I wasn't surprised to learn that philosopher Kate Manne (Cornell) had given up on Twitter; I'm amazed she could bear it for as long as she did, since mindless ad hominem abuse is the normal form of interchange, conjoined with particular interest in abuse aimed at gender, race and religion. Professor Manne had the particular misfortune to become the target of the "Jordan Peterson twitter army," which can't have been pleasant.
I was amused, though, to discover that Kant had written about Twitter in 1784: "despite the apparent wisdom of individual actions here and there, everything as a whole is made up of folly and childish vanity, and often of childish malice and destructiveness." (OK, actually he was talking about world history.)
I'm thinking of giving up on the medium myself; at a minimum, I'm going to stop engaging, it's pretty hopeless. On one occasion, I attracted the Twitter Nazis (literal ones), who discovered my "Jew" article on free speech, and I then received more than a thousand abusive tweets over a day or two. (These folks definitely didn't think I was "white"--more on that in a moment.) I responded to no one, and blocked no one, and they moved on. This is clearly the right approach.
Ever since I had the temerity to call attention to Kathleen Stock's critical writings about issues raised by the gender recognition law in the U.K., I've been exposed to what seems to me an equally unhinged part of twitter: the self-annointed "trans activists." The rabid and unhinged Katja Thieme (British Columbia), for example, declared me an "anti-trans activist" the other week. Apart from calling attention to views she clearly deems unacceptable, whether those of Kathleen Stock or Leslie Green, my "anti-trans [sic] activism [sic]" is on full display here and here and here and here. But she outdid herself more recently by comparing me to the sexual harassers and anti-semites I discussed here. Unhappy, frenzied zealots and mediocrities like this thrive on Twitter.
That article of mine, on citation practices, produced a remarkable set of outbursts on Twitter, disproportionately focused on my (alleged) race and (actual) gender; some examples:
Nikki Usher, Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, called me "a generic University of Chicago white-dude scholar who defends honorifics for Nazis." I pointed out to her that citations, at least in real disciplines, aren't "honorifics."
Rose Casey, Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University, after first mocking and insulting me on Twitter, responded to my blocking her by stating that, "We need less of this white male gatekeeping in academia." When challenged by another tweeter what she meant, she explained that "he blocked me" and that, "He is gatekeeping my access to the institution in which he wields power (incl tenure) & in which I do not." Put aside that I'm not in her field or at her institution, as someone else amusingly quipped in response: "Who knew that blocking someone on Twitter could derail the tenure track." Professor Casey's own social media performance is far more likely to gatekeep her out of the academy.
Nathan Hensley, Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, characterized my article as follows: "U Chicago philosophy bro defends 'the foundations of academic freedom' by arguing we should cite rapists. 'Let me explain,' says bro, before starting lecture on history of all knowledge."
Molly Valanth Hall, a PhD student in English at the University of Rhode Island, explained to me that, "Nothing exists outside of politics, even if you think it is important to still cite such scholars. How ignorant to think so. And a mark of privilege to think anything can ever be politically neutral. Doesn't sound like you practice an 'actual scholarly discipline.'" It used to be lit-crit folks thought nothing existed outside the text; now it's politics. I guess this passes as established wisdom in some fields.
Sava Saheli Singh, a postdoc at Queen's University in Canada, with a PhD in Educational Communication and Technology, explained to me that "you really do need to read about the politics of citation and spend some time understanding how gender, power, race, and socioeconomic status work to influence and shape academia." Fair enough, so I asked her for some pertinent literature recommendations--since she, like the others, takes this to be an established body of knowledge--to which she replied "oh feel free to use the academic resources at your disposal to find them," and then pointed to the results of a largely irrelevant Google Scholar search. For good measure, and confirming her status as an insolent Twitter jackass, she added, "[T]ry putting quotation marks around 'politics of citation', it’s a little trick you might not know. do a little more work and be a better 'scholar', Brian." She then denounced me on her Twitter feed as "a shitty philosophy bro," among other even more vulgar epithets and insults.
These irrational people really are what's wrong with certain academic fields, and their idiotic blather endangers all of us in higher education by undermining the integrity and public credibility of universities. Hungarian fascists are already shutting programs down for political reasons. If "everything is political," as these ignoramuses believe, then what will be their defense when North American fascists want to make a political judgment to shut them down?
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