moving the goalposts

The act of redefining the conditions for victory or completion of a task, either when the original conditions for achieving them were met or whilst the person or group is busy working to achieve the current conditions, in order to prevent them from succeeding. Usually done with malice by a superior or peer looking to exclude or remove people from a group by portraying them as incompetent of not completing the task they keep altering.

When Jake was close to finishing his training, his supervisor who had always hated him started moving the goalposts by claiming that Jake needed four references of work experience instead of two in order to graduate, a condition that nobody else had to meet and with only one day left for the deadline. Jake didn't pass.

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crybully

A bully who harasses their victim, then goes crying fake tears to a person or group of authority or publicity claiming that their victim harassed them, in order to encourage them to wrongly persecute the victim as well.

Des was a notorious crybully, one time he kicked at people building sandcastles in the playground before running off, and by the time we helped clean up those that were hurt, he'd dragged back a teacher and claimed that we'd all ganged up on him!

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