I saw, in this event, another case of misogynistic behavior. Which I find despicable. Yet I did fixate on how the social media phenomenon behaved rather than the importance of the what the victim was saying.
The sexual assaults by the accused and the uphill battle the victims face in seeking help and justice, and the cessation of similar scenarios by changing the entrenched social bias, are the most important things to address systemically.
Discussions regarding the how social media impacts the justice process are definitely secondary. I guess I just didn’t see it as an either/or discussion, nor did I realize that I would be perceived as against the first because I was concerned about the second. Live and learn.
The only consquence he faced in reality was losing his job, because his erstwhile partners (who knew him well) heard the accusations and essentially agreed amongst themselves that “yeah, that’s in character for him, so we need to ask him to leave.” We have no idea if the accusations would have resulted in a criminal case, and we are not sure why exactly he killed himself (except for his own statement that his accusers should not be blamed).
Not only off-topic but de-railing, which is frowned upon here. Why it’s unwelcome beyond that is something I can discuss further, but the moderator’s replies to you give reason enough.
ETA:
Ok, apparently you do need more detail. I’m going to try to add something to @orenwolf’s explanation as to why it was so unwelcome, especially presenting it as you did.
Per Cory’s FPP, the only people out there insisting on making this case a primarily a narrative about mob justice, in which Holowka performed a “self-execution” to escape their wrath, are Gamergate types from the manosphere (on-line home to MRAs, PUAs, incels, and other unsavoury characters). These are the same supreme-being-of-reason types who regularly show up here to concern-tr0ll here about legal technicalities and call the accusations of those putting themselves forward as victim into question (on no real basis) whenever some established white man or a young white man with a bright future is accused of sexual harassment or rape. Sadly, sometimes self-described progressive brocialist types also arrive to JAQ off in a more privilege-blind manner.
You may not have intended to come off like them, but you did and that’s part of the reason you’re getting the same reaction here that they do.
Maybe a better term would be “the chickens coming home to roost.” There wasn’t a mob. There were a handful of people who knew him very well who either accused him of abuse or believed those accusations due to their experience with him, and chose to remove him from his position which gave him access to victims.
If you never repeat this oft-used victim-blaming trope again, it will still be too soon.
Did you even read the link? Restorative justice focuses on doing what’s right for the victim, not the abuser.
So what? These are the normal ramifications for everyone involved in a bad social scene, particularly when crime is involved. It’s not a mob, it’s not justice, people just don’t want to be associated with other people’s problems. They drop you hard and fast. Consequences exist and are not doled out with any kind of legal precision. Every victim learns this… if they survive. But the pain there comes from it happening because of something someone else did to you. A bunch of people find out you’ve gotten into some kind of trouble and so decide to dissociate with you, maybe even pile on and talk shit about you? That’s exactly what you should expect. In no way shape or form do men accused of rape deserve some kind of special protection from social judgement that literally no one else in the world would ever even think to expect.
i feel like i hear this more and more as if it were the whole story.
hurt people hurt people, sure. but does every hurt person hurt people? absolutely not. and, can people who have lived without significant trauma cause trauma? of course they can. ( otherwise, explain brok turner. )
there are a whole host of reasons that people become abusive or break laws. and i think there’s more than enough examples of people who have lived pretty normal lives who get radicalized into white supremacists, misogynists, terrorists, whatever.
trauma is definitely a “risk factor” - but i can’t see a reason the assumption should be: oh they must have had a hard upbringing. that just doesn’t seem true.
I feel like it’s a bullshit excuse not only for shitty behavior, but also for people’s unwillingness to ‘course correct’ once they get called out on that aforementioned shitty behavior.
Read Scott Benson’s own article. He wasn’t punishing Alec based on an accusation. He was walking away because he, too, was a victim of Alec’s abuse. You are advocating for an abuse victim to stay in an abusive relationship and calling it “avoiding mob justice”. There is no “mob justice” in walking away/severing ties with/firing (which did not happen here, again, read Scott’s article), because they are abusive to you and those around you.
That’s called protecting yourself and those around you. That’s what you often see happening. One victim speaks up and others realize they are not alone, that it wasn’t an isolated incident, that they didn’t imagine it. And they are adding to the testimony and/or protecting themselves or others from the abuser, not pulling out pitchforks. That’s why it was called #metoo to start with: because that’s the response when you realize you aren’t the only one.
Because I can’t get enough Laurie Penny, and because this still feels relevant:
Even though the issue on the table is the awful things that women and girls have had to put up with for unspoken generations, we still, somehow, seem to be more worried about men. In almost every conversation I have had about this issue, with people of every gender, the topic has tilted slowly back towards how we’re going to help men, as opposed to how we might make all our communities kinder and better and less fucked up.
The question of what we do with abusers in our midst, abusers who some of us might love, has been tearing apart communities I have been close to for years. I have seen it happen again and again. Truths long hidden are spoken, and before long it is the people telling those truths — usually women — who are blamed, not for lying, but for causing harm — as if harm were not already being done, had not already been done, for years.
Some months ago, I was part of a large group of women, many of them victims and survivors, wondering what to do about a repeat rapist who many of us still cared for deeply. Because I am, as mentioned, a soft touch, I was one of the people on call to make sure he wasn’t in immediate danger of hurting himself after his transgressions were finally made known. Plans were drawn up for how he could make amends; programs for his healing were suggested; timetables were proposed for when and if the press or police should be called in. Almost nobody wanted the guy’s entire life ruined, but it was hard to know what justice would look like otherwise. The issue was only resolved when one of us who had been trying to stop this man from hurting any more of her friends for over a decade stayed up late, went on Twitter, and decided, you know what, fuck it: he’d had enough chances. She wasn’t waiting any more.
Everyone freaked out, including me. I was among the ones saying that we should give him more time, no, he really does want to change, he’s trying to understand what he did wrong, and if we go hard we’re going to lose him. I had forgiven him the demeaning, dehumanizing things he had done to me long ago, and I had forgotten that it was not my job to decide whether anyone else should do the same. I was terrified that this man, who I loved deeply and still do, would end his life. I was angry at Twitter Justice Girl for forcing the issue. I thought she had gone too far.
I was wrong. She did the right thing. We only found out how much of the right thing she’d done when all the other stories started coming out. The guy had spent 20 years hurting women on three separate continents and — I find it hard to write this, so give me a moment — he wasn’t going to stop. He wasn’t going to stop until the women who loved him stopped giving him chances. He might have wanted to stop, but he didn’t have to, so he wasn’t going to.
So when I am asked if this movement is going too far, being too brutal, I don’t always know how to answer. I know that the climate is, for once, less than merciful to men. I know that men are scared. I also know that this could not have happened any other way. I don’t want to live in a world where men don’t change until you threaten to destroy everything they love. I wanted to believe that men would care enough about women to want to change of their own accord. It is precisely because I’m enough of a sucker to endlessly assume the best of men that I wanted to believe this.
The real risk here is that we will let our very human compassion for men in pain be exploited to undermine a movement for sexual justice and liberation for everyone.
The problem is not simply that so many men are unable to cope with fear and distress — it’s also that society at large is unable to cope with male fear and distress, whereas women’s pain is normalized, made invisible, and accepted up to a certain degree as our lot in nature.
It would be easier to be exactly as unforgiving as we, people who ask for something with the flavor of sexual justice, are often painted. But since I am stuck with a heart that is no better than it ought to be, since I cannot seem to stop loving men and wanting the best for them, since I remain convinced that the way we get to a better world is ultimately together, or not at all, I want to know what comes next, and how we get through this dreadful, difficult transition period. That’s where it helps to remember that we have always been learning how to be human, and that when social and technological changes make new demands of us, it often takes a crisis to force that movement forward.
Please trust me that ultimately, most of these men are going to be just fine. They are going to have to live a little differently, but they are not at as much risk of losing everything as it sometimes feels like. I know what it is like to be publicly shamed, to be humiliated, to be threatened with social ostracization. I have, in fact, experienced full-on community shunning several times — including once when I dared tell the truth about my rapist. Ostracization is no joke, whether or not you deserve it. It hits at a primal panic. But I also know that ostracization can be survived, and that sometimes, even in the heat of internet outrage, it is possible to stay in the room with people’s rage and learn from it.
Lets be clear, Alec Holowka did not “pay a price” for his misdeeds. He checked himself out. Killing himself did nothing to atone for his crimes, it just made it impossible for him to make any of it better.
The only way to be fair to Holowka and his victims is to keep two distinct balance sheets. Adding self murder to ones list doesnt clean any slate, not by any book Ive ever heard of.
When I first saw someone making an oblique reference to something happening to Holowka, I Googled it, and the first site I found that mentioned his death also happened to be a germergoat-friendly gaming site. The comments there put it all in perspective. In between comments entirely blaming Quinn and calling for her death were comments pining for the death of all women, to be replaced by sex-bots. This is not hyperbole - I am being 100% accurate here.
But even without that, we know all we need to know by the fact that this is related to Quinn, who is suffering non-stop abuse and threats so heinous that she literally has to live a nomadic life shuttling between undisclosed locations for safety, all because of claims she had slept with games writers for coverage of her game when - an easily verifiable fact - the writers in question never even wrote about her game.
Someone who thinks women are worthless. It really is that simple. The gamertaint/incel Venn diagram looks a lot like a circle inside another circle.
I’ve seen some people claim/assume he got online abuse when the story came out. Even if it were true (and I’ve not seen any evidence for it), it would pale in comparison to what Quinn got for telling of the abuse, much less what she’s been getting for just existing as a woman making games.
Yeah, also: “I don’t want to work with a likely abuser” is about as far from “mob justice” as I can imagine.
Pretty much the opposite of “mob justice” I’d say, even.
I don’t want to “mob” you, and I won’t harp on all the points others have gone over, but I find it really fucking weird to be even asking that within the context of a story that involves Zoe Quinn. A woman who was accused - and very obviously wrongly - of using using personal relationships to get press for her game (something which had been standard operating procedure for the entire history of the game industry), and which resulted in the formation of an online mob that destroyed her life so utterly that even after all the articles I read about her, I still can’t comprehend the damage. She’s a woman now living in hiding, who may very likely be facing a lifetime of threats and abuse over accusations that were disproved even before the mob went after her; a woman who must be incredibly strong to have survived what she went through because that kind of abuse does kill people.
So when you ask that question, without acknowledging that it already happened and who it happened to, well… that just makes your question an example of the problem under discussion here, frankly.
This seems salient both in terms of what it suggests about how much consideration he was given(not exactly a case of being terminated by FooCorp HR because their social media metrics hit some threshold); and in the rather absurd standard of protection advanced by the implication that this is ‘punishment’:
We do attempt to regulate the actions of employers, especially large ones, in various ways because it’s recognized that their economic clout gives their policies around hiring, firing, promotion, etc. something not so distant from force of law for a great many people. We do not attempt to have the Department of Labor keep bands from breaking up except for cause and with appropriately robust processes for dispute resolution and such.
Even if someone thinks that bias is now tilted dangerously against the accused in the halls of HR (a deeply dubious position, but speaking hypothetically); that’s still of minimal relevance when the case is of the ‘the band broke up’ flavor of labor relations. To decry a lack of prodedural safeguards here is pretty much to (implicitly, since it’s too laughable to be said in so many words) demand that people be forbidden from removing someone from their social circle without a judicial verdict. That’s not how those sorts of relationships work.
Even if it were the whole story on causation(as you note, clearly not the case); it’s arguably not the whole story in a much more fundamental way:
For many purposes it doesn’t matter why someone is dangerous but that they are dangerous. Occupying positions of more power than accountability is one of those purposes: failure to identify and neutralize these cases means allowing dangerous people to continue to inflict damage, hard stop. Knowingly or voluntarily failing to do so, if you have the means to(a critical caveat, since almost by definition more power than accountability means having a bunch of people who have no means to stop you), means complicity in that.
The distinction between tragic backstory cases and just-plain-nasty-piece-of-work-for-no-obvious-reason cases may be relevant in some abstract moral sense; and may be hugely important information in determining whether someone will respond to a given intervention, presents a recidivism risk, etc. but the question of why people are as they are cannot be anything but hopelessly incomplete in the face of the fact that they are that way, however they got there, and failure to act accordingly will have consequences.
Add to this that the group of males that traditionally make up gamers are generally people (like my dorky self) who were the marginalized and poorly socialized (particularly with females) adolescents in a time when being dorks was a social death sentence.
It’s only in recent history that being a gamer guy, or attending comic-con, or any of the the other aspects of nerd-dom has become even marginally socially acceptable.
Yeah, a lot of us grew up a bit, expanded our horizons in college, and got over being the outcast picked on dorks, geeks, and nerds. That being said, I also have a classmate from high school who became an engineer, started working for video game companies, and in doing so found a safe haven for all his social awkwardness etc… He found a nest of similar minds and jumped in and never looked back. I’ve met his work friends, and some are awesome. A couple are just bizarre, and one is an absolutely intolerable a-hole incel. That being said, he’s tolerated in that group because everyone else wants their own weirdnesses and socially maladaptive traits respected.
These guys (read: “the video gaming industry”) is going through a social growth phase where they’re going to have to realize that it’s not just them in the basement hunched around a card table playing D&D anymore. You want the respect and $ that being involved with the larger society as a whole can grant, then you’re going to have to grow up and learn how to act in a socially acceptable fashion.
Please do. “Mob justice” has a very specific meaning and historical context in this society. Namely, when an actual mob enacts a violent and likely deadly extrajudicial punishment on a person suspected of a crime, or maybe just a person who had the wrong skin color.
Firing a man because someone made a credible accusation of sexual misconduct against him is not comparable to tar and feathers.
I was geeky in high school, too – just lucky that the school was basically filled with geeks and nerds. But you know what? Whatever happened in HS, we won. Geeks are at the top of the American business world, and they bloody define popular culture. That’s been the case since Dotcom 1.0 in the late 1990s.
And yet a subset of them never got over being outsiders who were teased in high school, despite making lots of money doing work they enjoy and having movies and TV shows almost custom-created to their tastes and sensibilities. They were defined as losers then and somehow they can’t shake that. Those are the ones who remain bitter and resentful, who maintain the hygiene and wardrobe habits of 12-year-old boys, who become incels and failed PUAs and the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. Too many of them go alt-right or become Objectivists or turn into Internet griefers and tr0lls.
I’m fine with people not growing up (it’s over-rated) or being eccentric weirdos and Happy Mutants – I’m the last person who should be casting stones there. I also don’t really care if they’re poorly socialised as long as they’re happy in the niches and havens they’ve carved out for themselves. But when they’re working from a place of anger and resentment that their intellectual superiority isn’t properly recognised by society (and by the women they desire), things can go very bad. Introduce undiagnosed or ineffectively treated mental illnesses and conditions and they go from bad to very worse for some individuals, as happened here.
Unfortunately (but understandably), gaming companies and gaming culture in particular and software coding in general have become collection points for this type of angry and frustrated white male nerd. The only way I can see this changing is the introduction of more women and PoC (groups, by the way, who’ve faced a lot more adversity in general than your average white middle-class male geek) into the industry and culture. As we see from this situation, though, the resistance to that is strong.
But the attackers are a mob, leaderless, disorganised, enabled by ano-, pseudo-nymity, it does not seem to be possible to prevent their poison. Nor does any amount of appealing to their selective hearing.
And the same could be said of any of these chaotic assaults on individuals.
Not so at our high school. A small (affluent, white, males from Kansas) section of our football team cashed in on seed money by supplying portable seat backs for the Atlanta Olympics and have parlayed that into the payday loan industry that Rent-A-Center grifters inspired. It’s rumored the two heads are close to being billionaires, and talk to very few of us anymore.
Another small group I’ve talked to is involved in “security”, and very vague about it, so it makes me wonder about Blackwater activity or maybe CPB contracting.
As for geeks, one works for the Kochs, another for some think tank in Washington state (? in the 90s when I last saw him) which is also described vaguely. The latter was a friend of mine, despite being a bit conservative was a Trekker since childhood, so I’m hoping he’s not playing for the bad guys.
That sounds like a truly scaly bunch of people, prospering off of the misery of others.
Still, in the general culture being a geek isn’t seen as the exclusively bad thing it was in the U.S. up until the early 80s. Bullying still exists, but at a certain point people have to get past what happened in HS, especially if what they were once bullied for becomes a path to career success and satisfaction.
One of the few kids in my class who was mildly bullied was a Trekker (as well as a friend of mine) back then. Apparently, he now spends a lot of time posting MAGA stuff on Facebook, so (unless he no longer likes the on-going saga of fully-automated space luxury communism) cognitive dissonance proves itself a strong force once again.
