Unlike his accusers, Jake is now working with the legal system, and his lawyers probably required language in that apology. But yes, I understand your feelings about it, I looked at it cross eyed too. You can look on twitter and find two different lawyers taking it apart, one who dislikes Jake, and one who views the apology as a product of a defendant with a lawyer. The deconstructions of the language of the statement are dramatically different (you can track either from @shava23 from yesterday I think).
The damage done is to the community. The victims have chosen a route that is open ended and has no closure. They think it will provide a deterent for future sociopaths to create a strong shaming mechanism (yesterday, I think I may have coined the term āschmuck-shamingā) to keep sociopathic behavior down while not evoking state controls such as state incarceration or state violence.
While several people have used the term sociopath, several have objected, but Iāll use it, and it includes a parameter: a ālack of remorse,ā which includes a lack of shame. Putting the community on shaming defcon 99 may send bad actors into the shadows for a bit, but like roaches they will come out as everyone adjusts to the high levels, and then where do we go? The victimsā efforts may not result in what they envision.
Where my criticism has drawn fire that I am trying to silence the victims, I donāt think this is so. I am hoping we can find a most effective way to control sociopathic behavior in our community, and prevent harm in the future, and deal with this is just and sustainable ways that ideally donāt end up with the wrong people in court for the wrong things.
An old friend of mine was a retired CIA analyst, and he used to chuckle that it was too bad I didnāt have the predilections to be an analyst, because I have that sort of mindset. Itās not that I donāt have compassion in this situation. Itās that I see it as a huge system over time, and the impacts are potentially much larger than most of the people are envisioning.
And this makes me unpopular, because all focus should be on the pain of the victims. Not the effectiveness of the victimsā methods in actually achieving their goals, not the good of future victims, not the health of the culture, not the health of the ecosystem around us.
Itās a loyalty and a purity test at the moment, and I do not pass the test, and I have to accept that and be a lightening rod, because no one else will, because there is so much energy in the system, and it can not be controlled.
But there has to be at least one point for dissenting messages, in the presence of a puritan movement with an unassailable banner. I am an old dry crone, this is my last act here likely, so I have no reputation to lose.
