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.
There’s a lot to snark at. A few in particular:
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.
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.
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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)!
Scott is to Journalists as other Scott is to Women.
Yeah, exactly. My first draft of this included this passage from the post:
Basically: “Why can’t journalists just give nice guys like us a chance?”
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.
also we just had a 2023 of Sam Bankman-Fried in the media as the extremely criminal public face of EA
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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.
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.