Apt comments here:
I don't want to give the impression that I am unduly interested in the cottage industry that has grown up on the US Right of, let us say, severely critiquing my work. It comes with the territory that if you become a public figure, you get attacked. In fact, even very, very minor status as a public figure opens you to having virtually anything said about you with impunity, including that you have been impregnated by green Martians. In my world, of academia, people are usually good about going to the source and double-checking assertions, so these National Enquirer type pieces don't have, I think, much purchase there. But some kind readers have suggested that I ought to do a point by point reply to critics just so the record is straight somewhere. But the scribblers for hire are legion and who has time?
Having "very, very minor status as a public figure," I've had my own brief encounter with the slime-and-smear machine. (And then, of course, there are all those other Cyberspace "encounters"--with noxious mediocrities, the mentally ill or seriously disturbed, and so on. As the economists like to say, "the barriers to entry" are low in Cyberspace, and while they are thinking mainly of economic cost, equally (perhaps more) significant is that ordinary non-economic barriers operative in the academy, sometimes in the media, in ordinary social life--barriers like competence, knowledge, intelligence, social skill, human decency, and sanity--are also missing in Cyberspace.)
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