Academic article withdrawn after threats — 19 Comments
Very few members of the Republican establishment or mainstream conservatives seem to have the slightest understanding that the domination of the academic world by leftists is of far greater consequence for the future of our republic than any legislation concerning taxes or health care or gun control.
What article was it? There is no link!
This used to (may still) go on in climate science all the time. If an article disputed the received wisdom and it got past the hostile referees the editor would be hounded until he quit.
Sam L.:
If you follow the link I gave, all the information is in that post at Legal Insurrection, including other links.
Is this the one where somebody dared to question the orthodox all negative view of colonialism?
Antifa and the antifascist league are communist creations of the commiterm last century… old news… if ya didnt want to do something about it then, why bother now? Not like Willi Munzenberg was unknow, or Otto Katz, and it took a long time for that to grow like an oak tree into something strong and a problem in our lives… but why bother doing anything about anything BEFORE that happens? that would require forethought, and knowing the history and a desire to action to save others that would hurt you not to be saved.
waste of time covering.
look… if father coughlin and the nazis were not enough to reject social justice, then why bother discussing it now that its a big thing and dangerous.
look, we can talk about the senkakus now or before, or we can wait till we are at war with china and THEN discuss it helplessly and no way to do anything about anything… wasting time.
i spoke about antifa how long before they were even in the news? so what? have to wait till the desease progresses till the cancer cant be cured and no one can doubt its deadliness before you do what? discuss it while the body politic dies?
ok…
whats next?
by the way, the answers above are silly because they only apply if you sit there and thing they re stupid rather than nasty entryists of the trostky form…
ok.. only a few republicans know (despite them all having higher law degrees and applying the same ideas in their work), and the rest must be what?
bet the word complicit never comes to mind.
because john cleese taught, as long as you pretend to help someone, you can really screw them up and hurt them and not have anyone fight back..
hows that working?
its sad to see so many basic things that soviets know and so on, and see them being played out to dodo’s losing their country and who, without experience, have no labels let alone a history and modus operandi and so on..
like the dodos, they discussed things while they got eaten
till what was left?
Is this the one where somebody dared to question the orthodox all negative view of colonialism?
no, this is where on FACTION of the left and a few other FACTTIONS of the left are battling their own people for control of the revolution to be first, so they rule… has nothing to do with any of those things as those things have nothing to do with education… (not like anyone gonna read the papers about that stuff from the last century and how to apply and the principals of operation and ends… as far as i can tell even forwarts, voorwarts, and vpred had everyone confused till they just ignored it.. or sayd it was nothing)
here is what this is and going on
Until 1928, the period of the United front, there was significant collaboration between the Communists and non-Communist anti-fascists. In 1928, the Comintern instituted its ultra-left “Third Period” policies, ending co-operation with other left groups, and denouncing social democrats as “social fascists”.
oh… so the history was that after these guys rose up and such they then decided NOT to work with the united fronts (you know, feminism, racialism, unions, etc… ).. and oppose their own side…
you know, denouncing the social democrats (communists if your not from USA), and fighting for the lead..
and THEN what happend in history Grandpa?
From 1934 until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Communists pursued a Popular Front approach, of building broad-based coalitions with liberal and even conservative anti-fascists. As fascism consolidated its power, and especially during World War II, anti-fascism largely took the form of Partisan or Resistance movements.
oh, so from the liberalization, and all that to gun control, to the laws, and the ideas, and the movements and the people theyu have been repeating the history of how a western democracy would change from that to a full communist state without the full destructive revolution..
germany showed them the way to do that, and italy and so on, and that is whats going on now…
the question back then was:
which will we end up being? fascists or communists?
nothing else was allowed to sit on the table to be chosen!
In the 1920s and 1930s in the Weimar Republic, Communist Party and Social Democratic Party members advocated violence and mass agitation amongst the working class to first stop the Freikorps movements in immediate post-WW I Germany, and not long thereafter, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote:
[F]ighting squads must be created … nothing increases the insolence of the fascists so much as ‘flabby pacifism’ on the part of the workers’ organisations … [It is] political cowardice [to deny that] without organised combat detachments, the most heroic masses will be smashed bit by bit by fascist gangs.”
“Very few members of the Republican establishment or mainstream conservatives seem to have the slightest understanding that the domination of the academic world by leftists is of far greater consequence for the future of our republic than any legislation concerning taxes or health care or gun control.”
Ain’t it the truth. To see some of the consequences of the left domination of academia, just take a look at this, just published today by FIRE:
Interesting response to the article from the editor of the leftist magazine Current Affairs:
I am not signing the petition to have it retracted, because I believe that the journal shouldn’t retract it simply because there was public pressure. I am also very concerned that this could be a PR coup for the right, as so many of these things are. It’s tough, of course, because for the reasons I’ve outlined above, the article shouldn’t have been published. Gilley did not meet the standards that should be expected of an academic. He falsified history. When evaluated by a fair standard, he has not upheld the honesty and rigor that should be expected of someone in his position, and the article is a factual disgrace as well as a moral one. But it would be very easy to fall into a certain predictable trap, where the left calls Bruce Gilley a racist, and Gilley declares that they simply can’t handle the truth. And while I’m sympathetic to the argument that we should avoid that by Not Even Addressing Such Rubbish, bad arguments fester when they go unaddressed.
I think, then, that all responses to this article should be rigorous and careful. I think everyone should try to read the full thing, to know what Gilley argues and what he doesn’t argue. And we must repeatedly emphasize that the reason Gilley’s piece is so wretched is not just because it advocates something that contradicts our sense of justice, but because he has deliberately produced a false version of history.
Ann:
I haven’t read the article. But I’ve seen plenty of false histories published all the time—some of them on the left.
And Legal Insurrection quotes the former link to the article as stating this:
This Viewpoint essay has been withdrawn at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay. Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal’s editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently received serious and credible threats of personal violence. These threats are linked to the publication of this essay. As the publisher, we must take this seriously. Taylor & Francis has a strong and supportive duty of care to all our academic editorial teams, and this is why we are withdrawing this essay.
As I said, I haven’t read the article, and can’t judge its veracity. But I wouldn’t trust Current Affairs’ word on that veracity or lack thereof.
The Thought Crime is consistent with Smart Fraction economic theory.
The proposition is that folks with IQs above ~106 have a wholly disproportionate impact on economic development.
The correlation is ~ 92% — an unheard of correlation in the social sciences.
Colonialism largely consisted of bringing Men with IQs of >106 to the Third World. (The dummies were largely left back at home.) The selection was largely based upon reading and writing skills.
For example, a rubber plantation owner// operator would have a college education — at a time when that was rare.
Zimbabwe is seeing this wholly reversed. Elite (White// Dutch) farmers are being driven off — and their employees don’t know what to do next — even though they’ve been performing their tasks for years.
The downside to this situation is that the top players are universally seen as elite — wealthy — and in the opinion of native politicians — too powerful.
Politics trumps economics.
Which is also the case for this academic fire storm.
Didn’t you once post a link by an African who argued that in some cases what in his view Africa needed in order to combat political corruption and economic stagnation was the re-institution of something akin to colonial governance?
The “credible threats of personal violence” are coming from the actual present-day fascists whom our liberal clerisy ought to “resist.” It will take courage, but it will only prove more dangerous not to have opposed them now.
Intolerant totalitarians like these,make me want to channel Cromwell and yell at them:
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”.
But it would be futile to do so. The profoundly stupid, and only they, are absolutely convinced of their own infallibility. It’s part of the definition of stupidity.
Baceseras Says:
October 11th, 2017 at 5:35 pm
The “credible threats of personal violence” are coming from the actual present-day fascists whom our liberal clerisy ought to “resist.” It will take courage, but it will only prove more dangerous not to have opposed them now.
* *
First they came for … etc.
Easier to say than do, in Academia as well as in Hollywood.
The interesting thing to me is that the author wanted to withdraw the article once the back-lash started, and the journal declined to do so, until threatened.
Did he not believe in his subject and conclusions?
If not, why did he publish in the first place?
Was he so naive as to not see that he was going to get pounded for such a politically incorrect position?
Too bad he didn’t team up with Jordan Peterson first.
Interesting coincidence that I read this article yesterday.
“A friend of mine, an academic researcher in what at least 99.9 per cent of the population would find an arcane area of human knowledge, recently brought to my attention the form he was obliged to sign in order for a particular learned journal (owned by a publishing conglomerate) to agree to publish a review article that he had written.
It was an extraordinary form, six pages long, and so one-sided in the contractual obligations it imposed, or tried to impose, that I wondered whether any court would enforce it. Among other things, it demanded an absolute warranty that the article contained no defamatory material or misleading information, and that it contained nothing that could harm anyone.
…
It takes two to be misled or harmed by information. Indeed, people can be harmed even by information that is true if they misconstrue its import or implications; harmful information is presumably that which results in harm. The form aimed to make the author infinitely and indefinitely responsible for the consequences of his article, however remote those consequences.
…
We sign lengthy documents that we have not read and possibly could not understand if we did read them, but which might be used one day against us by faceless organizations. If we are professionals, we conform to procedures we know to be pointless but which it is too much trouble to protest against.
It is the formlessness of what is disagreeable in their lives, and the difficulty of proposing improvement, that angers people and makes them long for scapegoats or tangible enemies. They feel that there must be some central error or even plot that could explain their dissatisfactions, their lack of freedom–and this makes them susceptible to demagoguery, of which we have by no means seen the last gasp.” –Theodore Dalrymple
That’s a very interesting link you provide at 11:43 pm, AesopFan.
A very interesting article by Dr Dalrymple and a worthy website that I have bookmarked for future browsing – so thanks for that.
Dalrymple rightly points to an entrenched practice now amongst businesses of all kinds, (not just publishers- but retailers also), who in the ordinary course of their business receive and rely on, and in turn profit from, the sale by them of the raw material of other parties’ labors.
The custom now by publishers, retailers and the like is to try to shift what are properly their own costs and risks of doing business over to their suppliers.
When I dealt with such contracts professionally it always struck me that in a practical way, what such contracts were doing was trying to turn a business supplier or trading partner into a de-facto insurer in all cases against every and all risks.
Of course, some assurances are arguably reasonable such as that the published article is not defamatory, (which is really not all that hard to identify for practical purposes), or is not plagiarised or not revealing of commercially valuable intellectual property that the author may have even agreed to not disclose.
Arguments can be run by reasonable people along the edges as to where the proper and fair line/s are to be drawn – but I agree with you and Dalrymple that the balance of power is almost always weighted strongly towards the publisher/retailer against the author/supplier. It is an interesting field.
But it seems to me that what Dalrymple is decrying in his article is not quite the same thing as what Neo’s Red Guards have done here.
Dalrymple seems to be lamenting the indirect, dampening effect on authors flowing from the trend of publications demanding they effectively take on the role of insurers – or what the great Justice Cardozo in 1932 warned against: “liability in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class”.
What the red guards have done is, on the other hand, straight-out censorship simply because some arrogant SJW or Trigglypuff faction happens to disagree with the author’s premise.
I really like Dalrymple. Always worth the reading. Well spotted, AesopFan.
The illustration of the Chinese Red Guards in various novels, specifically the sci fi novel Three Body Problem published and translated from Tor, is very interesting.
Shows another glimpse into the R/D of the Left’s weapons department.
Elections are like winning a battle or a Tet Offensive. Strategy and logistics are the culture.
Short term vs long term. Westerners like to talk about long term investment and proper risk management, but for conservatives that think they can plan long time to be stuck on stupid (winning elections) at the expense of the strategic/logistical front… maybe amateur generals need to go back to West point on that.
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
Very few members of the Republican establishment or mainstream conservatives seem to have the slightest understanding that the domination of the academic world by leftists is of far greater consequence for the future of our republic than any legislation concerning taxes or health care or gun control.
What article was it? There is no link!
This used to (may still) go on in climate science all the time. If an article disputed the received wisdom and it got past the hostile referees the editor would be hounded until he quit.
Sam L.:
If you follow the link I gave, all the information is in that post at Legal Insurrection, including other links.
Is this the one where somebody dared to question the orthodox all negative view of colonialism?
Antifa and the antifascist league are communist creations of the commiterm last century… old news… if ya didnt want to do something about it then, why bother now? Not like Willi Munzenberg was unknow, or Otto Katz, and it took a long time for that to grow like an oak tree into something strong and a problem in our lives… but why bother doing anything about anything BEFORE that happens? that would require forethought, and knowing the history and a desire to action to save others that would hurt you not to be saved.
waste of time covering.
look… if father coughlin and the nazis were not enough to reject social justice, then why bother discussing it now that its a big thing and dangerous.
look, we can talk about the senkakus now or before, or we can wait till we are at war with china and THEN discuss it helplessly and no way to do anything about anything… wasting time.
i spoke about antifa how long before they were even in the news? so what? have to wait till the desease progresses till the cancer cant be cured and no one can doubt its deadliness before you do what? discuss it while the body politic dies?
ok…
whats next?
by the way, the answers above are silly because they only apply if you sit there and thing they re stupid rather than nasty entryists of the trostky form…
ok.. only a few republicans know (despite them all having higher law degrees and applying the same ideas in their work), and the rest must be what?
bet the word complicit never comes to mind.
because john cleese taught, as long as you pretend to help someone, you can really screw them up and hurt them and not have anyone fight back..
hows that working?
its sad to see so many basic things that soviets know and so on, and see them being played out to dodo’s losing their country and who, without experience, have no labels let alone a history and modus operandi and so on..
like the dodos, they discussed things while they got eaten
till what was left?
Is this the one where somebody dared to question the orthodox all negative view of colonialism?
no, this is where on FACTION of the left and a few other FACTTIONS of the left are battling their own people for control of the revolution to be first, so they rule… has nothing to do with any of those things as those things have nothing to do with education… (not like anyone gonna read the papers about that stuff from the last century and how to apply and the principals of operation and ends… as far as i can tell even forwarts, voorwarts, and vpred had everyone confused till they just ignored it.. or sayd it was nothing)
here is what this is and going on
Until 1928, the period of the United front, there was significant collaboration between the Communists and non-Communist anti-fascists. In 1928, the Comintern instituted its ultra-left “Third Period” policies, ending co-operation with other left groups, and denouncing social democrats as “social fascists”.
oh… so the history was that after these guys rose up and such they then decided NOT to work with the united fronts (you know, feminism, racialism, unions, etc… ).. and oppose their own side…
you know, denouncing the social democrats (communists if your not from USA), and fighting for the lead..
and THEN what happend in history Grandpa?
From 1934 until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Communists pursued a Popular Front approach, of building broad-based coalitions with liberal and even conservative anti-fascists. As fascism consolidated its power, and especially during World War II, anti-fascism largely took the form of Partisan or Resistance movements.
oh, so from the liberalization, and all that to gun control, to the laws, and the ideas, and the movements and the people theyu have been repeating the history of how a western democracy would change from that to a full communist state without the full destructive revolution..
germany showed them the way to do that, and italy and so on, and that is whats going on now…
the question back then was:
which will we end up being? fascists or communists?
nothing else was allowed to sit on the table to be chosen!
In the 1920s and 1930s in the Weimar Republic, Communist Party and Social Democratic Party members advocated violence and mass agitation amongst the working class to first stop the Freikorps movements in immediate post-WW I Germany, and not long thereafter, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote:
[F]ighting squads must be created … nothing increases the insolence of the fascists so much as ‘flabby pacifism’ on the part of the workers’ organisations … [It is] political cowardice [to deny that] without organised combat detachments, the most heroic masses will be smashed bit by bit by fascist gangs.”
“Very few members of the Republican establishment or mainstream conservatives seem to have the slightest understanding that the domination of the academic world by leftists is of far greater consequence for the future of our republic than any legislation concerning taxes or health care or gun control.”
Ain’t it the truth. To see some of the consequences of the left domination of academia, just take a look at this, just published today by FIRE:
https://www.thefire.org/new-survey-majority-of-college-students-self-censor-support-disinvitations-dont-know-hate-speech-is-protected-by-first-amendment/
Interesting response to the article from the editor of the leftist magazine Current Affairs:
Ann:
I haven’t read the article. But I’ve seen plenty of false histories published all the time—some of them on the left.
And Legal Insurrection quotes the former link to the article as stating this:
As I said, I haven’t read the article, and can’t judge its veracity. But I wouldn’t trust Current Affairs’ word on that veracity or lack thereof.
The Thought Crime is consistent with Smart Fraction economic theory.
The proposition is that folks with IQs above ~106 have a wholly disproportionate impact on economic development.
The correlation is ~ 92% — an unheard of correlation in the social sciences.
Colonialism largely consisted of bringing Men with IQs of >106 to the Third World. (The dummies were largely left back at home.) The selection was largely based upon reading and writing skills.
For example, a rubber plantation owner// operator would have a college education — at a time when that was rare.
Zimbabwe is seeing this wholly reversed. Elite (White// Dutch) farmers are being driven off — and their employees don’t know what to do next — even though they’ve been performing their tasks for years.
The downside to this situation is that the top players are universally seen as elite — wealthy — and in the opinion of native politicians — too powerful.
Politics trumps economics.
Which is also the case for this academic fire storm.
Didn’t you once post a link by an African who argued that in some cases what in his view Africa needed in order to combat political corruption and economic stagnation was the re-institution of something akin to colonial governance?
The “credible threats of personal violence” are coming from the actual present-day fascists whom our liberal clerisy ought to “resist.” It will take courage, but it will only prove more dangerous not to have opposed them now.
Intolerant totalitarians like these,make me want to channel Cromwell and yell at them:
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”.
But it would be futile to do so. The profoundly stupid, and only they, are absolutely convinced of their own infallibility. It’s part of the definition of stupidity.
Baceseras Says:
October 11th, 2017 at 5:35 pm
The “credible threats of personal violence” are coming from the actual present-day fascists whom our liberal clerisy ought to “resist.” It will take courage, but it will only prove more dangerous not to have opposed them now.
* *
First they came for … etc.
Easier to say than do, in Academia as well as in Hollywood.
The interesting thing to me is that the author wanted to withdraw the article once the back-lash started, and the journal declined to do so, until threatened.
Did he not believe in his subject and conclusions?
If not, why did he publish in the first place?
Was he so naive as to not see that he was going to get pounded for such a politically incorrect position?
Too bad he didn’t team up with Jordan Peterson first.
Interesting coincidence that I read this article yesterday.
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2017/10/10/perfecting-fear-in-bureaucratic-society/
“A friend of mine, an academic researcher in what at least 99.9 per cent of the population would find an arcane area of human knowledge, recently brought to my attention the form he was obliged to sign in order for a particular learned journal (owned by a publishing conglomerate) to agree to publish a review article that he had written.
It was an extraordinary form, six pages long, and so one-sided in the contractual obligations it imposed, or tried to impose, that I wondered whether any court would enforce it. Among other things, it demanded an absolute warranty that the article contained no defamatory material or misleading information, and that it contained nothing that could harm anyone.
…
It takes two to be misled or harmed by information. Indeed, people can be harmed even by information that is true if they misconstrue its import or implications; harmful information is presumably that which results in harm. The form aimed to make the author infinitely and indefinitely responsible for the consequences of his article, however remote those consequences.
…
We sign lengthy documents that we have not read and possibly could not understand if we did read them, but which might be used one day against us by faceless organizations. If we are professionals, we conform to procedures we know to be pointless but which it is too much trouble to protest against.
It is the formlessness of what is disagreeable in their lives, and the difficulty of proposing improvement, that angers people and makes them long for scapegoats or tangible enemies. They feel that there must be some central error or even plot that could explain their dissatisfactions, their lack of freedom–and this makes them susceptible to demagoguery, of which we have by no means seen the last gasp.” –Theodore Dalrymple
That’s a very interesting link you provide at 11:43 pm, AesopFan.
A very interesting article by Dr Dalrymple and a worthy website that I have bookmarked for future browsing – so thanks for that.
Dalrymple rightly points to an entrenched practice now amongst businesses of all kinds, (not just publishers- but retailers also), who in the ordinary course of their business receive and rely on, and in turn profit from, the sale by them of the raw material of other parties’ labors.
The custom now by publishers, retailers and the like is to try to shift what are properly their own costs and risks of doing business over to their suppliers.
When I dealt with such contracts professionally it always struck me that in a practical way, what such contracts were doing was trying to turn a business supplier or trading partner into a de-facto insurer in all cases against every and all risks.
Of course, some assurances are arguably reasonable such as that the published article is not defamatory, (which is really not all that hard to identify for practical purposes), or is not plagiarised or not revealing of commercially valuable intellectual property that the author may have even agreed to not disclose.
Arguments can be run by reasonable people along the edges as to where the proper and fair line/s are to be drawn – but I agree with you and Dalrymple that the balance of power is almost always weighted strongly towards the publisher/retailer against the author/supplier. It is an interesting field.
But it seems to me that what Dalrymple is decrying in his article is not quite the same thing as what Neo’s Red Guards have done here.
Dalrymple seems to be lamenting the indirect, dampening effect on authors flowing from the trend of publications demanding they effectively take on the role of insurers – or what the great Justice Cardozo in 1932 warned against: “liability in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class”.
What the red guards have done is, on the other hand, straight-out censorship simply because some arrogant SJW or Trigglypuff faction happens to disagree with the author’s premise.
I really like Dalrymple. Always worth the reading. Well spotted, AesopFan.
The illustration of the Chinese Red Guards in various novels, specifically the sci fi novel Three Body Problem published and translated from Tor, is very interesting.
Shows another glimpse into the R/D of the Left’s weapons department.
Elections are like winning a battle or a Tet Offensive. Strategy and logistics are the culture.
Short term vs long term. Westerners like to talk about long term investment and proper risk management, but for conservatives that think they can plan long time to be stuck on stupid (winning elections) at the expense of the strategic/logistical front… maybe amateur generals need to go back to West point on that.