{"id":1627,"date":"2016-10-09T19:05:54","date_gmt":"2016-10-09T19:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/?p=1627"},"modified":"2016-10-13T14:23:03","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T14:23:03","slug":"michael-lacour-has-rebranded-himself-as-michael-jules-at-www-michaeljules-xyz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/1627","title":{"rendered":"Michael Lacour has rebranded himself as Michael Jules at www.michaeljules.xyz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Lacour is a former aspiring political scientist famous for standing accused of a major academic fraud that made national news, embarrassed huge names in his field, led to a major retraction, and drove him from academia forever while netting his whistleblower a job at the prestigious Stanford University.  So naturally I&#8217;d be curious what Lacour would do next, and I&#8217;ve been following his main sites, http:\/\/www.michaeljules.xyz and http:\/\/www.beautifuldataviz.com\/ , for a while.  <\/p>\n<p>The takeaway is that the ever-enterprising guy didn&#8217;t stay down. He&#8217;s been learning to code and develop himself as a data scientist.  www.beautifuldataviz.com is still clunky, but it&#8217;s much less unbeautiful than it was six months ago, so I figure he&#8217;s coming along well enough on his plan B.<\/p>\n<p>It all makes me wonder what I&#8217;d do if I ever got in the same kind of mess, and what would others do about me.  They&#8217;re questions worth thinking about.  Most people probably don&#8217;t care and would be wary but ultimately ready to forgive me, though not to the point of ever letting me back in the ivory towers again.  That&#8217;s probably justified.  I imagine that a small number of others would continue to dog me no matter what I tried for next, and try to protect the whole world from me by spreading my old and new names on the Internet.  On that I&#8217;m torn.  There&#8217;s no evidence that Lacour showed any contrition, so maybe everyone should be protected from him.  But suffering is a private thing, and it&#8217;s funny to make permitting the guy to ever breathe again contingent on his satisfying you that he feels bad or learned the right lesson.  Assuming I&#8217;m actually not a sociopath, I&#8217;d want to draw the line at academia and assert my freedom to move forward from there.  But maybe I shouldn&#8217;t be allowed near schools of any kind.  So when you&#8217;ve been shunned at a national scale, what doors should remain open to you in even the eyes of your most toxic schadenfriends?  The answer is clear, and Michael Jules Lacour nailed it: even the most dogged of your haters are gonna fall off if your idea of moving forward is to enter the private sector.  There&#8217;s a fine history there: exiled Harvard primatologist Marc Hauser went into consulting I think. And sociopath or not, capitalism is made for thriving off of people with a name for exploiting the trust of others, and if it doesn&#8217;t affect the bottom line, the market is more than ready to forgive it.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t say what I&#8217;d do.  Start a business. JK.  Actually, I already know my plan B: get back into the organizing of worker-owned businesses. But I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;ll come to that.  On the market now.  Wish me luck.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Lacour is a former aspiring political scientist famous for standing accused of a major academic fraud that made national news, embarrassed huge names in his field, led to a major retraction, and drove him from academia forever while netting his whistleblower a job at the prestigious Stanford University. So naturally I&#8217;d be curious what &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/1627\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Michael Lacour has rebranded himself as Michael Jules at www.michaeljules.xyz<\/span><\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1627"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1739,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1627\/revisions\/1739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}