He was talking about a situation at a gaming convention. Your comparison doesn't follow.Let's follow this a bit. I feel offended by your post.
He was talking about a situation at a gaming convention. Your comparison doesn't follow.Let's follow this a bit. I feel offended by your post.
Ok, now let's consider what will happen in the real world.
I'm in a Magic the Gathering tournament at the con. I end up in the top 8, there's one person with a deck that can consistently beat mine. So I have a plan I setup earlier. I call a female friend that came to the convention separately and have her go report the guy for making an offensive rape joke. Wait 15 minutes, call a second female friend and have her report him for inappropriately touching her.
By your standards he's out, and I win the tournament.
That's the problem with these policies that permit anyone to declare "Harassment" by allowing them to define what is harassment and then making the mistake of following Anita's "Listen and Believe", it's trivial to exploit them to gain advantage in competitions or to eliminate people who disagree with you (I.e. Honey Badgers incident last year).
"I'm offended" isn't enough. "I feel harassed" isn't enough. The only way to handle this is to clearly define cause for ejection in the convention's documentation and leave nothing up to the interpretation of the person making the complaint, because otherwise people are just going to do what they're doing right now, exploiting it to eject people they don't like or don't want to be at the con.
To be fair, if your job is the enforcer of discipline in an organization, "What did he say?" is actually an appropriate- arguably necessary- question when dealing with allegations of language creating a hostile work environment.
Speaking from experience, I know of a situation in which a woman heard "menstrual" when the speaker said "minstrel" in a particular sentence. Since the error was caught, there was no need to go at the speaker.
Two things: one, just saying that doesn't make it so -- add some reasons to your declaration. Two, I find your statement offensive and have reported it.He was talking about a situation at a gaming convention. Your comparison doesn't follow.
To help a victim, be supportive and non-critical of them. At the very least they believe such harassment really did occur, and there are likely other factors involved that are not immediately present. The victim may have survived a war, made a suicide attempt in his/her teens, or possess some other form of emotional trauma exacerbating the situation. Something that would never effect you could well effect someone else.
Wow.Ok, now let's consider what will happen in the real world.
The "Duke lacrosse team" example is overused to the point of nonsense.
Let's do some math. There are ~15,000 students at Duke. We'll pretend that 7500 of them are women (probably more). Of those 7500, ~20% - 1500 - will be sexually assaulted while at Duke, on average. Number of students on the Lacross team? About 50? So there are still a 30:1 ratio of false accusations to average sexual assaults at Duke alone for that single year. Now let's add all the other colleges where there WEREN'T false accusations that year: ~12 million (under 25), half of whom (really more) are women. That's about a 1.2 million to 1 ratio of sexual assaults to false reports IN ONE YEAR. Now let's add all the other years that there WEREN'T false accusations at Duke, or any other college, but there continued to sexual assaults. The point is obvious. Even if you think the 20% number is wrong and it's closer to 2%, that's still hundreds of thousands more assaults than false reports.
Using the Duke lacrosse team as a counter example is like saying, "that one time, someone who was wearing a seat belt died because of it." That one time. Out of thousands of lives saved every day. You can't justify never wearing a seat belt because of that one time, and you can't justify a muted or non-existent response to sexual assault because of a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of false reports.
Yes: false reports are horrible. You know what else is horrible? The hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of sexual assaults that happen per single false report. The numbers are incomparable, so the idea that one equals the other is ludicrous. The idea that because one can happen we still need to err on the side of the one that happens maybe a million times less often is ludicrous. The idea that nothing needs to be done is ludicrous.
But false reports are scary to men: that's the only difference. Even though women are assaulted zillions of times more often, that doesn't affect most men in a direct way - but false reports! That could affect ME! That's the only reason why false reports are elevated to such a scare level, and why they are cast time and again as a reasonable response to sexual assault responses when in fact they are trivial in comparison.
(There are many other examples in politics right now of similar comparisons which are nonsense but are nonetheless SO SCARY to the people in charge that they outweigh the nonsense. Trans people assaulting women in bathrooms, for example.)
OK, so you're saying it's absolutely certain not just one, but two females will collude with a male gamer to make a rape accusation--no small thing, mind--so the guy, and not the girls, gets a reward?
This claim doesn't hold up under scrutiny, because we know that harassment of women is widespread to the point of being endemic.
The second hidden claim is that one person losing out on a tournament win due to unscrupulous lying is at least as morally objectionable as the widespread harassment of an entire gender, for which there are deleterious effects to gaming culture and the industry.
Let me see if I have this right:Several (3+) Canadian women schemed up a sexual assault/rape claim...(snip)...Google it.
I'm not saying that Rygar's story was correct, but these sorts of things happen more often than people imagine. (snip) I think this just shows how we need to be careful how easily we just drop everything and simply believe anything that we're told.
I wasn't using "endemic" as a noun. I was using it as an adjective.What constitutes an "endemic", and how do we know that it's that bad?
Do you know what a hidden claim is?Rygar never made such a claim.