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Also feels like something that could be life ruining if someone innocent finds themselves on the list by mistake/fluke. This is presumably crowdsourced which is not bulletproof
(Famously, Weinstein did this to actresses)
And also based on the emails, because convinced made Epstein more respected in his circles.
Not as likely as you think. The reason a list like this feels necessary to many (presumably mostly) women is that in SV culture there's a presumption that these sorts of claims are almost always baseless. That these women engaged in consensual activities and either regretted it after the fact or were trying to make a buck.
If it was a strict 'no workplace dating ever' it would have been easier for everyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230597
Then all the other sexual assaulters can leap to his defense and circle the wagons around him again!
But sexual assault is the one area that is almost always taking two parties at their word, and very very frequently, the only court is the court of public opinion. That makes it rife for abuse in both directions - people doing it believing they'll get away with it because it comes down to their word vs. someone else's if it ever even comes out, since so few people go to the police, and people know they can lob an accusation out there and do a lot of damage without having to prove anything.
I think the former happens far far more than the latter, but I'm also not going to wonder why people discuss the latter - it's real, and it happens. People discuss getting attacked by sharks whenever sharks come up, too, even though that's almost certainly not going to be something they need to worry about, either.
This sort of list is exactly the sort of place where those false accusations can be really easily inserted with minimal vetting. I'd also bet it is an almost entirely accurate list.
All these things can be true at once.
Legal Eagle made a good video talking about how there's a bit more to it than that, it was about the Platner and Salwell allegiations: <https://nebula.tv/videos/legaleagle-she-said-is-evidence>.
And given how abysmally low the rate of false allegations is maybe we should all do a bit better and stop running interference for our oligarch class, especially since sexual impropriety seems to be how they operate in a lot of domains, not just with adult women.
Interestingly I have seen the opposite where if a guy is accused, it is automatically assumed he is guilty. Especially with sports players, which lead to the Duke Lacrosse false accusations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_rape_hoax
Embezzling is universally bad, and can be proven with "objects" ie transaction and contracts and the like.
the pernicious problem with sexual assault is that first you need to prove the assault happened, which is hard, because its often in private with no witnesses.
Second you have to prove consent.
worse consent can be withdrawn, especially if things go too far or violent. so it might appear to witnesses that it look ok when they saw them.
Finally the elephant in the room. There is a taboo around non straight male sexuality which varies by region. Its very easy to paint the cliamant as someone with loose sexual morals, filled with guilt/loathing lashing out to smear an innocent party.
The problem for the victims is that agreeing to sex is vaguely taboo for non-straight men to do. Therefore they are at fault.
I'd say a better phrasing is that innocent until proven guilty applies - just like with other crimes. Crowd sourced lists aren't that so treating them with some caution is warranted.
I can see how even an unreliable list may be of use practically to women though even if process wise it is quite dubious.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape#Estim...
Both men and women can have incentive to act amorally, and the context of the situation is often the best we have to weigh those incentives and feel out what really happened and the scope of the impact from it.
This is complicated by the fact that SA is largely subjective, and what some people get lifelong trauma from is another Friday night for others. So both the act and the outcome are subjective.
Those other crimes are pretty binary, where you did or you didn't do it. SA is different because often guilt is a confluence of many factors rather than a single verifiable action, and those factors are mostly subjective self-reported ones that can have incentivized bias (something the legal system works hard to weed out in other cases).
I've never heard of anybody's life being ruined over an accusation of arson that was dropped for lack of evidence (or even later proven to be false). As long as the consequences of the accusation are greater, the scrutiny will be, too.
That's because that's the narrative people push out to their followers. It allows them to continue to abuse women and take advantage of men with their countless grift. So there is a strong incentive to push that narrative. It's helpful to remember that these people think women are lesser and objects, not people.
Life-ruining? No, not at all. Not even close.
Indeed. Some privileged people confuse being denied opportunity (rightfully) with a life being "ruined". It's a telling behavior rooted in entitlement.
Those poors have to deal with this often, which is considered a "them" problem. Be it because of credit score, carried debt, criminal record, or loss of license, etc, as I have seen and experienced.
I had sex therapy to be able to understand where my fantasy ends, and where the real world starts, and how people in the real world aren't there to play the roles my fantasies give them.
It sounds obvious when I say it like this but there are many men like me, who didn't grow up emotionally, and having difficulty accepting the agency of others. Women had to be interested in me so that I could feel validated. I also had never stopped and asked myself "does she really want this or am I trying to manipulate her?".
You also see the same pattern with men who think it's their right to find a female partner and they feel wronged by the society when this doesn't automatically happen.
Try getting some help, fellow men. It takes a lot of weight from your shoulders and you become much less likely to end up getting on such lists.
There is certainly no excuse for bad behavior, and it is certainly the case that for many folks they absolutely know what they are doing.
If your point is that people are culpable for their bad behavior regardless of their claims about knowledge, then I agree.
At the same time most of the culture that raised me runs on people denying to themselves what they are doing, ranging from highly individualistic sublimations of the "fundamental attribution error" to renouncing culpability for their direct work at building the torment nexus.
The entirety of the mode of production here relies on ignoring how we exploit the people around us in almost every exchange so it's not at all surprising to me that, looking towards the OP, men in this culture commonly are able to hide their bad behaviors in layers of fantasy so deep that they aren't able to consciously understand how they are treating their lovers.
I don't know your context here, but if that kind of self-deception is news to you you might want to review the behavior of the people you're around (or your own), because either your threshold for bad behavior or your perceptions of peoples' capacity for self-delusion is perhaps a little low.
Don't get me wrong, I was being horrible and probably made someone or two uncomfortable.
Good thing about therapy is you don't get judged like the responses I get here.
... but yes it's still weird from an objective standpoint and only makes sense when you insert yourself into the bizzaro world bubble of SV.
is this related to the whole alpha/beta male tediousness, or something tangentially related?
Surprised nobody else brings this up, but then again I lived to 49 before I figured out what BPD was.
"Media Men Lawsuit Ends in Settlement"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/style/media-men-list-sett...
Depending on who is asking, there is a different tang to that question.
If you see, hear, or think that one of your "bros" is abusing someone, fucking talk to them and tell them to stop. If they dont, cock block them so they can't abuse your friends.
This stuff continues on because its overtly, or covertly approved. Men dont cry or talk about feelings because "thats what girls do". Thats how powerful social pressure is.
"oh but women love a powerful man" they might, but they don't like being abused. All that shit you hear from pickup artists doesn't work. 90% of it is showering cash and cornering people to the point where they can't say no comfortably.
Did I imply that all men are rapists? no.
I said that its up to us to police this. thats all. I don't think thats particularly anti-men.
its like saying, if you see your mate drink driving, you tell them not to do it. Its not controversial to do that, and its doing them a service. It'll stop them getting injured or injuring someone else.
do you want to see your mate's life ruined?
Then the me-too moment happened and everyone remembered the 1990s as a time where all kinds of nasty behavior was tolerated.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that a lot of the people involved were too young and/or not paying attention during the me-too movement.
Can we ever figure out how to break the cycle?
Clarence Thomas had been appointed to the Supreme Court after a lengthy investigation into sexual harassment claims by Anita Hill. At the time, SNL seemed to think that the main problem was his lack of game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shkJfRpktGc
A few years later we found out that Clinton had been getting BJs from his interns. This time the Republicans wanted to make a big deal about it so Moveon.org was born. It started as a petition asking Congress to literally "move on" from the Clinton scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoveOn#Opposing_Clinton's_impe...
Neither Anita Hill nor Monica Lewinsky seem to consider either of those investigations remotely successful.