Pretty frightening, really. These kinds of experience have absolutely though subtly changed how I interact with people. Particularly, as a man, with women and children.
Once my parents were visiting me and we took my kids to a playground. While there, my dad noticed a girl sitting on the ground crying, and seemed to be hurt. He looked for a moment to see if anyone was coming, and then went over to her and asked if she was alright, if she needed help, and where her parents were. He didn't get a clear response from her so he started walking around to the various adults around the playground inquiring if the hurt girl crying was theirs. Finally he got to one group of women and after asking one of them said something along the lines of, "yeah, I saw you over there bothering her" in an accusatory tone. Seeing where it was going, he put his hands up and just walked away without saying another word. The girl remained there crying, alone.
It was actually kind of a scary because later that day I realized how in that moment that woman, who my dad had never met before, could probably have destroyed his life right then and there if she wanted to.
These days, in the back of my mind I'm always considering how my actions, particularly towards women and children, could be misconstrued. When I'm at the playground with my kids, I don't talk to kids I don't know, at all, for any reason, even if they talk to me. I just smile and make myself busy with my own kids.
The correct response is to stand your ground and say "No, I'm trying to connect a hurt child with their parents. Are you their parent? If not, we'll cut this favor short and just call child services".
Then do it. Call 911, say there's an injured, unattended child at the playground, and you're getting a hostile response from folks as you try to locate the guardian so you'd appreciate it if a social worker collected the kid until the parents can be found.
There is nothing illegal about speaking to a child, and when you soft play people like this you empower them. Let them have to show a cop a DL to get their kid out a squad car to learn their lesson if they can't handle polite help.
(Also, what is this narrative around HN about being accused of nefariousness at playgrounds? I used to eat my lunch at one near me because it was the only park with a trash can nearby and I didn't want to lug my trash back to my apartment before going on my way towards the city -- nobody ever said a word to me aside from asking for a ball if it rolled over.)
> Are you their parent? If not, we'll cut this favor short and just call child services".
> Then do it. Call 911, say there's an injured, unattended child at the playground, and you're getting a hostile response from folks as you try to locate the guardian
That is the same thing, though! ... very quickly escalating a probable mundane situation to very serious accusations!
I'm the father of a 3 year old daughter, who I take to the playground multiple times per week. This is in Brooklyn, NYC. I haven't had any issues. But I believe the horror stories, there are just a sufficient number of crazy people out there, overly concerned "karens", or reddit warriors, or whatever. People overly confident in their judgement based on a cursory one-sided description of events. It seems you want to "fight fire with fire" or "play hardball" because that seems fair or necessary, but ... jeez. This is why guys are cautious and disengage.
Involving the police in that situation would be an insane and risky escalation. The girl has a cold, anti-social caregiver/parent. That's sad, not illegal. There were zero reasons to involve the police. What happens when we call the police and the woman lies and says one of us was groping the child and her friends corroborate her lie? I'm not taking that risk.
Don't try to out-crazy a crazy person. That's not a game I'm going to play.
This came out really petty and evil, suggesting revenge as taking away other people's kids just because you don't like them, and lying to the authorities.
In the original post they had confirmed that they were the parents, and were aware of her situation. While their response was rude, that's not a reason to threaten them to call 911 with lies, or to actually do it. I suggest you reread the original scenario.
I don't know. I might do that depending on $country. Person A's idiotic comment shouldn't punish the actual parent. So I would only call police if it is helpful. I have called police when I found a kid before. while I was in the phone I found the parents so said all good. I think the cop was relieved! But this is not in the US.
I agree with this statement. While it's not 'your job' to save the child, if you've already started along the path, you might as well see it through to the end.
If you never found the child's parents, you'd have to call CPS. Being prevented from finding the child's parents, just necessitates you move that step forward.
Of course, it's not 'your job' so technically you could abandon the child at any point but it does feel a bit heartless to give a kid hope, then say 'meh you're on your own, this is too troublesome'. As for just leaving the child with others who are complaining, I doubt that's a good idea. They were making no move to help, and bystander effect will probably keep them from ever doing a thing.
It´s already a long time ago, I was on my way home when I saw a young boy crying. Turns out he got disconnected from his parents on public transport and totally lost where he was in some other part of town. When I tried to calm him down, I was making sure to stand several meters apart. We called his mother on my phone and I actually brought him to the station where she would pick him up. The whole time, I was keeping several meters distance and making sure to speak extra loud and formally, to make clear what I was doing with a crying child from a different ethnicity obv not mine. This was in a semi-civilized country in europe, not the "US". And still I was worried it would "look wrong". Weird times.
Wow, sounds like that person's brain has fried itself if it jumps to conclusions like that. Which region or general area do you live? What has happened to common sense in the community?
It's not just you. Men in general are realizing the risks and are changing their behavior and environment in order to protect themselves from accusations. Everything from ensuring witnesses are always present to simply not interacting at all.
To be fair, victim-blaming has always been a risk women have had to contend with, the novelty is mostly that perhaps men are now exposed to it as well.
That is a real shame. I have had almost exclusively positive interactions with the other parents and kids at the playground. Maybe a different culture where you are.
> I have had almost exclusively positive interactions with the other parents and kids at the playground.
These stories were all over Reddit for years. I remember a thread asking for examples of things Reddit led them to believe that weren’t true, and the top voted comment was that Reddit made them think that going to the playground as a lone dad would cause women to view them as a predator. In reality, going to the playground as a dad in most places is a non-event. It’s common for dads to be there alone with their kids. When I go, it’s a mix of moms and dads and we all talk and interact.
Yet to a non-parent reading Reddit it seemed like going to the park as a dad was asking for trouble. The story was repeated so often.
I’m sure these events do happen some times. When it does, I wouldn’t be surprised if the accuser was reading their own Reddit equivalent social media website where stories about men being creeps at the playground get passed around as fact. To them, it’s just how they see the world working because they’ve heard it repeated so often.
The problem here is the asymmetric nature of outcomes. The vast majority of these types of interactions will be positive, but it only takes 1 to ruin someone's life or reputation, that forces over-correction in behavior
Honestly it’s rare, it’s not normal. But it’s also so scary I just won’t risk it, however small the risk. You can’t tell which strangers are crazy.
My wife, on the other hand, is the parent who will go over and play with all the children while the parents are on their phones. But she’s a woman, so it’s different.
The problem is that if anyone at any time feels like they're just annoyed with you or don't want you around anymore they can make an accusation, completely unfounded, that will destroy your life.
The problem is is that a lot of guys walking around that haven't had it happen to them assume it hasn't happened to them because they've been doing everything right when really you've just been lucky so far.
I experienced a similar situation and decided from then on to get a second adult involved before assisting a stranger's kid.
In my situation, a girl was stuck at the top of the highest climbing fixture I've ever seen at a public playground. She was crying for a couple minutes without aid, so I walked over to tell her that I'd try to find her parent. The mother sprinted over and yelled to leave her daughter alone, then left the playground w/ her daughter.
I grew up in a small village. Such towns place social cohesion above all. As a child I thought that as long as I am right, I'd be able to reason my way out of everything. But I learned that in a crowd shit can go from 0 to 11 very fast, which is why I have a deep fear of people, and especially crowds. When you're there with one person you might have a slim chance of reasoning with them, but crowds behave unpredictably, emotionally, and violently. They almost always follow the most charismatic leader, not the most logical one. The older I get, the more I hate people and the more disgusted I am with them. I understand why so many old people are bitter cunts. I want to make it until retirement and then move far away from everyone else, just me and my internet connection. I want to gain financial independence so that I don't need to rely on people's petty games to make a living.
I still try to find those few people around me who aren't garbage, but it's a tough job.
While my fear of crowds may not be as strong as yours, I see your point of view. In most situations, it doesn't take a lot for a crowd to become a mob.
> It was actually kind of a scary because later that day I realized how in that moment that woman, who my dad had never met before, could probably have destroyed his life right then and there if she wanted to.
I know what you mean, but he could also have said "fuck off, lady; that's a kid crying, so grow up" and thereby have made clear he was worried about the kid, not some creeper who she hoped to have just told off.
She knew he was just trying to help. I think she didn't appreciate having the crying child brought to her attention which would have interrupted her conversation she was having with her friends.
The insinuation was, "stay out of my business or I'm going to tell a lie that could ruin you". He was clearly not bothering the child, anyone could see that, she could saw it herself. Whatever her game was, it was completely deliberate.
Since the child wasn't actually in any real danger, we chose to simply remove ourselves from that situation and not involves ourselves with a crazy person. Unfortunately being a shitty parent isn't illegal.
I do not know anything about this author’s situation and won’t pretend to, but I did watch a sexual misconduct accusation play out in person once. The speed at which everyone assumed the story was true and turned against the accused was basically instant.
However there were some key details about the accusation that didn’t add up. The accuser tried changing the details of the story once they realized others were noticing the problems with the claims. It also became clear that the accuser had an ulterior motive and stood to benefit from the accused being ostracized. The accuser also had developed a habit of lying and manipulation, which others slowly began to share as additional information.
This was enough to make the situation fall apart among people who knew the details. However, word spread quickly and even years later there are countless people who only remember the initial accusation. Many avoided the accused just to be safe. The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It remains one of the weirdest social situations I’ve seen play out. Like watching someone drop a nuclear bomb on another person’s social life and then seeing how powerless they were to defend against it. In this case it didn’t extend to jobs or career. Their close social circle stuck with them. However I can still run into people years later who think the person is a creep because they heard something about him from a friend of a friend and it stuck with them.
> The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
you mean a movement where an entire half of the population have been treated as less than, coerced, not has the same rights, earn less money, and are still routinely demonized with 2000 year old paleolithic thinking?
why do men think they can get away with everything, and that the moment women try to speak up they are evil?
> The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It's what happens when we see people as stand-ins for their group, but we can't see the individual behind it.
I've seen four "in person", one very public (just purely IRL public).
I didn't see anyone (with one exception) pick sides immediately; although most people's "picked" side was "not involved". (The one exception was a community organizer who definitely has Been Through This Before).
For three of those, I did my own homework - a lot of asking around, and then a lot of conversations with both people. In the end, most of that didn't matter: the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it.
Not excusing anyone who jumps at judgement, but this illustrates the importance of protecting the integrity of due process. People have over time seem many cases of due process being corrupted by money, power or just incompetence. Many times it has happened to them. Due process is often opaque, complex and lengthy so they decided to bring that in-house and make their own judgements.
I have learned to fight the instinct to judge because many times I judged very very sure of my conclusions, only to find put some time later how completely wrong I was. It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong. As a rule I try never to make a decision on the same day I receive information. You'd be surprised how much your opinion can change once you digest your info.
>People have over time seem many cases of due process being corrupted by money, power or just incompetence. Many times it has happened to them. Due process is often opaque, complex and lengthy so they decided to bring that in-house and make their own judgements.
I doubt that's the case here. People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
> People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
My theory is that people do it (hey I do it too) to get the kick of "look at that piece of shit, I'm glad compared to them I'm a better/smarter/etc person.".
> It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong.
This is such an important idea to me. We all really only live in our own lives, and even if we read and talk to others endlessly, it's very hard to learn the full scope of the world and others' struggles. So there's some hubris to thinking that you fully understand things and can judge them absolutely.
Not saying there's no right and wrong, just that maybe reserving judgment has its place. I mostly think about this to coach myself, but I think it has use for others as well.
Something similar to this is my personal stance against the death penalty, where I think in the grand scheme of uncertainty, we should err on the side of caution by drawing the line before taking lives in an institutionalized fashion.
"Due process" did its job perfectly as it should have in the author's case. But exoneration still didn't save his life from falling apart. It's not a legal or policy issue, it is a culture issue.
Things seem to have cooled down on the cancellation front since the peak fever of 2020 and 2021, so I don't see it as much anymore. But for a while, the rejoinder of the cancellers was always, "well, he can just find a different job" or "he got a different job, cancelled yeah right."
As if the job was all that mattered.
We are social creatures. Shunning and ostracism have a significant impact, even when happening by people we don't know, especially when it's a pile-on.
I'm not saying there's never a reason to shun someone. If people do something terrible, cut ties with them. I don't think that's what a lot of this is, though. If it was, it wouldn't happen on such flimsy evidence and it wouldn't happen to people others don't even know.
Most cancellations are a blood letting, where people are trying to feel powerful and the cancelled (or even the wronged) don't really matter.
It's surely not your contention that said apologies sound hollow because there is nothing really to apologise for and therefore it is inherently untrue?
There are some challenges with media-based apologies because they can only be done at all through media PR systems, of course, and there's an impact therefore on the shape and style of an apology that Marshall McLuhan might have written about if he were still here.
So there's an element of apology fatigue that will prompt some of those replies.
But even then, apologies that sound hollow or sound written by PR generally are somewhat hollow or written with help from, or experience of, PR. Usually the PR of a law firm, right?
It is wholly possible to apologise in ways that do not have those qualities, and wholly possible for people to recognise them.
I absolutely do not agree with public pile-ons, social media hysteria, or understandable mistakes leading to cancellation. Everyone should be able to make mistakes and learn from them -- that is incredibly important.
But shame is also incredibly important in that it causes self-policing of social norms. There is no way that society would work if everyone just did things that benefited them with no regard to others, in ways that weren't actively harmful but just annoying. That's why we have norms and enforce them with shame. If this gets broken down because people use shaming inappropriately then it will be used as a reason to do away with shaming completely. We see this trend happening and its continuation can only lead to bad outcomes.
Agreed. Additionally, negative sanctions have been part of human life since the beginning. Anyone who has raised a child or pet understands this.
This discussion of far more nuanced than many of the comments in this post address. It's true people are often swiftly found guilty in the public eye without due process - see most true crime - but it's also true such sanctions have their place.
Well, maybe women who’ve been sexually harassed for most of their lives, and who couldn’t even feel safe at their own community events, were fed up with “letting it go.”
(Caveat: I have no idea what happened with this particular person.)
Many, many people deserve to be shunned or ostracized.
The inverse here is that we should all be forced to like people we don't like. Well, that's stupid.
If you're an asshole then I don't want to hang out with you. Doesn't matter what, specifically, you did to be an asshole, as long as it's legitimate (not a lie).
Yes, I'm going to "shun" people I don't like. Not because I'm evil or I even want to harm them. I don't. I'm only thinking about myself - not them. Okay, I want to have a good time, so that necessarily means I can't be around people I don't like. So, there.
If that's cancellation well then, cancel me back in retaliation.
> Things seem to have cooled down on the cancellation front since the peak fever of 2020 and 2021, so I don't see it as much anymore. But for a while, the rejoinder of the cancellers was always, "well, he can just find a different job" or "he got a different job, cancelled yeah right."
Thank god society got more mature since then and didn't participate in imagine some kind of doxing app for this purpose :)
I have no idea who is telling the truth in this situation, and unless you are the person who has been accused or those who are the alleged victims, neither do you. For situations like this where the allegations fall short of criminal misconduct, a thorough process run by someone independent of the situation needs to a) to evaluate the claims made b) determine whether they are justified c) issue a clear and open report on what took place for the benefit of the community involved. As far as I can tell no investigation has been carried out to verify or falsify claims made by the individuals concerned.
But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women, and if what these women say is true, it would be utterly unsurprising to me. The High Court judgement in this situation is a civil matter; nobody has been "cleared" of anything.
>you can form your own judgement about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on
Therein lies the danger. An outsider with little knowledge cannot make a good judgement. Their judgement will be based on intangibles, such as "something similar happened to somebody I know, so I tend to believe X's account over Y's account".
But that's not proof, or evidence, or anything really. It's just naked bias from a different situation applied to an unrelated one. Saying "history is replete with examples" is exactly that. If that is going to be used as a metric, then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women carries with it a high degree of risk. No matter how you behave, a single accusation from somebody willing to lie or exaggerate--for whatever reason--will be supported and amplified using this same historical rationale.
If the accusations are true, then this is yet another example of a pattern of behaviour played out so regularly, across cultures, centuries and communities, that it is boringly predictable: "Senior community member, almost always a man, sexually exploits vulnerable women seeking acceptance into that community."
When a possible situation arises you should investigate it and, if there is reasonable evidence that it is true, do what you can to stamp it out and ensure it stops happening.
It's not as easy as some people make it out to be to create a believable story about abusive behavior.
> then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women
You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees.
If you do, then yeah maybe you need to think twice about that, and maybe that's not such a bad thing?
The thing is, /both people are telling the truth!/ If you read their accounts, they're not especially contradictory. It's not as if she's saying, "he raped me" and he's saying, "no I didn't."
It's somewhat subjective, but if you read between the lines, it's clear, and sad all around:
pretty.direct is borderline incel, incapable of forming meaningful romantic relationships. But he's not being malicious -- in his view, he's acting in good faith, trying to at least get some consensual action.
yifanxing is young and not yet sure how to exist in the world. She believes what people tell her.
They had sex, as humans do. She was friendly with him for a time thereafter, but eventually came to regret the act, and then came to see herself as a victim.
This was understandably unforseen by him, and the whole episode, though unfortunate, is not really worth all the anguish it has caused everyone.
If both people are telling the truth, then it sounds like you're saying that although very sad, a community "gatekeeper" sexually exploiting a vulnerable newcomer is just part of life and we should move past it.
I'm not sure I agree with this, and I think we can and should do better.
Well... unfortunately the world does not come equipped with a "figure out the truth and report back" button.
We have some truth-discovering methods... but they are hard, expensive, and often return empty handed. Science. Courts. Fact finding commitees. Etc.
So... you can't have that. What we have is heresy, and a "how to act" dilemma in circumstances where truth isn't known and will not be known.
Im going to encourage you not to form your own opinion on who is lying. Read the accusations of you want.. but don't pretend you are in a position to judge... only to execute.
> I have no idea who is telling the truth in this situation, and unless you are the person who has been accused or those who are the alleged victims, neither do you
Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
> But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women
And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
> > I have no idea who is telling the truth in this situation, and unless you are the person who has been accused or those who are the alleged victims, neither do you
> Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
A fair-as-possible process that is only fair if you have enough money to afford a lawyer, the time to fight for your case, are not part of a community that has been systematically discriminated against by the people enforcing the process, that the laws are in your favor, that you are not victim of a difficult to prove crime, ...
I will never advocate for vigilante justice, but let's not kid ourselves, the justice system has many, many flaws and bias, and acting as if it should be the only source of truth, and that no personal judgment should be made without, is very naïve.
No - and in fact in my view this is the core problem with these kinds of situations - there isn't a long established process validating a set of accusations, that if true, fall short of criminality but should result in your exclusion from a community.
Individual communities have to establish ground rules for these sorts of things to protect the vulnerable.
> And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
I do not accept that this happens with nearly the regularity that people, usually men, claim it does. To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways.
By way of example, 1 in 100 rape accusations MADE TO THE POLICE in the UK leads to a charge being made against the accused. That is what we as a society are up against, and why we have to take creepy, exploitative behaviour that falls short of criminality so seriously.
Not saying I know the truth here, but you are falling for the oldest trick in the book. Effective lies always work in little tidbits of truth (as externally known/validated by the audience).
If the women in question had gone to the actual courts, rather than the Scala community, they might have had an opportunity to see justice (assuming their allegations are true). But because they chose to make very public accusations that were widely circulated, they have now denied themselves the opportunity to use the legal system, because they have prejudiced the process.
I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
What specific advice would you give young women in such a situation?
>I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
Are you suggesting that if Pretty were found liable for sexual harassment against two different women that he would not have also faced similar negative social outcomes?
The high court judgement is against part of the lynch mob, not the original accusers. Given their original statements are still up, I would assume they are still behind their words and neither the judgement nor his side of the story invalidates their experiences.
Maybe there's mismatched expectations of a women going alone to hotel rooms with the men they later accuse of assault.
The man gets the wrong idea that the woman is interested in sleeping with him, whereas the woman just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room.
Most women can tell fairly easily when the man they are talking to is sexually attracted to them (and signs of attraction is something almost all women watch for whenever they talk to a man they don't know very well).
If the man then invites the woman to a hotel room, 99.9% of women will strongly assume that the man is trying to advance a sexual agenda if the most likely alternative motivation for the invitation is that the man "just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room."
> it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women
Which doesn't really say anything about this specific scenario. History is also replete with theft, arson, and murder but that doesn't mean it's a good argument when accusing a specific person of a specific instance of theft.
Two things can be true at the same time:
- many women have been, and continue to be, sexually abused and often fail to get justice, and
- sometimes some accusations are made by bad faith actors and/or confused people
are not in conflict. They can both be true at the same time.
I also have no idea who is telling the truth here; just saying that "these things happen" is not really an argument here.
Actually, because these things actually do happen makes the accusations so powerful. History is also replete with false accusations; remember the whole "Satanic panic" from the 80s and 90s where everyone and their dog was engaging in sexual Satanic rituals? Or QAnon today.
I can't imagine not just one, but two women coming forward and making such accusations against me. People here are acting as if he is the victim, not them.
Insofar as the letter signed - UK law has it so the letter worded as it was, with the burden of proof on the signers, could be held as libel if signed - so the UK signers got caught up in their country's law, due to the accused being litigious.
One pleasing thing to me is, however casual some people's attitudes to all of this is, out of control behaviors can cause legal and PR problems for corporations, and that is a move forward that, despite ebbs and flows, will not be moved back in any substantial sense. Woe be the CEO or HR director who thinks they can ignore bad behavior.
I once had a friend that was cancelled by an ex-girlfriend for petty and political reasons. I knew it was false because I had been present in most of the situations she described to cancel him and her story was full of lies. She was also a distant friend and her only comment was “I know why I do what I do”, which was pretty weird.
My friend was devastated, he had to stop going to his classes and feared that nobody would hire him, professors would hate him (since students already did), and that his life had ended. I spoke with him and assured him that wasn’t the case but to be honest I wasn’t sure either.
I don’t know the details but one year later she was suspended for a year for falsely accusing him, my friend graduated and promptly found a job.
All this to say I’m awfully scared now of the risk of my interactions with women being used in the future as a false narrative to cancel me. I’m happily married and due to life stuff I do have to interact with young girls and women. Because of this I try to be as distant as I can and limit any interaction that doesn’t involve multiple other adults.
I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
> All this to say I’m awfully scared now of the risk of my interactions with women being used in the future as a false narrative to cancel me.
Maybe just keep a war chest and slam them with a bunch of lawsuits if they get annoying. Or at least, that's how the professional bullshitters like Trump solve this problem
How can "political reasons" be false? I can imagine a lot of political reasons for a woman to "cancel" a man, especially if they're misogynist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or transphobic, but the vagueness of your anecdote is suspect.
> I don’t know the details but [...]
> I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
I'm sorry to hear that you've seemingly adapted your life based on someone else's "petty" experience with an ex-girlfriend, as you put it. Do you feel that this is a healthy and realistic way to live, though? Do you drive a car, walk around your neighborhood, or eat meat?
Depending on what kind of person you are, there are plenty more serious and realistic risks that getting randomly cancelled by your social circle.
> How can "political reasons" be false? I can imagine a lot of political reasons for a woman to "cancel" a man, especially if they're misogynist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, or transphobic, but the vagueness of your anecdote is suspect.
What was false were the claims and I can say that because I was involved in the situations she described to cancel him.
I said “petty political reasons” as a summary for conciseness sake. But if you want more details:
- after they broke up she joined a certain left wing political party (student federation elections are a big deal here)
- during the election cycle my friend was part of the opposing team and they were doing quite well
- so the girl was approached by her party leadership to cancel him. They had this whole “cancel the opposition” operation
- Turns out everything was false and was done to benefit the left wing candidates and end the candidacy of the opposing party. which worked. They had to take down their candidacy to deal with all the problems that come from being cancelled.
> Depending on what kind of person you are, there are plenty more serious and realistic risks that getting randomly cancelled by your social circle.
I’m not so sure about that. Being cancelled is pretty serious, and quite risky. I’ve seen it quite a few times (this one being the closest I’ve been to people involved), and it’s so easy to avoid that I prefer to just do it. For example if I could avoid driving a car I would, but I do it because otherwise it is prohibitively expensive time wise.
Ultimately, this reflects just terribly on the Scala community and every individual who signed the open letter, including Brian Clapper himself and over 300 others. You can read the full list of names here: https://scala-open-letter.github.io/
Having been in a similar situation myself as a teenager, it is truly abhorrent how quickly people are willing to jump to conclusions against someone based on the most limited information, and without giving the accused any chance to tell their side of the story or defend themselves. Not even a single one of my so-called friends asked me what happened, and almost all of them disappeared from my life permanently.
What I learned from the experience was that none of the people who jumped on the cancel bandwagon had ever been worth even a second of my time. It was their loss, and I became much more careful about who I choose as friends after that.
I can certainly say that if I encounter any of the 300+ individuals listed in the letter in my personal or professional lives, I will be giving them a very wide berth indeed.
> Ultimately, this reflects just terribly on the Scala community
Maybe the lesson of this is that people should be cautious about getting involved in communities like this to the extent that being cancelled by the community does you this much damage.
If you're interested in a vaguely similar case, I found the situation of somewhat-famous video game writer Chris Avellone interesting to follow.
He's worked on some games I enjoyed in my youth (Planescape: Torment is probably the most well known, considered a genre classic) and my reaction to his cancellation was roughly something like "ah crap, another one of my heroes turns out to be a bad egg". The narrative of famous men abusing their end of a power dynamic is generally easy to believe, etc.
As a result, he lost his employment, contracts and so on as well.
But this one had an aftermath a couple of years later. He wrote some elaborate/lengthy pieces defending himself (which struck me as plausible and even convincing, but then I had to keep in mind he's an expert writer) and initiated legal proceedings -- that he eventually won, resulting in a public statement by the accusers that the events they accused him of never took place. I think his posts make for interesting reading.
His career seems to have resumed recently, five years after the accusations were made public.
Even so, if you look at internet comment threads on recent news of his new game involvement, there's a persistent meme that he paid for this statement in the form of a "seven-figure settlement", which is a curious misreading because the seven-figure sum was paid to him by the accusers to make up for damages.
Sadly, the case of another writer I sometimes liked (Warren Ellis; I enjoyed Transmetropolitan back in the day) is rather grim in comparison.
Readit News
Once my parents were visiting me and we took my kids to a playground. While there, my dad noticed a girl sitting on the ground crying, and seemed to be hurt. He looked for a moment to see if anyone was coming, and then went over to her and asked if she was alright, if she needed help, and where her parents were. He didn't get a clear response from her so he started walking around to the various adults around the playground inquiring if the hurt girl crying was theirs. Finally he got to one group of women and after asking one of them said something along the lines of, "yeah, I saw you over there bothering her" in an accusatory tone. Seeing where it was going, he put his hands up and just walked away without saying another word. The girl remained there crying, alone.
It was actually kind of a scary because later that day I realized how in that moment that woman, who my dad had never met before, could probably have destroyed his life right then and there if she wanted to.
These days, in the back of my mind I'm always considering how my actions, particularly towards women and children, could be misconstrued. When I'm at the playground with my kids, I don't talk to kids I don't know, at all, for any reason, even if they talk to me. I just smile and make myself busy with my own kids.
Then do it. Call 911, say there's an injured, unattended child at the playground, and you're getting a hostile response from folks as you try to locate the guardian so you'd appreciate it if a social worker collected the kid until the parents can be found.
There is nothing illegal about speaking to a child, and when you soft play people like this you empower them. Let them have to show a cop a DL to get their kid out a squad car to learn their lesson if they can't handle polite help.
(Also, what is this narrative around HN about being accused of nefariousness at playgrounds? I used to eat my lunch at one near me because it was the only park with a trash can nearby and I didn't want to lug my trash back to my apartment before going on my way towards the city -- nobody ever said a word to me aside from asking for a ball if it rolled over.)
> Then do it. Call 911, say there's an injured, unattended child at the playground, and you're getting a hostile response from folks as you try to locate the guardian
That is the same thing, though! ... very quickly escalating a probable mundane situation to very serious accusations!
I'm the father of a 3 year old daughter, who I take to the playground multiple times per week. This is in Brooklyn, NYC. I haven't had any issues. But I believe the horror stories, there are just a sufficient number of crazy people out there, overly concerned "karens", or reddit warriors, or whatever. People overly confident in their judgement based on a cursory one-sided description of events. It seems you want to "fight fire with fire" or "play hardball" because that seems fair or necessary, but ... jeez. This is why guys are cautious and disengage.
Don't try to out-crazy a crazy person. That's not a game I'm going to play.
In the original post they had confirmed that they were the parents, and were aware of her situation. While their response was rude, that's not a reason to threaten them to call 911 with lies, or to actually do it. I suggest you reread the original scenario.
If you never found the child's parents, you'd have to call CPS. Being prevented from finding the child's parents, just necessitates you move that step forward.
Of course, it's not 'your job' so technically you could abandon the child at any point but it does feel a bit heartless to give a kid hope, then say 'meh you're on your own, this is too troublesome'. As for just leaving the child with others who are complaining, I doubt that's a good idea. They were making no move to help, and bystander effect will probably keep them from ever doing a thing.
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Suburban East Coast US.
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These stories were all over Reddit for years. I remember a thread asking for examples of things Reddit led them to believe that weren’t true, and the top voted comment was that Reddit made them think that going to the playground as a lone dad would cause women to view them as a predator. In reality, going to the playground as a dad in most places is a non-event. It’s common for dads to be there alone with their kids. When I go, it’s a mix of moms and dads and we all talk and interact.
Yet to a non-parent reading Reddit it seemed like going to the park as a dad was asking for trouble. The story was repeated so often.
I’m sure these events do happen some times. When it does, I wouldn’t be surprised if the accuser was reading their own Reddit equivalent social media website where stories about men being creeps at the playground get passed around as fact. To them, it’s just how they see the world working because they’ve heard it repeated so often.
My wife, on the other hand, is the parent who will go over and play with all the children while the parents are on their phones. But she’s a woman, so it’s different.
The problem is is that a lot of guys walking around that haven't had it happen to them assume it hasn't happened to them because they've been doing everything right when really you've just been lucky so far.
In my situation, a girl was stuck at the top of the highest climbing fixture I've ever seen at a public playground. She was crying for a couple minutes without aid, so I walked over to tell her that I'd try to find her parent. The mother sprinted over and yelled to leave her daughter alone, then left the playground w/ her daughter.
I still try to find those few people around me who aren't garbage, but it's a tough job.
I know what you mean, but he could also have said "fuck off, lady; that's a kid crying, so grow up" and thereby have made clear he was worried about the kid, not some creeper who she hoped to have just told off.
The insinuation was, "stay out of my business or I'm going to tell a lie that could ruin you". He was clearly not bothering the child, anyone could see that, she could saw it herself. Whatever her game was, it was completely deliberate.
Since the child wasn't actually in any real danger, we chose to simply remove ourselves from that situation and not involves ourselves with a crazy person. Unfortunately being a shitty parent isn't illegal.
Just one comment thread up there's a person rushing to believe her and distrust the dad:
> "And don't get me wrong, I'm strongly inclined to believe women and I generally distrust men."
^ from the other comment thread above this one
Well, who would you believe? Who would the average person believe?
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However there were some key details about the accusation that didn’t add up. The accuser tried changing the details of the story once they realized others were noticing the problems with the claims. It also became clear that the accuser had an ulterior motive and stood to benefit from the accused being ostracized. The accuser also had developed a habit of lying and manipulation, which others slowly began to share as additional information.
This was enough to make the situation fall apart among people who knew the details. However, word spread quickly and even years later there are countless people who only remember the initial accusation. Many avoided the accused just to be safe. The strangest part was seeing how some people really didn’t care about the details of the situation, they viewed it as symbolic of something greater and believed everyone was obligated to believe the accuser in some abstract moral sense.
It remains one of the weirdest social situations I’ve seen play out. Like watching someone drop a nuclear bomb on another person’s social life and then seeing how powerless they were to defend against it. In this case it didn’t extend to jobs or career. Their close social circle stuck with them. However I can still run into people years later who think the person is a creep because they heard something about him from a friend of a friend and it stuck with them.
Why is that strange? That's what the propaganda tells them to do - they're just doing as told: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believe_women
you mean a movement where an entire half of the population have been treated as less than, coerced, not has the same rights, earn less money, and are still routinely demonized with 2000 year old paleolithic thinking?
why do men think they can get away with everything, and that the moment women try to speak up they are evil?
It's what happens when we see people as stand-ins for their group, but we can't see the individual behind it.
I didn't see anyone (with one exception) pick sides immediately; although most people's "picked" side was "not involved". (The one exception was a community organizer who definitely has Been Through This Before).
For three of those, I did my own homework - a lot of asking around, and then a lot of conversations with both people. In the end, most of that didn't matter: the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it.
> the accused ended up damning themselves (or not!) pretty immediately when I talked to them about it
So you mean yourself being the exception?
I have learned to fight the instinct to judge because many times I judged very very sure of my conclusions, only to find put some time later how completely wrong I was. It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong. As a rule I try never to make a decision on the same day I receive information. You'd be surprised how much your opinion can change once you digest your info.
I doubt that's the case here. People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
My theory is that people do it (hey I do it too) to get the kick of "look at that piece of shit, I'm glad compared to them I'm a better/smarter/etc person.".
Both my father and I have excellent “gut feelings” to the point that “I hate being right” is the family motto.
It would be so easy to believe I’m always right in my judgement of people. But I’m extremely wrong at least 5% of the time.
If nothing else, that 5% helps me learn to read people better. If I didn’t reserve judgment, that 5% would quickly become 50%.
This is such an important idea to me. We all really only live in our own lives, and even if we read and talk to others endlessly, it's very hard to learn the full scope of the world and others' struggles. So there's some hubris to thinking that you fully understand things and can judge them absolutely.
Not saying there's no right and wrong, just that maybe reserving judgment has its place. I mostly think about this to coach myself, but I think it has use for others as well.
the only fix I can think of is having a "don't shit where you eat" attitude and just keeping everything cleanly compartmentalized
As if the job was all that mattered.
We are social creatures. Shunning and ostracism have a significant impact, even when happening by people we don't know, especially when it's a pile-on.
I'm not saying there's never a reason to shun someone. If people do something terrible, cut ties with them. I don't think that's what a lot of this is, though. If it was, it wouldn't happen on such flimsy evidence and it wouldn't happen to people others don't even know.
Most cancellations are a blood letting, where people are trying to feel powerful and the cancelled (or even the wronged) don't really matter.
How many replies are about how the apology sounds hollow, or how a PR person must have written it?
There are some challenges with media-based apologies because they can only be done at all through media PR systems, of course, and there's an impact therefore on the shape and style of an apology that Marshall McLuhan might have written about if he were still here.
So there's an element of apology fatigue that will prompt some of those replies.
But even then, apologies that sound hollow or sound written by PR generally are somewhat hollow or written with help from, or experience of, PR. Usually the PR of a law firm, right?
It is wholly possible to apologise in ways that do not have those qualities, and wholly possible for people to recognise them.
But shame is also incredibly important in that it causes self-policing of social norms. There is no way that society would work if everyone just did things that benefited them with no regard to others, in ways that weren't actively harmful but just annoying. That's why we have norms and enforce them with shame. If this gets broken down because people use shaming inappropriately then it will be used as a reason to do away with shaming completely. We see this trend happening and its continuation can only lead to bad outcomes.
This discussion of far more nuanced than many of the comments in this post address. It's true people are often swiftly found guilty in the public eye without due process - see most true crime - but it's also true such sanctions have their place.
Go read about the psychology of forgiveness. There are some pros to "letting it go", when appropriate.
(Caveat: I have no idea what happened with this particular person.)
The inverse here is that we should all be forced to like people we don't like. Well, that's stupid.
If you're an asshole then I don't want to hang out with you. Doesn't matter what, specifically, you did to be an asshole, as long as it's legitimate (not a lie).
Yes, I'm going to "shun" people I don't like. Not because I'm evil or I even want to harm them. I don't. I'm only thinking about myself - not them. Okay, I want to have a good time, so that necessarily means I can't be around people I don't like. So, there.
If that's cancellation well then, cancel me back in retaliation.
Thank god society got more mature since then and didn't participate in imagine some kind of doxing app for this purpose :)
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But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women, and if what these women say is true, it would be utterly unsurprising to me. The High Court judgement in this situation is a civil matter; nobody has been "cleared" of anything.
In the absence of an investigation, you can read the original statements made by the women who made the accusations of wrongdoing [here](https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...) and [here](https://killnicole.github.io/statement/), and you can form your own opinion about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on.
EDIT: s/judgement/opinion/
Therein lies the danger. An outsider with little knowledge cannot make a good judgement. Their judgement will be based on intangibles, such as "something similar happened to somebody I know, so I tend to believe X's account over Y's account".
But that's not proof, or evidence, or anything really. It's just naked bias from a different situation applied to an unrelated one. Saying "history is replete with examples" is exactly that. If that is going to be used as a metric, then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women carries with it a high degree of risk. No matter how you behave, a single accusation from somebody willing to lie or exaggerate--for whatever reason--will be supported and amplified using this same historical rationale.
If the accusations are true, then this is yet another example of a pattern of behaviour played out so regularly, across cultures, centuries and communities, that it is boringly predictable: "Senior community member, almost always a man, sexually exploits vulnerable women seeking acceptance into that community."
When a possible situation arises you should investigate it and, if there is reasonable evidence that it is true, do what you can to stamp it out and ensure it stops happening.
> then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women
You don't need to worry unless you're having sex with your mentees. If you do, then yeah maybe you need to think twice about that, and maybe that's not such a bad thing?
It's somewhat subjective, but if you read between the lines, it's clear, and sad all around:
pretty.direct is borderline incel, incapable of forming meaningful romantic relationships. But he's not being malicious -- in his view, he's acting in good faith, trying to at least get some consensual action.
yifanxing is young and not yet sure how to exist in the world. She believes what people tell her.
They had sex, as humans do. She was friendly with him for a time thereafter, but eventually came to regret the act, and then came to see herself as a victim.
This was understandably unforseen by him, and the whole episode, though unfortunate, is not really worth all the anguish it has caused everyone.
I'm not sure I agree with this, and I think we can and should do better.
We have some truth-discovering methods... but they are hard, expensive, and often return empty handed. Science. Courts. Fact finding commitees. Etc.
So... you can't have that. What we have is heresy, and a "how to act" dilemma in circumstances where truth isn't known and will not be known.
Im going to encourage you not to form your own opinion on who is lying. Read the accusations of you want.. but don't pretend you are in a position to judge... only to execute.
Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
> But - it is worth stating very clearly that history is replete with examples of men who have used their senior position in communities to take advantage of women
And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
> Almost sounds like there'd be a long established fair-as-possible process for dealing with these situations, doesn't it?
A fair-as-possible process that is only fair if you have enough money to afford a lawyer, the time to fight for your case, are not part of a community that has been systematically discriminated against by the people enforcing the process, that the laws are in your favor, that you are not victim of a difficult to prove crime, ...
I will never advocate for vigilante justice, but let's not kid ourselves, the justice system has many, many flaws and bias, and acting as if it should be the only source of truth, and that no personal judgment should be made without, is very naïve.
Individual communities have to establish ground rules for these sorts of things to protect the vulnerable.
> And now history is replete with examples of woman destroying the lives of men with no process or consequence.
I do not accept that this happens with nearly the regularity that people, usually men, claim it does. To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways.
By way of example, 1 in 100 rape accusations MADE TO THE POLICE in the UK leads to a charge being made against the accused. That is what we as a society are up against, and why we have to take creepy, exploitative behaviour that falls short of criminality so seriously.
Super curious what the stats are that support a statement like this. Scale matters with everything.
"It was like reading a fiction about me concocted from benign fragments of reality, transplanted into new context to make them sound abominable."
makes it sound like the accusations weren't based on totally made up facts. It was rather a biased (is the author's view) interpretation thereof.
I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
>I don't know if they'd consider this a problem, though, given the life-destroying outcome meted out by the Scala community may actually exceed the punishment the legal system would have deemed appropriate.
Are you suggesting that if Pretty were found liable for sexual harassment against two different women that he would not have also faced similar negative social outcomes?
There was in fact a judgement.
The man gets the wrong idea that the woman is interested in sleeping with him, whereas the woman just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room.
If the man then invites the woman to a hotel room, 99.9% of women will strongly assume that the man is trying to advance a sexual agenda if the most likely alternative motivation for the invitation is that the man "just wants to have a nice conversation in the enjoyable environment of a hotel room."
The OP article was so vague i didn't even realize i had already read about it.
Which doesn't really say anything about this specific scenario. History is also replete with theft, arson, and murder but that doesn't mean it's a good argument when accusing a specific person of a specific instance of theft.
Two things can be true at the same time:
- many women have been, and continue to be, sexually abused and often fail to get justice, and
- sometimes some accusations are made by bad faith actors and/or confused people
are not in conflict. They can both be true at the same time.
I also have no idea who is telling the truth here; just saying that "these things happen" is not really an argument here.
Actually, because these things actually do happen makes the accusations so powerful. History is also replete with false accusations; remember the whole "Satanic panic" from the 80s and 90s where everyone and their dog was engaging in sexual Satanic rituals? Or QAnon today.
Insofar as the letter signed - UK law has it so the letter worded as it was, with the burden of proof on the signers, could be held as libel if signed - so the UK signers got caught up in their country's law, due to the accused being litigious.
One pleasing thing to me is, however casual some people's attitudes to all of this is, out of control behaviors can cause legal and PR problems for corporations, and that is a move forward that, despite ebbs and flows, will not be moved back in any substantial sense. Woe be the CEO or HR director who thinks they can ignore bad behavior.
My friend was devastated, he had to stop going to his classes and feared that nobody would hire him, professors would hate him (since students already did), and that his life had ended. I spoke with him and assured him that wasn’t the case but to be honest I wasn’t sure either.
I don’t know the details but one year later she was suspended for a year for falsely accusing him, my friend graduated and promptly found a job.
All this to say I’m awfully scared now of the risk of my interactions with women being used in the future as a false narrative to cancel me. I’m happily married and due to life stuff I do have to interact with young girls and women. Because of this I try to be as distant as I can and limit any interaction that doesn’t involve multiple other adults.
I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
Maybe just keep a war chest and slam them with a bunch of lawsuits if they get annoying. Or at least, that's how the professional bullshitters like Trump solve this problem
> I don’t know the details but [...]
> I learnt that even if you do nothing wrong you can always be at risk, so I just try to minimize that risk as much as I possibly can.
I'm sorry to hear that you've seemingly adapted your life based on someone else's "petty" experience with an ex-girlfriend, as you put it. Do you feel that this is a healthy and realistic way to live, though? Do you drive a car, walk around your neighborhood, or eat meat?
Depending on what kind of person you are, there are plenty more serious and realistic risks that getting randomly cancelled by your social circle.
What was false were the claims and I can say that because I was involved in the situations she described to cancel him.
I said “petty political reasons” as a summary for conciseness sake. But if you want more details:
- after they broke up she joined a certain left wing political party (student federation elections are a big deal here)
- during the election cycle my friend was part of the opposing team and they were doing quite well
- so the girl was approached by her party leadership to cancel him. They had this whole “cancel the opposition” operation
- Turns out everything was false and was done to benefit the left wing candidates and end the candidacy of the opposing party. which worked. They had to take down their candidacy to deal with all the problems that come from being cancelled.
> Depending on what kind of person you are, there are plenty more serious and realistic risks that getting randomly cancelled by your social circle.
I’m not so sure about that. Being cancelled is pretty serious, and quite risky. I’ve seen it quite a few times (this one being the closest I’ve been to people involved), and it’s so easy to avoid that I prefer to just do it. For example if I could avoid driving a car I would, but I do it because otherwise it is prohibitively expensive time wise.
Having been in a similar situation myself as a teenager, it is truly abhorrent how quickly people are willing to jump to conclusions against someone based on the most limited information, and without giving the accused any chance to tell their side of the story or defend themselves. Not even a single one of my so-called friends asked me what happened, and almost all of them disappeared from my life permanently.
What I learned from the experience was that none of the people who jumped on the cancel bandwagon had ever been worth even a second of my time. It was their loss, and I became much more careful about who I choose as friends after that.
I can certainly say that if I encounter any of the 300+ individuals listed in the letter in my personal or professional lives, I will be giving them a very wide berth indeed.
Maybe the lesson of this is that people should be cautious about getting involved in communities like this to the extent that being cancelled by the community does you this much damage.
He's worked on some games I enjoyed in my youth (Planescape: Torment is probably the most well known, considered a genre classic) and my reaction to his cancellation was roughly something like "ah crap, another one of my heroes turns out to be a bad egg". The narrative of famous men abusing their end of a power dynamic is generally easy to believe, etc.
As a result, he lost his employment, contracts and so on as well.
But this one had an aftermath a couple of years later. He wrote some elaborate/lengthy pieces defending himself (which struck me as plausible and even convincing, but then I had to keep in mind he's an expert writer) and initiated legal proceedings -- that he eventually won, resulting in a public statement by the accusers that the events they accused him of never took place. I think his posts make for interesting reading.
His career seems to have resumed recently, five years after the accusations were made public.
Even so, if you look at internet comment threads on recent news of his new game involvement, there's a persistent meme that he paid for this statement in the form of a "seven-figure settlement", which is a curious misreading because the seven-figure sum was paid to him by the accusers to make up for damages.
Sadly, the case of another writer I sometimes liked (Warren Ellis; I enjoyed Transmetropolitan back in the day) is rather grim in comparison.