Hate and Scorn should be his last concern if he alleged kidnapping and raping someone.
God almighty .. the nerve of you to made this as sort of high ground.
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Alec Holowka (Night in the Woods, TowerFall) accused of sexual assault [Update: Alec Holowka has reportedly passed away] [See staff posts/threadmarks]
- Thread starter TacomaSCDisaster
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God almighty .. the nerve of you to made this as sort of high ground.
This. Absolutely this. This thread is disgusting, to be frank.
The narrative at NeoGAF is that of course Zoe had this planned and wanted him to kill himself. Lost causes.
When I suggested that she isn't exactly doing a good job at that because her other accusers are still alive I was banned. Hilarious. They don't see how absurd their thinking is. Obviously this is a sad situation and I continue to see both of them as victims, but I highly doubt either of them wanted the other dead.
When I suggested that she isn't exactly doing a good job at that because her other accusers are still alive I was banned. Hilarious. They don't see how absurd their thinking is. Obviously this is a sad situation and I continue to see both of them as victims, but I highly doubt either of them wanted the other dead.
Yet again, we have bad faith self righteous people using a man's suicide to trash ResetEra. And even worse, they're siding with the sexual assaulter by saying we shouldn't be vicious.
Let me tell you, it was that "viciousness" that got Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby in the first place. So congrats, your suggestion is basically saying fuck rape victims and the #MeToo movement. Won't someone think of the poor assaulter.
And stop fucking hiding mental illness. Do you know how insulting that is? He's not an invalid. He knew what he did was wrong. What if someone did the same to you like he did to Zoe? Would you really like it if defenders said "mental illness. don't be mad at him lulz"
And now I await the same people calling for sensitivity to call me a heartless, angry shrill without seeing a hint of irony of hypocrisy.
Let me tell you, it was that "viciousness" that got Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby in the first place. So congrats, your suggestion is basically saying fuck rape victims and the #MeToo movement. Won't someone think of the poor assaulter.
And stop fucking hiding mental illness. Do you know how insulting that is? He's not an invalid. He knew what he did was wrong. What if someone did the same to you like he did to Zoe? Would you really like it if defenders said "mental illness. don't be mad at him lulz"
And now I await the same people calling for sensitivity to call me a heartless, angry shrill without seeing a hint of irony of hypocrisy.
This times a thousand. What do we as an internet mob have to offer to the situation? I feel for Zoe, but nobody needed the critical thoughts of Resetera on this.
Comparing Alec to Etika sure is something. Etika wasn't a serial sexual abuser as far as I heard.
I wish people will stop saying "Will be" with posts like this. It already is. You can see it even in this thread. It was made into that the second it happened. Y'all ain't prophets, you're describing what's *happening*, what was *always going to happen* and what anyone with two brain cells knew was going to happen.
How do you think this should've gone?
Like, Zoe keeps her assault to herself? Seems bad
She goes to the police? Stats tell us the odds there. And even if her case isn't tossed like so many others, then Alec gets arrested, charged, and sentenced to decades in prison. If tweets caused him to hurt himself (as you seem to be saying at least partially), how do you think he'd have held up when his mugshot is all over Twitter anyway?
I wish he didn't hurt himself. He needed prison. But I don't see how this goes any other way.
I utterly despise this thread. What a shit show in every direction. Literally everyone loses.
And the trash admin lets that shit slide. Wasteland.
Believe victims. Don't blame Era or the victim for his death. That's such bullshit.
bye
I don't know man. I don't know what the answer is. I just feel shitty. He shouldn't have done what he did but he didn't deserve this. I'm not saying that the internet caused this. We will never know. I just don't think it helped. It's not on us to call judgement on someone.
Their situations are similar and also Etika's ex did claim he abused her, but I'm not sure that it was sexually. Just something about force feeding her until she puked. He was mentally ill though, and I've heard the situation with Alec was mental illness that he was trying to work on and he was seeing a lot of improvement to the point that he could actually function on the day-to-day again.
I don't know what the answer is dude, I just don't feel good about this. That's all. He shouldn't have died.
I heavily disagree that the mob/cancel culture helps no one. It's been an instrumental part of bringing things like MeToo into the social conciousness and creating an environment where it's more socially acceptable for victims to come forward and share their stories and be respected and believed. The way this resolved is unfortunate but the outcry and drive to expose Alec and the call for abusers to not be covered up or ignored comes from a morally necessary place to creature cultural change when the system we have been in for so long leaves no hope for the authorities or other legal means to deliver justice.
I'm not sure what your point is. Abusers DESERVE to have their crimes brought to light. They're abusers. And he deserved to be brought to court and punished for what he did.
Of course not, but the behaviour is the same.
Someone is tagged as "impure", be it Etika by Beef and other poster posts or Alec by Zoe's tweet. Then, this forum engages in a performative act of wokeness during which posters succesfully dehumanize the tagged "impure", throwing insults left and right, a gleeful competetition in which virtue is signaled by vilifying another human being.
This chain of events is a mainstay of Resetera. It needs to end.
I'm sorry that this dude suffered from mental health issues and I wish he'd been able to get a hold of it because he basically turned in to wrecking ball hurting himself and everyone around him. Maybe he felt he didn't have the control to stop, but his actions have caused a shitstorm of pain.
User banned (5 days): thread whining and generalizations in a sensitive topic
I really dont felt comfortable posting on here anymore, not fear of straying away from common line of thought or mods banning me for dumb shit, I have said some dumb shit and have been rightly call up on it, but this whole thread is vile on so many levels. Genuinely don't think I'm equipped to post on here anymore if this gonna be sort of threads sitting at top of the page. Maybe I'm simple & niave but I wanna talk about games not rape allegations sexual offenders, I can't be only one who feels that way.
it's so fucking shitty. People are trying to fit some narrative with it. Easy ignores.
It's almost like people don't respect someone that post racial/homophobic slurs
You can just...post in other threads, then. Like Klepek said, it's okay to not have a take on everything.
... And you have perfectly illustrated the issue that we face on this forum. You are so zealous in your position that the general framework of civility gets thrown out the window. You stated that the police officers that I know don't know anything. Simultaneously, I am supposedly to blindly accept that you know what you are talking about...
Your position is defacto truth, and mine is wildly out of touch. I need to put effort into my post, while yours is the gospel.
Like mine, your opinion is exactly that - a opinion.
The difference was I was respectful, while yours was not.
There is an ignore function. Use it.
but don't act like this kind of shit can be swept under the rug. People deal with it daily. Consider yourself luckily to not have to deal with any of this in your personal life but it should be a conversation that people can have on here. Education is also important because ignorance breeds some of the hateful shit were seeing come from this situation.
This is one of the few worthwhile posts in the entire thread. Everyone should read and re-read this post a couple of times.
The only thing I can add to the advice above is that mental illness is not something that absolves people of responsibility. It should never be used as some kind of "get out of jail free" card.
Filing criminal charges or bringing a civil suit is not silence. Taking the allegations to social media results in mob "justice" that will cut both ways.
It seems likely that him being confronted with the abuse he was responsible for was a big part of why Alec took his own life. He was struggling with his own mental illness, and I am sure that was a very difficult thing to have to confront. However, this abuse was not only from the past, but something he had still regularly administered until this scandal broke. The problem is that Alec was still engaging in abusive behavior. Victims need to have some means to protect themselves and others. Currently, that is by taking their stories public. Remove their ability to do so and you are damning countless people to abuse. Remove other people's ability to spread the story and you are still removing the ability for victims to defend themselves.
This is all very difficult. It is murky. It is hard to see what the correct course of action is. However, I don't think weakening the tools victims have to fight abuse is a great solution.
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The thing is, filing charges regularly DOES result in silence because these kinds of cases almost never go anywhere. Statistically, assault cases fizzle out in court or end in an acquittal because you need definitive evidence to prove the crime was committed and definitive evidence of rape and assault does not last long.
The reason MeToo is happening at all is because the standard ways of trying to get justice for these kinds of crimes do not suffice.
Almost all the other threads on the first page are about games, post in them and put this one on ignore, it's not that difficult.
Because the justice system has proven it can handle sexual assault cases...right.
It's a pretty massive contradiction that people think we should talk less about abuse and that the victims should be more silent when the abuser was a former victim himself who, if he had been free to be more open and talk about it earlier on in his life, might have got the help he needed to not turn into an abuser and eventually take his own life as a result.
But silence is the answer, sure. Just let the courts handle it somehow. It's better if we don't actually figure out how to deal with these issues as a culture, because it's not our place, and victims should know that nobody wants to hear about it unless it's in a courtroom.
But silence is the answer, sure. Just let the courts handle it somehow. It's better if we don't actually figure out how to deal with these issues as a culture, because it's not our place, and victims should know that nobody wants to hear about it unless it's in a courtroom.
Which is why I said in my last post that we need to change the laws. At present the laws don't work as well as they should but they work better than Twitter Justice.
Imagine having faith in the justice system regarding cases such a this.
And who cares if judges are often hostile to rape accusers and juries lack the ability to empathize with women but are perfectly capable of bending over backwards to protect the honor of "promising" young athletes? Just trust the system as it already exists! Don't bother trying to change or improve anything. My own personal comfort in this immediate moment matters more than working toward building a world where these kinds of crimes are so stigmatized that they stop happening.
This is such a bad take. Alec chose to do shitty things to other people and he chose to commit suicide. To blame Resetera or Twitter for it is idiotic - it was his own choice and it came from circumstances that were of his own making. (I don't think it needs to be said but I obviously am not happy he is dead - I don't think it represents any kind of justice)
This instance proves Twitter doesn't work any better than our courts.
Why would you deny her the freedom to speak publically about the abuse she suffered? She has that right, to speak about it in the manner in which she chooses.
You think you are smart, you are not.
You are asking victim to stay silent, you are disgusting.
It's just insane to me that people want to say a victim speaking out is what killed him when we are told he is a former victim of abuse who obviously did not get all the help that he needed.
Silence is what turned him into the same thing that once hurt him. Silence kills.
It's not a solution and it doesn't stop abuse; it just means you don't have to be inconvenienced or made uncomfortable hearing about it.
Silence is what turned him into the same thing that once hurt him. Silence kills.
It's not a solution and it doesn't stop abuse; it just means you don't have to be inconvenienced or made uncomfortable hearing about it.
Caught up on the thread since the first page or so following the news. A whole lot of frustrating things in this discussion.
To begin with: obviously, as a society we need to get better at discussing abuse, mental illness, really a great many things. There are things about punishment and atonement, "missing stairs", how we lead communities, etc. that can be vastly improved. But... I sincerely don't understand a lot of the assumptions being made here about this situation and especially this forum?
Was there really a Twitter mob (and if it exists, it matters quite a bit here if anyone participating in genuinely supported his accusers, not trolls) going at him to begin with? Because my understanding (which ?absolutely may be wrong) was that he locked his account nearly immediately; I did not hear of some big mob attacking him before this; there was the people making accusations normally, and then the mobs of shitheads attacking the accusers. And I need to be clear that I am absolutely not trying to make light of anything he may have received, but I am just deeply, deeply confused by comments going "this is what you contribute to when you call someone a monster on Era" let alone those blaming people who acted elsewhere based on the accusations.
Can discussion here ripple outward? Should we probably be thinking more about how we talk about people who may actually view the site? I can agree with that much. But there is something very weird to me about the idea of tiptoeing around their feelings of anger, disgust, betrayal, lack of safety, etc. This is deeply complicated, I understand why people are looking everywhere for answers, and I don't want to dismiss legitimate concerns people have over how we treat each other. But I don't know if "we should be less harsh when we talk about horrifying things people have done" is really the solution here? And that's kinda how I'm reading this.
This is just an incredibly shitty situation. And it feels like it's not anywhere close to being over, that it's just going to linger and cause more problems, no resolution for anything or anyone, and that scares me in itself.
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Now. Separately, I also think that though it was (extremely understandably) immediately overshadowed by this news, the Kickstarter update written by Scott Benson before this happened may be helpful for some people to read. I think it speaks to some issues people keep trying to think through here, specifically something deeply personal happening in public (out of necessity), pretty well.
To begin with: obviously, as a society we need to get better at discussing abuse, mental illness, really a great many things. There are things about punishment and atonement, "missing stairs", how we lead communities, etc. that can be vastly improved. But... I sincerely don't understand a lot of the assumptions being made here about this situation and especially this forum?
Was there really a Twitter mob (and if it exists, it matters quite a bit here if anyone participating in genuinely supported his accusers, not trolls) going at him to begin with? Because my understanding (which ?absolutely may be wrong) was that he locked his account nearly immediately; I did not hear of some big mob attacking him before this; there was the people making accusations normally, and then the mobs of shitheads attacking the accusers. And I need to be clear that I am absolutely not trying to make light of anything he may have received, but I am just deeply, deeply confused by comments going "this is what you contribute to when you call someone a monster on Era" let alone those blaming people who acted elsewhere based on the accusations.
Can discussion here ripple outward? Should we probably be thinking more about how we talk about people who may actually view the site? I can agree with that much. But there is something very weird to me about the idea of tiptoeing around their feelings of anger, disgust, betrayal, lack of safety, etc. This is deeply complicated, I understand why people are looking everywhere for answers, and I don't want to dismiss legitimate concerns people have over how we treat each other. But I don't know if "we should be less harsh when we talk about horrifying things people have done" is really the solution here? And that's kinda how I'm reading this.
This is just an incredibly shitty situation. And it feels like it's not anywhere close to being over, that it's just going to linger and cause more problems, no resolution for anything or anyone, and that scares me in itself.
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Now. Separately, I also think that though it was (extremely understandably) immediately overshadowed by this news, the Kickstarter update written by Scott Benson before this happened may be helpful for some people to read. I think it speaks to some issues people keep trying to think through here, specifically something deeply personal happening in public (out of necessity), pretty well.
She has a right to speak about what happened to her and it would be an impossibility to make people just not react to such a terrible thing.
I'm going to quote this for posterity. Thank you for trying to help the forum understand.
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