This is amusing; an excerpt:
If you liked the Thieves’ Guild’s guide to the ethics of personal property, and if you found yourself moved to tears by the Arsonist’s Society’s guide to the ethics of firefighting, you will adore the Put-the-Shiv-in-Rebecca-Tuvel Gang’s guide to publishing ethics. Yes, three out of five of the authors of the “white paper” on publishing ethics were signatories to the now-infamous “open letter” calling on the feminist journal, Hypatia, to recall Rebecca Tuvel’s paper on transgenderism/transracialism, after it had been published. [1] A fourth serves on its advisory board, the whole of which reads like a who’s-who of the woker-than-woke-crowd who have been doing their busy best to turn our once-distinguished, highly respected discipline into an intellectually lightweight, identity-obsessed laughing-stock; the delight of YouTube trolls and right wing political commentators everywhere and fodder for every miserable conservative state-legislator looking for a reason to slash humanities and liberal arts budgets in “red” states and counties across the country.
So shameless is this particular klatch of woke philosophers that in their document (I can’t keep calling it a “white paper” without feeling the urge to shove my head through the drywall in my office) they admit that the inspiration for developing ethical publishing guidelines for philosophy arose from “a wide range of ethical issues pertaining to publishing in humanities (including the question of how to address them)” that “came to the fore in 2017 when three publication controversies made headlines.” They even cite the Tuvel-affair as one of the three, but never identify themselves as among the principle miscreants. Could they have possibly thought that no one would notice or find out? Are they so convinced of their own virtue and importance within the profession that they don’t think it matters? Where they emboldened by the idea that their shills in the philosophy blogosphere would run interference, as the indomitable Weinberg valiantly tried to do in the discussion following the Daily Nous post on the subject? The mind reels....
Rather than survey the thousands of professional philosophers across the country – or world – which is relatively easy to do in the internet-age, but the results of which would be unpredictable, they limited their investigations to those whom they knew were likely to share their view of the profession, namely its gatekeepers and those of other branches of the humanities. [3]
The result is an entirely predictable litany of identity-soaked keywords, catchphrases, imperatives and concerns. We should worry about the extent to which “systemic bias — by authors, reviewers, editors, and the discipline as a whole — compound difficulties in preventing, identifying, and correcting unethical and unreliable scholarship.” We must ensure that “journal leadership include[s] more varied backgrounds, experiences, scholarly traditions,” because “accomplishing diversity of authorship would flow more easily from that.” We should concern ourselves with how to determine the “difference between responsible engagement and exploitative appropriation of ideas, histories, and experiences” and lament the rarity of “guidelines on diversity (for instance, anything approximating the principle ‘Nothing about us, without us’ for policies and research on vulnerable populations…)”
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