 |
| Poor bitter Peter Boghossian |
I haven't paid much attention to Peter Boghossian, one third of the Sokal Grift, mainly because James "your mom" Lindsay is such an attention hog.
I've mentioned Boghossian a few times on Pinkerite but never as the main subject. I wrote about him in his connection to Lindsay; his business connection (along with Lindsay) with Christian nationalist / Soros conspiracy obsessive Michael O'Fallon; and when I noted that he appeared on alt-right racist Stefan Molyneux's show at least four times.
So imagine my surprise when I found Boghossian attacking me on Twitter for daring to criticize Steven Pinker when only one of my three papers on Google Scholar got any citations - only 2 (the article about the intellectual property lawsuit I was involved in) compared to "celebrity intellectual" Steven Pinker's more than 100K citations.
I'm not sure what his point about verified accounts is - to be verified on Google Scholar you basically have to have an email address.
Now Boghossian is a professor of philosophy, albeit a non-tenure track assistant one, so he must be acquainted with the logical fallacy known as "appeal to accomplishment" described on the web site Logically Fallacious as :
When the argument being made is sheltered from criticism based on the level of accomplishment of the one making the argument. A form of this fallacy also occurs when arguments are evaluated on the accomplishments, or success, of the person making the argument, rather than on the merits of the argument itself.
Several people I follow on Twitter immediately pointed out the problem of Boghossian in particular using this approach, since Boghossian criticizes others who are far more prominent and more often-cited than Boghossian.
Boghossian holds his ideological opponents to much higher standards than he holds himself, exactly as James Lindsay, co-author with Boghossian of the book "How to Have Impossible Conversations" urges civility while being consistently uncivil on social media.
I'm not the only person who has noted what utter hypocrites James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian are. In this review of Impossible Conversations, Oliver Traldi writes:
Imagine if Donald Trump wrote a book advising you on how to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Or if Antonio Brown wrote a book advising you on how to keep your job as a professional athlete. You might feel an initial rush of puzzlement — you might even feel a little resentment at their gall, their presumptuousness. You might ask yourself: “What do they take us for? Don’t they know that we know who they are?” These are the sorts of thoughts that might cross your mind.
And there is this issue: if Boghossian's point is that I am an under-accomplished nobody, who should dare not criticize a prominent and accomplished celebrity intellectual, why is he talking about me at all? What possible interest could my "relentlessly publishing hit pieces" have for anybody?
And as if Peter Boghossian making a fool of himself on my behalf wasn't enough, Evan Marc Katz jumped into Boghossian's thread.
 |
Men win you over by giving to you. We ask you out. We call you. We pay for dates. We initiate sex. We ask for commitment. We propose marriage. We give. You receive. Reverse this order by asking him out, initiating sex, asking for commitment, or proposing marriage, and a masculine guy will feel, well, emasculated. Thus, if you want a masculine guy, your greatest move is to embrace your passive feminine side.
Katz has clearly been harboring bitter resentment towards me for years, because although he uses present-tense "writes about me" as if this is an ongoing thing, in fact the last time I wrote about Evan Marc Katz was in 2017 in a post on my personal blog which is entitled, with obvious justification: Evan Marc Katz is a right-wing snowflake who can't tolerate criticism. So although in Internet time my criticizing Katz is ancient history, he is unable to let it go and fails to take his own advice: "all you can do is ignore."
Apparently all it takes for Evan Marc Katz to label a woman a "loon" is for that woman to criticize a man. Maybe Katz should write his own book lecturing others on how to be civil in public discourse.
This latest Katz incident has convinced me that not only was I right all along about Katz being a right-wing misogynist asshole, I may have underestimated how misogynist he is. What a freaking creep.
