptions:
> "We've tried the 'rawr girl power, women can do everything men can do' culture, and the result is scores of women being used and taken advantage of because they were not capable, emotionally/temperamentally, to be their own advocate in sex and dating interactions."
Like I said, if you disagreed with the claims I'm making, about the psychological profile of a typical woman, or even what proportion of that profile is biologically determined, and expressed that skepticism in a polite and open-minded manner, I would have been happy to provide sources.
But you are not open to counter arguments enough to even evaluate what evidence supports them. Your position on this issue is based on a weak/entirely-ideological heuristic.
> "We've tried the 'rawr girl power, women can do everything men can do' culture, and the result is scores of women being used and taken advantage of because they were not capable, emotionally/temperamentally, to be their own advocate in sex and dating interactions."
"We've tried" = subjective
"rawr girl power, women can do everything men can do' culture" = subjective
"the result" = subjective
"because they were not capable, emotionally/temperamentally" = subjective
"in sex and dating interactions" = subjective
"Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error."
Except we're seeing its horrendous ideas flourishing.
Did they all wear Nike?
What mobile phones were they using, iphone, huawei?
Clickbait, trying to ruin a reputation?
To what effect is this article written is the central question.
Woman, use your head and learn from experience.
Unbelievable, the times we are living in. I wouldn't speak to this woman ever, who knows what she might write about it years later. This is insane to go public like this about your private life, and again, to what effect? You don't have to be above average intelligence to understand the whys of this drama.
Jesus...
Could it be that users of a software focused site are overcorrecting for the threat of being labeled creeps?
Jesus christ
Innocent victim of mob justice, Jeff Epstein.
Mistake #1
> Remembering that he had suggested I get milk and wine in our previous conversation, I also bought them. I don’t remember how much I drank.
Mistake #2.
Obviously we're not excusing the behavior of the guy. However, when will we learn that we should not mix genders this way, and especially the many times people have been bitten with alcohol. It's bizarre really. People want to have their cake and eat it. They play with fire then cry when they get burnt.