If he did rape someone, no due process means we're treating rape as a mere HR issue, and he's free to go rape more people.
If he did not rape someone, then at least some of the allegations being thrown around are false. No due process means that someone unconnected with this may reasonably assume all of it is false.
What do you mean "against all odds"? Unless you're connected with this personally, all you have to go on is their internal investigation, which did not mention rape. So apparently no one is even claiming that anymore.
Again, they can either turn this over to the police, or I'm going to assume it's all made up and I'm not going to care. Not that my opinion is worth any more than yours, which is to say it doesn't matter at all.
I don't know what the truth is here, but I can't trust anyone who won't make the investigation public by that very fact.
And just for the record, I have been severely sexually harassed, enough that the person responsible was fired. So it's not like I can't sympathize with victims of harassment. Yes, it really is uncomfortable facing them, but it's also the right thing to do.
EDIT: Not clear why this is so controversial, but that doesn't beget trust, either. But it's true and I'll stand by it.
by requesting NOT to have a judicial investigation the accusers are effectively saying "we are content to allow for trial by torch-wielding-mob in the court of public opinion and reputation" instead of allowing for a trial by an institution established specifically for impartiality and upholding the rights of both the accusers and the accused.
I stupidly hadn't asked enough questions about the back story of how this guy got involved with the previous incarnation of the organization - he came in, stirred up trouble, drove out the existing leadership and due to their missteps, was able to portray his behaviour as reasonable... when it became apparent he was losing some level of control over the current org, he did it all over again. My fault entirely for being not cynical enough and the other people for believing in his bullshit.
I understand your point of view, but until you have been in a real world situation where the legal system is COMPLETELY USELESS, you will never really understand how the world really works (aka reach 40, not a conservative, no brain etc). The amount of ambiguity inherent in evaluating human behaviour is a lot more than you think, and people like this use it to their advantage. And the legal system is very expensive, so trying to use it to achieve 'justice' tends to be, overall, not cost effective. The legal system is ONLY about monetary issues.
And people like Appelbaum know this - they know how to skate the line and to use the weaknesses of society, social relationships, the legal system ... to their advantage. Reading about Appelbaum triggered all my triggers about people who should be avoided. I really "get" this ideal of Solomon-like impartiality, but facts / evidence / scientific-ish attitude... you have to also understand people as well besides this to grok the truth and that requires actual wisdom. And over 40, you begin to understand that an awful lot of people have zero integrity, especially those whose primary goal is power of some sort.
The fact that psychopaths exist is not evidence of Applebaum's guilt. This torch wielding angry mob might have a legitimate grievance, or they might be a spontaneous torch wielding angry mob, they might even be stirred up by a psychopath like the one you describe.
That's why we need a process better than the torch wielding angry mob.
Perhaps the global 'social networking' phenomena / the democratization of the media / etc offers something - all in all, all the discussion around things like this is ultimately useful; it raises people's awareness.
I don't need the certainty of a court verdict to convince me a bozo isn't worth my time. When there's no shortage of good people to work with, anything less than a "yes" is a "no".
Conversely, I also choose my own friends. I've befriended social pariahs many times, because having played that role many times myself, I get it.
So, since I have no idea what your point was, can you rephrase your post? What was your point?
I mistakingly assumed everyone has heard of the maxim attributed to Churchill. It's a bit flippant, but there is some truth to it if you look past the surface meaning. The world is fundamentally run by money and power, two things 'conservatives' are stereotypically obsessed with. When you see that 'liberals' can be driven by those two things as well, then how society really operates becomes a lot clearer.
As for my post, I was trying to say the legal system is inadequate for some things. In a small community, there are social mechanisms by which the group can deal with problematic people, if the group steps up to the task. Western society today is not a "small community" but perhaps the rise of social networking etc allows for this. The problem then becomes acting with integrity, and trying to deal with the issue evenhandedly - I am of course assuming the Tor Board did its best here. It's unfortunate those that things needed to get to the point where there was enough of a public outcry to finally address the issue - as I understand it, people have been complaining about Appelbaum for years (same as for Jian Ghomeshi in Canada). But that is how it usually works - people "knew" about Bill Cosby and Jimmy Saville for years but the issue never got addressed.
How can communities police themselves without having to rely on an external authority or hierarchy? Always relying on the legal system as the external authority is impracticable.
communities can police themselves about how well their members fit in with the group and obey social norms using whatever tools they like, up to a point.
up to a point.
the point where self-policing must end and external authority must take over is when criminal allegations are made against a member of the community. if someone is accused of sexual assault, that is a crime they can face prison time for. it is deeply inappropriate for the community to try and self-police a criminal allegation of that weight.
if the accuser is not willing to let the criminal justice system investigate a criminal allegation then I think there's something else going on. using criminal allegations for social-normative or political ends is a dangerous game though.
It isn't really "shitty" to be under 40 or conservative.
What you are arguing is that, in the absence of a trial by a government, people have the active right to participate in an organization that doesn't want them. That goes against every bit of the ethos of a project like Tor. (And if you won't believe any other argument, keep in mind that it's not fair to him: why would the state be inclined to treat him fairly, for everything he's done to oppose the state?)
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
I think you may have missed what the front-page of HN looked like when this was first happening. I won't bother re-quoting/linking things beyond previous discussions (since those contain the information) but your comment is entirely out-of-sync with what was happening.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11845338 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837901
If you're referring to the "DieJakeDie" account, I acknowledge that it existed, but it was very clear that it had no involvement with victims or (as far as anyone can tell) anyone involved in the Tor community. The integrity of the Tor process was not compromised by its existence, any more than the integrity of a government trial is compromised by protesters outside calling for blood.
These accusers only become "victims" after an impartial jury of Appelbaum's peers weighs the evidence and pronounces him guilty.
Not every judicial system uses juries.
"Victim" is not a predominantly judicial term, unlike "defendant" or "felon", so the everyday meaning of someone who suffered something applies. That's a factual thing, not procedural as you claim above.
No, its how the justice system determines whether fact claims are adequately supported to apply legal sanctions.
Individuals are free to determine and speak on their conclusions as to the truth of fact claims independent of judicial conclusions; this is a fairly fundamental freedom (reflected in the first amendment) and essential to the marketplace of ideas.
The vast majority of accusations in our lives have no place in court.
Only the very gravest ones find their way there. And we're under no obligation to refrain from drawing our own conclusions.
Occam's razor, and straightforward root cause analysis -- via the weight of numerous (largely very credible) statements from multiple witnesses -- suggest that he ultimately ruined his own life by choosing to engage in a persistent pattern of aggressive and uncivil behavior towards others in his community.
Not that it was ruined "because of" the statements the Tor project made about his case.
In either case, however, I don't think Tor's actions would be very professional. How often do you see a company blog about why they fired someone?
That's an interesting position which you haven't presented much reasoning for; its not, however, what the US has generally decided, so if you want it to change, you should probably say why.
The decision the US has mostly come to is this:
(1) You can't impose legal sanction without proving something in court.
(2) If someone is harmed (including by accusation of criminal behavior) by something you say, they can challenge it in court as defamation (e.g., slander, libel). and they must show evidence that it is false.
Your proposal is a fairly radical restriction on free speech.
"The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to be confronted with the witnesses against him.
...
The Confrontation Clause has its roots in both English common law, protecting the right of cross-examination, and Roman law, which guaranteed persons accused of a crime the right to look their accusers in the eye. "
There should be an unbiased mediation system available to resolve this, but the judicial system is not that. This is a shift in society as we begin to care more about these types of allegations.
Just as these things were often unfairly ignored before they may now be addressed in ways that are potentially unfair to the alleged perpetrator.
It's an evolution of our society away from bias towards the agenda of dominant men. Like it or not, this is the direction we're heading.
It is the right of most organizations in most states/countries to exclude people of their choosing. They have verified a couple complaints and decided he was enough like a person they wanted to exclude. Which it sounds like he was doing from his side as well.
So I'd say that legally, he is being considered innocent.
This is like 'I can say whatever I want without the consequences of my peers because of the first amendment.' The right to free speech and the right to be innocent until proven guilty apply to a citizens relationship with the government.
The reason no one else "gives two shits" about a father spending time with his children whom he loves and supports even though his ex thinks he's a cretin is because that's how it's supposed to be. If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children. There are lots of kids who've never even met their fathers. Lots of them would be happy with the cretin.
For one, I intentionally did not use gender pronouns in my comment to avoid seeming like I was blaming someone in this sort of trope. Yet you inferred them anyway.
Secondly, the child in question was unplanned, in a relationship that was never planned for marriage (and the two indeed never were married). The mother in question was extremely young herself, and almost 20 years younger than the father.
Thirdly, there's a shitload of actual evidence of harm which was obtained from the father's personal computer and forms the basis of 8 counts of a class D felony in this state. But you know, you don't seem to care about evidence.
You also clearly have zero understanding about how civil parenting and custody cases work if you think that a court's willingness to laissez-faire just let people have unsupervised time is somehow evidence that the person "isn't so bad." In my mom's experience, she's even seen a father who was convicted of raping his own daughter be awarded parenting time visits with that same daughter after his jail term had ended, despite the daughter's own testimony that she was afraid of him and did not want to ever see him.
> If he were really such a horrible person, she shouldn't have chosen him as a father for her children.
You probably don't know someone has >1000 child porn images on his computer when you first meet him. Especially since such people are well-known to be manipulative, particularly of young women.
Wow. You are a piece of work.
BTW, this is all publicly searchable. I want to emphasize that, until the conclusion of the criminal case, these are merely charges and he may not be found guilty. But from the position I am in, knowing what evidence there is and the feelings of professionals that he is dangerous, it is obvious that I feel a need to protect my nephew as much as possible.
Feel free to go to the Indiana MyCase website and search both the criminal and civil cases. < https://public.courts.in.gov/mycase/#/vw/Search >. I don't want to give the other party's name here, since it will get indexed by Google, but you can feel free to email me at < [email protected] >, and I'll tell you the name in personal correspondence and then you can go and look at the extensive case log yourself.
I'm trying desperately to protect my nephew Ian from what I believe to be an actually dangerous person. Not trying to aid in vindictively settling an angry divorce case by appealing to inflammatory stereotypes. I personally don't care at all if anyone other than the court believes he's dangerous or guilty, nor even if he avoids jail time or never pays back owed child support or anything. I 100% only care to keep my nephew safe from him.
Your lazy and clumsy I-wish-I-was-actually-smart-enough-to-make-SJW-contrarian-arguments-like-Scott-Alexander-does-but-I'm-not-and-don't-have-the-self-awareness-required-to-understand-why-my-bastardizations-of-those-contrarian-arguments-are-harmful thinking is really fucking tiresome.
I know it's gonna fall on deaf ears, but you really, really should be ashamed of yourself. The attitude you depict is morally reprehensible. It's not because you fail to bombard caricatures of evil dead beat dads with morally vindictive insults. I don't want those caricatures anymore than anyone else. It's because you're a contrarian fanboy regurgitating thoughtless bullshit in an arena that actually causes people fucking harm. There really are abusive or dangerous fathers out there, and truly the only thing your faux righteous babble does is to perpetuate a culture of blaming their victims and giving them endless second chances with which they just harm and harm and harm some more.
Even though your comments seem unrelated to the topic at hand, they might be in some sense a twisted reflection of the common sentiment here. Many comments say, "It ought to be illegal to speak of the guilt of those who haven't been convicted by a court." You say, "The court should decide ahead of time which divorced parents are destined to do awful things to their children." These propositions seem to be at odds, but really, both you and others here decry both the fallibility and the limited purview of the courts. It simply isn't possible for the courts to punish all rapists, nor for them to predict ahead of time which divorced parents will illegally harm their children. In many cases, we must decide for ourselves whether to kick assholes out of our organizations, or have children with them, or do something else entirely.
Eventually one finds the courts to be a human institution: fallibility is unavoidable, so their limited purview is all that can save them from creating tyranny. When the courts are silent, we may use our own judgment.
The organizations that conduct supervised visitation, for example, are basically hard-coded misogyny, and have caused us considerable trouble because they don't enforce their policies at all, have allowed the father in this case to even bring his cell phone into his supervised visits and take pictures, which a private detective we hired later found on VK being used most likely for purposes of grooming -- and, there was already a court order in the civil case that the father was not allowed to maintain that VK page (we had used screenshots of it in one of the hearings) and that the supervision facility's own written policy, which my sister was given a copy of, said that all cell phones were disallowed during visits.
She (the supervisor) was forced to admit that she violated that rule in court, or else admit perjury, because we were able to present the photo captured from the VK page showing my nephew inside the visitation facility!
The women operating the supervision facility have treated my sister like she is the scum of the earth the entire time. Basically the way it works is they assume anyone who is ordered to interface with any kind of visitation must be a deadbeat, both the mom and the dad, or a drug user, or some kind of criminal unfit to have kids, and that the poor dad is just being railroaded and probably, on balance, deserves custody about as much as or more than the mom.
As a result, they sympathize with the dads ordered to have supervised visits, cut them breaks, bend the rules. And then act like hard-asses to the moms, write up court notices if they are 5 minutes late because of a snowstorm, or if the kid has his shoes untied when he shows up.
When we first started this whole endeavor, our attorney told us that we should expect, even in the absolute best case scenario when there is smoking gun evidence involving child porn and it is as open-and-shut as it can be, that it will take probably around 4 years to get a conviction, and that the prosecutor and others will focus almost solely on cutting deals to get guilty pleas rather than have it tie up the court for 4 years and be a big headache. That has been true. The opportunity for frivolus continuances, motions, etc., is through the roof, etc.
The criminal defense attorney in this case is a real life version of Better Call Saul from Breaking Bad. He's a genuine psycho. He told my sister in one meeting that poor people should just be euthanized, and then basically laughed about because what's she going to do, tell people he said that? And even though trying to get a deal where the father has a reduced sentence and gets counseling is probably what would be in his best interest, his attorney is taking it as a personal vendetta to take it all the way to the bitter end of a jury trial.
He said, literally, to our civil case attorney that his client, the father in this case, is a "good kind of pedophile" and laughed about it. Our attorney's mouth just dropped, and he looked like he might even cry when we were all debriefing afterwards. He said in his ~ 20 years of practicing he's never seen a defense attorney like this guy.
At a regional level, for me in northeast Indiana, I've even begun researching into the National CASA Association, because some of the higher regional administrators in that organization have actually married regional judges here and things, and it seems like some glaring conflicts of interest regarding sending business their way.
They use untrained volunteers, and some of the stuff in their manuals is unbelievable. There actually are online support groups of people (mostly women) who have been absolutely screwed over by CASA, especially in cases involving child porn, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. These people are not trained in psychology, especially the manipulative aspects of dealing with child predators. And most of them are young women volunteers, exactly the people that these child predators manipulate most often. It's really a disgusting Catch-22.
When I look at the whole thing, I absolutely do not see a broad US legal system that intervenes too much as you suggest. I absolutely see a system where regional/county level prosecutors do not give a shit ever about child safety, they try to get the cases out the door as fast as possible, mostly by cutting guilty plea deals, they throw people into volunteer-based supervised visitation services that are basically the personification of misogyny, and they utterly do not care if someone raises a fuss about it at all.
I have already begun speaking with some attorneys about the possibility of suing the National CASA Association and/or their parent company United Way to recover some of the extreme legal fees we've faced, specifically because their failure to follow their own rules with the cellphone photo incident directly put my nephew in more harm (his photo landing on VK as part of grooming activity), and then we had to pay a bunch of money to file a motion and request a hearing for that, and put the supervisor on the stand and make them admit to it and everything.
Anyway, I definitely do not see it the way you describe. The system basically fucks over women and goes to the greatest lengths possible to give white men infinity chances without any serious jail time or serious penalties.
Edit: Added detail about the connection between judges and CASA.
< http://www.in.gov/judiciary/jud-qual/files/jnc-apps-cherry.p... >
Here's a link to some biographical info about the magistrate judge Paul Cherry for the northeast Indiana district court. His wife is mentioned there, Kristi Bachman Cherry, and she is the executive director for Northeast Indiana CASA:
< http://www.neincasa.net/meet-our-staff/ >
Obviously, this mere fact of marriage is not that big of a deal. But in light of all of the other shit I've seen go on in just the tiny sphere of my nephew's single court case, it sure does make me very, very suspicious about how such an incompetent organization as CASA seems to be thriving and receiving tons of business from the courts here.
One way to win would be to hire the local judge's favorite lawyer. The better way to win is not to play the game in the first place. Don't have children with unsuitable partners, and if you've made that mistake, don't compound it by dragging the whole family into court.
In other words: since the family courts do such a poor job, why would we want them to do more?
How to put a price on ensuring your 5-year-old nephew is kept away from a highly probable source of abuse? Had we not pursued this through the abusive, misogynistic legal system, we would have had no enforceable way to keep my nephew out of immediate risk of grave and really, truly serious harm. Not the false, inflamed stereotype of harm you described earlier about dead beat dads who get railroaded. Not that. But real sexual and/or physical abuse, and well as the potential for psychological harm related to seeing or being made to take part in child pornography.
The legal apparatus, for all of its horribleness, allowed us to convert metric shitloads of money into safety for my nephew. At least we've gotten several years of safety for him, even if the father ultimately slips through the cracks and gets off easy in some way. At least we've given my nephew the chance to have some years of a safe and normal childhood routine, and allowed him to age and hopefully get to a point where he could recognize if his father ever tried to do something wrong to him in the future.
One way to put it is that you love them so much you agree to basically free fall into PTSD and financial instability if it spares them the strong risk of harm. You hate that that's what the scammy legal apparatus makes you do, but you do it for them. Avoiding it to keep the money really, really won't be better for them if they are significantly abused. People can go on and on about how you shouldn't throw yourself into ruin, much as how you should eventually embrace hospice care and physician assisted suicide when you're terminally ill instead of cranking up the medical bills hoping to prolong life in vain. I see a lot of people mistakenly think the same sort of logic applies when a young, defenseless child is at risk of serious abuse or harm. It doesn't. If the best you can do is throw all your resources at it and you still come up empty handed, well you still have to try. Having saved all those resources and secured a more comfortable life in other ways in the future is completely devoid of meaning or utility if your defenseless young family member really does suffer the harm you failed to relentlessly try to prevent.
I think a lot of your comments are moralistic as well. Of course no one wants to "play the game." The mother in this situation, my sister, was extremely young, uneducated, and in no way even remotely close to a life situation in which she should have made these sorts of decisions. Now she's older, busting her ass at a decent job, raising her kids as a single mother who receives no child support, went back and finished college while working. Frankly she's one of the most impressive people I know. And yet her life is defined by living with mistakes she did not even understand she was making at the age of 21. Being punished over and over for decisions made out of youthful ignorance and small, isolated moments of rebellion.
Yeah, if you're lucky to emerge from youth not happening to have made these mistakes, it's great to turn around and blame others. Or, in my case I didn't make mistakes myself, and in fact managed college and grad school really well, and still had my life ruined by extension when it fell to me to bear the bulk of financial responsibility, and then later also a whole bunch of other things too.
I'm sure the same thing happens to drug users and their families, and all sorts of other hardships. It's like what Philip K. Dick wrote: these people were punished entirely too much for what they did. And what's so sickening is that the other side, the biological father who has caused all of these problems, is not punished at all. His license is suspended and he drives around town anyway, never gets in trouble. He's thousands of dollars in arrears on child support, never pays it back, doesn't matter, no one does anything to him, even as he is delinquent in payment for years. His family are close friends with a local attorney who has basically worked his civil case for free, meanwhile we've paid a huge sum of money just to secure bare minimum supervised visits (which aren't even conducted properly).
The victims in these situations are the ones who are punished. Not the perpetrators. And they are punished for decisions they did not comprehend or understand -- often which they could not have comprehended at all. Yes, it's better if you don't "play the game" but truly no one ends up there through their own volition -- not even when it was based on a choice like drug usage or unprotected sex. When these things are lifelong problems for which you are perpetually punished for something you did before you could even legally buy alcohol, it's really just an unlucky lightning strike that you'll be punished for forever. It's not "your fault" in any realistic sense.
But grandstanding moralists who want to blame the victim will still say it is. Oh, you don't want to have to spend > $100k in legal fees to protect your son from a child predator when you're in your late 20s? Welp, then when you were extremely depressed that one semester in college 6 years ago, you shouldn't have accidentally drank too much and then had unprotected sex that one single time and gotten pregnant. Since you did "choose" that, you are hereby punished for decades. Ugh.
Elsewhere the state will pay for an attorney if you can show in a pretrial proceeding that your claims are not obviously without merit and that you are indigent.
Not "reimburse later and hope you're solvent long enough", but actually "paying the attorney".
So maybe you should reexamine your premise before dismissing the idea.
It wasn't the event that made him look bad, it was his actions. Don't be passive about this.
It was what somebody else claimed his actions were.
"This sort of event" is an incredibly passive expression of what he is accused of doing. Such language is incredibly common [0] in rape and sexual assault cases, because it removes actors from the conversation. You can say "The actions that Appelbaum people have accused him of" and be much more actively voiced while also respecting your wish to present him as simply the accused.
[0] http://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist156/Bohner_2001.pdf Quoting: "The language of headlines that participants generated for their reports also reflected judgments of assailant and victim responsibility. Implications for the non-reactive assessment of responsibility attributions and directions for future research are discussed."
you said "it was his actions". this asserts that you know, positively, what his actions were. do you really? I said you should not act like you are the judge or jury because I find it highly unlikely that you really know the facts of the case. I don't think anyone really knows the facts of the case, and we never will, because there won't be a fair trial.
It is not simply 'semantics', there is a research basis to suggest that these semantics are used in specific ways in specific situations that bring into question the intentionalality and choice behind them.
The victims involved in this have specifically asked this to not happen. I'm sure you can understand why the members of a community like this would have personal or political reasons to avoid a judicial investigation.