Saturday, April 24, 2010

Orlando Figes- Too Stupid To Troll

Academic feuds are notoriously unpleasant and vicious, so the fact that historian Orlando Figes wrote psuedonymous reviews of his rivals works on Amazon isn't remarkable.

What is incredible is that he is such a complete moron who can't even troll properly. He posts a number of comments praising himself and trashing his rivals which might be enough to raise suspicions that he might be him. So how did he cover his trail? He used the nom de plume "Historian" as well as "Orlando Birkbeck". Orlando is a historian at Birkbeck just in case you hadn't guessed.

How can anyone that stupid be a professor?

2 comments:

Macheath said...

A Freudian interpretation would argue that it was a subconscious guilty desire to be discovered and punished that led to his choice of name.

I prefer the theory that the man's massive academic ego couldn't cope with the idea of publishing anything anonymously and missing out on the attention.

Ross said...

Ha ha. I thnk you ae correct.