>My question is why do you think we should default to not believing rape victims?
Where I live, we have the principle that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. It is a legal right as well as a human right under under the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11.
Frankly, this trend of accusation = guilt that has popped up among today's youth is rather disturbing. Hopefully, enough of them will be bitten by it for them to re-learn the lessons of history that caused the presumption of innocence to become the standard.
Social ostracism can be a very efficient tool to strip people of a lot of things that are kinda important; and an accusation as serious as this is particularly potent in that regard. I mean, how many organizations would hire a guy whose name was prominently featured alongside the word "rape" in mass media?
Now, I'm not saying that you should adopt the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard and all that stuff. But I don't think it's reasonable to just blindly believe any accusation, either. Just as you owe the alleged victim to hear their side of the story, you also owe the alleged perpetrator to hear theirs, and at least try to see which one makes more sense.
Ah. I see the problem here. You are mistaking a court of law for society outside its doors. The criminal justice system must treat any subject before it as innocent until proven guilty, the rest of us do not have such restrictions. We operate is a fuzzy place where reputation is a strong determinant in whether heresay matters, where a pattern of suspicious behaviour is sufficient to decide not to associate with someone, and where OJ actually did kill his ex-wife.
I'm curious what you think about private discrimination on account of race, then (e.g. when hotels and restaurants were turning away black customers, back in 50s in US - not because the law said so, but because they could).
Discrimination in commercial transactions within the public marketplace are illegal (c.f. Katzenbach v. McClung, et al) and discriminatory membership requirements for "private" clubs that operate in public is unpleasant, but I have no idea how to fix that particular problem legally so we solve it with the previously noted social pressure (aka "mob justice") and this seems to work reasonably well. OTOH, the state does not get to tell you who your friends will be or who you should be spending your time with.
They are illegal, yes. I was wondering whether OP also treats it as "just freedom of association", since fundamentally refusing to serve some customer for any reason whatsoever is exactly that - and yet most people would agree that, done on such scale, it violates people's rights, too.
There's a difference between discrimination - ie, different treatment based on the group, class, or category to which that person is perceived to belong to rather than on individual merit - and choosing not to associate oneself with a specific individual.
I think you, in turn, are mistaking the legal concept for the general principle. We have the legal right to be presumed innocent – true. However, most people would additionally advance the principle that we, outside legal proceedings, ought to expect hard evidence to accompany allegations of wrongdoing.
I didn't want to sound provocative, I was hoping for what I got – a small discussion around the subject. When this event occurred the story got flagged (or deleted?) as soon as it reached the front page, multiple times. I don't appreciate this kind of censorship, especially since knowing whether the Tor org can be trusted is very useful information for one of my side projects.
On-topic, there've been multiple rape scandals online in the past few years, and the truth can often be hard to discern.
Why should we default to believing an accusation of anyone on any matter in particular absent proof? Is burden of proof not always on the accuser, rather than the accused?
