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My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

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Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#421

Post by sweetheart »

naurupatel wrote: post #388
epicureanideal wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes character assassination is coordinated. I personally only slightly increase the probability of something being true when multiple accusers come forward. I still want to see proof. What if a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together and decided to ruin your life with accusations?

Bummed I had to scroll this far into the thread to see some reason. This is horrifying if it did happen but I don't know Yifan and I don't know Jon Pretty nor the trustworthiness of either. It's disturbing to see HN readers jump to conclusions so quickly without proper evidence. If we continue to reduce our capacity for assessment of a situation to individual anecdotal accounts what kind of world will we live in 5 ye…

When these things happen, it's often impossible to provide evidence. There is nothing could be proven in the court of law. So we have victims, and no justice in that case, so what are we supposed to tell the victim? Don't get raped? And if they are, and resort to the only form of vindication they have left (openly sharing it), we're supposed to tell them to shut up?

Sharing these things often feels like (and IS) the _only_ thing a victim can do to maintain even a shred of their personhood or agency. If we take that away, we are telling victims of horrific abuse to pick up the pieces of their lives alone, and quietly. That is not how one heals, and it will exacerbate a chilling system of victim shaming that leads to untold anguish.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#422

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

I don’t give two damns about Scala and its community, and I neither believe nor disbelieve the linked post, but boy oh boy does it remind me of the academia in some (many?) countries, where educational/academic advancement per vaginam has been practically an unwritten norm for decades, to the joy of many a creepy professor!

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#423

Post by eloff »

dmit wrote: post #398
eloff wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's say it's a man and a women, she's the "perpetrator" and he gives consent. She's his boss and they're on a business trip and drank too much at the bar. In the morning he feels taken advantage of and deeply regrets it because he's married. Do you still stand by that?

> she's the "perpetrator" and he gives consent If "he gives consent", then she isn't a perpetrator. By definition. If one of the parties gets drunk, they can't give consent. Again, by definition.

> If "he gives consent", then she isn't a perpetrator. By definition.

> If one of the parties gets drunk, they can't give consent. Again, by definition.

Say she comes on to him, and he responds enthusiastically. But he's too drunk to give consent by your definition. Then she's just committed a rape? From her POV, also drunk, she made a move, he reciprocated, all in all it was a pleasant evening.

She clearly didn't mean to commit a crime in this case, and both their judgment was impaired. Whose fault is it?

I don't think it's fair to say it's all her fault - and I don't think a court of law could find fault here, fairly, with no witnesses and no evidence.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#424

Post by DaveExeter »

ummonk wrote: post #339
DaveExeter wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming. Huh? Have you ever heard of the Central Park Five? Google "Central Park Five" and you'll have a more enlightened view!

The Central Park five voluntarily confessed and were almost certainly guilty. The only issue was that there was a sixth perpetrator who had raped the victim after and wasn’t caught at the time.

If you did a little research you will find they got paid $41,000,000 by the City of New York!

You think the City just handed over tens of millions of dollars because settling would be cheaper then going to trial?

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#425

Post by dang »

nindalf wrote: post #408

@dang I’m sad that this was flagged. It would be nice if you or some other mod could explain why this decision was taken.

Mods don't flag submissions; users do. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#flag.

I turned off the flags on the post when I first saw it (before it made the front page) but it has gone through a couple of different phases since then.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#426

Post by GavinMcG »

voces wrote: post #326

Since the pattern is so similar, I now recognize this as a form of harmful #metoo activism. - Attack entire community, not individuals - Court of Public Social Justice - The charges amount to unwanted advances being made during a social interaction where that would be acceptable -- not sexual harassment, nor illegal behavior. Compare https://medium.com/@kristianlum/statistics-we-have-a-problem... Make the problem abo…

> because someone makes an advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely declining

Convenient to leave out the rape in the next sentence, and the other rape in the next paragraph:

> I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying.

> There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to.

Sorry you don't like to think about that.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#427

Post by sweetheart »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #413
_f1dq wrote: post #280

There is a lot about the sexual events in this post that, to me, highlights something I feel is important which is: we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex. This girl was feeling uncomfortable and crying but at the same time "didn't think those behaviors were problematic". I can't help but wonder if her parents never sat her down and discussed situations like this and, I ge…

we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex. I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence. I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespe…

DoreenMichele coming in as a strong contender for Parent of the Year 2021. You rule.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#428

Post by nindalf »

dang wrote: post #425
nindalf wrote: post #408

@dang I’m sad that this was flagged. It would be nice if you or some other mod could explain why this decision was taken.

Mods don't flag submissions; users do. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#flag . I turned off the flags on the post when I first saw it (before it made the front page) but it has gone through a couple of different phases since then.

Thanks for the quick response.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#429

Post by GavinMcG »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #311
mirekrusin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"seems" doesn't mean "is", we have law systems to deal with those kind of issues. Judges are for determining where the line between "shitty partner" vs "rapist" lies.

The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her. She suggests, strongly, that he's a shitty person. She wants other people to know this. Courts don't adjudicate such matters, unless they have further consequences.

"Insist[ing] on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to" is rape.

Re: My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

#430

Post by _ofdw »

scala__alacs wrote: post #301
na85 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse? How? It's quite simple, really. You know that phenomenon you see here on HN with big names like Steve Jobs or RMS, or Elon Musk? The phenomenon where people give them a pass for being disgusting, abusive assholes because "he's a genius/luminary/visionary" or because "his contributions to $thing are so great"? It's the same phenomenon with people like Jon Pre…

Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero. None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase). He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, pr…

>Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero.

>None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).

>He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero.

>I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.

Change just a handful of words and this exactly describes Stallman. I think my description is more apt than you might think.

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