Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison ,
the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
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Notes -
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Claudine Gay should've been fired. Fired for not being qualified, not for having done plagiarism. If Harvard scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find a black woman academic who hasn't committed plagiarism and elevates them to President, nothing's actually improved. The reason we have a plagiarism rule is because plagiarism is bad, not as a tool to use to take out opponents who've done other bad things, even when said opponents deserve it. It's a much more 'symmetric' weapon than the weapon one wants - 'she's not qualified, so she shouldn't have the job'.
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison , the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
The, imo correct, worry with that approach is that, so long as the stage is just Rufo and Gay and similar people dueling, that'll never happen - there'll be a hundred scandals every year, we'll perpetually be draining the swamp of the rot, and somehow it'll never go anywhere. It's not that Gay shouldn't be fired for plagiarism, it's that it just doesn't really matter, and that thinking it does is kinda a misdirection.
There are a lot more important lies than 'Gay didn't do plagiarism'! Not that one should object to her firing, but maybe not put your will behind the idea that the thing generating this is something that's useful in the long run.
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I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
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