Helen Pluckrose equating "making the best case" with "facing no editorial scrutiny" says a lot about the IDW's conflation of scholarship and opinion. It helps explain how Areo published a plagiarized piece with a phoney author. And it underscores why their work is untrustworthy.
I feel I've made the "best case" when I know specialists have checked what I've said against what they know, and editors have commented on the logic and interest of the argument.
Helen is promising her authors that no one will ask them to fix any factual or logical flaws at all.
(For the record, I believe her.)
Yes, she's trying to reassure scholars whose work she admittedly opposes. That doesn't make this stance better.
In effect, she's saying: "we both know this is a political project, not a scholarly one, so I promise not to even try to handle your contributions professionally."
An editor seeking viewpoints she may disagree with is normal in edited collections. It's an argument *for* outside review, not against *any* review.
That Helen is treating it as exceptional, and an excuse for laxity, says more about her than about the fields she critiques.
So much for the principle.
In practice, why would academic writers spend time on a publication that will count for nothing (because not peer reviewed) and serve simply as a foil for more Sokal Squared commentary, supplied gratis?
Who knows? Perhaps Helen doesn't think her own side would survive peer review, and this is an excuse.
Or perhaps she knows her offer is a waste of most academics' time, but thinks that their declining it can be marketed to her audience as a victory for her. (She's likely right.)
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Setting the content aside, the position that "most people know more about X by simple observation/common sense" than people who study X in depth is a core commitment of the IDW.
It is, by definition, anti-intellectual, and it lends itself to fascistic censorship of universities.
Which is why it was utterly predictable that the IDW would in fact support fascistic censorship of universities -- whether it be Peterson's praise for Orban, the entire Turning Point phenomenon, or Lindsay et al's campaign to get "woke" academic work banned by law in the US.
Actual "liberals" who gave this the time of day have begun to back away, but not so honestly as to own their role in promoting it.
Meanwhile, more of the fanbase -- and more and more conservative politicians -- are comfortable talking about academics in openly fascist terms.
Not sure how this "translates" what I said, unless by "translate" you mean "say something different."
Ftr, I doubt "recognized authorities in full sympathy with their subjects" *will* publish here. But what I said was that Pluckrose's attitude toward "editing" explains a lot.
You can see my tweet here, in case you missed it. I'm not sure what language in it is so complicated that it would require "translation" for "everyone".
Remember when a Ben Shapiro fan shot people up in Quebec City and Kellyanne Conway promoted the Christchurch shooter's manifesto and Anders Breivik denounced "Cultural Marxism"?
How about when anyone at all named-dropped Critical Race Theorists before killing anyone at all?
Imagine subscribing to a worldview that not only *prevents* you from seeing the targeted killing of Asian women as racist, but *motivates* you to use it chiefly to score culture-war points against writing you'll never read
On the misuse of the observation that race is constructed as a way to silence discussion of racism.
This could have been written today, but it’s from Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness (1995), 255.
I think this illustrates a conflation of race and racism that Fields talks about — but instead of making the ostensible fact of “race” an alibi for the effects of racism, it uses the constructed nature of race as an excuse to treat racism as imaginary or historically irrelevant.
It also shows the important role that misconstruing “socially constructed” as “not real” or “malleable at will” plays in these and related arguments. This is not a mere misunderstanding; it’s essential to the point.
Full disclosure here: I went to a boarding school in Massachusetts for most of high school, so (while accumulating substantial student debt there and at subsequent levels of US education) I’ve also benefited from this system. It does not need to be saved from “wokeism.”