Comment by standardUser
20 hours ago
I knew nothing of this at the time, but I just read the accusatory letter: https://scala-open-letter.github.io/
Reading that letter it seems that Jon was being accused of... nothing in particular? I'm not even sure what he could refute. There's no accusations of consent violations. There's really only the one phrase - "sexually harass and victimize women" - but without examples that just sounds like a pot shot. Especially given that they identify a "systematic pattern", which is apparently a pattern with no specific examples of wrongdoing.
And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men. Especially when it comes to their interactions with women. And I believe these women probably had plenty of valid complaints, in part because I know very well how aggressive, oblivious and entitled a lot of men can be, and how many "normal" interactions between men and women do involve consent violations, if not assault or worse. So given what I know about the dangers women face routinely, and the vague and mild allegations in this letter, I'd guess like the biggest crime he committed was being another guy who's god awful at dealing with women, dating and sex.
Unless there is more that I don't know about.
The open letter was a response to some specific allegations, including https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...
Thanks for that. Everything in that letter is, unfortunately, upsettingly, fairly common. But I'd want him out of my life and professional settings too if that's the way he was acting.
> I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men
Is it based on personal experience or some statistical properties of the sexes?
The most common drivers for consciously planned long-term anti-social behavior are ASPD and NPD (and possibly BPD but it's rarer and not as conductive to long-term planning in my understanding). The exact numbers vary but it does in fact appear these traits are 2-4x more common in men.
However, I still find them way too high to believe anyone making such claims. Over time, anybody will come into contact with enough people to run into several of these and if all it takes is one accusation without any repercussions for false accusers then false accusations will keep happening.
> And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men.
It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society
It's really not. Many people are strongly inclined to believe claimed victims and disbelieve reflexive "I didn't do it" claims. Accusations have a lot of strength generally.
Does "believe victims" avoid triggering your feelings better?
It just happens in this case that the accusations flow predominantly one way due to common behavior differences between men and women, and historically it's been one of the areas where the allegations were least believed by the legal system* so "believe women" becomes shorthand for "believe claimed victims of sexual harassment or worse."
Consider the stories around Weinstein or R Kelly. "Open secret" sorta thing where people in the know avoided the guilty party. Yet nobody took it seriously enough to take legal action. There are a lot of other crimes you couldn't get away with in the open like that for so long.
> It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society
It's amazing the sorts of things men will say to women regularly with frequently no repercussions. Not everyone who's creepy or makes threats ends up raping or murdering a woman, but of the men who DO murder women, you'll see a ton of creepy/threatening past behavior.
It becomes "desperate times, desperate measures."
It's hard, of course, for other men to police other men directly because the creeps are usually smart enough to not say it in front of other men.
So you get to a situation where a lot of us men have:
1) heard men talk amongst themselves when women aren't around after-the-fact about creepy-ass-things they've done
2) heard women talk about men doing creepy-ass things when other men aren't around
so updating your priors to favor "lean towards believing a claim by a woman over a denial by a man" is entirely reasonable until someone can show that false accusations are a big chunk of the accusations. You hear a lot about false accusations on certain parts of the internet; I have seen very few accusations at all in real life and sadly none of them have been false - they've all been the "creep wasn't even smart enough to avoid witnesses" type.
And there's just not a lot of women raping or murdering men happening - some significant physical differences, to start with - soooooo it doesn't seem like something we can be sex-blind about.
> It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society
I'd say it's an OK stance to take (e.g., based on past experience) if one of the conclusions you take from it is that it calls for a process that isn't similarly biased. If you recognize and acknowledge your own bias, you should be able to critically challenge it and/or be interested in neutral fact-finding, due process, and so on.
For myself, I'd say it's less general distrust of men and more the observation that many situations in society greatly favor men in their power dynamics and make it more probable for men to misbehave, i.e. given the option.
Your response and what the above is responding to are different things. Being interested in neutral fact finding and due process are polar opposites to just believing someone because they are a woman and distrusting someone because they are a man.
I think the neutral acceptable position, which I acknowledge is my opinion, would be to trust the woman enough to seriously validate their claims. And to persecute the other party proportionate to actual evidence. I think that is an extremely difficult line to tow especially to make people feel listened to but to just go all in on little evidence is bad for society and bad for those people who do suffer real trauma
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It’s one of those idiosyncrasies we’ve fallen into on the way to equality.
People haven’t trained themselves to do some simple thought exercises such as “what if I reversed the genders/ethnicities/whatever in this claim.”
It’ll get better though. People will mature.
I imagine if you'd had the countless conversations I have had with women over the years about men and intimacy, you wouldn't find this amazing in the least.
Not nothing. The events described by the original letter are very something. Something rapey. https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...
And none of that was shown false. It looks like all that the court said was "no evidence was provided".
Duh imagine being a victim there and providing "evidence". It looks like any text messages would be careful and all the stuff would be IRL (if he did it).
He himself could say "I didn't sleep with a young attendee of a conference I helped her get into, by getting her drunk in my airbnb" on this letter. But he didn't deny it. He just said "fake evidence" and "short relationship". C'mon...
It's clear as mud.
> It's clear as mud.
NGL, love this phrase for this situation; I'm reading it as: "utterly opaque but also clearly what it is (mud)"