Seems Like Targeting
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Hounding the president of Harvard out of a job because you think she’s a DEI hire is one thing, but going after a Billionaire’s wife? How dare these journalists! What big bullies.

Bonus downplaying of EA’s faults. He of course phrases the Bostrom affair as someone being “accused” of sending a racist email, as if there were any question as to who sent it, or if it was racist. And acts like it’s not just the cherry on top of a lifetime of Bostrom’s work.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    9 months ago

    There’s a lot to snark at. A few in particular:

    • Scott is irrationally scared of journalism. He talks about it as if it’s an omnipresent, omnipotent spectre that swoops down on people on a whim and destroys their lives when it pleases the spectre. In reality, the “whims” are a confluence of the subject’s presence in the public consciousness and market pressures on reporting.
    • Scott has no clue how power works. On one side, you have someone who resigned because of a billionaire-backed witch hunt. On the other, Oxman didn’t resign. Scott fails to see that it’s the billionaire who holds power here, and instead thinks it’s the journalists, specifically the ones that said his understanding of journalism was shit at best.
    • This whole post is really an expression/extension of Scott’s victim mentality/persecution complex/“nice guy” personality, where the mean ‘jocks’ (journalists/people scott doesn’t agree with) get to ‘date the hot girls’ (by which I mean, ‘commit lots of mild misdeeds’), while the ‘nice guys’ (the eugenicist sex creeps) are shunned by society.
    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      9 months ago

      What Scotty is missing or rather eliding is that Ackmann, Rufo et consortes hounded a woman of color out of a prestigious job by knowing how to manipulate the media. That, of course, is just valiantly exposing wrongdoing and hypocrisy. Someone cheekily pointing out that Ackman’s wife did essentially the same thing is however a vicious attack on the saintly Ackmann.

      This is what Substack does. Instead of having an editor telling the writer “JFC Scott this is just Streisanding” they have to Produce Content. Oh well, it’s all grist for the sneer mill.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        missing or rather eliding

        This is one of those malice/stupidity things except it’s both. The malice is obvious but I genuinely think he is too stupid to see the manipulation at play.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, exactly. My first draft of this included this passage from the post:

        If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite. Again, I don’t think I’m discovering anything surprising here, I just want to make this explicit for people who have otherwise just sort of been noticing it on the fringes of their consciousness.

        Basically: “Why can’t journalists just give nice guys like us a chance?”

        • Evinceo@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          9·
          9 months ago

          I genuinely wonder if years of training one’s self to be “rational” makes you forget how fundamental stories are to the human experience. Journalists write stories about real life, for good or ill. If something happens in real life but isn’t a story, it doesn’t get printed. “Random lady plagiarized her thesis” is not a story, but “lady related to major plagiarism story also plagiarized her thesis” is a story.

          His observation that EA suddenly got piled on is missing a more subtile point: lots of the coverage of EA was probably an extension of the tech beat and thus benefitted from the access journalism and rosey-glasses’d that was rampant in the early aughts before a more critical eye was cast in the last few years. Tech Won’t Save Us does a good job explaining the phenomenon (ctrl+f “access” in the transcript) in part of its Musk series.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      smokes a joint made out of NRx printouts

      You know how leftism is Cthulhu? inhales Journalism is Nyarlathotep (And yes, Lovecrafts infiltrating evil elder god being a swarthy egypthian pharao type is a bit on the nose)!

    • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      Oxman didn’t resign

      She’s pretty much self-employed and out of academia, so that probably wasn’t in the cards to begin with. Perhaps her company will lose some business, but I kind of doubt it. The stuff she does seems sufficiently low-profile that nobody will care that she plagiarized a bit.

      I mean, if you see a bit of sculpture in a corporate lobby, you’re probably not going to wonder if the designer stole a paragraph in a thesis, let alone care.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        Oh, absolutely. I didn’t have the time to investigate her position and whether or not it was a resignation situation. I was mainly trying to show how Scott misses the point entirely and doesn’t understand how power works in as few words as I could get away with.

        Thanks for the added context, though; it is an excellent point. Someone in Oxman’s position is insulated from the kinds of power plays that can oust people in positions like Gay, which Scott does not recognise at all.