He didn’t lose his positions at ScienceOnline and Scientific American as a punishment for doing bad things, or to somehow ‘pay’ a ‘price’ – as if these jobs were his to give away – he lost them because it became apparent that he wasn’t fit to do them, and in fact never had been.
He did many good things, and of course we shouldn’t ignore them.
But this isn’t a set of scales were balancing. We’re not weighing good against bad here, because the things that Bora fucked up are not optional. ‘Not sexually harassing women’ is not a ‘bonus extra’ in the job description. He harassed professional contacts for sex, brought his employers into very public disrepute, seriously damaged the reputation of a major conference, and undermined relations in the communities in which he worked.
Zuiker's Zivkovic's* apology only came AFTER it was proven that he had lied about the number of women he had harassed. Also, his come back blog completely skipped over why he had been on hiatus in the first place.
These are not the actions I would expect of someone who actually feels remorse but of someone who would rather we all just pretend he didn't act in an incredibly shitty and predatory manner.
*Whoops, mistake on my part with the name. I was distracted with my kids when I posted this and rather than double checking I simply glanced down and used the first Z-name that I spotted in the article. Sorry for the mistake, Zuiker is actually Zivkovic's friend and cofounder of ScienceOnline who is also trying to pretend that none of the incredibly weird and downright disgusting crap Zivkovic did matters anymore.
Luckily Bora himself was so annoyed that I wasn't giving him credit for his creepy, predatory behaviour that he felt compelled to contact me directly.
Apparently the idea of someone getting his name wrong is just so insulting to his sense of self-importance that he would prefer to give even more attention to the fact that he's a terrible human being who uses positions of influence to sexually harass women. Go figure.
