Kulturkampf

[Eric Cartman]

What does POC mean anymore. It used to be non-white. Then they started the dumb BIPOC thing to separate black and nebulous ideas of indigenous. Then brown became a thing classifying shades from South American to Laos. Now East Asians aren’t defined by POC? Who fits these days? Skeeter?

It seems to me, the differentiation started in earnest in the discussion about reparations (US, obvs) when people decided they didn't want to split their hypothetical share with like, a recent somalian refugee (who obviously had a racist free life), or other immigrants who came with nothing and made something of themselves, but also couldn't really justify native americans as being less historically fucked over in the US than other groups.

[Puffy Fucking Baby]

I have no words

Edit:

Worst thing is it's an AP article, who are supposed to be straight down the middle news, not guardian thinkpieces.

[Uncle]

"new conservative weapon: proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that their perceived enemies actually literally committed murder for real"

[HaughtyFrank]

Worst thing is it's an AP article, who are supposed to be straight down the middle news, not guardian thinkpieces.

They also threw this line into the article:



Which they then later edited

[Uncle]

I remember when the first settlers accused the indigenous chieftains of plagiarism and forced them to retreat westward in embarrassment

[Nintex]

Worst thing is it's an AP article, who are supposed to be straight down the middle news, not guardian thinkpieces.

It's all the same fake news. It's just that their hatred for the jews is bigger than their ability to hide their bias and special interests.  

The closest thing to straight down the middle news these days is Fox News and they're trying really hard not to be. 

[benji]

"new conservative weapon: proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that their perceived enemies actually literally committed murder for real"

Juries are how white supremacy enforces its system of oppression.

[Puffy Fucking Baby]

As someone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, I feel like it's possible to be so without being two logic leaps away from thinking maybe Hitler wasn't wrong

[Nintex]

Bill Ackman put out a lengthy statement.

tldr : Nintex was right, DEI is fucking bullshit. Vote Trump  

[quote]In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

[Nintex]

Bill Ackman put out a lengthy statement.

tldr : Nintex was right, DEI is fucking bullshit. The board should resign too. A Business exec should run Harvard  

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about
@Harvard
when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel.  Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. 

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.

I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.

America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.

I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on
@X
that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.

When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement.  I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.

I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.

I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.

In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.

Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.

While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.

I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.

All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.

This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.

The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.

The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate.  The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university.  It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.

The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.

Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.

The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.

The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?

In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.

The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.

The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.

And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.

It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.

The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.

According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.

Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.

In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.

So what should happen?

The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.

The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.

The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.

Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus. 

Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.

These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.

A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.

A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.

Today was an important step forward for the University.  It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.

We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[BIONIC]

Yeah, I’m not reading a word of that lmao

[Potato]

As someone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, I feel like it's possible to be so without being two logic leaps away from thinking maybe Hitler wasn't wrong

Absolutely. Most people think Israel is wrong in how it deals with its problems, but that doesn't mean you have to endorse the murder of innocent people by Hamas.

[Potato]

Yeah, I’m not reading a word of that lmao

I did. I thought it was a good read.

[benji]

OVG @ovgstories
A Black Empowerment Movement - 🎙️Podcasts | 📹Docs | 🎫Events | Hosted by: @iamkenim | FOLLOW our YouTube: @BrandVideoPro

[benji]

[benji]

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1742455903264129474

I have no words

[HaughtyFrank]

OVG @ovgstories
A Black Empowerment Movement - 🎙️Podcasts | 📹Docs | 🎫Events | Hosted by: @iamkenim | FOLLOW our YouTube: @BrandVideoPro

I honestly think that for some people it is empowering to hear just how much of a victim they are. MJ being superstar already while dark skinned is just boring to them. If he was robbed of stardom, now that's something to identify with

[Polident]

What’s amazing about this Gay story is how every new fact makes her and their handling of it look worse. Like how she is of a privileged upbringing and the works she stole were from black women who didn’t have the same advantages. Two ways to look at it: she viewed them as beneath her or she didn’t think she’d get caught. Then there’s that Harvard hasn’t docked her pay despite changing her role. She’s getting upwards of $900k annually for less work. 

If anything, the people flipping out must see themselves as vulnerable. They know they’re unqualified and  the slightest due diligence will reveal their fraudulent person. Yet, the consequences aren’t getting fired or losing face or going hungry.

[HaughtyFrank]

"They held us to the standard we ourselves set, that's racism!"

It's all just so absurd. Like even if you don't care about plagiarism, the Congress hearing was a massive fuck up that alienated so many Jewish students but somehow this doesn't matter at all. Words are literally violence except when it's us who fucked up. It's all just about the wrong people pointing out the failure.

I also find it really rich to say that this is an attack on academic freedom when the same people celebrate whenever some professor gets suspended or speaker uninvited for having the wrong opinions

[HaughtyFrank]

Meanwhile in 2021 a white male University president resigned over a fucking plagiarized commencement speech...

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996523535/university-of-south-carolina-president-resigns-after-plagiarizing-commencement-s

That's the real win of the conservatives here. Not ousting Gay who keeps a high position at Harvard anyway and a 900k salary on top of it, but exposing this huge double standard and how ready leftists are to throw all their principles away because it's the wrong target.

[Rendle]

I have no words

Plagiarism - or application of the rules around plagiarism - therefore cannot be considered a "weapon".

I hate this editorialising shit. I thought Community Notes were supposed just add facts and this is plainly not true. Did whoever wrote this even google "weapon" before putting it in inverted commas?

"A means of gaining an advantage or defending oneself in a conflict or contest."

If context notes get used by politically motivated users to score zingers, it defeats the point. They'll be as shitty and partisan as the tweets they are correcting.

[Rendle]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dershowitz%E2%80%93Finkelstein_affair

Zionist can plagiarise, everyone else is shit out of luck.

[Uncle]

I have no words

Plagiarism - or application of the rules around plagiarism - therefore cannot be considered a "weapon".

I hate this editorialising shit. I thought Community Notes were supposed just add facts and this is plainly not true. Did whoever wrote this even google "weapon" before putting it in inverted commas?

"A means of gaining an advantage or defending oneself in a conflict or contest."

If context notes get used by politically motivated users to score zingers, it defeats the point. They'll be as shitty and partisan as the tweets they are correcting.

I think the implication is that it's not something that conservatives are inflicting upon others, but something they do to themselves

the alternative is that literally everything is a weapon and the word loses all meaning

like, if you are kicked out from your school for plagiarism unrelated to any political motivations, I suppose that's education using plagiarism as a weapon against those who are dishonest (justifiably)? you could characterize it that way, but is that really the most appropriate word to use?

[HaughtyFrank]

^

[Rendle]

I think the implication is that it's not something that conservatives are inflicting upon others, but something they do to themselves

It's like if I said "conservatives weaponized James Gunn's past tweets" or "when we argue my wife always weaponizes my relationship with my family" or "intelligence agencies use blackmail in order to weaponize a target's sexuality". Just because something is weaponized against you doesn't mean you deserve it (or in Claudina's case, doesn't mean she didn't). Perhaps the word 'weapon' wouldn't be as suitable if this information came to light in a neutral probe into plagiarism, but it's hard to imagine that the people who found and exposed this information were moved to do so by their deep passion for academic integrity. For them it is about the sinner and not the sin.

[Uncle]

the trouble is the baggage that the word carries in a political context, and using it as part of your unbiased professional news headline

calling it a weapon sort of implies that those it's being used against should erect a defense, like tacit encouragement that colleges should include some new language in their rules about evaluating on a case-by-case basis so they don't have to fire people for plagiarism anymore, since that's the new du jour weapon that we must stop at all costs

[Eric Cartman]

I think the implication is that it's not something that conservatives are inflicting upon others, but something they do to themselves

It's like if I said "conservatives weaponized James Gunn's past tweets" or "when we argue my wife always weaponizes my relationship with my family" or "intelligence agencies use blackmail in order to weaponize a target's sexuality". Just because something is weaponized against you doesn't mean you deserve it (or in Claudina's case, doesn't mean she didn't). Perhaps the word 'weapon' wouldn't be as suitable if this information came to light in a neutral probe into plagiarism, but it's hard to imagine that the people who found and exposed this information were moved to do so by their deep passion for academic integrity. For them it is about the sinner and not the sin.

I agree with you as to motive, but where the 'punishment' is wholly appropriate to the 'crime' I disagree that that is something you can term as 'weaponised', even where the motives for exposing the 'crime' and bringing down the 'punishment' are suspect.

For example; "jilted lover weaponised a botched surgery while drunk into a doctor losing his medical licence".
Is that 'weaponised' because the motives for exposing what happened were purely self serving (revenge for being jilted), or is losing your medical licence because you botched a surgery while drunk entirely appropriate and therefore the use of 'weaponised' is only there to exonerate the perpetrator from their act by questioning the integrity of the source?

The other examples you provide are where the 'punishment' (losing your employment or reputation) are inappropriate to the 'crime' (being outed as gay); something where the 'crime' is disproportionately 'punished' for the purpose of harm.

[TylenolJones]

[Uncle]

I also don't think "weaponizing past tweets" is quite the same thing, since in a sane world, "exposing" your past tweets shouldn't generally have any well-defined consequences, unlike clear examples of academic dishonesty

there are few legal or regulatory reasons why bringing up past tweets or posts should matter, the fact that they're still online and up on the platform implies they were fine to post and don't break any TOS, and the consequences are fuzzy, like how cancel-able are you if it's discovered that you said "fag" once 20 years ago?

exposing tweets is to impose social consequences, make the uninformed say "my god, what an awful person" and join in, without them knowing that you wanted their help in cancelling the person, an obvious attempt at stirring up trouble

whereas plagiarism already has clear rules against it, there's no statute of limitations, and it's a pretty clear-cut and obvious situation of wrongdoing

[Potato]

This is the result of years of online "activism" and e-begging.