Thread by @deonteleologist

Everyone should know @ConceptualJames & @HPluckrose are responsible for feeding the entire reactionary anti-woke ecosystem dogshit interpretations of scholarship. They’re seen as top IDW experts.

How did James respond to my review of Cynical Theories? 🧵
liberalcurrents.com/the-cynical-th…

James’ first strategy is to poll his followers to ask whether he should address my critiques, calling me a “griefer who knows better than everybody.” One of his followers thinks this would be helpful; many seem to agree. James resorts to complaining about how much work it’d take.

His next move is to claim that, in fact, my review isn’t actually reasonable criticism; it just LOOKS like it is. He follows this up by accusing me of being unsure about the sum of 2 + 2 — despite the fact I never weighed in on this Conceptual Controversy!

James seems to think the heart of my criticism was “you don’t understand Foucault.” In fact, Foucault came up in just one sentence of my review, which is approximately 5000 words in length.

I went out of my way to be gentle with James, in the hopes that I could get a debate out of him. All I ever got was a big fat block. It’s a shame, even his fans wanted to see us go at it! Well, at least he wrote 19,000 words on another topic instead.

Why was Jimbo so unwilling to respond to the criticisms raised by myself and @olivertraldi? According to him, it’s because we “spend an inordinate amount of time treating [him] like shit publicly.” Now, that may be true for me now, but it wasn’t then!

Time for a fart joke.

James subtweets me, again claiming I don’t believe in objective truth! Very strange behavior, unless you’re looking to do whatever it takes to distract your fans from your own cowardice. The next day he butchers the notion of epistemic oppression, capitalizing on another excuse.

This is especially revealing when one considers the fact that “the Dotson portion” of my review is without question the most damning of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s scholarly ineptitude. It’s important for Jimmy to sweep this under the rug!

A couple days later, more sophistry is being exposed on the TL (shoutout @LitAnscombe & @caitlinmoriah) and James is just QTing away, showing his bare ass to everyone. He must have quite a bit of confidence in his fanbase’s ignorance/stupidity.

After Jimbo lectures his minions about the importance of flooding Amazon with 5-star reviews, we get the bizarre claim that there haven’t been any academic reviews of the book? As if... as if Cynical Fucking Theories is going to be reviewed in Philosophy & Public Affairs?

This is one of my favorite parts of the saga. James goes fucking HAM with the scare quotes, baby. He links my academia.edu page (😂) and makes accusations of hypocrisy while exemplifying hypocrisy par excellence!

Well, Helen & James promised us a response to the substantive objections against Cynical Theories sometime within the first few months post-publication. It has now been over nine months, and we have still yet to receive any serious engagement with the criticisms. Telling.

[fin]