This is funny; an excerpt:
Last week, I published a piece on the website Quillette. Founded by Aussie Claire Lehmann, Quillette has frequently been associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW). It’s not left-leaning, though if you rummage around you’ll find pieces from a number of different orientations. They’ve sparked controversy here and there: on James Damore’s once-infamous Google memo, for example. They’re pretty obsessed with attacks by the woken on free speech on campus. And the sort of reaction they’ve provoked often provides excellent examples of the intolerance they condemn....
I was surprised by the responses I got on Twitter and in a number of emails. Almost nobody wrestled with my argument; rather, they focused on the sheer fact that it was in Quillette. Actual philosophy professors seemed to argue that where it was published showed it was false, or that it doesn’t at all matter whether it is, just that it was published in Quillette and hence associates me with people they repudiate, and thus refutes my reasoning and my very person.
“Crispin,” wrote @nathanoseroff, “not a good look to publish on the pro-eugenics, pro-‘culture war’, anti-trans website started by a far-right explicitly anti-feminist Australian that previously worked for The Blaze, a Canadian anti-Muslim disinformation website.” In the course of our discussion, he added, “Guess a website dedicated to mainstreaming eugenics doesn’t cross the line.” What he objects to, he said in the subsequent discussion, is “mostly the explicit pro-eugenics propaganda, really.” I tried to get Nathan to show me the pro-eugenics editorials, but to do that would force him to link stuff that he repudiates, and that was a non-starter. Googling “quillette eugenics” produced only a review that presupposed that eugenics was wrong and disgusting.
But at any rate, even if Quillette published something that someone could construe as pro-eugenics, that doesn’t make me an advocate of eugenics, which I repudiate. This guilt-by-association approach to publications and publication ends up attributing thousands of contradictory opinions to everyone who writes opinion journalism for many outlets....
But Nathan Oseroff-Spicer is at least consistent, and condemns himself on the same grounds:
Oseroff regretted having appeared in THE on the basis of this article. But this is getting sad: Oseroff-Spicer is going to quickly make it impossible for himself to advocate his positions in any outlet, or at least an outlet that has any readers who don’t already agree with him. And what will he have accomplished?
No doubt Times Higher Ed journalists are gnashing their teeth about having lost such an authoritative source as Mr. Oseroff-Spicer!
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