Aaminah didn’t say that. I said that.

jb: Aaminah, I think M. was saying that Amanda cited Huang in her article. I don’t see where. Does anyone else?

This is correct. The citation is at the bottom of the original RH Reality Check article published April 2d, not in the text itself. I suspect that’s part of the reason why AlterNet cut it entirely when AlterNet ran the piece; different organizations have different citation guidelines.

Ah, found it now. I was looking at the alternet article. My mistake, she did cite one woman of color originally. I don’t think it excuses her from not citing anyone else who influenced her, but yes, that is something.

jb: But the focus of Amanda’s article (as well as the focus of the current debate) was not Asian women or white women or men. Perhaps her original article should have been broader, but if you do feel that way, you should probably take it up with Amanda.

Wow, you really missed the point. The point was that she did link to a woman of color in the original article as related posts — just not a Latina woman of color. See: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/04/02/can-a-person-be-illegal

Nope, I think you missed my point. My point was that in an article where she herself writes pretty much exclusively about Latina women of color, it would have been better to cite a Latina woman of color. Perhaps she should have broadened her focus to other immigrants, but again, you would have to take that up with her. But, thank you for pointing out that she did cite at least one woman of color. I think that most people missed that because it did not show up in the alternet article. Which is a problem with alternet, rather than with Amanda.

Also, point me to where I made any of the fallacies you mentioned.

Re-read the thread: towards the middle I started citing most of them directly.

The only fallacies you cited in relation to me were “straw man” fallacies. There may be some truth in this, particularly the one post I made in anger (BFP’s must read like a legal journal, etc.) but again, the rest due to a misunderstanding on your part.

jb: I would be quite angry with myself if I EVER conflated correlation and causation or committed post hoc ergo propter hoc, but I honestly don’t think I did.

There are other fallacies, you know. The ones I’ve seen you rely on are equivocation (stealing == appropriation) and straw men (where cited earlier).

That’s funny because from my understanding, if you use a word (and someone else misunderstands what meaning associated with that word you are using), it’s only equivocation if you were glossing over the fact that you are using a different meaning or if you were intending to deceive the other person. I haven’t accused you of equivocation for your use of the word “stealing,” though I thought about it (I decided that you aren’t actually trying to gloss over which definition you are using either). You insist that someone must be conscious of what they are doing in order to “steal” something. Actually, I think my definition is the more common one.

To be fair, you really don’t have to deal with those in most types of experimental research.

Nope, can’t think of a time that I’ve had to deal with either in that context, but I still know what they are.

most of that was an misunderstanding on your part of what I was saying and who I was even saying it to.

It wasn’t a misunderstanding on my part. When you say that you want “some recognition that it’s not all about Amanda” in a discussion with someone who’s not Amanda, then you’re implying that you want the recognition to come from the person you’re speaking to.

Bullshit. I can talk about what I want to see from Amanda to whomever I want. The context of the comment made it pretty clear that I was talking about Amanda.

I don’t think that Amanda was influenced by BFP just because BFP said these things before Amanda did. I think BFP influenced Amanda because Amanda was a regular reader of her blog

I hate to break it to you, but that is what a post hoc ergo propter hoc error looks like in a non-scientific setting. It boils down to “BFP wrote about these ideas before Amanda and Amanda read it, ergo, Amanda was thinking about it and is guilty of stealing.”

Maybe if I had actually claimed that Amanda was thinking about it. I claimed that Amanda read it. In reading it, she was influenced by it. If you like, we can drop the word “stealing.” Amanda is guilty of appropriation, or of participating in appropriation.

The problem is that people are more influenced by the individuals they physically interact with than by people they read. Reading’s abstract, and isn’t likely to sink in if it’s read alongside numerous other authors on numerous other topics.

BFP wrote about these issues a lot. Virtually every day, sometimes. Amanda was a regular reader.

because the similarities were just so eerie

Then I suggest you get the immigration law articles I recommended — the similarities between BFP’s ideas and theirs are equally creepy.

I believe you. Are you sure Amanda has read those law articles? Either way, I’m sure she was influenced by BFP since I know that she actually did read her, so I don’t see that it matters too much.

because Amanda has a poor track record when it comes to racial issues

I’m not terribly familiar with her work, so I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to. Do you mean she’s stealing because she wants to make up for the track record, or the stealing’s in keeping with the track record?

I mean that it’s in keeping with her track record. Which by itself is not enough to “prove” anything, but yes, she’s done this sort of thing before.

But, I don’t see how any appropriation is not “stealing,” in the sense of taking something that isn’t yours without permission.

Because ideas aren’t owned. Stealing’s about ownership; appropriation is about structural inequities.

Let’s just drop the word stealing already. I don’t care what it’s called. I guess I’ll just repeat that Amanda fucked up.