Thread by @RadioFreeTom

Now, I'm not going to post @asatarbair's links, because the point, I suspect, of all this hooey is to bait people into debating him so others will see those links.
If they are as turgid as the 1960-ish Soviet level of his tweets, you are not missing anything. /1

@asatarbair My advice, however, to Dr. Bair, as a colleague, is that creating a stir on Twitter - and, ahem, I have created many - is not a substitute for basic competence in the scholarly field he has chosen to argue. /2

@asatarbair There's nothing wrong with pissing people off about music, food, and which James Bond was the best.
But teachers have a responsibility to know at least *something* about a scholarly matter before weighing in on it.
This is where Dr. Bair has gone very wrong. /3

All of us occasionally wander out of our subjects and there's nothing wrong with having strong opinions on politics. I am proof of that. If Dr. Bair prefers Stalinism to other systems, that is his right and he is free, as we all are, to express himself on it. /4

But long disquisitions on why Stalin was pretty good and why the Uighurs aren't really being genocided from someone who has no evident background in either matter - none, that I can see - is questionable intellectual rigor, at best. /5

I will now leave Dr. Bair to his rather obvious attempts to build an audience by issuing hot takes on Stalinism (and Chinese policy).
We all have views - and many of mine on many things do indeed suck - but on some subjects, actual expertise really should precede the takes. /6x