We Live in a Golden Age of Crybullyism | Hacker News Reader

We Live in a Golden Age of Crybullyism

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21 pointshypeit48 comments

I find myself sympathetic to people like Oxman that are catching strays. Attacking someone's family as a proxy isn't holding them accountable, it is bullying.

She actually did plagiarize, so this is mainly just uncovering latent (existing) problems that were not being paid enough attention to. My hope is that this work is extended to the entire academic corpus, so we can see just how much, uh, "unattributed borrowing" happens.

Ackman is on a jihad so he should have fully expected collateral damage, and should have anticipated this.

She's a public figure, a billionaire, and a plagiarist; feeling sorry that her misdeeds came to light is a great illustration of OP's article.

The language of victimization is dangerous. There was a time when it might have seemed liberatory when applied to "marginalized" populations but the categorical imperative always gets you in the end...

But the blindness of many internet commentators towards power relations is frankly weird. We have to make different rules depending on the power one yields: for example, transparency is a necessity against the powerful, while the rest have a right to privacy. It is as fundamental as the separation of powers in modern democracies.

Maybe it hanging out with more leftists but I am really bothered with people who seem to think that when a black man or a white man have a conflict the black man should always win or when a man and a woman have a conflict the woman should always win. I worked enough at a mediation center to know that anyone can be in the right or in the wrong.

I think the first time I heard a leftist reject the categorical imperative was a friend of mine who I met when we were activists for the 2000 Ralph Nader campaign and what was one of the most active local Green parties in the US for a few years. He was teaching a course in ethics at a local college and when I asked him about "how do I make better ethical decisions?" he gave me a spiel about how the left is on the side of the angels and the right is on the side of the devils.

On Mastodon I run into people like that all the time. If you confronted a rightist about, say, Pinochet's crimes, they would probably say it was justified, just look at what Lenin and Stalin did. They did it (and might even do it again) so we have to do it too. Many online leftists (like my ethicist friend) would probably say something to the extent that "it's OK that we do it but not OK when they do it" which is right up there with people who take Carol Gilligan too seriously.

I've found this type of thinking across the spectrum. All I can do is ignore it and realize a lot of people are simply "morally lucky" and didn't come to their conclusions via any principled reasoning...

It's easiest to spot when a new issue comes up that adds a cost to their self-professed values (eg, generative AI).

People here focus on a plagiarist who was caught in her husband's crusade, but it really miss the point. Whining because a lot of people were mean to you one one side, and crushing people on the other side is becoming a trend, and I'm not surprised.

Another day another episode of the “Legacy Media vs Billionaires”. Today: Media strikes back. Quite the hit job, too: light on facts but quite strong in name calling, insinuations and quick judgements. Journalism has adapted quite well to our modern times.

The political class the author belongs to (left-leaning intellectuals) may not have created this trend, but they did popularize it. It’s obvious that the author and his ilk believe that only people who are suffering have value or deserve to have opinions. Of course sociopaths are going to try and appear like they are suffering in response. Sleep in the bed you helped make, Adam.

Pretty rich to say that when this whole drama is caused by Ackman launching a great war on academia under the pretense of weeding out plagiarism, and then throwing a hissy fit when shown his academic of a wife has done worse than Claudine Gay.

Sleep in the king-sized bed you helped make, Bill.

I don’t give a single flying fuck about Bill Ackerman or his wife, they can burn in the fires of public opinion as well for all I care. The article is complaining that people are acting like victims when the political left made victimization a core tenet of identity politics. So maybe Bill Ackerman wouldn’t be acting in such an embarrassing manner if they hadn’t done that.

Google "the lost cause", the "war on Christmas", "white flight"...

The right has played the victim card for decades. It's their core tenet.

Zionists have been using victimization as a core tenet to advance their agenda for decades. To say this started with the “political left” is simply not true.

It's third wave feminism, when the word emancipation was replaced by the very liberal and individualistic 'empowerment', and the liberal captation of postmarxism that created identity politics.

Saying 'the left created identity politics' is quite antinomic. Identity and individuality are clearly not core left wing values.

The left didn't make victimization a core tenet of identity politics. The left made power differences et abuse of power the core tenet of its politics - and the right caricaturize it as only "playing" the victim - the extreme version being the constant accusations of "crisis actors" lobbed by Alex Jones and co.

This is a gross deformation/strawman argumentation.

You called me out for strawmanning, used the most extreme and atypical person you could think of in your argument (Alex Jones) in a way that only tenuously makes sense, while simultaneously admitting that your example is extreme?

Maybe you should have replied with a third attempt at something coherent. Third times the charm, as they say

Alex Jones is not "the most extreme and atypical person" on the right, he is saying openly what the right thinks quietly: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-pra... https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-likes-conspira...

I don't know anything about Neri Oxman, but she didn't suddenly become a public figure by virtue of what Ackman did. "Holding her accountable" (to use their dishonest words) is itself mean and bullying.

So holding people accountable is "mean and bullying"? The article points out the hypocrisy of Ackerman discrediting people for plagiarism while defending his serial plagiarist wife Neri Oxman:

> Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and celebrity within the world of academia, stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars, and technical documents in her academic writing, Business Insider has found.

She certainly sounds like a "public figure", certainly public enough to be held accountable for the crap she and her husband are pulling.

Kudos to Business Insider for this excellent reporting: https://www.businessinsider.com/neri-oxman-plagiarize-wikipe...

"accountable" for what? is the twitter mob going after every professor? Or just the ones whose spouses they don't like?

Ackman said he plans to use the data he collected by going after every MIT professor to expand it to the larger academic population. So, he's already planning this.

Missing from all the attack-dog defenses is:

what did Oxman ever do to help fire Claudine Gay?

If the answer is "Nothing, but..." then you are just going after her because you hate Ackman. That's all.

Anything else you say about "accountable" is just window-dressing for a revenge hit. If you don't like Ackman, be adult enough to stick to attacking him.

I want every professor everywhere who has plagiarized at their level to have their plagiarism exposed.

Personally I liked Neri- she has done some incredible work. So I think you actually have completely the wrong impression of what my intent is.

> what my intent is.

so your intent is to have every professor exposed, but only if we start with the ones you don't like?

I don't care what order it is done in.

Ideally, it would be done all at once- for each professor in the US who wrote a technical thesis, identify all sections which can reliably be considered plagiarism (direct copying without attribution, for example) and publish a national report.

That would then expose the base rate of plagiarism, which I believe is extremely high (I could not say, for certain, whether I did it in my thesis, although I worked extremely hard to follow every academic rule associated with technical writing, and would be surprised if there was any text, other than from the papers I had already published, that was directly copied).

Once the base rate had been exposed and people kind of see just how much of this occurred, we can start to have the discussion of "what are the consequences"?

The consequences to Neri are just reputational- she already left her professor role and it's unlikely she needs her reputation to continue to be wealthy/successful/attend the hot parties.

I'd be fine if that led to massive resignations of the tenured, as long as the New University was better: more devoted to Truth, not My Truth.

In the grand scheme of things, she's a nobody. Story of her plagiarisms wouldn't be listed anywhere in normal circumstances. This is purely spite driven move to hurt Ackerman by proxy by publicly humiliating her.

You can make that argument if you wish. But then it goes both ways, and you must stand against Ackerman's actions in all this. You have to be consistent and have integrity. Ackerman I believe targeted college students. His wife is fair game.

You can make that argument if you wish. But then it goes both ways, and you must stand against Academia's actions in all this. You have to be consistent and have integrity. Academia I believe targeted college students. They are all fair game.

Or...

I don't support Ackerman targeting students. See? It's that easy to not be partisan.

I guess it's harder to spell people's names correctly.

Excuse me, but maybe read the article (and the links to several articles published on Neri Oxman).

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/style/neri-oxman-mit.html

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-year-of-neri-o...

Excuse me, but I did read the articles. What was I supposed to see? That she was already a public figure? So what?

What I did not see was any connection to the Claudine Gay affair. So there is none, correct?

Her Wikipedia page is pretty long, she was a public figure long before this controversy, even ignoring the fact that simply being a billionaire invites public scrutiny.

Nonetheless, no one was calling out her plagiarism before they got their knickers in a twist over Claudine Gay. Pure meanness and revenge. Are they going to shadow his kids at school, too?

It’s simple cause and effect. Not sure why it’s so hard for you to grasp.

I grasp it perfectly. It's you who can't grasp bullying:

"Oppose us, and we'll ruin you. And your family."

I just want to check: you are reading Ackman's tweets, right?

I just want to check: what point are you attempting to make?

I think if you read what he says on Twitter it demonstrates that he's gone so far beyond norms that it's not unreasonable to expect that people are going to target his family (non-violently).

I love how all these attacks are presented as if no one is actually doing them -- like it's God himself visiting vengeance on him. Some impersonal force, in other words.

Try being grown-up enough (or maybe "big enough") to stick with the people who've actually offended you.

That Ackerman was the one who started with “oppose us and we’ll destroy you” by trying to doxx pro Palestinian protestors and going on a crusade to discredit universities.

Turnabout is fair play.

It isn't "turnabout", it's "infantile striking out at everybody within sight."

As for the "pro Palestinian protestors", they signed their names, did they not? Did they expect all would be forgiven when they try to get jobs?

It literally is exactly that. They are using the same tactics on him that he used on them. Sorry if you don’t like that, but that’s the reality.

OK, so my criticism of Ackman is actually "infantile striking out at everybody within sight". He made a series of escalating tweets that were truly baby-like, attacking BI, and saying he was gonna tell their daddy (Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, which owns BI) and when BI concluded they had done nothing wrong (the article was not motivated, and was based in fact) he just escalated further (threatening a lawsuit).

I have some sympathy for Ackman, but the methods by which he is achieving his goals undermine his own arguments.

.. and you've still shown zero connection between his wife and Gay. Just one guy you don't like.

I love it when the wokest of the woke mob get outed with revelations about their past history. Maybe the "church of modern day woke" could borrow something about repentance & forgiveness from other much older religions but that was never part of the doctrine from the very beginning.

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