• saltesc@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Oh, dear. This has gone quite far over your head.

    “Trust and verify”… Trust enough to… Anyone?.. Anyone?.. Anyone? Verify what they’re saying.

    “Believe the victim” Believe… Anyone?..Anyone?..Anyone. What they’re saying without verifying.

    You can’t exactly believe and verify.

    You got to look at all the word people are saying, else you’ll end up stuck on some quite unrelated fallacy like…

    You trust people you don’t believe?

    The fuck’s that got to do with what’s being said? lol

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This is nuanced so please bear with me.

      You don’t have to trust an entire person to trust them with some things. You can trust someone to wash your car but not trust them with your credit card number.

      But if you trust someone to wash your car, you don’t do it in degrees. You don’t 80% trust someone to wash your car. It’s binary. You either trust them to and allow them to, or you don’t trust them to and don’t allow them to.

      I trust literally everyone when they say they’ve been raped. I believe them. But the world is complicated, people makes mistakes, and other people have rights. So you don’t just chuck someone in prison because you believe the victim. You verify. You have a trial. And if the victim was lying, then my trust and belief were misplaced. But I start out from a place of trust and belief. Because that’s what you do when someone has been hurt, and I’m not omnipotent to know what happened.

      If you trust someone to tell you the truth on a topic, but don’t fully believe them, then you don’t trust them on that topic.

      • saltesc@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        You actually almost got it, except that last bit kind of falls off what was being said again.

        The car wash analogy is good.

        If I believe someone can wash my car, they get to do it. Every time. I’m impartial to the quality of it.

        If I trust someone to wash my car, they get to do it. But if I verify they sucked at it, they won’t do it again since I no longer trust they can wash my car and certainly don’t believe they can.

        Claims can be so outlandish, like “Blue gnomes burst from the earth and made me rape her!” It’s unbelievable, it’s dismissable. But if it’s said by someone that’s never known to lie in their life, there’s an element of trust where the claim’s worth verifying, despite how unbelievable it is.

        This links to the premise of “innocent until proven guilty” and loops us back to the article and the original comment @smotherlove left.

        It shouldn’t need to be explained this much. I don’t care much for up and down votes, but in this case, I think they may be a useful indicator, at best, that you’re not grasping something commonly understood—except that last one where I said you’ve almost got it. Maybe it’s just simple misunderstanding. Regardless, in such cases, it’s better to reassess, reflect, and attempt to understand rather than distribute 100% of capacity into opposing, which obviously won’t ever conclude as much as you would like it to.

        • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Saying to believe all victims has the added benefit of encouraging rape victims, who historically would stay quiet out of fear and shame, to speak up. This benefit drastically outweighs the “occasionally sometimes people make shit up” scenario. This is why we do not caveat the phrase. If we said, “believe all rape victims, but sometimes y’all are liars and you’re going to have to seriously prove this shit”, then we would go back to silencing real victims.

          Of course some are going to lie, and you shouldn’t have trusted them, and you’ll know that retrospectively. But I’d rather be burned by a couple liars and help many victims.

          • saltesc@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Well, that’s why trust and verify is the concept. To not see anyone burned by lies. Victims will also exaggerate or lie to get a more vengeful outcome for what happened to them. Defaulting to believing what they say, simply because we know they’ve been wronged, can easily result in unjust consequence.

              • saltesc@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                I no longer understand where you’re going. Are you implying that it’s okay for things to be unjust and unfair if it may pave way for more opportunities to serve justice and fairness? Like, collateral is okay if it’s worth it?

                I’m a bit drunk so I hope I’m completely misunderstanding this. But if I’m not, it’s quite concerning—albeit intriguing.

                • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  I’m saying that it’s very important that as many actual rape victims come forward as possible. To have that happen we must appear supportive and show that we will believe them. That’s why we say we believe the victim. To get them to come out.

                  The court system is there to verify the claim after. That’s obvious and we don’t need to highlight that point. Highlighting that point, that the process of conviction isn’t easy, dissuades victims from coming forward.

                  The point of this story, which many missed, is that the court system failed. His lawyer told him to plead guilty. And he did.

                  The “verify” part is broken, and you don’t fix it by trusting victims less.

                  • saltesc@lemmy.world
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                    7 months ago

                    The point of this story, which many missed, is that the court system failed. His lawyer told him to plead guilty. And he did.

                    The “verify” part is broken, and you don’t fix it by trusting victims less.

                    No. The point of the story is, someone exploited this…

                    To have that happen we must appear supportive and show that we will believe them. That’s why we say we believe the victim. To get them to come out.

                    …and the concept you’re advocating is the thing that almost had an innocent person’s life ruined. To which you seem to be fine with at 0.01%—“Whoop-de-doo”—because you have an assumption that it’s offset by catching more bad guys.

                    That. Is. Fucking. Sick. I’m trying to give you benefit of doubt, but you’re doubling down on it.

                    we must appear supportive and show that we will believe them

                    That’s called Dark Psychology. Spoiler alert: It results in bad outcomes, such as seen in this article. An innocent almost had their life ruined because of the concept you’re advocating.