Parents can be abusers.
Foster parents can be abusers.
Step parents can be abusers.
Traffickers of any stripe can pose as parents.
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As someone who is also published at Ars Technica, I… truly, truly have no idea what the right response is, regarding his old articles. I’ve got simultaneous knee jerk responses for “burn it all down!” and “destroying data is rarely the right move”.
(Obligatory: while I am an Ars contributor, I am not an Ars employee, and have absolutely zero authority over this question.)
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So many likes. I’m glad you said it so I don’t have to.
As for the post itself, it’s incredibly disturbing, as are his conversations others have posted above. It brought to mind the time we found out our neighbor had been molesting my then-girlfriend’s second son. Those were some dark days, ending with the abuser killing himself. Hopefully this guy was caught before fucking up minor’s lives.
I may regret this… but…
We are still having to deal with hetero men flaunting their sexuality openly for decades. Finally it seems like pushback is achieving some positive changes, just in time for women to lose their legal bodily autonomy in the courts. Yay?
It’s possible the people with non-hetero interests are overcorrecting. It’s also possible that – since their partner possibilities are more scare than hetero combinations – they need to broadcast more openly to find like-minded people. And for what may turn out to be a brief period of time, they are finally able to be themselves to varying degrees.
I don’t feel like people who openly self identify as “poly, pan, and/or pervy” should fear having to be also equated to “pedophile” because of this… gentleman.
Discretion is great, and not a bad idea, but the fact is even if he didn’t label himself that way it wouldn’t have changed who/what he is at the core of himself.
Saying, “well obviously he was a horrible person, look at how he labeled himself” feels to me like finding out a campus shooter played Call of Duty and saying his rampage was because of video games. It’s focusing on the trees without taking into account the forest, and then saying all trees are the same tree.
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I wonder if there isn’t a bit of confusion in this discussion about the difference between discretion and self-supression.
For example, I have no issues with any co-workers casual mention of dates, relationship arrangements, or orientations. No one should ever be discrimated against or made to feel unwelcome for legal personal choices.
OTOH, I am equally averse to hearing the details of your swinger party, masturbation session, or BDSM dungeon, as I am to hearing about someone else’s 50 years of monogamous missionary sex.
None of my co-workers should have to hear about what I like in bed or who I am attracted to. They also should not have to avoid my constant trolling for partners while trying to do their jobs.
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I think that’s a very good point, but it’s not clear where the line is. Your examples are pretty clear-cut cases to me of “Don’t involve other people in your sex life without consent” which includes giving them all the graphic details about it. Just listing “Pervy” without any other detail or elaboration on one’s twitter bio does not cross that line I don’t think, given it’s so vague as to encompass whatever minor kink you can imagine, and also straight-up pedophilia, apparently. Dropping that information in a real-life conversation might be a little more problematic, because even without any additional information, it can be assumed you’re dropping that detail for a reason, rather than just broadcasting it randomly into the internet.
Likewise, when it comes to the actual details, twitter is a different beast. It would be massive inappropriate for one to go on at length about their sexual preferences in the middle of an office where everyone has to hear them. Doing the same thing on twitter may not be wise if it’s your real name, linked to your job, but no one has to listen on twitter, where you generally won’t see someone’s tweets unless you actively want to, and if someone you don’t like is getting re-tweeted onto your timeline, you can block them.
Of course, openly tweeting objectifying content about the women around is gross. Openly tweeting pedophilia is just horrifying.
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If it wasn’t clear from my comment, I don’t think it is either. That falls under “casually mentioning” as far as I’m concerned. The actual content of his tweets is far more problematic.
I feel that in general, we are moving toward a much more inclusive and open way of understanding relationships and sexuality, and that the natural progression will actually lead to more respect and discretion, because assumptions about those topics will become irrelevant with so many considerations to make.
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Disappearing huge amounts of writing because the author turned out to be a monster in one way or another always creeped me out.
I don’t see how it helps. It just sweeps things under the rug and pretends like this type of stuff doesn’t happen.
I mean, your site is yours to do with however you please, but what seems better, is when sites post a disclaimer, going, obviously worded more diplomatically: This person turned out to be a big piece of shit. We know this and truly believe they should go fuck themselves, but in the interest of transparency, have left their writing up.
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I have this image of the US system that entrapment is illegal, and it seems to me that a federal agent contacting the guy to offer such opportunities falls neatly under that.
Why am I mistaken?
Because entrapment doesn’t mean what you think it does.
US laws are many and varied by state and federal law is potentially different again.
But in general law enforcement are allowed to do an awful lot of things that an ordinary person might consider to be actively encouraging someone to commit a crime.
In this case it doesn’t sound as if they even did that. They presented him with the apparent opportunity to commit a crime. He apparently took that opportunity and ran with it.
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I mostly lean away from deleting myself.
The more I think about this, the more I think this modern instinct to somehow mark, brand or otherwise disavow a perp’s past work is often a mistake. An attempt to produce feelings of control where there is no relevant control.
It can be a little different with showbiz people, where their personality and image are such a big part of the work they produce, where it’s hard to look past the things they stand accused of. You see a movie credit: “Produced by Harvey Weinstein,” and you’re taken out of the moment. I haven’t seen any Louis C. K. stuff since his scandal broke, but I imagine I’d have a hard time separating the art from the artist.
I’m not terribly likely to read any old Peter Bright columns - it’s quickly-obsolete tech stuff after all - but if I do, it’s likely I won’t even notice a column is by Peter Bright. Anyone who’s curious why his submissions stopped suddenly will be able to find out easily. Marking or deleting his work won’t actually fix the things he’s accused of. Choosing not to mark or delete his work isn’t erasing history. He doesn’t (presumably) get paid every time someone reads one of his old columns.
Maybe the right thing to do is to publish a story about why he was fired, and leave it at that.
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Oh, no kidding there. That one makes me very conflicted about some of my favorite movies, and I’m generally not one to watch a lot of movies in the first place.
I think that’s a good way of handling it. Fair, to the point, and nothing gets memory-holed.
One example that springs to my mind is H.P. Lovecraft. From what I’ve read and heard, he was a peach of a gentleman. But I never got much into his original Elder God stories, and I learned about them through other sources (thanks public domain!), so I don’t have trouble keeping the man separated from his art.
That said, the more I learned about Piers Anthony, the less fond of his books I’ve become. I missed the slathering of misogyny and pedophilia that most (all?) of his books have when I was a teen reading them in the 80s. I still have a handful on my bookshelf that I will never read again – but I also don’t want to give them away to avoid directly passing along the darkness, and I don’t want to just destroy them, because… books. So they sit and gather dust.
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Sometimes you want toxic waste to be cleaned up, not left lying around in the community to help “educate” people.
That said, it is true the ars content is totally unrelated to the incident at hand (contrast to the Piers Anthony work), so probably best to just leave it up and indicate disavowal of the author if someone clicks on the byline / bio.
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I think all is fair.
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Could they redact his name but keep the content? I said this earlier but since it’s not op eds I think it’s valid to keep up technical content.
Ex IIRC ReiserFS is still a thing
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