Comment by ceol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceol | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not writing from a position of fear. The thought process of rapists is an interesting— albeit chilling— subject to study.

My problem was with the responses to the rapists by what appeared to be normal, well-adjusted people: Heavily upvoted comments excusing what was textbook rape because alcohol was involved, or she said she wanted it at one point (or maybe she didn't and they assumed she said it), or because she "got a little slutty [and did something stupid]." There is nothing of benefit in those replies. All they serve to do is make actual rapists feel better about the fact they raped someone and make it harder for rape victims to come forward due to fear of similar reactions by friends, family, and law enforcement.

Certainly there's a benefit to anonymity in a discussion, and I'm in no way advocating for your identity to be attached to everything you post a la South Korea. My issue isn't with anonymity in general; it's with reddit. The mask of anonymity, the pervasive anti-moderation sentiment, the inexplicably held notion that they belong to some elite club of Internet-goers, and the karma system make for an at times vicious amount of groupthink and close-mindedness.

I think what I'm saying is that you're upset about a thing that is a necessary reaction to the telling of truth.

Do you mean that the victim-blaming is what these people actually believe and therefore it's a form of "truth"? That we can say victim-blaming is wrong but the truth is, there's a lot of people out there who blame the victim for rape and that's something that should be acknowledged?

That's something I think I can agree with. Clearly, victim-blaming is a bigger problem than people might like to admit and while reddit represents a relatively small niche of society at large, there's clearly a lot of people sympathising with rapists and to just dismiss such comments as unproductive or unhelpful is ignoring a large problem in society.

>Do you mean that the victim-blaming is what these people actually believe and therefore it's a form of "truth"

That's obvious to the point of uselessness. I think we're on the same page re: victim-blaming being a big problem. I don't dismiss any of the comments that talk about victim-blaming.

The only thing I'm really pushing for is: this conversation should happen. And it is, between you and me.

The reddit thread in question had an absurd amount of victim-blaming.

Not to disparage reddit as a whole, but there's a lot of close-mindedness and misogyny in the more populated subreddits.

You haven't said anything that has attacked my point.

You haven't said anything concrete enough to attack. Just a bunch of stuff about "the telling of the truth", whatever that's supposed to mean.

I hold that when you consider both subject matter and the community together, there are things which should not be discussed and analyzed. The reddit thread in question is an example. The community clearly demonstrated it was not equipped with the tools to handle that discussion.

Are you saying you can't comprehend what I was trying to mean?

Your second paragraph is exactly the attitude that I despise. I don't care what your intent is: the effect is you want to hide what people really think.

There are no tools to handle that discussion. And that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. And that means we'll find the tools for it.

Clueless.

edit: I feel like I'm in the midst of the argument that HN doesn't want. And I both don't want it and do want it in the same breath.

HN doesn't have the self-examination reddit does. It just doesn't. HN manages it by careful changes to its ruleset.

Reddit manages it by having an incredibly uncontrolled diverse ecosystem of recursively examinative subreddits.

And while I admire HN's adherence to quality, I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess.

So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed.

Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system? There will be no moderation at all. Every and any topic is able to be discussed by anyone. The fringe opinions mobilize and are given a powerful soapbox, and so horrible becomes the new normal. You can see this in nearly every thread on reddit dealing with sexism and (especially) race relations.

You can't say that the average internet citizen, wandering into any of the sickeningly racist discussions found weekly on r/videos, won't see the hundreds of upvotes on vile opinions without also seeing an illusion of consensus, the normalization of disgusting prejudice. And you can't say that won't have an effect on their thought process next time they interact with a person of colour. That is the price paid for unrestricted discussion of the worst crap people can dedicate themselves to typing on the internet.

That was just a particularly salient example. Everywhere else you see normalization of mysogyny, normalization of pedophilia (seriously, nearly any discussion of gymnasts during the olympics was disgusting). All this on a website with tens of millions of users, claiming itself as the front page of the internet.

You go on to say reddit has self-examination. Reddit is not a single organism; the self-examination you refer to comprises many disgusted users, yelling at the people spouting crap who carry along regardless. "Self-examination" in this fashion is not a substitute for actual moderation. SRS has started linking to the odd HN comment, by the way.

The crux is that tolerating and analyzing horrible opinions only serves to normalize them. There are some ideas that quite simply don't deserve to see a soapbox. You'll probably play the slippery slope card here. I don't care. We have many excellent moral frameworks with which to analyze ideas, and they are more than adequate for sorting out the grey area of what should and should not be allowed.

>So, I suppose you would describe yourself as being absolutely in favor of unrestricted free speech. Nothing is off-limits. All shall be discussed.

Yup.

>Now, what happens when you mix this attitude with a self-moderating system?

/r/AskScience

You can't make horrible opinions less horrible by making them invisible.

Askscience is heavily moderated.

> "I will endure downvote after downvote unto hellban in order to defy our stodginess."

You made some good points in the "nobody wants to read your shit" thread. You should apply those insights to your own posts here.

We signal, with downvotes and hellbans, the kind of shit we don't want to read. Some of your earlier posts in this thread were merely disagreeable, but you've descended into full-on trolling. Please don't do that.

The hell?

No, discussions which lead to more rape should not happen. This, I feel, is an unambiguous truth.

(I'm not saying that the particular reddit thread encouraged rape, though a psychologist much more well-versed than myself did -- but I don't think its a logical leap to see why victim-blaming would encourage self-rationalization of rape.)

The psychologist you cite I myself cited. The point of discussing anything is that no discussions lead to more rape.

Unless you're afraid.

If you're afraid that real discussion will cause more rape, and that the sacrifice of real understanding is worth pretending that that more rape doesn't exist.

Because that's the guarantee.

That's what that meh-ish psychologist proved.

We will not forget. Because there's nothing we're not afraid to know.

"The point of discussing anything is that no discussions lead to more rape."

"If you're afraid that real discussion will cause more rape, and that the sacrifice of real understanding is worth pretending that that more rape doesn't exist."

Please qualify these statements and explain why your argument is superior to that of a psychologist?

oh god I hate writing arguments from authority but... oh wait.

I'm only fighting an argument from authority.

Hah. I actually don't have to say anything.

But while I'm here, .;'';.

It's a troll face.

Victim-blaming, like all blaming, is a matter of opinion. There is no objective truth in who's to blame -- not because the facts can't be established, but because blame is by its nature about meaning, not about whether events happened.

You're saying it's a necessary reaction to the telling of truth. He's saying it's not about truth, it's about opinion.

So yes, he is responding to your point.

And it's ineffective. If you have to say it's about opinion, you've already lost. I know that there are opinions that state that victim-blaming is a terrible thing.

I even believe it.

But we couldn't have this conversation unless this, _this itself_ was a reaction to the telling of truth.

Victim-blaming is not a necessary reaction to anything.

You're flat-out wrong. The word "necessary" has so many connotations that you can't control it.

Necessary means that it happens whether or not you want it to.

Necessary hurts.

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