the rachel drama/hack, the pronoun struggle sessions, and now this (most likely) false accusation against beatnik show that there's a lot of asshats with no morality willing to use anything against the site, and we need to get a lot smarter and stop falling for it
I don't think that's true. Believing all women doesn't mean believing anything a woman says without any critical thought. It's pretty self-evident how that's a flawed idea. This isn't a contradiction. Our position differs in that we didn't dismiss anything. Some random commenters cracking jokes may be insensitive but the admin are taking it seriously. And that's who needs to take it seriously. We can't do this thing where a few users shitpost and we treat that as the moral failing of the entire left. This isn't a referendum on where the left, even the online left, stands on MeToo. There is no identity crisis. Let's not lose our heads here.
This was always going to turn out one of two ways. Either we get rid of Beatnik and that proves that chapo is infested with pedos just like they already say. Or nothing happens, the accusations are dismissed, and that proves we're hypocrites for not believing all women. There is no win here. We've been here before when they said we were all white college bros. They're going to think what they think no matter what we do. There's no level of cooperation or humility good enough. So we don't worry about it. We don't agonize over what some chuds and libs might say. This isn't a PR thing. The soul of the left doesn't rest on what goes on in this site. Anyone who thinks it does isn't worth taking seriously.
Exactly. "Believe all women" doesn't mean that women never lie, it means that accusations need to be taken seriously and not just swept under the rug because it's convenient, you know the accused and he would never, she was just asking her it, etc, etc, etc. It means to listen and investigate, and if necessary, take serious action, which is what the mods are doing. I don't see any reason for a struggle session here.
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Well, the point is that often women aren't believed. Reports go unfiled and uninvestigated, rape kits go untested, the default response is "it didn't happen, and if it did she was probably asking for it." So believe all women, even if she engages in "risky behavior," even if they'd been dating, even if she's a sex worker, even if he's an important man, even if they'd both been drinking, even if a conviction would spoil the life of a "promising young man." Believe that no matter the woman's circumstances or identity, her claims are worthy of being listened to and investigated. The current system is shit, especially if you're, for example, a WOC, or trans, or any of a number of things that make you worth less in the power structure that exists today.
All that does not mean that no woman has ever lied. It just means that every accusation (no matter who makes it and how much status they have) deserves a rigorous investigation, and consequences if necessary. This is not how things go in most places today, but the mods are working to ensure that it's how things will work here. I hate to be all, "as a woman," but really, as a woman who uses this site, I find that reassuring. I'm sure it would be MUCH easier for them to latch on to some of the details from the accusation that make it seem ... questionable ... and just declare Beatnik innocent by default, but they're not doing that.
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Our admin reached out to the alleged victim. They locked the post and stated that any harassment of either party would be banned. Beatnik handed over all his admin privileges and basically transferred site ownership to TC69 and the other admins. Beatnik is now just a normal user who hasn't posted since making a statement. He could be easily banned and if we get any hint he's posting again, he can be called out. But this isn't a court, we can't stop him or anyone from posting. Bans aren't permanent. This is a problem with putting so much on the internet and trying to force it to be something it can't be. In person, you can get a restraining order and you can physically bar someone from a community. So there's only so much we can do as a site to punish someone. Because of that we shouldn't attempt to act like there's some scenario where proper justice, in a liberal or any other sense, can be done.
That response is as different as it could be from the chud response. The alleged victim comes forward. The post is immediately deleted, they're banned. Everyone has a laugh about it. The accused brags about it on twitter or the site. A person in power has been protected. They kept their admin status. Nothing changed. Everyone keeps posting about how women lie to get attention or money.
In your view are these situations the same and indistinguishable because of the "everyone had a laugh part?" Seems awfully reductive. Especially when everyone here did not have a laugh.
Now onto the broader philosophical argument. If chuds view themselves as justified in protecting good men from unscrupulous accusers, how is that different from us believing Beatnik might be the victim of a scam? How do we know we're good and they're bad when they believe they're good and we're bad? Outside of the above response, I don't know. I feel like this is one of those "how do you know your green isn't my red?" questions. I don't think morality is so objective. You try to do the best thing you can and live with the consequences. Chuds don't even try to do that.
I mean I look at the context of the post. We're beset by trolls just about every week. We have old chapo members who hate us and are gladly tweeting that we support pedophiles right now. We have people from a discord who hate us and raid every so often. There are two or three very active subreddits dedicated to trolling us and posting drama. There's a whole nother site for a different podcast that likes taking a shot at us from time to time. That's not including the various interpersonal and ideological struggles happening within the site at any given time. These are real things that happen. This isn't like claiming the deepstate is paying women to lie about Trump.
Not only that but we have bad actors who are active users here. I know that because as soon as the accusation was posted, it was almost instantly posted in other places. So all these people who hate us are here and at least some of them have become long-standing members with credibility. They just get a kick out of being a double agent or whatever. Or they believe in the politics but hate the idpol shit so they vent by stirring shit from the other end. When the stupidpol purge happened there were several users who posted there and here.
None of that means that we don't have weirdo sex pest users. Of course we do. So does any large group of people. Being leftist doesn't make us immune from having shitty people on our side. If anything this site defaults to thinking everyone is a secret chud or wrecker a little too much.
I think a lot of the struggle here isn't actually over philosophy or morality, it's that we're trying to force this site and the internet to do something it can't do. If we ban a sex pest they can just get a new name and keep posting. Materially there is no change. You would never know you're replying to them unless they made it obvious. Therefore we can't actually be a platform of justice in any real sense. Liberal or otherwise. We can ban people and try to curtail the bad people but we can't actually stop a really clever bad person.
That's why I occasionally push for logging off. We put too much faith in the internet and try to make it the center of our movement and that's a bad thing. Precisely because it's so easy to lob a grenade into the center of anything we build and bring it down. It's not secure by design. There's a reason leftist orgs had in-person vetting before corona. The internet should be the way to get to a place, it shouldn't be the place.
This also plays into how we deal with our own powerlessness. We put so much emphasis on online behavior being the metric by which we judge right and wrong, and who belongs and who doesn't. It comes from a good place but it's still misguided. We can't control anything happening in politics so we redefine what happens online as politics and then try to control that. We turn that control into a moral crusade because control means safety. We control who gets to be in our community and who doesn't. We get to control, to an extent, who says what. We determine which are the right opinions and which are bad.
I know that sounds like a parler post. But I don't disagree with some levels of control because they are indeed necessary to secure the community for marginalized members. Unlike the internet censorship people I agree with banning chuds and sex pests and others as well as not turning this place into some kind of marketplace of ideas where lolbertarians come debate us everyday.
But the control has a bad side because it means people confuse that for political control. They think by regulating the community they're doing praxis. Again, to some extent it is because marginalized groups need safe places to congregate without harassment. But it's not going to help bring about socialism or propel the leftist project forward. So we can't treat it as an important part of the movement or accomplishing politics. Therefore we should limit our agonizing over these lines in the sand we set up to police our community. We shouldn't put so much emphasis on policing consumption and worrying about how watching the wrong movie or liking the wrong podcast makes you a chud.
If you understand that then these online interactions become simpler and easier to contextualize in a broader political sense. A lot of controversies aren't actually meaningful. The power the internet has appears to only exist to those who believe it has power.
So to bring this back around. I guess the idea is that I'm pretty comfortable with my morality on this. I don't see it as a contradiction. I see a material difference between how this has been handled so far and how r/The_Donald would handle it. I think it's been handled as well as it could have been for a website. The accused are no longer in power. The site is still up. The alleged victim has every channel of support from the admin and most users open to them. They've been clear that people shouldn't harass anyone over this. Not sure what else there is to do. I don't know what a perfect response looks like. If Beat had been banned instantly and publicly then we'd just be having a permutation of the same conversation.
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