One woman complained. USCF assigned her an escort. More women complained. USCF banned the guy.
This sounds completely reasonable, unless the first woman provided proof, you can't just ban someone because of an allegation. But they took steps to ensure her safety at future events.
What does Lichess want here? They say it's insufficient, but they never really say what should have been done.
Edit: to clarify, I'm talking about the incident with Timur
They seem to want confidence that US Chess and STLCC leadership are able to handle these complaints appropriately going forward: a change of leadership would be one way. Per the intro, they're looking for scrutiny and accountability of the handling: with that the current leadership might be able to regain confidence, I guess.
Your characterisation ignores the other case, of course, but on the one you're referring to note that there were two complaints prior to the multiple ones and the ban was a secret, partial ban.
It's very likely there would be no proof, but a competent investigation can talk to those involved and come to a conclusion. Patterns of behavior can be established over time. And there may have been say CCTV that an investigation could obtain that the woman herself couldn't immediately provide.
Both of the offenders here have multiple allegations against them -- escorting one woman doesn't protect other women (and presumably ends at the edge of the venue), and escorting all women isn't a scalable solution.
Timely, competent investigations of allegations and the removal of predators is the only way. But orgs are learning this stuff, and are staffed and run by humans. Where mistakes are made they should be owned up to.
For women to be able to enjoy chess without fear of assault, and for chess clubs to raise the bar on protecting the physical integrity of their members.
> they never really say what should have been done
It’s for the individual club to decide, but I think the answer is uncontroversial and obvious: find out if their member assaulted another member and kick them out of the club permanently.
They want each organization to publicly state (“acknowledge”) that they acted and communicated inappropriately in the past regarding these events. In their exact words from the post:
> However, in our opinion, both US Chess and STLCC have failed to demonstrate an important aspect of accountability – a willingness to acknowledge and address past shortcomings. We do not think that reconciliation will be possible without this acknowledgement.
Not happening. The sad fact is, people and organizations rarely admit to wrongdoing. You usually only see it happen in court and even then they may deny it even when judged to have done wrong.
Lichess wants women and girls to feel safe. When women and girls feel safe, Lichess can once again endorse USCF. It's not lichess/Thibault's job to fix USCF.
You absolutely can ban someone because of an allegation. It's a chess club. The worst punishment they can levy is banishment. That doesn't need the kind of "beyond reasonable doubt" certainty that a court throwing you in prison needs.
If this kind of ban was happening all over the place for similar reasons I’d argue that you have a point. After digging a bit, however, I wasn’t able to find many males banned for harassment or assault on another member. So it seems you’re protesting on the basis of an unlikely hypothetical scenario.
What are you talking about? There are like... a thousand things that could have done better here, and which were still being done long after the complaints.
Ban the people. Completely totally remove the people who are assaulting underage girls from any event and any association. Don't "provide an escort", wtf. Ban them.
Yes, it's shocking the lack of empathy towards the victims being shown by the organization and the lack of long term prevention for this kind of behavior.
There's much talk in media and on social media about accusations of pedophilia, but when there are multiple real predators being outed there is a surprising amount of people who come out to support treating them with white gloves. The fact it's taking lichess to disassociate with these organizations to attract attention to their lack of urgency and care for victims is deplorable.
Yep. Why should underage girls — or of-age women, or men, or anyone — have to be escorted around to keep them safe? The victims here aren’t wanting to walk around Mogadishu at night. They’re at a chess tournament.
Yeah I was typing up a response the inherent disconnect between taking the allegations seriously enough to provide an escort while still allowing the abuser free to assault other women is galling.
We know from painful experience that some accusations are baseless. there are people who will allege harm just to get rid of an opponent they do not want to play against. As such it is really hard to figure out what of the thousands of things they can do are really the right thing to do.
"Some accusations have at some point been baseless" is utterly irrelevant. Are these accusations baseless? Multiple ones, from multiple people, about the same person, over years? No, they're not. Done. End of story.
That would be like arguing: some logical statements are false, therefore the truth of logical statements is unknowable. Lol, no, it just depends on the statement.
(Nowhere in this article, by the way, did anyone allege harm to "get rid of an opponent they do not want to play against".)
The article didn't allege that. Probably that wasn't the intent for any case. However such things happen and so we must always be careful about allocations.
Yeah, too hard to figure out what the problem is here – might be all these women lying to ruin his life. Better do nothing about it until we're sure.
> 2011
> A woman alleges that she was sexually assaulted by Alejandro Ramirez at a chess camp in 2011, when she was 15 years old. (WSJ)
> Jennifer Shahade alleges that she was assaulted by Ramirez for the first time in 2011. (Lichess)
> 2014
> Jennifer Shahade alleges that Ramirez assaulted her for a second time in 2014.
> Claire Grothe alleges that in 2014 she was assaulted by Ramirez at a reception organized by STLCC, and that the incident (and Ramirez’s response to it) led to her leaving her job at the World Chess Hall of Fame later that year. (WSJ)
> 2015
> A woman who was underage at the time alleges that Ramirez encouraged her to drink alcohol, attempted to have sex with her, and initiated oral sex without her consent. (WSJ)
> 2016
> A woman alleges that in 2016, when she was underage, she was warned by STLCC employees to not allow herself to be alone with Ramirez. (WSJ)
> 2017
> A young player’s mother says that in 2017 she alerted top US Chess officials to Ramirez’s behavior, and overheard STLCC staff make jokes about his interest in young women. (WSJ)
> 2019
> A woman alleges that in 2019 she was sexually assaulted by Timur Gareyev while walking to her car from a hotel where a US Chess sanctioned tournament is taking place (in which Gareyev was playing). She submitted a complaint to US Chess shortly afterwards. The US Chess ethics committee declined to accept jurisdiction of the matter, as the alleged incident had occurred outside the hotel, and therefore (in the committee’s view) it could not be “directly connected” to the chess tournament. No action was taken against Gareyev. (Lichess)
> Another woman alleges that at a different US Chess sponsored tournament in 2019, Gareyev grabbed her and kissed her against her will. (Lichess)
> 2021
> In January 2021, Jennifer Shahade informed STLCC and US Chess of a case involving an alleged victim (of Ramirez) who said she was 15 years old at the time of the first alleged incident. She urged US Chess and STLCC to act against Ramirez. (Lichess)
You know those "code of conduct" pages you see a conferences, where you sigh and think this is obvious. Lamentably this is why you have them and you enforce them. If things get bad, people don't want to associate with your group.
I want to address this more generally. I'm not taking issue with any of the claims, I don't know what is true or isn't.
The thing I wonder after reading this is how many organizations struggle to deal with these types of situations. Employers, schools, universities, clubs all seem to now have to have a process to address these things. And yet they seem to fumble it regularly, in every direction. The results are all over the map, ignore the issue, too strict, knee jerk in about every way, sometimes every way...
It occurs to me that none of these organization naturally have a good mechanism for dealing with these things, nor do they necessarily have people qualified to do so (even Big US Universities for all their resources have demonstrated their own ability to do poorly in every way).
We all have ideas about how we think these groups should act after the fact, but how do you really get it right?
How does any organization decide "We're going to address these kinds of claims, investigate, and act appropriately?" Where do they even start?
I'd suggest lobbying congress to reform the US courts. A few things come to mind:
- ban binding arbitration and all other extrajudicial legal proceedings
- strengthen whistleblower laws so that NDAs against people with whistleblower protection are non-enforceable
- train a subset of police to properly investigate sexual assault / harassment allegations
- provide a low cost alternative to civil court similar to small claims court for situations where there is a large asymmetry in the financial resources of the two sides of the proceeding.
>ban binding arbitration and all other extrajudicial legal proceedings
Sure.
>strengthen whistleblower laws so that NDAs against people with whistleblower protection are non-enforceable
Ok.
>train a subset of police to properly investigate sexual assault / harassment allegations
Not really something the feds can handle except for the minority of cases that end up in federal jurisdiction. Most policing is local.
>provide a low cost alternative to civil court similar to small claims court for situations where there is a large asymmetry in the financial resources of the two sides of the proceeding.
I was going to point out that your first two point would increase the world load on our already overworked court system. But you noticed that. The only problem with this approach is there really isn't an existing framework, as far as I know, that would allow for this. You would want it to be held to the same standards as normal courts. In which case it will be just as slow and expensive. The law is complicated and therefore requires professionals. And professionals are expensive. I don't have a solution to this. But saying, we need simpler and cheaper courts sounds nice but doesn't really work if you still want things like innocent until proven guilty and beyond a reasonable doubt.
And I shudder to think of the amount of information an actual adult and politician has to willfully resist to learn to say things like: "If it's legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down, [...]".
> And yet they seem to fumble it regularly, in every direction. The results are all over the map, ignore the issue, too strict, knee jerk in about every way, sometimes every way...
> It occurs to me that none of these organization naturally have a good mechanism for dealing with these things
Can there even be a good mechanism to deal with these things, when most often there isn't any evidence and it's a "he said she said" situation? That's a fundamental problem with these situations that's intrinsically hard to solve.
One reasonable course of action is to say "we'll see if evidence accumulates, and if there's multiple independent complaints then we'll assume it's true". Which is pretty much what they did here, and now they're facing flak for that, as being on the "ignoring the issue" side of the fence. Another is to say "zero tolerance, any complaint and you're out". And that has obvious problems of being weaponized, and would end up on the "too strict, knee jerk" side of things.
Men and women are both incredibly complex and varied, and organizations having to judges of characters and relationships with limited evidence is going to be inevitably fraught with peril.
"Conflict is not abuse" yes. But also, abuse is not conflict. Organizations and communities have their own ways of limiting, tempering, and mitigating conflict within them that relates to the domain of the organization. But however effective those methods are, they will be insufficient to handle cases of interpersonal manipulation, abuse, sexual harassment, etc. Because again, those things are not conflict.
One thing I'm really struggling with for all these kind of issues is do we really want to create another legal system? That's basically what every organization is being pushed into at this rate.
From Universities to chess Leagues they are assembling what amounts to their own judges, juries, and prosecutors.
If someone is committing sexual assault why does their seem to be this avoidance of the existing legal system and a push into these opaque and what amounts to amateur alternative legal systems?
It makes sense that the legal system and individuals' freedom of association would have different thresholds for deciding to act.
Suppose we say that the legal system needs to have 95% probability of guilt to render a guilty verdict, and its associated consequences such as imprisonment and/or restitution. A high threshold makes sense for such systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio).
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have a person for whom you have 80% probability of their guilt. That, then, is not enough to render a guilty verdict; 20% is clearly "reasonable doubt".
80% probability of guilt, however, is absolutely enough for reasonable people to say "I don't want this person associated with my organization", or "I don't want this person presenting at my conference".
This, among many other reasons, is a very good reason for organizations to have their own standards which are independent of those of the legal system.
Absolutely true (civil cases are "preponderance of the evidence"), but the same principle still applies, just with lower numbers. 51% likely might be enough for a verdict against someone in a civil case and a legally enforceable monetary judgement. But if you have someone 30% likely to have done something (where the baseline should be close to 0%), that's still enough that reasonable risk-averse organizations may reasonably choose to not associate with them.
A court that can render legally enforceable judgements against someone should absolutely have a higher bar of certainty than an organization that is simply excluding someone from participation in that organization.
The problem with that is that if the accused is only 30% likely to have done something, then there may be an equal or greater likelihood that the accuser is maliciously lying (allowing for some likelihood of genuine misunderstanding).
Not necessarily. Unless the presence of the accusation already was used to get that 30% number, you also need to take into account the a priori probability of someone maliciously lying (or better yet, the particular accuser to be lying in this case) and apply Bayes's theorem.
The problem is that 30% is not a good estimate in the first place, because the organization doesn't have the same skills/resources/judgements to make an accurate assessment.
It might well have substantial uncertainty, in either direction. Suppose it's 30% plus or minus 20%, a huge amount of uncertainty. That's still absolutely a reasonable threshold someone could use as the basis for a decision.
The exact numbers here are examples, not the determining factor here, nor do most organizations express them quantitatively.
The important point is that organizations can and do have a different threshold for action. You could absolutely argue about whether an organization has the right threshold, but I don't think there's a case for a deontological requirement that every organization's threshold for taking any action at all must be the same as the threshold for conviction in a court. (Leaving aside that that would utterly invalidate freedom of association.)
no it's not. it subverts the principle that someone is innocent until proven guilty. with so many associations becoming mandatory (eg: i can't do my job without a google account) we can no longer allow any organization to reject people based on their own judgement. at least for the larger ones that don't have trivial alternatives.
Innocent until proven guilty is primarily a legal principle in the United States and doesn’t really apply to the court of public opinion. And in fact for many of the good reasons presented by the person to whom you’re responding, really shouldn’t apply to the court of public opinion or the principle of freedom of association.
doesn’t really apply to the court of public opinion
i strongly disagree with that. allowing public opinion to judge people without proof leads to mob rule. any rumor can destroy someones life. as a society we must not allow that to happen.
innocent until proven guilty should apply to every interaction we have with any human being. if there are suspicions it is ok to take precautions, and obviously those who are victims should be able to seek and get support even if they can't prove what happened. but any actions against the accused must not be irreversible until a verdict has been reached.
part of the reason this is necessary is because as a society we are not doing well with forgiveness especially in cases where someone has been wrongfully accused. to many times their life has been destroyed anyways.
individuals maybe, but large organizations that people depend on no. and even as individuals we need to be careful to not allow prejudice to control our actions. some people take "being black" as a red flag.
it does negate people are free to have red flags that cause them to cut ties with other people because you are not free to have whatever red flags you want. if you see red flags you should evaluate them and make sure they are not just prejudice.
remember that joke about a someone in an airplane sitting next to a black person, complaining loudly that they want to sit somewhere else. the stewardess comes over and says: "my apologies, it is of course unacceptable that you should have to sit next to such an obnoxious person". and then invites the black person into first class to everyones applause.
you can leave, but if you complain you should probably be kicked out.
i don't know why we are having such a stupid argument. it should be clear that racism is unacceptable and that it doesn't give you any right to show disrespect.
I said "people are free to have red flags that cause them to cut ties with other people" and you continue to twist what was a statement about free association into statements (that you want to argue about) regarding active discrimination. If you'd stop doing that, the argument would end pretty quickly.
that's because i have always only been concerned about active discrimination. and your statement is too generic to exclude that. let me repeat what i said:
innocent until proven guilty should apply to every interaction we have with any human being
as individuals we need to be careful to not allow prejudice to control our actions
if you see red flags you should evaluate them and make sure they are not just prejudice
you seem to be claiming that the right to free association should allow people to remain to be racist. no, it shouldn't.
i not twisting anything, especially not since this thread started with your criticism of my first statement, and this whole argument looks like you seemingly trying to use the right of free association to excuse people being racist.
what if a person was asking for help? but they couldn't because you turned away? can you see how an action that according to you is just your expression of free association turns into active discrimination?
I expect a "chess federation" to be good at.....federating chess.
Why do we expect a chess federation to be good at policing, investigating claims, collecting evidence, following precedent, passing judgments, and balancing collective and individual interests?
We have actual, legitimate justice systems that do this. Are they perfect? No. But why do you expect a bunch of chess nerds/experts to be any better at it?
---
You're complaining that a plumber did a crap job fixing your car. I 100% believe you that they did a crappy job, but also maybe you should have hired someone else?
That still provides deterrence, and safeguards against future harm from the same perpetrator.
Regardless, the chess federation is not being asked to act on pre-crime either, so in that aspect they are no different than the legal and police systems.
I don't believe anyone wants to create a new legal system, but the reality is the vast majority of sexual assault cases aren't resolved in court due to existing social issues. These "judges, jurries and prosecutors" are just people who don't want to associate with potentially dangerous people regardless of the legal outcome. Beyond legal consequences to crime there have always been social consequences too - I think the major difference compared to the past is that these companies put out press releases instead of just blacklisting someone and moving on.
I agree that often that's not the goal, but if you have multiple parties making different claims ... all of a sudden you have to determine facts to make a decision based on and suddenly you've got a sort of mini justice system and you're learning all the ins and outs of such a system, making the same historical mistakes and so on.
> These "judges, jurries and prosecutors" are just people who don't want to associate with potentially dangerous people regardless of the legal outcome.
This is true, but also has excused discrimination in the past (e.g. white flight), and can very easily lead to the tarring and feathering of innocent people.
At the individual level, not associating with potentially dangerous people is fine and smart. When large swaths of people avoid the same potentially dangerous people, though, the "potentially" part really does merit a bit more weight.
The possibility of discrimination exists in all cases where any human entity, whether individual or group, judges another human entity. This is widely accepted in human societies as a necessary risk of being able to judge others as fit or unfit for participation, and Lichess is exercising their right to do so, just as all other human entities may choose to do. Until a pattern of bias is demonstrated, such judgments are neither implicitly discriminatory, nor are they implicitly a slippery slope to discrimination.
> Until a pattern of bias is demonstrated, such judgments are neither implicitly discriminatory, ...
I mean, by definition they are discriminatory though: you are choosing to discriminate between individuals that you will associate with and those you won't.
This is not inherently bad, but can definitely be unjust toward those on the receiving end even if it's justifiable by the discriminator.
For instance, maybe a neighbor down the street seems a bit creepy, so I tell my kids not to hang around them to stay safe. This is fine. For that person, though, it may be a totally unfair and unwarranted restriction, and they actually are kind and good, and hurt that people won't associate with them.
The point I'm making is that even if everyone is just exercising their rights and being reasonable and safe, the outcome can disproportionately negatively impact the receivers of the (perhaps reasonable) discrimination.
Exclusion is not necessarily discrimination. Discrimination is a subset of exclusion, not an equivalent of it. People will be hurt by exclusion. Overuse of exclusion is a possible downside. Enforcement of bias through exclusion is a possible downside. Neither of these potentials means that exclusion is always discrimination. In most circumstances, exclusion is simply exclusion.
When exclusion is used in service to a bias and exists explicitly to disadvantage those the bias is against, that becomes discriminatory exclusion. Lichess is exercising their right to exclude here. You could construct a plausible argument that Lichess is discriminating against organizations that refuse to take a stand against sexual predation upon women and minors; I would absolutely agree.
However, “organizations that refuse to take a stand against sexual predation” is not a legally protected category, and so harassment laws do not apply. By the arguments of the top comments on this post, then, Lichess’s actions are lawful and therefore permissible.
If you’re able to identify amother category where their actions are biased against a protected group, that’s a good tangent, I suppose. But non-religious organizations don’t qualify for such protections, and so any actions taken here against these two chess organizations, are not grounds for a finding of discrimination — regardless of whether their exclusion is deemed to be discriminatory or not.
> I don't believe anyone wants to create a new legal system, but the reality is the vast majority of sexual assault cases aren't resolved in court due to existing social issues.
That's as may be, but the answer isn't to let every HOA and garden club run their own kangaroo courts.
> I don't believe anyone wants to create a new legal system, but the reality is the vast majority of sexual assault cases aren't resolved in court due to existing social issues
If by existing social issues, you mean lack of evidence, statute of limitations, then sure.
For instance, I see zero evidence that anything occurred here. There may be evidence, but the point of the justice system is to publicly disclose it and debate it such that the public can make a determination. Once determined (by a jury) a punishment, agreed upon by the society is handed down.
The alternative is issuing unsubstantiated claims to the public. Then blacklisting and deplatforming the person do they cannot defend themselves. To be honest, that’s effectively what led to the US revolution — lack of due process, ability to redress grievances and representation.
It’s very unamerican, that said, many of these organizations that do this aren’t American so it is what it is.
This is 100% wrong. American' are very much in favor of instilling their own ethics and morality and guidelines on things they own. Which is exactly what is happening here.
Your belief that you can dictate to others how they can manage their own property is the unamerican thing here.
True, America is / was known for the Jim Crow laws, public lynchings without a trial, etc. I guess it is “very American”.
That said, if you ask around, I suspect most Americans believe that is horrendous and not at all what America is. In fact, there are a lot of laws protecting the accused for this very reason.
That said, I do think the accused here should consider a civil lawsuit (if they’re innocent). It would help clear their name, because they aren’t doing so — I do suspect the claims are true, for what it’s worth.
There’s a whole lot in there about lack of representation, lack of due process (ie trial by jury) and representation (like the whole list of complaints are these 3 things)
The Founding Fathers never said “if you’re accused of horrible things, everyone still needs to be nice to you and want to hang out with you until you’re convicted of a crime.”
Actually the ethos is precisely the opposite and is enshrined in our Constitutional right to association. You have the right to associate and disassociate with whoever you wish for whatever reasons you wish.
The legal system has a much higher bar to put people in prison for crimes. Organizations have a much lower bar for deciding not to associate with people. Their goal is to protect their members.
Also, there are lots of things that are problematic but not crimes. "Sexual misconduct" could mean sexual harassment, which isn't a crime but shouldn't be allowed in organization.
> But Lichess has neither the means nor interest in uncovering the truth.
I don't see how that follows at all? Obviously they have interest. As for means, what more do you want? We have a public accusation from a victim in her own words under her own name. Maybe you choose not to believe her, but that's absolutely admissible as evidence. Why doesn't it count here?
The subtext to all of this pontification is clearly not about whether or not private organizations can police their own members. Clearly they can. You don't need to be convicted in court to be fired for stealing soda from your work fridge. This is no different.
What's bugging people in this thread is the same culture war fight we always get into: you tend to disbelieve sexual assault accusations from women, and Lichess tends to believe the accuser. And so sides are drawn up and strawman arguments are prepared. But it's just culture war.
As a male who was wrongfully accused of sexual assault by a covert narcissist, and basically expelled from communities I've been part of for all my life, I find it hard to see this as merely a "culture war". I used to instantly side with the "victim", because I couldn't imagine that someone would invent claims in such a sick and cruel way.
I am not saying that this happens often, there's just no way to know. And maybe it's still better to "play it safe". It's hard, but I've personally grown to accept that I have to live with "being the perpetrator" in the eyes of most. I lost most of my what I considered to be my friends, and my professional career. But the few remaining ones who believe me I now know I can fully trust.
How so? They can gather evidence and hear testimonies as well as anyone else can. They don't have the power of the state to compel testimony but tempered by the lower consequences of an incorrect decision.
Notice that courts don’t really “uncover the truth” either, not even on paper. They just establish likelihood of guilt — just like any other org could.
Generally the existing legal system is a very difficult path.
Having said that I do agree with you (and thus my other comment) that these informal efforts by people who understandably are not qualified to deal with these things, are a mess too, and I'm not at all sure how they could possibly get it right often enough.
US Universities in their effort to make the path less difficult have demonstrated that just pressing your foot down on the balance of justice is not justice.
> Generally the existing legal system is a very difficult path.
Yeah, it's a difficult path because of pesky things like evidentiary rules, burden of proof, and presumption of innocence. False accusations happen, especially in mega-competitive spaces like sports/chess competitions. I'm not sure why so many folks believe that destroying someone's livelihood, career, and reputation is ethically permissible based simply on a paragraph with zero transparency.
Hypothetically, if you were falsely accused, wouldn't you want a fair trial?
> Generally the existing legal system is a very difficult path
And for good reason, the current legal system assumes innocent until proven guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt (for criminal cases). Civil cases have a lower burden of proof.
These protections are there for a reason. Everyone has likely been accused of things they didn’t do. We shouldn’t assume anyone’s word without a decent amount of certainty.
sexual “misconduct” is even more insidious, because most people making the accusations are doing so long-after the fact, often have outside motivation for making claims AND likely have too low of a burden for a civil or criminal case… In other words, feel free to make claims, but without proof it’s hard to justify ruining someone’s life.
> Everyone has likely been accused of things they didn’t do.
To this degree? No. This is not likely.
> We shouldn’t assume anyone’s word without a decent amount of certainty.
Several claims from individuals with corroborating evidence in this case.
> most people making the accusations are doing so long-after the fact, often have outside motivation for making claims
Citation needed. I need evidence that most people making accusations are doing so "long after the fact" AND have motives outside the offending incident to do so.
On a side note: Codes of Conduct and Guidelines have existed long before the modern era. Private entities are free to handle these however they want, and suggesting they leave everything to the courts is a new and unique perspective that needs more backing to suggest it would be a better system.
(to be clear, I'm pretty sure I agree with you @jasonlotito)
> long after... motives after
AFAIK/IME this actually does end up being true, but why it's true matters -
1) It can take a long time for someone to realize what they've been through, and it can take even longer for them to get to the point where they can talk about it.
2) A lot of folks seem to take the stance that they don't want to deal with everything involved in bringing up what happened to them until they start seeing it happen to others.
> Several claims from individuals with corroborating evidence in this case.
Claims are not evidence, can anyone see the claims?
Can I see the rebuttal from the accused?
The point I’m making is this is not “justice” it’s “injustice” because it’s not actually adjudicating a dispute. What’s happening here isn’t a “trial”.
Here’s what I understand from the article — a group of people (who likely know each other), accused a high profile competitor of sexual misconduct, 4 years after the incident. There appears to be no police report nor any other legal action.
That’s it… so to me it’s hard to say “yeah let’s ban someone and ruin his name!” Because quite frankly, I don’t see any evidence. Note: there could be evidence! I just don’t see it presented here.
I’m curious why you feel the actions of a private group amount to a legal system. To me they seem quite different. In one the punishment amounts to expulsion from the group and damage to reputation. The actual legal system has more consequential punishment (confinement, monetary loss, permanent record as a felon & sexual predator) but also higher standards of evidence, procedure, defendants rights etc.
To me, the “amateur legal system” you identity is closer to a more formalized version of what a friend group might do when they decide to ostracize someone due to boorish, misogynist or similar behavior. Since the chess association size exceeds the Dunbar number a lightweight process is needed to ensure proper function.
This is a little like suggesting an HN ban should require formal due process. These are private organizations, and everybody involved here is exercising their rights of free association. Lichess can ice out other organizations for all sorts of reasons, moral, legal, commercial, and aesthetic. You in turn can respond to their actions by choosing how you'll associate with Lichess.
The legal system is exorbitantly expensive. I had a neighbor sue me over a land dispute (yes, they’re that petty). My lawyers informed me that I was looking at $80-200k in legal bills to take even this little thing to trial.
It doesn’t surprise me that organizations actively try to avoid it.
I lived with someone for several years who was in a legal dispute with their tenants. Once one lawsuit was over, the other part retributed. I never knew them when they were not either suing or getting sued.
It taught me this: don’t ever go to court if you can avoid it.
> do we really want to create another legal system?
Yes, yes we do. The current legal system is inadequate to the task. It is costly, intimidating, strenuous to wield and aggressive in its penalties. Accountability and recompense can be more judiciously attained by interpersonal conflict-resolution practices at the lowest institutional level, ie at the leaf-nodes of the social hierarchy.
By asking us to rely on an unreliable legal system, you are asking us to accept victimization. If institutions return to "passing the buck" as they broadly were before, eg #MeToo, the buck will not stop. It will ricochet off the indifferent law.
I don't see any evidence of Lichess being "pushed into" this. It's owned entirely by a single person. I don't recall any PR campaign to pressure Lichess into doing this.
This feels much more like one person making a decision about who he would and would not associate with.
I don't disagree that moral panics and mass hysteria are real but this does not seem to be a case of that.
“No” certainly isn’t a viable answer, as it resulted in the evidence of inaction and blame-shifting presented by Lichess. However, your opinion as indicates hostility to “Yes”. In light of that contradiction, what action do you recommend organizations take other than refusing to govern their members with regards to sexual assault?
Our existing systems are actually just plain bad at handling "intimate crime", for a whole host of reasons. AFAIK the US legal system was designed first to handle "the state versus a person", and second "contract enforcement". It's also designed "to be blind" (to very arguable success), and "slow but inevitable" ("gears of justice").
One of the main reasons it doesn't work to well in community management - Call it the "tip of the iceberg" effect. Where there's one problem, there's usually a whole bunch more, even if they're smaller. I removed someone from my community in exactly this kind of situation; they had a couple of explosive breakups, and once people started talking more and more came out (outside of the relationships).
After we'd (myself and another leader) talked to everyone we possibly could, two things became apparent: 1) He'd end up hurting someone else again if we kept him around, and 2) none of the "evidence gathering" steps were necessary. If someone is unable or unwilling to accept any causation of another's harm, then they can do nothing to prevent that harm from recurring. Which matters when it's clear that it keeps happening, and they're always involved.
So yeah - all of that and more means the legal system is poorly suited to handling what's basically a heavy-duty form of community moderation.
> From Universities to chess Leagues they are assembling what amounts to their own judges, juries, and prosecutors.
Increasingly, many legal disputes are handled through arbitration, which is literally this. There are a lot of motivations for avoiding the courts: arbitration is usually faster, cheaper, and can be more discreet. From my understanding, big entities really only take something to court when they want to rely on legal precedent or establish a new binding precedent.
Fundamentally all businesses/entities have to decide who they want to associate with, Lichess is not required to do anything with USCF or the STL Chess Club. There's plenty of non-criminal reasons to not associate with someone which the legal system will never cover, so the fact that some action may or may not rise to the level of criminal doesn't really tell you very much in regards to what Lichess should do about it.
There's also the fact that Lichess is probably happy to associate with people who have committed other kinds of crimes - are you suggesting they should blacklist everybody who has been convicted of a crime in the past? Or should they make a list of what crimes are/aren't ok? If we're making a list of which crimes are "actually" bad, then aren't we back at the same problem of Lichess having to decide what they're ok associating with?
Additionally Lichess isn't even based in the US, so which country's criminal laws is the owner supposed to use? It's not like any of these alleged crimes could be tried in France.
There's just no other solution to what you're presenting that is reasonable at more than a surface level.
Large organizations are in a middle ground between "You are forced to participate" nation-state groups and "Leave at any time with little impact" groups like a small club or friend group. Different levels of proof are appropriate at these various levels. For a nation-state, you need to be damn sure before levying a punishment, because the impact of punishment is much greater. The trade off is a much more rigorous investigation of potential wrong-doing, and a certain level of acceptable false negatives. It's better for a nation-state to let a couple people get away with crimes versus falsely convicting someone. In a small, informal group, the greatest punishment they can issue is a relatively low-impact exile, so levels of proof can be extremely low: a vaguely plausible rumor will probably get someone kicked out.
Big organizations like universities, chess leagues, and workplaces are in a middle ground. Exile from such a group is a much bigger deal, as it can threaten someone's livelihood, future, or incur other fairly large opportunity costs. However, they can't throw someone in prison, so compared to the nation state they need less confidence to levy their punishments, and thus are expected to be less accepting of members getting away with inappropriate behavior.
All of this comes to head with the issue of sexual harassment and assault. It's a very hard category of crime to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt", because often the only witnesses are the victim/accuser and the perpetrator/accused. If an organization takes a stance of only kicking someone out when they are convicted in a court of law, they are stating that they are willing to accept some level of misconduct, which is greater than most would like.
Every organization beyond an individual has a legal system. Whether the rules are formal or informal, defacto or defined is irrelevant, there is a legal system of some sort.
Within the family, it may not be there in writing, but Mom and Dad run the show. The rules are the ones they set for the household. The neighborhood has its norms, unspoken or baked into ordinances. The congregation has its rules, the corner store has a boss that says what goes...
If you have an organization, and it has even the slightest hint of formal governance, you have rules (laws) and a legal system. In this case, yes, chess organizations must deal appropriately with problems of sexual misconduct, including following the laws of the land. In the situations cited in the article, in particular, even if there were now criminal charges leveled, the legal system of the chess federations should have ensured that one member could not gain a position to continue preying on other members. They should do this regardless of what other supervening laws exist. Those other laws will come into play, but there does need to be governance of acceptable behavior within their sphere of concern.
Disclaimer: keeping situations that are clearly criminal 'in house' is bizarre and I agree - forward to the authorities. Many situations fitting the mold of this article are not so cut and dried so I am primarily addressing that here.
Well, from a practical stand point not every instance of inappropriate behavior is illegal, and not every instance of illegal behavior is prosecutable. If you want standards for behavior in your group you probably have expectations of time to resolve and level of evidence than the legal system is not going to meet.
From a more philosophical perspective it would make sense for groups to form and enforce norms - the law sets a minimum expectation of behavior after all and has very different goals/principles. A legal system might err on the side of leniency/underspecifying in order to preserve liberty, and have requirements around process and evidence in order to put constraints on the authority to put a person into a cell for the rest of their life. Rules around who can attend a tournament don't have the same scope or impact and are probably not improved by including the assumptions of the legal system.
From a pedantic standpoint they are not at all creating another legal system because they have precisely zero authority, they are enforcing social norms through freedom of association. That you might see similarities probably isn't surprising given the need to investigate claims and take action, especially given the increased desire around transparency and hence published standards.
Side note; I feel your core observation but I personally wonder how much is something new vs a function that has broadly existed in organizations that is becoming visible due to expectations around transparency and action.
> If someone is committing sexual assault why does their seem to be this avoidance of the existing legal system
At base, because the legal system:
- takes too long to be a useful preventative measure
- frequently involves re-traumatizing the victims, including via requiring public testimony of incredibly personal information
- often results in acquittal, frequently because victims choose not to submit themselves to trial
The goals of the legal system are essentially at odds with those of civic organizations. The legal system is designed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, a solid standard to use before e.g. incarcerating a person.
However, this standard is not necessarily stringent enough to vet people who supervise minors. More to the point, no private group of people is compelled to allow any individual to associate with them.
> If someone is committing sexual assault why does their seem to be this avoidance of the existing legal system and a push into these opaque and what amounts to amateur alternative legal systems?
That's not a legal system, and the reason for it is (or, at least, includes) that the organizations themselves have duties that are enforceable through the actual legal system, and they would rather not fail those duties in a costly way. And those duties often include duties to both potential victims and accused, so determining the facts in order to take the correct actions to uphold those duties requires some method of resolving disputes.
This is literally the definition of social justice. I just wanted to emphasize because this the term has lost a lot of meaning since it’s used as a catchall (by both opponents and proponents).
No, it's not. It's one possible parsing of the words "social" and "justice" when combined together, but "social justice" has been used in its current form since at least John Stuart Mill in 1861:
> Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost degree to converge.
USA is a free country. It also has a Federation enshrined in law, with powers reserved for the non-Federal government. That idea of self-government permeates society.
We don't wait for the government to tell us what to think. Other countries have different culture.
Such is the problem with free speech: it enables free association.
Alternative language for what you're saying: Should we force people to allow everyone access to them/their company/their spaces? If not, how do we determine what groups are and aren't protected?
Tangential: Why would banning criminals be fine for you, and what crimes warrant exclusion? Should tax cheats be excluded from chess orgs? What about someone with a DUI?
There are several arguments on this post to that effect: that, yes, organizations should have no right to exclude anyone for their behavior, and should be forced to accept anyone who demands membership.
Banning criminals is a popular rhetorical construction used by those who do not have felony records, in order to scaremonger others into supporting an argument that promotes existing biases and status quos; in this case, in favor of the “sexual misconduct is disregarded” bias.
Oh I know, I once got into a massive Twitter blowout with Brendan Eich because he believes that all computing conferences should invite "the best" speakers (how do you determine that? well I assume "invented JS" would be a qualifier...) regardless of their personal or legal issues.
It's a tough philosophical space balancing between free speech/association and criminal discrimination and I think it shouldn't be surprising that an ecosystem that produced a "free speech absolutist" like Musk who bans dissenting opinions would also create a group of people who think that everyone has to tolerate them no matter how abhorrent their behavior or ideas as long as it doesn't cross a line into "criminal".
Well yea. Nothing white dudes hate more than being told women and minorities are allowed to do something they aren't (and since it appears to be just us talking here, I think we can both admit that's really all that's going on).
"Oh no, a problematic white man suffered a consequence. I'm a problematic white dude, I wouldn't want to be kicked out! This should be illegal!"
If that's the way you want to approach it, which does have some value, the starting question is "why isn't the legal system sufficient or able to address this?" Which is a many-layered question but let's go.
The needs of a small organization are different from an entire state. Transgressions can be disruptive or destructive to organization-scale relationships without rising to criminality.
And the the traditional feminist answer of "why can't the legal system address sexual assault" is "it wasn't meant to." A famous quote on this is that from a woman's perspective rape isn't illegal it's regulated. The definitions of it and the standards to be met for deciding it has taken place were decided by men, to enforce against other men. The way women feel about their interactions with men has not traditionally been a prioritized factor in the legal system.
> A famous quote on this is that from a woman's perspective rape isn't illegal it's regulated.
"Regulated" in the sense that the average prison term for [edit: federal cases of, see reply for closest approximation I could find for non-federal average sentence] sexual abuse is 17 years?
(1) only gets referrals related to federal sentencing (which are a small and not-representative minority of “sexual abuse” cases (if you look at your own document, the majority of the cases are charges specific to one form or another of child sex trafficking—almost half for production of child pornography alone, while only 10% are rape, the specific thibg being referred to in the post you responded to.)
(2) Doesn't include statistics covering situations where law enforcement, prosecutors, etc., decided not to pursue charges.
So on what basis, other than "men bad", does the claim that rape is merely "regulated", and that the legal system wasn't (Shouldn't that be "isn't"? Or will we argue about what the legal system was like a century ago, and imply but not state that it hasn't changed?) meant to address it, rest?
In the UK, the police have even withheld evidence from defense lawyers to ensure convictions for rape. Does that affect the claim how the law is basically pro-rape, or is it completely immune to evidence, so long as a single rape can still occur? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2018/06/05/basic-tenet-j...
> Then robbery and assault and battery are also only “regulated”
If you have an intellectually-honest response to the post three levels upthread of your most recent one, the place to make it was as your first response to that post, not in response to and without acknowledging anything in my post calling out the manner in which your initial response to that post abused statistics that did not address the point raised there.
> without acknowledging anything in my post calling out the manner in which your initial response to that post abused statistics
I amended my original post to state it only refers to federal convictions, as you correctly pointed out, found the closest thing I could to non-federal statistics, to address your claim that federal ones are non-representative, cited statistics from the largest US anti-sexual assault organization to show that rape is handled comparably to other serious crime, and then added more examples to show rape is treated harshly by both society and the law, to the point that innocents sometimes are convicted of crimes they didn't commit.
In short, I addressed every point you and the original post raised, and addressed them using sourced statistics and reliable news organizations, despite the "rape culture" allegations being unsourced and unfalsifiably vague.
It would be more than clear to anyone reading this that it is not I who should worry about intellectual honesty.
Sounds like they have multiple allegations from multiple victims across multiple years. That seems like a reasonable cause for USCF to investigate those allegations.
This comment [0] doesn't list their sources, but their list of events certainly makes it seem more conclusive than I was initially impressed skimming the post. That seems to be causing some confusion between the "just an accusation" and "it's not just an accusation" people.
“SJW” has become somewhat of a term that’s used pejoratively by a certain group of people. But if it aligns with wanting women to be able to exist and enjoy chess without being harassed, it’s probably a good thing.
By using it in the pejorative sense here you’re on the wrong side of history, which is your prerogative.
You can want women to feel welcome and be safe in chess without being a social justice warrior. In fact im not even sure a social justice warrior even wants that.
Im not saying Lichess is SJW because they want women to feel and be safe in chess. Im saying they are a bit SJW because they infused ideaology with their totally idealogical site. Communism, atheism, feminism,etc. Of the developers own admission.
Lichess is in the convenient position of having a lot of negotiating power over other organizations because of its ascendancy, which means that since it apparently has a sense of ethics it can assert those ethics on the more-despicable organizations that don't. We are lucky to have them in that position.
Weird way to phrase it. Most people, even the ones who rail against social justice, would not categorize "actually doing something about sexual abuse" as a social justice cause -- a phrasing which is obviously intended to politicize it and disable your need to care about it, anyway. Is your preferred alternative "don't do something about sexual abuse"? Good luck with that.
Lichess is doing something because (a) they can and (b) the people who could, won't. That's pretty much how progress happens. c.f. every labor movement ever.
But thats what social justice is. Im not sure why you have a negative connotation with it when you describe it as a positive.
> Lichess is in the convenient position of having a lot of negotiating power over other organizations because of its ascendancy, which means that since it apparently has a sense of ethics it can assert those ethics on the more-despicable organizations that don't.
It seemed like you were using it as a slur, which I disagreed with. Usually people who call "just being good" by a phrase like "a social justice cause" are, in my experience, doing that for nefarious reasons.
SJW is primarily used as an insult. It's not synonymous with someone who just does things that are socially just. It's used to describe people/organizations who are unreasonable or even fraudulent in their actions.
Do you really want to belong to an organization that bans based on accusations? That seems like a great way for someone dishonest to avoid playing someone they know they will have a problem beating - just accuse them of sexual harassment and you don't have to worry about it.
Things like the above have been done in the past. That is why the courts have complex and slow procedures to solve problems. I hate it as well, but any alternative is at least as bad - though perhaps in a different direction.
> Do you really want to belong to an organization that bans based on accusations?
Are there non-government civic organizations that require accusations to be completely adjudicated in courts before ejecting a member? I have never heard of even one that would fit this description.
Apologies then, as I interpreted the OP's comment to state that since this man hasn't been convicted in a court of law, Lichess should not behave this way.
That conclusion doesn’t even follow your interpretation though.
He can think Lichess is wrong for disassociating. That doesnt challenge supposed first amendment rights. Keep in mind the lichess dev doesnt have first amendment rights. He’s french.
One woman complained. USCF assigned her an escort. More women complained. USCF banned the guy.
This sounds completely reasonable, unless the first woman provided proof, you can't just ban someone because of an allegation. But they took steps to ensure her safety at future events.
What does Lichess want here? They say it's insufficient, but they never really say what should have been done.
Edit: to clarify, I'm talking about the incident with Timur