YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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).

And also based on the emails, because convinced made Epstein more respected in his circles.

If it was a strict 'no workplace dating ever' it would have been easier for everyone.

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.