Sasquan did consult Carrie Cuinn about Lou Antonelli’s online statements about her and the threats she received as a result (Cuinn’s account was quoted here yesterday), however, the convention subsequently represented her answer as a request not to ban him —
@DawnSabados @eilatan The woman in question has asked us not to ban him. We have chosen to respect her wishes.https://t.co/ApZ1BITHxa
— sasquansf (@sasquansf) August 11, 2015
Cuinn has repudiated that interpretation in a series of tweets.
https://twitter.com/CarrieCuinn/status/631267133096374272
https://twitter.com/CarrieCuinn/status/631267979884396544
https://twitter.com/CarrieCuinn/status/631271457490927616
Cuinn elaborated in a Facebook post that it was only her interaction with Antonelli she was evaluating, not the larger question whether he should be banned which was never posed to her:
The Sasquan Con Committee has asked if I want Lou Antonelli investigated for his recent statements about me and the ensuing harassment. I have told them no: I don’t believe he specifically asked anyone to attack me. However, I also don’t believe he didn’t have any idea what his statements could cause, and I don’t believe his apology. In short, he shouldn’t be banned from Sasquan because of me, as I don’t think he personally did anything criminal. He’s just a jerk.
ETA because the con committee had issued comments which are factually incorrect: I did not ask for Antonelli not to be banned. I was not asked if he should be banned. Not banning him had nothing to do with “respecting my wishes”. I was only asked about his interaction with me, and since I’m not attending, I felt it didn’t meet their harassment guidelines. That’s all we discussed.
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I’m so glad to see she posted that in her timeline instead of just her replies to @sasquansf et al.
“In short, he shouldn’t be banned from Sasquan because of me,”
Given what she did say, I can see how the Sasquan committee got to:
“The woman in question has asked us not to ban him. We have chosen to respect her wishes.”
But she didn’t ask them not to ban them. She said not to ban them BECAUSE of her. The event certainly should have weighted their decision.
Also “do you think we should ban him” (which is what she says the concom asked her) is wildly inappropriate. That’s THEIR job to determine, not hers.
(sigh)
You know, when I saw Sasquan’s statement yesterday that Carrie Cuinn asked them not to ban Antonelli, the thought that immediately entered my head is that WisCon claimed in 2014 that the woman who filed the 2013 sexual harassment complaint against Frenkel has asked for him to be allowed to attend… and that claim was completely false. (And the aggrieved party was not only stunned to find him at the 2014 convention, but shocked to find him actually hosting the con suite.)
But I didn’t say anything, because it would have been an empty accusation without any foundation.
Now I’ll say it, though: Hey, isn’t this just like when WisCon falsely claimed that Elise Matthews had asked them not to ban Jim Frenkel?
Can we briefly review the common sense concept that code-of-conduct policies should be written and applied in a consistent, impartial, and universal way, and that a committee dealing with a harassment complaint or incident should review it according to policy, rather than saying to the aggrieved “Well, what do you want us to do about it?”
If the committee was questioning Cuinn to find out whether Antonelli’s behavior crossed territory into Sasquan’s purview, that’s reasonable. If it did not cross over, then her name should never have entered into this, apart from acknowledging they had questioned her and determined the incident was not relevant to Sasquan. If they determined the incident was relevant to Sasquan… then they’ve chosen not to ban someone who’s created 2 relevant code-of-conduct incidents before the convention even begins, and they’re justifying this by claiming (false in one instance) that it’s the decision of the aggrieved parties and their just going along with that.
I have admired Sasquan’s grace under pressure until now, but this one is a mess. And preventing messes exactly like this one is the point of having well-written policies and procedure, rather than relying on favoritism, misinterpretation, emotion, personal preference, etc.
I am also still so bemused by this whole notion of allowing a confirmed, self-admitted harasser to attend your event so long as he’s shrewd enough to choose victims who don’t advocate for him to experience consequences for harassing them. Why even go through the theatre of having a code-of-conduct policy if you’re making your decisions on that basis?
To pay lip service to the idea, I guess. There are people who won’t attend if there isn’t one, but rarely do they get an advanced preview of how useless it is going to be.
Does anyone know who the members (job roles) of the Sasquan executive committee are? I’m assuming the convention chair and three vice chairs listed on the website are part of it, but there also are a bunch of division heads who might be involved in making a decision on a situation like this one.
Well said Laura.
This whole affair is muddled. If Carrie Cuinn had said yes, what would have the decision been ?
I agree entirely with Ms Resnick. Seems pretty chickenshit to hang their decision on Cuinn. It’s terrible, cowardly policy to further victimize targets of harassment by making them responsible for the punishment of their attackers.
This seems like a really great reason why “the victim is fine with the harasser attending!” shouldn’t be sufficient to overrule a decision to ban someone. All it does is place pressure on victims to forgive their harassers or to otherwise participate in public dialogue about the decision.
What Laertes and Eselle28 just said. +1
Committee didn’t exactly own the decision in the case of the LA vs DG harassment either:
As with Cuinn, the committee places responsibility for the decision squarely upon the victim.
And they close with some smarm:
…explicitly endorsing the view that Antonelli’s presence at Worldcon is a “benefit” for Gerrold, Worldcon, and its members.
(Come to think of it, the ground upon which I’m stomping must surely have been covered yesterday, when I wasn’t around. Apologies for beating dead horses.)
The code of conduct doesn’t say that they must punish violations. It merely says that they may. You really wouldn’t want a system that left no role for human judgment.
People who refuse to admit they did anything wrong are the ones you want to be sure to punish. Ones who want to make peace should be encouraged to do so.
I see where Vox Day is posting that this whole episode proves that “you should never apologize to a progressive.” Let’s not prove him right.
To be clear, I’m not claiming that Sasquan ought to ban Antonelli. I’m saying that they ought to own their goddamn decision instead of hanging it, both times, on the victim.
I’m not at all surprised at the lesson that Day has drawn from l’affaire d’Antonelli. A conclusion like “you should never SWAT people” or “you should never incite a mob of enraged shitweasels to send death threats to people” would obviously be beyond his poor reasoning powers. “You should never apologize” is surely the best he can do, the poor dear.
I should add that I think David Gerrold was in a very awkward position. As WorldCon GoH, he’s lately been trying to reset and replace the toxic atmosphere the Puppy mess has created around Sasquan with one of “fandom coming together to celebrate” at WorldCon. Publicly forgiving Lou Antonelli is apparently his personal/private decision, but I think that whether or not it was, it HAD TO be his public/professional decision, or else he couldn’t keep that plan alive, given how CLOSE we are to WorldCon now–it starts in a week. As a highly-visible figure in this and a tone-setter for Sasquan, I do think the responsible and also practical thing for him to do here was to forgive, reach out, attempt to heal the mess Antonelli created, try to prevent a whole new round of Puppy rage and agitation, etc., etc.
But his position as a public figure/icon (and target for Puppy anger) is different form the con com’s obiglations. Their obligation in this matter, IMO, was to handle a (everyone seems to agree) serious code-of-conduct violation according to policy, show attendees they take their own harassment policies seriously and will enforce them, and ensure that someone who has committed a serious code-of-conduct violation before the convention even begins experiences the appropriate consequences for that.
@Greg Hullender:
Who said the system shouldn’t have a role for human judgment? The committee used its judgment twice, first to decide Antonelli shouldn’t attend and then to overrule itself. People are criticizing the second decision given these particular facts and particularly the justification for that decision, not arguing that there should be no discretion whatsoever.
There are several motives for punishing someone. One is to rehabilitate someone, and remorse is a step down that path if not evidence of complete change. Another is to protect people from someone who may be harmful. If that’s one’s motive, it doesn’t really matter if someone is sorry about their past actions if their future ones are likely to be a danger to others.
A harassment policy that flows and ebbs based on whether or not the current victim wants to forgive the culprit isn’t a policy at all–it’s a just a toothless bit of fluff that ignores that the primary reasons for such a policy isn’t to balm the feelings of those who have already been injured, but to protect those who may in the future endure similar behavior. Attempting to essentially SWAT any member should be ample grounds for banishment regardless of how that member feels about it.
And jesus, who cares if we prove Vox Day right? Encouraging people to make peace is fine, but saying you’re sorry doesn’t exempt you from the consequences of your actions–and if those actions amount to harassment the policy needs to be followed or it means nothing.
@ Greg Hullender
In addition to what eselle has already noted, it’s also very unclear whether “ask victim for input” is even part of the policy they were supposed to be following, since the Sasquan account of events I read was that they reviewed the incident, deliberated, made their decision, and THEN David Gerrold came to them to express his views–and they overturned their decision.
Since then, they keep justifying their decision by saying “David wanted it,” which doesn’t really sound like judgment to me. They’ve also specifically justified their “decision” by claiming that Carrie Cuinn asked them not to ban Antonelli, and Cuinn has not only stated that claim is false, she has posted the conversation so that people can see that isn’t what she said.
I understand what you mean about employing human judgment in addition to relying on policy, but my impression is that both judgment and accountability were dropped here, rather than employed.
Again, I think this incident is one mistake (albeit messy and with possibly further consequences) by a committee that’s had a lot of messy and complicated problems thrust on them by the Puppy mess, and that they have handled most of those situations with admirable grace. I don’t mean to imply that one mistake means Sasquan is a wash, or that the committee are Evil and Bad. It means I think they’ve made a mistake. (And I make mistakes, too.)
One point is – can you even IMAGINE the Puppy frothing rage at Gerrold at this point if Antonelli had been banned? He would be seen as the 100% instigator and decider of that matter, no matter what. Many of them already refuse to back down from the opinion of him as an aggressor and liar, can you even imagine what they would be doing at this point?
Which is again why Gerrold and Cuinn should have had NOTHING to do with this decision. Zero. Gerrold’s feet are literally held in the fire on this.
But the whole “we’re not punishing Antonelli because we’re afraid of what his buddies will be incited to do” is literally handing the victory to threats and intimidation.
Gabriel F. : Which is again why Gerrold and Cuinn should have had NOTHING to do with this decision. Zero. Gerrold’s feet are literally held in the fire on this.
Really? The Sasquan committee are holding Gerrold down and torturing him over this? He will be appearing as GOH on crutches with his feet bandaged? Have the cops been told about this deliberate burning?
“Literally”. Look up the meaning of the word or stop fucking abusing it.
@CPaca: That’s a lost philological battle. You might just as well erupt into spittle-flecked rage when someone says “begs the question” when they mean “raises the question.” In either case, you’d be on shaky ground because usage changes over time. And in either case it’d be bad manners to emote rage over a trivial disagreement about word usage.
CPaca
No, why don’t you try reading a little better? My whole first paragraph was how the PUPPIES would react if LA had been banned.
@CPaca: That’s a lost philological battle.
Never. We will fight them on the beaches (*), we will fight them on the streets (**), we will fight them in the hills (***). We will never surrender! (****)
Aaaaaaand I see GF wasn’t smart enough to bother looking up the word and figuring out what the rant was actually about.
(*) Not literally
(**) Also not literally
(***) Really not literally – the hills here are too steep to climb, let alone fight on.
(****) Literally. I intend to be a grumpy old man in a nursing home throwing vases at nurses who misuse the word.
I had this feeling I had run across something to do with Sasquan and harassment before the puppy thing broke. A bit of googling turned up this. So it may be Sasquan is somewhat inclined to come down on the side of forgiveness to harasserrs somewhat more than they on the side of not forgiveness.
Whoa. That was unexpectedly rage-filled, CPaca. And, yes, your post was clearly primarily about the misuse of “literally,” but it also contained a clear misreading of Gabriel’s post, which she corrected.
Thank you, LunarG, spot-on.
I was giving the semantic wailing the attention it deserved, Cpaca, and will continue to do so.
rcade on August 12, 2015 at 1:31 pm said:
http://sasquan.org/committee-list/
The head of Ops conducted the investigation.
Greg Hullender on August 12, 2015 at 2:05 pm said:
eselle28 on August 12, 2015 at 2:13 pm said:
A Code of Conduct shouldn’t be about “punishing” anyone. It’s about making the con safer for everyone involved. If Antonelli had had his membership refunded, that isn’t a punishment. That’s an action the Con Com would have taken to make the con safer for attendees.
I think that’s what’s missing from part of this response. It’s not Antonelli is a jerk and we have to punish him. It’s Antonelli’s actions harassed a member and what can we do to make the con safer for that member and everyone else?
I think Sasquan’s actions made things more stressful for Cuinn and they owe her an apology.
The role of an apology — a sincere one, at least — is not to evade responsibility and thus punishment for bad behavior. It’s to express remorse that the bad behavior happened and to indicate that such behavior will not happen again in the future. You apologize to someone because you’re sorry about what you did, NOT because you hope to avoid the just consequences for your errors.
It’s good that LA apologized and it’s good that David Gerrold accepted it gracefully. But it should not figure into the decision about whether LA should have to deal with the consequences of his nastiness. Otherwise you set up a situation where people apologize only to avoid said consequences, and they will get mad and feel betrayed if their apologies do not succeed in deflecting those consequences. I would bet this is behind VD’s gripes about “not apologizing” — he thinks the point of it is to evade punishment, and if your apology is accepted but you are punished anyway, that’s some kind of of a cheat, instead of simple justice.
An apology is supposed to go hand in hand with making amends and accepting appropriate punishment for your behavior, such that when the apology is accepted, the amends are made, and the punishment is completed, THEN you are restored to a state of grace. It’s not a replacement to allow you to duck out on the hard parts about making amends and dealing with consequences of your bad actions.
James Davis Nicoll–WOW. That is an interesting link.
Ultragotha, I agree. Getting banned from a con isn’t “punishment,” it’s a standard consequence of breaking the rules of a recreational event. You’re asked to leave (or barred from entering) so that you, who broke the rules, don’t get to spoil or keep spoiling the event for others.
Being banned from a convention is not equivalent to being denied your human rights or sent into exile. It’s a standard and pretty minor consequence of making bad choices about your self-conduct in the context of a short-term recreational event.
@ May Tree –
Very well said.
If concoms adopt a policy that people who are charged with harrassment will be sanctioned even if the victim forgives the harrasser, will that policy deter some victims from reporting harrassment in the first place?
@Cpaca:
No need to BACAI.
Are you suggesting that some victims of harassment report their harassers just to extort an apology from said harasser and waste everyone’s time? Which is to say, that someone reports a harasser NOT because they want the harasser punished, but because they want to put a scare into him?
I just want to be clear on what you’re suggesting here before I frame a reply. Because it really sounds like you’re saying that some people who report harassment aren’t serious about it and don’t actually want the harassment policy enforced against the harasser.
I would bet this is behind VD’s gripes about “not apologizing” — he thinks the point of it is to evade punishment, and if your apology is accepted but you are punished anyway, that’s some kind of of a cheat, instead of simple justice.
Having just followed along as Natalie Luhrs live-tweeted reading through one of his atrocious Christian themed fantasy novels, I would tend to agree. It seems to be part and parcel of his particular idiosyncratic version of evangelical Christianity that if you repent, your sins must be forgiven, no matter how outrageous they might be, and anything less than that is simply unfair.
Whoa. That was unexpectedly rage-filled, CPaca
Nope. We’re talking about an extremely useful word being degraded to the point of uselessness by people’s sheer laziness. There are many words you can use to show emphasis – there is *no* other word that conveys the meaning of “literally”.
Let me repeat that – this is nothing but laziness, ineptitude, and apologism for same. If you love language, you should agree it’s worth fighting over.
YEAH! Language should never evolve! Ancient Sumerian was good enough for our ancestors, it should be good enough for us! And then we could go around reprogramming people by talking to them, like in Snow Crash. That would be so cool.
@CPaca, further, if you look at the etymology of most of the intensifiers in the language (really, very, and so on) you see a series of terms that started out with that meaning and lost it. There is a deep hostility in the English language and its speakers towards the existence of a word that unambiguously means what ‘literally’ is supposed to mean, and at this point ‘literally’ is literally our last trench in the war against that hostility.
(literally last, that is. Not literally a trench.)
May Tree: I’m imagining a scenario where a victim of harrassment wants the behavior to stop but doesn’t want the harrasser to be kicked out, and the harrasser, knowing this preference, pressures the victim into saying nothing to the con authorities. “Hey, I’m sorry things got out of hand and I promise I won’t do it again. Please don’t tell security, because if those bluenoses hear what happened, they’ll ban me, and you wouldn’t want to do that to my career, would you?”
That’s the risk if the concom automatically ignores the wishes of the victim. And if the concom automatically defers to the wishes of the victim, then victims who do report can be under pressure to forgive (as others have pointed out in this forum). And if the concom has discretion over how much weight to give the victim’s wishes, then it can abuse that discretion.
I don’t know what kind of policy is the least bad.
Aaron:
If that’s an accurate description of Wright’s views, then they are a weirdly muddled version of Christ’s teaching. Christ insists that we should confess our sins to God, and that God will forgive us. However, when it comes to how we should behave towards one another, Christ is more radical than Wright gives him credit for. According to Christ, we should forgive everyone who wrongs us, regardless of whether they apologise or not, we should love our enemies, and we should not presume to judge anybody else.
The extent to which the outspoken Christian author John C Wright exemplifies these precepts is left as an exercise for the reader.
If that’s an accurate description of Wright’s views
It was a book by Beale. From the descriptions of the events in Beale’s book, that sure seems like his view.
To me it appears that the procedures need an overhaul. I would say that if the persons in charge determine that the code of conduct has been violated then the outcome (banning) is automatic. However it appears that there is no firm procedure in place: after determining that a violation occurred *then* the committee struggled with what to do. Difficult for all involved, I should think.
It’s the same situation law enforcement faces with domestic abusers much of the time here in the U.S. (although less serious that domestic abuse) and experience has shown that the right thing to do is for the domestic abuser to be punished no matter what the victim wants, because victims of abuse are under a ton of psychological pressure (and often economic as well) and will sometimes argue for leniency for their abuser and then end up dead at his hands. (Or very rarely, her hands.)
One could say that this might cause some battered partners of any gender to delay reporting their abuser for fear that the cops will come and imprison him/her, but the legal system got fed up with having the abuse being reported and then the abuse victim coming in and begging for the abuser to get let off, followed by the victim ending up hospitalized or dead next time the abuser lost control. (I imagine the waste of time and effort was also a factor in the laws changing.) And obviously most abused kids don’t want to be removed from their parents, but that often has to happen regardless of the kids’ wishes.
Does this stop some partners and children from reporting abuse? Maybe. But most harassment — as with domestic abuse — is WELL over the acceptability line before it gets reported. If the victim is susceptible to being guilted out of reporting, that will happen regardless. It’s more important to take reports of harassment very seriously when they occur than to have harassment rules with no teeth on the grounds that the toothless rules produce less guilt in the victims when brought to bear.
Aaron:
Ah, of course, bit of a reading fail there on my part. Feel free to search and replace as appropriate.
But writing about the radical doctrine of forgiveness in Christ’s teaching has got me thinking. Like many other commenters on this site, I’ve been perplexed and frustrated by BrianZ’s continual exhortations to do nothing to confound or inconvenience the Puppies, but instead to reach out to them and include them in the community with no regard to their evident desire to destroy it. This has always seemed incomprehensible to me, but now I’m starting to wonder if there’s one way in which it could all make sense.
Could it be that…
…BrianZ is the Second Coming?
Jeff R: There is a deep hostility in the English language and its speakers towards the existence of a word that unambiguously means what ‘literally’ is supposed to mean, and at this point ‘literally’ is literally our last trench in the war against that hostility.
PRE-cisely. Lose “literally” and, contrary to the cry of “evolution!”, the English language becomes poorer not richer.
It is not quite the same to be generally opposed to accepting the evolution of language and to object to losing shades of meaning with particular changes. Lost battles are one thing – “terribly” will never be the same again – but as the process of linguistic change is a total of individual reactions it is not completely silly (used to mean “holy”, selig, not any more) to agitate for literally, or agenda as a plural, or the distinction between shall and will, on the basis that the distinctions enrich the language.
I’m kind of with you? I mean, I regret the loss of “begging the question” because there’s no similarly pithy way to express what that phrase used to mean, and we already had the perfectly serviceable “raising the question” to express what it now means?
But, for God’s sake, go back and reread yourself at 2:41. These little disputes about word use should be a fun little pastime. It’s just not right to drop that much anger on someone for treading upon one of your idiosyncratic little pet peeves.
Further to what May Tree says just above, I took a police course last year, and we spent most of an evening on domestic abuse. In most US states, a domestic abuse call is now a MANDATORY ARREST. (Note: This doesn’t necessarily reduce calls, since it’s not as if only the victim can or does call it in. Neighbors, bystanders, witnesses, children, and other family members make many of the calls. Also, when you think you spouse or partner is about to kill you, you’re often more concern about surviving the night than about the phrase “mandatory arrest.”)
Multiple reasons it has become a mandatory arrest (which means, on a domestic call, the cops CANNOT leave the scene without making at LEAST one arrest).
One is that a visit from the cops doesn’t necessarily cool things down as much as you’d think, and before the days of mandatory arrest, the domestic fight would again start up as soon as they left, and they’d get another call for the exact same address that exact same night.
Another is that, as May Tree notes, these problems just keep escalating without intervention, and the victim soon winds up dead. Mandatory arrest for the very first call means that intervention starts much sooner, i.e. as soon as the violence has reached a level where someone calls the cops for the first time.
Additionally (and not unlike the point I keep making about relying on policy rather than on victims, emotion, individual preference, etc. in a harassment incident at a con), mandatory arrest means there is now a set, fixed, required procedure, rather than leaving it up to the individual judgment of police officers whether the victim is REALLY in danger, whether the abuser is REALLY sorry, whether it’s REALLY true that he won’t hit her again with a two-by-four, etc. Mandatory arrest ensures that fewer victims die because the cops didn’t recognize how much danger the victim was in, or was too inexperienced to understand the danger. It also ensures that a cop doesn’t live with knowing a woman is dead because he believed her and her parnter’s assurances that it was just a one-time spat, not really that bad, all over now, and would never happen again.
Also, again because these things escalate, cops found that once they got ONE domestic call for an address… they got them again and again and again, week after week after week. There were addresses they were going to 20 times a year, because the exact same incidents kept occurring over and over and over and over and over there, and the woman kept saying over and over and over and over and over, “No, I don’t want him arrested.” Even if it was going to take the abuser years to kill his “partner,” this was an enormous hole into which police time and attention was sinking, and so they realized they had to change how they handled these calls.
RE the discussion about Christianity and forgiveness– I can’t speak for any Protestant sects, but in Catholicism, IIRC, you have to be genuinely penitent to be forgiven. An insincere apology isn’t good enough, nor is going to Confession if you are insincere about that.
The problem with mandatory arrest policies is the same as with schools’ “zero-tolerance” policies – they throw up a nontrivial number of situations where it is the worst response which is mandated. (An obvious case being a call by a third party who took as abuse something which was not.) In the end a too-draconian policy brings the administration of justice into disrepute, and the whole merry-go-round starts again.