Bambaataa was a serial sexual abuser and everybody in the rap scene knew it back in the day (early 90s) same way everyone knew about R. Kelly (I ran a rap program on the radio in 92-94).
Damn. As someone half the world away I just knew him as a pioneer, news didn't travel enough to know anything about the personal lives of artists in the early 00s.
No idea about the allegations until now, which means the news doubly suck.
That's sadly a recurring pattern with Black American pioneers.
For example a lot of early bluesmen are known to be highly problematic and the completely clean ones are rare (Howlin' Wolf is one).
I've been recently experimenting with rape as a structuring force in sociology and anthropology (when I say "experimenting", I'm mean as a work hypothesis) and I'm now thinking it's more determinative at scale than murder. After all murder takes someone out of the pool.
I wouldn't go around DJing an abuser's music but I find it insufficient to stop at signaling about it and cancelling. That's where the work begins, not where it ends.
Stopping at jailing abusers will force them to hide better and prevent the more cowardly ones from acting, but it won't stop before the process behind it is fully understood, internalized and treated.
I don't know the story behind it but there's a very high chance Afrika Bambaataa was abused as a child.
Sadly a reoccurring problem with lots of white rock and roll “heroes” from Aerosmith to Led Zeppelin to Iggy Pop to Lynyrd Skynyrd to The Cars to The Stones…
> That's sadly a recurring pattern with Black American pioneers
I think we have enough evidence these days to confidently say race has nothing to do with it.
For people who get enough power and influence they'll either become role models from a position of power, get followers and maybe even act as mentors to their subsequent victims (priests, teachers, various artists, activists and other "influencers"), or they're rich enough to think/know they can get away with anything (everyone in the Epstein files).
I've read this a number of times, and dismissed it because there's no proof. But, I'm beginning to believe it, given the sheer amount of different sources saying it.
I can imagine scenarios where decent people in tough environments might be compelled to join a gang, rob, or even murder. That doesn’t make it ok, but it makes it at least understandable.
I’m unable to imagine a reason why decent people might be compelled to rape children, let alone serially.
There is the position, of course, that a sexually abused child that reaches teen years or adulthood is no longer a "decent person" .. which is an interesting transition to dwell on.
That makes it more understandable, but he lost a trial that said he was raping a child when he was 38 years old.
Someone abused as a child who does sketchy things in their early 20s is tragic. Someone doing the same when they’re nearly 40 is a whole lot harder to dismiss. Like, you don’t make it to that age without hearing a lot of people along the way saying not to rape children.
Oh, please, don't think I'm making any excuses here .. but I was around and about the evidence management side of a five deep dive into institutional childhood abuse ... the various things that went down tend to explain a lot of early following behaviour once some kind of distance from early abuse is made.
You're right to flag ongoing and persistent shitty behaviour as unacceptable - even assigning blame there gets problematic as there absolutely is an element of "would they be less bad had they had more support on escape", but you can't be giving a pass forever.
Bloody Trolley problems .. this is one of several areas with no good choices, no easy solutions.
Yeah, I hear ya. My wife and I like watching crime shows, and you see someone like Ed Kemper, and wonder how he would’ve turned out if he hadn’t been subject to loads of abuse. If his parents hadn’t sucked, he might’ve been a doctor or something. It doesn’t forgive his crimes but does give a lot to ponder.
If only human behavior was that simple. The DSM-5 is filled with diseases of the mind. Choice often isn’t as cut and dry as we would like to believe.
No one wakes up and thinks “I want to suffer today of _____.” [1] AndI want others to suffer along with me.
That said, perhaps the universe is binary? Perhaps evil, pure evil does exist? Perhaps there’s no to stopping evil than “just say no”? It’s hard to say.
There is also the theory that it serves as a reenactment of one’s own abuse. Trying to find peace and return to safety by replaying the scene, this time not as helpless victim but perpetrator: in control.
Victims of sexual abuse thus often are haunted by “fantasies” of abuse but avoiding the victim position; the trap is to identify with the fantasies. All too often, they’ve been told it is their fault, they wanted it etc, so the imagined replay “proves the original perpetrator right”.
The only way to break the circle seems to be to fully go into the fantasy and process the victim position, with support of a well-meaning presence (typically a therapist but in another reality it could be friends or family).
Um, yeah? You can’t think of a single reason for justified homicide, ever? Maybe a kid who’s tired of seeing his stepdad beat the hell out of him and his mom, or they’re in a lawless part of the world where might makes right and the local mayor is horrid.
I’m not talking about random “my neighbor disrespected me so I killed him” idiocy. Just saying, I can at least imagine situations where, even if he shouldn’t have done it, if I were in the jury, I’d probably vote to acquit. If you can’t, you are definitely not a decent person.
Nope, I would never justify outright murder. I don't even support capital punishment. I might be able to develop an understanding for the circumstances, but that doesn't mean I would say "Hey, that instance of lynchmob justice was actually OK." Because you know, its a slipery slope I am not willing to walk on.
That's a totally fair and reasonable moral perspective, albeit one not widely shared. I can't imagine a plausible scenario where I — living in a safe place, around decent people, in a stable environment — would ever feel the need to proactively protect myself or my family with lethal force. But every day I watch the news and see people living in war-torn settings, and I can sympathize that they might see it otherwise.
Not a reasonable question. All my information was third hand at best.
We didn't play Bambaataa, R Kelly or Tupac (convicted rapist) records. That's about all a radio station could do. Can't state what legally speaking were merely rumors on the air without facing problems. All you can do is not support them commercially, which we did.
We had a whole list of stuff we wouldn't play. R Kelly's first album was around 93 (I can't remember now) and the video of him and the underage girl that initially got him charged was known about at the time. The music and also information about the musicians reached people in the loop somewhat earlier than it reached everyone else. It's also 30+ years ago and details are not easy to remember, but there was no social media or internet. We had pirated cassette tapes and vinyl freebies from the distributors and word of mouth. R Kelly specifically there were djs who played him. This was not a commercial station so we could ban Tupac with no problems and we did. We also thought he was a mediocre rapper. There's lots of revisionism in how people remember things now.
For context we were in a big northeastern city with a good range and at the time there was almost no other regular rap programming on the radio (one other show locally). Outside NYC it was very hard to get rap (or even R&B) on the radio except in certain places or in very commercial programming (and then biz market and Beastie boys were maybe the best stuff you could put on the radio). Something like hit 107 in ATL (a very receptive market) started in 1990 and even there rap programming was mostly on college and community stations. We had guest djs beeping swearwords live on turntables while they stole our records because everyone was too high to pay attention. It was very much a bunch of kids into music convincing someone that this music deserved a time slot and one mistake and it all got cancelled. A lot of them were socially conscious and there was a lot of pushback against the misogynistic and gangster stuff but commerce won. We had issues about playing shabba ranks and the like too because of all the homophobia in dancehall. Tupac's case was a tough one because he had fans and defenders.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait and/or snark? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly; actually a rather shocking amount. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
A friend of mine has worked in TV and film for decades. Many times he has told me about rumoured offenders (typically after they are arrested), but other than avoiding working on productions with them what are his choices? Trying to do a completely ridiculous "citizen's arrest"?
I'd say the point is "An Ordinary Guy did X". Vs. an engineering genius, or somebody with deep pockets, or a Hollywood special effects model builder, or 3D printer junkie, or whatever.
"Engineering genius" not being an "ordinary guy" is a kind of classism. The whole tenor of the "truck driver did something interesting" is essentially classist thinking.
Jesus christ this is pedantic. You do understand that not all statements can be universally distilled to true or false right? That there's nuance and opinion here right?
Silly management fads waste huge amounts of time and resources and generate all manner of perverse incentives. They entrench institutional mediocrity as much as anything.
What is worrisome about this development, and corollary actions like the hiring of a CEO with a $300,000/year salary, is that the essentially independent and community based platform will disappear. The ArXiv exists because mathematicians and physicists, and later computer scientists and engineers, posted there, freely, their work, with minimal attention to licensing and other commercial aspects. It has thrived because it required no peer review and made interesting things accessible quickly to whomever cared to read them.
A setup as a US-based "non-profit" is worrisome, if only because 300K is an obscene salary even in a for-profit setting. That the US-based posters can't see this is evidence of the basic problem which is that the US, both left and right, has been taken over by a neoliberal feudal antidemocratic nativist mindset that is anathema to the sort of free interchange of ideas that underlay the ArXiv's development in the hands of mathematicians and physicists now swept aside and ignored by machine learning grifters and technicians who program computers.
As a US based academic, I have to say when I saw the salary I immediately gawked. I think it's not americans but silicon valley-ites and tech bros on here who have lived with inflated salary/net worth that think it's just a middle of the road salary. As I regularly interact with friends in engineering who make like $200k + benefits ($), and I wonder why I don't jump ship to that weird land.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Does arXiv count as a publication? Yes, pretty much anything that gives you a DOI does, for example Zenodo. Does it function as a reputable anything? No.
The paper you link to counts as a publication, but its reputation stands on its own, it has nothing to do with arXiv as a venue. Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't, just by publishing in certain venues your paper automatically gets a certain amount of reputation depending on the venue.
> Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't
We require a method of filtering such that a given researcher doesn't have to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper he comes across because there simply isn't enough time in the day for that.
Ideally such a system would individually for each paper provide a multi-dimensional score that was reputable. How can those be calculated in a manner such that they're reputable? Who knows; that exercise is left for the reader.
In practice "well it got published in Nature" makes for a pretty decent spam filter followed by metrics such as how many times it's been cited since publication, checking that the people citing it are independent authors who actually built directly on top of the work, and checking how many of such citing authors are from a different field.
> We require a method of filtering such that a given researcher doesn't have to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper he comes across because there simply isn't enough time in the day for that.
We do require such a method. Isn't that what AI is for? Strictly working as a filter. You still need to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper you rely on for your work.
Maybe. I think that's still experimental and far too resource intensive to do on an individual basis. However an intensive LLM review performed by a centralized service once per paper as a sort of independent literature watchdog would likely be of value. I haven't heard of such a thing yet though.
PageRank was a decent solution for websites. Can't we treat citations as a graph, calculate per-author and per-paper trustworthiness scores, update when a paper gets retracted, and mix in a dash of HN-style community upvotes/downvotes and openly-viewable commentary and Q&A by a community of experts and nonexperts alike?
Of course we could! My tongue in cheek "exercise is left for the reader" comment was meant to convey that it's deceptively simple.
Just one example off the top of my head. How do you handle negative citations? For example a reputable author citing a known incorrect paper to refute it. You need more metadata than we currently have available.
tl;dr just draw the rest of the fucking owl.
Upvotes, downvotes, and commentary? That's extremely complicated. Long term data persistence? Moderation? Real names? Verification of lab affiliations? Who sets the rules? How do you cope with jurisdictional boundaries and related censorship requirements? The scientific literature is fundamentally an open and above all international collaboration. Any sort of closed, centralized, or proprietary implementation is likely to be a nonstarter.
Thus if your goal is a universal system then I'm fairly certain you need to solve the decentralized social networking problem as a more or less hard prerequisite to solving the decentralized scientific literature review problem. This is because you need to solve all the same problems but now with a much higher standard for data retention and replication.
Very topically I assume you'd need a federated protocol. It would need to be formally standardized. It would need a good story for data replication and archival which pretty much rules out ActivityPub and ATProto as they currently stand so you're back to the drawing board.
A nontrivial part of the above likely involves also solving the decentralized petname system problem that GNS attempts to address.
I think a fully generalized scoring or ranking system is exceedingly unlikely to be a realistic undertaking. There's no problem with isolated private venues (ie journals) we just need to rethink how they work. Services such as arxiv provide a DOI so there's nothing stopping "journals" that are actually nothing more than lightweight review platforms that don't actually host any papers themselves from being built.
> Upvotes, downvotes, and commentary? That's extremely complicated.
No, it is not. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Zenodo is centralized, and that is fine. A system hosted by CERN would be universal enough for most purposes.
The truth is, most papers cannot stand on their own, they need a reputable venue. While it is difficult to get into Nature, it is much more difficult to actually contribute something substantial to science. That's why we don't have a system like that.
I think you've misunderstood me. Did you read my final paragraph? I was agreeing with what you wrote there - that simply rethinking how centralized journals operate could accomplish the majority of the goal while sidestepping most of the complexity.
That said, I disagree that papers require a centralized venue in any fundamental sense. They currently need such a venue because we don't have a better process for vetting and filtering them at scale. The issue is that decentralizing such a process in an acceptable manner is a monstrously complicated prospect.
Sure. In that case I guess I'm just waiting for a couple of college kids in a garage to start a website that actually uses it for its intended purpose, so that we can finally deprecate PrestigiousPrivateJournalRank.
It was not awarded because that paper is on arxiv. That paper could have been printed and sent out by mail. Or posted on 4chan. etc. It just so happens to be it was on arxiv which made no difference to anything.
so there's an unconditionally correct answer (it's also equal to abs(x) for x>0), and then there is an answer that is only correct for half the domain, which requires an additional assumption.
Not in general. As people have pointed out elsewhere, it's true if x is real. That isn't always a helpful assumption. (When x is real you can plug that assumption into Mathematica. Then Mathematica should agree with you.)
But consider sqrt(i) = sqrt(exp(i\pi/2)). That's exp(i\pi/4). Your rule would give 1 as the answer. It's not helpful for a serious math system to give that answer to this problem.
The analysis isn't great. In particular, they say "this is a three-factor test, two of the factors are in favor, one is against, two is more than one, so Tile is fine". Normally you'd expect some kind of analysis of how much weight each factor contributes.
That said, they do also say this:
> we determine that Appellees received inquiry notice of the Oct. 2023 Terms. Evaluating whether inquiry notice has been established is, however, always a “fact-intensive analysis,” Godun v. JustAnswer LLC, 135 F.4th 699, 710 (9th Cir. 2025), and we do not hold that notice by mass email establishes inquiry notice in every case.
So the HN headline is misleading at best.
(They also note that, while they should consider how normal internet users behave, they can't do this because "there is very little empirical evidence regarding" the question. So they substitute a discussion of how reasonable they find Tile's actions in the abstract.)
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