Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment

I don't know Nick very well, but I've seen him around and spoken to him at hacker events for most of my life now. He's an incredibly stand-up dude and when I think about it really the heart of the community. When you compare him to other folks with any notoriety, he's drama-free and sqeauky-clean.

If he says this is what Jake did to him, I can't imagine it isn't just like he says.

I also agree, both Nick and Meredith are incredibly stand-up decent people. But this is the danger of accepting "a story" based solely on your impression of a person. Jake's been around a long time, and people respect his work, so they either didn't believe or didn't care about the stories about him. Now Nick has a story, and because we know and like Nick, we choose to believe that. In the end, we're all just taking sides.

Here's the other problem with this whole scenario: there are accusations of everything from "he made fun of me" to "he harassed and intimidated me" to straight up rape. Now it just looks like people just don't like him, removing credibility from the most serious accusations. And to be fair, i've known of him being a douchebag for over 10 years. But that also doesn't prove or disprove anything, it just makes things seem more plausible. So while I believe Nick's story, I don't know any of the other people with stories, so my opinion of them is still undecided.

> If you're not going to support these claims, you shouldn't make them.

Why is that? I am personally willing to believe "Multiple generally-trustworthy members of a community make accusations about a person P which, by their nature, cannot be easily substantiated to the public, which if true would imply that P is/has done X" as very strong evidence for "P is/has done X" - certainly enough to override my prior for "Most people are not/have not done X". And therefore, I think that people should make claims they believe to be true even when they are unsubstantiable by nature, and I am glad that these claims were made.

I'm not trying to make you feel bad for calling this out; you're just saying something that I see a lot in technical communities, in a lot of contexts. I would like technical communities to have a good, strong, evidence-backed way of reasoning about things like this. It seems so often that we default to reasoning about things the way the Anglo-Saxon legal system wants to reason about things when considering whether to point its monopoly on violence at a person. Especially for matters like harassment and sexual assault, we have strong reason to doubt that the legal system is well-suited in its current form at accurately making that judgment, let alone whether it is correct at judging truth, which it explicitly makes no claim to (Blackstone's dictum is specifically about how the legal system should minimize harm on the occasions it gets truth wrong). That default is baked into us by culture, but I think it's a bad default, or more specifically, an irrational and often erroneous default. Hearsay isn't allowable in a court of law, but that's not a reason that hearsay shouldn't be allowed to influence the personal opinions of community members who are making judgments for themselves and not for a government.

What exactly did he plagiarize, and where is the documentation of that? If it's about giving credit where credit is due, I don't see how just destroying Appelbaum as a "plagiarist" really helps there.

I guess my problem is: even assuming all charges are true, the way this is done, and the way it's nodded off by people in the name of being decent (less questions asked = more decent?), while others dismiss it as some SJW stunt or conspiracy or whatever, is just a horrible precedent to me. This all out attack on the totality of a person, this "creating facts on the ground", and this binary dichotomy of "only one party can ever be in the wrong", the extreme polarization.

For what it's worth, I know how being gas-lighted feels, I know how it is to see someone go from friendly to snarling with utmost hatred back to friendly. I don't feel like sharing all that, but that's kind of how I know a bit about sociopathy and narcissism to begin with, I had to learn.

But that's also why that website kind of struck me as kind of weird, since it talks about sociopathy yet seems not only kind of devoid of compassion, but also reckless, seeing how the destruction of Appelbaum seems to be intended to be total and forever. As in, just because he's no good as a "community leader", who cares what happens to the human being - he didn't care either, he started it after all. No fair judge and no psychologist worth crap would talk like that, and that's why such things should be left to both ultimately.

Even sociopaths are people, even after having been clinically diagnosed. Human rights apply even to those who don't afford them to others. This is a principle that is more important than anything else. EVEN if you have to disarm a person, set boundaries, and so on, there is never a point where they're just fair game for anything. You know how free speech is about protecting the speech you despise? Same goes for human rights. Believing in due process for the innocent is easy, believing in due process of a serial killer, now that's where it starts to become more adult, and there is no crime so atrocious the perpetrator loses their status as human being. We know this is hard to grasp for many people, but when "hackers" start forgetting that as well, that's troubling.

So I am really not liking this whole thing as it stands, and am also not liking this dichotomy of "either you believe it or don't", since I'd still have all the above questions or objections even granting every claim is 100% true.

And the shaming of people who reserve judgement or ask for any evidence, or more substance in general, in light of such a huge, all out attack, also sucks. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, people can "command" their personal friends to "not question, just hug" when that's all they can take (and I don't mean that snarkily, honestly), but that's not something a society or justice can operate on. His character has been effectively assassinated, no matter what comes of this most people who saw that may never see the follow-up, and we can't even ask questions? You can't take abuse seriously and then say "nothing you do to an abuser is ever abuse", that's not justice.

But if the accusations are true, maybe you dodged a bullet by not getting on his radar. So, I wouldn't feel bad about it. It maybe was your defense mechanism, sensing something bad and taking the exit.