omg this is so embarrassing

Al Gore's Masculinity Adviser Naomi Wolf wrote a book about "forbidden love" or whatever.

A central claim of her book is that people were executed in England for sodomy as late as the 1830s.

She bases this on seeing the words "death recorded" on a number of sodomy cases.

It turns out "death recorded" doesn't mean that the prisoner was executed, but that the possibility of a death sentence was noted, and then the judge pardoned them.

This is the central claim of her book and she didn't bother to look up the meaning of the phrase. She just... guestimated.

The cringe, it is exquisite.

This would be professional suicide for anyone who was not a Democrat agitator. For them, there is no such thing as professional embarrassment, just alternate pathways to promotion.

More from John Sexton and Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

Imagine spending about nine months writing a book and then going out to promote it and only learning then that a "fact" central to your thesis is just completely wrong, and so your entire book is now not even fit to be pulped.

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:03 PM

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