[jchallis]

I used to tutor math and physics near Bloom's office in Timothy Dwight. My main association with the man is that he would come on strong to every female English graduate student he could reach.

When #MeToo first came to national consciousness about men in arts and letters who completely abused their position to take advantage of women, I thought of Harold. How could these giants of arts and letters abuse so many? Because no one spoke out.

It does sound near the end of his life, he got some of the medicine he deserved: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/12/16/students-organize-...

[dlivingston]

Regarding Bloom's accuser,

> In 2004, Wolf wrote an article for New York magazine accusing literary scholar Harold Bloom of a "sexual encroachment" more than two decades earlier by touching her thigh. She said that what she alleged Bloom did was not harassment, either legally or emotionally, and she did not think herself a "victim", but that she had harbored this secret for 21 years. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf

[tzs]

For those who have never heard of "sexual encroachment" and are wondering how it differs from "sexual harassment", Wikipedia covers it [1].

Briefly, she did not feel harassed or traumatized or victimized by it, but rather that her education was corrupted. She says: "Sexual encroachment in an educational context or a workplace is, most seriously, a corruption of meritocracy; it is in this sense parallel to bribery. I was not traumatized personally, but my educational experience was corrupted. If we rephrase sexual transgression in school and work as a civil-rights and civil-society issue, everything becomes less emotional, less personal. If we see this as a systemic corruption issue, then when people bring allegations, the focus will be on whether the institution has been damaged in its larger mission".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf#Alleged_sexual_encr...

[soulofmischief]

When you hear a phrase like "sexual encroachment", you may prepare yourself for a modern pseudo-feminist spiel about how any kind of unwanted physical contact is sexual assault, but Wolf's explanation of her use of the phrase and her emphasis on its distinctions while maintaining its corrupt nature is spot on and very appreciated.

A couple weeks ago my neighbor was drunk and kept trying to make physical contact with me, grabbing my hand, hugging, touching me, despite me incessantly asking her to stop. I didn't feel victimized or assaulted (I have actually been sexually assaulted by another male and it is different), but I was still at a loss for words to explain to her the severity of her actions and how different it would be if our genders were reversed. Sexual encroachment is probably a good phrase for it.

[mellosouls]

Comment removed.

[SomeOldThrow]

What does this have to do with the accusation? It has nothing to do with his being significant except through the window of his abusing his power.

[mellosouls]

I think you have misread my comment.

[elliekelly]

Perhaps I've misread and/or misunderstood your comment as well. It seems you're suggesting that she's an unreliable witness and her accusations shouldn't be given much (or any) weight because her academic and professional work is of low quality.

[SomeOldThrow]

I don’t believe I have. What do claims of plagiarism have to do with claims of sexual harassment? Your post seems to defame the alleged victim.

[mellosouls]

That wasn't the intent; but as you and at least one other have read it that way I've removed it.

[carterschonwald]

When I was an undergrad there 2006-2010, his perviness was well known across campus. Female dorm residents had lots of stories

[vixen99]

And in effect, now there's one more with further reach.

[WheelsAtLarge]

>>How could these giants of arts and letters abuse so many?

We tend to give people that are accomplished in a field an aura of saintliness that they don't deserve. The reality is that once people attain a bit of power many find it hard not to abuse it. And also, people around them tend to ignore the abuses. The only way to fix it is to call the abusers out on their behavior but it's hard for most people to do it because of all the trouble it brings even if it's 100% true. It's easier to give it a pass and hope someone else will do something about it.

[whiddershins]

You can do as you like, but for me it is a decent heuristic to not speak ill of the dead.

I, personally, really don’t enjoy reading about people using someone’s death or funeral as a platform for maligning their life, regardless of the accuracy and poignancy of the claims.

Would you bring up this discussion in front of a grieving family member? Do you think it impossible someone already in pain might read what is said on the internet?

There’s a concept I like that even the bitterest of enemies allow the dead to be buried in peace.

[oska]

> it is a decent heuristic to not speak ill of the dead

I take somewhat the opposite view: once someone is dead they can no longer be hurt by anything bad said about them. Defamation law also follows the same principle.

Not that I want to speak ill of Harold Bloom. I only knew him through reading The Western Canon, which I found a very rewarding read, and for his disdain for the Harry Potter mania, where I felt the same way.

[ncmncm]

The law favors the idea that the dead are beyond harm.

[keiferski]

Writing a short call-out comment on an anonymous internet forum is easy. Thinking deeply about the appropriate time and place to bring up and challenge a person’s perceived unethical past deeds is difficult.

[angry_octet]

Your feelings are really of no consequence compared to those who were victims. If you have a personal interaction to weigh in the positive side of the scales, speak now.

[trianglem]

I feel like coming on strongly to women is something desirable now, a drastic deviation from how I used to think less than half a decade ago.

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

[_edo]

I understand why you don't like this comment.

I don't understand why this is worth your commenting on but you're silent on the airing of somebody's dirty laundry between their death and their funeral.

What this signals to the Hacker News community is disturbing to the extent that I'm not sure I want to spend any more time here.

[dang]

It's off topic, unsubstantive, and inflammatory. It takes the thread in an extraneous flamebait direction, just what the site guidelines ask people not to. This seems obvious. Am I missing something?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The question of airing dirty laundry immediately on someone's death is more complex. I agree that accusations against Bloom should not dominate discussion over the significant things he did. But they're not off topic, and the social injunction against speaking ill of the dead isn't shared by the whole community. We can argue reasonably about how to handle all of that. From my perspective, there aren't guidelines violations in those comments, but the various other things moderators do to encourage substantive discussion are applicable.

But I see no such nuance in "I feel like coming on strongly to women is something desirable now". That doesn't mean the GP was posting in bad faith, but it's the sort of post we have to moderate if we don't want the thread to burst into flames.

[jacques_chester]

Or anywhere, really.

[emmelaich]

> Because no one spoke out.

Did you?

[jlilbgusfhd]

Yeah that's not cool.

What's also not cool is to judge people from another time by the standards of today.

[jerf]

You shouldn't speak ill of the dead like this. It is uncouth and crass for all sorts of reasons. It doesn't mean you need to forget or ignore it, it just means... today is not the day. More days will come.

[0_gravitas]

Not OP but I've never liked the notion of "too soon" as a reason for not doing/saying things, it feels very arbitrary. And I don't know much about the person of subject but I will speak ill of anyone living or dead if they are someone worth speaking ill of.

[jeffdavis]

There are two separate issues: speaking ill of the dead at all; and speaking disrespectfully too soon after a death.

Speaking ill of the dead at all is generally not good because the person is no longer able to defend their reputation, and no remedy can be made. The dead is no longer in a position of power to be removed, nor can they improve themselves out of remorse. So of something ill is to be said, saying it after death is too late, not too soon.

"Too soon" is problematic because you are using a death as an opportunity to amplify your own message, and because it can amplify the grief of those left behind.

[p1necone]

I don't know that I consider calling people out for shitty things they've done to be "disrespectful". Calling people out for shitty things they haven't done would be be disrespectful.

[smallnamespace]

The problem with that attitude is that we all live in glass houses.

Unless you truly believed that if we were to go through your life with a fine toothed comb, nobody could find anything at all objectionable?

[fzeroracer]

What about those that were harmed by the individual in question? Does it make sense to shame them into silence when they deal with grief and pain of their own?

We should remember people as they were in totality. That means recognizing that people are human, and humans can be remarkably awful to some while putting on a good face to others.

[milemi]

You totally convinced me, I’m so sorry now for all the bad stuff I said about Hitler.

[jerf]

It is not for the deceased; it is for the family of the deceased and others left behind. They are grieving and don't need to also have to deal with rumors adding to their pain. They didn't do it.

It is also a simple application of the Golden Rule; you would not care for everyone around you to take your death as an opportunity to slag you, neither should you do it to you other fellow humans, all condemned to die one day as well.

There will be more days. It doesn't have to be done today.

[Barrin92]

>It is also a simple application of the Golden Rule; you would not care for everyone around you to take your death as an opportunity to slag you

if I ever turn into someone who gets a reputation for molesting young college students drag me all you want, hell rent a billboard for all I care and chuck my remains into the trashcan.

If I ever figured out that one of my family members engaged in behaviour like this I would not mind it one single bit if their accusers spoke about it the day they died, the only thing I'd be sad about is that I didn't know sooner.

[TurkishPoptart]

>if I ever turn into someone who gets a reputation for molesting young college students drag me all you want, hell rent a billboard for all I care and chuck my remains into the trashcan.

>If I ever figured out that one of my family members engaged in behaviour like this I would not mind it one single bit if their accusers spoke about it the day they died, the only thing I'd be sad about is that I didn't know sooner.

He touched a woman's thigh and then died.

[oska]

The family of a controversial public figure would do better not to expose themselves to public discussion of that person soon after their death but to grieve privately.

And if people are speaking ill of the dead it's highly likely that people were speaking ill of them before they died too, so any 'ill-speak' is hardly likely to be news to them.

(I'm speaking from principle here; I personally have nothing ill to say about Harold Bloom).

[beerandt]

To me, it's more about giving someone a chance to defend themselves. If you said the same thing to their face when they were alive, then fine. Continue to say it after they pass. But to all of a sudden have an opinion, or to air a grudge that you've never thought worthy of speaking about publicly before? That's cowardice.

And yes, I'm including victims who felt they had something to lose. Those are the claims someone has the greatest interest in defending themselves against.

[mturmon]

But then we would not have Hunter S. Thompson’s scathing take on Richard Nixon, published in Rolling Stone just after Nixon’s death:

“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

I guess I’m arguing that the right words are a function of the context.

[master-litty]

I understand your sentiment but to clarify, that is indeed ignoring the bad behavior. It's placation, even if temporary.

And it's polite. There's nothing wrong with keeping these thoughts to yourself. With rare exception, it certainly doesn't harm anyone.

But when a person leaves this world, they take all their good and all their bad with them -- I think it's acceptable to acknowledge what we are left with. To some, the striking acknowledgement is that we are one harasser less.

The conversation will naturally steer towards the good if it outweighs the bad. Perhaps I'm being too insensitive; Those are my thoughts for the moment, anyway.

[djrobstep]

Actually it's very good to speak ill of the dead when they have done bad things.

When we are all thinking about them and their legacy is an opportune time to discuss the underlying issues. How else can we accurately remember the dead, and learn from their actions?

[angry_octet]

I don't know about Bloom, but it has become abundantly clear of late that many sexual predators and generally nasty people were very good at covering up their misdeeds, and enabled in so doing by institutions and silent conspirators. I'm completely over this idea 'yes he may have abused X, but he made great thing Y, let's remember him as a great fellow'. It's time for complex appraisals, and to say 'yes, he was a shit' if that was the reality, even if some illusions are shattered.