I find it ironic that you think the humour piece is the best summary, given that a significant part of it is about the permanent damage done. So permanent the damage, yet only two days later you can't even get her name right.
The vast bulk of people who have commented in the last couple of days will have forgotten her name in several months.
Interesting that even after reading all or most of the account you still refer to the victim as "she". For awhile, I also thought the victim as a "she" and I'm wondering if that clouded the account at all or there was any purpose to including the top picture.
I bet you could take the tales about her, change her name to someone else who's well known in the valley, fix the pronouns, and it would look positive. Someone should try taking this story, washing it through sed, and re-posting it somewhere to see what the reaction is then.
...on the other hand, the article notes that she hated being called that.
Calling her by her real name is a bit more respectful, and when people click on the link without recognizing the name (as I did), it serves as a good reminder that she was a regular human being born with an unfortunate medical condition.
Yeah, I got to the first "this isn't her real name but that's what journalists do..." and rolled my eyes. I thought that was a one time thing, but it continued. I'll look for a summary in the comments here.
The most funny thing of this article, is the writer branding Sydney a She, because it gets argumentative...And I wont comment more or serious trouble will brew.. :-)
I was sympathetic to her plight up until the 'personal impact' part. It seems to me that the author is using hyperbole when describing her physical/emotional impact on herself and her family to gain some form of sympathy from her audience. With statements like this:
>This strife has shattered all of our lives like nothing else before.
Based on this statement it seems to me the author and her family have yet to face any real travesty. There are varying degrees of severity in harassment and to me this case seems mild to moderate and not in any way a cause for the health effects described. I also believe it also offers some insight into character and possible extreme sensitivity to perceived injustices/slights. I also agree with other posters here in regards to only getting one side of the story, much context is missing.
> Most of the other evidence, in particular her occasional slips mixing up father and husband have no real evidentiary value. Confusing relatives with each other is something that people with incipient memory failure do literally all the time.
My nephew's name starts with the same letter as my own name, and consequently, only he and I can consistently get the two names straight. It's a bit of an extreme case, but anyone with a decent-sized family can probably attest to the inability to get even their immediate relatives correctly identified 100% of the time correctly, and this is far before anyone starts getting senile.
What a bitter, twisted thing to write about a dead person.
It seems her husbands problems have become a large part of her identity, and what greater way to feel better than write an opinion piece about how shitty he was in the NYT?
Well if you leave out her name, then readers will never see her as an individual and will only think of her as a wife of an important man. People on HN and even the author too will go into denial about this and give you some bullshit about "recognizability" or "editorialization" but that is the real reason because they both hate women and are also too cowardly to admit it.
The vast bulk of people who have commented in the last couple of days will have forgotten her name in several months.
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