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as a side note I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone handle it with such poise as she did

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Oh absolutely. It’s still apples to oranges comparing how anyone reacts to a mob of peers including friends (‘friends’) with how they might (or uh have) to the scarier but less reputationally threatening mobs of pseudonymous MRAs.

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oh yes, it’s a different ordeal from the ‘same side’ one, and who knows how she’d do with that, but fate gave her the one she was fit to respond to with a wry smile

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(whisperingly: I kind of think she'd do much worse in that scenario. But worth disclosing that I'm a bit to the right of Phoebe on this particular subject. Not enough to want to actually dive into it though. Hence the whispering.)

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This type of thing makes me unduly nervous about my own dissertation, which is silly, but it’s interesting to me how some people outside academia perceuve a lot of importance in dissertations and MA theses that isn’t realistic. A conservative or centrist or someone was posting a lot of ridiculous-seeming disses and theses on X to make fun of, which like, sure, some of them did seem laughable, but an MA thesis in a humanities department doesn’t mean much anymore and even a dissertation isn’t peer-reviewed or really published. Maybe the fact that these documents are often available publicly on Proquest (or wherever) makes people assume they’re academically significant in a way that an actual academic book would be?

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It's very much like this with articles in college newspapers. It used to be, you could be in school and write your articles and at most your classmates would laugh at them. Now it's all online for all to see and every so often a college student is main character'd for this.

But even an academic book or journal article is, at the end of the day, someone's work assignment. How profound is every memo everyone has ever produced? How profound does it need to be not to be pilloried?

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