LiesSlander

Very true, it is not required to have a solution, I myself only gave a couple of broad frameworks as alternatives, alongside a call for abolition.

But consider for a moment the people you're accusing of "vigilantism" here. These are people who very often did go through the so-called justice system, for example Aubuchon reported her case, completed a rape kit, then waited a year for nothing to happen. It was only after being utterly failed by the system that she posted on social media, with the intent of warning others about this creep. He does not deny having sex with her, on the job while he is in a position of power over her no less, but says it was consensual. Remember, she was only 18 at the time, and has no wealth to speak of. What else was she supposed to do in this situation?

Or take Longhorn's case, she followed all the appropriate channels, and got nothing but grief for it. An official complaint to her work led to harrassment, and her case was dropped by the prosecutor because he thinks she should have fought him off. Here we have a member of the justice system itself advocating what could reasonably be interpreted as "vigilantism" in favor of the official legal channels. According to Wikipedia: "Vigilantism refers to the act of preventing, investigating, and punishing perceived offenses and crimes without legal authority." Fighting off one's rapist would count as prevention, and she did not possess legal authority to assault him while in his home. Then he sued her, forcing her to pay legal fees before dropping the case. What should Longhorn have done differently in this situation? At what point did she ever engage in "vigilantism"? His defamation suit against her is not due to a social media post, but rather her talking to coworkers and contacting authorities.

I'm not gonna straw-man you here, but you might want to think about the implications of calling what these women did "vigilantism" in light of the actual actions that they took. Namely, contacting the authories.

But let's leave the survivor's personal experiences aside for a minute and talk about systemic change. How should people who have been systematically abused by a system try to change it? Would revealing it's failures on social media for all to see perhaps be a step in that direction? It's not as if the levers of power that can make the changes you suggest are terribly accessible to the general population. If fact, they are far more accessible to the very people doing the raping, powerful men. Posting about rapists on social media is a tactic to change the justice system, it's just one that those currently priviledged by the system are threatened by.

Insisting that we must change the system, while decrying the powerless' efforts to do so, doen't that seem a bit contradictory?

To address your last sentence, we should give up on the so-called justice system. It does not create justice, but rather perpetuates inequality. Please understand, this does not come from a place of rejecting the concept of justice. On the contrary, I wish to see a more just world, and I am unwilling to compromise that ideal. The "justice system" is unjust. There are promising, proven alternatives. Why don't we try those instead of the promise of reforms that have never once materialized?

I suppose it's a slightly more accurate term. The messages here are not truly private since they are not encrypted, but since they are sent directly no one should read them in the normal course of using the platform. Calling them private might imply to people that other people cannot read them, rather than the reality that it is just very unlikely anyone will. I would also argue that if something is released to an authority it is not "private" even if it is not publicly available.

Honestly, it doesn't really matter which you use. People will generally understand either way, so you can go ahead and keep saying PM and others will say DM and we can all just understand that they mean the same thing.

How would you propose fixing the justice system? What changes are necessary to make survivors of sexual assault feel safe coming forward with their stories? What does "justice" look like to you?

How infuriating, and sad. The stories in this article are awful to read, like the woman whose case passed a grand jury, got dropped by a misogynistic prosecutor, then was retaliated against with no real recourse. There are a number of good points made, such as what SLAPP means, and the fact that these cases enforce the very power dynamics that lead to sexual assault in the first place. But there is one big point the author misses:

These cases are a result of the so-called justice system functioning exactly as intended.

The legal system in the US is designed to preserve existing power differentials. The laws are paid for, the proceedings opaque, and if you want any chance of success you must have money for lawyers (or find a lawyer with enough in the bank to take it pro-bono). A legal system like this is 'capitalist' in the sense that it discriminates based on access to wealth, which in a patriarchal society like the one we live under makes it especially bad for women. As we can see here. And it forces survivors to relive their trauma, over and over again as the proceedings stretch on.

"But what about false accusations?" The tired argument of trolls, chuds, and those who've bought these rapists' PR pitches everywhere, it unfortunately bears addressing here. False accusations are rare, far rarer than legitimate ones, which are themselves pretty uncommon due to all the barriers and retraumatization involved. Since they are so rare, and sexual assault so common, it makes little sense to focus on this one possibility when doing so is likely to spread further harm by hurting the percieved legitimacy of those who accuse their rapists.

But, for the sake of argument, let's think about how accusations might work (false or not), in the context of a stratified society and legal system. I see four basic situations we can start with, based on the relative wealth of the two parties in question:

Poor accuser vs rich accused. The accused can just hit the accuser with defamation lawsuit, kind of like we see here. It honestly doesn't make any sense for someone to falsely accuse someone richer than them, as it doesn't take much thought to know how it will turn out. This is also the most common scenario covered on the news, and therefore the most common place to find false accusation FUD.

Poor accuser vs poor accused. No great options for either party here, since you need money to access most the legal system. This kind of thing basically never gets beyond local news so we don't really talk about it online much. It's hard to go through a trial like this for either party, and the system is going to make it hard on both parties.

Rich accuser vs rich accused. Since both parties have money, they can drag things out into a real shit-show, similar to what we saw in Depp v. Heard. It would be hard to call the sort of process we see in a case like this "justice", especially when it is broadcast on television for everyone to gawk at. In the high-profile case we saw, both parties ended up looking like shitty people to a polarized audience.

Rich accuser vs poor accused. Now we get a situation where the worry about false accusations makes a lot more sense, since the accused has no good recourse to the legal action against them. Again, the legal system is shit. We also don't see much of this, rape relies on power dynamics, and rich people are more likely to ignore us poors than go out of their way to personally ruin us. Plus, if they wanted to there are usually better ways to ruin someone's life that don't involve the risk of hours spent in boring legal proceedings.

There are endless confounding factors in these situations, and they could end up all sorts of ways, but thinking through the dynamics gives us a bit of a picture of just how flawed the legal system is, and how little sense false accusations make. The most common place to see the idea is under stories where the accuser has less power than the accused, which is also the situation in which it doing so carries the highest risk and lowest reward. Additionally, this is one of the most common abuses of power in our society. So no more of that, this talking point hurts many people and protects rapist. If you somehow read this far and engage in this sort of behavior, know that your actions cause real harm to real people.

Okay, so the justice system is bad, what do we do about it? We abolish it, that's what, and replace it with various alternatives that don't presupose punishment as the end-all-be-all of justice. For that we have two broad frameworks to look at, restorative justice and transformative justice.

Restorative justice understands that everyone who is affected by a harmful act, victim, offender, and broader community members, is a human being worthy of dignity and respect. In the best cases the process asks what people need to be as okay as doable, and does it's best to make that happen. This involves active community engagement, and does not necessarily entail the offender ever coming face to face with their victim, as while everyone has needs in this situation the person who was hurt comes first. Restorative justice programs exist today, but often in forms tacked onto the existing legal system.

Transformative justice understands that no action occurs in isolation, that people do not simply choose to harm others out of nowhere. As a process it seeks to understand why a harmful act occurred, what about the community in which it occurred could be changed to prevent future acts, and how such a change can be made. At it's best, transformative justice prevents harm from ever happenning by preventing the conditions that cause it in the first place.

Both of these forms of justice require significant time and energy to work. It is entirely valid not to seek justice sometimes, as it is a lot of work, amd these processes might not offer any outcome that's worth that work. Though in the case of sexual assault in particular we desparately need some transformation. As long as we continue to try fixing a fundamentally broken system instead of building something better, we will see sexual assault and SLAPP suits continue.

Maybe "femme presenting people" would be a more accurate term than "women"?

I'm in a similar place to you in many ways, AMAB, cool with being cis but not really sure about it, mostly have my sexuality figured out (I think I do anyway). I personally say "femme people", "femme bodies", or the first example I gave to describe my sexual attraction, though I haven't figured out other aspects like romantic and sensual attraction, still working on establishing those concepts in my mind.

I wouldn't worry too much about getting labels exactly right, this is a messy conceptual space and English isn't great for understanding it. Lots of terms that are common today were invented pretty recently online, and there are some weird linguistic quirks and assumptions that cause issues still (easy example: 'they' being a 3rd person singular pronoun still causes confusion among some people). I imagine our collective understanding of gender and whatnot will improve over time in new and unexpected ways, and as that happens the meaning of labels might shift too, or new ones will be created. Then again, if labels are important enough to you go ahead and worry about it.

Good luck on your journey!

It's going to take a lot more than legal challenges to hold the people profitting off of this to account. The system is designed so that those with money can drag things out, something oil companies in particular are expert about. Plus the rich write the laws, and love fossil fuels' effect on their wallets, I doubt they'll take this seriously until we're well over the brink.

But there is another way. Fossil fuel infrastructure exists physically, it can be destroyed with a few dedicated people, a good plan, and high risk tolerance. Executives and billionairres also exist in the physical world, as bodies that require food, shelter, and medical care. I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been more focus on making change where they are weak, instead of this focus on institutions and policy where they have already stacked the deck.

They are further along their trajectory now. They were always heading this direction, that much should have been obvious to a lot of people all along. I believe it was, but that the endless propaganda of the US media machine kept most of its population from realizing it. There are all sorts of (arguably) respectable political issues conservatives of the past focussed their words on, while their actions spoke different.

Some of them might even have believed they wanted 'small government' or 'fiscal responsibility'. But their actions were clear in intent, from racial segregation, to the Red Scare, to suppressing social movements, to implementing a politic of austerity. I only fail to mention war because their liberal 'opposition' carries roughly equal blame for the US war machine.

The people today may be different in body, action, word, but this is a continuation of a long political project that ended up in facism.

I have one of those too! Glad yours is blooming. Mine flowers sometimes, but sadly it got infected with thrips a couple years ago and I haven't been able to kill them. It flowers less often, but does okay with regular maintenance on my end (rubbing all the surfaces with a little neem oil and soap in water).

For real, this is sobering information. I already try to avoid microwaving plastics, but I'm gonna be even more careful now, and try to spread this study. Billions of nanoplastics per square centimeter, it's scary to think about the size of containers, number that would likely be used in a day, and the fact that infants are so small with that information in context.

I'm honestly impressed. Like, yeah, it isn't cool to mislead people and whatnot but you know that. I hope you can find a creative writing outlet on Lemmy because I'd love to read your stories. Also, just because your stories aren't in a book format doesn't make them less real, if writing books is your goal then please seek it, but there are other formats that are no less "real".

Web serials, for example, tend to be first draft work so people are about as chill about grammar as they are on reddit. Or you could take a bunch of stories you made on the internet (like you have here) and make them into a collection someday if you really want to have a book. Point is, you are actually writing, and its good writing at that. Please keep doing it, and I hope you find a place where you feel good about what you're making, whatever that looks like to you.

They're saying they aren't vegetarian, so know what real chicken nuggets taste like. OP worried that people might assume they are vegetarian, and therefore might not have a good idea of what chicken nuggets taste like. That sentence is meant to avoid people assuming that.

That's my best guess anyway.

Capitalism is inherently contradictory to my basic values, terrible at efficient economic allocation, actively destroying everything, and is built on a foundation of war and genocide.

I believe that everyone should have as much autonomy as possible. Capitalism's basic premise is that economic allocation is determined by those who own capital, allocation of the resources communities and individuals use is an autonomy problem. Since Capitalism concentrates power among a very few, it is actively limiting the autonomy of literally billions of people for the benefit of less than a thousand.

The allocation of resources itself, the basic purpose of any economic system, is incredibly inefficient undee Capitalism. Take food, vast amounts are produced, enough to feed everyone, yet people starved to death while I was writing this. Not only that, food itself is peoduced in such a way as to maximize profit. This comes at the expense of local food systems, which have been in large part dismantled by environmental damage. It comes at the expense of vast CO2 emissions to run the machines that mine phosphorous, manufacture fertilizer and pesticides, run the various pieces of farm equipment, process food, and the planes, ships, trucks that ship it to stores. It comes at the expense of soil health, which monocropping, tilling, fallow, and agrochemicals all harm. This is just food, look at any other sphere of human activity and you will find a similar story. Meaningful measures of efficiency and system health are ignored to pump out as much profit as possible, and this gets called "efficient".

Capitalism is the great machine that is destroying everything. Under it's logic of endless expansion we have seen entire ecosystems bulldozed and turned into suburbs, watched millions of people be enslaved even in the present day, witnessed war and genocide on a scale never before fathomed. Both world wars happenned under Capitalism, and war has continued unabated ever since. The so-called United States is the dominant Capitalist power on Earth, and holds millions of people in legal slavery, if you don't believe me read the 13th amendment to its constitution. Many other people are describing the results of ecosystem destruction, the Climate Catastrophe, as their primary reason for anti-capitalist beliefs.

Capitalism as a system grew under feudalism before supplanting it, and directly springboarded off of Colonialism to become the dominant economic system of this world. The horrors of colonization follow(ed) a similar logic of expansion to capital, exploiting millions of people through slavery and genocide, spreading plagues that have killed countless individuals and entire cultures, introducing poverty to places where the concept had not preciously made sense. Capitalism cannot be separated from its historical roots, if you want to learn more about this I recommend the, "A ______ People's History of the United States" series of books. I'd prioritize the Indigenous and Black histories.

This is an indictment of Capitalism, but presents no alternatives. I will do that here.

Indigenous cultures had/have land-based economies that center care. This is not an alternative, it is thousands of them, each adapted to a local ecosystem. In order to survive we need to localize resource production, and land-based economies are the way to do that. I would recommend learning about how Indigenous people groups in your area thrived before Colonialism forcibly severed many of their connections to place, how they survive today, and how they are working to heal their relationships to the land. A related concept is that of the gift economy, a common practice for many groups world-wide, the particulars of which are as diverse as our species. Look into it, gift economies work, and operate on principles that are essentially as "anti-capitalism" as one can get.

Commons-based peer production is another, complimentary option for future economic systems. It is directly born out of the open source software movement, and imagines structuring all production around simular principles. People produce for themselves and their peers, keeping resources in common to ensure equitable allocation. If you do not believe commons can work, I would recommend looking into Ostrom's eight principles for managing commons, just highlight that phrase and paste it into a search engine. A related concept is that of "cosmo-local production". The idea is that physical production is localized to reduce impact on the planet (local), while information on process is shared freely with everyone (cosmo). This ties into the idea of "donut economics" which is basically the idea that we should meet human needs while staying within planetary boundaries, the inside and outside of the metaphorical donut respectively. Look up any of these terms and you will find loads of thought-provoking writing, imagining a better world. Plus many of the people doing the theorizing are programmers like you, I'm sure you'll find ideas that resonate with you if you look for them here.

It took courage to make this post, thanks for starting some interesting discussions. I might believe you are wrong about Capitalism, but I respect your honesty and willingness to engage with other ideas here. I would strongly encourage reading further to understand these concepts on a deeper level than a Lemmy comment can give you, especially the economic alternatives, I basically just skimmed over a whole field of emerging theory.

Edit: accidentally posted before I was done, added 3 paragraphs.