291–300 of 359 posts
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For the crime of sexual assault to be proven, you need more than a he said/she said. For the crime of perjury to be proven, you also need more. Substantive proof of lying, not just 'the guy did not get convicted'. I don't think there is a chilling effect when you use a standard of proof to admit a claim of fraud.
Doesn't perjury already apply?
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For the crime of sexual assault to be proven, you need more than a he said/she said. For the crime of perjury to be proven, you also need more. Substantive proof of lying, not just 'the guy did not get convicted'. I don't think there is a chilling effect when you use a standard of proof to admit a claim of fraud.
Doesn't perjury already apply?
But for matters adjudicated by universities, it's possible that neither of these apply, since official police reports are not necessarily filed, and testimony is not given in a courtroom, under oath.
More generally, you could claim defamation. This is not a crime though — it is a civil matter. If the defamer has no assets, it would be an expensive way to make a point ("I didn't do it!") and could lead to the Streisand Effect.
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Careful with that kind if talk here. In this kind of social political climate logic does not always prevail. Just go look at some past HN threads regarding sexual harassment. The sheer number of people who react emotionally to allegations of sexual harassment is truly astounding. All rationality goes out the window with men throwing themselves over each other to proclaim "I BELIEVE YOU" instead of asking for the leas…
This is a huge straw man if I've ever seen one (and present in many other posts on this thread). To act as if there isn't any logic in the opposing side isn't going to get anywhere. Because of the very nature of sexual assault, providing evidence up to the standards of the US criminal legal system is very hard to do. It likely means that more harassers get off and very few get wrongful sentences. The logic in support…
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Yeah, they're basically industrial-scale defamation without recourse, trial, or evidence. From a game-theoretic perspective, you would be wrong not to take advantage of it to burn your competitors. If it hasn't dawned on you, this is a political strategy, not a tool for the downtrodden. I have quite literally heard people talking about these things as "the way we'll close the gender participation gap", as in, they'll…
> If it hasn't dawned on you, this is a political strategy, not a tool for the downtrodden. Also something that occurred to me - if I was an SJW, I'd encourage "guilty until proven innocent" mob reactions against sexual harassment accusations by women to create a powerful leverage for them - the ability to threaten someone with an accusation.
All the while, the public grows more jaded to all trials of these heinous crimes, which casts more public doubt on the allegations of genuine victims.
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Dropping the "proven" thread because it's not what I want to focus on. > Or maybe you think I'm deliberately avoiding taking an object-level position. > If he's against charging fraudsters You're still turning a descriptive statement into a prescriptive one. peteretep did not advocate any policy in the comment you replied to. Among the policies he did not advocate is "we should never charge any fraudster". Another po…
> He did not advocate a policy, but you took his comment as advocating an extreme policy. That's pedantically true, and more honestly false. Are you honestly going to claim that his description of "putting off victims" advocates for no position? That's ridiculous. He explicitly said ... which is generally thought to be not a good thing. Are you next going to claim that he thinks putting off victims is not a good thin…
No specific policy, certainly. There are many policies consistent with what he said. I gave one already; another would be we should punish false accusations of sexual assault, but not as severely as sexual assault itself.
But you leapt to the most indefensible one. And you didn't even seem to notice that you were making this leap. I don't think it's nitpicking of me to point this out.
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This is a huge straw man if I've ever seen one (and present in many other posts on this thread). To act as if there isn't any logic in the opposing side isn't going to get anywhere. Because of the very nature of sexual assault, providing evidence up to the standards of the US criminal legal system is very hard to do. It likely means that more harassers get off and very few get wrongful sentences. The logic in support…
> This is a huge straw man if I've ever seen one Where is the straw man? I simply argue that accusations should be substantiated. Once upon a time, this viewpoint would have been considered common sense and not something controversial. And yet here we are. > The logic in supporting a standard that requires less than the US criminal legal system currently is that it will help put away many more guilty people and put a…
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Compare the definition of harassment: Persistent attacks and criticism causing worry and distress or deliberate pestering or annoying. With the definition of sexual harassment: The making of unwanted and offensive sexual advances or of sexually offensive remarks or acts, especially by one in a superior or supervisory position or when acquiescence to such behavior is a condition of continued employment, promotion, or…
It always seemed to me, as outsider, that sex in the US culture is a single topic that is especially uncomfortable to people, far more than in Europe. Just look at the TV/movies or social media rules: you can show blood, violence, guns, all kinds of criminal or deviant behavior, but any kind of nudity will set off alarms, to the point that we need to defend mothers' rights to breastfeed in public because nipples are…
Nudity is still rare but not really like it was 20 years ago. Religious nuts will protest "think of the children" and no politician will want to seem like they dislike children so they play along to get votes.
Not going to touch breastfeeding, media fuled firestorm. Who cares?
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False accusations should be punished with the same penalty as the accuser tried to put upon the innocent. Until that happens, people will see no reason to stop false accusations that they think will help them.
This has the side-effect that real victims are put off from filing charges, which is generally thought to be not a good thing.
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> If the USA believes polygraphs are unreliable Polygraphs are unreliable. Countries are aggregates to which beliefs can be attribute only by misleading anthropomorphization, however. > they should be banned from all usage, for all types of crimes and government screening. They should be. We're not actually there, though a majority of state and federal courts hold them as inadmissible per se, IIRC, largely due to the…
That's certainly a fine position to take but it doesn't change the results of the study: 40% of complainants admitted they lied. Unless you think people were lying about having lied, and also making up an explanation for why they lied, just because of polygraphs? edit: I should note something else here. Kanin's study has an appendix where he reports a similar analysis on two university campuses. In this case polygrap…
One might reasonably expect that if I wanted to comment on the broader issue of the study rather than the issues of polygraphs, I would.have done so.
HN discussion threads aren't simple two-sided structured debates, and there are reasons to respond to comments besides rebuttal to the central thesis of the comment to which a response is offered.
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> The most famous study (by Kanin)[..] And that study is deeply flawed: that one small midwestern police department used polygraphs on accusers. That's a practice that has long been shunned because (a) polygraphs are (now) known to usually find the investigator's opinion reflected in statistical noise, and (b) the victims (rightfully) see the test as an accusation and prefer to recant for fear of prosecution. The stu…
I'm aware of all the criticisms of the Kanin study. None of them seem valid. If the USA believes polygraphs are unreliable they should be banned from all usage, for all types of crimes and government screening. That hasn't happened. Instead, people who didn't like Kanin's conclusions - and noted that many rape accusers prefer to drop their accusations rather than take a polygraph test - decided it should be banned fo…
It is well known that polygraphs are completely unreliable. It is also well known that they are useful for tricking people into admitting things that they wouldn't otherwise admit. That is why they are still in use.