I do wish Justin Weinberg (South Carolina), who has run his own "safe space" philosophy blog for five years now, could have marked the occasion without launching yet another tiresome attack on me full of falsehoods and half-truths. (He used to do this a lot, then seemed to grow out of it.) I mostly enjoy his blog, despite his consistently awful judgment on professional matters and contempt for academic freedom. But I do wish he could let his obsession with me go.
Since there is no point, as Shaw said, in "wrestling with a pig," I'll just make a general comment:
Since last May, I have been defending the freedom of speech and inquiry of feminist philosophers and activists (especially philosopher Kathleen Stock of the University of Sussex) concerned about the ramifications of current notions of “gender identity” for the rights of women in female-only spaces and for lesbians. (You can see almost all the posts here.) As a result, I have also become a target of harassment and abuse from those, even within philosophy, wanting to vilify those with the “incorrect” views, though nothing as bad as Stock and others have experienced (of course, I've been accused of "transphobia," but that's the least it). I have criticized universities, faculty (and here and here etc.) and students for their bad behavior towards Stock and others that affect honest and open discussion of these issues. I do not always agree with Professor Stock, but she is a model of courageous and principled advocacy on an important issue, and in the face of a sometimes organized campaign of vilification, harassment, and threats.
UPDATE: A funny twitter thread on Weinberg's usual hypocrisy.
ANOTHER: Weinberg decided to celebrate the fifth anniversary of his blog not only by attacking me but, in keeping with his faux commitment to civility, opening up his forum for unmoderated insults, lies, and abuse of me. (My thanks to several folks who sent nice messages today after Justin's slimy stunt.)
Interestingly, a sane person finally commented on the thread, a philosopher who had struggled on the job market and with a disability, who had largely ignored blogs until s/he found her/himself in a new job in a new location, isolated from friends and family. S/he writes:
The fact is that when I got on Daily Nous and saw some of the comments being made on here, it was almost literally incredible to me that they were being made by professional philosophers or graduate students. Some of these comments were so juvenile, sanctimonious, self-ignorant, and mean-spirited, they defied parody. That they passed moderation seemed to make a mockery of moderation. This kind of behavior is painful enough when it comes from the right, but every one of these commentators I am thinking of were ostentatiously expressing a concern for the oppressed and vulnerable. Given that I have harbored such concerns for a long time, and these appeared to me so grotesquely fake or corrupted, well, it was just stomach-turning.
I also say it was traumatizing. That is surely in large part due to the extreme duress I was under at the time. Even though my normal life is a daily struggle, I would not normally be traumatized by something like this. But under these circumstances, I just could not believe that I had suffered and struggled so much to fight my way into a career that, at least so it appeared, was increasingly populated by people who looked as far away from ‘lovers of wisdom’ as one could imagine, and were aggressively attempting to silence others while making a great deal of noise about the badness of silencing people. Much of this behavior I also saw on facebook, and collectively it was extremely dispiriting.
My impression is that the comments on the whole have improved a great deal on this blog, though there is still a fair bit of this sort of thing (and other forms of ‘jerkiness’–from which I do not entirely exempt myself). Nevertheless, my impression of the profession overall is nothing close to how you describe it in the beginning, Justin. It seems to me that many vulnerable people–including myself–are effectively silenced by mobs of online shamers and harassers (that is not to deny that other people who had previously been silenced are now much more free, which is great). Even if this view is mistaken, it is widely held, as is evidenced routinely in the comment section here (also, it is hard to see how it could be widely held and likely to be false, at least if we take standpoint epistemology seriously at all). It seems to be that jerks have not, in the aggregate, waned at all, though the net influence of certain types might have (as I say, I was not online much before 5 years ago).
For example, it seems to me that Nathan Oseroff, Christa Peterson and many [others] aggressively silencing those who question gender ID laws have acted jerkily (and libelously) in such a way repeatedly. Why doesn’t this breed of jerkiness (not to say defamation) count? For there is a *very* great deal of it, and it often is much worse than mere jerkiness (McKinnon’s abuse of you stands out especially, though she ranges widely). For what it’s worth, I expect that the content of Nathan’s and Christa’s twitter feed, and not what Leiter has said about them, will constitute whatever ‘political’ problems they have on the market. So it is clearly disingenuous to say that them being on the market will be a test case for Leiter’s power, other than his ability to direct attention to what strikes me as ‘manipulative bullshit’, to use Christa’s words.
(Yes Christa, what Nathan said was defamatory, in my judgment. Why should Dr. Stock not respond the way she did? Saying that she is directing hate toward students and faculty is just a lie. Saying that she is advocating treating trans people the way gay people were treated decades ago is a vicious lie, as far as I can tell. Why should you expect these lies not to be called out, and why should your potential employers not take them into account?)
I suppose it's a small sign of hope for saving the profession from the New Infantilists and the thought police that this comment was, even prior to my linking to it, the most-liked comment on that whole sorry thread.
3/15 UPDATE: So I finally went back to look at Justin Weinberg's "civil and polite" blog, in which he created an unmoderated sewer--worthy of the metablog--for abuse, insults and lies not just about me, but, for reasons unknown, also Daniel Kaufman! (Finally, at the end, a bit of reality intrudes into the festival of abuse.) Weinberg's slimy hypocrisy is old news, alas. (Prof. Kaufman has also commented here, here and here on some of Justin's performance.) I did laugh out loud when I saw Ms. Peterson (of all people!) complaining that it was "pretty inappropriate to throw...out...completely unsubstantiated" claims, right after she had made a series of not simply "unsubstantiated" but outrageously false claims about me. On advice of counsel, let me correct for the record a few (not all) of them:
(1) Ms. Peterson refers, falsely, to “Leiter’s ongoing harassment of graduate students.” There has been no “ongoing harassment of graduate students.” I have criticized Ms. Peterson (on three occasions over the last eight months) and one other graduate student, Nathan Oseroff, after both heaped abuse and, in one instance, libel on feminist philosophers concerned about changes to the gender ID law in the UK. In Ms. Peterson's case, I also criticized her for tweeting her frustration about having to wait “for Leiter to die” so she could resume her twitter abuse of those same feminists without critical comment from me, as well as comparing my speech to the speech of Nazis. Being criticized for one's public misconduct is not "harassment."
(2) Ms. Peterson states, falsely, that I am “accommodating for [allegedly having less “power”] by targeting students, now, instead of junior faculty.” I have never targeted students or junior faculty; I criticize those who engage in foolish, destructive, or illiberal misconduct, regardless of status. My blog is a matter of public record, and a review of its contents and those whom I have criticized reveals that Ms. Peterson's claim is manifestly false, and she must surely know it to be false: those in academia I have criticized are by a wide margin tenured faculty.
(3) Ms. Peterson states, falsely, that I “lie[d] about Nathan [Oseroff] having been suspended” from his editorial role at the APA blog (after Prof. Kathleen Stock and I exposed his abuse of his position). I have seen no evidence that it is false that Mr. Oseroff was briefly suspended and had good reason to believe he was. A professor who was friends with the editor of the APA blog confirmed to me that Mr. Oseroff had been suspended. When I wrote to the editor of the APA blog noting his suspension and asking, “If there is anything you want to say for the record, I am happy to quote you," the editor replied, “Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I appreciate it. However, at the moment I do not have anything to add to the matter," the "matter" being, of course, the suspension.
I'll conclude with an apt tweet:
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