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The guy who pretended he was running a legit exchange and hedge fund, lied to lenders, spent customer's funds, acted like an altruist (while laughing about it being bullshit) and made dark political donations is a "scapegoat by the media"?
0%, in fact 60 Minutes just did a puff piece hagiography for him on Sunday:
https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/SLLumNQElCg4KvRF7GUbpKX8_VAJ...
Other exchanges run by other people also committed crimes, but those crimes aren't what SBF is on trial for. He's on trial for his own crimes.
It's an Old Testament thing, the original meaning can easily be looked up. Some take the scapegoat as a metaphor for the New Testament Jesus (who is viewed as sinless by most followers). Ergo, we lay the sins of the community upon the innocent goat, and send him out in to the desert.
Regardless, I'll give you that goats can be ornery little fuckers, but I don't think they do a lot of "sinning" in the biblical sense.
Regardless, clearly the colloquial definition is what the original poster was referring to anyway, since any Christian must necessarily believe that SBF along with every other human alive today is subject to original sin. So it's a useless term for any practical purpose if you believe that scapegoats must be sinless and are talking in a strictly biblical sense.
In the figurative or colloquial sense of the expression, a scapegoat is a person being punished for something other people did. They might also be a bad person in other unrelated ways, but what makes them a scapegoat is the part where they're punished for something they didn't do, for something other people did. You cannot be a scapegoat if you actually did the thing you're being punished for.
In both cases, the scapegoat is punished for something somebody else did. The biblical meaning and the colloquial meaning align neatly, there is no meaningful distinction here. SBF is to be punished for his own crimes, not for the crimes of other cryptobros, so he is not in any sense a scapegoat. Not in the biblical sense, nor in the colloquial sense.
Suppose I'm a bank robber. The feds catch me and and throw me in jail, but they fail or neglect to catch some other bank robbers. Am I a scapegoat in the colloquial sense? No. I'm not a scapegoat because I am in fact a bank robber being punished for bank robbery. I'm not being punished for the bank robberies perpetrated by other bank robbers, I'm being punished for my own crimes. Since SBF will be punished for his own crimes, not for the crimes of other cryptobros, he is not a scapegoat in any sense.
I don't really know or care about the specifics of the SBF case and I'm not saying this applies to SBF. All I am saying is that at least two people in this discussion disagree with your understanding of the colloquial definition (me and the person you originally replied to with this criticism). So on that basis alone I don't think you have a right to be so assured in your definition.
When you've actually done a lot of crime, you're not a scapegoat for the village's sins, you're an actual sinner getting his just deserts.
No, it’s the investors who were wrong.