> I truly wish that allegations of any and every sort were considered not credible by the general public.
If someone steals my phone at the bar and everyone at the table sees them do it, then tells you exactly what happened with the same story - would you say "no, this is _not credible_. It is not something I am able to believe could happen and it is not plausible". Surely not. It would be a credible allegation.
> This isn't against women. How many of us, given such an arbitrary and powerful weapon, would have the character not to use it, especially against someone we hate for personal reasons?
Given the ability to you would falsely accuse someone and ruin their lives? Have you considered that you may be projecting that onto others?
> Accusation is not guilt,
Which is why we have different words to help explain the differences.
> and we need to stop assuming that every accusation is credible.
We don't. That's why it is reasonable to mark some of them as credible.
This is a pretty good scenario for explaining why accounts like this can be not credible.
A is at the table and "sees" B steal his phone. A accuses B of stealing his phone in front of C, D and E. Cop receives testimony from A, C, D and E that is all the same story.
Eye witness testimony is not that valuable when people have conferred with each other.
Five matching witness testimonies can be both incorrect and credible. To say that they are not believable is, frankly, bizarre to me. The example is bereft of detail so you can obviously make up a situation which matches it and it is not believable but that would ignore the point here.
A simple rephrasing is that you can make credible false allegations.
Multiple eye witnesses help make the allegation credible, yes. Which would go against the idea of no allegations being considered credible by the general public. That was your opening statement.
> But I'd suggest stepping back and considering the overall point you're trying to make.
It's very simple. Some allegations are credible, and it is entirely reasonable for the general public to thing some allegations are credible and others not.
> You might start with a scenario which is, by construction unfair: a couple fights, she takes the kids, he shouts, she calls the police and claims abuse, he is beaten and arrested; during the divorce she uses the arrest as evidence of the abuse, and frames the beating as evidence of her husbands violent tendencies; the court accepts this argument and he loses the children, getting supervised visitation only 90 minutes once a week.
> Does that sound right, or fair to you?
It sounds like it has nothing to do with whether any allegation can be considered credible. It could be an argument against all allegations being considered credible and it can be an argument against people mixing up someone _alleging_ another is guilty and that person being _found_ to be guilty.
> all in seeming defense of the principle: we can and should considered guilty until proven innocent.
Perhaps try reading my comment again, and if after that and this extra explanation you still think I am claiming somehow that all allegations should lead to convictions or that all allegations are credible or that guilt should be assumed, then I have no way of reaching a consensus with you as to what point I'm even trying to make.
So... you're countering one strawman with another?
>I can't understand how or why anyone would want this to be how things work
It's a hypothetical scenario, a strawman, so of course not.
Is this actually how things work? Do you have any stats about wrongful accusations to back up your ideas? My personal experience from speaking to women who have actually suffered abuse at the hands of men is that the problem is very much the other way around - nobody believes them and brushes it off exactly as you are doing.
A strawman is when you misrepresent another person's argument. What I've done is present a hypothetical situation, apply the GP's prescribed view to it, and asked if it's fair. It is basically a kind of "proof by contradiction" where you assume the opposite of what you want to prove, apply it to a situation and show a contradiction, and so it must be false. I think it's a pretty strong, argument, actually.
Seeing something happen does make an allegation more credible; this is the whole point of, say, witness testimony. Why we are more likely to believe things which are attested to by others. Credibility is also an element of character and relation to the victim. If I told my parents I was mugged in an underpass on my way home, which explains why I don't have my cell phone, I'd be a little weirded out if they simply replied with "your allegations are not credible, that's a strawman."
>we can and should considered guilty until proven innocent.
Guilt and innocence in which epistemic context? Consider that there are both very well known cases of public opinion being wrong (and overturned by a court or other method), or the findings of courts being wrong (and overturned by public investigation and revelations). Guilt in one arena does not necessarily equal guilt in another[0], and I think that's part of the point GP was trying to make.
>a couple fights, she takes the kids, he shouts, she calls the police and claims abuse, he is beaten and arrested; during the divorce she uses the arrest as evidence of the abuse, and frames the beating as evidence of her husbands violent tendencies
You can't seriously accuse GP of setting up a straw-man, then relay an idealized (for your point) situation which is, to my knowledge, not backed up by any statistical power.
>Because this is what I'm arguing against, and I can't understand how or why anyone would want this to be how things work.
You're arguing from a view-from-nowhere, that is, you have already relayed the facts of an unfair situation and the legal consequences of that situation, without taking into account that the situation you relayed is a failure of the justice system, not only of the allegation. Your depiction of how a single allegation snowballs like that isn't impossible - but you haven't done anything to show that this is the result of most (or even a significant number of) allegations of domestic abuse.
[0] "In at least a wide variety of cases, our orientation toward testimony is a non-skeptical one: when someone tells us that P, we end up justified in believing that P. And ordinarily, if the speaker knows that P and tells us that P, we end up ourselves knowing that P. That testimonial knowledge is common is both commonsense and philosophical orthodoxy.
But we do not always take this kind of stance. Sometimes we interrogate testimony; sometimes we explain it away or demand proof. As much recent literature in both social psychology and epistemic injustice has shown, social and cultural factors influence the degree to which testimony is considered credible."
I can because mine was not a strawman, it was a variant of proof-by-contradiction: assume ~P, produce a contradiction, QED: P. I suspect you know this is a logically valid argument because you segue quickly to "statistical power".
It makes sense to question the frequency of things when talking practicality. I agree. I assert that most people have no idea what goes on in "family court", or the accoutrements surrounding it (like the police, or visitation centers, etc). The people who know are family law attorneys, judges, and those who've been through it. Maybe some others know: therapists, police officers, doctors.
But let me tell you, it's a cynical, brutal game of posturing that starts out giving the father every-other-weekend with the children. And it only can get worse from there. The wife's attorney's will generate any and all accusations to build leverage to take the children away; this gives them leverage for a settlement, because a trial can take years and 100's of thousands of dollars. The father must decide: take the deal, or not see your kids?
This is standard operating procedure in divorces in the united states, although I'm guessing you didn't know that. I'm just saying that my own experience has changed my perspective significantly - when I hear an accusation of DV during a divorce, there is a strong likelihood that we are seeing the mechanization of the attorneys. And they know, more than anyone, the power of an accusation regardless of it's truth value.
Some of the MRA movements are odious and/or ridiculous at times, but the problem is real.
He had multiple allegations from both exes. He lightly joked about rape, domestic abuse etc. Yeah, they're jokes, but when I stopped being a child that stopped being funny, you can still see him making these jokes int interviews about his situation.
You've got people on HN today that believe that metoo is just made up. Those victims were mocked and denied justice for years because a lot of socially awkward dudes make the mistake of assuming that cause they're nice other guys are, too.
I know nothing bout him other than the public forum that he himself put in. There's no other way to judge him. I think it's telling that you've flipped this around into tropes about gender and being scorned.
Sure, these accusations can be very hard to prove. But an accusation of a false accusation is even harder to prove. Yet most people will be inclined to reactively put their faith in one of those accusations, but not the other. The idea we’ve come up with to resolve this tension is the presumption of innocence, and that accusations must be proven for justice to be carried out. This is one of the foundational moral and legal principles of all liberal democracies. While people might end up frustrated by the unavoidable outcome that sometimes, some conflicts can’t be satisfactorily resolved, throwing out the core principles of justice seems like a bad solution to some people.
The court of public opinion has existed before and after #metoo. Let's not pretend that #metoo invented it. If twenty people were to go public and say that Justin Bieber beat each of them with a crowbar, Justin Bieber would have some 'splainin to do, whether or not there's a court case.
If twenty people gave interviews and said that Martha Stewart personally fed them poisoned pies for shits and giggles, Martha would be affected by that, whether these people decide to sue or not.
But the society made an exception for sexual abuse. Rape and drugging in particular. #metoo simply made it count just as much.
And "extrajudicial punishment" is a stretch for "I have a right to tell people what happened to me without shame and harrasment".
Did #metoo make a call to burn people at stakes that I missed?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karenrobinsonjacobs/2020/06/30/...
https://www.tampabay.com/blogs/media/2017/10/31/house-of-car...
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-...
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-the-cancelling-of-j...
https://nypost.com/2020/06/11/the-wing-ceo-audrey-gelman-res...
https://pagesix.com/2020/07/01/essence-ceo-richelieu-dennis-...
https://www.distractify.com/p/tyler-joseph-canceled
https://www.rt.com/news/535587-depp-cancel-culture-festival/
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, looks like you attribute all scandals to #metoo agenda.
Women are still often told that sexual harassment is their own fault for dressing the way they do, or get told "boys will be boys". It used to be expected that women would have to put up with it in the workplace.
Rape victims get told that if they really didn't want it to happen they could have fought harder.
There are still judges in the US giving lighter sentences or no jail time at all and citing this sort of reasoning.
So yes, society has certainly made an exception for sexual abuse of all forms for many years and those excuses are still being made. Are things improving? Yes. Are those improvements good enough? Not by a long shot.
Name one case in the last 5 years where the judge uses the victims clothes as a reason for a light sentence in USA, and where the judge wasn't punished for it. It should be possible to find one right? If you can't even find one for a whole 5 years I wouldn't say that this is a problem we need to care about, once per 5 years in a population of 300 million is basically never.
--------------------------------------
You are asking the wrong question.
The judges don't give reasons for their sentences like that (i.e., the judge is under no obligation to say "I was going to give this person X years, but I'm giving them X-Y because the victim was wearing a mini skirt").
The question you should be asking is: is victim's clothing an admissible evidence in rape cases? That's to say, is it something that the defense uses in their arguments?
And the answer is that, historically, yes, victim's clothing has been extensively used by the defense in rape cases.[1]
The issue was serious enough that states started to adopt laws that banned using clothing as indication of consent in rape cases. By 1994, NY introduced such a law - being the second state in the nation to do so[2].
However, no matter what the law is regarding admissible evidence, the judges will most likely know what the victim was wearing because that, in itself, is collected for evidence. To argue that this does not factor into sentencing would be improbable given the prevalent attitudes in our society, and studies like[5] confirm that.
Which brings us to the main problem: that even without taking clothing as an excuse, sexual assault perpetrators are often left unpunished or given a slap on the wrist, like in the infamous case of the rapist Brock Turner[7].
This is, of course, tangential to the point that a significant part of the population believes that clothing can be an indicator of consent [3][4], which results in the dismal proportion of cases being reported to begin with, and then a small percentage of those brought to prosecution.
In the end, the judges simple don't give prison time to rapists. The judges give light sentences citing anything as a reason, without consequence.
You can see plenty of cases in the survey[8], many of them quite recent.
The analysis of the extent to which victim-blaming has been a factor in each of those cases is left as an exercise to the reader.
[1]https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/30/nyregion/new-law-says-vic...
[3]https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/13/...
[4]https://philpapers.org/archive/WOLPDA-3.pdf
[5]https://escholarship.org/content/qt0fq160dv/qt0fq160dv.pdf?t...
[7]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/us/brock-turner-blamed-dr...
[8]https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/sexual-assault-r...
The post I responded to says they did, note the "citing this sort of reasoning", citing means they said it straight out and you should be able to find a court document where they explicitly used that reasoning:
> > There are still judges in the US giving lighter sentences or no jail time at all and citing this sort of reasoning.
It is a very different thing from judges being open about these things and it getting pushed underground. I asked about evidence of the former since that was what the person said still happened today. I just wanted to confront that lie, people often lie about these things to make their case seem stronger.
A cursory Google search turned up an example in Canada[1] and Ireland[2]; followed by California passing a law banning use of clothing as evidence of consent last month[3]. Such laws and guidelines are still non-existent in states like Indiana[4].
I have no idea how to find court documents (I'm not a lawyer!), but given the above, I'd find it highly unlikely that the US is faring that much better than Canada and Ireland.
In particular, given that the vast majority of sexual assault and rape cases don't go to trial at all, I don't know at which stage clothing is used as evidence of consent. And as long as it's presented in court, it's a factor in the jury deciding whether to declare the defendant guilty.
But if you want to die on that hill, sure, let's assume that that particular sentence is false.
I.e. that it only used to be the case in the US, it's still the case around the world, and states like California are passing this kind of legislation in 2021 just for shits and giggles.
That doesn't affect any other point made in this conversation, but I hope you enjoy confronting this "lie" =)
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-attire-does-n...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46207304
[3] https://www.kvcrnews.org/california-news/2021-10-12/in-cases...
[4] https://www.thestatehousefile.com/politics/lawmakers-urged-t...
However those objective are very clearly to undermine the foundational principles of justice. Perhaps you find the arguments for this to be very compelling, but it’s simply a fact that metoo set out to promote a presumption of guilt, in all areas of society that it was able to influence. Most metoo advocates entirely avoid addressing this fact, and a lot of people reasonably disagree with metoo because of it.
And as far as concrete responses go, I would think it extremely unjust to lock up somebody purely based on anecdotes about creepy behaviour towards kids. But I also wouldn't hire him as a babysitter or a television presenter.
I don't really think there's a prescriptive solution to this, but I hope society improves on it. Reality is what it is.
Indeed, reading allegations and treating that as research does come off as naive.
> Yeah, they're jokes, but when I stopped being a child that stopped being funny, you can still see him making these jokes int interviews about his situation.
It’s cool that your sense of humor about that changed during adolescence. That’s not true for many people around the world, especially people who are now in their 40s+. Mainstream standup comedians were joking about domestic abuse in the 2000s still. People joke about dark and inappropriate shit all of the time. Real life isn’t like the workplace or campuses where everything is politically correct.
This is called paternity fraud, because once pregnant the father will have no say in the disposition of the child, AND will be on the hook for child support. That's 18 years of free money for the mom! To quote Lynch's Dune, "And for the father, nothing."
> This is called paternity fraud
It's called rape. He consented to sexual activity under the impression birth control was being used. If it wasn't, the consent was invalid.
And I'm not sure what you consider to be "ordinary standards of evidence", but you started this subthread by insisting that we should automatically assume allegations were not credible, even in a case where multiple people have independently testified to the same pattern of behaviour and a court has ruled them to be credible, and then went off on an entirely irrelevant tangent about how a half-jokey comment some trashy talk show host made about how to have a second baby with a partner who changed his mind about more kids could, in theory, lead to "18 years free money for the mom". I'm struggling to understand any connection at all between the points you're bringing up other than the repeated insinuation that women are inherently untrustworthy...
But of course we attack the victim here. Because he's a man. Because he's been accused of DV. Because he's a wimp and couldn't take it. Because he's selfish, self-destructive, and abandoned his kids. Right?
Well, if I had my way I'd investigate each and every suicide that was a result of a justice system action. I would take a microscope the proceedings and to the allegations. This man spent his life to say something, to warn us, and I think we could at least take his last, most serious complaint, seriously. (And by implication, don't use the act of despair to further heap blame and abuse on the man.)
And make no mistake, it IS a warning, to the ~10% of marriages that will end in a high conflict divorce, and our concept of right and wrong, just and unjust, is not reflected in the family court system. It is arbitrary, personal and extraordinarily biased for the mother. For those women willing to take it, the high-conflict divorce DV allegation is a super-weapon that you can use to utterly destroy your opponent - not just win, but take all his tools away for fighting, and take all public support for him and his rights. It's extraordinary.
Given how our judicial system works, if I had an public known history for jokes about rape, it would be even easier to mount a case of domestic abuse on me.
If a divorce will grant me unique custody of my children or money and get rid of my ex, I would be ready to lie my way out.
Unless there is proof, these are just allegations. And if I were to lose my children due to the court system being biased, I'd be pretty devastated as well.
Every judge has it out for me.
It's not my fault my kids don't like me; their mom keeps poisoning them against me with lies and my visitation schedule makes it impossible for me to be in their lives.
No one ever believes me, they all just want to think I'm the bad guy.
You don't need to construct hypotheticals here because we're talking about a specific person. He pretty much sounded like what I just wrote. How many years can you listen to someone give the same excuses over and over - it's never their fault, it's because X, Y or Z - before you figure out that they're not the unluckiest person in the world but just an asshole?
You seem stuck on the scenario where, by construction, an actually guilty person is accused, and then claims the allegations are false.
But you haven't really engaged, it seems to me, with another scenario where, by construction, an actually innocent person is falsely accused, and then claims the allegations are false. Is your position that this just never happens, and never could happen? Or it happens so infrequently it can be ignored?
Now I wouldn't say that my dad was a good dad, but he wasn't an abuser.
I wouldn't doubt that. This is called parental alienation and it happens extremely often if my lawyer friends are to be believed.
At work, a female colleague described similar situation. A family member had a child with her husband, divorced him and took the child to the United States so they'd be out of his reach. Apparently it's easier to illegally enter the country if you have a child with you. Now she sends my colleague and her family threatening messages using fake instagram accounts, taunting them with the fact they will never be able to "ruin her life" now that she's in the USA. She's supposed to be arrested for kidnapping and lose custody of the child if she ever steps foot in my country again.
Autists often don't pick up on that and continues to make unfunny or cringe jokes year after year. That makes them prime targets for false accusations, since the world is full of people like you who will assume they are guilty just because they are socially unaware.
Lack of social awareness isn't an excuse for rape and abuse jokes. You don't need any social awareness to figure out that you shouldn't do that. The concept of "jokes at someone else's expense = bad" isn't hard to grasp for an analytical mind.
Autism is not stupidity. You are not doing "autists" any favor by trying to excuse this behavior.
(Also, for some reason, autistic women aren't seen joking about rape and domestic abuse. Perhaps autism isn't the reason why someone may feel comfortable making these jokes, huh.)
* in its original definition
And difficulty reading social cues doesn't apply in cases where many, many, many people openly and directly explain why jokes at someone else's expense are bad (and correlate with the people being the butt of the joke being mistreated).
I have deconstructed the rape joke in another comment. Maybe to you immediately feel why it's not an OK thing to say. I go through the analysis. We both arrive at the same destination by different means.
Literally to mean “in a literal sense; exactly” not the novel accepted usage to include meaning “figuratively, not literally”.
What definition of social awareness are you using to make that assertion?
If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”
Then, having the necessity to apply that rule, you would need to be able to evaluate “is this contemplated joke going to be at someone’s expense?”
I can’t see how you could correctly evaluate such a predicate if you had literally not any “ability to take the perspective of [nor] empathize with others”. Evaluating that correctly requires at least a shred of social awareness.
* defined as above and referenced originally here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186509
Yeah, that's not what autism assessments mean by "social awareness". When it comes to autism, social awareness is more narrowly defined to be literally that: ability to be aware of what's going on in social settings. This would be things like "reading social cues", "reading emotions", etc. (See [1]). However, let's proceed with your definition.
>If you have literally* not any of that, you might need to have a procedural/analytical rule to tell you “Jokes at someone else’s expense = bad”
First, as I said, autistic people can take perspective of others and empathize with others. What's lacking is the ability to do that through indirect communication, aka "getting the hint".
Second, I do have a rule, and that procedural rule is known as "learning from history", or "taking 5 seconds to google the link between hateful jokes and violence".
The full version of the rule is " Jokes at someone else's expense = bad whenever the people joked about are defined by a characteristic not resulting from their choice".
There are many examples in history how racist / sexist humor being normalized correlated with hate and violence; how "just joking" is used as an excuse to push an agenda[2][3].
You can analyze what makes a joke funny. Take the joke that got a juror dismissed from the Rittenhouse hearings ("Why did the cop shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because he ran out of bullets"). Its punchline is, effectively, "Because you don't need a reason to murder a black person".
Now, if a black person makes this joke, it can be seen as gallows humor - a commentary on the grim situation they find themselves in while interacting with the police - the reality that they don't get to choose. A black person saying "our lives are worth nothing" is calling your attention to a serious problem.
A white person making that joke would be making fun at Jacob Blake's expense (as well as other people killed by police). A white person saying "black people's lives are worth nothing" - well, given the history of racial violence, the premise that this is the person's actual belief may not be excluded; and telling this joke without additional context is harmful, because it would simply reinforce this idea, and put black people in more danger.
There are very good reasons why we should avoid laughing at characteristics that people don't get to choose. I can go on, however - does the above satisfy your inference criteria?
Perhaps it does require * a shred * of social awareness, but to say that autistic people don't have that much would be simply false.
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/erv.2736
[2]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/26/990274685/how-extremists-weap...
[3]https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/sexist-humor-and-rape-proclivity...
Social skills therapy exists and you can learn these things. Poor social awareness does not make up for contributing to a hostile work environment, full stop. Autism means you have to work on yourself and understand your emotional triggers to a degree non-autistic people just don’t. That’s just our lot in life.
Autistic people aren’t dumb. We do understand when actions have consequences. The reasons why may seem arbitrary to us, but again, it doesn’t mean the consequences aren’t real or that we can violate the psychological safety of others with impunity. Yeah, that may mean getting fired for telling edgy jokes to understand you don’t make edgy jokes at work. I’m 100% ok with that as an autistic person.
No such assumption is made. However, rape jokes are a signal that gives some credibility to such accusations.
Just like the knowledge of someone making constantly jokes about murdering a particular person (say, Jensson) would be very much on the radar as a suspect in case Jensson accuses that person of attempted murder.
SA may have had a lot of that shit back in the day (and may still in some corners, I’ve never spent much time in FYAD), but it shouldn’t take long at all for anyone to notice that the community there has evolved well past that kind of exclusionary behavior.
And it's still claimed that violent video games normalised violence, despite research suggesting otherwise. So is the above claim something that is researched fact, or your opinion?
Exhibit 1: A bad-faith question: something that is very eaisly answered with a single Google search, but instead asked in a conversation to cast doubt on what the other person just said.
[1] https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/sexist-humor-and-rape-proclivity...
Google isn't research. Search results only have to look right, they don't need to be right. That aside, it's not my claim to provide evidence for, that burden is on the claimant.
Attacking my character with an ad-hom, and suggesting I'm acting in bad-faith doesn't impress me either - notice how I say "the burden of proof is yours" without calling you lazy, or implying you have an agenda.
wrt "Sexist Humor and Sexual Aggression Against Women" - do you have a link to the original study and/or methodology (e.g. the paywalled pdf)?
The claim being explored here is "Rape jokes normalize sexual violence" - how that is to be interpreted is open to question, but:
- The study appears to focus on sexist and/or "control-primed" men specifically, so not a representative sample of men in general. The original link even specifies "sexist men" - again, I'd like to know how this is defined.
"[men in the study] scores in hostile sexism reported a higher rape proclivity when exposed to sexist (vs. neutral) humor"
- How is "rape proclivity" gauged/determined? Incidentally, I'm suspicious of "self reported" anything unless it is explicitly confirmed as "self validated" as well - that game has already played out in studies describing "self reported victims of sexual assault" who didn't incidentally agree with that label, but who'd descriptions where matched against a pre-determined definition of assault, whether the subject agreed with that definition or not.
- what timescale does this represent? I consider the original claim to be one of long-term, or persistent effect per the term "normalize"; not a short-term suggestive one.
Your first comment used autistic people as an example to advance your argument. When an autistic person used personal experience to counter your argument, you defended your argument by accusing the autistic person of lacking the social awareness needed to understand the point they just made.
Frankly, your comments aren't making any sense.
Seems like you're referring to me here, and again, are making unsubstantiated assumptions. Is that a hobby of yours?
I've told this particular joke, and didn't find it problematic in the past. I learned.
See, it doesn't have to do with social aweareness. After thinking about it, I figured it's bad to think that way (as explained above).
>other autistic people should just naturally understand that rape jokes are bad
Never said that. Please don't lie.
>doesn't prove anything either.
Your claim that autistic people are more likely to make that joke because of their autism is
1) incorrect, as proven at least by this counterexample, plus the analysis above, and observation that autistic women aren't seen telling rape jokes at the same rate as all men;
2) offensive to autistic people, by implying that figuring this out is a-priori beyond their reach;
3) not a claim you are qualified to make.
Please stop.
Autism doesn't make people douchebags, making rape jokes does.
The fact that somebody would act different if they grew up in a different environment isn't an argument for anything. If I grew up in Jim Crow era America, my likelihood of being a segregationist is increased which proves nothing about the virtue of that belief.
Also, "baby burning jokes" are exclusively funny to 14 year olds and the perpetually adolescent mind. They're not considered the height of comedy in any mainstream circle.
First, I agree: rape is a bad choice for humor. For a number of reasons.
Second, sexual assault is a huge problem and it has affected my own life in various ways. People I love have been sexually assaulted. I've seen the damage and I'm sure that the damage runs deeper than I can truly know.
However...
What mind finds deliberately hurting another
human being an enjoyable pastime?
It's gallows humor, more or less. The idea is that you're laughing because you know that rape/murder/whatever is wrong. The jokes generally make no sense otherwise. For many it's even sort of a coping mechanism. It's not entirely dissimilar to the appeal of horror/slasher movies - folks generally aren't watching them because they think murder and torture are "enjoyable pastimes" in a literal sense.
Or when somebody says, "I'm gonna kill the next telemarketer who tries to sell me an extended car warranty!" We understand that they are using hyperbole: murder (a thing we acknowledge is wrong) would clearly be an unethical and disproportionate response. Therein lies the humor.
Again, please let me restate that I agree with you: rape is a very poor choice for humor. But your posts lead me to believe there is a deeper misunderstanding at work.
I know, and that's a problem. I was in that number, too.
To be clear, I didn't say that this is what people who tell the joke think. I was explaining why, as you said, rape is a bad choice of humor to the parent commentor, who didn't see it as such.
>It's gallows humor, more or less.
Gallows humor would be me saying, to another Jewish person, that we'll going to be debating whether a particular act was antisemitic or not all the way to the concentration camp.
A sexual assault survivor telling that rape joke would be gallows humor, too.
> When somebody says, "I'm gonna kill the next telemarketer who tries to sell me an extended car warranty!" do you think they are literally glorifying murder???
No, but that has to do with the reality that telemarketers aren't being actually murdered en masse (whereas, as #metoo showed, women are raped en masse).
But if somebody said "I'm gonna kill the next n----- that touches my driveway", I wouldn't feel easy - because shit like that does happen [1].
> The idea is that you're laughing because you know that rape/murder/whatever is wrong
Hate to be Captain Obvious again, but if the idea of rape was, indeed, as outlandish as murdering a telemarketer, every other woman wouldn't have a sexual assault story to tell.
Also, "rape is wrong" alone doesn't make the joke funny.
Here's another joke to consider:
Why did the Kenosha police shoot Jacob Blake seven times? Because they ran out of bullets.
Instead, the judge judged the person making the joke as too biased to be on the jury.
The ability to judge people by the kind of jokes they make, when, and to whom is what we're talking about here.
>You don't have to make it more horrifying than it already is by assuming that everybody who jokes about a disturbing topic is actually endorsing it in a literal way.
The assumption is not there :) In the sense that perpetuating a stupid joke like that does not mean the person is endorsing it consciously.
But the net effect amounts to the same.
Going back to rape, we'd live in a better society if men were taught by the culture that sexual intercourse with an unwilling participant is inherently unenjoyable.
Just imagine that, for a second. Would that joke be a single bit funny?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/us/texas-driveway-killing...
------
P.S.: You seem to have assumed that the question I asked ("What mind finds deliberately hurting another human being an enjoyable pastime?") was rhetorical, with an obvious answer. It's not. It's a question to think about.
My personal answer is: "a mind that I don't want my mind to be". What's yours?
However...
Hate to be Captain Obvious again
[unlike a rape joke, the joke about murdering telemarketers
is okay because of] the reality that telemarketers aren't
being actually murdered en masse (whereas, as #metoo showed,
women are raped en masse)
Gallows humor would be me saying, to another Jewish person,
that we'll going to be debating whether a particular act was
antisemitic or not all the way to the concentration camp.
A sexual assault survivor telling that rape joke would be
gallows humor, too.
However, you can joke about concentration camps, and that's gallows humor, despite not having actually been sent to one? As one of Jewish descent, I do not dispute that the reality of the holocaust has affected you in myriad direct and indirect ways that I can not fully understand.[1] But the same could be said of sexual assault. The statistics are stark: essentially, literally everybody has been affected by it directly or indirectly. I haven't been raped, but loved ones have.
And how does this relate to the telemarketers example? You say it's okay to joke about killing them, because telemarketer murder is not really a thing and therefore we recognize it as a joke, however, you can joke about Nazis when Nazis (and their ideological cousins/descendants) are still very much a thing?
In the sense that perpetuating a stupid joke like that
does not mean the person is endorsing it consciously.
But the net effect amounts to the same.
But I think you're overlooking some key things here. When examining humor it's crucial to understand not only the topic being joked about, but the target or butt of the joke.
If I say, "so-and-so is a shitty person; he probably rapes gerbils in his spare time" then that is a pretty bad choice. I wouldn't say that. But it also is pretty impossible to frame that as even an implicit or unconscious endorsement of rape. While a poor choice, it can't be compared to a "joke" like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape" or whatever.
Going back to rape, we'd live in a better society if men
were taught by the culture that sexual intercourse with
an unwilling participant is inherently unenjoyable.
Other forms of rape are probably more about a lack of empathy and/or communication. Partner 1 understands that unwilling sex is bad, but has deluded themselves into thinking that sex is really what Partner 2 wants.
---
[1] However, my grandfather (Jew) nearly died in a Nazi labor camp, so I'm not entirely disconnected from that reality either... at least we can hate Nazis together.
>OK, so let me get this straight. Only actual, literal sexual assault survivors can joke about it and have their jokes justified as gallows humor?
I never said only, did I? I said that in this context, it would be gallows humor.
By definition, gallows humor is joking about a grim situation that the person making the joke finds themselves in. A rape victim joking about rape in that way would be an example of gallows humor.
>However, you can joke about concentration camps, and that's gallows humor, despite not having actually been sent to one?
Yes, because I am Jewish, if that was not clear from the context, and the possibility of being killed for being Jewish isn't a remote fantasy, as you know full well. 2 of my great-grandparents died fighting, grandpa on father's side went to Berlin and back. That doesn't matter for my argument, though; what matters more is that the Pittsburgh shooting happened here and now.
Joking possibility of being killed for being Jewish is an example of gallows humor when you are a Jew and that possibility exists for you.
>you can joke about Nazis when Nazis are still very much a thing?
You can always joke about the Nazis. This doesn't have to do with them being a thing or not. It has to do with who is the butt of the joke.
The fine print to "jokes at someone's expense = bad" is "...when someone is defined by characteristics they didn't choose". Rape victims didn't choose to be raped. Jews didn't choose to be Jewish. People don't choose who they are attracted to, or what color their skin is.
But being a Nazi is a choice. Joke away.
Whether something is a thing or not a thing has to do with whether what you say will be perceived as a figure of speech or an actual concern, that doesn't really factor in here.
>But I think you're overlooking some key things here. When examining humor it's crucial to understand not only the topic being joked about, but the target or butt of the joke.
To the contrary, that was exactly my point from the very beginning :)
>If I say, "so-and-so is a shitty person; he probably rapes gerbils in his spare time" then that is a pretty bad choice. I wouldn't say that. But it also is pretty impossible to frame that as even an implicit or unconscious endorsement of rape.
Well of course, because gerbils being raped is not a concern. We're on the same page here.
>The rapists aren't under the illusion that what they're doing is enjoyable.
They enjoy the power. They aren't raping out of obligation, after all.
>Other forms of rape are probably more about a lack of empathy and/or communication. Partner 1 understands that unwilling sex is bad, but has deluded themselves into thinking that sex is really what Partner 2 wants.
Potato potato, and it's incredibly common.
And if they clearly don't want it, then the rapist thinks they should, so it doesn't matter.
I know at least two women who's been raped by their spouses over extended periods of time off the top of my head. Many more who were raped / sexually assaulted at some point.
Rapist Brock Turner's father complained that his son getting justice is a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action". That's how these people see it - it's "just some action" to them.
Jokes like "9 out of 10 people" help perpetuate this view.
Do we still need the help of Captain Logical Consistency? :)
Listen, though: your heart's in the right place. That's really the important thing.
I mean, I'm not here to "win" a discussion, just hoping to present my point of view. And it looks to me like we agree on everything, so I'm surprised to leave you with this impression.
In any case, it was great to talk!
It does. There are also a lot of jokes about burning babies etc. Just because you don't understand that sort of humour doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
How do you stop a million Jewish babies from bleeding to death? Holocauterization.
(It's really hard to think of a joke about burning Jewish babies. This one took about 30 minutes, and it isn't even baby-specific.)
As a half-Jew, this seems like innocent wordplay. But if it's problematic or harmful, I'd like to understand why.
TL;DR: this article goes into detail:
https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
Below, I'll explain using this particular joke. --------
Context is key here: are you laughing about our world being so so fucked up that the million deaths actually happened (the good), about it being funny that a million Jewish kids actually perished (the bad), or are just shoehorning a taboo topic/horrific event into a pun for pure shock value (the ugly)?
- The good is gallows humor, which is what someone would perceive once you identify as having Jewish heritage. It's making laughter out of tears, and it's an old, and good tradition. This particular joke would be a big stretch, but can be pulled off.
- The bad is Neo-Nazi land. The goal is to not make people laugh, but to trivialize mass murder. Jews were dehumanized, described as vermin that needs to ne exterminated prior to Holocaust — and it has heen an effective strategy to normalize the genocide. You can see the same kind of "jokes" used to send a message about South American refugees today. This is
- The ugly is juvenile idiocy of a child who just learned a bad word, and enjoys the shock it causes. The harm on such ugly jokes is that after evey edgelord makes them a million times, not only is the shock value completely gone, but people get used for the Holocaust being that-thing-people-joke-about-that-Jews-whine-about, without ever trying to understand it. They've seen it enough times that familiarity starts to feel like understanding ("I did Nazi that one coming! That's gonna holo-cost you!”). That's the loss, for the sake of a rather stupid gain.
Depending on what context you make the joke in, it can be either.
Perhaps it wouldn't be wise to tell it to someone crying at a Holocaust memorial mourning the loss of their family.
But at a Chabad dinner, when the topic of conversation is how Jews have always used humor to get through the difficult times — not the worst way to make yourself a schlimazel :)
[1] https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
I don't see any claim that they speak for the spectrum, i.e. no appeal to authority/identity. Sure, it means they don't provide a basis for their claims, but in this case I am attacking what I see as an invalid basis.
Also:
> by saying that autistic people wouldn't know that..
They said "Autists often don't.." i.e they aren't speaking about all/any/every, but some. They are talking about some subset of the population.
> Perhaps you should direct your comment to them.
What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business. Given the hedge of talking about some autistic people it's almost certainly true without qualification.
> or even claiming to speak from personal experience
OP didn't talk from PE of other autistic people, but purely from their own behaviour, i.e. an n=1 generalisation.
As an autistic person, who knows other autistic people, and is a part of online community of autistic people, I'll go out on limb and say that the OP is talking out of their ass, and I can comfortably speak on the behalf of the community on this topic. Other people who identified as being on the spectrum in this thread agreed.
OP never said they were autistic. It's just what they think autistic people would do.
It's an n=√-1 generalization: purely imaginary, and on top of it, insulting, because figuring out why a joke like "9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape" is bad doesn't take that much.
Particularly because so much has been written about it. Go ahead and read [1], it's an excellent article. Or my comments elsewhere.
TL;DR: portraying the condition of "being a jerk" as an autistic trait is a jerk move.
>What I feel is worth spending time criticising is my business.
Then perhaps you should spend less time criticizing, and more time getting a clue — though again, I'm sure you have different plans regarding that too.
[1] https://theconversation.com/psychology-behind-the-unfunny-co...
It works both ways though; sometimes I'm trying to tell someone to go fuck themselves in a polite way, and for some reason it takes them forever to get the hint.
I've learned to be patient in either case.
They say that the history of making such jokes makes the accusations more weight, which is a reasonable thing to say. We are not putting someone behind the bars for making a joke.
There was a comment which didn't get enough attention during that trial: the defense claimed that fewer then 1 in 1000 women who suffer domestic abuse are killed by their domestic partners and therefore allegations of spousal abuse by OJ Simpson did not constitute supporting evidence.
But: this is wrong. Because once a woman has been killed, if her domestic partner was an abuser then almost 80% of the time the abuser did it (given reasonable other factual assumptions - i.e. pretty obviously if they weren't in the same state at the time then we can exclude it etc..)
The key part of the issue is that once an event has occurred, the Bayesian prior has changed: we are no longer evaluating the same initial probability.
There are significantly fewer false allegations than real ones. I'd be amazed if more than 1% were proven to be false, and it's likely far less than that.
To assume that the alleged victim is lying would be incredibly harmful; many more people would refuse to make an accusation if they weren't going to be believed.
Your opinion on this is completely wrong.
In my case I was stabbed by her and still charged as if I was the aggressor. The state of California refused to drop the charges even with this evidence and I couldn’t afford a lawyer to fight it. I plead to a misdemeanor and now I cannot own a firearm for the rest of my life.
I don’t even like talking about it since the stigma around it is so large and I know people think I’m a liar because why would a woman lie about that?
> many more people would refuse to make an accusation if they weren't going to be believed
Of course. That's the point. Why should people be able to accuse others of serious crimes without one shred of evidence?
Are people innocent or guilty by default? That's what this boils down to.
> There are significantly fewer false allegations than real ones.
Does it matter how many false allegations are made? If there's a chance that it could be false, you must assume it is until proven otherwise.
Fundamentally, this is an issue of false positives and false negatives. Most societies are founded on the principle that false negatives are better than false positives: better to let a criminal go free than convict an innocent. It seems at some point western societies experienced an inversion of values: now it's better to convict innocents than let a criminal go free.
This is dangerous. The potential for abuse is obvious.
When it comes to investigating a crime, it's neither. It's not up to the police (or the public) to determine guilt; that's a job for the court. The job of the police is to investigate what happened. When a crime is reported to the police they must believe what the victim is saying until they have a damn good reason not to. If they started with a presumption of the victim making a false allegation very few domestic abuse crimes would ever get investigated, let alone prosecuted.
The potential for abuse is obvious.
Domestic abusers already claim they're being accused falsely. If the police and public assumed they were telling the truth they would get away with it much more, and they already get away with it a lot. That's the abuse that people should be much more concerned about.
> If they started with a presumption of the victim making a false allegation very few domestic abuse crimes would ever get investigated, let alone prosecuted.
I agree that these crimes must be investigated thoroughly. Is it really okay that men can be arrested based on allegations though? I don't think that should ever happen unless guilt is proven.
> Domestic abusers already claim they're being accused falsely.
I don't deny that. The guilty will lie to protect themselves, this is a fact. However, claiming false accusations does not imply guilt. It could be true. The possibility cannot be dismissed.
> If the police and public assumed they were telling the truth they would get away with it much more, and they already get away with it a lot.
Are you prepared to sacrifice innocents to make sure all these slippery abusers are punished? Stopping an abuser or making sure the innocent are not wrongfully punished, what's more important?
> That's the abuse that people should be much more concerned about.
Does the suffering of innocent men not matter? It certainly doesn't seem to bother the people I've talked to. I've always thought this was pretty interesting.
Aren't people supposed to go to prison after they're sentenced?
>"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and yet here we are
The fact that these same two statements are in the same paragraph seems sarcastic, if not ironic.
Yet women, as a group, have been exempted from these truths by the state and society on any matter relating to domestic violence. This is an unearned and unjust exemption that must end.
This is not against women because I make the same objection to any other [group, subject] exemptions. The "hell hath no fury" quote is merely to remind people that women are people who feel people things, who rage, have ambition, can be cruel, and so on.
It is on the basis of this exemption that society has given every woman a gun aimed at the head of every man she's ever met, trigger pulled with a tweet.
(It occurs to me that this exemption is ironically dehumanizing to women. It puts them on a pedestal of purity, and in so doing separates them from humanity by ignoring the reality of their human foibles. Women are gross poopy stinky hateful angry greedy clever loving fearing homo-sapiens, just like everyone else.)
This is a wild claim you’ve been repeating without a shred of evidence. It’s offensively untrue to anyone who’s seen how hard it is for a victim of abuse to get it taken seriously, and I really think you need to produce hard evidence backing it up. Your comment history sounds like you’ve spent time in a bar listening to bitter guys complain about their ex-wives and treated it as a research paper.
>to even doubt a woman's allegation is to condone violence against women
I'd go so far as to say it's naive to consider that the problem of believing women too easily when they accuse men is significant _compared to_ the problem of not believing women who accuse men. Unfortunately those are always in comparison, since more of one means less of the other.
>here we are, giving scorned women the literal power of life and death over the object of their rage
A client killing themselves over legal consequences is a tragedy that might speak to those legal consequences, but it's unrealistic and unfair to say the other client was given power over life and death.
200% correct! There are a lot of conniving folks out there who use the system to falsely claim victim hood of domestic abuse. This typically leads to more undesired outcomes than originally anticipated.
Also buried in that massive thread is a post by one of the women he abused. An actual court of law, not just a web 1.0 forum, found him guilty of squandering marital assets and domestic abuse. By all accounts, he killed himself to avoid taking responsibility.
Lowtax's was a relentless downward story, where he squandered everything he had with no redemption arc. It's very sad, but it's not the bizarre strawman scenario you've concocted.
In those circles it’s used as a way to diminish and remove oxygen for the issue of domestic violence.
I won’t go into it’s merits, or demerits, further. Just an FYI as to why this argument deservedly gets suspicion.
Certainly seems thay way. In my country, there is a female criminal psychologist who confirmed this based on her own experience. In the context of divorce and child custody, she said most accusations are likely to be false. It immediately became a media scandal.
If you want to push the idea that a significant number of these cases are bogus, you really have to provide some evidence for that. Domestic violence (against both women and men) is real, and people (usually women) often die as a result of it. Spouting off sexist tropes that women are just going it because they're 'scorned' really isn't acceptable.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... [3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
And a hundred men kill themselves every week in UK. Suicide is often associated with relationship abuse, if an abusive woman makes her spouse commit suicide then that is also murder, but it wont go into the statistics. It is important to realize that women can also abuse men, and that this can be just as damaging even if the bruises aren't always visible, the psychological damage can still be enough to make them kill themselves. And false allegations is one way for women to abuse men, it is extremely powerful since it will ruin many of his friendships making him lonely and more likely to kill himself. The more people she can take away from his life the more likely he is to kill himself.
Note I'm not saying that we shouldn't protect women, just that we should also work to protect men.