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> This is people being assholes because they know they can get away with it. Nope. These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes. Never attribute

• theseatoms 9y ago
  I mean... rotten characters can make rational decisions, to achieve their rotten ends.
• voidlogic 9y ago
  >Nope. These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes. To be fair, even an asshole may show some restraint when they have a clear understanding of consequences. Thinking their money buys them immunity from consequence is an enabler as they don't believe they have the slightest need for this kind of rational self-interest. You are both right, an asshole is an asshole as you suggest, but even so, assholes are worse when they think they won't face consequences as the poster your replied to implied.
  • tajen 9y ago
    Men need to work hard to jail those assholes, here's why: They are the reason why men are described as generally threatening, discrediting and imposing huge constraints in advance on all men who show proper social restraint and respect for women.
    • malandrew 9y ago
      I wonder how many innocent people we'll end up condemning with this posture. It's not like history lacks any examples that demonstrates that this is exactly what happens when you get tough and prosecutorial. You're pretty much sanctioning a pitchfork and torch attitude and that evolves into mobs that are often wrong. These days it feels like we've learn nothing from stories like the Scarlet Letter that describe a time from our history where we treated women how you now propose that we treat men. Neither gender deserves this.
      • ShabbosGoy 9y ago
        > You're pretty much sanctioning a pitchfork and torch attitude and that evolves into mobs that are often wrong. What you are seeing is the decline of rational and logical thinking. No one wants to think critically anymore, because smart phones reduce available cognitive resources. So you end up in situations where an inflammatory, poorly researched article emotionally hijacks the brain of a person who would have normally been capable of rational thinking. I'm not saying that's the case here, but there are numerous cases where outrage porn has ruined the lives of innocent people.
      • zo1 9y ago
        I wonder how many innocent people we've already condemned with this attitude.
    • jessaustin 9y ago
      Men aren't going to be on the front line of this for the same reason white people aren't on the front line of combating racism [0]: even if we don't do awful things one side effect of which is to reinforce privilege, we still benefit from that privilege. A woman seeking funding has to worry about all the things a man seeking funding has to worry about, plus she has to deal with being pressured into sex. That's not great for society, but it is an advantage for men. [0] as a white man, it is my privilege to make sweeping statements about whites and men b^)
    • uxp 9y ago
      While I get and understand your sentiment, the problem is that being an asshole and a creep isn't illegal in itself. If some male VC groped a female founder in the course of trying to set up a funding deal, then sure, press charges and make it right, but texting a founder "Why are you still with your boyfriend/partner/girlfriend? We should go out for drinks, I'm so much better than him" is just wrong, but not criminal. As much as I would like to see punishment for clearly abusive and shitty behavior like this article describes, 90% of the time it comes down to character profiles as this thread explains. Even if it found its way into court, the defense would almost certainly try to be framed as a misunderstanding. Instead of punishing and potentially ruining lives for what is sounding like thought-crime, lets just get men off the pedestal and put them on the same goddamned level as women. A woman shouldn't have to defend her reputation for not being slutty if she gets groped, assaulted or raped, and more importantly shouldn't have to fear retaliation for accusing someone of being not just an asshole, but a dangerous asshole.
  • BoiledCabbage 9y ago
    I think it's important to distinguish that these aren't people who are necessarily assholes to everyone. They have plenty of friends and acquaintances who would never believe they'd do something like this. And others who upon hearing it, would've assumed it was a harmless misunderstanding. I think one of the larger problems that society is struggling with is the idea that two different people can be in very similar proximity, interact with the same people and yet one can have to suffer through radically different (and horrible) treatment. The reason I believe this is so difficult, is the other person legitimately think "I know that person, I know that place, I've gone through that and I've never seen anything remotely close to that." And reasonably conclude that it didn't happen. It's difficult to accept that there is an entire world that they don't ever experience. But we all need a find a way to account for this, because too many people go through beimg mistreated and their concerns are simply dismissed.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • adamsea 9y ago
      How does their niceness in other situations matter?
      • watwut 9y ago
        It proves that "being able to get away with it" is significant factor.
      • ubernostrum 9y ago
        It matters because it creates a situation where one set of people have an awful experience with someone, and another set all say "well, in my experience he's perfectly nice and would certainly never do something like that..."
        • jimnotgym 9y ago
          I suppose the fact that they are assholes in one situation but behave respectably in another is what makes this discrimination? If they were assholes to everyone then.... I think it is an interesting thing I see with successful people that they often attribute too much of there success to their personalities and too little to luck and circumstances. This makes them believe their own bullshit about how great they are, and how bad other people are.
  • curun1r 9y ago
    The other part of the situation which we're not hearing and are unlikely to ever hear are the cases where the interest was somewhat mutual. Given the billions of dollars at stake and the fame that comes with startup glory, I don't think it's a stretch to believe there are some female founders that try to use their sexuality to their advantage. Perhaps I'm naive, but given how blatant some of the stories have been, I wonder whether these men didn't arrive at their apparent level of bluntness without having gone through a few rounds of being more subtle and moving a lot slower. I'm willing to bet that these men have been somewhat conditioned into this level of behavior. Don't get me wrong...the behaviors in these accusations are reprehensible and, even if the interest was entirely mutual, it would piss me off to no end if I were an investor in any of these funds that the managers were using my money to pursue women or generally anything other than trying to invest in the most promising companies. Even if they didn't have an obligation to the women pitching to them or common decency, which they do, they still have an responsibility to their investors which they completely violated. But if we're going to be consistent, we need to call out anyone who brings anything sexual into what should be a strictly business setting, and I'd bet there are people on both sides of the pitch who've done that.
    • adamsea 9y ago
      Intellectual consistency would require acknowledging the systematic repression of women in western history (not being able to vote, etc), and thus, the effects of what is still a patriarchial culture as often as not. In other words, your argument attempts to ignore simple historical facts which you can verify easily on Wikipedia.
      • curun1r 9y ago
        Where did I ignore that? I called their behavior reprehensible. I'm just saying that it's unlikely the behavior exists in a vacuum and that things are never as black and white as they're made out to be. Historical oppression doesn't justify questionable behavior. I've seen many instances where women have "dated up" to help their careers. I even saw one instance where a female director dated the CTO and later the CFO to have someone to support her coke habit. Just calling out the men will never truly fix the problem. We need to be giving a consistent message to both sexes. These types of relationships (and expectations of relationships) are not acceptable under any circumstances. Because if it's wrong for men to pressure women but it's okay for women to pursue those men, then there can always be the hope in the back of the man's mind that maybe it's possible.
• notjack 9y ago
  Then why does their behavior disproportionately affect women, who have less power to complain about their behavior? If this were entirely an aspect of their character or personality they'd be an asshole to everyone equally, not opportunistically take advantage of people who have less ability to stop them.
  • theseatoms 9y ago
    By your definition of "asshole", are openly bigoted people not assholes because they're not "an asshole to everyone equally"?
    • yawaramin 9y ago
      But that's not the definition that was given: > These people are assholes because they know they can get away with it. So yes, openly bigoted people are assholes. But if they knew their bigotry wouldn't fly, they would at least not be open about it and not be assholes to people.
  • Grustaf 9y ago
    >Then why does their behavior disproportionately affect women I'm sure they use their positions of power in many different ways that affect both men and women, but their sexual advances obviously target women because most of them are straight.
  • js8 9y ago
    > they'd be an asshole to everyone equally I think they often are. But you don't hear about it, because almost no one cares about males at the bottom of the social ladder. At the bottom, men are "valued" (for a lack of a better word) even less than women.
    • jimnotgym 9y ago
      Or perhaps being an asshole to someone in the mailroom because you didn't like the way round a letter was put on your table is not in the same scale of things as trying to coerce someone to have sex with you
• angstrom 9y ago
  High functioning sociopaths. A person can be an asshole and not know it. A sociopath knows they're not acting within acceptable social norms and hides it. These investors are sociopaths. An asshole will make a comment and not deny it. A sociopath will try to twist it into a seemingly logical action ie "I was just trying to get rid of her because I didn't like her idea." By that logic who knows how many Jehovah's witnesses this person groped and/or fucked.
  • andrepd 9y ago
    >High functioning sociopaths. That's actually a medical/psychiatric diagnosis. I don't really think it applies here (or maybe it does, I don't know, I only know that you can't just throw that casually at run-of-the mill creeps).
    • naasking 9y ago
      I believe OP was referring to the studied fact that leaders and business moguls tend to exhibit many more of the sociopathic check points than the ordinary person.
      • angstrom 9y ago
        Right, you might call these people manipulative, but on a level where they can camouflage their behavior. Bill Cosby for instance could possibly be considered one. His also seems more methodical. What's worse: 60 possible rapes spanning decades or 60 possible rapes spanning a year?
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > By that logic who knows how many Jehovah's witnesses this person groped and/or fucked. I'd love to know what you mean here, because I can't see how this follows anything.
    • mirimir 9y ago
      To get rid of them. Me, I start going on about the benefits of trepanning, and invite them out to the workshop ;)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• ridruejo 9y ago
  They act that way because the other person is in a vulnerable position. Most of them will shrink pretty fast when confronted by someone who is not. So they are "selective assholes" so to speak.
  • honestoHeminway 9y ago
    kickin downwards lickin upwards, thats the why we all love hierarchical companys so much.
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      This works everywhere there is a social hierarchy, starting from extended families in tighter-knit societies.
      • honestoHeminway 9y ago
        The problem is that this sort of hierarchy rewards two abilitys- sliming and kicking - and (if you are good at that) upholding and extending hierarchys.
• joeyo 9y ago
  Mister Rogers says: But the very same people who are good sometimes Are the very same people who are bad sometimes.
• everdayimhustln 9y ago
  People aren't archetypes or labels; that's too black & white, un-nuanced thinking. Psychological and sociological reseach proved most people act however they're expected to within a given power dynamic circumstance, except for a few outliers which will go their own way, for anti- or pro-community. This wrong "bad apples" analogy as it applies to police or genocide perpetrators also is dangerous because it's simply untrue. Well meaning people will commit atrocities if directed to by a superior authority figure; the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiments underscore this. Instead, there must be social and business pressures brought to bear to prevent emboldened behavior with accountability. If there is boundaryless affluenza anarchy, spoiled brats will overtly behave however they wish. If there are consequences, the behavior will be reduced and become covert. There must be constant vigilance on the part of those stakeholders to enforce consistent accountability for professional/personal behavior.
  • bernardlunn 9y ago
    some people are assholes, very few but some
  • snsr 9y ago
    > Instead, there must be social and business pressures brought to bear to prevent emboldened behavior with accountability. Some of the actions described in the article are crimes - these assholes should be prosecuted.
  • gracenotes 9y ago
    Yes. It is a slow, slow decline into the kind of behavior described in the article that could have been stopped or mitigated at any point along the way but wasn't. Not necessarily in terms of how someone is deep down, but in terms of their understanding of how they can/should interact with people around them. Rather than refuse to understand how someone could have gotten there, let's try to understand the assumptions they made along the way. Then rather than pretending we're unaffected by the culture around us, let's see if we share some of those assumptions. If we want to fix things rather than be blindsided by them, these are at least the first steps.
  • throwaway338833 9y ago
• coldtea 9y ago
  >These people are being assholes because they ARE assholes. Never attribute to rational decision making what can be attributed to rotten character. This kind of thinking is even worse than what they did, because it crystalizes them into some of their decisions and deprives them of being human. While their acts are bullying, harassment, etc., this characterization is not that different to labelling a race inferior (or attributing some other characteristic as an unshakeable part of it). Only instead of a race it does that to a person (or a number of persons) based on past behavior. People change, people can behave like assholes in one instance and be sweet and caring in another, and tons of other distinctions. In the end, this type of thinking is what condemns those convicted in the US to inhuman treatment -- the belief that they are incorrigible because of something they did, and as thus deserve only hell.
  • 628C6l0 9y ago
    Strongly agreed. Hitler was psychologically capable of doing what he did because he sincerely believed Jewish people are _morally_ bad.
• dreamfactory2 9y ago
  It's cultural and power related. SV aready thinks it has 'droit du seigneur' over everybody in the world's data; no surprise to see entitled power dynamics leak into the workplace.