The Forbidden Topics
The post says:
What's the status here, was this post redacted or not? Or did it just drop off the frontpage?Edit: Case in point: this post was quietly removed by Hacker News moderators within 40 minutes of its submission.
Is there any transparency with regards to moderation here, now that I think of it?
> Our community has persistent and pervasive problems of a particular sort which we are not allowed to talk about: sexual harassment and assault. Men who assault, harass, and even rape women in our spaces, are protected.
This is completely alien to my personal experience. Does this match anyone else's personal experience? Have I just avoided all the objectionable events by sheer luck?
If this statement is true, I would have expected to have observed at least some harassment or mild assault by now, but I haven't. I can't think of an instance. I mean, one time I saw some guy grab some girl's ass, but it turned out she was his wife.
> I attended a hacker event this year – HiP Berlin – where I discovered that some of the organizers had cooperated to make it possible for multiple known rapists to participate, working together to find a way to circumvent the event’s code of conduct – a document that they were tasked with enforcing.
This is just kind of strange. It's not clear what he means by "circumvent" the code of conduct. Is he saying that they were rapists in the opinions of the organizers? And that if they were rapists in the opinions of the organizers then they should have barred them from the event, but they didn't?
I would assume that the most likely situation is that something happened which Drew thinks means the people in question are "known rapists" but the event organizers did not. And not knowing the facts, we can't really say which of them is right.
I mean, unless I'm supposed to just believe that Drew is right because he's speaking up about a difficult topic or something like that. At the risk of potentially silencing marginalized people with extraordinary standards of evidence: no, I won't just believe him.
> Some of us have events in our past that we try not to think about, because if we think too hard, we might realize that we crossed the line. This fills men with guilt and uncertainty, but also fear. We know the consequences if our doubts became known ...
> So we lash out in this fear. We close ranks. We demand the most stringent standards of evidence to prove anything, evidence that we know is not likely to be there
Let me get this straight here: sexually assaulting someone -> defensiveness -> expecting evidence
So his criticism of people who expect evidence of assault is that they're really just defensive closet rapists? This seems like a really bizarre take, I wonder why he's making it
Couldn't a more reasonable take be that more egregious allegations require more rigorous proof (and more extreme consequences for lying)? What's unreasonable about that expectation?
If I go around accusing John Appleseed of murder and manage to fuck up his entire life, are you saying I should just be able to get away with that because murder is bad or under-prosecuted?
> They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable
This is the cover of Australia's largest [1] newspaper: https://www.reddit.com/r/perth/comments/169mucb/how_we_stop_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_West_Australian - It has Australia's largest share of market penetration (84% of WA) of any newspaper in the country.
Excellent. Very well said.
> You need to be someone who will do something about it.
Apparently "do something" doesn't extend so far as to naming names?
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