“Lizbeth Mara” depicts herself in several places on the Internet by a stock photo of a pretty brunette muzzled by a pair of grimy male hands. Who knew that moral philosophers ever got their hands dirty?
Charlotte Allen reports, and reflects at length, upon all the sturm und drang, and also the delicious ironies attendant on the story emerging this month of the public shaming of a much-philandering Yale professor of Moral Philosophy and Global Justice by an irate female grad student, furious at having been seduced, now avenging herself via the extra-judicial methods of Internet grassroots appeals and social media.
Ms. Allen finds much entertaining reading in the now widely-distributed anonymous complaints of the alleged victim.
She reported that she began to get suspicious when the professor declined to leave his partner in order to be with her—or even, in fact, to tell his partner that she existed. Then she found out about the “22-year-old virgin†who’d been his former secret mistress, plus the “PhD student in India, who wears a sexy negligee,†and the “other young female scholars that he hosts in his apartment.†Anonymous concluded sadly: “He will continue giving his lectures about justice around the world, pretending not to eat meat for moral reasons, inviting young women to his hotel room for philosophical discussions, and I’m just among the other young women scorned by the moral philosopher, who devotes his life to justice.â€
All this would make for a merry tale illustrating the adage “Hell hath no fury like a woman who discovers that her man has been whispering the same sweet nothings into the ears of other females as he’s been whispering into hers.†It would also make for a merry tale of hypocrisy among sanctimonious progressives in academia. “Global justice†typically involves requiring citizens of wealthy First World countries to hand over their income and assets (via taxes) for “redistribution†to impoverished Third World countries, on the theory that they’re complicit in Third World poverty. It’s always fun to see a vegetarian guru of redistribution who also happens to occupy a cushy position at a prestigious East Coast university doing a bit of redistribution of his own on the side. Anonymous lamented: “I falsely assumed that the man who calls affluent westerners human rights violators would treat women with dignity.†Surprise, surprise!
And finally, this ought to be an inspirational tale for grad-school nerds laboring in the library stacks trying to finish their philosophy dissertations: Get yourself a job in “global justice,†and you’ll have more progressive females in sexy negligees throwing themselves at you than there are stars in the sky or Third World kleptocrats.
But Allen is also a bit alarmed at the dark side of all of this, as one example of an increasing number of cases of feminist warfare against academic departments of Philosophy, and she notes that Internet shaming and mobbing has been, in this case, quite effective.
[W]ithin days of the appearance of Anonymous’s article in Thought Catalog, he was specifically identified by a number of feminist activists—including Anonymous herself—as a Yale professor who had allegedly made sexual overtures to a female Yale undergraduate while serving as her senior-essay adviser and, after her graduation in 2010, employing her as a researcher and translator. That woman is reportedly preparing to sue both the professor and Yale itself, which, according to a September 30, 2011, article in the student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, had found “insufficient evidence to support the allegation of sexual harassment†and merely issued the professor a reprimand for improper business practices.
In short, the global justice professor has been effectively “outedâ€â€”linked irrevocably not just to a taste for trysts in hotel rooms around the world but to a concrete allegation of sexual harassment on his own campus. He may win the lawsuit if it is ever filed (those cases are hard to prove), but that’s beside the point. Everyone in the philosophy world is now pretty certain who he is (he has been named on several philosophy blogs), and his career in academia, if not formally finished, may well be mortally wounded. Several well-known philosophers at other universities are more or less calling for his head. Global justice, indeed.
Amit Agarwal, the Indian WSJ’s personal technology columnist offers 101 useful websites, each of which does something useful very well, and all of which are easy to remember.
I can add one more.
102 tineye.com reverse image source, can often identify where that unlabeled picture came from.
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law“–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
The company explains that renting an imaginary Internet Girlfriend has multiple uses and is much less complicated than the real thing.
Sometimes people need to rent a fake girlfriend for their job. Some employers are biased towards single folks. Often times employers give preference to people in more serious relationships so it can benefit a person to have a fake online girlfriend they can say they are in a long distance relationship with.
Sometimes people hire a fake internet girlfriend to make an ex-girlfriend jealous. In fact, we get a lot of clients for this reason.
Sometimes people don’t want to hear it from their family, they want to avoid the drama all together of the never ending questions about dating so they simply employ a fake internet girlfriend so their family will stop hounding them about finding the right girl.
Sometimes people want to keep certain aspects of their personal life, well personal and private. The one way to do this is to hire a fake internet girlfriend for appearances sake. It avoids all the pesky little questions about why you’ve never been seen dating a girl before.
It isn’t cheap, however. A Fake Internet Girlfriend costs $250 a month, with a minimum three month commitment. Her utility is seriously limited as well since she will never meet you in real life, and will not do sexting.
A study by Pew Research found liberals are so much more intolerant on the Internet than the rest of us that it isn’t even funny.
Not exactly shocking news for those exposed to them for years, but the respected Pew Research Center has determined that political liberals are far less tolerant of opposing views than regular Americans.
In a new study, the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life Project confirmed what most intelligent Americans had long sensed. That is, whenever they are challenged or confronted on the hollow falsity of their orthodoxy — such as, say, uniting diverse Americans — liberals tend to respond defensively with anger, even trying to shut off or silence critics. (i.e. photo above of President Obama reacting to Boston hecklers.)
The new research found that instead of engaging in civil discourse or debate, fully 16% of liberals admitted to blocking, unfriending or overtly hiding someone on a social networking site because that person expressed views they disagreed with. That’s double the percentage of conservatives and more than twice the percentage of political moderates who behaved like that.
The proportion jumps even higher when someone on a social site disagrees with a liberal’s post.
Only 1% of moderates would block or shut out someone who dared to disagree with them, compared to 11% of liberals, whose rate was nearly three times that of conservatives.
Of course, it is not as if liberal intolerance is restricted to opposing expression on the Internet…
We’ve recently learned that it isn’t only Harvard which has acquired a NSFW site where students (and/or alumni) post naked pictures.
Unlike Harvard’s gay-interest-only site, the Brown site is coed and publishes student-written porn.
There wasn’t any Internet back during the consulate of Plancus, but I expect we also had an adequate quantity of horny exhibitionists willing to post personal pictures on these kinds of sites back then, too.
Greg Rutter’s Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You’re a Loser or Old or Something.
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The California State Senate voted 28-8 on June 1 to exempt its members from gun-control laws applying to other Californians. The only news source reporting was the Washington Times which neglected to quote or identify the bill.
Eve Cassidy was a beautiful girl with an extraordinary voice, but she never received a major recording company contract because her repertoire was too eclectic. When she died of melanoma at age 33 in 1996, her recordings were posthumously published, and the album Songbird became a number one hit in England selling a million copies. YouTube has a collection of her recordings.
Cade Metz, in the Register, outlines the technological strategy that allows Wikileaks to use host-servers on US soil, while enjoying impunity from interference by federal authorities.
WikiLeaks is hosting its cache of confidential US Statement Department cables on US-based Amazon servers, just as it did with with the classified Iraq War documents it released last month.
According to NetCraft’s records, the whistle-blowing website is mirroring the diplomatic cables on Amazon’s US-based EC2 service and France-based servers operated by French ISP Octopuce. The main WikiLeaks site is mirrored on Ireland-based Amazon servers.
WikiLeaks also uses a US-based domain name registrar (Dynadot) and a US-based DNS service (EveryDNS).
In theory, if the US government decides that WikiLeaks has broken the law in publishing federal intelligence data, it could move to have WikiLeaks booted from such US-based servers. But WikiLeaks could simply fall back on its core servers — presumably still hosted by “bulletproof” Swedish hosting outfit PRQ — and the feds would take a PR hit.
Clearly, this is how WikiLeaks reads the situation, as it continues to use Amazon’s US-based “cloud” service to accomodate extra demand for its data.
In an added twist, the whistle-blower is also using software from Seattle-based outfit Tableau to visually map its trove of leaked diplomatic cables. Tableau grew out of a project run by the US Department of Defense.
I missed the Antoine Dodson “Bed Intruder” meme, until it finally hit the New York Times and was forwarded by some classmates.
Viral videos tend to have a short lifespan online. The best ones might attract a few million views on YouTube and get a mention on a late-night talk show before fading into oblivion.
The Gregory Brothers used footage of Glenn Beck on Fox News in a Web video series called “Auto-Tune the News.â€
But in one of the stranger twists in recent pop-music history, a musical remake of a local news clip transcended YouTube fame and reached the Billboard Hot 100 chart in August.
It was a rare case of a product of Web culture jumping the species barrier and becoming a pop hit.
The song’s source material could not have been more unlikely: A local TV news report from Huntsville, Ala., about an intruder who climbed into a woman’s bed and tried to assault her.
But with some clever editing and the use of software that can turn speech into singing, the Gregory Brothers, a quartet of musicians living in Brooklyn, transformed an animated and angry rant by the victim’s brother into something genuinely catchy.
The resulting track, “Bed Intruder Song,†has sold more than 91,000 copies on iTunes, and last week it was at No. 39 on the iTunes singles chart. Its video has been viewed more than 16 million times on YouTube.
And to top it off, the song was No. 89 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the week of Aug. 2.
The viral amusement item of the day is this dry erase board photo presentation by a cute young thing allegedly composed and sent to co-workers on the occasion of her quitting her job.
If the story really is on the up-and-up, I would guess that it will quickly attract new job offers. I have my doubts though. She is too pretty, and the storyline is too pat.
As predicted, it was a hoax. These perfect little gems that completely fit our expectations always are.
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Another UPDATE, a few more minutes later.
But, wait! Prankster brother tells Media Memo, No, no, “Jenny’s very real.” An update is promised for tomorrow. “Jenny” may be appearing on Jay Leno and Good Morning, America.
