The problem with guys like Wenig and Wymer is the classic problem with large organizations: they didn't explicitly say to do something horrible like this, so they're off the hook.
All they did was hire the horrible people and setup the environment where doing horrible things would be not just an option, but the best option to succeed at the goals that they then assigned to those people. They gave these people an enormous budget, and then (apparently) never asked what they did with it.
But hey, they didn't know anything unethical was going on, right?
> they didn't explicitly say to do something horrible like this, so they're off the hook
As you said, this is what's frustrating. More power should always be tethered to more responsibility. Their tacit authorization of these tactics should have put them on trial as well. But, the more frustrating thing is how quickly these sorts of abuses are forgiven and swept under the rug. It's as if once you get high enough up then society's sunk cost aversion kicks in and everyone suddenly finds it so hard to believe that someone they implicitly gave power to could have done something wrong.
My take is this presents an existential dilemma: what if the people we've given power to aren't the most worthy? It is easier to buy your way out of this by writing off an incident like this as merely a fluke.
The system is broken, and the brokenness is by design.
>“She is [a] biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN,” Wymer responded, adding, “I’ll embrace managing any bad fallout. We need to STOP her.”
which seems pretty explicit to me. "I'll embrace managing any bad fallout" is pretty corporate doublespeak-y, but any reasonable person would understand this as the manager taking responsibility, right?
The frustrating part isn’t so much that there’s no criminal liability for them, on the balance criminal law probably should remain tethered to actively malicious mens rea even if it produces some miscarriages. It’s the apparent lack of any social or career consequences.
It appears to many of us that once a person hits the CEO of a major company level, a criminal conviction is the one and only thing that can, maybe, bring them down. Anything else and they are provided a soft landing.
As an ebay seller, it is evident you never, ever comment negatively about ebay online. There are too many times sellers, including large ones, make negative comments only to see ramifications occur.
When this occurred, I was dumbfounded Wenig and Wymer faced no repercussions from what happened. Plausible deniability is quite the cloak.
I could only imagine receiving a funeral wreath for a spouse or having porn addressed to you delivered to your neighbors. Frightening.
ebay strikes me as a company living in the past and squandered what they had built.
>I could only imagine receiving a funeral wreath for a spouse or having porn addressed to you delivered to your neighbors. Frightening.
YMMV. My neighbors would give me my porn magazines back (or they'd take it and read it themselves) and we'd have a laugh about it. Also the police would laugh at me if I tried to report these things. Pigs and bugs in the mail? Most people would be annoyed and little more.
Everything short of the stalker van only really works on upstanding people in quiet suburbs.
When your trashy neighbors get their tires slashed or get in heated arguments on the front porch you feel confused instead of harassed when funeral wreaths start showing up.
Receiving a funeral wreath and books on dealing with the death of a spouse seems not laughable to me. Same for being tailed by a van, then an SUV later. Have a look at the website(s) for "Progressive Force Concepts". They don't seem like your average prankster.
Edit: The scary part to me isn't just what Progressive Force Concepts might do within the bounds of whatever their internal guidelines are. Those are bad enough. But, it looks like a paramilitary organization. The pool of people they hire from is loaded with people that are likely to do whatever they want.
Well, I am not upstanding at all. I would still vote to convict on that jury for uttering death threats re: the funeral wreath. A reasonable person would reach that interpretation, I think.
I can’t believe the Boys and Girls Club of Silicon Valley appointed Wymer their CEO even though they were (and are) well aware of these incidents.
It made me wonder what other types of sociopaths are working there. A quick internet search reveals lots and lots of pedophiles in related organizations throughout the valley:
CEO of the Boys and Girls Club? That seems insane.
> A quick internet search reveals lots and lots of pedophiles in related organizations throughout the valley
Is there another resource or evidence you found? The link you posted doesn't seem to confirm this. It simply lists nation-wide stats about several organizations but not Bay Area specific.
I read recently a perspective that said the real purpose of twitter/social media has been to reveal just how idiotic and corrupt our leadership is all the way up the chain on a minute to minute basis (not just big Bay of Pigs style controversies). We have the richest person in the world tweeting about taking a shit.
'The Story' here is why this hasn't had more widespread media coverage particularly on the big networks, and the answer is likely that EBay is a major corporate sponsor and advertiser.
That is interesting. It's basically "Big Corporate Giant Hires Paramilitary Firm to Terrorize Private Citizens". That seems like it should have been all over the news. I'd never heard about it, and it's all more than a year old.
* the main thing we care about is: can the new submission support a substantively different discussion than the previous ones?
By those criteria I suppose this is borderline, since (I'll take your word for it) the article contains SNI, but (on the other hand) the discussion will very likely be generically about the original stalking story rather than substantively different based on the new post.
From the lawsuit: “On or about August 15, 2019, the Defendants threatened to kill the Steiners when they sent an ominous funeral wreath to the Steiner residence.”
All they did was hire the horrible people and setup the environment where doing horrible things would be not just an option, but the best option to succeed at the goals that they then assigned to those people. They gave these people an enormous budget, and then (apparently) never asked what they did with it.
But hey, they didn't know anything unethical was going on, right?