There's always a huge amount of drinking at tech gatherings. Please do yourself and your peers a favour by knowing when to stop drinking. It helps to have a drink limit and sticking to it, no matter if others encourage you to drink more. I'm going to sound like an advertisement, but please drink responsibly.
Because it needs to be said
201–210 of 635 posts
Re: Because it needs to be said
#202I think there's a deeper cultural problem here: that the behavior of Joe had that much of an impact on Justine's life in the first place. There are women that would experience the same thing, but would not retreat into themselves in this extreme way. There are even women that would shrug it off. However, the response of Justine matches ancient societal expectations: if a woman has been violated, she loses all value.…
Unmitigated bullshit.
> However, the response of Justine matches ancient societal expectations: if a woman has been violated, she loses all value.
"The response of Justine matches" (be more pretentious) the response of someone who has experienced extreme violation of trust by a close friend who was also an authority figure. If you like, invent a hypothetical scenario that involves public humiliation and violation of trust and all the rest and no sexuality whatsoever and a person might be equally traumatized.
It's interesting that you recommended she see a therapist. As with all the well intentioned advice she's getting as a result of posting this, it's certainly a possibility that has occurred to her and has been recommended by those close to her.
Re: Because it needs to be said
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain how it fails at achieving its goals? What do you think the goal of a trigger warning is?
It's supposed to warn readers who have had similar experience that the content of the article could cause flashbacks of their own experiences. And I somehow can't shake off the feeling that all it does is promote the victim mentality in the the author and the audience. Also good job white knighting your pants off in this thread.
That's not all it does. It's okay to be wrong. We've all been there.
Re: Because it needs to be said
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a much more workable solution would be to collectively attempt to abandon the shitty American brand of alcohol culture that seems to be a fairly common contributing factor in a lot of these stories about rape and assault. Alcohol makes one stupid, not cool. I have no idea why it is held in such high esteem in the US tech industry.
No, the problem with American alcohol culture is that they treat it as a "big bad monster", rather than a part of life. Result: people not knowing their limits. Public drinking is allowed in Germany, however, funny as it seems it's not a barbaric (ahem) hellhole. Nor you see a lot of people "losing it" That's maturity.
> Public drinking is allowed in Germany, however, funny as it seems it's not a barbaric (ahem) hellhole. Nor you see a lot of people "losing it"
Oh yes you will.
Re: Because it needs to be said
#205Reading the comments here makes me think I am in bizarro world. Is expecting women to say "No!" already too much personal responsibility for them these days? Calling this "sexual assault" is just crazy. There was no force, she never told him to stop. This would be thrown out in court without question in any half-way sane country.
Consent is not defined by the absence of a no, but a presence of a yes.
The situation described falls within the definition of sexual assault in the United States, at least. I am not a lawyer. Decide for yourself: http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/2907.03
Re: Because it needs to be said
#206I think there's a deeper cultural problem here: that the behavior of Joe had that much of an impact on Justine's life in the first place. There are women that would experience the same thing, but would not retreat into themselves in this extreme way. There are even women that would shrug it off. However, the response of Justine matches ancient societal expectations: if a woman has been violated, she loses all value.…
I can't believe I'm reading this here. What if some other assault happened, you got kicked in the guts by your boss while everyone around you just stood there and didn't do anything about it? I know I'd be quite upset. That man had absolutely no right to do what he did and you can't blame the victim for getting upset about it.
Re: Because it needs to be said
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
posting your personal account of someone's crimes against you in a blog is not a fair or reasonable way to deal with what is clearly a very serious matter. it sounds like what happened was awful and these types of incidents are common in many predominantly male professions, e.g. law, finance. i was recently seriously harassed and more-or-less sexually assaulted by an acquaintance's wife at a wedding in a swimming poo…
> this trend of women posting their account of a sexual assault online is alarming because of what hawkharris describes: it could be false and then is plastered all over the net, irrevocably damaging the reputation of the accused. Here is something I find curious: you are one of many commenters here literally ignoring the fact that Justine has witnesses to what happened and bringing up the hypothetical, irrelevant po…
Both of the witnesses' testimonies seem to be subjective: "It was getting creepy, but Justine didn't move, or slap him. She was laughing..."[1]; "The executive's posture and actions aggressive; "no" was not a possibility."[2]
Their stories also don't corroborate: "Fast forward to (from what I remember), around 1am. "[1]; "It was slightly before midnight..."[2]
I think it is good that there are witnesses but it is not as simple as saying that because there are, Justine's version of events is correct. We don't know exactly what they saw and heard, how much of their versions are based on actual events or the aftermath or their relationships with the involved. That is why it is still important to maintain innocence of the accused until proven guilty.
"Here is something I find curious: you are one of many commenters here...bringing up the hypothetical, irrelevant possibility that such an accusation could be made falsely"
It certainly isn't irrelevant to the accused. His reputation and in fact his entire life is at stake. A few blog posts do not constitute proof.
[1] - http://blog.matt-darby.com/essays/i-am-the-other-developer
Re: Because it needs to be said
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bigger deal because of frequency. There are orders of magnitude more rapes than rape accusations, even including legitimate ones. Rape is endemic in our society. If you are comparing them 1:1, we can have a discussion, but I am speaking in aggregate.
And yet I worry about both because I realize that all victims deserve my sympathy and attention, regardless of how they were made a victim or whether there is enough of them to justify me giving them a second thought. And I'm saying that the blogging response to the one you do care about might be having unintentional consequences for the other that you don't care about, and advising caution on an obviously explosive…
In what you are arguing, you fail to realize that there is only one victim. And while that might be the accused, in this case where we have 3 accounts supporting the accuser... well... it's not wrong to side with either of them, but you can't really call out supporting her side as biased in any way.
Re: Because it needs to be said
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that you think that statement is bold says a lot about how far we are from solving it and helping people.
Rape creates victims. False accusations create victims. Before you say "not the same!" they both often end in suicide. So, knowing that and knowing how difficult of a topic false accusations are to study and how little we know about the bad side of human beings, I would hope that anybody who is reasonable would read "rape is a bigger deal than false accusations of rape" and say whoa, nelly, partner, do you know somet…
I've floated this question in two other places, but I'll try again here.
> False accusations create victims.
This is almost certainly not a false accusation since Justine has multiple eyewitnesses, two of whom have confirmed her story on their blogs.
Why are you bringing up the problem of false accusations?
edit: I really am interested in your answer, more so now that you responded but failed to answer. Rereading the post I think you're referring to didn't really help.
Re: Because it needs to be said
#210This article confuses me. 1. Why do work collegues party with each other? Isn't work for work and non-work for non-work? Why mix the two? That's asking for shit, throwing professionality out the window. At my recent places of employ I have religously avoided any private contact with my collegues. This gives me an air of professionality and a sense of trust = "Icecreampain will treat me fairly because he is not best f…
Like some other posts note, there are eyewitnesses (including a pair that wrote about it). It's very unlikely to be made up, even though her account is very one-sided.
Sadly, it's really clear from this post that this poor young woman has other issues in her life. And those issues will probably not be improved with the way she's chosen to handle this unfortunate event.