Considering the Epstein connections, why is it a shock that it is still happening? People in that position often feel they can do anything they want, including sexual assault. The fact so few end up being investigated is disgusting.
These kinds of things constantly come out. In the 1990s, (when I was a teenager,) and these scandals happened, everyone thought "never again, it's better now."
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.
Maybe the answer is communism (trigger warning for the snowflakes). With a more equal distribution of wealth, there wouldn't be the rich and resourceful being able to build a fortress (with bought politicians, bought police, expensive lawyers) that would allow abuse against the less resourceful...
It may be difficult to find a decent historical accounting, but I can't think of any worse environment than the unaccountable all-male single-Party hierarchy of the Communist states for generating sexual assault on a massive scale.
I know it's probably more tongue-in-cheek/choice-words, but I don't think you need communism to prevent massive wealth inequality. We have taxes in capitalist society. We were still capitalist when wealth inequality was less pronounced. We don't suddenly stop being capitalist by adding additional taxes and incentives to reduce wealth inequality.
I don't think you know what Communism is of you think it's a way to stop sexual assault.
BTW: Communism isn't about equality, it's about saying whatever BS is needed to concentrate power into a group of elites who are mostly concerned with keeping their power.
I don't know how you think communism will solve the problems you think it will; they were all in the Soviet Union, but the lack of a free press made it so that most people didn't know those problems were there.
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.
With Lewinsky things are slightly different because (a) there was DNA evidence and (b) the claim of wrongdoing didn’t revolve around consent but rather the fact that Bill was her boss.
I think the U.S. needs to finally adopt the ERA into its constitution. Many people don’t realize that women still don’t have equal protection under the constitution in the U.S. It’s absurd in my opinion.
I feel like Joseph McCarthy’s list of <over 200 communists in the Department of State, or whatever> is particularly noteworthy. He couldn’t have contrived that list without Roy Cohn, and Cohn is one of the founding fathers of today’s ruling party. The legislative and executive branches legitimized giving attention to dudes with a secret list.
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
Interesting that every instance of sexual assault is preemptively doubted by default, whereas that's not a primary part of the conversation for accusations of other crimes like arson, theft, embezzlement, etc. False accusations of any crime could hurt the accused, that's more or less an unavoidable tautology of the legal system. There's just one kind of crime where public conversation obsesses about that, though.
I wouldn't say "every instance" is is preemptively doubted, but there is a wikipedia page on false accusations for a reason. With most studies indicating double digit % of false accusations. (and some numbers far higher than I would have guessed [0])
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.
Your source doesn't really say what you're stating though. The ranges seem to be 4-13%, with the majority closer to 8. The one that was highest for the US (10%) was a self-reporting survey that asked people if they had been falsely accused -- surely not the most reliable method.
The criterion for being considered false accusations in that table seems to be 'no charges filed'. Even in those cases, the disclaimers are pretty strong:
> The police continue to misapply the "no-crime" or "unfounded" criteria.
> It is impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" because many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies.
In the UK, charges can only be brought if there is sufficient admissible, credible, and reliable evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction.
It's a fairly high bar - it's not simply a matter of the alleged victim deciding to "press charges" as is sometimes portrayed in the media, and is subject to significant external oversight (it's not just the police who are involved).
So "no charges filed" is very very different to "unfounded" in the UK.
Fair, but isn't that the nature of these accusations? It's almost always one party's word against another's. So insufficient corroborating evidence seems to mean no witnesses or paper trail.
Because this is the sort of thing that in most cases can’t be substantiated by hard evidence. Whereas all of the rest of the examples you have generally can be. Would you support punishment of anyone as an arsonist only on the basis of a claim that they committed arson and #believeallwomen?
Shouldn't it be a good thing that we are presuming someone innocent rather than guilty?
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
This is assume SHE is guilty of a massive lie. The assumption is that she is trying to baselessly destroy him. Otherwise said, the benefit of the doubt is not symmetrical.
Yes we give the accused the benefit of the doubt and require the prosecution to meet a high burden of proof to overturn that. It is not symmetric by design.
> not a primary part of the conversation for accusations of other crimes like arson, theft, embezzlement
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.
It's just an unbiased recognition of the system of SA.
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).
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.
There will of course be a secret mirror blacklist: anyone who does report sexual assault to the authorities will find it much harder to get a job and impossible to access the inner circle.
Weinstein is doubly bad. At the same time he was raping starlets and blacklisting victims, he cultivated a ‘woman friendly’ public image, famously bankrolling Hillary Clinton’s campaign and acting as an industry mentor to Obamas daughter.
> Also feels like something that could be life ruining if someone innocent finds themselves on the list by mistake/fluke.
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.
Somehow I've gotten through decades of working alongside women without having accidentally assaulted anyone. If you're unsure then use your words to ask.
> Women get bitten by the vagueness of their own rules, since they want to keep all options open.
What does this even mean? Do you know how ridiculous you sound?
> If it was a strict 'no workplace dating ever' it would have been easier for everyone.
News flash: most companies have rules around relationships between superiors and subordinates. Such rules are only effective when they're respected and enforced.
And what's your solution for "investors" who prey on female founders, tech millionaires and billionaires who use their reputations and influence to befriend women they later pounce on, etc.?
Sure, dude. "Women get bitten by the vagueness of their own rules, since they want to keep all options open" sounds like a completely detached, "I have no skin in this game" argument. Eyeroll.
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.
Maybe Robert Scoble should tweet about how unfair life is, put forward an absurd definition of sexual harassment, accuses women of reporting it to fit in with the cool crowd, attack his own accusers, and plug his latest business venture again.
Your comment implies that it is impossible (or at least so unlikely as to be not worth thinking about) for someone or someones to intentionally put an innocent person on the list.
“Some predators want the shiniest star, the harder you are to take down, the more powerful they feel. It’s a conquest,” they said.
That applies to many areas, also censorship and cancellation targets. The Python Steering Council focused on successively harder targets in order to keep power, gratify their psychopathic instincts and keep their corporate jobs (which backfired fortunately).
I think the question is: Does this list work better in secret, where the perpetrators don't know they're on the list; or does it work better in public, where the general public learns that these kinds of problems continue to happen?
The temptation will be to pressure people on a secret list with public disclosure. And there’s a grey zone, too. Imagine a messy divorce, in which one person’s name is conveniently found on a list that’s time stamped during some period of contented infidelity. I think that’s how these are supposed to work.
The "missing stair" list exists in a lot of communities. The problem is that because it's not written down it relies on new women joining the scene being quietly taken aside and told who they should never be alone with, and sometimes the message isn't delivered in time.
Is the system so broken that it is denying proper investigation to the victims? if not, i think this list will just waste a lot of time, energy and reputation.
Because rent is expensive and options are limited, we've promoted the sigma grindset culture to an insane degree, and people like to cluster together socially, especially when doing something that scares them, like trying to launch a startup. Save on money, be around people experiencing the same things you are, potentially be able to collaborate if you end up working on the same thing, etc.
... 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.
Yes. This idea that there's some third option, where you just uh.... spend all your life grinding hard to someday maybe make it big while sacrificing all of the other stuff you might otherwise enjoy in life. Because, you know, you're some third other option that doesn't care about the stuff alpha and beta males care about.
We have a geriartic toddler in control of the world's largest military, voted in by other people driven by their (to reduce it to 2 words) immature anger... biological age isn't mental age.
Sorry for writing from a throwaway account because there's still a lot of stigma to this, while I think it's a pretty average experience.
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.
Women had to be interested in me so that I could feel validated
i don't quite get the meaning of this in the context of accepting agency of others. because it works both ways. either it means you assume that they are interested in you to validate yourself, or it means you need see/experience them actively showing interest in order to validate your approach.
likewise with agency, i can assume someone has agency, which is actually bad because it leads to thinking: if they didn't want this they would have used their agency to stop it. or i can ask myself whether there might be something that could prevent this person from using their agency.
a problem is also that when approaching someone you know what you want, and what you want could be something harmless. but the approached person doesn't know that if they don't know you well enough already.
i forgot to add that i am just talking about general definitions and my own feelings, not your personal specifics. feel free to respond as you feel comfortable
This is incredibly obvious and believable. The reason why American elites, particularly the SV executive class, went so hard for Trump is because he gives them complete lack of accountability. Whether it is sexual predation, financial regulation, crypto regulation, anti-gambling, it is all the same. Anybody putting any kind of rules in place for them is an affront to their 'freedom'.
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.
So many weird assumptions about men. Contrary to popular belief, we aren't all rapists or friends of rapists. And oh, by the way, some women do pretty awful stuff like this too.
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.
unless the subtext of this is that you don't think women are getting abused?
Wow, this is about cases of rape and sexual assault and yet so much hand wringing in the comments is about, maybe, a dude gets put on the list who didn't do anything.
95 comments
[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadThen 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?
BTW: Communism isn't about equality, it's about saying whatever BS is needed to concentrate power into a group of elites who are mostly concerned with keeping their power.
I don't know how you think communism will solve the problems you think it will; they were all in the Soviet Union, but the lack of a free press made it so that most people didn't know those problems were there.
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.
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
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...
> The police continue to misapply the "no-crime" or "unfounded" criteria.
> It is impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" because many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies.
It's a fairly high bar - it's not simply a matter of the alleged victim deciding to "press charges" as is sometimes portrayed in the media, and is subject to significant external oversight (it's not just the police who are involved).
So "no charges filed" is very very different to "unfounded" in the UK.
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
2.) The actual prosecution of a crime does not start with the assumption that whoever is reporting the crime is lying.
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.
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).
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.
(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.
The rest will genuinely ask nicely and risk getting reported to HR for harassment.
You're implying here that a significant number of women would want to report genuinely respectful men for an unstated reason.
Would you be able to share a reason they'd do this?
These people simply do not want to believe that sexual harassment and assault really happen.
What does this even mean? Do you know how ridiculous you sound?
> If it was a strict 'no workplace dating ever' it would have been easier for everyone.
News flash: most companies have rules around relationships between superiors and subordinates. Such rules are only effective when they're respected and enforced.
And what's your solution for "investors" who prey on female founders, tech millionaires and billionaires who use their reputations and influence to befriend women they later pounce on, etc.?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230597
Please don't assume that.
"Media Men Lawsuit Ends in Settlement"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/style/media-men-list-sett...
That applies to many areas, also censorship and cancellation targets. The Python Steering Council focused on successively harder targets in order to keep power, gratify their psychopathic instincts and keep their corporate jobs (which backfired fortunately).
Every single one of them is essentially making it clear they are 100% not safe people to be around. Literally putting themselves on their own list.
... 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?
It is exactly as dumb as you are fearing.
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.
i don't quite get the meaning of this in the context of accepting agency of others. because it works both ways. either it means you assume that they are interested in you to validate yourself, or it means you need see/experience them actively showing interest in order to validate your approach.
likewise with agency, i can assume someone has agency, which is actually bad because it leads to thinking: if they didn't want this they would have used their agency to stop it. or i can ask myself whether there might be something that could prevent this person from using their agency.
a problem is also that when approaching someone you know what you want, and what you want could be something harmless. but the approached person doesn't know that if they don't know you well enough already.
Surprised nobody else brings this up, but then again I lived to 49 before I figured out what BPD was.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/technology/agi-house-ai-c...
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.
unless the subtext of this is that you don't think women are getting abused?