Wren Reillyakareilly@hachyderm.io
Nov 9, 2026, 9:11 AMAccountability isn’t revenge.
Accountability feels bad to someone who did bad things.
Don’t get it twisted.
Replies
- Wren Reillyakareilly@hachyderm.ioNov 9, 2026, 9:13 AM
For assholes, cutting off access to victims feels like revenge.
Ignore the whining of assholes.
- Wren Reillyakareilly@hachyderm.ioNov 9, 2026, 9:17 AM
Ways to stop violent assholes that are embraced by communities may not be suitable for governments.
I oppose the death penalty. I don’t mourn someone killed by a person they tried to harm.
Restorative justice and changes in behaviour are of course the best outcome. If that doesn’t work, I fully support threats of proportional violence to dissuade a serial
abuser from bringing his nonsense to a given place. - Wren Reillyakareilly@hachyderm.ioNov 9, 2026, 9:21 AM
Banning a serial abuser from a specific gathering is not revenge. It is not exclusion from society as a whole.
Refusal to ban a serial
abuser from a specific gathering excludes people who did nothing wrong, and makes the whole event more sexist, more racist, more exclusionary. - Wren Reillyakareilly@hachyderm.ioNov 9, 2026, 9:28 AM
Refusal to embrace accountability is often buried in lots of flowery language, but it’s simple:
It’s the assertion that putting an abusive person through anything close to what the victims experienced is a bridge too far.
It’s the assertion what victims go through is acceptable, and not only that, they haven’t suffered enough. Meanwhile, the perpetrators get handled with soft gloves, even if this keeps the harm to victims going.
It’s the acceptance of a world in which the characteristics you were born with, not your actions, determine whether everyone looks away when someone hurts you.
- Wren Reillyakareilly@hachyderm.ioNov 9, 2026, 9:31 AM
Remember, if a harmful asshole understood that he did something wrong, he would have exiled himself already.
A harmful asshole who wants to attend events with victims is ready and willing to do more harm.
Accountability for past harms is the prevention of more harm.
Nov 9, 2026, 10:01 AM@akareilly great points, and for those that would use the violence as a tool for victim blaming, allow me to add this:
It takes a surprisingly low amount of violence to keep an asshole out of a space. As a bouncer for several years, I maybe had to use physical violence only three times, and nobody ever went to see a doctor for it. A little reminder that being an asshole can have consequences is pretty far from a death penalty.
Point being there's no revenge whatsoever indeed, the job is just to avoid harm.
And the better society does at keeping abusers away from their victims, the safer even the abusers are. You're doing them a favor by banning them.