Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

In one California county, 30% of COVID-19 cases are traceable to church gatherings...

...and yet one religious crazy is ready to fight for the right to sicken his parishioners!

(Thanks to Jill Landowski for the pointer.)

The morbid reactionary fantasies of Adrian Vermeule

The latest.  Do note that Professor Vermeule is a "moral realist"!

As usual, religious zealots are a threat to human well-being

Unbelievable.  And some of these morons think that the First Amendment protects their right to endanger public health:   it doesn't.

UPDATE:  Good news, one of the pastors breaking the law has been arrested.  A few civil suits down the line for reckless indifference to human life would be appropriate too!

Even in the midst of a pandemic...

...Chris Bertram (Bristol) still can't stop his petty sniping. Amazing!  (More on Bertram for the uninitiated; new readers can safely ignore:  academic philosophy has a lot of resentful pests on its margins.)   Meanwhile, in the real world, here's a representative nice message I got from a non-philosopher:

I discovered your blog just about a week ago. In my search for people who were asking big questions about the virus and humanity, I googled "philosophers" and "corona virus."  And there you were!  Your blog is that welcome breath of sanity in a cluttered universe of internet claptrap. I have a round of sites I visit when I'm feeling especially powerless about our lives, and I've moved you right up to the top tier (between the Guardian and the Boston Globe). Bravo!

Fox, the fascist propaganda network, is now an official threat to public health

 

This ad makes clear why Trump is a threat to public health

 

Why having an incompetent President is a problem during a national emergency

Yesterday I noted that Governors, not the President, have authority to take public health measures like shutting down businesses and requiring individuals to stay home, but this interview makes very clear why having an imbecile as President is a real problem; an excerpt:

What is supposed to happen is the federal government has to activate the Defense Production Act immediately. Now, what Defense Production Act does is it allows the federal government to step in and aggressively force the private sector to produce what we need. And what is so critical in this is timing. Because you can't simply build factories from scratch; what you can do is identify a supply chain in order to make it work.

For example, if New York needs rubber gloves, New York cannot simply build rubber glove factories overnight. However, there might be a rubber glove factory in Ohio that could produce it, but they might not have the latex. So therefore, the Defense Production Act allows the federal government to go to the condom factory in Missouri and say, "Listen, you have barrels of latex we need. We are requisitioning those. We are giving them to the rubber glove factory in Ohio. And then we are transporting the finished rubber gloves to New York." That's how it is supposed to work.

The authority to lockdown business and quarantine people rests with the states, not the federal government...

...so the decision-maker who matters in the U.S. is your Governor not the monster-child.   See the comments on Twitter from law professor Bobby Chesney (Texas).

Leiter v. Trump

A funny message, from longtime reader Larry Franz:

Thank you for your COVID-19 posts. The public needs reliable information like you've been providing. We also need TV networks to stop giving the president free access to misinform the public. He's a risk to public health.

Alas, I can only address one of these issues!

Trump's and the right-wing media's disinformation campaign on coronavirus

A philosopher elsewhere kindly invited me to share the following:

I think we're seeing that Trump's initial misinformation about the risk posed by the coronavirus is causing fewer Americans to socially distance than otherwise would. Willingness to socially isolate tracks party affiliation, with way fewer Republicans than Democrats saying they're willing to do so: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republicans-are-far-more-likely-than-democrats-to-think-the-coronavirus-threat-is-exaggerated-new-survey-finds-2020-03-10 . It's not hard to find people not just defying recommendations to socially isolate, but doing so proudly.

Right-wing media is almost certainly responsible for this.

Until sometime in March, Trump's downplaying of the pandemic was part of Fox News' editorial stance. They would often slip this in as they criticize Democrats for trying to use the crisis to their own advantage.

Fucking Moron Watch: David A. Clarke, Jr. edition

JFC!

Matt and Noah Colvin should be arrested for endangering public health

They're apparently too stupid to realize that being featured in the NYT is going to bring the wrath of people and law enforcement down on them.

Trump and Kudlow should both be moved into the Kirkland, Washington Life Care Center...

...for the duration of this fiasco they helped create.

Bristol newspaper names and shames adult men threatening Greta Thunberg on social media

What a collection of winners!

In case anyone forgot that Rush Limbaugh is the scum of the earth (with apologies to scum)...

...a small sampling, but one that does no justice to the extent to which he has damaged the polity and the democracy over the last thirty years.

Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on "guilt-by-association" and the Twitter Red Guard

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.

Everything is bigger in Texas...

...including the morons.

Not even Karl Kraus could have imagined James Bennet, the NYT editorial page editor

This account is horrifying.  If the quotes are accurate, the man is both illiterate and an imbecile.  Here he is commenting on Brett Stephens, the worst NYT op-ed writer since Abe "I'm writing as bad as I can" Rosenthal:   "I just think he’s an exceptional writer and thinker.”   Only someone not familiar with writing or thinking could say this.

Vigilante justice comes to NYU...

...as a reader points out to me.  Professor Ronell was at least found to have violated sexual harassment rules on her campus, unlike Professor Hubbard, but her case was adjudicated and she was sanctioned.  Unless universities respond quickly and harshly to these student mobs (in this case, a small one), this is going to spread and eventually lead to violence and criminal misconduct.

Biologist Jerry Coyne on Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's paper on "white empiricism"

Professor Coyne is very patient in going through this stuff.  (We encountered Professor Prescod-Weinstein once before.  You can read her demand for honoraria here.)  An excerpt from near the end of Coyne's piece:

I am growing weary, for I have dissected papers like this before—papers on white glaciology, the racism of Pilates, lattes, and pumpkins, and so on. The difference here is that Prescod-Weinstein is a working physicist with respectable accomplishments in the field. It is a sad testimony to the power of ideology, though, that her interpretation of what science is has been so severely distorted by her anti-white feminism.  Instead of arguing, as I’ve said, on moral grounds, she argues that the objectivity of science itself is in conflict with the supposed dismissal of black women’s experiences of racism, and that such an attitude is not just racist but anti-science.

In view of the paucity of black women physicists with a Ph.D. (there have been only a few dozen in history), what should we do? I agree that there may be a problem here, and my solution is, as always, twofold. First, rectify any inequality of opportunity starting at the ground—the limited opportunities afforded to minorities by living conditions and poor schooling, themselves byproducts of racism. Second, for the time being practice a form of affirmative action, realizing that diversity in the physics community is an inherent good for several reasons (providing role models to eliminate roadblocks to opportunity, for one).

Deranged UT Austin students now harassing classics professor at his home

They're proud of it!   This faculty member's "crime" is his scholarship.  The students should be prosecuted under any applicable criminal statutes, and Professor Hubbard, the victim of this abuse, should bring a civil action against the students (including for defamation:  calling someone a "pedophile" when they are not is per se defamatory, meaning he won't even need to prove damages).   I will be glad to raise money for his legal action if there is one.

(Thanks to Joel Pust for the pointer.)

The author of the "1619 Project," Nikole Hannah-Jones...

...is a journalist (Karl Kraus, where are you?), not even an historian, and she puts on quite a display on Twitter (e.g., announcing that as a Black person in America she doesn't have to consider historians like James McPherson "preeminent").  Most striking is her main line of defense against the criticisms we've noted the last few days:  "there is no such thing as objective history so complaints that the 1619 is an illegitimate reframing of history deny that all history is framed."   There may be no uniquely correct account of historical events, but there are certainly better and worse ones, correct and incorrect ones, and the objections are that the 1619 Project makes a number of contentious, and indeed false, claims about the history.   It's hard to believe an imbecile like this is writing for the NYT.

(Thanks to a young philosopher on the job market for calling this to my attention.  Because of the culture of open debate and tolerance for competing views in academic philosophy, this student did not want to be named.)

Scholarship by classics professor with "incorrect" views is now as bad as sexual harassment according to students at UT Austin

I'm glad the university has rebuffed these benighted students, but it's no doubt a symptom of what's to come as the campaign against actual sexual harassment gets mixed up with the general New Infantilist hysteria about "harmful" ideas:

A group of students at the University of Texas are calling for the firing of a classics professor who has written extensively on “pederasty”—socially acknowledged romantic relationships between adult men and teen boys—in ancient Greece....

“Contemporary American legislation premised on children’s incapacity to ‘consent’ to sexual relations stems from outmoded gender constructions and ideological preoccupations of the late Victorian and Progressive Era,” Hubbard reportedly wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Thymos: Boyhood Studies. “We should consider a different ‘age of consent’ for boys and girls"....

A group called Students for Safety issued a press release last month which claimed that Hubbard “has used his position to further a community of individuals hoping to prey on underage boys” and that his writings “encourage these illicit acts.”

Siena philosophy professor Emanuele Castrucci is a Nazi sympathizer

What an embarrassment.  I am unsure of the legal status of pro-Nazi speech in Italy, although I would not be surprised if, as in many European countries, it is illegal.  In any case, it appears that academic freedom in Italy does not protect extra-mural speech.  There's more here (in Italian).

UPDATE:  Some of this maniac's creepy musings and comments are translated here.   And more news coverage (in English).

The Internet, defined

"Costless, rapid communication of lazy, angry thoughts," from philosopher Christopher Morris (Maryland).  It could hardly be more apt!

Ibram Kendi, totalitarian

Amazing:

He wants unelected “formally trained experts on racism” (presumably all from critical race-theory departments) to have unaccountable control over every policy that won’t yield racial equality in every field of life, public or private. They are tasked with investigating “private racist policies.” Any policy change anywhere in the U.S. would have to be precleared by these “experts” who could use “disciplinary tools” if policymakers do not cave to their demands. They would monitor and control public and private speech. What Kendi wants is power to coerce others to accept his worldview and to implement his preferred policies, over and above democratic accountability or political opposition. Among those policies would be those explicitly favoring nonwhites over whites because “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Philosophy graduate student at Berkeley gratuitously (and rather stupidly) insults rural Americans...

...and faces a predictable right-wing lapidation.  Having occasionally come across Mr. Kernion on social media, where he  seems a sanctimonious scold, I'm not wholly surprised by his outburst, which says more about his class position than about residents of rural America.  But I'm even less surprised that the usual suspects have pounced on this; I hope and expect Berkeley will do the right thing, and continue to make "no comment."  Mr. Kernion's speech is lawful, however foolish, and it is none of the university's business.

I'll give the final word to a correspondent from the UK who flagged this episode for me yesterday:  "Yet another junior scholar bringing shame to the profession on social media, but this one stands out for his utter ignorance of how countries and economies work. Conservatives are pointing to him as just another philosopher who is clueless about the 'real world.' And in this case they are correct!"  But let's remember that Mr. Kernion, like anybody, is a lot more than some unfortunate and ill-considered tweets.

Regarding the monster-child...

...this is perceptive.

The very sick and stupid person described in this news article...

...could kill us all in the next half-hour.  Everyone should be following George Conway who is documenting this horror show.   We have only two hopes:  (1)  General Mattis told the narcissistic idiot that Manhattan would be leveled first if he goes nuclear; and (2) the military professionals will, in fact, disregard him.

UPDATE:  A predictable response from the Turkish strongman to the fool's bluster.  But once the monster-child hears about this, I expect he'll reverse course on Syria nad Turkey.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Dr. Johnson noted...

...but religion is surely in the top three, as this noxious blather by the disgraced Attorney General William Barr nicely illustrates:   a mix of historical falsehoods, confusions about cause and effect, and right-wing talking points.

(Thanks to Jerry Dworkin for the pointer.)

Carrie Jenkins (British Columbia) assures readers that people in and around her generation...

...are only "speciously characterized by their narcissism and political correctness."  No further comment.

ADDENDUM:  For those newer to the clown show that is on-line academic philosophy, I want to affirm that, in fact, most millenials are not narcissists and politically correct.   Carrie Jenkins, however, was perhaps not the best witness for that purpose...hence the humor.

The moral bankruptcy of techno-elites

This is certainly true, but what shows their moral and intellectual bankruptcy is the prattle that comes out of their mouths about just about everything. But in a capitalist society, having made money is invariably interpreted as having opinions that are worth hearing, although the opposite principle might be a sounder one.

America is crazy, Florida edition

Jesus Fucking Christ.  Next up:  arm the children.  

The President of the United States is an imbecile, an ongoing saga

Why didn't General Mattis save us from this imbecile?

Philosophers behaving bizarrely in cyberspace: Dan Hicks edition

Dan Hicks has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, and is taking up a tenure-track position at the University of California, Merced this year.  Congratulations to him!  But for reasons known only to his therapist, or perhaps known to no one, he decided to attack Robert Paul Wolff (at Professor Wolff's blog) for having dinner with me.  Seriously.  Let me explain.

Philosophy's "woke triangle"

This is funny and apt about the "woke" cult in philosophy; an excerpt (but read it all, really):

As is so often the case, these recent woke outbursts were caused by something utterly ordinary and reasonable, specifically, a short piece that appeared in Inside Higher Education, in which twelve philosophers called for an end to the no-platforming and silencing of critics of contemporary gender identity theory and for a conversation on sex and gender within the discipline that is simultaneously rigorous and civil. (2) In making one’s way through the woke responses to the piece, one finds oneself confronted with rhetorical maneuvers straight out of the Oceanian playbook: repeated outrages to reason and common sense; bold inversions of reality; a constant refrain of “nothing to see here,” regarding things that are staring you right in the face; and of course, cynical manipulations of language and rejection of the ordinary, standard uses of common words.

The latest stupidity about gender critical feminists

I confess I'm amazed that even Weinberg couldn't see that this piece was pitifully stupid (or maybe he advised them to write anonymously because he did--but then why publish it?)  Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) comments here and here.  Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) gave permission to share his apt comments from Facebook about this absurd display:

The central thesis of this anonymous piece is that certain gender-critical feminists (hereafter GCFs) are actually engaging in *activism* rather than scholarship, which presumably means whatever academic freedom should be extended to scholarly speech does not quite apply to them.

But the article doesn't even try to provide evidence for this claim (that it's activism rather than scholarly speech). Rather, all it does is list examples of things which the GCFs think and say (things which are trivially implied by their position) in their scholarly works and then complains that these things are morally wrong and bad. But it doesn't provide evidence that they are in fact engaging in activism rather than scholarship.

This kind of behavior is getting tiresome. The standard liberal theory distinguishes between speech and violence, as well as between speech and activism. In order to generate illiberal conclusions, some philosophers try to argue that speech is in fact a form of violence. It's not convincing, so now they turn to arguing that it's really activism. Also not convincing, in part because this long-winded piece contains literally zero evidence for such a conclusion.

NB: I am not endorsing GCF. I am merely critiquing the transparently bullshit behavior various philosophers exhibit toward the GCFs.

ADDENDUM:  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that (as a reader points out) Kate Manne (Cornell) disagrees with Professor Brennan and thinks this critique of GCFs is "excellent."

Twitter is not the real world, an ongoing saga

Twitter is the only place where people think that the bloggers at the trashy on-line tabloid Above the Law are (a) reliable, and (b) authorities.  When I tell this to my legal practitioner and legal academic friends, most can't believe it's true!

UPDATE:  Since most of my readers do not use Twitter, I realize the latter was a bit opaque--sorry!  Briefly, one of the dopey bloggers at Above the Law was mocking me last week for allegedly thinking I could copyright my tweets so no one can retweet them, and then other people retweeted his mockery.  This would have been silly, but it had nothing to do with the issue I was raising.  What was omitted is that my Twitter account is protected (i.e., only approved followers can see my tweets--much better, I must say!); when your account is protected, not even your followers can retweet anything you post to your account.  Yet someone then among my followers was taking screen shots of my tweets, and then reposting them elsewhere and sending them to non-followers--which defeats the point of protecting the tweets, of course.   The Twitter terms of service do not directly address the status of protected tweets, but one extreme possible solution, suggested by my lawyer (who is an actual lawyer specializing in intellectual property and defamation for 25 years, not a failed lawyer like the ones at Above the Law), was to register the copyright for the protected tweets.  Not worth the trouble, obviously, and in any case the problem has been solved by other means since.   What's amazing is that even nominally adult tenured faculty--like Jacob Levy (McGill) and Kate Manne (Cornell)--retweeted the Above the Law nonsense (Manne makes a particular fool of herself with her commentary).  I'm not sure what explains their gullibility:  malice?  stupidity?  both?  Oh well.

ANOTHER:   One might have hoped Prof. Manne would have learned something about the risk of relying on out-of-context snippets from a protected Twitter account, but it appears not yet.  In any case, I hope she can  get over her obsessive Twitter vendetta against me (of which the above was but one example over the last few weeks) and move on to more productive activities.

IHE must be desperate for news...

...if they're organizing a story around tweets by random maniacs, ignoramuses, and self-promoters on Twitter.  And I say this as someone who doesn't much care for Professor Pinker!

I've apparently been keeping some of the lesser minds in philosophy busy "for decades"

This is Robin James (PhD, DePaul), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, writing about me:

I did a search, and couldn't find any of the papers on the connection between my rankings, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarcy.  I guess these fine scholars are still work-shopping them.  Exciting!

 

Wollongong Undergraduate Students' Association... (UPDATED)

...is a disgrace.  How can the Australasian Association of Philosophy permit such an event?  (And if the AAP isn't hosting this event, why are they permitting the use of the AAP logo?)

UPDATE:  A rather tepid response from the AAP--no condemnation of the Wollongong group or defense of Professor Lawford-Smith, the target of this abuse.  (Thanks to Mark Tushnet for the pointer.)

A screen shot of the Wollongong Undergraduate outburst below the fold:

The Internet: inspiration for murder

Yet one more reason the free speech norms that worked for the traditional media won't work for the cyber-world of unmediated insanity and nonsense.

Michael Savage is a Nazi without a swastika...

...banned from the U.K. because of his "hate speech" (it is under UK law), and yet now the NY Times has legitimized him as a merely "conservative" commentator.   Karl Kraus:  "No ideas and the ability to express them:  that's a journalist."  But this is even worse than that.  Shame, shame, shame!

"Minorities and Philosophy UK" calls for incorrect philosophical views to be punished

I don't want to make more of this disgraceful statement than it deserves; many MAP chapters are doing constructive work, and they would do well to repudiate this embarrassment from the UK chapter.  One can support equal opportunity for and dignified treatment of trans philosophers, as Professor Stock explictly does, and still disagree with how some trans philosophers understand gender.

Note that this statement is the work of a handful of individuals, including the already notorious Keyvan Shafiei and Puck Spicer,* the equally benighted spouse of Nathan Oseroff, among others.  It was apparently prompted by the fact that the Aristotelian Society, much to its credit, permitted a professional philosopher, Kathleen Stock, to present a philosophical paper on sex and gender, and even defended her right to do so.  For the Red Guard wannabes at MAP UK that was too much to bear, hence the statement, complete with the usual make-believe allegations of "harm" (that someone finds someone else's philosophical views offensive and upsetting isn't a harm:  please read John Gardner's earlier comments on this subject).

I'll conclude with the apt comments of a philosophy graduate student in Canada who sent this statement to me (I bold a couple of quite important bits):

I was hoping you'd say something about it on your blog. The statement, and the usual suspects on Twitter, often try to frame things as if most people in the discipline secretly agree with them, but for some reason aren't willing to "speak up and protect its most vulnerable members." Of course, the actual reason people aren't "willing" to speak up is that they don't think that we should ban people from talking at conferences if they have the wrong views on philosophical issues. The statement tries to frame things to sound like any philosophical discussion of issues around sex, gender, and sexual orientation that doesn't toe the party line is an attack on trans people, and that discussing these issues without saying the right things means excluding and marginalizing "vulnerable persons." But that kind of over-exaggerated language is just a transparent attempt to shut down debate -- notice that the statement doesn't include any engagement with the actual content of the talk.

I appreciate you generally drawing attention to these people's silly behavior; most other grad students I talk to think these people mostly embarrass themselves with the things they do online. I think it's important to have a voice in favor of actual academic freedom, as opposed to censoring views that don't fit with the political views of the day.

UPDATE:  Ophelia Benson dissects what she aptly describes as the "lying" statement with its "hyperbolic bullshit."

*I have been informed that Mr. Oseroff's spouse wanted to be mentioned by name; I had thought I was doing them a favor by omitting their name, which has never been noted here before, but apparently not!

Professor Stock schools the smarmy Jonathan Ichikawa

Very amusing.  (Link fixed:  click on the "3 replies" to get Stock's full response to Ichikawa's typical stupidity.)

(Thanks to Alex Parrish for the pointer.)

The quest for "relevance" by some analytic philosophers, and their ignorance of the post-Kantian traditions in European philosophy

Apt observations from a very good philosopher expert in the post-Kantian traditions in European philosophy:

We all recall the times when presenters of papers in philosophy expected an onslaught in the Q&A. It was never appealing prospect or sight, and the notion that it was stirred only by the pursuit of truth was obviously a contrivance. It did, however, have one advantage: it ensured that philosophers spoke about only what they honestly thought they had some expertise in. It was expertise gained through intensive thought and study.

We now have a kinder environment, and those, particularly from analytic backgrounds, are feeling the freedom to take off some of their armour, move from specialist areas, and to try their luck with issues of political and social concern. These efforts are met, generally, with good will. The problem, however, is that they are, with a few celebrated exceptions, mostly rubbish. The topics studied are taken from wikipedia and / or newspapers (in fact, there’s better work in those newspapers much of the time). The insights of the broader European tradition are largely unknown to them. It’s probably a lack of education or maybe an unwillingness to be slowed down in the quest for ‘relevance’, i.e. attention, that keeps them from complex texts.

(As an aside: the trendy move away from classic Anglo-American philosophical concerns hasn’t involved much reconsideration of the marginaliztion of European philosophy in Anglo-American philosophy departments. In the UK, at least, a Brexit mentality is reproduced at the higher level of philosophical prejudices.)

Receptive audiences are often emancipated analytic philosophers, and between them all they really know very little. They cheer on their own new ‘significance’ or ‘impact’. Ignorance isn’t ignorance, it seems, when the majority are ignorant. And when the majority contains senior academics ignorance wins.

"Transphobia"

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 1, 2019--STILL RELEVANT, ALAS

One of the tactics for shutting down rational discussion of the gender self-ID law in the U.K. is the accusation of "transphobia."   Because I've given attention to the important and substantive views of several feminist and gay philosophers writing about this issue--perhaps most prominently, Kathleen Stock (Sussex) (e.g, here and here), but also Leslie Green (Oxford)--I'm now being accused by the usual suspects of "transphobia."  (I suspect the additional reason for the smear is that I've also been vigorous in objecting to the harassment and defamation of Professor Stock, including by many philosophy faculty and students.) 

In any case, I thought it would help to collect examples of my horrifying "transphobia" such as here and here and here.

ADDENDUM:  This new piece in New York Magazine gives a sympathetic and clear account of some of the issues being debated about sex and "gender identity."  (It uses the term "TERF," but not dismissively or as an epithet.) 

Philosatire on Twitter

Still the funniest and most apt description of Twitter.  ("Philosatire" arose after the "site visit" fiasco at Colorado back in 2014:  for example.)

Twitter "believe it or not," part 4: juvenile jackass confronts adult on-line

This episode is unusual only because an adult, the philosopher Leslie Green (Oxford & Queen's U) intervened after this grad student at Queen's had the outburst, below, after he insulted me out of the blue on Twitter and I blocked him:

Mr. Jokic deleted his stupid tweet when confronted by an adult.  But the real question is why more faculty aren't stepping up and doing the same thing?  I realize many aren't on Twitter, but many are.   And even if you're not on Twitter, you might want to inform yourself about how your students are behaving, if not self-destructing, on social media.   Remember that twitter, which is full of a lot of clueless folks, tends to reinforce the worst behavior:  someone who is ruining his or her reputation even as a graduate student may be getting the message from the Twitterati that they're funny, wonderful, etc.  

Twitter "believe it or not" part 3: the Twitter kids can't figure out why no one is taking them seriously

I won't embarrass this individual, who seems more clueless than malevolent, but from this philosopher's Twitter feed I learned that Keyvan Shafiei (yes, the person who launched the out-of-the-blue verbal assault on feminist philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith, and who prefers the pronouns "they/their," which I honor in what follows) actually had the audacity to stand up at a panel on diversity at the Pacific APA two weeks ago to ask about the "harassment" [sic] of "junior" scholars by "senior" scholars (referring to my noting  their misconduct although presumably without mentioning their declaration that Prof. Lawford-Smith was a "vile fucking human").   The member of the Twitterati recounting the story reported, with astonishment, that no one on the panel took this part of the question seriously or responded to it. 

It did not seem to occur to this Tweeter that this is because it is not "harassment" to criticize people's gross misconduct on public social media platforms.  If you're really having trouble understanding this, try looking at this and this.  Or to quote the otherwise absurd Rebecca Kukla:  "Calling people out for their shitty behavior is not rude [or harassment]; it's morally necessary."  She apparently didn't notice that's what Professor Green did, however.