In the state I work you can fire someone for any reason at all (that’s not explicitly protected under non-discrimination laws.)
That’s not the case in most other places. I’m aware that plenty of American states don’t bother protecting employees. I can’t help but wonder if that leads to the sort of attitude that it’s fine to damage or destroy someone’s life in other ways with an unfounded accusation.
Speaking of unfounded accusations, will you take back yours, since I just provided evidence against it?
He quite clearly said exactly the opposite of this, saying (and I’m paraphrasing because I can’t be bothered to find the quote) that it’s not a problem to talk to those close to you as long as they’re not going to widely publicise the name of the accused, and that it’s the wide, public spreading of an unsupported accusation that’s the problem.
Were it possible, I’d prefer that defendants remained anonymous until conviction, let alone with simply an accusation, but that would cause too many other problems and I don’t see ways round them.
However, I believe that “innocent until proven guilty” is a good rule in general, as long as it’s recognised that there are greatly varying standards of proof required in different situations. With something like leaving your kids with a babysitter requiring the least amount of evidence that the sitter is a paedophile, and sending him to prison needing the most. And other things like social interaction, employment, and so on requiring other amounts.
Plus the belief that bad things don’t happen to good people. Get cancer “did you smoke? Have an abortion? Eat poorly? Carry too much weight?” Get raped - “Were you drinking? How were you dressed? Were you flirting?” Your kid gets abducted or eaten by an alligator “You weren’t watching him?” “Why did you let him go off on his own?” At a nightclub and get shot “well, gay…” Hurricane hits “God is punishing you for being bad.”
Are you not in America? I specifically said in my post you quoted that some American states allow it. I don’t know of anywhere else in the first world that would allow it.
Where I live, in the UK, the most that could happen is that you could be suspended with full pay while an investigation is carried out, and if someone was (or believed they were) unfairly sacked it would go to court.
If it turned out the accusation was unsupported, they would get a significant amount of money in compensation, and have the right to get their job back. I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks it’s acceptable to fire someone based solely on someone else’s word.
You can fire someone for no reason in their probationary period (either as defined in the contract or a statutory maximum of I think 1 year), or for not being able to do the job, or whatever, but you still can’t do it for an unfair reason. So if there was a documented complaint that was dealt with simply by sacking, there could be legal problems.
Ah, and here I thought we could commiserate about how horrifying it would be if these kinds of people ever get control over the American legal system, but that wouldn’t affect you.
[QUOTE=Steophan]
However, I believe that “innocent until proven guilty” is a good rule in general, as long as it’s recognised that there are greatly varying standards of proof required in different situations. With something like leaving your kids with a babysitter requiring the least amount of evidence that the sitter is a paedophile, and sending him to prison needing the most. And other things like social interaction, employment, and so on requiring other amounts.
[/QUOTE]
I agree with all of this. I agree the media/mob justice approach is terrible. I even agree the defendant shouldn’t be named to the media until a conviction is made. I totally agree with the legal standards and I totally recognize that standards change according to context. That is what I have been saying all along and what SlackerInc. is arguing against. In his view there is only one standard of evidence – the legal standard – and if you don’t meet it, you have to suck it up. You acknowledge the standard of proof varies according to context. What higher standard of proof can you have than having actually experienced it?
You’re being way too charitable with SlackerInc’s position. It was much more extreme than you’ve noted. He said a victim is morally obligated to report it to the police or she is responsible for his future crimes but must take great care not to damage the perpetrator’s reputation unless she can prove in a court of law what he did. He said the onus is on the victim to protect her rapist’s reputation, but at the same time the onus is on her to prosecute him.
[QUOTE=Steophan]
Are you not in America?
[/QUOTE]
That wasn’t the unfounded accusation I’m talking about. I’m talking about the one where I allegedly claimed everybody should believe me, with no evidence.
Here we aren’t talking about crime - in a legal sense - we are talking about unacceptable behavior and the consequences of it. We aren’t talking about jail time - we are talking about “is it ok for me not to hire a guy because I know through a friend that he was let go from his last job for making inappropriate comments.”
I have a friend - “Sandy” who was married for a long time to “Richard” Richard was a man-whore - and cheated on Sandy a lot. Eventually, the kids were older and the indiscretions too indiscreet - and she cut him loose.
Another friend of mine - “Toni” is good friends with Sandy. Toni had a job opening that she was the manager of the hiring manager for. Richard applied.
Should Toni have hired him?
What happened was Toni did hire him - or rather the manager under Toni did and Toni kept her concerns to herself - his sex life having little to do with job performance, Richard seemed like a good candidate, and he had once - long ago - done Toni a favor. And regretted it. Because it turns out the Richard’s ethical problems were somewhat greater than just cheating on his wife. The contempt for women that he displayed with his wife also played out with his female coworkers - including his boss and Toni. He didn’t follow process. He risked exposing confidential data. And he was lazy. All things Toni had heard from Sandy, but she thought maybe a bitter ex-wife was exaggerating. (Toni told me “I think Sandy has been overly kind to Richard in not trashing him nearly as much as he deserves.”)
Another story. I was working in IT operations and we had a resume come across my desk from a guy who had most recently been working with a bunch of people I’d worked with at a prior job. He and I didn’t cross, but my friends were still there. So I picked up the phone. “Hey, I have Jeff’s resume in front of me…what do you think?” “Well, we didn’t fire Jeff, but we made it pretty clear he should leave - he was falsifying the data on backups - turns out, they weren’t running, but Jeff was logging that they were and not fixing the problem.” (I took this to mean that they put him on a PIP with the intent of firing him at the end of 30 or 60 days and he said “screw it, I’m outta here.”) We chose not to interview him. Now, maybe the buddy I called just really didn’t like Jeff and it was all a lie to get some sort of revenge. But who am I going to trust - my buddy or a guy I’ve never met. And the downside of hiring someone who doesn’t do his work and falsifies his process results is that the job doesn’t get done - and that’s my problem, I’m his boss.
Once more, with feeling: We’re not talking about the law.
[QUOTE=Spice Weasel]
And hey, let’s not confuse the law with everyday life. I wouldn’t want my abuser to go to prison without the evidence to convict him. That’s a legal standard I respect.
Am I going to post flyers all over his neighborhood about what he did to me? You can bet I’ve fantasized about it, but no. I’m not that vindictive.
Am I going to bend over backward to protect his reputation? Hell no.
[/QUOTE]
BTW, I am all for additional protections for employees. I agree America is shit when it comes to that.
Try to keep in mind that an accusation isn’t unfounded if you were the one who was raped. If your acquaintance had held you up at gunpoint and robbed you, so you knew for a fact he was a thief, and the police still didn’t believe you, you would still be well within your rights to tell people he’s a thief.
Sigh.
Do you feel your argument is being mischaracterized? That’s my reading of what you’ve said. If you disagree, please feel free to clarify.
Some is 49 out of 50. In 49 out of 50 states you can be fired for wearing ugly shoes - or no reason at all. Montana makes you put an employee on probation for their ugly shoes before firing them.
Which makes it very important in this country that you don’t get a reputation. If you whine too much (about the behavior of men in the office for instance) or are too off color to the point where a boss is concerned about liability, they can let you go and don’t need to tell you why.
And let me tell you, that cuts both ways. It isn’t like women get a free pass on the not getting fired for stupid reasons.
HOWEVER, if you fire someone without a valid reason, they can get unemployment. Unemployment insurance is based on how many claims are made against your company. So companies aren’t too interested in laying off people for ugly shoes - it creates additional expense.
Is it also my correct understanding that in the U.S., your employers don’t even have to tell you why they are letting you go?
Slacker, I get it, the false accusation against your best friend ruined his life, and it ended very tragically. Who would not be bitter about that? It seems that tragic experience has resulted in you holding a very strict ethical philosophy that just doesn’t pass muster when applied to the real world. Please do not interpret my attacking of your argument as an attack on you. If I’m not supposed to take your position personally, you’re not supposed to take mine personally. Remember, I have a personal stake in this too, which the right to speak my own truth and to name what happened to me. I just don’t see the internal logic of what you’ve proposed… unless I misunderstand it.
It seems like Slacker is the one who really needs to think seriously about what “hard cases make bad law*” actually means.
*And, yes, of course he has also misunderstood when the phrase “make law” has meaning.
It has definitely been mischaracterized (as coming from a venemous, misogynistic place), but that was not what spurred the sigh. Rather, it was this:
It’s a very solipsistic POV, and I think it explains why Steophan thought you were insisting others had to believe you but not the person you were accusing (your posts have come across as inconsistent in this respect). Okay, yeah: in your mind, you *know *what’s true. So the fuck what? The vast majority of people on Earth are neither you, nor the person you’re accusing. So you expect each of them to start from scratch and either go with their gut (which is bullshit) or conduct some sort of mini-trial to try to get to the truth (which, repeated ad infinitum, is impractical and an extreme amount of duplication of effort). It’s not only more ethical, but more practical, for us all to treat everyone as innocent of wrongdoing until judged otherwise in a trial.
And BTW, it’s another illustration of how the truth is not always so clear-cut, and how different things can look to different people, that you guys are saying “oh, no one believes the victim, everyone thinks the rapist is innocent/gives him a pass”. That sounds like something out of the 1950s, and it doesn’t reflect the world I’m familiar with. In the circles I’m familiar with, it is the protestations of *innocence *that are side-eyed (at best), with the exceptions being mainly people who are either (1) close to the person being accused or (2) obvious and egregious misogynists. (Neither of which group, of course, is seen by the wider public as very credible.) If neither the alleged victim or alleged perpetrator are known to them personally, the people I encounter believe the alleged victim every time, even if she is the only one lodging such an allegation. And that is a big problem, and pretty much 180 degrees from the picture you guys are trying to paint.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that there is still a old boys’ network that operates as you describe. I don’t rub elbows with such people, but I’m willing to acknowledge they must exist, especially among the older cohort. But thirty years from now they will be gone, which is good in many ways (certainly you guys will be celebrating), but it looks to me like there is likely to be a chilling PC regime taking their place. Not “PC” in the way Trump describes it, but in the way Jon Chait does. Never mind whispers of rape: if someone gets a reputation (which will of course dog them online, no matter where they go in the real world) of “problematic” interactions with “intersectionality”, perhaps committing “cultural appropriation” by throwing a Tiki-themed party or god knows what, they will be unemployable for life. They may as well just head down to the nearest highway overpass and set up camp.
It just seems such a shame that it seems we’re going to go straight from the old right wing assholes running everything to this kind of PC-left world, without ever giving good old fashioned Chait-esque, center-left, free speech, presumption-of-innocence liberalism a go. 
You apparently believe that a woman who was raped, but can’t prove it, should just keep her mouth shut. Sure, tell one or two close “confidantes,” but otherwise… her story is not hers to tell. Because it doesn’t matter how she was violated, she can’t risk the reputation of her rapist. Do you not see how twisted that is?
Yes, false accusations are a problem. They can ruin innocent lives. So can cases of rape that cannot be proven in a court of law. You appear to advocating that a victim relinquish her own story - her own true experience - if it cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Every experience you have had, good or bad - stop experiencing the truth of your own experiences if it won’t stand up in court. Keep your mouth shut about it. If the cops won’'t follow up, or test the kit, or just can’t prove you’re not lying - just shut up about about it. Your experience doesn’t mean anything if it can’t be verified.
More good points, however Im sure a lot of Brock Turners actions during the trial were at the advise of his counsel. As for his father any father that would not try to do all they can to get their child out of a serious legal jam either has a dysfunctional relationship with their children, mentally insane or is an asshole.
Maybe Brock Turner is a deserving victim with no sympathy, but is also powerless to do anything to change the legal system. Protestor hated is best directed at other targets.