Life after an internet mob attack

I'm a staunch Democrat, but the Kavanaugh accusations were absurd and angering to me. There was nothing there to back her allegations at all. The witness she said was there, her friend, said she didn't remember the incident. She couldn't even remember where the alleged assault took place. She even got the year wrong and had to backtrack to a "more correct" date range later on.

I think she has some form of false memory syndrome, which would explain why she believes so strongly that this event happened, but she has absolutely not even a single atom of proof.

It's funny that a letter signed by 65 (SIXTY FIVE) women all stating that he was a gentleman was completely ignored by the media. The media hones in on a single woman who claims sexual assault with no evidence, meanwhile there are 65 women willing to testify on his behalf. It's incredible to me. If he were a predator, wouldn't you think there would be a single woman in the 40 years since this alleged assault would have come out?

> So is there any point at which you would say it matters whether an accusation is true or not? Is it only if there’s a criminal investigation?

It always matters whether an accusation is true. Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.

> You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.

You’ve completely misunderstood my perspective. I’m looking at it from the perspective of the person afraid to make an accusation.

This is absurd. The “mob” that “ruined” his life did no such thing. Multiple accusers had credible accounts, media did scrutinize their accounts and determined that one wasn’t credible while others were. He wasn’t “cancelled”, he has a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the most powerful country in all human history. This “mob” theory is ridiculous. Yet one of his accusers was so afraid for her life she went into hiding. This is exactly why I’m opposed to penalizing accusers.

So if I were to name the people who have sexually assaulted me, here in a comment—which I’ve already said I’m terrified to do even though they don’t have an audience here to my knowledge—but if I did so, just said so to an audience, I should be legally liable to prove it? Because I didn’t keep it private?

Can you not see how harmful that is?

It's only a 5 min read, I recommend it, you might find you have more shared liberal values then you thought, but if you're not going too, let me point out some of the relevant ones here:

Article 12 > No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

This is a liberal value. False accusations go against this, so would most of the US politcal tactics employed to smear and discriminate other parties. It's rampant in today's society, in fact you did just that, by trying to compare people who disagree with you as "idiots". You took attack on their reputation.

Article 23 > Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection

Wage slavery is a catchy attention seeking way of saying that this right is being breached by a lot of employers.

Article 19 > Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

This is where it gets tricky. It is your right to be allowed to tell others on social media about any information or ideas you hold. So it seem to make sense that one could tell people that their ex was abusive and a scumbag. And in turn it is fine for others to tell the ex they believe what they think of it.

But what if your ideas are an attack on someone's else honor or reputation? Are you still free to express them? Would it not then breach the other right to not have honor and reputation attacked?

Well yes, this is a dilemma. One where different people lean more on one right or the other. In the US, people lean more on the right to speech, so it tends to be free game to say whatever you want and thus internet mobs are okay.

Now what I think is that there is no real contradiction. You have the right to express yourself freely, but not to hurt someone else's reputation. So expressing lies and falsehoods to attack someone goes against that person's rights, and your right to express yourself freely is for things you believe to be truthful, or things which don't attack someone's reputation only.

That said, and I won't quote them here, other liberal values say everyone is innocent before proven guilty and have the right to a fair trial. So it would be to the person whose reputation they feel attacked to prove that the other person did in fact express lies and falsehoods to attack their reputation, and that person would need a fair trial and be treated innocent until guilty. Similarly no penal offence can be taken against someone just because there is somebody claiming they are abusive and were harassed by them, a fair trial must be held.

That leaves us with how things are exactly right now. Everyone is free to say what they want to anyone else, and everyone is free to any idea they hold of others. And for the government to interfere in any way, there'd need to be a fair trial that proves that one person's speech was a real attack on someone's reputation, and not just sharing their truths.