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Ted McCormick Profile picture
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27 Feb, 15 tweets, 5 min read
Wow. "Anti-Wokeism" is tearing itself apart with tone policing, ideological purity tests, and cancellation
who could have seen this coming from people who think scanning texts for "postmodern" vocabulary is intelligent criticism
Anyway Young does indeed appear more concerned with Conversationalist James's hectoring tone and pandering manner than with the fact that he is a fraud who makes things up, so a plague on both your houses, etc, etc
"I hate inquisitions, that's why I'm issuing this simple guide to identifying and rooting out the crypto-woke who lurk insidiously among us, seeking to destroy us from within"
Update: the saga continues, and miraculously (or, to put it another way, predictably) both sides persist in being utterly unsympathetic

It's nothing short of heartwarming that two sets of people both comfortable with making things up about *pretty much the same set of targets* and promoting *pretty much the same set of conspiracy theories* STILL can't get along
Probably no one made more hay out of James & Helen & Peter's silly stunt than Quillette -- hell, Jon Kay promoted Controversialist James as one of the, er, thinkers he gets most from following on here. So wailing that the leopard finally ate your face is... awesome, keep at it
Imagine arguing over who started bullshitting about "Critical Theory" first. Next they'll be measuring dicks over anti-freemasonry.

Who will get these clowns back in the clown car?

I mean, what is the "logical" endgame for you when you are emotionally triggered by Theory... or is it just Black women online?

It was always, always, always going to end this way. It was clear, to anyone really looking, from the start.
Let the mutual airbrushing begin!
Claire's TL is split between people saying James is a better scholar, Claire panders to bourgeois academics, Claire shouldn't have used the r-word (it only makes James angrier), or Claire absolutely should use the r-word

High-level stuff! I can see why people publish w/Quillette
Reminder that this is, in the end, a fight between two pseudo-intellectual critics of Left Academia, one of whom doesn't know what peer review is and the other of whom can't make sense of a newspaper
I would like to end my coverage with a plea to the @nytopinion, which, you may not remember, featured Lindsay & Co. -- rooters-out of the "crypto-woke" -- as models of "disagreeing better".

Please, please, please do a "where are they now" follow-up!

nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Appendix 1: There's just so much good disagreement going on here

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Ted McCormick Profile picture
26 Feb
The last point is key and often gets lost. Running universities as brands first and academic institutions second will *always* mean sacrificing academic freedom to PR.
"Running it like a business" is antithetical to running it like a university.
Gauging concern about how and in what interests universities are actually run (as opposed to safe spaces, trigger warnings, etc) is, in my experience, a good way to tell who is concerned about academic freedom and who just wants to find the quickest way to shut other people up.
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
25 Feb
since money is a social construct, how come I can't choose how much I have???
the only way out is to admit that money was created just moments after the Big Bang, checkmate postmodernists
unironically lmao at the replies implying "social construction" was invented by some entity called "The Woke"
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
25 Feb
it's like watching someone turn into James Lindsay by choice
step 1: define your political opponent as bad, make up a term for them that underlines the imputed badness, but let the idea that the term is a neutral analytical one persist
step 2: appeal to common sense/intuition/reasoning as fact (without any real work to show why the point is in fact intuitive or reasonable, let alone factual)
Read 12 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
24 Feb
Introductions and summaries have their place but "don't try to read the primary texts, you won't understand them and it will frustrate you," besides being patronizing, is bad advice.

Reading widely and talking with other people, formally or informally, is often a good idea.
Part of the value of primary texts is that they have been and still are open to different readings. Substituting a summary -- as opposed to using one as a help -- closes off that engagement. If you are curious about the ideas in the first place, why would you want to do that?
I also find that moving from incomprehension to (greater) understanding by working through texts or other primary material -- with helps, by all means! -- is a good part of the value of reading and indeed of education in general. Why would I want to short-circuit that?
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
24 Feb
These days you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're a historian of science or medicine
This is the real reason I haven't been back to the UK in a few years. Outstanding warrant for a tweet about air pumps
hilarious
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
24 Feb
So, in sum, a school district made material available and Counterweight helped get it removed and replaced. "Extreme" is vague rhetorical garnish.

I don't see how this is more than an ideological pressure group -- which is fine, but has nothing to do with protecting free speech.
I mean, the whole point is explicitly to make things they don't agree with harder for people to access. The comments congratulate them on rolling back CRT "implementation", but that's a red herring -- by their own account, the only "implementation" was making material available.
Again -- if you want to be an ideological pressure group that agitates for school boards to replace things you don't like for ideological reasons with things you do, OK. That's your right. But to pretend this is about promoting free speech or debate is silly. It's clearly not.
Read 8 tweets

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