"Extrapolated" Conclusions

Judd Bagley, the proprietor of the blog "AntiSocialMedia," maintains in his latest posting there that nobody has ever shown anything he's said to be wrong.

Then he adds a neat little parenthetical qualification, for which I will personally take credit. He writes, "Yet, with a single (quickly rectified) exception, every conclusion extrapolated here has proven accurate."

The exception that I presume he has in mind involves a reporter named Susan Antilla, of Bloomberg News, who has written critically of Mr. Bagley's favorite company, Overstock dot com. That's always a good way to draw Bagley's attention, which it seems to have done.

Antilla is also the ex-wife of Dennis Leibowitz. For the particulars of why that's important to Mr. Bagley see what I wrote in September.

Anyway, after Bagley went out on a limb on an IV bulletin board and referred to the present-tense Antilla-Leibowitz marriage, he was immediately informed of the divorce. He chose not to believe it, and to write up his disbelief in Antisocial. He even suggested Antilla's divorce lawyer may have failed to file the appropriate papers, so she may still be married without knowing it.

Now, this is a matter on which there can't be a lot of room for confusion. I happen to be a member of the bar of the state of Connecticut (that is itself a matter of public record, as easily verified as is marital status!) and I know that a divorce can be verified with ease.

Anyway, after this was explained sufficiently to Bagley, he eventually deleted the babbling from his website. Since he's been called on it before, I do believe that's the "one exception" to his accurate "extrapolations" he now acknowledges so fleetingly.

We shouldn't let him off the hook too easily here, especially given the odd word "extrapolation" itself. He made a false statement of fact on an easily verified matter. What was supposedly extrapolated?

I'm not inclined to accept his implicit factual claim (in that parentheses) that this was his only factual error. He hasn't hired me as a fact checker, after all. But I'm pretty confident that is the factual error that inspired the parenthesis, because of an exchange he and I had on the subject in September of last year.

At that time, Bagley e-mailed me to note that I had referred to "demonstrably false assertions" of his. He asked which assertions were those. I replied, referencing Susan Antilla. He responded to that, claiming that he hadn't made the marital claim about Susan Antilla in his blog, only on IV. That was a demonstrably false assertion itself, as I pointed out to him in his reply. Deleting something from a blog doesn't mean it was never there. Deletion isn't a memory hole.

He replied telling me, "Forget Susan Antilla," [I'm sure he would like me to] and asking me for other examples of his falsehood, on the theory that learning of them would help him develop as a writer. At this point I was getting tired of the game, and I didn't reply.

As I had expected, he soon thereafter posted a very long blog entry in which my name plays a very small part. He puts me on a list of his blog's "harshest critics" and complains in general that none of us have replied to his e-mail. "My e-mail must be broken" he says, in what I suppose is meant to be irony or sarcasm or something stylish.

Just in case anybody who read that has now found your way here. Mr. Bagley's e-mail isn't broken. I did reply to his initial request about whether he had said anything demonstrably false, and I pointed out to him that he had. He told me to "Forget Susan Antilla." I did so, and accordingly did not respond subsequently. Now I see that all of this rates a parentheses from him.

Ah, so I have not lived and breathed entirely in vain.

Why am I taking note of it only now, five months later? Well, because Bagley doesn't occupy many of my neurons for very long and I've let time slip by occupied with other matters.

But I come back to it because I do feel a certain non-emotive indignation at being listed, as I now have been, as among Mr. Bagley's blog's "harshest critics." That's language that just makes you say: huh? If I'm among that blog's harshest critics, it leads a charmed life indeed. I've written of it rarely, and if any "harshness" has crept into my writing on the subject, I'm unaware of it. Correcting the Antilla error isn't harshness. It's fact finding. Positing the absense of any need for an article about Mr. Bagley on wikipedia may be as "harsh" as I've gotten. But, hey, there's no article on wikipedia about me, either, and that's honky-dory at this end.

Wikipedia

There's a brief article on a fellow called Judd Bagley in wikipedia, and there's an "Articles for Deletion" page on Bagley as well.

I find myself in an odd position here, because something I wrote has apparently been cited as one of the reasons why Judd is notable enough to warrant an encyclopedia article of his own.

Editor Phil Sandifer wrote, "Bagley is involved in a financial scandal with coverage in the New York Post, New York Times, Bloomberg, and the HedgeWorld Daily."

Well, I wrote the last of those. In fact, Bagley is mentioned exactly three times in the pages of HedgeWorld, and each of those three times the byline is mine. Here's one of them.

But I don't think he warrants a wikipedia entry of his own. He's worth the sporadic mention he gets because of his position as "director of social media" at Overstock, a company I've mentioned more than one here I think.

I might as well mention, though, that Susan Antilla, a finance journalist, wrote a column for Bloomberg in February of this year on what she called the "bizaare battle against naked shorts" being waged by Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Mr. Bagley. The gist of the column was that although Mr. Byrne is "pro at creating havoc [he] isn't so good at creating profits," as indicated by Overstock's history.

This Antilla column generated an odd response from Mr. Bagley on the InvestorVillage message board. He referred to Dennis H. Leibowitz, founder of the New York hedge fund firm Act II Capital LLC, as Ms. Antilla's husband. He also said that this provides "a wee bit of context" on her column -- he left, and I think he meant to leave, the implication that the Leibowitz/Antilla marriage is itself a microcosm of a broader hedge fund/financial media conspiracy.

On March 14, on his AntiSocialMedia web site (which Mr. Bagley appears to maintain of his own initiative, outside the scope of his employment at Overstock), Mr. Bagley acknowledged that he had read on another web site or blog that Ms. Antilla and Mr. Leibowitz are divorced. He responded, "I went on to spend about 10,000 moments online searching for evidence of that divorce, yet found no record of the dissolution of the Antilla-Leibowitz union. In fact, I'm on the verge of advising Ms. Antilla to ask her divorce lawyer for her money back."

The divorce lawyer in question can keep his fee, though. The records of the Family Division of the Superior Court for the State of Connecticut in Stamford clearly show that Ms. Antilla filed for divorce on Feb. 2, 2005. The marriage was formally dissolved Oct. 31, 2006, months in advance of the Bloomberg column that drew Mr. Bagley's effort at that "wee bit" of contextualizing.

The nature of social media is such that Mr. Bagley was soon directed to this document, and backed down from an impossible position, acknowledging the divorce.

People outside Mr. Bagley's own limited social circle seem to mention him chiefly in conexts like that -- contexts in which he made demonstrably false assertions. Hardly a sufficient reason to give him a wikipedia entry of his own, IMHO.

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P.S. Subsequent to my composition of the above, the Bagley article was in fact deleted from wikipedia, pursuant to its Afd procedure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Judd_Bagley_%282nd_nomination%29