The Forbidden Topics | Hacker News Reader

The Forbidden Topics

drewdevault.com

The post says:

    Edit: Case in point: this post was quietly removed by Hacker News moderators within 40 minutes of its submission.

What's the status here, was this post redacted or not? Or did it just drop off the frontpage?

Is there any transparency with regards to moderation here, now that I think of it?

Moderators didn't touch this post or even see it until now. It was flagged by users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#flag

Which is not surprising. Even the article posits that this is not an issue with any one person, but with the hacker community and culture as a whole. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "Well, users flagged it" is very much in line with the kind of behavior he's criticizing.

> Moderators [...] sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair

Seems like it should be turned off in this case?

Yes, it should be turned off.

But, apparently nobody cares even if the flag was unfair and unnecessary.

Why was this submission never unflagged?

> Our community has persistent and pervasive problems of a particular sort which we are not allowed to talk about: sexual harassment and assault. Men who assault, harass, and even rape women in our spaces, are protected.

This is completely alien to my personal experience. Does this match anyone else's personal experience? Have I just avoided all the objectionable events by sheer luck?

If this statement is true, I would have expected to have observed at least some harassment or mild assault by now, but I haven't. I can't think of an instance. I mean, one time I saw some guy grab some girl's ass, but it turned out she was his wife.

> I attended a hacker event this year – HiP Berlin – where I discovered that some of the organizers had cooperated to make it possible for multiple known rapists to participate, working together to find a way to circumvent the event’s code of conduct – a document that they were tasked with enforcing.

This is just kind of strange. It's not clear what he means by "circumvent" the code of conduct. Is he saying that they were rapists in the opinions of the organizers? And that if they were rapists in the opinions of the organizers then they should have barred them from the event, but they didn't?

I would assume that the most likely situation is that something happened which Drew thinks means the people in question are "known rapists" but the event organizers did not. And not knowing the facts, we can't really say which of them is right.

I mean, unless I'm supposed to just believe that Drew is right because he's speaking up about a difficult topic or something like that. At the risk of potentially silencing marginalized people with extraordinary standards of evidence: no, I won't just believe him.

> This is completely alien to my personal experience. Does this match anyone else's personal experience? Have I just avoided all the objectionable events by sheer luck?

I've seen this a lot, folks protecting and defending men (in particular) that assault women. They do it under the guise of "innocent until proven guilty," as though we are operating as agents in courts of law. That's what Drew is describing in the post, in different words. You may have been lucky enough to avoid seeing this but it definitely happens.

I can second that.

In my experience these phrases are used often:

- "No he wouldn't do that"

- "Are you sure that this is true?"

- "I mean, how could he know that it was too much?"

- "Maybe it was kinda overstepping, but he apologized!"

- "I mean she isn't such a pious girl either." (kind of literally translated from my language, so maybe it sounds strange in English)

> Some of us have events in our past that we try not to think about, because if we think too hard, we might realize that we crossed the line. This fills men with guilt and uncertainty, but also fear. We know the consequences if our doubts became known ...

> So we lash out in this fear. We close ranks. We demand the most stringent standards of evidence to prove anything, evidence that we know is not likely to be there

Let me get this straight here: sexually assaulting someone -> defensiveness -> expecting evidence

So his criticism of people who expect evidence of assault is that they're really just defensive closet rapists? This seems like a really bizarre take, I wonder why he's making it

Couldn't a more reasonable take be that more egregious allegations require more rigorous proof (and more extreme consequences for lying)? What's unreasonable about that expectation?

If I go around accusing John Appleseed of murder and manage to fuck up his entire life, are you saying I should just be able to get away with that because murder is bad or under-prosecuted?

> They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable

This is the cover of Australia's largest [1] newspaper: https://www.reddit.com/r/perth/comments/169mucb/how_we_stop_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_West_Australian - It has Australia's largest share of market penetration (84% of WA) of any newspaper in the country.

Excellent. Very well said.

> You need to be someone who will do something about it.

Apparently "do something" doesn't extend so far as to naming names?

> Apparently "do something" doesn't extend so far as to naming names?

All talk and no action.

People need to start naming names.

I don't think naming names in this post is necessarily the best action. This would only serve to reproduce the idea that the problem is individual rapists who need to be punished. Instead, Drew is pointing towards systems which need to be transformed, in order to make our communities safer.

For example, the story about the conference, why was it possible for malicious organisers to hack the safety protocols? Making spaces safer requires recognising the roles that decision-making protocols and organisational structures, among other components, have in enabling rapists to act.

> Apparently "do something" doesn't extend so far as to naming names?

Might be too risky, legally speaking

Well-said? He approached a sensitive topic by prefacing it with horse shit about how all "free[-]speech absolutists" in cyberspace are not victims of hate speech, therefore they go out of their way "to defend hate speech". This is false, and anyone who does this and claims to be such an absolutist, is lying to themselves and to everyone else around them, because they do not understand what free speech even entails.

I'm targeted (either personally or blanketed) by all manners of what most people would call bigotry and hate speech, and I still defend the position that such speech should be considered protected under free-speech doctrine, because for one, it gives me a clear indicator of what those people really think about me, rather than anyone having to beat around the bush and hope that I understand that they're a transphobe or whatever. And for another, it empowers me with the exact same language I can use to defend myself. On top of that, this kind of shit enters dangerous territory when it comes to the rights of parody authors or, say, black comedy. Fuck that.

Calls to action (the "shouting fire" or, more relevant here, calls for genocide or other hate crimes) are not protected under free speech. Devault is kidding himself by misinterpreting or simply not bothering to understand a definition that has been solidified by many a historical philosopher. They all came back with the same conclusion, and somehow that's lost on the masses today.

I admit to not having read the full article because I already have an idea of what the rest of it is about (after hearing what Devault dealt with early this year, from his own talk with me) and I don't feel comfortable endorsing this post at all when the entire first page is blasphemous.

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