“Although our department approaches philosophy from an analytic perspective, we welcome applications from candidates who have used this perspective to work on underrepresented areas of philosophy, such as Buddhist/Indian metaphysics and epistemology or feminist metaphysics and epistemology.” (Washburn University)
“Demonstrated teaching experience in the history of western philosophy (especially Ancient Greek and/or Early Modern) and/or feminist philosophy.” (Foothill-De Anza Community College District)
“AOS and AOC open but the department has interest in Philosophy of Race or Asian Philosophy.” (University of West Georgia)
“Applicants should possess the terminal degree in philosophy with a concentration in Social-political-legal Philosophy and/or Africana Philosophy or Non-Western Philosophy.” (Morehouse College)
“We seek an individual who can teach Ancient Greek Philosophy and Africana Philosophy or Critical Race Theory.” (St. Lawrence University)
“Such teaching areas include (but are not limited to) courses in critical race theory, African American philosophy, neuroscience and philosophy, applied ethics, courses that draw on philosophical and religious traditions that originated in Africa, Latin America, Asia or the Middle East, and continental philosophy.” (Wellesley College)
“AOS Feminism, Philosophy of Science and Technology, Ethics and Critical Theory” (Stony Brook)
“AOS Philosophy of Race” (John Carroll University)
“We are seeking scholars with expertise in two areas: Native American/Indigenous Arts and Knowledges and Global Indigenous Medicine.” (University of California, Riverside)
“AOC categories Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Gender” (University of North Texas)
“AOC History of Philosophy, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Feminism, Philosophy of Race” (Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago)
“AOC Gender Studies and/or Women’s Studies, Critical Political Economy, Development Studies, Feminist Geography, Economic Anthropology, Political Science or a related field specializing in gender, labor, economic development, global inequality, social change and social justice.” (The University of Washington Tacoma)
“AOS Postcolonial/Decolonial Theories” (Appalachian State University)
“AOC categories Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Gender” (University of North Texas)
“AOC History of Philosophy, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Feminism, Philosophy of Race” (Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago)
“AOC Gender Studies and/or Women’s Studies, Critical Political Economy, Development Studies, Feminist Geography, Economic Anthropology, Political Science or a related field specializing in gender, labor, economic development, global inequality, social change and social justice.” (The University of Washington Tacoma)
“AOS Postcolonial/Decolonial Theories” (Appalachian State University)
“AOS categories Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Social Science, Applied Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Gender, Philosophy of Race, Value Theory” (Pennsylvania State University)
“AOS philosophy of law, feminist philosophy, or history of analytic philosophy” (Illinois Institute of Technology)
“AOS categories Applied Ethics, Biomedical Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy” (Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen)
Stanley, Haslanger and other extremely well connected people have explicitly stated their intentions to change the discipline. And they have power and status. That’s where the danger lies. They want emotive political activism masquerading as philosophy to have higher status than LEMM. The APA’s new direction and its use of funds is an example of how quickly they can move towards their objectives. That’s why we need quiet but effective pushback: don’t hire their fellow travelers, etc.
I think these trends in hiring are directly related the failure of the field to figure out and vocally defend a “canon.” Does one ever have to read, say, The Republic to be a philosophy professor? Should one have struggled with Hume or Kant or Aristotle (or even just some disjunction here) before one is ready to call oneself a competent teacher of philosophy? A lot of people in the field seem to answer the previous two questions with a proud and confident “no.” It’s odd to me how so many of the current voices in the profession are just jumping at the bit to diversify everything to the hilt. Don’t be surprised, then, that when “philosophy” becomes a grab-bag of pet interests that deans and administrators start wondering what philosophers do that can’t be done by other departments.
I think this is a little ridiculous. Do you really think most of these universities care about what Jason Stanley or Sally Haslanger thinks? Most of them probably don’t even know that Jason Stanley has made a pivot towards “ideology studies” or whatever he does now, if they even know much or anything about him to begin with.
I think most of these offers reflect a broader shift in student interest, and an increasing focus on offering courses that will provide high awareness. Students become more politically aware at a younger age. Nowadays, I feel a generational gap even with people 3-4 years younger than I am.
You can complain about it if you want, but a better strategy will be to think about how to make your LEMM courses more attractive to students, and *sell* yourself that way and/or work to hold your nose and develop an AOC in one of these areas. You might even learn something.
That’s interesting, 2:10. You’re saying that politicized philosophy sells more. That’s probably true. But so far philosophy had the virtue of resisting to those external pressures by upholding its own internal standards of rigor, rather than pandering to student tastes. If people start offering popular easy courses inside philosophy it will be the end for those attached to the old conception of philosophy.
The Unity of Science movement didn’t organize crybully campaigns to destroy the lives of emergentists. They had political views, but they were still philosophers, not Stanleys and Lackeys and Haslangers.
Certain types of student have always been interested in light-weight, politicized, low-effort courses. We didn’t accommodate them before, so why should we do it now?
I believe this comment was initially directed at me, so I’d like to respond.
I agree with you that there’s a coterie of high prestige folks who appear to have largely abandoned philosophy to play politics. I’m just not convinced they’re going to change the face of the discipline.
Many of the philosophers I know, although they don’t dare speak about it explicitly, have little patience for “activism masquerading as philosophy.” Indeed, for sociological reasons and due to the figures and topics at the center of the subject, I just can’t see philosophy ever being a very happy home for activists. They’re never going to be able eradicate the people who just want to study Leibniz, causation, or being qua being. The latter folks may not resist forcefully, but their mere presence in philosophy provides a bulwark against activist politics. There are many philosophers–perhaps the majority–who are deeply committed to the “culture of justification” and they have a substantial say in who gets admitted to grad programs, hired, published, and cited.
My semi-optimistic prediction is that the on-going push for “inclusion and diversity” will end up sorting people and departments in ways that SPEP/APA affiliations do at present. We’re probably going to end up with a few departments that transition from doing “analytic” philosophy to mostly doing “analytic” identity politics. But they’ll hardly be the majority and they’ll probably become marginalized over time.
I’ve contributed a fair amount to all the metablogs. I’d like to step in on a certain issue as a referee.
Apparently, among the wholly legitimate comments in the last thread that discussed the merits of Rachel McKinnon’s position and the appropriateness of critically commenting on her influence rather than those of her friends, there was a comment that reproduced an account of a private experience she had blogged about under a pseudonym on a now-defunct personal blog.
First, if that is correct, I hope we all agree that the person who reproduced that here crossed the line and isn’t what this blog represents. However harmful McKinnon’s ideas and influence may be to the profession. she deserves to be treated with basic dignity. We should be able to attack her ideas all we want, but our target should never be her as a person. She, like all the rest of us, is entitled to her own private online life. If she chose to write a blog under a pseudonym and not to reveal that pseudonym to the public, then what she wrote on that blog should be off-limits in the discussion, or at least it shouldn’t be identified with her.
At the same time, McKinnon seems very wrong in saying on her Twitter feed that whoever reproduced that account did so to mock her and saved the passage from her blog in order to humiliate her. That really is a wild and unsubstantiated guess, flying as usual for her to the worst possible interpretation of someone’s motivation and asserting it as an indisputable fact. It’s pretty easy to see what happened if one goes through the conversation in the last thread. There was a legitimate conversation about how easy it is to gain privilege or oppression points and hence power among the Social Justice Warrior crowd in philosophy. McKinnon’s work had been discussed in the vicinity, and someone pointed out that McKinnon is surely sincere and not merely posturing for points because she has committed to her identity as a woman. Another person, who always shows up to criticize the blog, said that talking about McKinnon’s transitioning was off-limits. The reasonable reply given to that was that McKinnon’s status as a trans woman cannot be off-limits because McKinnon herself has spoken extensively about it in public fora. The regular metablog critic kept it up, and it seems the person who posted the excerpt from McKinnon’s blog did so in order to show that McKinnon had in fact discussed these things quite publicly.
There would be nothing illegitimate about that were it not for the fact that the blog was apparently written under a pseudonym and then taken offline. There is no reason at all to think that anyone was mocking McKinnon by reproducing the passage. It was settling a dispute about what is legitimate to say about her by citing, the rest of us thought, something she had said publicly about herself. There is also no reason to believe that the person who reproduced the passage had saved it from before in order to spring this on her. Almost all of us are capable of finding passages from offline blogs. It’s not that difficult.
However, the fact that the blog was not only offline but pseudonymous really seems to settle the case. We all have a right to our private lives, and moreover there was clearly no compelling reason to resort to that quotation to settle the issue. It would have been better to let the ignorant social justice warrior who hangs around here win debate in error than to prove that s/he was wrong using this method, even if there had been no other way to show that McKinnon makes her transgender status extremely public and a major topic of conversation. In fact, there is plenty of other evidence for that.
Moderator, I suggest that the quote from McKinnon in the other thread be removed and that McKinnon herself receive an apology from this blog for the commenter getting out of hand. We should do this not only to rebut the very unfair characterization of what almost all of us are doing here at the hands of people like McKinnon herself, but also because it’s the right thing to do.
I am another long-time reader and occasional contributor to all the metablogs. I approve of this message except for its final paragraph. Only the person who posted the offending material is in a position to issue an apology for doing so. The moderator is not at fault for hosting a forum free of censorship.
We can do better than this, people. We often do.
There are real and deep problems with the philosophy profession. It sometimes seems that we stand upon the edge of a knife. If we stray but a little more, the profession will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true (props if you recognize the reference). I encourage all readers to focus on these professional issues and to, whenever possible, avoid nasty personal attacks, even against those we believe to be deeply mistaken.
What a bullshit characterization of the last thread. You conveniently left out the fact that there was at least one person in the previous thread who actually requested details on RM’s transition and sexual orientation, which was then provided by the person who accessed an offline blog (or had the entry saved for some weird reason). Under Rachel’s own name. What a fake “apology”.
It may be pretentious to think of oneself as among the “voices of reason” on an anything-goes blog. But I think I satisfy that description, and it sounds like you do too, Referee. We should do utterly fill this blog with reasonable thoughts. Bring your friends, and have them post thoughtful things too. This is, really, the only way to resist the crazy and the nasty without becoming crazy and nasty.
“Why not mobilise the vast majority of reasonable human beings to marginalise what is really a tiny but disproportionately noisy minority of extremists?
Last autumn, Facebook launched a project with the thinktank Demos on what it calls “counterspeech”, providing alternatives to extremist narratives, and it has recently begun working with academics at King’s College London who specialise in jihadi propaganda. It doesn’t have all the answers yet, says Milner, but “what does work is the kind of thing Sheryl was talking about: humour and warmth”. If extremists seek to spread fear and shock, counterspeech might aim to make them look small and ridiculous.”
Moderator, I urge you to have a look at Rachel McKinnon’s recent tweets to see how she is choosing to interpret what happened on the main February thread. She has already made a strong public attempt to have this blog discredited and probably worse. In the comment I just wrote, I make the case for removing that otherwise unnecessary comment and apologizing to her on behalf of the poster. Thanks for considering that.
“the blog was apparently written under a pseudonym and then taken offline…almost all of us are capable of finding passages from offline blogs. It’s not that difficult.”
??? It’s not that easy. Offline and pseudonymous and yet the poster knew where exactly what to look for and where at the drop of a hat. Isn’t that just a tad suspicious? Do you really think anybody other than RM is at all interested in her private life? I’m certainly not, and I suspect others feel the same. RM was also accused by the previous metablog proprietor of similar false flags.
I was going to say the same. Whoever knew RMK’s pseudonym and had a copy of her deleted pseudonymous blog has a good chance of being identical to RMK. She already has a history of similar attacks against herself on previous metablogs.
“Sockpuppetry was rampant, which we know because we tracked IP addresses. (Contrary to speculation, the Blogger platform can be modified to accommodate this.) Some commentators would post incendiary (mean-spirited, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transmisogynistic) remarks about Philosopher X, only to reply in the next comment with a spirited defense of Philosopher X. Comments of this sort often originated from the home institution or city of Philosopher X.”
One and the same person was playing both sides, in other words, and whoever it was came from the very “home institution or city” of the subject. At the time, only two people had been the subjects of real attack: Rachel McKinnon and Matt Drabek. So at least one of those two was guilty of sockpuppetry, presumably to get attention? I, along with many others, am pretty sure that Rachel was the guilty party here.
The ‘uncorroborated claim’ objection, used by a Social Justice Warrior. Please don’t make us laugh: we have chapped lips. The claim made by the moderator of that blog was clearly not vindictive: it doesn’t even name the perpetrator or the school where he or she operated from. Why exactly do you think it’s untrustworthy?
Not long ago RM harassed and was harassed by some “TERF”s on Twitter. I don’t think anyone left that exchange happy, so some of them may be here, looking for ways to humiliate her. If that’s what’s happening, we may be in for far worse than we’ve yet seen, in terms of embarrassing personal posts and personal attacks.
You can’t “discredit” the metablog by attacking what’s said here. The only way to “discredit” it would be to bring in censorship, which is what you’re suggesting, because then you’re attacking the very heart of the metablog’s existence.
As for the comment in question, I’ve never seen the blog from which it was pulled, so I don’t know how it was connected to RM. Did RM admit to writing it at some point? Did it include so many details that it became obvious? Either way, reproducing it may not be nice, but it’s not deserving of removal. Everyone here should be smart enough to know that once something is online, it’s online forever. If you want to keep your feelings private, write them on paper or not at all.
Whoever’s doing this, please knock off the RM attacks. We know your opinion; we’ve seen your obsessive vindictiveness. RM had two trivial rows with Leiter (“asshat”) and Weinberg (“allies”), but RM is an obscure non-entity SJW, has no big blog platform, doesn’t run witch hunts and has harmed no one. Leave her alone.
No, Rachel McKinnon has had and continues to have a significant influence on norms in the profession. This was explained to you repeatedly in the last thread, 2:18, with many citations you chose to ignore repeatedly.
It’s true that people shouldn’t disclose or repeat things about Rachel McKinnon’s personal life that she only wrote about pseudonymously and wishes now to be silent about. The reason is that those are irrelevant points and there is no justification for raising them against her wishes. But it is *not* morally wrong to criticize McKinnon’s public behavior, tweets, articles and talks within the profession, and this seems to be a good place to do it. So long as it’s done cleanly, it would be wrong to try to stop it.
2:56, I’m repeating here a comment someone else made in the previous thread.
“We’re at the point where the APA is calling for the suppression of speech (including this blog – I mean what other “anonymous blogs” are they possibly referring to?). The statement was remarkable for its duplicity. It’s based on a vicious and totally false association of the metablog with racist abuse and even criminal threats directed at Yancy. As there is no racism or threats here, one has no guess at their true motivations — presumably it’s about silencing political views they dislike (basically criticism of their friends). For an association representing professional philosophy to do that is just crazy. What’s next from the APA, I wonder?
“RM has been cheering them on, despite the fact she is an inexhaustible fountain of toxicity and abuse. As in other cases we’ve seen, these outbursts are never censured by the “be nice” crowd. RM’s antics are concerning because she is helping to establish a climate where one narrow clique is permitted and even encouraged to scream at and silence anybody deemed unworthy. The screeching mobs that are whipped up are being used for political ends – most recently to attack Synthese. I can’t think of any other individual who is working harder to chill dissent, though to be fair lots of people besides her are criticized here (including Weinberg). I’m actually very surprised you think this is all just trivial stuff.”
2:56, or anyone else saying McKinnon’s actions really have no influence, I’d like to hear you respond to this. I’d like to hear you explain, also, why she’s been invited to have a significant voice in forming APA policy, why she gets to appear as a sort of authority on the issue at APA meetings, and why she’s been able to go around to prominent departments promoting her views, if she’s just a quiet, marginalized figure that nobody cares about. The burden is on you to establish your extraordinary claim. You’re going to need some pretty extraordinary evidence.
“I’d like to hear you respond to this. I’d like to hear you explain, also, why she’s been invited to have a significant voice in forming APA policy, why she gets to appear as a sort of authority on the issue at APA meetings, and why she’s been able to go around to prominent departments promoting her views, if she’s just a quiet, marginalized figure that nobody cares about. The burden is on you to establish your extraordinary claim. You’re going to need some pretty extraordinary evidence.”
Go on, then. Explain it. Don’t just ignore it. We’re waiting.
Here is a simple reason why we should stop discussing RM: “I uploaded a copy of my Epistemology of Propaganda paper 5 weeks ago and nearly 1000 views already.” These people feed on our attention and benefit professionally from it.
Ahhhhhh.
After last week’s ugly personal attacks, the PMMMB is redeemed!
Beautiful. *This* is why we keep checking in, wading through some sludge, sometimes holding our noses, hoping to find a gem. I shall treasure this one for a long time.
What “ugly personal attacks”, idiot? Your smug self-satisfied complacency might make you feel like a genius, but outside of the feminist echo chamber, you need to argue for your assertions.
Oh, you need an argument for the claim “outside of the feminist echo chamber, you need to argue for your assertions”, idiot? I’m all to happy to oblige. Here’s an argument by example. Premise one: you’re outside of the feminist echo chamber now. Premise two: many times since you’ve been outside of the feminist echo chamber, on this very blog, you’ve been asked for arguments to back up your assertions. (You’ve invariably failed to provide one). Further premises: many others here have been asked for arguments and have produced them (we’ve produced them for you, for instance); it’s part of legitimate philosophy to back things up with arguments, because that’s what real philosophers do and in fact what constitutes real philosophy; etc.
My calling you an idiot is not an *ugly* personal attack. It’s attacking your intelligence, but not in an underhanded or nasty way. I’m just calling a spade a spade here. It’s certainly better than slapping the smirk off your face, as you’ve no doubt experienced in person from many people when you’ve pulled your smug bullshit with them.
Do I have a basis for calling you an idiot? Sure I do. Here’s one data point: you’ve mistaken the claim that one needs to argue for one’s assertions for the claim that every assertion needs an argument provided at the same time that one makes the assertion, which would lead (obviously) to vicious regress.. Any minimally intelligent person would have understood that the point was in reference to your repeated refusal to provide support for your assertions when asked to support them. But rather than provide support or fucking off, as a non-idiot would have done in the circumstances, you stayed around and uncharitably misinterpreted a simple request yet again either on purpose (making you an idiot) or because you’re just too stupid to get it (making you, again, an idiot).
“It’s certainly better than slapping the smirk off your face, as you’ve no doubt experienced in person from many people when you’ve pulled your smug bullshit with them.”
I’m going to have to raise a doubt as to how likely it is that a smug academic’s been slapped. In my experience, the smug don’t get slapped nearly enough… if ever.
Too true, 6:25. If the jerk had hung around in non-academic circles for a little, he might have learned a lesson from the palm of someone’s hand once or twice and maybe even become a non-idiot. Regardless, listening to the shithead’s drivel is pretty irritating. I can sympathize with the sentiment.
I love it when the unemployed loser “philosopher” intimates that he might be a tough guy! You should not have been caught with those up-skirt photos of undergrads, creep. Maybe then you would have better things to do than monitoring this blog to call people idiots because they don’t meet your posting criteria.
Wow, Anony. You must be quite the dizzying intellect, what with your ability to see people’s entire past just from their blog comments. You should hang up your diploma, if you have one, and go into business reading fortunes. I’m serious. Just please don’t become another Title IX officer and use your powers to ‘see’ that everyone you hear about has been caught with creepy up-skirt photos of undergrads just because the voices in your head are screaming that at you.
Well, maybe if other people *cough* hadn’t decided to show up and monitor this blog for negative descriptions of feminist philosophers, it wouldn’t have been necessary for anyone to monitor the blog for busybody idiots.
Can we stop talking about this non-entity, RM, and focus on the Stanleys and Haslangers of this world, who are deliberately trying to turn philosophy into a truth-free activist club like the rest of the humanities? Thank you.
“Our collective dissatisfaction with how legal systems deal with rape cases must coalesce now. We deserve courts that specialise in sex crimes. We deserve state-funded victim support. And to all the dissenters who want a woman to prove she was raped, the burden of proof should be with you to prove she wasn’t.”
This has been published in a national newspaper with a massive international web presence, not some obscure extremist blog.
We need a society where people are instantly jailed if they’re accused of something. We should all be so proud that philosophy’s SJWs have inspired the profession to accept this major moral insight.
The Guardian is a shit publication. Have you read Gaby Hinslow’s shit piece on the Cologne incident? The best thing about the Guardian is its football pages and some comments, if the Guardian alows them.
Also, the mod here must have ovaries of steel, to resist the urge to censor all this shit. Well done, and I hope nothing bad happens to you on account of it.
Here’s a great post from the old PMMB. In light of the recent APA statement, it seems appropriate to post it again:
The vocab is hard to keep up with. Should we start a running glossary?
“Problematic”: adj. (of arguments) false; (of pratices) must be banned; (of utterances) must be retracted and apologised for; (of tweets) must be deleted;
“Free speech”: n. a problematic concept [see above]
“Censorship”: n. the alleged suppression of problematic ideas, a largely mythical practice. [compare “silence”]
“Silence”: v. (1) to ignore, not talk about. (2) to disagree with (3) to discuss a marginalized individual [see below] in terms they would prefer not to be discussed
“erase”: v. synonym for silence
“identity”: n. an (esp. marginalised) individual’s conception of themself. NB all other definitions, such as those which have been explored by philosophers over the past two millennia, are problematic [see above]
“offense” – n. something nobody ever complained about [compare “harm”]
“harm” – the inevitable consequence of erasing [see above] an individuals identity [see above]
“listen” – (to a marginalised individual), agree with, show deference to,
“bully” – v. synonym for erase
“expert” – n. a marginalised person
“educate” – v. to inform a non-marginalised person of the correct opinion
“safe space” – one in which no identity is erased. Unsafe spaces are problematic [see above].
What was the excuse of Tranley to move from a state school to an Ivy League university? And how did he square this move with his prior comments on how immoral it is to teach at a private university?
By the way, I guess that makes you and me shockingly creepy for caring or knowing about a philosopher’s life choices, publicly expressed. Bone-chilling, isn’t it.
Now, hold your horses right there, 1:28. It’s very, very creepy of you to care about Jason Stanley, a man who never harmed anyone. What do you think this is, a blog that discusses other blogs and social media? Leave poor Jason alone. Sheesh.
2:53, the harms that most of these people cause tend to be directed at a large range of people. Example: Jason Stanley has famously stigmatized all philosophical couples by writing that it’s morally inferior to form relationships, even long-term ones, with others in the profession because feminism. People listen to that geeb, so now everyone has to walk around feeling that they’ll be judged an immoral and inappropriate person if they divulge to others that they’re involved with someone else in the profession.
To that extent, he’s like someone who promotes the idea that gay people are a little suspect because they just might lead to God hating us and maybe they’ll molest children at a higher rate. It’s hard to say whom such comments have harmed, but you can be pretty sure they’ll make several harmless people really uneasy in the process of helping the speaker feel good about himself and portray himself as a Moral Crusader.
You are being baited here, 3:08. 3:19 wants to send you on a wild chase through Jazz’s prolific and uncontrolled Facebook rants, only to later castigate you for violating his privacy. Don’t fall for it.
Here’s Jason Stanley from 2013: “…there appears to be a disproportionate number of female philosophers who are married to male philosophers. Obviously love is a wonderful thing but it does send a certain message to male philosophers. I wouldn’t mention this third factor, except for the fact that I have heard male philosophers admit in my presence that they are pretty hopeless on the dating scene, and that their chances to be with an attractive women are much higher if they focus on female philosophers. The time I’m thinking of was a kind of male bonding moment, and though I threw up in my mouth, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t throw up in their faces.”
There’s nothing imaginary about the various witchhunts Jazz Tranley and others have led. When you are the public or nearly-public target of ridicule and hate, maybe you’ll understand this better. So please, tell me your real name, and I’ll arrange for some SJW-style justice to rain down on your head. Then we’ll talk.
Your interlocutor seems to be capable only of hollow mimicry. She was called an idiot repeatedly, now she calls others idiots. She also seems hopelessly incapable at reading charitably. I’ve only known one person to combine these faults before: the Femtroll.
What is the cause behind the following physical law? Any philosophy metablog shall, after a period not exceeding 2 months, reach an equilibrium in which love-hate heavy petting between the ARG and the femtroll accounts for 90% of postings?
“I have heard gay philosophers admit in my presence that they are pretty hopeless on the dating scene, and that their chances to be with an attractive man are much higher if they focus on gay philosophers. The time I’m thinking of was a kind of male bonding moment, and though I threw up in my mouth, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t throw up in their faces.”
Well Leiter is on the right side of the APA’s thought-policing fiasco. The people responsible for that document should not be allowed to call themselves philosophers. And fuuuuuck. Read Crispin Sartwell’s takedown:
“philosophers .. live in quaking fear of the supernatural power of phonemes. they are what they think the followers of donald trump are.”
“let me ask you this, philosophy professor: when i designated you as ‘special needs’, did you hear that as an insult? or was it ok? why? i thought you said that one was ok! whatever i may have been thinking at that moment, i did not call you a ‘cretin,’ an ‘idiot,’ or a ‘retard,’ or any of the other superseded euphemisms primitive people such as yourselves thought would cure us all.”
Wow. This will trigger a few acquaintances of mine. Can’t wait.
New study which has all-too-obvious relevance to the past several years of moralistic onanism on the philosophy blogosphere. (Also perhaps notable that most of the researchers are from Yale. Perhaps they should have been invited to the Ideology conference?)
>>> Thus, we provide evidence that punishing selfishness can act like a peacock’s tail – it can serve as a public display that hints at a quality (trustworthiness) that can’t easily be observed. We help resolve the “free-rider” problem by showing that individuals who punish others benefit from an improved reputation. And we help explain why we might have developed a sense of moral outrage in the first place.
Our theory can also speak to why people sometimes punish wrongdoing that could never affect them personally, even in the future. For example, why do men condemn sexism, even though they have no personal stake in wiping it out? One explanation may be to signal to women that they can be trusted not to behave in a sexist manner. <<<
This link appears here and a few minutes later Brotevi, who of course would never frequent such a filthy place, shares it on FB to try and show that he’s so above this kind of accusation that he can even joke about it. The bro doth protest too much.
> Thus, people may engage in disproportionate punishment, or punish accidents, for the purpose of boosting their own reputations. These examples demonstrate that if punishment evolves to benefit individuals, we should expect imperfect outcomes for society when individual and collective incentives do not align.
Someone wrote in the previous thread about how one can gain oppression points, I would like to add to that:
Declare your peanut allergy to be a crippling disability. Let the world know how much you suffer and let your friends write empty statements of commiseration on your facebook page. React to friendly offerings of peanuts as if it was the most heinous attack: Scream “ableism” as loud as you can.
Try to be non-white, non-male, non-Christian. But that should be obvious
Engage in endless self-pitying navel-gazing. Write about that one time when Jazz Tranley did not invite to a fancy dinner, because he allegedly “had to give a talk”. Complain that you are not part of the in-crowd, despite having an Ivy league education at both undergraduate and graduate level.
Become a member of the Alliance for FuckingAroundEthically, maybe even their spokesperson in charge of social media.
Write stupid opinion pieces for the NYT that are both uninformed and badly reasoned but of course with a social justice bend.
… in which he says that if you don’t support the privileged Yale crybullies you are in cahoots with the politicians who got a Mizzou untenured professor fired for trying to violently remove a student journalist from a place he had every right to be.
“For shame, philosophers who criticized student protestors. For shame for lending your support to this witch hunt against leftists.”
So now we are the witch hunters and the leftists are the Ivy League “diversity” idiots with Goldman Sachs parents who tried to get academics fired for their vaguely non-pc views. I’m going to call this propaganda.
The structure of the argument is this: “Jonathan Haidt argues for free speech, but on my uncharitable reading of some of Haidt’s comments, he’s opposed to free speech. Therefore, free speech is bad and anyone who promotes free speech is shameful.”
The media have discovered they can generate advertising income by publishing ragebait. Using an archive in these cases helps defeat the media’s strategy.
Criticize student protesters? For shame! Criticize professors who instigate violence against student journalists? Witch hunt!
So J. Whitey is for student protesters but against student journalists. In a way I envy him for being able to pick his principles so flexibly. On the other hand it’s probably better if you don’t have a dark triad personality like his.
Come on, people with a letter from him can be just fine. His writings do seriously undermine his credibility as a letter writer, though. I will say that.
This is petty and silly. Stanley isn’t exactly the most convincing person, I wouldn’t worry about his students secretly picking up his bad habits. Most of them don’t even work on this stuff but instead on more traditional topics in epistemology/language.
Or married to one. I couldn’t figure out how a piece like ‘culture of justification’ Dotson’s “Word to the Wise” could possibly be published by Philosophy Compass given its mandate until I learned who the editor-in-chief is.
I’m telling you, they are ruthless. They’ll blatantly violate the policies of a journal to advance Dotson’s career as she is one of their standard bearers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also started trying to block the publications of some brave soul like Lemoine. We need to fight back.
I don’t know how anyone who is paying attention to stuff like this can think the Social Justice narrative is immune to the objections Haidt and others are raising.
The interesting thing is that the general public, and intelligent society outside of certain areas in the universe, don’t take the Social Justice Warrior side anymore. 2015 was the year the Social Justice Warriors not only came into their own, but massively overplayed their hand. They are now generally hated, but have surrounded themselves with an echo chamber that prevents them from seeing how badly their message is going over outside of their small circles of friends. Because of this, their message is getting more and more shrill and unacceptable exactly when they need to dial it back a bit. The backlash against them will be sure to be intense when it comes, and I think it’s going to come very soon.
This is what brought down the paleo-PC movement in the late 80s-early 90s. Many liberals, of course, defended paleo-PC for a long time…and attacks by conservatives just made that worse. But PC overplayed its hand and liberals turned against it.
A couple of interesting things though:
First, it turns out that PC was only partially defeated. It went into hiding and rose again, as we know. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. I don’t suppose one should expect many bad political/philosophical ideas to be defeated once and for all.
Second, one of the things that functioned as a kind of reductio of paleo-PC was the “Antioch Rules”, requiring that students at Antioch college ask for consent, permission to proceed at ever point of “escalation” or whatever we should call it during sex. This was even parodied on Saturday Night Live. So the craziest expression of paleo-PC at one of the leftiest universities is basically now being mandated by the government as official policy across the country in the newest wave of PC. This is obviously cause for concern. It isn’t even taking up where it left off…it’s much worse than that…
It’s true, Stealthy: that’s worrying. But the general public, outside of sine very toxic feminist subcultures in academia and law, are as horrified by that as we are. The extremists are a small and shrinking minority here. Unless Clinton wins the presidency, I predict the next person in the Oval Office (whether Sanders or any Republican you name) will stop and reverse this insane trend in sexual assault law. Pressure to do so from the majority is already getting quite strong.
Don’t be so sure. The SJWs managed to take over most of the humanities in the 80s. Philosophy saved itself thanks to analytic intolerance for obscurantist bullshit. But now JS, SH & co are trying to make it unacceptable to publicly call bullshit on Judith Butler or Derrida.
Uh… are you denying that the Social Justice Warriors in Philosophy are demanding that we embrace far more into philosophy than actual philosophy? Look at what one of the most powerful and disgusting SJW documents, the Colorado Site Visit report (written and then dishonestly leaked by the APA’s own Committee on the Status of Women) has to say: “Realize that there is plurality in the discipline. If some department members have a problem with people doing non-feminist philosophy or doing feminist philosophy (or being engaged in any other sort of intellectual or other type of pursuit), they should gain more appreciation of and tolerance for plurality in the discipline. Even if they are unable to reach a level of appreciation for other approaches to the discipline, it is totally unacceptable for them to denigrate these approaches in front of faculty, graduate or undergraduate students, in formal or informal settings on or off campus.” (Summary of Report by the American Philosophical Association to the University of Colorado Boulder, Jan. 31, 2014, pp.6-7)
It’s obvious that they’re trying to force the legitimation of continental bullshit under the banner of feminism and racial justice. Or rather, they’ll tolerate the bullshit if it helps purging the discipline of a few inconvenient type and replace them with their friends with the correct political views.
Yes. Remember the SPEP Report bullshit of a few years back? Same kind of attempt to fuck up philosophy because feminism, same bunch of douchebags promoting and going for it.
You only have to see the way the Chronicle of Higher Education treats the Melissa Click story in their twitter feed to see it is a lost cause: https://twitter.com/chronicle
Stanley is not reaching out to the public. Stanley is preaching to the converted at the SJW altar.
Interesting that this comment appeared here before the obit on Daily Nous. More evidence for what is already widely known: that Justin and many others read this blog obsessively.
What on earth are you talking about? Can you think of no other way that Justin would have got information roughly around the same time as the poster? Sheesh.
You’re certainly correct, but I see where 2:54 is coming from. Philosophers are constantly bending over backwards to assure the SJWs that they do not read the PMMMB. It is plain as day (and deeply annoying) that they’re lying through their teeth, and one proof of the lies is the timing of blog and Facebook posts that mirror what’s already been up on the PMMMB for a while.
Norcross is obviously the source for Weinberg. He’s a Syracuse PhD so he’s in position to know quickly, plus he supplied the photo, and made the first comment.
I frequent the PMMMB but have no interest in the misogyny of #gamergate, and it has no place here. Same with the toxic MRA crap that people sometimes try to connect to the PMMMB. I hope that much is obvious to everyone!
Different voice here, 5:05. Do you mind justifying your “toxic MRA crap” line?
I’m not a Men’s Rights Activist, but I’ve seen many Men’s Rights Activists who made excellent points, just as there are many feminists who have made excellent points (though the feminist points tend to be less important now, since the feminist narrative is so widely accepted and the points are seldom genuinely new contributions to discussions, unlike the MRA ones).
Why dismiss all MRA stuff a priori as “toxic crap”? Isn’t that just as dismissive as someone who would reject all feminist claims out of hand as “toxic crap”? If not, why not?
Wow. I wanted to know if there was an prima facie or even outright reason to discount anything men’s rights activists say. Your coming up with that mock hashtag really fits the bill as a knockdown argument. What it lacks in logic or evidence, which is to say absolutely everything, it more than makes up for in brainless snark.
This, folks, is what happens when we try to make friends by kindly pretending that feminist “philosophy” is actual philosophy.
Once again, you show yourself incapable of anything but irrelevant digression and blatant misinterpretations (through stupidity or trolling or a combination of the two).
It’s difficult to blame you entirely, though. It’s hard for people to admit that, beneath their bluster, they have not even a whiff of a coherent argument. It’s particularly hard for Social Justice Warriors, since they are completely unused to an environment in which claims are criticized and responses or revisions are expected. And you’ve clearly been led to believe that you can do philosophy without any critical thinking skills or belief revision in the face of objections, so this must come as a big shock to you.
Still, this is what we philosophers, and more broadly all people of integrity, do. We provide arguments for contentious claims. We don’t try to distract from the inadequacies in our case, or even the total lack of any case, through distractions, particularly inept ones.
Yes, 7:00, they do. But it’s a nonstop pattern with this person. A joke’s a joke, but this person is repeatedly trying to twist conversations with irrelevant distractions.
5:05 did not dismiss all MRA stuff as toxic crap. 5:05 dismissed toxic MRA crap. There is a difference, just as there is a difference between saying all white criminals should be jailed and saying all white people are criminals. And provided that a) there is some toxic MRA crap that has b) been posted here, you should agree with what 5:05 said. It has no place here, and has only been posted as a smear against the philosophy underground.
For those who’ve never heard of it, Return of Kings is a mostly satirical site that takes MRA ideas to ridiculous extremes. Some commentators and feminists take it seriously though and actually think that it’s the sort of thing PMMMB readers would like. That’s why the FemTroll drops references to it here and on the old PMMB. Ridiculous.
Return of Kings isn’t even an MRA website. It’s a gender-conservative website, and they despise MRAs because they think MRAs are ‘too feminist’.
Obviously nobody here draws ideas from RoK, but that’s probably what some of the SJWs think. Certain SJWs seem to believe (or want to believe) that anyone who disbelieves or disobeys them must be a moron or a villain.
It looks like there is no point in anyone providing an example at this point, because even if 3:58 agrees that the example is an incidence of toxic crap, he/she will argue that it this means that it must have been posted by ‘the Femtroll’ as part of a false flag operation, because no true PMMBer would post such crap.
And your evidence for this contention is…? Also, even if it were true that someone here were committing the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy, it doesn’t follow that everyone here is. We’d like to see your evidence and hear your case, if you’ve got one, that people are posting ‘toxic MRA crap’ here. I don’t know anything about the ‘Return of Kings’ site, but it seems someone who knows or claims to know something about it has contested your allegation that it’s a serious website, etc. Ball’s in your court.
Most important, it isn’t sufficient for something to be an instance of X that it comes from a website that sometimes publishes X. Just as it doesn’t follow from the fact that Hitler said something that what Hitler said is an instance of racism, just because Hitler was a racist and said many racist things.
I still haven’t seen any evidence that something was published here that is an instance of ‘toxic MRA crap’, and you haven’t said what claim was published here was in fact toxic MRA crap.
I’m not sure what you mean. There’s some sexism in gamergate, but there’s some sexism in lots of things. Most gamergate stuff is in no way sexist. It’s mostly an anti-PC / SJW movement so far as I can tell. And /r/Kotakuinaction is a pretty good source for relevant links.
‘shadowing banning’ and the institution of a ‘Trust and Safety Council’ at a when they’re loosing users and shares at an all-time low … dunno what they’re thinking
“Cultural authoritarians from both the left and right occupy most positions of power in government, academia and the media. Both argue that art and expression can be harmful. Conservatives say that overly-violent video games and movies are the cause of school shootings and youth crime. This was the view of Jack Thompson, who led a crusade against violent video games and rap lyrics in the late 90s and early 2000s. Progressives argue that “problematic” media can lead to racism and misogyny. In the words of left-wing culture critic Jonathan McIntosh, “oppressive media representations can be damaging sociologically.” Underlying both Thompson’s and McIntosh’s arguments is the idea of culture as a corrupting influence, one that must be policed. This view has little scientific evidence to support it. A recent long-term study found no link between video games and sexism, and violent crime has been in decline for decades despite the growth of violent media. Nonetheless, arguments for a link continue to surface.”
….
“WHAT CULTURAL LIBERTARIANS BELIEVE
Free expression. No idea is too dangerous for cultural libertarians, who want total artistic and intellectual freedom. They often indulge in deliberately outrageous jokes and wacky opinions to test the boundaries of acceptability. Little wonder that the movement’s leaders often attract large followings from the the chaotic, politically incorrect world of anonymous imageboards like 4chan.
Resisting identity politics and public shaming. The movement can also be seen criticising modern methods of cultural control and the neo-puritanism they say has infected modern cultural criticism. The newest of these is a rash of social justice-inspired online vigilantism where professional offence-takers use the power of social media to destroy the reputations and careers of their targets. Justine Sacco, who faced global outrage and the loss of her job over a single politically-incorrect joke, is one well-known victim. Astrophysicist Dr. Matt Taylor and biochemist Sir Tim Hunt were also victims of this modern form of thuggery.
A sense of humour. Cultural libertarians combat anger with ridicule. There is a certain preposterousness to bloggers and social media addicts setting themselves up as a new priesthood, which makes them easy targets for comedy. As MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin puts it: “Tyrants, authoritarians and activists all hate the sound of laughter.” Cultural libertarians understand this instinctively.
An end to nannying and “safe space” culture. Arrayed against the cultural libertarians is the control freakery of the establishment, left and right, and the second coming of political correctness as embodied in campus safe space movements. This latter movement claims that students are too fragile to be exposed to dangerous ideas, and that even mildly offensive speech can cause permanent emotional damage. On the internet, these activists enjoy the support of outlets like Vox and Buzzfeed.
Defending personal freedom. Cultural libertarians may have their own opinions about how people should live their lives, or have low tolerance for offensive speech. But what distinguishes them from their opponents is their rejection of attempts to impose personal standards on others.
Defending spaces for uncomfortable opinions. Reason columnist Cathy Young is a critic of the “misogynistic rhetoric” of masculinist bloggers like Daryush Valizadeh, but nonetheless defended Valizadeh’s right to speak after activists launched a campaign to ban him from Canada. Cultural libertarians are serious about protecting the the freedoms of people they despise.
Fact over feelings. Hand in hand with their commitment to free speech goes a loathing for narrative-led journalism. Cultural libertarians are highly critical of “feelings over facts” in general, but particularly where it gives rise to failures in reporting such as the Duke Lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone debacle, “Mattress Girl” Emma Sulkowicz and GamerGate.
Standing up for consumers and producers over hand-wringing middle-class panic merchants. Cultural libertarians are the natural allies of consumers and want fandoms to have access to a wide variety of culture and ideas. They also stand up for the right of publishers and content creators to experiment wildly with art and believe that nothing should be “off-limits” however uncomfortable it may make some people.
Celebrating culture in all its forms. Cultural libertarians can be divided into three broad categories: vanguard hell-raisers who generate headlines by provoking social justice warriors, followed by a loose coalition of academics, journalists and social commentators who provide intellectual substance to the movement.”
I suppose if I had to choose between being an SJW and being a perpetual virgin, I’d drink the hemlock. Thankfully, the God provides many paths through life, most of which can be tread without falling prey to false dichotomies.
“This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here.”
Hey, shithead, why don’t you take a month off. We won’t miss your idiotic attempts at humor and derailment.
Come back when you have arguments to present and are done with the brainless snarkiness. We’re all sick of it. It’s not going to convince anyone here, it’s fucking stupid, and it’s a waste of our time. Go back to Feminist Philosophers or NewAPPS or whatever other shitbag blog your friends hang out on. Maybe they’ll like your crap over there.
lol u mad bro? listen to what somebody posted above why doncha?
“A sense of humour. Cultural libertarians combat anger with ridicule. There is a certain preposterousness to bloggers and social media addicts setting themselves up as a new priesthood, which makes them easy targets for comedy.”
I’ve got a sense of humor. I laugh at many good jokes. I laugh at myself quite often and don’t take myself very seriously. But not every attempted joke is funny. Sometimes, attempted jokes are just pathetic attempts to evade refutation. Get it?
Have you ever heard of falsifiability? If so, can you see what’s wrong with this defense of your claim that your jokes are funny and that we just lack the sense of humor we need to ‘get’ how funny you are?
Apparently you can’t see it. Pity. But not our problem. Go away.
I don’t see how the episode is connected to your concerns. Maybe elaborate? AFAIK metaphilosophy is not primarily a phil sci journal and does not specialize in methodological/foundational issues in science and phil of science.
Hold on a minute, 11:20. In what way was 7:30/31 and 10:59 “derailing”? 7:19 mentioned the APA interviews and 7:30 / 31 provided the link to the nomination page. 10:32 implied a metablog commenter would never be accepted. 10:59 said that would be a data point for the censorship claim. How is that derailing? It’s right on topic it seems to me.
True, the shithead wasn’t so much derailing that time as inventing a bullshit uncharitable story in advance and being sarcastic about it. He or she started mocking some imaginary people he/she thinks are the metabloggers for recommending themselves to the APA interviews and then inanely blaming it on censorship when they’re rejected.
In other words, the shithead was laughing at us for thinking of ourselves as victims for no good reason (which is the familiar feminist trope about us), even though nothing of the sort had been said, none of us had been rejected, and none of us had even applied to it.
The shithead is obsessed with portraying us as living up to the bullshit feminist characteristic of MRAs, come what may. It’s a really fucking irritating form of bigotry.
I’m with 1:17. Whoever it is is a nuisance and is just trying to undermine the blog. I’m pretty sure it’s someone who did this on the other metablogs, too.
This nonsense is getting more hilarious all the time! My biggest chuckle was at the bit about “the lack of open acknowledgment of the issues.” You know, because we never hear anything from anyone about sexual harassment in the profession, and nobody ever discusses it anywhere. Except, uh, absolutely everywhere, and in some places all the time.
Respect to the moderator for deleting the thread stated by the guy who accidentally posted with a real email address and then requested deletion of his post. I find that to be a very encouraging sign.
There was what was to me a brilliant comment on the November MetaMetaBlog to the effect that most of the SJW’s have never engaged in a single political action away from the campus and of wider societal significance. I was about to copy this comment when the blog went down. If anyone has it archived I would appreciate your reposting it. Thank you in any case.
“Indeed, 8:14. The passive-aggressiveness of most SJW’s is part of what makes me believe that their thought, talk and behavior is largely disingenuous social signaling. If they really, genuinely believed half of the things they claim to believe (and with the psychological certainty they claim to possess), then presumably they’d be outright aggressive both in speech and behavior. For instance, if I am certain that someone is trying to harm me or people I care about in a significant way, I will not aim to “educate” them. Rather, I will use to law, or barring that, my fists, to prevent them from doing so. Until I see some SJWs who are prepared to get physical–as socialists, communists, anarchists, and animal rights activists have been–I will continue to doubt the sincerity of their stated political beliefs.”
I could be remembering wrongly, but the comment I remember was more general. It was more-or-less saying that big noises on campus never actually cared enough about any serious issue in the real world to do anything there.
The comment you posted is also great, thanks very much.
I’ll post that whole comment thread if I can figure out how to do so anonymously. I pasted the whole thread into an email to a colleague, so they’re in plain text. Ideas about how to do this?
There are comments about Leydon-Hardy and Ludlow in there, which will make this pastebin a takedown target for Ludlow’s lawyer. A “scrubbed” version without reference to Leydon-Hardy or Ludlow should be posted too. I’ll do that if some asshole takes down this one.
Erm, have you been following the fortunes of this blog? It was taken down twice after these and similar comments were made. Why do you think the site doesn;t exist any more?
4:04 has bought into the feminist narrative that anyone who disagrees with the feminists is a deluded male conspiracy theorists, living in his parents’ basement, and is motivated only by sexism and envy that women are taking away his job. it could never possibly dawn on 4:04 and the like that people of all affiliations are united in disgust over what the crybullies are doing to the profession for principled reasons that we discuss here all the time. That’s why 4:04 is incapable of accepting even straightforward empirical facts such as that this blog has been taken down twice before. It threatens 4:04’s religious narrative, so it must be false.
I’ll retract my claim that this is paranoia when the pastebin gets deleted. I have no need for feminist narratives, just facts.
And you have no need for induction, either? Laughing Philosopher, Metablog, Metametablog…
You might be new here, 4:04, but a lot of “philosophy underground” type stuff gets hit with takedown notices. I don’t think taking note of this fact is paranoid.
Aannnddd it’s now deleted.
client-side encrypted text dump of pmmv nov 15 comment thread availabe upon request.
Maybe “SJW’s” and “off-campus”? It was towards the end of the month, I think. Thank you very much.
Hi guys and gals, lots of stuff happening at the Pilos lately. I can’t wait to post as well on the March thread when it is released, hopefully nice and early, but I notice there’s a new one here (because things are cookin!) so I just want to draw attention to what’s been happening at the Pilos lately
– Pilos profiles going really strong, we got Bertrand Russell this time.
And we’ve started covering news in the profession! For now it relies heavily on other blogs like Brian’s (thanks mate) and the beautiful Daily Nous. We hope to take over in the next few months.
FP are trying to use the Click/Mizzou case to highlight sexual harassment issues. The little detail they don’t report about the difference between “students’ bodies and students’ cameras” is that, unlike the UCLA harasser, Click was untenured.
Click was not tenured. I think that what’s potentially problematic in this case was a failure of due process. But I also suspect that had due process been followed, Click still would have been fired.
Yeah, I really didn’t undertstand the point of that FP post. So some bad tenured people didn’t get canned; how does this show that another bad untenured person, Click, shouldn’t get canned? Fergodssakes, she was caught on camera trying to get someone assaulted… on campus, no less!
Some people with tenure were alleged to have done something wrong. It would have been hard to prove that it happened for sure, and tenure makes dismissal difficult. Those people were not dismissed.
Someone else without the protection of tenure clearly did something wrong, and it was captured on film for all to see. It would have been easy to prove that it happened for sure, and that person’s lack of tenure would have made dismissal easy. That person was dismissed, and many of us, including Leiter, are arguing that that person should not have been dismissed even though the person clearly did something wrong and didn’t have tenure.
It’s an extraordinary sleight-of-hand trick. It’s a line that can be run on any higher-ed discipline issue other than sexual harassment or assault: “You support that X was disciplined for Y, but Y isn’t sexual harassment or assault? You’re clearly an apologist for or don’t give a shit about sexual harassment/assault.” It’s a strategic red herring they can toss out whenever they want.
The first obvious thing to say is that they would not dare raise this issue if the politics of the situation were different. If Click were an opponent of the protests and the journalist were affiliated with the protesters, they would obviously support the firing and they would do so without a second question about the priorities regarding sexual harassment/assault. (For example, I don’t recall similar posts on FP when John McAdams was stripped of tenure at Marquette for his blog posts criticizing a graduate student.)
The second obvious point here is that the dichotomy between cameras and bodies is ridiculous. Click clearly called for violence against a student reporter in an extremely tense situation. She is just lucky that she didn’t bring serious injury to the student. It’s easy enough, then, to flip this around on FP: if FP genuinely cared about the integrity of students’ bodies, why weren’t they deeply upset about how Click called for illegal violence against a student? No mention of this, of course, for the standard, predictable reasons.
The third obvious point is that FP just gets the conclusion wrong. Let’s grant that they are entirely right about that sexual harassment and assault aren’t taken as seriously as the issues should be and that many people weren’t disciplined/dismissed who should have been. What I would take to follow from that is it’s the failure to take sexual harassment/assault seriously that’s messed up. It is hard to see why anything about Click’s firing being messed up follows.
Fourth, isn’t the sudden concern for due process here rather amusing? It’s certainly at odds with how little priority some of these sorts of folks seem to give to due process concerns in other types of cases. Perhaps the reason for the due process concern is this: Click and FP share the same politics and her dismissal for violating a student’s legal rights in service of those politics sets a symbolic precedent that they cannot do whatever they want with total impunity to advance their political agenda.
(Let’s just think about the “due process” claim for a minute. Here we’ve got an untenured professor who, among other things, was recorded on video calling for “muscle” to be used against a student in a public place for exercising first amendment rights. Instead of the university immediately dismissing (untenured) Click in the spring semester, she was placed on paid leave while an independent firm conducted a thorough investigation. The investigators interviewed a number of witnesses, reviewed recordings, interviewed Click twice (while she had counsel), and then issued a 30-page report, which it made public, along with Click’s response. The Board of Curators voted to dismiss Click for violating university policy, which she clearly did, and, in the form of the independent report, they detailed the evidence for her violations of that policy (again, all of this has been made public). And she may still issue an appeal to this decision. Now that may not satisfy everyone’s reasonable due process concerns, but it’s not like the university just fired her on a whim without any concern whatsoever for evidence, fairness, or due process.)
There are serious concerns in the Missouri case, such as the drastic cuts aimed at the higher education system in general or the way that some legislators are attempting to shut down the exercise of free speech there (drastic, punitive budget cuts because of student protests are likely to have chilling effects on free speech down the road). But those concerns are not really what’s at issue in FP’s red-herring post.
Alfred H MacDonald · February 29, 2016 at 8:38 pm
this headline is worryingly misleading and possibly dramaticizes things a bit — it’s unclear to a person unfamiliar with the metaphor that “bunny-drowning” is in fact a metaphor
Justin W. · February 29, 2016 at 8:50 pm
I added scare quotes around “bunny-drowning,” which I should have included originally. Thanks.
—-
Anyways, let’s celebrate the demise of that awful finance hawk of a university president. We should overthrow these assholes more often.
Attention metabros and metasisters and metaungendered fellow philosophers: the new version of Tor tells me that DN has a system that tries to pull my computer’s personal info. The new Tor can stop that (you get an option) but I don’t think the old one could. Not sure how commercial VPNs fare in that respect. Watch out for the wrath of sneaky Whineberg and his cabal of witch-hunters. The recent relaxing of censorship may be a strategy to harvest our IPs.
Philosophymetametametablog 
“Although our department approaches philosophy from an analytic perspective, we welcome applications from candidates who have used this perspective to work on underrepresented areas of philosophy, such as Buddhist/Indian metaphysics and epistemology or feminist metaphysics and epistemology.” (Washburn University)
“Demonstrated teaching experience in the history of western philosophy (especially Ancient Greek and/or Early Modern) and/or feminist philosophy.” (Foothill-De Anza Community College District)
“AOS and AOC open but the department has interest in Philosophy of Race or Asian Philosophy.” (University of West Georgia)
“Applicants should possess the terminal degree in philosophy with a concentration in Social-political-legal Philosophy and/or Africana Philosophy or Non-Western Philosophy.” (Morehouse College)
“We seek an individual who can teach Ancient Greek Philosophy and Africana Philosophy or Critical Race Theory.” (St. Lawrence University)
“Such teaching areas include (but are not limited to) courses in critical race theory, African American philosophy, neuroscience and philosophy, applied ethics, courses that draw on philosophical and religious traditions that originated in Africa, Latin America, Asia or the Middle East, and continental philosophy.” (Wellesley College)
“AOS Feminism, Philosophy of Science and Technology, Ethics and Critical Theory” (Stony Brook)
“AOS Philosophy of Race” (John Carroll University)
“We are seeking scholars with expertise in two areas: Native American/Indigenous Arts and Knowledges and Global Indigenous Medicine.” (University of California, Riverside)
“AOC categories Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Gender” (University of North Texas)
“AOC History of Philosophy, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Feminism, Philosophy of Race” (Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago)
“AOC Gender Studies and/or Women’s Studies, Critical Political Economy, Development Studies, Feminist Geography, Economic Anthropology, Political Science or a related field specializing in gender, labor, economic development, global inequality, social change and social justice.” (The University of Washington Tacoma)
“AOS Postcolonial/Decolonial Theories” (Appalachian State University)
There are lots of male SJWs and some even write on feminist philosophy. Are they getting any of these jobs?
Let’s hope not. If you’re going to hire SJWs then at least you should hire women to fill the quotas. I’m sure the ‘males’ will understand.
Yes, they do. You know how I figured that out? I used the philjobs appointments search function, rather than polling my intuitions.
“AOC categories Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Gender” (University of North Texas)
“AOC History of Philosophy, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Feminism, Philosophy of Race” (Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago)
“AOC Gender Studies and/or Women’s Studies, Critical Political Economy, Development Studies, Feminist Geography, Economic Anthropology, Political Science or a related field specializing in gender, labor, economic development, global inequality, social change and social justice.” (The University of Washington Tacoma)
“AOS Postcolonial/Decolonial Theories” (Appalachian State University)
“AOS categories Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Social Science, Applied Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Gender, Philosophy of Race, Value Theory” (Pennsylvania State University)
A couple of the above posted twice. Sorry.
“AOC in one or more areas: gender and/or feminist studies, social and political philosophy, Pragmatism.” (Pacific Lutheran University)
“AOC Open, but competence in analytic feminist philosophy is highly desirable.” (University of Alabama)
“AOC History of Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Law” (Saint Mary’s College)
“AOS Islamic, African, or Latin American Philosophies, and Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Science, Epistemology, or Metaphysics” (Colby College)
“AOS categories Epistemology, Applied Ethics, Biomedical Ethics, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy” (Macquarie University)
“AOS philosophy of law, feminist philosophy, or history of analytic philosophy” (Illinois Institute of Technology)
“AOS categories Applied Ethics, Biomedical Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy” (Health Services Research Unit, University of Aberdeen)
Stanley, Haslanger and other extremely well connected people have explicitly stated their intentions to change the discipline. And they have power and status. That’s where the danger lies. They want emotive political activism masquerading as philosophy to have higher status than LEMM. The APA’s new direction and its use of funds is an example of how quickly they can move towards their objectives. That’s why we need quiet but effective pushback: don’t hire their fellow travelers, etc.
I think these trends in hiring are directly related the failure of the field to figure out and vocally defend a “canon.” Does one ever have to read, say, The Republic to be a philosophy professor? Should one have struggled with Hume or Kant or Aristotle (or even just some disjunction here) before one is ready to call oneself a competent teacher of philosophy? A lot of people in the field seem to answer the previous two questions with a proud and confident “no.” It’s odd to me how so many of the current voices in the profession are just jumping at the bit to diversify everything to the hilt. Don’t be surprised, then, that when “philosophy” becomes a grab-bag of pet interests that deans and administrators start wondering what philosophers do that can’t be done by other departments.
It’s already happening! And the feminists don’t need to care. When all else fails, there’s always Women’s Studies.
I think this is a little ridiculous. Do you really think most of these universities care about what Jason Stanley or Sally Haslanger thinks? Most of them probably don’t even know that Jason Stanley has made a pivot towards “ideology studies” or whatever he does now, if they even know much or anything about him to begin with.
I think most of these offers reflect a broader shift in student interest, and an increasing focus on offering courses that will provide high awareness. Students become more politically aware at a younger age. Nowadays, I feel a generational gap even with people 3-4 years younger than I am.
You can complain about it if you want, but a better strategy will be to think about how to make your LEMM courses more attractive to students, and *sell* yourself that way and/or work to hold your nose and develop an AOC in one of these areas. You might even learn something.
That’s interesting, 2:10. You’re saying that politicized philosophy sells more. That’s probably true. But so far philosophy had the virtue of resisting to those external pressures by upholding its own internal standards of rigor, rather than pandering to student tastes. If people start offering popular easy courses inside philosophy it will be the end for those attached to the old conception of philosophy.
De-politicized philosophy was politicized from the start: http://www.cambridge.org/ve/academic/subjects/philosophy/philosophy-science/how-cold-war-transformed-philosophy-science-icy-slopes-logic
The Unity of Science movement didn’t organize crybully campaigns to destroy the lives of emergentists. They had political views, but they were still philosophers, not Stanleys and Lackeys and Haslangers.
There’s a difference between ‘politically aware’ and ‘ideologically driven’.
Certain types of student have always been interested in light-weight, politicized, low-effort courses. We didn’t accommodate them before, so why should we do it now?
I believe this comment was initially directed at me, so I’d like to respond.
I agree with you that there’s a coterie of high prestige folks who appear to have largely abandoned philosophy to play politics. I’m just not convinced they’re going to change the face of the discipline.
Many of the philosophers I know, although they don’t dare speak about it explicitly, have little patience for “activism masquerading as philosophy.” Indeed, for sociological reasons and due to the figures and topics at the center of the subject, I just can’t see philosophy ever being a very happy home for activists. They’re never going to be able eradicate the people who just want to study Leibniz, causation, or being qua being. The latter folks may not resist forcefully, but their mere presence in philosophy provides a bulwark against activist politics. There are many philosophers–perhaps the majority–who are deeply committed to the “culture of justification” and they have a substantial say in who gets admitted to grad programs, hired, published, and cited.
My semi-optimistic prediction is that the on-going push for “inclusion and diversity” will end up sorting people and departments in ways that SPEP/APA affiliations do at present. We’re probably going to end up with a few departments that transition from doing “analytic” philosophy to mostly doing “analytic” identity politics. But they’ll hardly be the majority and they’ll probably become marginalized over time.
Only if we act now. Good things don’t happen by themselves.
I’ve contributed a fair amount to all the metablogs. I’d like to step in on a certain issue as a referee.
Apparently, among the wholly legitimate comments in the last thread that discussed the merits of Rachel McKinnon’s position and the appropriateness of critically commenting on her influence rather than those of her friends, there was a comment that reproduced an account of a private experience she had blogged about under a pseudonym on a now-defunct personal blog.
First, if that is correct, I hope we all agree that the person who reproduced that here crossed the line and isn’t what this blog represents. However harmful McKinnon’s ideas and influence may be to the profession. she deserves to be treated with basic dignity. We should be able to attack her ideas all we want, but our target should never be her as a person. She, like all the rest of us, is entitled to her own private online life. If she chose to write a blog under a pseudonym and not to reveal that pseudonym to the public, then what she wrote on that blog should be off-limits in the discussion, or at least it shouldn’t be identified with her.
At the same time, McKinnon seems very wrong in saying on her Twitter feed that whoever reproduced that account did so to mock her and saved the passage from her blog in order to humiliate her. That really is a wild and unsubstantiated guess, flying as usual for her to the worst possible interpretation of someone’s motivation and asserting it as an indisputable fact. It’s pretty easy to see what happened if one goes through the conversation in the last thread. There was a legitimate conversation about how easy it is to gain privilege or oppression points and hence power among the Social Justice Warrior crowd in philosophy. McKinnon’s work had been discussed in the vicinity, and someone pointed out that McKinnon is surely sincere and not merely posturing for points because she has committed to her identity as a woman. Another person, who always shows up to criticize the blog, said that talking about McKinnon’s transitioning was off-limits. The reasonable reply given to that was that McKinnon’s status as a trans woman cannot be off-limits because McKinnon herself has spoken extensively about it in public fora. The regular metablog critic kept it up, and it seems the person who posted the excerpt from McKinnon’s blog did so in order to show that McKinnon had in fact discussed these things quite publicly.
There would be nothing illegitimate about that were it not for the fact that the blog was apparently written under a pseudonym and then taken offline. There is no reason at all to think that anyone was mocking McKinnon by reproducing the passage. It was settling a dispute about what is legitimate to say about her by citing, the rest of us thought, something she had said publicly about herself. There is also no reason to believe that the person who reproduced the passage had saved it from before in order to spring this on her. Almost all of us are capable of finding passages from offline blogs. It’s not that difficult.
However, the fact that the blog was not only offline but pseudonymous really seems to settle the case. We all have a right to our private lives, and moreover there was clearly no compelling reason to resort to that quotation to settle the issue. It would have been better to let the ignorant social justice warrior who hangs around here win debate in error than to prove that s/he was wrong using this method, even if there had been no other way to show that McKinnon makes her transgender status extremely public and a major topic of conversation. In fact, there is plenty of other evidence for that.
Moderator, I suggest that the quote from McKinnon in the other thread be removed and that McKinnon herself receive an apology from this blog for the commenter getting out of hand. We should do this not only to rebut the very unfair characterization of what almost all of us are doing here at the hands of people like McKinnon herself, but also because it’s the right thing to do.
Thank you.
I am another long-time reader and occasional contributor to all the metablogs. I approve of this message except for its final paragraph. Only the person who posted the offending material is in a position to issue an apology for doing so. The moderator is not at fault for hosting a forum free of censorship.
We can do better than this, people. We often do.
There are real and deep problems with the philosophy profession. It sometimes seems that we stand upon the edge of a knife. If we stray but a little more, the profession will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true (props if you recognize the reference). I encourage all readers to focus on these professional issues and to, whenever possible, avoid nasty personal attacks, even against those we believe to be deeply mistaken.
What a bullshit characterization of the last thread. You conveniently left out the fact that there was at least one person in the previous thread who actually requested details on RM’s transition and sexual orientation, which was then provided by the person who accessed an offline blog (or had the entry saved for some weird reason). Under Rachel’s own name. What a fake “apology”.
Idiot, that wasn’t left out, and it wasn’t an apology. Go back and read what you’re commenting on, if you can manage it.
It may be pretentious to think of oneself as among the “voices of reason” on an anything-goes blog. But I think I satisfy that description, and it sounds like you do too, Referee. We should do utterly fill this blog with reasonable thoughts. Bring your friends, and have them post thoughtful things too. This is, really, the only way to resist the crazy and the nasty without becoming crazy and nasty.
There’s some evidence that this is the way to overcome toxicity and abuse of the kind that RM and others spew:
“Why not mobilise the vast majority of reasonable human beings to marginalise what is really a tiny but disproportionately noisy minority of extremists?
Last autumn, Facebook launched a project with the thinktank Demos on what it calls “counterspeech”, providing alternatives to extremist narratives, and it has recently begun working with academics at King’s College London who specialise in jihadi propaganda. It doesn’t have all the answers yet, says Milner, but “what does work is the kind of thing Sheryl was talking about: humour and warmth”. If extremists seek to spread fear and shock, counterspeech might aim to make them look small and ridiculous.”
Moderator, I urge you to have a look at Rachel McKinnon’s recent tweets to see how she is choosing to interpret what happened on the main February thread. She has already made a strong public attempt to have this blog discredited and probably worse. In the comment I just wrote, I make the case for removing that otherwise unnecessary comment and apologizing to her on behalf of the poster. Thanks for considering that.
“the blog was apparently written under a pseudonym and then taken offline…almost all of us are capable of finding passages from offline blogs. It’s not that difficult.”
??? It’s not that easy. Offline and pseudonymous and yet the poster knew where exactly what to look for and where at the drop of a hat. Isn’t that just a tad suspicious? Do you really think anybody other than RM is at all interested in her private life? I’m certainly not, and I suspect others feel the same. RM was also accused by the previous metablog proprietor of similar false flags.
To the girl who cries ‘wolf’…
I was going to say the same. Whoever knew RMK’s pseudonym and had a copy of her deleted pseudonymous blog has a good chance of being identical to RMK. She already has a history of similar attacks against herself on previous metablogs.
Can you tell us more about this history of attacking herself, please? Any sources?
Here’s a quick recap of what happened about a year ago. The owner of the old PMMB reported that the nastier personal attacks were coming from the same IP addresses as were the defenses:
“Sockpuppetry was rampant, which we know because we tracked IP addresses. (Contrary to speculation, the Blogger platform can be modified to accommodate this.) Some commentators would post incendiary (mean-spirited, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transmisogynistic) remarks about Philosopher X, only to reply in the next comment with a spirited defense of Philosopher X. Comments of this sort often originated from the home institution or city of Philosopher X.”
One and the same person was playing both sides, in other words, and whoever it was came from the very “home institution or city” of the subject. At the time, only two people had been the subjects of real attack: Rachel McKinnon and Matt Drabek. So at least one of those two was guilty of sockpuppetry, presumably to get attention? I, along with many others, am pretty sure that Rachel was the guilty party here.
Thanks! Very interesting.
Uncorroborated claim. No evidence was given, but you’ve bought it whole-hog. I have some miracle snake oil to sell you.
The ‘uncorroborated claim’ objection, used by a Social Justice Warrior. Please don’t make us laugh: we have chapped lips. The claim made by the moderator of that blog was clearly not vindictive: it doesn’t even name the perpetrator or the school where he or she operated from. Why exactly do you think it’s untrustworthy?
The fact that McKinnon has an “eidetic” memory lends credence to your suggestion. Who else would remember what she said years ago or care?
Not long ago RM harassed and was harassed by some “TERF”s on Twitter. I don’t think anyone left that exchange happy, so some of them may be here, looking for ways to humiliate her. If that’s what’s happening, we may be in for far worse than we’ve yet seen, in terms of embarrassing personal posts and personal attacks.
Here’s an acronym: Trans Unallied Radical Discussant. #Tired of RM’s TURD tactics.
I’m not sure TERFs could cope with the metablog. It would trigger them so bad.
You can’t “discredit” the metablog by attacking what’s said here. The only way to “discredit” it would be to bring in censorship, which is what you’re suggesting, because then you’re attacking the very heart of the metablog’s existence.
As for the comment in question, I’ve never seen the blog from which it was pulled, so I don’t know how it was connected to RM. Did RM admit to writing it at some point? Did it include so many details that it became obvious? Either way, reproducing it may not be nice, but it’s not deserving of removal. Everyone here should be smart enough to know that once something is online, it’s online forever. If you want to keep your feelings private, write them on paper or not at all.
Whoever’s doing this, please knock off the RM attacks. We know your opinion; we’ve seen your obsessive vindictiveness. RM had two trivial rows with Leiter (“asshat”) and Weinberg (“allies”), but RM is an obscure non-entity SJW, has no big blog platform, doesn’t run witch hunts and has harmed no one. Leave her alone.
No, Rachel McKinnon has had and continues to have a significant influence on norms in the profession. This was explained to you repeatedly in the last thread, 2:18, with many citations you chose to ignore repeatedly.
It’s true that people shouldn’t disclose or repeat things about Rachel McKinnon’s personal life that she only wrote about pseudonymously and wishes now to be silent about. The reason is that those are irrelevant points and there is no justification for raising them against her wishes. But it is *not* morally wrong to criticize McKinnon’s public behavior, tweets, articles and talks within the profession, and this seems to be a good place to do it. So long as it’s done cleanly, it would be wrong to try to stop it.
“Rachel McKinnon has had and continues to have a significant influence on norms in the profession.”
This is paranoid lunacy.
2:56, I’m repeating here a comment someone else made in the previous thread.
“We’re at the point where the APA is calling for the suppression of speech (including this blog – I mean what other “anonymous blogs” are they possibly referring to?). The statement was remarkable for its duplicity. It’s based on a vicious and totally false association of the metablog with racist abuse and even criminal threats directed at Yancy. As there is no racism or threats here, one has no guess at their true motivations — presumably it’s about silencing political views they dislike (basically criticism of their friends). For an association representing professional philosophy to do that is just crazy. What’s next from the APA, I wonder?
“RM has been cheering them on, despite the fact she is an inexhaustible fountain of toxicity and abuse. As in other cases we’ve seen, these outbursts are never censured by the “be nice” crowd. RM’s antics are concerning because she is helping to establish a climate where one narrow clique is permitted and even encouraged to scream at and silence anybody deemed unworthy. The screeching mobs that are whipped up are being used for political ends – most recently to attack Synthese. I can’t think of any other individual who is working harder to chill dissent, though to be fair lots of people besides her are criticized here (including Weinberg). I’m actually very surprised you think this is all just trivial stuff.”
2:56, or anyone else saying McKinnon’s actions really have no influence, I’d like to hear you respond to this. I’d like to hear you explain, also, why she’s been invited to have a significant voice in forming APA policy, why she gets to appear as a sort of authority on the issue at APA meetings, and why she’s been able to go around to prominent departments promoting her views, if she’s just a quiet, marginalized figure that nobody cares about. The burden is on you to establish your extraordinary claim. You’re going to need some pretty extraordinary evidence.
“RM has been cheering them on”
So. Fucking. What. What has she done? Nothing. Zero.
Now can you go away, you obsessive loon, and stop making PMMMB look stupid?
I guess you still ain’t reading.
Let me ask you this *once again*, 3:22.
“I’d like to hear you respond to this. I’d like to hear you explain, also, why she’s been invited to have a significant voice in forming APA policy, why she gets to appear as a sort of authority on the issue at APA meetings, and why she’s been able to go around to prominent departments promoting her views, if she’s just a quiet, marginalized figure that nobody cares about. The burden is on you to establish your extraordinary claim. You’re going to need some pretty extraordinary evidence.”
Go on, then. Explain it. Don’t just ignore it. We’re waiting.
Eh? You’re obsessed with an obscure, non-entity, high-heeled trans woman with purple hair, rainbows and cats. Fuck off.
You have been given a cogent argument and chose to reply with the same purple hair line as in the previous thread.
‘Rage MacKinnon can’t be dangerous because she has puppies on her Facebook!’ That fallacy is ‘new climate’ philosophy in action.
Hahaha! Exactly. The “rainbows, cats, and purple hair, ergo, harmless” argument. Brilliant. What fucking imbeciles.
Here is a simple reason why we should stop discussing RM: “I uploaded a copy of my Epistemology of Propaganda paper 5 weeks ago and nearly 1000 views already.” These people feed on our attention and benefit professionally from it.
This just in:
“Speculating about whether a trans woman is really autogynephilic is SUPER transmisogynistic. Don’t get it twisted.”
Take note, all.
I’d just like to point out that such speculation is also expialidocious.
It is supertransmysogynisticexpialidocious.
If you say it loud enough you’ll always sound precocious!
Ahhhhhh.
After last week’s ugly personal attacks, the PMMMB is redeemed!
Beautiful. *This* is why we keep checking in, wading through some sludge, sometimes holding our noses, hoping to find a gem. I shall treasure this one for a long time.
What “ugly personal attacks”, idiot? Your smug self-satisfied complacency might make you feel like a genius, but outside of the feminist echo chamber, you need to argue for your assertions.
What “ugly personal attacks”, idiot?
Hysterical! Intentional?
Your smug self-satisfied complacency might make you feel like a genius,
Not at all — I feel like a fortunate consumer of other people’s genius.
but outside of the feminist echo chamber, you need to argue for your assertions.
… he asserted, without argument.
Keep it up! In your own way, you are also adding to the entertainment value of the PMMMB.
Oh, you need an argument for the claim “outside of the feminist echo chamber, you need to argue for your assertions”, idiot? I’m all to happy to oblige. Here’s an argument by example. Premise one: you’re outside of the feminist echo chamber now. Premise two: many times since you’ve been outside of the feminist echo chamber, on this very blog, you’ve been asked for arguments to back up your assertions. (You’ve invariably failed to provide one). Further premises: many others here have been asked for arguments and have produced them (we’ve produced them for you, for instance); it’s part of legitimate philosophy to back things up with arguments, because that’s what real philosophers do and in fact what constitutes real philosophy; etc.
My calling you an idiot is not an *ugly* personal attack. It’s attacking your intelligence, but not in an underhanded or nasty way. I’m just calling a spade a spade here. It’s certainly better than slapping the smirk off your face, as you’ve no doubt experienced in person from many people when you’ve pulled your smug bullshit with them.
Do I have a basis for calling you an idiot? Sure I do. Here’s one data point: you’ve mistaken the claim that one needs to argue for one’s assertions for the claim that every assertion needs an argument provided at the same time that one makes the assertion, which would lead (obviously) to vicious regress.. Any minimally intelligent person would have understood that the point was in reference to your repeated refusal to provide support for your assertions when asked to support them. But rather than provide support or fucking off, as a non-idiot would have done in the circumstances, you stayed around and uncharitably misinterpreted a simple request yet again either on purpose (making you an idiot) or because you’re just too stupid to get it (making you, again, an idiot).
Now fuck off.
“It’s certainly better than slapping the smirk off your face, as you’ve no doubt experienced in person from many people when you’ve pulled your smug bullshit with them.”
I’m going to have to raise a doubt as to how likely it is that a smug academic’s been slapped. In my experience, the smug don’t get slapped nearly enough… if ever.
Too true, 6:25. If the jerk had hung around in non-academic circles for a little, he might have learned a lesson from the palm of someone’s hand once or twice and maybe even become a non-idiot. Regardless, listening to the shithead’s drivel is pretty irritating. I can sympathize with the sentiment.
I love it when the unemployed loser “philosopher” intimates that he might be a tough guy! You should not have been caught with those up-skirt photos of undergrads, creep. Maybe then you would have better things to do than monitoring this blog to call people idiots because they don’t meet your posting criteria.
Wow, Anony. You must be quite the dizzying intellect, what with your ability to see people’s entire past just from their blog comments. You should hang up your diploma, if you have one, and go into business reading fortunes. I’m serious. Just please don’t become another Title IX officer and use your powers to ‘see’ that everyone you hear about has been caught with creepy up-skirt photos of undergrads just because the voices in your head are screaming that at you.
Well, maybe if other people *cough* hadn’t decided to show up and monitor this blog for negative descriptions of feminist philosophers, it wouldn’t have been necessary for anyone to monitor the blog for busybody idiots.
Can we stop talking about this non-entity, RM, and focus on the Stanleys and Haslangers of this world, who are deliberately trying to turn philosophy into a truth-free activist club like the rest of the humanities? Thank you.
“truth-free activist club like the rest of the humanities.”
Excellent phrase.
Here is an article in the British Guardian newspaper, which left me dumbfounded:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/23/kesha-benefit-claimant-women-burden-proving-rape
The concluding 3 sentences of the article:
“Our collective dissatisfaction with how legal systems deal with rape cases must coalesce now. We deserve courts that specialise in sex crimes. We deserve state-funded victim support. And to all the dissenters who want a woman to prove she was raped, the burden of proof should be with you to prove she wasn’t.”
This has been published in a national newspaper with a massive international web presence, not some obscure extremist blog.
We need a society where people are instantly jailed if they’re accused of something. We should all be so proud that philosophy’s SJWs have inspired the profession to accept this major moral insight.
The Guardian is a funny case. Ten years ago it was probably the most respectable mass journal in the UK. Today it is a cuckoo radfem paperbag.
How do these people think lynching worked?
Serious question: has anyone ever seen an African-American woman defend this view, that the burden of proof in rape cases should be on the accused?
The Guardian is a shit publication. Have you read Gaby Hinslow’s shit piece on the Cologne incident? The best thing about the Guardian is its football pages and some comments, if the Guardian alows them.
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
Bleep blop to you to, fellah.
pretty sure they are calling PMMMB a toxic waste dump
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+this+is+not+a+place+of+honor&oq=google+this+is+not+a+place+of+honor&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64l2.5159j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8#q=this+is+not+a+place+of+honor
Congratulations, PMMB. You just spent a whole day discussing a nobody who’s done nothing and who nobody cares about or likes.
*PMMMB
RM-PMMMB
Also, the mod here must have ovaries of steel, to resist the urge to censor all this shit. Well done, and I hope nothing bad happens to you on account of it.
More Jazz Tranley, less Rage McKinnon, please.
Because…?
Because Jazz Tranley is the better nickname? I could read about Jazz Tranley all day.
I like Jazz Whitey even better.
Jews can’t have white privilege, so Jazz can’t be white.
The privilege will have to go to Rage McWhitey then.
This is a friendly reminder that an up-to-date guide to various non-politically-correct philosophy blogs is here: https://philosophymetameta.wordpress.com/
Bookmark it, just in case anything happens to this one.
“I think feminist epistemology is first philosophy.” – Jazz Tranley
Discuss.
“If you want a comprehensive survey of some of philosophy of language”
lol, what a tool.
I know right, hilarious the ways this guy bends over backwards to get favor with SJW groups.
Look at me! Look at me! Me too! Me too!
“All men, by nature, desire to know what’s its like to be a woman in philosophy.” — Jazz Tranley
Hilarious!
Here’s a great post from the old PMMB. In light of the recent APA statement, it seems appropriate to post it again:
The vocab is hard to keep up with. Should we start a running glossary?
“Problematic”: adj. (of arguments) false; (of pratices) must be banned; (of utterances) must be retracted and apologised for; (of tweets) must be deleted;
“Free speech”: n. a problematic concept [see above]
“Censorship”: n. the alleged suppression of problematic ideas, a largely mythical practice. [compare “silence”]
“Silence”: v. (1) to ignore, not talk about. (2) to disagree with (3) to discuss a marginalized individual [see below] in terms they would prefer not to be discussed
“erase”: v. synonym for silence
“identity”: n. an (esp. marginalised) individual’s conception of themself. NB all other definitions, such as those which have been explored by philosophers over the past two millennia, are problematic [see above]
“offense” – n. something nobody ever complained about [compare “harm”]
“harm” – the inevitable consequence of erasing [see above] an individuals identity [see above]
“listen” – (to a marginalised individual), agree with, show deference to,
“bully” – v. synonym for erase
“expert” – n. a marginalised person
“educate” – v. to inform a non-marginalised person of the correct opinion
“safe space” – one in which no identity is erased. Unsafe spaces are problematic [see above].
A hall of fame for posts like this would be nice.
What was the excuse of Tranley to move from a state school to an Ivy League university? And how did he square this move with his prior comments on how immoral it is to teach at a private university?
Rutgers didn’t want him anymore, but Yale did.
That is the obvious #reason for moving, but what was the given #excuse for moving?
1:53, he explains it here: http://chronicle.com/article/A-Leading-Philosopher-Is-Drawn/138513/
By the way, I guess that makes you and me shockingly creepy for caring or knowing about a philosopher’s life choices, publicly expressed. Bone-chilling, isn’t it.
Ugh. That is one of the most ridiculous puff pieces I’ve seen in a long long time.
Now, hold your horses right there, 1:28. It’s very, very creepy of you to care about Jason Stanley, a man who never harmed anyone. What do you think this is, a blog that discusses other blogs and social media? Leave poor Jason alone. Sheesh.
“Jason Stanley, a man who never harmed anyone”
Your sarcasm is hilarious and well-noted.
Can someone give me an example of how Jason harmed someone? He seems to be hated here, but is it just because he publicly embraces identity politics?
2:53, the harms that most of these people cause tend to be directed at a large range of people. Example: Jason Stanley has famously stigmatized all philosophical couples by writing that it’s morally inferior to form relationships, even long-term ones, with others in the profession because feminism. People listen to that geeb, so now everyone has to walk around feeling that they’ll be judged an immoral and inappropriate person if they divulge to others that they’re involved with someone else in the profession.
To that extent, he’s like someone who promotes the idea that gay people are a little suspect because they just might lead to God hating us and maybe they’ll molest children at a higher rate. It’s hard to say whom such comments have harmed, but you can be pretty sure they’ll make several harmless people really uneasy in the process of helping the speaker feel good about himself and portray himself as a Moral Crusader.
+1, 3:08. +1.
He claimed it’s wrong to form a relationship with someone else in the profession? When? Why?!?
You are being baited here, 3:08. 3:19 wants to send you on a wild chase through Jazz’s prolific and uncontrolled Facebook rants, only to later castigate you for violating his privacy. Don’t fall for it.
Here’s Jason Stanley from 2013: “…there appears to be a disproportionate number of female philosophers who are married to male philosophers. Obviously love is a wonderful thing but it does send a certain message to male philosophers. I wouldn’t mention this third factor, except for the fact that I have heard male philosophers admit in my presence that they are pretty hopeless on the dating scene, and that their chances to be with an attractive women are much higher if they focus on female philosophers. The time I’m thinking of was a kind of male bonding moment, and though I threw up in my mouth, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t throw up in their faces.”
Here’s where you can find the remarks in full and in context: http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/06/is-philosophy-especially-plagued-by-sexual-harassment.html#comment-6a00d8341ef41d53ef0192aace998c970d
“You look for romantic prospects among people with whom you share interests, skills, and values? I throw that in your face!”
Idiot, this is the stupidest thing you’ve posted to date. Tell us about the other imaginary harms you face from the NC.
There’s nothing imaginary about the various witchhunts Jazz Tranley and others have led. When you are the public or nearly-public target of ridicule and hate, maybe you’ll understand this better. So please, tell me your real name, and I’ll arrange for some SJW-style justice to rain down on your head. Then we’ll talk.
Nicely put, 3:44.
Your interlocutor seems to be capable only of hollow mimicry. She was called an idiot repeatedly, now she calls others idiots. She also seems hopelessly incapable at reading charitably. I’ve only known one person to combine these faults before: the Femtroll.
What is the cause behind the following physical law? Any philosophy metablog shall, after a period not exceeding 2 months, reach an equilibrium in which love-hate heavy petting between the ARG and the femtroll accounts for 90% of postings?
“I have heard gay philosophers admit in my presence that they are pretty hopeless on the dating scene, and that their chances to be with an attractive man are much higher if they focus on gay philosophers. The time I’m thinking of was a kind of male bonding moment, and though I threw up in my mouth, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t throw up in their faces.”
Found this in Synthese. Burn them! Burn them all!
i.e. Burn all the copies of Synthese.
Well Leiter is on the right side of the APA’s thought-policing fiasco. The people responsible for that document should not be allowed to call themselves philosophers. And fuuuuuck. Read Crispin Sartwell’s takedown:
http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/2016/02/bully-for-you.html
“philosophers .. live in quaking fear of the supernatural power of phonemes. they are what they think the followers of donald trump are.”
“let me ask you this, philosophy professor: when i designated you as ‘special needs’, did you hear that as an insult? or was it ok? why? i thought you said that one was ok! whatever i may have been thinking at that moment, i did not call you a ‘cretin,’ an ‘idiot,’ or a ‘retard,’ or any of the other superseded euphemisms primitive people such as yourselves thought would cure us all.”
Wow. This will trigger a few acquaintances of mine. Can’t wait.
New study which has all-too-obvious relevance to the past several years of moralistic onanism on the philosophy blogosphere. (Also perhaps notable that most of the researchers are from Yale. Perhaps they should have been invited to the Ideology conference?)
>>> Thus, we provide evidence that punishing selfishness can act like a peacock’s tail – it can serve as a public display that hints at a quality (trustworthiness) that can’t easily be observed. We help resolve the “free-rider” problem by showing that individuals who punish others benefit from an improved reputation. And we help explain why we might have developed a sense of moral outrage in the first place.
Our theory can also speak to why people sometimes punish wrongdoing that could never affect them personally, even in the future. For example, why do men condemn sexism, even though they have no personal stake in wiping it out? One explanation may be to signal to women that they can be trusted not to behave in a sexist manner. <<<
http://theconversation.com/evolution-of-moral-outrage-ill-punish-your-bad-behavior-to-make-me-look-good-55103?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for PENMA to solve the problem of the one and the many.
Oh, I thought they were working on the Aggregation Problem?
This link appears here and a few minutes later Brotevi, who of course would never frequent such a filthy place, shares it on FB to try and show that he’s so above this kind of accusation that he can even joke about it. The bro doth protest too much.
what did he say?
He set the thread to open so anyone can read it here: https://www.facebook.com/john.protevi/posts/10206973404605405?pnref=story
> Thus, people may engage in disproportionate punishment, or punish accidents, for the purpose of boosting their own reputations. These examples demonstrate that if punishment evolves to benefit individuals, we should expect imperfect outcomes for society when individual and collective incentives do not align.
Now what group of people do we know who do this?
Say what you want about Jazz Tranley, Jennifer Saul is an even bigger 771.
Because?
Someone wrote in the previous thread about how one can gain oppression points, I would like to add to that:
Declare your peanut allergy to be a crippling disability. Let the world know how much you suffer and let your friends write empty statements of commiseration on your facebook page. React to friendly offerings of peanuts as if it was the most heinous attack: Scream “ableism” as loud as you can.
Try to be non-white, non-male, non-Christian. But that should be obvious
Engage in endless self-pitying navel-gazing. Write about that one time when Jazz Tranley did not invite to a fancy dinner, because he allegedly “had to give a talk”. Complain that you are not part of the in-crowd, despite having an Ivy league education at both undergraduate and graduate level.
Become a member of the Alliance for FuckingAroundEthically, maybe even their spokesperson in charge of social media.
Write stupid opinion pieces for the NYT that are both uninformed and badly reasoned but of course with a social justice bend.
… in which he says that if you don’t support the privileged Yale crybullies you are in cahoots with the politicians who got a Mizzou untenured professor fired for trying to violently remove a student journalist from a place he had every right to be.
“For shame, philosophers who criticized student protestors. For shame for lending your support to this witch hunt against leftists.”
So now we are the witch hunters and the leftists are the Ivy League “diversity” idiots with Goldman Sachs parents who tried to get academics fired for their vaguely non-pc views. I’m going to call this propaganda.
The man is an utter embarrassment to philosophy.
Here’s the piece: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Free-Speech-Fallacy/235520
It’s disappointing that Stanley writes like a journalist now. I find it very hard to figure out the structure of the argument.
The structure of the argument is this: “Jonathan Haidt argues for free speech, but on my uncharitable reading of some of Haidt’s comments, he’s opposed to free speech. Therefore, free speech is bad and anyone who promotes free speech is shameful.”
Let’s read it from an archive instead:
Archived Stanley article
The media have discovered they can generate advertising income by publishing ragebait. Using an archive in these cases helps defeat the media’s strategy.
Wow. That’s pretty terrible alright.
Criticize student protesters? For shame! Criticize professors who instigate violence against student journalists? Witch hunt!
So J. Whitey is for student protesters but against student journalists. In a way I envy him for being able to pick his principles so flexibly. On the other hand it’s probably better if you don’t have a dark triad personality like his.
Isolate him. Don’t hire anyone with a letter from him.
Come on, people with a letter from him can be just fine. His writings do seriously undermine his credibility as a letter writer, though. I will say that.
They can be fine, but why take the risk? He explicitly plans to stuff philosophy with SJWs. There are enough good people out there.
This is petty and silly. Stanley isn’t exactly the most convincing person, I wouldn’t worry about his students secretly picking up his bad habits. Most of them don’t even work on this stuff but instead on more traditional topics in epistemology/language.
As a lemming I can testify that many lemmings are SJWs.
Or married to one. I couldn’t figure out how a piece like ‘culture of justification’ Dotson’s “Word to the Wise” could possibly be published by Philosophy Compass given its mandate until I learned who the editor-in-chief is.
I’m telling you, they are ruthless. They’ll blatantly violate the policies of a journal to advance Dotson’s career as she is one of their standard bearers. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also started trying to block the publications of some brave soul like Lemoine. We need to fight back.
“an institution controlled by people who condemn one of the positions in advance lacks an atmosphere conducive to open debate” – does he mean the APA?
Stanley’s on the losing side of this one, but it’s good to see someone with such a high profile giving a frank endorsement to the view.
For some background on what Heterodox Academy has been up to, see:
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/21/political-diversity-response-to-33-critiques/
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/24/krugman-is-wrong-we-are-not-conservative/
And Haidt in particular:
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/11/24/the-yale-problem-begins-in-high-school/
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/12/01/centerville-students-debate-coddle-u/
I don’t know how anyone who is paying attention to stuff like this can think the Social Justice narrative is immune to the objections Haidt and others are raising.
The interesting thing is that the general public, and intelligent society outside of certain areas in the universe, don’t take the Social Justice Warrior side anymore. 2015 was the year the Social Justice Warriors not only came into their own, but massively overplayed their hand. They are now generally hated, but have surrounded themselves with an echo chamber that prevents them from seeing how badly their message is going over outside of their small circles of friends. Because of this, their message is getting more and more shrill and unacceptable exactly when they need to dial it back a bit. The backlash against them will be sure to be intense when it comes, and I think it’s going to come very soon.
This is what brought down the paleo-PC movement in the late 80s-early 90s. Many liberals, of course, defended paleo-PC for a long time…and attacks by conservatives just made that worse. But PC overplayed its hand and liberals turned against it.
A couple of interesting things though:
First, it turns out that PC was only partially defeated. It went into hiding and rose again, as we know. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. I don’t suppose one should expect many bad political/philosophical ideas to be defeated once and for all.
Second, one of the things that functioned as a kind of reductio of paleo-PC was the “Antioch Rules”, requiring that students at Antioch college ask for consent, permission to proceed at ever point of “escalation” or whatever we should call it during sex. This was even parodied on Saturday Night Live. So the craziest expression of paleo-PC at one of the leftiest universities is basically now being mandated by the government as official policy across the country in the newest wave of PC. This is obviously cause for concern. It isn’t even taking up where it left off…it’s much worse than that…
It’s true, Stealthy: that’s worrying. But the general public, outside of sine very toxic feminist subcultures in academia and law, are as horrified by that as we are. The extremists are a small and shrinking minority here. Unless Clinton wins the presidency, I predict the next person in the Oval Office (whether Sanders or any Republican you name) will stop and reverse this insane trend in sexual assault law. Pressure to do so from the majority is already getting quite strong.
Don’t be so sure. The SJWs managed to take over most of the humanities in the 80s. Philosophy saved itself thanks to analytic intolerance for obscurantist bullshit. But now JS, SH & co are trying to make it unacceptable to publicly call bullshit on Judith Butler or Derrida.
Oh, right, I remember the paper where Haslanger says that.
Not.
Stanley has always liked the Continentals. That’s how he started in philosophy, actually — at Stony Brook.
Uh… are you denying that the Social Justice Warriors in Philosophy are demanding that we embrace far more into philosophy than actual philosophy? Look at what one of the most powerful and disgusting SJW documents, the Colorado Site Visit report (written and then dishonestly leaked by the APA’s own Committee on the Status of Women) has to say: “Realize that there is plurality in the discipline. If some department members have a problem with people doing non-feminist philosophy or doing feminist philosophy (or being engaged in any other sort of intellectual or other type of pursuit), they should gain more appreciation of and tolerance for plurality in the discipline. Even if they are unable to reach a level of appreciation for other approaches to the discipline, it is totally unacceptable for them to denigrate these approaches in front of faculty, graduate or undergraduate students, in formal or informal settings on or off campus.” (Summary of Report by the American Philosophical Association to the University of Colorado Boulder, Jan. 31, 2014, pp.6-7)
It’s obvious that they’re trying to force the legitimation of continental bullshit under the banner of feminism and racial justice. Or rather, they’ll tolerate the bullshit if it helps purging the discipline of a few inconvenient type and replace them with their friends with the correct political views.
Yes. Remember the SPEP Report bullshit of a few years back? Same kind of attempt to fuck up philosophy because feminism, same bunch of douchebags promoting and going for it.
You only have to see the way the Chronicle of Higher Education treats the Melissa Click story in their twitter feed to see it is a lost cause: https://twitter.com/chronicle
Stanley is not reaching out to the public. Stanley is preaching to the converted at the SJW altar.
RIP, Jose Benardete 😦
Interesting that this comment appeared here before the obit on Daily Nous. More evidence for what is already widely known: that Justin and many others read this blog obsessively.
What on earth are you talking about? Can you think of no other way that Justin would have got information roughly around the same time as the poster? Sheesh.
You’re certainly correct, but I see where 2:54 is coming from. Philosophers are constantly bending over backwards to assure the SJWs that they do not read the PMMMB. It is plain as day (and deeply annoying) that they’re lying through their teeth, and one proof of the lies is the timing of blog and Facebook posts that mirror what’s already been up on the PMMMB for a while.
Norcross is obviously the source for Weinberg. He’s a Syracuse PhD so he’s in position to know quickly, plus he supplied the photo, and made the first comment.
I know, I know, it’s breitbart.com but can anyone here point to a more credible source that corroborates those allegations?
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter-shadowbanning-is-real-say-inside-sources/
There’s a good reddit on these topics at /r/kotakuinaction.
Yeah, right.
I frequent the PMMMB but have no interest in the misogyny of #gamergate, and it has no place here. Same with the toxic MRA crap that people sometimes try to connect to the PMMMB. I hope that much is obvious to everyone!
Different voice here, 5:05. Do you mind justifying your “toxic MRA crap” line?
I’m not a Men’s Rights Activist, but I’ve seen many Men’s Rights Activists who made excellent points, just as there are many feminists who have made excellent points (though the feminist points tend to be less important now, since the feminist narrative is so widely accepted and the points are seldom genuinely new contributions to discussions, unlike the MRA ones).
Why dismiss all MRA stuff a priori as “toxic crap”? Isn’t that just as dismissive as someone who would reject all feminist claims out of hand as “toxic crap”? If not, why not?
#notallmras
Wow. I wanted to know if there was an prima facie or even outright reason to discount anything men’s rights activists say. Your coming up with that mock hashtag really fits the bill as a knockdown argument. What it lacks in logic or evidence, which is to say absolutely everything, it more than makes up for in brainless snark.
This, folks, is what happens when we try to make friends by kindly pretending that feminist “philosophy” is actual philosophy.
NO JOKING AROUND AT THE PMMMB! NO SILLY HASHTAGS! NO FUN AT ALL! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF FOR THAT HASHTAG! SHAME, SHAME!
Idiot @ 6:40,
Once again, you show yourself incapable of anything but irrelevant digression and blatant misinterpretations (through stupidity or trolling or a combination of the two).
It’s difficult to blame you entirely, though. It’s hard for people to admit that, beneath their bluster, they have not even a whiff of a coherent argument. It’s particularly hard for Social Justice Warriors, since they are completely unused to an environment in which claims are criticized and responses or revisions are expected. And you’ve clearly been led to believe that you can do philosophy without any critical thinking skills or belief revision in the face of objections, so this must come as a big shock to you.
Still, this is what we philosophers, and more broadly all people of integrity, do. We provide arguments for contentious claims. We don’t try to distract from the inadequacies in our case, or even the total lack of any case, through distractions, particularly inept ones.
lighten up, francis. philosophers also sometime take the piss out of Very Serious People
Yes, 7:00, they do. But it’s a nonstop pattern with this person. A joke’s a joke, but this person is repeatedly trying to twist conversations with irrelevant distractions.
@6:57 Keep going, I’m about to cum #lovedirtytalk
#whysoserious
#hashtagbattleroyale
5:05 did not dismiss all MRA stuff as toxic crap. 5:05 dismissed toxic MRA crap. There is a difference, just as there is a difference between saying all white criminals should be jailed and saying all white people are criminals. And provided that a) there is some toxic MRA crap that has b) been posted here, you should agree with what 5:05 said. It has no place here, and has only been posted as a smear against the philosophy underground.
OK, 9:23. Let’s take your interpretation. What, please, is an instance of ‘toxic MRA crap’ that’s been posted here, and why is it toxic MRA crap?
Someone made a reference to Return of Kings a while back, implying that PMMMB readers drew ideas from there.
Who? What? Where?
For those who’ve never heard of it, Return of Kings is a mostly satirical site that takes MRA ideas to ridiculous extremes. Some commentators and feminists take it seriously though and actually think that it’s the sort of thing PMMMB readers would like. That’s why the FemTroll drops references to it here and on the old PMMB. Ridiculous.
Return of Kings isn’t even an MRA website. It’s a gender-conservative website, and they despise MRAs because they think MRAs are ‘too feminist’.
Obviously nobody here draws ideas from RoK, but that’s probably what some of the SJWs think. Certain SJWs seem to believe (or want to believe) that anyone who disbelieves or disobeys them must be a moron or a villain.
It looks like there is no point in anyone providing an example at this point, because even if 3:58 agrees that the example is an incidence of toxic crap, he/she will argue that it this means that it must have been posted by ‘the Femtroll’ as part of a false flag operation, because no true PMMBer would post such crap.
And your evidence for this contention is…? Also, even if it were true that someone here were committing the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy, it doesn’t follow that everyone here is. We’d like to see your evidence and hear your case, if you’ve got one, that people are posting ‘toxic MRA crap’ here. I don’t know anything about the ‘Return of Kings’ site, but it seems someone who knows or claims to know something about it has contested your allegation that it’s a serious website, etc. Ball’s in your court.
Most important, it isn’t sufficient for something to be an instance of X that it comes from a website that sometimes publishes X. Just as it doesn’t follow from the fact that Hitler said something that what Hitler said is an instance of racism, just because Hitler was a racist and said many racist things.
I still haven’t seen any evidence that something was published here that is an instance of ‘toxic MRA crap’, and you haven’t said what claim was published here was in fact toxic MRA crap.
Out of ideas? Need an argument? Use muhsogyny!
I don’t need no GamerGate because muhsogyny!
I’m not sure what you mean. There’s some sexism in gamergate, but there’s some sexism in lots of things. Most gamergate stuff is in no way sexist. It’s mostly an anti-PC / SJW movement so far as I can tell. And /r/Kotakuinaction is a pretty good source for relevant links.
‘shadowing banning’ and the institution of a ‘Trust and Safety Council’ at a when they’re loosing users and shares at an all-time low … dunno what they’re thinking
Perhaps 2015 saw peak SJW. But there is a growing response to this authoritarian crap (which is advocated by so many prominent philosophers),
The Rise of the Cultural Libertarians
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/24/rise-of-the-cultural-libertarians/
“Cultural authoritarians from both the left and right occupy most positions of power in government, academia and the media. Both argue that art and expression can be harmful. Conservatives say that overly-violent video games and movies are the cause of school shootings and youth crime. This was the view of Jack Thompson, who led a crusade against violent video games and rap lyrics in the late 90s and early 2000s. Progressives argue that “problematic” media can lead to racism and misogyny. In the words of left-wing culture critic Jonathan McIntosh, “oppressive media representations can be damaging sociologically.” Underlying both Thompson’s and McIntosh’s arguments is the idea of culture as a corrupting influence, one that must be policed. This view has little scientific evidence to support it. A recent long-term study found no link between video games and sexism, and violent crime has been in decline for decades despite the growth of violent media. Nonetheless, arguments for a link continue to surface.”
….
“WHAT CULTURAL LIBERTARIANS BELIEVE
Free expression. No idea is too dangerous for cultural libertarians, who want total artistic and intellectual freedom. They often indulge in deliberately outrageous jokes and wacky opinions to test the boundaries of acceptability. Little wonder that the movement’s leaders often attract large followings from the the chaotic, politically incorrect world of anonymous imageboards like 4chan.
Resisting identity politics and public shaming. The movement can also be seen criticising modern methods of cultural control and the neo-puritanism they say has infected modern cultural criticism. The newest of these is a rash of social justice-inspired online vigilantism where professional offence-takers use the power of social media to destroy the reputations and careers of their targets. Justine Sacco, who faced global outrage and the loss of her job over a single politically-incorrect joke, is one well-known victim. Astrophysicist Dr. Matt Taylor and biochemist Sir Tim Hunt were also victims of this modern form of thuggery.
A sense of humour. Cultural libertarians combat anger with ridicule. There is a certain preposterousness to bloggers and social media addicts setting themselves up as a new priesthood, which makes them easy targets for comedy. As MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin puts it: “Tyrants, authoritarians and activists all hate the sound of laughter.” Cultural libertarians understand this instinctively.
An end to nannying and “safe space” culture. Arrayed against the cultural libertarians is the control freakery of the establishment, left and right, and the second coming of political correctness as embodied in campus safe space movements. This latter movement claims that students are too fragile to be exposed to dangerous ideas, and that even mildly offensive speech can cause permanent emotional damage. On the internet, these activists enjoy the support of outlets like Vox and Buzzfeed.
Defending personal freedom. Cultural libertarians may have their own opinions about how people should live their lives, or have low tolerance for offensive speech. But what distinguishes them from their opponents is their rejection of attempts to impose personal standards on others.
Defending spaces for uncomfortable opinions. Reason columnist Cathy Young is a critic of the “misogynistic rhetoric” of masculinist bloggers like Daryush Valizadeh, but nonetheless defended Valizadeh’s right to speak after activists launched a campaign to ban him from Canada. Cultural libertarians are serious about protecting the the freedoms of people they despise.
Fact over feelings. Hand in hand with their commitment to free speech goes a loathing for narrative-led journalism. Cultural libertarians are highly critical of “feelings over facts” in general, but particularly where it gives rise to failures in reporting such as the Duke Lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone debacle, “Mattress Girl” Emma Sulkowicz and GamerGate.
Standing up for consumers and producers over hand-wringing middle-class panic merchants. Cultural libertarians are the natural allies of consumers and want fandoms to have access to a wide variety of culture and ideas. They also stand up for the right of publishers and content creators to experiment wildly with art and believe that nothing should be “off-limits” however uncomfortable it may make some people.
Celebrating culture in all its forms. Cultural libertarians can be divided into three broad categories: vanguard hell-raisers who generate headlines by provoking social justice warriors, followed by a loose coalition of academics, journalists and social commentators who provide intellectual substance to the movement.”
Accidentally reversed my junk E-mail and my handle there. Moderator, could you please delete the above?
😀
Other pmmmb posters’ personal email addresses:
mightymachoman@…
therealdominator@…
apexpredatorlikeaSHARK@…
leaderofmen@…
lasttrueguardian@…
bitchesfearme@…
HERO@…
inanaccessiblepossibleworldmypenisisaboveaveragelength@…
SJW Ragnarok is coming; only the men with grandiose email handles can save philosophy now. http://imgur.com/gallery/CyFyMRL
Somebody please block this SJW idiot from the blog. It’s enough.
I suppose if I had to choose between being an SJW and being a perpetual virgin, I’d drink the hemlock. Thankfully, the God provides many paths through life, most of which can be tread without falling prey to false dichotomies.
You can call me the Nimble Navigator. And together we’re going to make philosophy great again!
‘APA member interviews’ – first Carrie Itchy, now Brotevi.
“This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here.”
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ScNb2PTM7ArWvXTWf1jETsiexEusIAdGFv7N1R-dAOI/viewform
And how do they decide who to interview among the nominees? Please.
Then you’d have a juicy scandal! Metablog commenter applies to APA blog and is turned down! Proof of censorship!
Hey, shithead, why don’t you take a month off. We won’t miss your idiotic attempts at humor and derailment.
Come back when you have arguments to present and are done with the brainless snarkiness. We’re all sick of it. It’s not going to convince anyone here, it’s fucking stupid, and it’s a waste of our time. Go back to Feminist Philosophers or NewAPPS or whatever other shitbag blog your friends hang out on. Maybe they’ll like your crap over there.
lol u mad bro? listen to what somebody posted above why doncha?
“A sense of humour. Cultural libertarians combat anger with ridicule. There is a certain preposterousness to bloggers and social media addicts setting themselves up as a new priesthood, which makes them easy targets for comedy.”
I’ve got a sense of humor. I laugh at many good jokes. I laugh at myself quite often and don’t take myself very seriously. But not every attempted joke is funny. Sometimes, attempted jokes are just pathetic attempts to evade refutation. Get it?
Your jokes stink. You’re an idiot. Go away.
PURITY! NO JOKES, NO DISSENT! THIS IS A FREE SPEECH ZONE!
You’re just not funny. I wish SJWs were funny, that would make them bearable.
having to say you have a sense of humor is pretty much proof that you don’t
Idiot,
Have you ever heard of falsifiability? If so, can you see what’s wrong with this defense of your claim that your jokes are funny and that we just lack the sense of humor we need to ‘get’ how funny you are?
Apparently you can’t see it. Pity. But not our problem. Go away.
I DO TOO HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR I DO I DO!!!
How many ARGs does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: Fewer than the number of gang rapes it takes for campus-feminists to write about Cologne.
Nailed it, 3:03! I wish we had a ‘like’ button on this blog.
Why don’t you email the lead editor and ask?
Can anyone help me understand this:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/bruyahah-update-brian-bruya-published-a-purportedly-scholarly-article-about-the-pgr.html
Is BL really consulting lawyers about a paper in a “heretofore obscure journal”?
If so, so I need to stop publishing papers on the methodological assumptions of various scientists in obscure Phil Sci journals, or am I in the shit?
I don’t see how the episode is connected to your concerns. Maybe elaborate? AFAIK metaphilosophy is not primarily a phil sci journal and does not specialize in methodological/foundational issues in science and phil of science.
Hold on a minute, 11:20. In what way was 7:30/31 and 10:59 “derailing”? 7:19 mentioned the APA interviews and 7:30 / 31 provided the link to the nomination page. 10:32 implied a metablog commenter would never be accepted. 10:59 said that would be a data point for the censorship claim. How is that derailing? It’s right on topic it seems to me.
True, the shithead wasn’t so much derailing that time as inventing a bullshit uncharitable story in advance and being sarcastic about it. He or she started mocking some imaginary people he/she thinks are the metabloggers for recommending themselves to the APA interviews and then inanely blaming it on censorship when they’re rejected.
In other words, the shithead was laughing at us for thinking of ourselves as victims for no good reason (which is the familiar feminist trope about us), even though nothing of the sort had been said, none of us had been rejected, and none of us had even applied to it.
The shithead is obsessed with portraying us as living up to the bullshit feminist characteristic of MRAs, come what may. It’s a really fucking irritating form of bigotry.
1:17-You’re deranged and take this shit too seriously. Settle down, bro.
I’m with 1:17. Whoever it is is a nuisance and is just trying to undermine the blog. I’m pretty sure it’s someone who did this on the other metablogs, too.
All right, then stop replying to them. It’s called ‘don’t feed the troll’.
https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/scp-to-host-prayer-service-for-victims-in-philosophy-at-the-central-apa/
Even the religious nuts are trying to get a piece of that sweet SJW bonanza.
This nonsense is getting more hilarious all the time! My biggest chuckle was at the bit about “the lack of open acknowledgment of the issues.” You know, because we never hear anything from anyone about sexual harassment in the profession, and nobody ever discusses it anywhere. Except, uh, absolutely everywhere, and in some places all the time.
This is genuinely funny. Do you think the SCP are trolling?
Respect to the moderator for deleting the thread stated by the guy who accidentally posted with a real email address and then requested deletion of his post. I find that to be a very encouraging sign.
Yes. We need to be able to retract stuff on here and most all protect our privacy.
By the way there’s no need to give any email address when you post.
“Even the religious nuts are trying to get a piece of that sweet SJW bonanza.”
And on that day the believers did join in joyous harmony, singing The Hymn of Saul, “It’s Not Rape When a Feminist Philospher Does It”.
There was what was to me a brilliant comment on the November MetaMetaBlog to the effect that most of the SJW’s have never engaged in a single political action away from the campus and of wider societal significance. I was about to copy this comment when the blog went down. If anyone has it archived I would appreciate your reposting it. Thank you in any case.
I have a saved copy of the thread. What keywords should I search it for to find the comment you want? It’s long.
Is this it? From the huge November thread:
“Indeed, 8:14. The passive-aggressiveness of most SJW’s is part of what makes me believe that their thought, talk and behavior is largely disingenuous social signaling. If they really, genuinely believed half of the things they claim to believe (and with the psychological certainty they claim to possess), then presumably they’d be outright aggressive both in speech and behavior. For instance, if I am certain that someone is trying to harm me or people I care about in a significant way, I will not aim to “educate” them. Rather, I will use to law, or barring that, my fists, to prevent them from doing so. Until I see some SJWs who are prepared to get physical–as socialists, communists, anarchists, and animal rights activists have been–I will continue to doubt the sincerity of their stated political beliefs.”
I could be remembering wrongly, but the comment I remember was more general. It was more-or-less saying that big noises on campus never actually cared enough about any serious issue in the real world to do anything there.
The comment you posted is also great, thanks very much.
I’ll post that whole comment thread if I can figure out how to do so anonymously. I pasted the whole thread into an email to a colleague, so they’re in plain text. Ideas about how to do this?
Use pastebin.com. Use Tor. Double-check that no details from your email exchange are in the text dump!
OK. This is most but not all of the thread, without time stamps, sadly: pmmb nov 2015 comment thread
There are comments about Leydon-Hardy and Ludlow in there, which will make this pastebin a takedown target for Ludlow’s lawyer. A “scrubbed” version without reference to Leydon-Hardy or Ludlow should be posted too. I’ll do that if some asshole takes down this one.
Ludlow does not have a “lawyer”. The previous publications were taken down by femphils.
Whoever the censorious dicks out there are, they’re not going to win on this one.
This is pure paranoia. The text dump of that comment thread is intact and will not get deleted. Why would it?
Erm, have you been following the fortunes of this blog? It was taken down twice after these and similar comments were made. Why do you think the site doesn;t exist any more?
4:04 has bought into the feminist narrative that anyone who disagrees with the feminists is a deluded male conspiracy theorists, living in his parents’ basement, and is motivated only by sexism and envy that women are taking away his job. it could never possibly dawn on 4:04 and the like that people of all affiliations are united in disgust over what the crybullies are doing to the profession for principled reasons that we discuss here all the time. That’s why 4:04 is incapable of accepting even straightforward empirical facts such as that this blog has been taken down twice before. It threatens 4:04’s religious narrative, so it must be false.
I’ll retract my claim that this is paranoia when the pastebin gets deleted. I have no need for feminist narratives, just facts.
And you have no need for induction, either? Laughing Philosopher, Metablog, Metametablog…
You might be new here, 4:04, but a lot of “philosophy underground” type stuff gets hit with takedown notices. I don’t think taking note of this fact is paranoid.
Aannnddd it’s now deleted.
client-side encrypted text dump of pmmv nov 15 comment thread availabe upon request.
Maybe “SJW’s” and “off-campus”? It was towards the end of the month, I think. Thank you very much.
Hi guys and gals, lots of stuff happening at the Pilos lately. I can’t wait to post as well on the March thread when it is released, hopefully nice and early, but I notice there’s a new one here (because things are cookin!) so I just want to draw attention to what’s been happening at the Pilos lately
– Pilos profiles going really strong, we got Bertrand Russell this time.
And we’ve started covering news in the profession! For now it relies heavily on other blogs like Brian’s (thanks mate) and the beautiful Daily Nous. We hope to take over in the next few months.
Happy philosophy!
FP are trying to use the Click/Mizzou case to highlight sexual harassment issues. The little detail they don’t report about the difference between “students’ bodies and students’ cameras” is that, unlike the UCLA harasser, Click was untenured.
I was wondering if Click was tenured. Her behavior was clearly wrong, but I wonder if dismissal is excessive? Was there a prior history there?
Click was not tenured. I think that what’s potentially problematic in this case was a failure of due process. But I also suspect that had due process been followed, Click still would have been fired.
Yeah, I really didn’t undertstand the point of that FP post. So some bad tenured people didn’t get canned; how does this show that another bad untenured person, Click, shouldn’t get canned? Fergodssakes, she was caught on camera trying to get someone assaulted… on campus, no less!
Here’s the point, 5:31.
Some people with tenure were alleged to have done something wrong. It would have been hard to prove that it happened for sure, and tenure makes dismissal difficult. Those people were not dismissed.
Someone else without the protection of tenure clearly did something wrong, and it was captured on film for all to see. It would have been easy to prove that it happened for sure, and that person’s lack of tenure would have made dismissal easy. That person was dismissed, and many of us, including Leiter, are arguing that that person should not have been dismissed even though the person clearly did something wrong and didn’t have tenure.
Therefore, the only explanation is patriarchy.
You had me there. Good one, 5:31!
Ha ha
It’s an extraordinary sleight-of-hand trick. It’s a line that can be run on any higher-ed discipline issue other than sexual harassment or assault: “You support that X was disciplined for Y, but Y isn’t sexual harassment or assault? You’re clearly an apologist for or don’t give a shit about sexual harassment/assault.” It’s a strategic red herring they can toss out whenever they want.
The first obvious thing to say is that they would not dare raise this issue if the politics of the situation were different. If Click were an opponent of the protests and the journalist were affiliated with the protesters, they would obviously support the firing and they would do so without a second question about the priorities regarding sexual harassment/assault. (For example, I don’t recall similar posts on FP when John McAdams was stripped of tenure at Marquette for his blog posts criticizing a graduate student.)
The second obvious point here is that the dichotomy between cameras and bodies is ridiculous. Click clearly called for violence against a student reporter in an extremely tense situation. She is just lucky that she didn’t bring serious injury to the student. It’s easy enough, then, to flip this around on FP: if FP genuinely cared about the integrity of students’ bodies, why weren’t they deeply upset about how Click called for illegal violence against a student? No mention of this, of course, for the standard, predictable reasons.
The third obvious point is that FP just gets the conclusion wrong. Let’s grant that they are entirely right about that sexual harassment and assault aren’t taken as seriously as the issues should be and that many people weren’t disciplined/dismissed who should have been. What I would take to follow from that is it’s the failure to take sexual harassment/assault seriously that’s messed up. It is hard to see why anything about Click’s firing being messed up follows.
Fourth, isn’t the sudden concern for due process here rather amusing? It’s certainly at odds with how little priority some of these sorts of folks seem to give to due process concerns in other types of cases. Perhaps the reason for the due process concern is this: Click and FP share the same politics and her dismissal for violating a student’s legal rights in service of those politics sets a symbolic precedent that they cannot do whatever they want with total impunity to advance their political agenda.
(Let’s just think about the “due process” claim for a minute. Here we’ve got an untenured professor who, among other things, was recorded on video calling for “muscle” to be used against a student in a public place for exercising first amendment rights. Instead of the university immediately dismissing (untenured) Click in the spring semester, she was placed on paid leave while an independent firm conducted a thorough investigation. The investigators interviewed a number of witnesses, reviewed recordings, interviewed Click twice (while she had counsel), and then issued a 30-page report, which it made public, along with Click’s response. The Board of Curators voted to dismiss Click for violating university policy, which she clearly did, and, in the form of the independent report, they detailed the evidence for her violations of that policy (again, all of this has been made public). And she may still issue an appeal to this decision. Now that may not satisfy everyone’s reasonable due process concerns, but it’s not like the university just fired her on a whim without any concern whatsoever for evidence, fairness, or due process.)
There are serious concerns in the Missouri case, such as the drastic cuts aimed at the higher education system in general or the way that some legislators are attempting to shut down the exercise of free speech there (drastic, punitive budget cuts because of student protests are likely to have chilling effects on free speech down the road). But those concerns are not really what’s at issue in FP’s red-herring post.
march thread plz
Alfred H MacDonald · February 29, 2016 at 8:38 pm
this headline is worryingly misleading and possibly dramaticizes things a bit — it’s unclear to a person unfamiliar with the metaphor that “bunny-drowning” is in fact a metaphor
Justin W. · February 29, 2016 at 8:50 pm
I added scare quotes around “bunny-drowning,” which I should have included originally. Thanks.
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Anyways, let’s celebrate the demise of that awful finance hawk of a university president. We should overthrow these assholes more often.
Attention metabros and metasisters and metaungendered fellow philosophers: the new version of Tor tells me that DN has a system that tries to pull my computer’s personal info. The new Tor can stop that (you get an option) but I don’t think the old one could. Not sure how commercial VPNs fare in that respect. Watch out for the wrath of sneaky Whineberg and his cabal of witch-hunters. The recent relaxing of censorship may be a strategy to harvest our IPs.