Sometimes, the bad guys actually get punished.
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Remember Richard Brittain, the creepy Countdown champion and obsessed stalker? I took my post about him down at the request of his victim, but I knew we’d hear more from him soon. Unfortunately, it’s happened: a woman wrote a negative review of his fantasy novel, so he tracked her down and attacked her.
The writer of the World Rose is arrogant. SO arrogant, in fact, that my review hit him where it hurts a little to hard. In return, he found out where I worked through Facebook, came from LONDON to where I live in the east of Scotland, and attacked me by hitting me over the head with a wine bottle from behind. Not a word or a sound. And then he left. I had to be taken to hospital to receive medical treatment for it, which included several stitches in my head.
Brittain was arrested, but he’s now out on bail. The woman is pressing charges. I expect he’ll be locked up for a while.
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Julien Blanc, another creepy dude who makes money with seminars about how to abuse women, has been deported from Australia. His next planned stop is Japan — yeah, the guy who bragged about how you can anything to Japanese girls, is going to Japan — but let’s all hope he gets kicked out of there.
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4channers are pathetic and awful. One of them, David Kalac, murdered his girlfriend and posted photos to 4chan. He’s been arrested, and I can’t imagine him getting off.
Unfortunately, justice is not perfect. The creeps at 4chan have used photos of the dead woman to make memes.
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Artie Lange (Who? Some third rate comedian who got his start as a sidekick to Howard Stern) used Twitter to babble obscene, racist ‘humor’ about an ESPN announcer. He lost a gig with Comedy Central and has been banned from ESPN. Now he’s placing the blame on “PC groups” who are “ruining the country”.
I know! He should send his tale of woe to Sam Harris!
The tropes are coming fast and thick, though; all of these guys have defenders, which I find bizarre. One of the most common defenses is to blame the victim, to drag out that nonsense about “professional victims” — there’s no such thing. But I’ll point to a really good storify that turns the tables: there are no “professional victims”, but there are definitely professional victimizers. The real profiteers are the people who have monetized accounts on Patreon and Youtube who are raking in surprisingly big bucks with popular videos about how evil Anita Sarkeesian, for instance, is.
Here’s a petition asking the Japanese Immgration Bureau to keep Julien Blanc out of the country.
Richard Brittain; For what it’s worth, according to his blog sometime mid-October he realized he was mentally ill and started therapy. He’s still nuts and doesn’t quite get it but … well, hopefully it’s a start. He’s removed the “benevolent stalker” post but hasn’t acknowledged the attack with a bottle.
Weird story.
Re: 1, here’s Streisand Effect in action: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23208841-the-world-rose
People get rich by promoting the powers in charge, much less often by fighting the powers in charge.
@2
Duh. Stupid me. Obviously as charges have been pressed and the guy is out on bail, therapy was probably on advice of his lawyer and may even have been terms of bail. It probably wasn’t his own idea. Duh. Well, anyway I hope it helps. The guy is seriously sick.
And *of course* there’s various comments on various websites arguing that the book-review attack never happened, it’s just a PR stunt.
Dang, that Storify by A Man In Black is…informative.
@Ophelia,
Yeah, I had no idea they were raking in that much cash from Youtube/Patreon from their harassment campaigns. I guess it explains why these people’s videos are so prolific. At a few hundred or thousand dollars per video, it’s a fair bit of cash.
What a piece of work.
I already heard about the 4chan killer from The Young Turks, and Richard Brittain from Cracked.
Creeps are creepy, victim-blaming assholes. Sad we still have so much of that, but unfortunately, at this point in time, not surprising.
Actually, there are, just in a completely different area of law … where you can actually make serious money that way.
Patent trolls. They make money by claiming that other businesses violated their (usually rather doubtful) patents. They hope the accused will pay danegeld instead of fight, because fighting tends to be more expensive (even though winning that fight against the troll seems to be a fairly common outcome once started).
(Interestingly enough, it looks as if they’re mostly men – at least I can’t remember ever hearing about a woman patent troll [so now someone will probably point one out]. Who’d’ve thought?)
It’s amazing what people are willing to do when they are desperately trying to maintain social tools based on sex and gender that they depend on. Surprising to me anyway, this is routine to others. What and why they are dependent is a weapon I want to discover. A selective societal preference for attacking women in certain contexts would not exist unless they are guarding something specific, even if they are not consciously aware of it. Disgusting, ignorant, dependent, weak (without a group), shitty people.
Richard Brittain is mentally ill and his stalking of a woman that he thought he was in “in love with” is certainly horrible and scary in its own right. And everyone else that you mention is a prime example of misogyny in action. However, there is NO news of Richard Brittain being arrested, charged or out on bail. In fact, there is no news source that even says that he was questioned. Beyond this one woman’s story, there’s nothing that anyone is going on.
Right now we have only the woman’s word for it that she was attacked. The fact that she claimed that it happened ONE DAY after she posted that Goodreads review also strongly suggests that it’s a load of crap.
Oh sure, he could have seen the review, done a ton of research to find out her true identity, place of residence, favorite shopping location and what she looked like enough to hop on a bus up to Scotland on THE VERY SAME DAY that he read the review (after he had been reading news stories and comments about how he was a total psycho – meaning that he ignored all of those comments in order to focus on this ONE REVIEWER), found her at the local grocery store, hit her over the head with a bottle, walked away, gotten on a bus to London and then be such a criminal mastermind that no one sought him for questioning or reported his arrested FOR THREE WHOLE WEEKS. There must be an entire conspiracy in the London and Scottish newspapers to keep this incident from reaching the public.
Of course, we would also have to assume that the reviewer has miracle healing powers and can hop on the internet and write her detailed story while she has the kind of brain injury that would require months of physical therapy to recover from (if the picture is correct). She doesn’t even have a concussion.
Sure ALL of this could be true.
But Occam’s Razor would suggest that the easiest solution is that one Goodreads reviewer wanted attention, posted a badly written review of a self-published book by a known stalker and then claimed that he attacked her in order to call attention to herself. Since this man has already admitted to stalking one woman, who would believe that he wasn’t capable of being a danger?
In doing so, she just made it more difficult for women who actually are being stalked by ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands and old acquaintances to come forward.
If there is any news about his arrest, questioning or bail that doesn’t ask us to trust the reviewer’s word without evidence, I will admit that I am wrong, but right now we have a lynch mob that is more than happy to believe in this bogus story because they can hate someone who is mentally ill and incapable of defending himself.
[Mr Lieder will not be posting his admission of being wrong, because such bizarre straining to blame the victim and excuse her attacker just got him banned. –pzm]
Blanc wasn’t deported as such, that suggests forcible removal. Rather he seems to have been driven to abandon his ‘seminars’ after social media and physical protesters caused venues to cancel his bookings. The government minister saw how the wind was blowing and jumped on the bandwagon by cancelling his visa. Whatever, good riddance. Let’s hope Japan responds likewise.
I wonder if the sad cases who paid to attend got their money back.
Tim @13:
No one is being lynched you. Stop engaging in hyperbolic bullshit in an attempt to make your point stronger.
FTFM.
Well, there is a news report about this quoting police:
But don’t let that stop your hyper-Vulcan skepticism Tim.
Hyperskeptical Tim apparently didn’t follow any of the links in my post before rushing to imagine a conspiracy against Brittain.
Inquiring minds want to know if Tim Lieder will acknowledge being wrong.
Place yer bets now!
From the story about the 4chan murder:
Baboons behave with more decency and decorum. This quote is a grievous insult to baboons everywhere. But really, what’s Wrong with these people?! What happened to their brains? (purely rhetorical, but yikes, I say yikes!)
Tim @13
The BBC thinks that Brittain attacked the woman with a wine bottle.
@4
Yep. That’s the way to make your name, get on the talking-head circuit, get your book deals. Write one of those awful “everything people tell you is wrong? They’re wrong!” books that litter the bookstores.
Now it’s online, and I’m sure it’s a much better way to get a few bucks than by doing hard work, research, and figuring out how to make the world a better place. (Making the world worse generally makes more money)
No wonder Tim is so sympathetic to a guy who attacks women. He attacked the reviewer himself in her own review space.
@13
Is that the proper application of occam’s razor?
It’s true we don’t have much evidence because, despite how it seems these days, not all news hits the internet in huge viral bursts. There are three reports of an attack in Scotland where she claimed and she provided photographs. If she’s claiming these stories were about her when the are not, it would be very easy for the victim or the police to notice and be less than happy about it. As well, if Brittain hadn’t attacked this would be *highly* libelous. However according to Brittain, himself, on the week immediately after the alleged attack, Brittain claimed the previous week was the worst of his life and he had to confront hard truths about himself and acknowledge that he was seriously and dangerously mentally ill and to have done great harm to others. There is no comment about him being maligned by a disgruntled reviewer. To be fair, he maybe didn’t know. But then it’s an odd coincidence that his blog posts a mental illness epiphany in coincidence with an attack in a scotland grocery store.
Occam’s razor? Weird though the story is (and it *is* weird) as presented is the most likely by my analysis. I just don’t think the police and the true victim of the attack would allow a disgruntled goodreads poster to pose as the victim.
@21
Al Dente, actually the police and that news report were before Brittain was identified and held.
I think I’m now officially sick of hearing about ‘Occam’s Razor’. But since it’s been brought up, Occam’s Razor would suggest that Tim Lieder has no idea what he’s talking about.
Anyone read Richard Brittain’s blog post from November 4? It’s a poem that contains the lines “Bottled rage, Run away.” Jebus.
There have been many moments in the past when one atheist/ skeptical personality or another (including some on FTB if memory serves) had pointed out how easy it would be for them to play on people’s biases and such to make a ton of money to show a difference in morality between them and their target. I guess some people mistook such talk for career advice.
From the guys blog itself…
Um….
It’s not a confession (which I’m sure his lawyer is advising him against) but, seriously, if he didn’t attack her, surely he has heard her accusations. He’s responding directly to amazon reviews which explicitely referring to this incident and he isn’t denying them.
So, Tim Lieder, how does Occam’s razor go again?
I assume it was a typo and he meant “OCTAM” – Only Can Trust A Male*
*because girls SMELL!
I’m surprised it took a whole 4.5 hours for someone to paste here what I described @6. I guess it probably took a while to write that wall of text.
Not sure if Lang belongs in the group with the other three. Sure, he’s a racist, sexist, jackass, but the other three were physically violent with women.
But then again, his punishment is far less severe — losing a comedy gig doesn’t really compare to being arrested or deported.
Tim @13,
We note your unnecessary use of violent and racist imagery (lynching) and your dismissal of the evidence Professor Myers provided.
Why do you assume the victim is lying? Are you aware that you, personally, whether you intend it or not, are making it more difficult for other victims to come forward with this kind of language? How do you think it feels to know they will be accused of leading lynch mobs or witch hunts or whatever other violent metaphors are conjured up?
Hmm, radio silence from Tim. Guess he can’t admit to being wrong.
Azkyroth @28
LOL! You ought to trademark that and put it on a t-shirt or something.
you obviously don’t know how to use that razor, and managed to cut your own throat with it.
you DID notice she claimed she had to go to the hospital to get stitches for the attack?
if she was trying to fake something, do you really think something so easy to verify locally would be part of it?
your logic… it fails you. you should get it replaced.
At blizzcon saturday the CEO of blizzard delivered a backhand slap to gamergate during his opening keynote, saying that threats and harassment aren’t what gaming is about. Wild applause. Blizzard is pretty influential – it’s not just the indies listening.
Oh really?
From the link:
A word of advice, Tim Lieder, for the next time you decide it is appropriate to dishonestly lie about a post.
Read the links first.
I don’t know the specifics of this incident, but I will question whether it would take a “ton of research”. Lots of sites allow log-in via your facebook account, so often there’s only a single click from getting angry to knowing where your victim lives. It simply wouldn’t take that much effort.
a fiver says that Tim never comes back to admit he was wrong.
…hell, with all the obvious information he missed, if it were me I’d be too embarrassed to come back and admit it either.
Just to add to the fuckton of obliviousness already displayed, here’s another datum Tim managed to miss: The documented attack on the Goodreads reviewer took place in Glasgow – the same city where Brittain’s stalkee apparently lives and works, and to which Brittain already regularly travels from London for the purposes of terrifying women whose actions and opinions do not align with his own.
Brave Sir Tim ran away.
He claims elsewhere that the review was written AFTER the attack, not realizing that Goodreads redates the review if you edit it. Then he claims she basically waved a red flag at a known stalker, then that the news stories don’t name names. Also? He claims there’s lots of violence that happens at those grocery stores. He wrote two facebook posts and a LiveJournal entry about it, and has been attacking the reviewer across the internet.
I suspect this reviewer is just one of many women Tim accuses of lying about the vicious things men do to them. He’s obsessed with it. The question is, why?
And when is he going to admit he was wrong?
@numerobis #29:
I’m surprised there isn’t software available to do it for them. Feed it a handful of concrete nouns and watch it churn out a screed full of spurious denunciations and misused references to logic.
I’m guessing they wouldn’t want to call it Eliza.
Tim Lieder is very invested in trying to blame the victim. Personally, I’m more inclined to believe the photographs Rolland published of the fucking huge gash in her scalp over the concerted deflection of some internet asshole.
He has posted his same bullshit in the comments for the original Goodreads review over which Brittain lost his shit, in the comments for a Cracked article that mentioned it, and a recent blog post:
Tim, this isn’t in any fucking way about your ego, and the fact that you use “eagerness to kill” to describe the online anger over some asshole’s behaviour in which he could have fucking killed someone tells me everything I need to know to avoid anything that comes from your publishing house.
Paige showed up in the comments of the Jezebel article
I see Tim is over there, spreading the same “she made it up! Occam’s Razor says so” shit as here.
Charming.
Rich Woods @43: it might be “fun” to track down a bunch of these comments of the type “she made up the attack for PR”, feed them into a markov chain, and generate some texts.
Esteleth @46:
On his FB page, he’s done the same thing twice now. He really does seem obsessed with this.
@36 Amphiox
To be fair though, the groupthink article’s source of information is entirely from the woman’s version of the story.
The main objections to taking the story on face value seem to be a) there is very little news reporting on this and b) it’s a strange thing for a person to bash another with a wine bottle for such a bizarre reason.
a) is actually not that strange. It’s a local story in a local paper in a non-urban region handled by the local police. Unless a reporter actually gets intrigued by a “what a hook!” angle it’s unlikely to get much more until it actually goes to trial. Not every police incident goes viral for any johnny googler.
As for b) well… Occam’s razor really. The one with the fewest required assumption is likely to be correct. This requires one; that a strange person did a strange thing. If she’s lying would require several (all including she is a strange person doing a strange thing).
There is the possibility she was attacked and the police are mistaken in identifying Brittain as the perpetrator or she is lying about it. Again this requires many assumptions about the ineptitude of the police and strange response of an innocent Brittain responding very bizarrely to a false accusation.
If one is going to apply Occam’s razor then apply it correctly.
I don’t see how #3 is justice at all. The guy killed his girlfriend and posted brag pictures online that people laughed about. He said he was going to pretend to shoot at the cops with a BB gun that looked real so they’d kill him. They apparently took so long to find him that he gave up and turned himself in instead. Which part is the justice part? That he didn’t get away? He apparently never intended to.
As for Brittain, I too noticed the “Bottled rage, Run away” line in his poem. That’s all but a confession.
People are currently trying to get Julien Blanc’s gig’s cancelled by phoning the locations they are to be held at, with some success. If you find one near you, that might be something you (generic) can do.
So, TF is making 4k from Patreon alone a month. Call me a suspicious bastard, but apparently he noticed that the creationist well was drying up, his “biblical scholar” videos were laughed at, but now he found a generous flock to fleece.
Jonah @50
I agree. But then, what is Justice when it involves something that cannot be given to those victims of injustice? I’ll settle for this worlds practical, achievable justice. As for it being a comeuppance, I’d hardly say that was fitting. Now, if the police finally crack down on /b/ at the behest of victim’s families to remove the “memes” from circulation, and the constant violation due to freeze speech offenders caused the board to be shut down – the very board whose presence engendered a response from a murderer who thought he had sympathetic peers on the site – that would be an awesome comeuppance and wholly justified.
@40
The attack on the Goodreads reviewer took place in Glenrothes (in Fife), rather than Glasgow.
@Giliell (#51): I just had a look, and TF00t is getting a bit above $2600 per video, and apparently puts out 4 or 5 videos “Patreon videos” a month. So he gets about $10K a month from Patreon. And yet his video quality still seems the same (and nowhere near the standard of Anita Sarkeesian).
I find it interesting that he (and the others of his ilk) commonly refers to Anita’s KickStarter campaign as a con, despite the fact that she had a defined funding period and very clear goals of how much she needed, and what she was going to produce (and has delivered on her commitments), compared to “X Amount per video” with no comment on how many videos he is going to produce.
In other comeuppance news, a Pakistani policeman was arrested for beheading another man who allegedly committed blasphemy.
@Patreon is a system for paying people to do more of something they do anyway.
It’s literally intended in every case to be “I do this, it doesn’t pay, but if you pay me I’ll do more of it”. His pitch was “these are my videos, pay me to make more”, and people pay him to make more. Which he does. The encouragement being a “per video” (or per comic, whatever) payment and patrons can pull out at any time without notice as a safeguard to quality.
Kickstarters are much less reliable. People promise to do stuff they haven’t done yet after they get paid in a lump sum. Lots and lots of them just strait up never deliver, generally because they massively over-promise. Being disappointed with your kickstarter payments has no comeback, if people get the goal money, that’s that, whatever you get out the end is blind luck.
Tim sez:
yeah, ya know what?
fuck you, Tim, you dishonest tweaking bag of shit. You’re not even worth logging into to your livejournal to inform you of what an assclown you are. Here’s good enough.
you didn’t even read the story then.
uh, you must have missed the part where they have him on videotape, HITTING HER WITH THE BOTTLE.
what the?
is it just poor reading comprehension, or what?
*reads Tim’s screed further*
*sigh*
Now I feel sorry for him.
Well, I’d feel more empathy for him if he didn’t spend so much time deflecting on the internet.
Tim is really invested in giving the guy ridiculous amounts of benefit of the doubt. The female victim? It’s hard not to see the way he clings to believing she MUST be lying (even when it’s beyond idiotic) as anything but sexism.
iammarauder @51:
Thunderf00t, misogynist extraordinaire, and massive failure as a decent human being makes that much in a month?!
I’ll be over here alternating between being irritated at that and bummed over how unfair life is to decent people (I know, I know, life ain’t fair).
Tony! @61
That’s the thing about being a privileged status quo supporter. Just keep repeating the same reactionary bs, and the money will come rolling in. I think it’s the same method mega-church pastors use. I’m sure that realization would make Tf00t proud.
Of course not.
But life doesn’t know any better.
I mean, I know that being decent means foregoing unfair advantages, and thus losing the benefits of them, but the fact that society chooses to organize itself in such a way that doing the right thing means being worse off practically every single time makes me wonder sometimes if society really deserves decency.
…oh, hey, did you know Petroleum Engineers make twice as much as any other kind?
@58
I did. Did you? The entire source was from Paige Rolland’s very believable and consistent reports. Other than the initial local newspaper accounts, Ms. Rolland’s account are the only information available. Despite what folks like Tim Leiderman thinks, not all news becomes immediately googlible. That does not mean any strange conspiracy series.
If groupthink actually spoke to the police rather than relied upon Paige Rolland they did not make that clear and I withdraw my statement but as the article reads it appears they relied upon Rolland’s first-hand experience.
I was discussing Occam’s razor and Leiderman’s blind inability to recognize it properly. Of all the possible and impossible explanations, Rolland’s story as it appears and is stated is the one with the fewest assumptions (and thus the most believable). I was merely pointing out all possible other explanations (Liederman’s preposterous alternative and any other alternative) require further and less believable assumptions.
Um… how did you comprehend what I immediately followed that with?: “Again this requires many assumptions about the ineptitude of the police and strange response of an innocent Brittain responding very bizarrely to a false accusation. If one is going to apply Occam’s razor then apply it correctly.”
In other words, I presented the possibility solely as a dismissible one.
uh, fail.
only the parts in gray are.
so, the videofootage from the store doesn’t exist then.
also, read the comments where they verify the police were spoken to, and the reasons why it looks like it does now, and why you don’t find it in larger reports.
no, you failed. utterly.
So in other words, even overlooking the third-party corroborating evidence, Tim Liar’s handwaving falls apart.
Um, what parts are from elsewhere and where are they from? WHom in the Glenclothes police department did groupthink speak with? All reports of police actions and statements were reported personally to Paige Rolland.
Available. To us. To Tim Liederman. To google. We (us, the voyeurs, the googlers, the ones evaluating the story from a distance) have available to us a) initial newspaper reports b) Rolland’s extensive comments, reports and posted photographs c) Brittains bizarre blog and statements of beginning therapy and anti-pyschotic drugs and d) coherent articles summarizing but based on the first three.
rolland’s reports are extensive and consistent. However they are all we have available to us. Sometimes news simply isn’t googleable in viral streams.
He applied Occam’s razor and claimed a preposterous and complicated explanation with many, many required unlikely assumptions to be more likely than Rolland’s simple straightforward explanation with only one requirement.
Corroborating third-party evidence isn’t always available. It isn’t available to us in this case. I think we can safely assume it will come when the case goes to trial. And although we don’t have third-party evidence, I think we can assume someone lying about an attack would quickly come to light. So far it hasn’t.
I think we can believe Rolland’s story.
But we still “only have her word on it”. For now.
@Tony! (#61): I am with you in the irritated/depressed cycle. There are so many ways I could make a fortune, if only I didn’t have deal with my scruples. I could promote the status quo (as noted by toska in #62), or sell homeopathic remedies, or be a psychic, or open a clinic offering various “detox” therapies (such as the ionic footbath)…
Making money is easy, making money in a way I feel comfortable is hard.
@tussock (#56): I was aware of the distinction, but it is more the point that there are constant accusations of Anita being a “conman” or scamming people with her KickStarter campaign. From what I have seen it all stems from Anta’s campaign receiving more than she asked for, and ignore that she is delivering what she promised.
As for accountability on the KickStarter front: When I looked into it a while ago campaign creators were notified that they may be held liable by their local laws if they failed to deliver. So here in Australia a campaign creator that did a “take the money and run” campaign would potentially face an investigation by various government agencies (and possibly fraud charges).
A small side note for example 1. IANAL but since the attack happened in Scotland, the decision to prosecute is not taken by the victim, but is reported to the procurator fiscal, who decides how to proceed with prosecution. Scots law is very different from English law (where victims decide whether or not to press charges). The role of procurator fiscal generally helps to remove issues of victim intimidation which means that this guy is very likely to be rigorously pursued.
I think there’s enough evidence to believe this woman, at least as far as I need to worry about it. The rest of this is a story about the media and how we ought to evaluate media, not how we ought to evaluate women’s stories of assault.
The way the article is written and structured does not suggest a lot of professional journalism work having been employed. it’s impossible to say what the source of any of the information is because the writer of the author doesn’t say. There are block quotes, but that doesn’t mean that the other information doesn’t come from the same source and is just paraphrased, not quoted. We may be used to reading articles by journalists who wouldn’t say “Police confirmed”, unless they actually talked to police, but even then it’s usually phrased as “police confirmed to us”, or “a spokesman for the police department said”. This is just a line that may be what the Goodreads reviewer said. Same for the security camera footage. Did the Goodreads reviewer simply say that security camera footage confirmed it? The BBC says a woman was assaulted with a wine bottle in a store in the East of Scotland. What are the odds of that happening when this woman says she was assaulted with a wine bottle in a store in the east of Scotland? That’s the best evidence, and it’s pretty good, for a start, as is the prior behavior of the alleged assailant (I’m all about Bayes theorem) and his more recent comments. But the article at Groupthink is piss poor, and is the kind of thing that sometimes happens when people are just trying to get attention or get some lulz and leads to an internet mob response. I don’t think that’s the case here. I think that kind of thing is usually about waiters getting stiffed, or someone trying to shake down KFC for some cash, not about women being assaulted. False allegations of that sort are exceedingly rare.
I don’t think we need to be hyperskeptical about women saying they’ve been assaulted, but if all we had to go on really was this one story as posted at Groupthink, I’d certainly reserve judgment. I’d also be a bit annoyed about the person who wrote it, who is, I don’t know? Just a random anonymous blogger? But the piece is sitting there like it’s journalism. What a journalist covering this should do is call the local police department for information before making those comments or at the lest be clear about the source. The problem there actually lies with this weird overlap that now exists between blogs and journalism, which sometimes results in really great coverage of things mainstream journalism doesn’t have time or budget for, but sometimes results in poorly written, poorly sourced articles that look on the surface like mainstream journalism, but are really just anonymous cobbling together of a couple of other blog posts.
So, since the reviewer’s posts have been removed, probably due to fear of legal threats (I believe the UK’s legal standards for libel are still ridiculous, so removing the posts, for someone unlikely to have the ability to afford legal representation, is wise and not the least an indication of reliability of the posts), I did a little search of Google cache to find them. She did mention the security camera and the police, but not in the exact words of the Groupthink post, and I’m inclined to believe her posts are the sole source for the Groupthink post. For anyone interested in hearing her story in full, try finding the cached pages. I won’t post the links since I want nothing to do or to put PZ in a position of having anything to do with whether they should be available or not or crazy British libel issues. But they’re out there, if you want to read them.
Also, yes, Occam’s razor is misapplied by Tim. Occam’s razor doesn’t mean: this is what naively makes sense to me, so it must be true. It means what woozy said it meant at #49. People really get stupid about Occam’s razor.
Skepticism doesn’t mean disbelieving all things until proven beyond a doubt. It means a reserved judgement and a concluded degree of surety related to the amount of evidence and the extraordinariness of the claim. (If “extraordinary claim require extraordinary evidence” then ordinary claims require ordinary evidence. And, unfortunately, assault is a fairly ordinary claim.)
What skepticism most assuredly does *not* mean is to refuse one explanation for another unverified one which is what the Liedermans of the world do.
====
@69. I didn’t mean to imply that the wasn’t any “third-party corroborating evidence”. There is. There are a) the original newspaper article b) Brittain’s log itself and c) lack of predictable consequences had the first hand evidence not been true.
====
@73
“The way the article is written and structured does not suggest a lot of professional journalism work having been employed. ”
Again, to be fair, this was not intended to be a piece of investigative journalism. It was an opinion blog piece. It did a very good and thorough job for that.
The Liedermans of the world seem to be happy when they get reams and of google hits. What they don’t realize is that if you trace the origins of the reams and reams of hits they usually circle back to only a few sources anyway. Also news coverage in small communities over local crime is not exhaustive. It is very common, as is this case, to have an initial story and then no mention in the papers again until the trial (but sometimes not even then). We had a robbery at a bike trail near here several months ago. It mentioned it was the fifth one this year. Were one to google, one would not find any more recent news nor would one find any mention of the previous four robberies this year (they didn’t make the news). That doesn’t mean the police aren’t working the case. It just means there is no news coverage. (Our local press isn’t what it could be.)
@73: She may also have been advised to remove her identification of the attacker to avoid prejudicing pending prosecution.
@53: Thank you. I was confused by a reference to a related incident “in Glasgow”.
Glenrothes is about 90 minutes by bus from Glasgow I believe?
In the OP:
Of course there are. Dawkins, Shermer, Eliot Rogers, most of the MRA movement, just for starters.
@76: I’d give it 2 hours. But it’s not much of a journey compared with travelling from London to Scotland in the first place.
We can home that Julien Blanc gets kicked out of Japan, but…
Well, from what I understand, Japan may be progressive in a lot of ways, but they are behind the US when it comes to women’s rights.
Canadians petitioning to keep Julien Blanc away from here as well. The minister responsible has responded. As the second article implies, this may be partly due to Jian Gomeshi’s crimes coming to light.