/lit/ - Literature

>>20526179
People have done similar fake articles with STEM and the articles got accepted.
Moral: every field has bullshitters and bullshit-accepting idiots.

>>20526193
yeah lol there have been fake math and physics papers that have been accepted by random fucking journals the same way as the sokal affair


in the op book, i think sokal talks about a few ideas that are actually kind of dumb, but a lot of what he talks about is just him not understanding the authors at all

>>20526218
Yeah I think the big problem with his whole project is that in most cases, postmodernists use physics jargon metaphorically. There are a few cases that don't, and these are total fucking howlers. Like Irigaray claiming that physics has trouble with modelling liquids because physics is patriarchal which makes it focused on with solid cock, and to better model liquids it would have do be feminine which would focus it on liquids pouring from a vagina. But most of the people Sokal and Bricmont try to criticise are smarter than her, and in their case the criticism amounts to that they are hard to read and use confusing metaphors. Which is a very valid criticism, but to properly make it you need to approach it fully and not beat the drum of "this when taken literally does not make sense". Anyway this style of writing probably descends from Hegel and is not a postmodernist invention.

>>20526218
>just him not understanding the authors at all
Misunderstanding a school of philosophy notorious for its obscurantist phraseology? Noooo, couldn't be...

>>20526179
well if your claim to fame is your thinking, and your thinking is worthless, then...

>>20526218
>>20526262
subhuman marxist pseud troons aspiring to become charlatans like their idols. your fields are intellectually broke and you're incapable of real thinking.

>>20526377
misunderstanding implies there is anything there to get in the first place.

>>20526551
There may be nothing, or there may be something - IDK, I haven't read most of them - but Sokal and Bricmont's book does not give us anything to suggest either options. They quote several paragraphs from writers who have extensive bibliographies. I don't argue that the ones they quote are at least badly written and at worst total bullshit. But even prominent scientists occasionally spouted total bullshit - e.g. Newton spent a lot of time practicing alchemy and chasing a Philosopher's stone, Descartes believed in ether, etc.

>>20526601
That's a shit fucking argument and you should kill yourself for being a subhuman charlatan apologist.
>this is the actual intellectual level of subhuman marxist pseuds
Never fucking post on/lit/ again, you're complete subhuman garbage.

>>20526218
Yeah. Now we have trolls using AIs to do it but Sokal couldn't have seen that coming back then. Unfortunately his point really only just ended up attacking the peer system (as well as that specific journal) instead of that field as a whole. It sometimes happens that some troll spits out an AI written math paper, for example, and some poor peer has to pretend to understand any of what that paper says, but he's tired af and can't be bothered anymore so he just lets it through with a glowing review. Even though it's gibberish it makes no difference to him because he can't make out the difference anyway.
Obviously this isn't that true for a field like math, especially if the journal is really good, but for physics this definitely sometimes happens (though, again, not so much in reputable journals). It's most terrible in fields that get BTFOd by the reproducibility crisis.
Shame really. I hate these sort of philosophy charlatans too. i'll still read this book though, it's still imrtdy

>>20528030
>It sometimes happens that some troll spits out an AI written math paper, for example, and some poor peer has to pretend to understand any of what that paper says,
hahahahahahaha

yeah, no shit, this is 'most' of the people involved; so long as you're writing confirmation biases of notions already held then it's fine. not, of course, what the thing was ever intended as but..

>>20526179
never heard of this or these people, but this sounds interesting in the reception..

What, they wrote a 'fake paper' about how 'post-modernists' (whatever this means nowadays) are affirming local contemporary notions of things? I don't get how this paper would be somehow 'fake', or 'a hilarious troll', seems like a damage control deflection by people who don't want to admit the premise of the paper.

>>20526483
off topic but i noticed the same thing reading 'very popular' magazine articles and things like this from the 1970's, Hunter S Thompson is a great example, where he's considered to be ahead of his life and he's just writing long-winded gibberish, knowing that the magazine people will be too embarrassed to admit that they don't understand what's being said, and he capitalizes on it.

No insult implied to Thompson btw, it's just pretty obvious that this was what was going on if you can, you know, read english at a good level then you know there's nothing being said.

Seems like there's a lot of this going on; people realizing that the people who publish and stamp the papers are dumb and that if they simply confirm the local biases and 'seem' as if they offer ammunition to reinforce those biases then they'll be 'peer approved'.

>>20526601
>They quote several paragraphs from writers who have extensive bibliographies. I don't argue that the ones they quote are at least badly written and at worst total bullshit.
exactly

>But even prominent scientists occasionally spouted total bullshit - e.g. Newton spent a lot of time practicing alchemy and chasing a Philosopher's stone,
exactly, Newton's a good example of confirming lots of silly biases and having a few obvious 'discoveries' ascribed to him. Although he was a mental case who was constantly trying to escape from his bedroom through the window so..he was probably writing under duress.

> Descartes believed in ether, etc.
ah but it'd be a mistake the conflate this type with actual human beings; generally, i think, if you can read at a high level you know pretty quickly from one to the next who's actually serious and who's actually not.

>>20526627
>That's a shit fucking argument and you should kill yourself for being a subhuman charlatan apologist.
who are you quoting here?

>>20526483
You can't just post an excerpt. If you posted an excerpt of Darwin to a Victorian audience it would sound like bullshit.
I haven't read that book (albeit I've read other "postmodernist" writings which I was able to confirm are frequently misrepresented by their opponents), but just googling I find this explanation which sounds pretty straightforward of some of those Deleuze ideas: https://epochemagazine.org/34/deleuze-on-problems-singularities-and-events/#:~:text=Deleuze's%20wager%20is%20that%20we,singularities%20are%20points%20of%20mattering.
I haven't read all of it, but the beginning at least looks rather clear.
Perhaps Sokal didn't read the rest of Deleuze's book? Or maybe he just has bad reading comprehension, like Richard Dawkins trying to read Kafka? Scientists in general have a hard time grasping metaphors. They are too literal minded, which is why the only art they enjoy is science fiction, video games and fantasy.
I have read articles by Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Frankfurt School authors, Barthes, Genette and others who are frequently grouped among these evil postmodernists and they were all rather clearly written. Derrida is a little more obscure, but clearly that was just a stylistic choice of his, as his writing is a bit more humoristic (he enjoys using puns, for instance) than is common among academics.

Anyway, it's all a rather useless discussion. I don't think someone who grew up on Jurassic Park will be able to understand any writer who makes constant references to Proust.

>>20529048
The reality is that it's obscurantist nonsense that nobody takes seriously, save a few sad dilettantes that lack both the academic grounding and critical stance necessary for evaluation. Maybe you'll find it easier to parse coney-catching after you graduate highschool. The examples that Sokal highlights in the text speak for themselves, no amount of deflection to additional interpreters changes the nonsense inherent to the cited "authors."
>Muh Proust
>Muh Foucault
You're a ridiculous pseud.

>>20529152
>a few sad dilettantes that lack both the academic grounding and critical stance necessary for evaluation.

I have a degree, and read on average 50-60 books a year, in at least 5 (sometimes 8) different languages.
And I have many disagreements with all of those authors too. In fact, it is logically impossible to agree with one without disagreeing with the others, as they're all very different thinkers.
But OK, I am a dilettante.
Whatever.

>>20529229
>I have a degree
>Polyglot
>different thinkers
Point proven, thanks.

>>20529229

>I have a degree

Confirmed, fully domesticated pseud.

>>20526179
There's a fair point to be made about the use of scientific terminology by these "theorists" and by extension the tendency of continental philosophers to comment on anything without having the training or experience to do so correctly or meaningfully (and considering how angry they get when it's done to them, you'd think that they would avoid doing it, but almost all of the criticism these thinkers and their supporters have towards others amounts to little more than projection.).

>>20526627
>charlatan apologist
But all the ones that I’ve actually studied in depth turned out NOT to be charlatans.
For example, people love to frame Lacan as a charlatan by picking out his wackiest quotes like “The Woman does not exist” or “the phallus inaugurates the process of signification” and presenting them with no context, ignoring the fact that a) people have attempted to give reasonable interpretations to these quotes, and also discuss his meta-theoretical reasons for using the language that he did, and b) most of his work doesn’t sound like that at all. If you read his “Ethics of Psychoanalysis” for example, you’ll find that it’s mostly quite lucid, and there’s a lot in there of interest to a general philosophical audience that isn’t even interested in his theories of psychoanalysis.
Perhaps it would be the same for Deleuze. These sorts of flowery excesses have been common in continental writing since Nietzsche. Or maybe he really is a charlatan. I don’t know, I haven’t read him. But I do know that I can’t judge him until I read him.

>>20529376
Lacan is far below Deleuze.

>>20529048
>I have read articles by Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Frankfurt School authors, Barthes, Genette and others who are frequently grouped among these evil postmodernists and they were all rather clearly written
You have to say that though because you're stupid but you still want to larp as an intellectual so you need the scam to keep going.

>>20529304
Same for scientists, though.
Don't you remember ten years ago those scientists constantly shitting on philosophy? Stephen Hawking saying it was dead, Sam Harris ignoring basic moral philosophy in his shit book, Freeman Dyson saying there was no real philosopher since Nietzsche or whatever.
Basically every group of thinkers comments on every other group, and frequently they get it wrong.
If anything continental philosophers at least show a certain respect and basic knowledge of science, while the likes of Harris seem to be fully ignorant of freshman tier metaethics.

>>20529474
>If anything continental philosophers at least show a certain respect and basic knowledge of science
Lol. Lmao

>>20529483
>>20529473
>>20529292
>>20529276
>>20529152
You have never carefully read a book in your life. You know nothing about textual interpretation and your linguistic capabilities are too weak for you to ever be able to read the French philosophers in the original.
Back to /pol/, you average IQ loser.

>>20529518
>IQ
Anon, you've already lost. Just let it go.

>>20529376
>people love to frame Lacan as a charlatan by picking out his wackiest quotes like “The Woman does not exist” or “the phallus inaugurates the process of signification” and presenting them with no context
Yeah it's pretty fucking evident that these are not, like, to be taken as someone adovacy of political demands to the literal meaning of the statement - or whatever. I don't care to rewind my brain to understand the cretinitude of newspaper tabloids and dumb people to remember how they misconstrue these things.

I remember "woman does not exist" was a statement of fact on the degraded status of women when women are removed from the procreative impulse and taken as individuals outside of the yin-yang dynamic of the physiological reality of the human species.

all true.

>>20529474
>Don't you remember ten years ago those scientists constantly shitting on philosophy? Stephen Hawking saying it was dead,

this is a good example:

a lament is misconstrued as hand-rubbing glee.

>>20529460
>Lacan
to a poor anglo-american reading comprehension is like serving cheerios to a dog, the dog cannot appreciate the flavor and wants the jellied cows anus.

>>20529518
it's okay troon, we know you got filtered by HS math and had to cope with deleuze instead.

>>20526179
People have done similar fake articles with STEM and the articles got accepted.
Moral: every field has bullshitters and bullshit-accepting idiots.

>>20529604
>slip up in peer review /= the entire field is systematically broken, worthless and built on a scam

>>20529583
obsessed

>>20529582
Holy ESL

>>20529689
hi faggot

>>20529474
>Basically every group of thinkers comments on every other group, and frequently they get it wrong.
Sure, and this is likely the inevitable result of practically every field of study becoming increasingly technical and specialized. There's a reason why it's easier to be dismissive of a field that still takes psychoanalysis seriously than it is to be dismissive of the sciences. To do so is to proudly declare that you are not a critical thinker, and this is damning for a field that constantly brags about its critical nature.
It's also a matter of communication. Ask anyone who is involved with continental philosophy for an explanation or elaboration, and you'll be told to read every single line of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger before you can even begin to comprehend a simplified explanation of any idea. At best you might get a inaccurate and empty outline of the history of philosophy. Scientists frequently work to make simplified versions of their ideas known to the public. When you look at it like that, the fact that continental philosophers even use scientific and mathematical terminology as metaphors shows that they don't hold themselves to the same standard they hold others, and that scientists (and really anyone outside of continental philosophy and its adjacent fields) just want to hold these people to the same standards they hold themselves. Continental philosophers and theorists always end up looking like intellectual cowards because of their unwillingness to communicate, and as long as that field continues to exist and operate as it does, attacks on philosophy as a whole will continue and to some extent be justified no matter how lousy they are.

>>20526179
What are some books like this that criticize entire philosophical traditions in book-length treatment? I only know this one and Ernest Gellner's Words and Things, which polemically criticizes ordinary language philosophy. I've read smaller books against postmodernism but they didn't do the thing of targeting specific authors each chapter and criticizing them directly. What are other books that do that?

>>20529847
Fashionable Nihilism: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy

>>20529847
main currents of marxism

>>20526601
>But even prominent scientists occasionally spouted total bullshit - e.g. Newton spent a lot of time practicing alchemy and chasing a Philosopher's stone, Descartes believed in ether, etc.
How is that at all comparable? Newton never even published his alchemical works, they were all private researches; and even when he did publish something like. "The planets should all eventually veer off according to my calculations so, perhaps, God's hand puts them all back in place every now and again" it was tentatively put forward as a possible explanation. This isn't just charlatan nonsense but someone sincerely trying to understand the world.
>>20528996
>Newton's a good example of confirming lots of silly biases and having a few obvious 'discoveries' ascribed to him.
How? I just don't see it.
>>20529518
>your linguistic capabilities are too weak
Yeah, I'm afraid I'm not good enough to

>>20529847
Time in the Ditch
Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands
I don't know how good either of them are, but I think that's the sort of thing you're looking for.

>>20529460
Can you summarize any of Deleuze’s critiques of psychoanalysis or Lacan’s theories of subjectivity more broadly?
I know I’m going against the spirit of my own post, but, I would like some reassurance that Deleuze isn’t JUST extravagant poetry before I make a serious attempt to study him.

>>20529473
Derrida’s the only one among that group who has a reputation for being obscure. The others are all quite approachable, even Sokal would probably agree. And even with Derrida, there are levels. There’s a big difference between Plato’s Pharmacy and Of Grammatology.

>>20530016
Don't the Germans have a specific word to refer to the obscurity of Adorno's style?

>>20529836
>Psychoanalysis
Many continental philosophers criticize it.
"Contemporary French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze asserted that the institution of psychoanalysis has become a center of power, and that its confessional techniques resemble those included and utilized within the Christian religion." (From Wikipedia, no less)
Foucault in particular, as far as I known, is famous for his critique of psychiatry in general. Haven't read his History of Madness, though, so I can't really comment.

>than it is to be dismissive of the sciences
Sure, but it's also easier to be more dismissive of analytic philosophy than of science, and of biology than of physics, and of science in general (due to the problem of induction and so on) than of radical skepticism.

>It's also a matter of communication. Ask anyone who is involved with continental philosophy for an explanation or elaboration, and you'll be told to read every single line of Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger before you can even begin to comprehend a simplified explanation of any idea.
False. You can find many lectures on YouTube about continental philosophy. There are also the TTC courses, SEP articles and so on.
Why are you asking random people to explain those things to you?
Have you ever asked a scientist in real life? They're not very keen on explaining complex ideas to random people who ask. It's a myth that scientists are all a bunch of beautiful Carl Sagans wanting to explain things to kids. Most of them are bored professionals like everyone else.
Just go and look for introductory books, SEP articles and YouTube lectures, such as Rick Roderick's (although his are not in-depth).

>and that scientists (and really anyone outside of continental philosophy and its adjacent fields) just want to hold these people to the same standards they hold themselves
Different disciplines, different standards.
Also, stuff like string theory, evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, econometrics, etc. is all very shaky. Science has deep replication crises and physics is getting more and more untestable.

>Continental philosophers and theorists always end up looking like intellectual cowards because of their unwillingness to communicate
Again, I don't know why you talk like that.
Zizek, Foucault, Baudrillard, Agamben, Marcuse, Sartre, Roland Barthes...
All of those people are/were extremely popular and wrote very popular books, gave public talks, and so on.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Perhaps in the US they are obscure?
Because I live in Latin America and all of the names I mentioned are extremely well-known, their ideas are discussed without problem by philosophy students, Law professors, and so on. I am a lawyer myself and we read Foucault in uni, where nobody had problems understanding him and discussing his views on the prison system. Some of us agreed, others disagreed, just like with any other philosopher.

>>20530035
>idiot third worlder
Your takes go in the garbage can along with the troons.

>>20530032
Maybe. I have some familiarity with his works. I wouldn’t call him obscure but he does have an odd and idiosyncratic style. Very staccato, like every sentence is a self-contained oracular prophecy read out in a solemn voice, and then a pause, and then the next sentence. Each individual point on its own is clear enough, but sometimes it can be hard to fit it all into a coherent picture.

>>20526179
these are the guys that take a quote, say "lol that's so wrong" and then move on to the next quote without elaborating, right?

>>20526262
it's got more to do with the french academic tradition of abstruseness and the "neverending clauses" nature of the french language itself, which when translated into english turns into borderline nonsense

>>20529868
It’s hilarious calling analytic philosophy “nihilistic” when analytic philosophers are the only academic left in the western world who still take seriously ideas like objective morality, objective beauty, free will, etc.

>>20529152
>nobody takes seriously
sokal took it so seriously he wrote and published a book about it anon

>>20529304
>i follow the science

>>20529920
>Newton (silly)
>How? I just don't see it.
Alchemy. Also, fairly sure the gravity and thermodynamics thing could've been called "basic commonsense" for anybody, not even to say such observations were known to the Greeks and Romans, but really anybody could've observed these points - he dressed it up in overly complicated language, it seems.

>>20530107
A book documenting obscurantism, yes. The book isn't for academics, it's for the layreader and the primary showcase is physics envy and the misappropriation of terminology in theory. It's a book about jargon.

>>20530115
This is just sad. I don't know what's worse, your ahistoricism or your pseudery.

>>20530106
They take it seriously for their little logic puzzles, then at the end of the afternoon they say School's out, enough 'doing philosophy' for today

>>20530123
I don't think Marxists like Sokal or Bricmont have any right to criticize others for "jargon". Yes, Foucault and Deleuze were evil Nazi fascists who dunked on Marxism, we get it, blah blah blah.

>>20530009
I can sum up the "one wolf or many" bit from A Thousand Plateaus: Freud believes that the mind is a singular discrete thing. This is not the case; what Christfags get wrong is that the mind is not a computer; ignoring the fact that it doesn't work in binary, it also lacks a CPU and is more so just a collection of peripherals with their own RAM. Freud's problem then is that he assumes that any given thing has to have one singular cause; a result of this is the idea that people "get" fetishes by consuming some media as a child, such that one singular occurrence afflicted them for life. This is necessary to Freud's therapeutic goals, as if this is the case then one single thing can undo that occurrence.

But if you realize that the mind is a multiplicity (one=/=many=/=multiplicity), you understand that that can't happen. Freud's obsession with finding the ONE SINGLE THING that causes a problem (the "Freudian Excuse") is just that: an obsession with no attachment to reality. Freud is not only missing the mark, he is directly harming people. Rather, mental phenomena are caused by a wide range of things interlinking together that we only later, retroactively, perceive as a singularity. There's a lot more on this leading into "Events", but that is neither here nor there. Thus, scat-porn causes scatophilia, as the scat-porn is a necessary component of the scatophilia (Deleuze is a sort of upside-down Aristotelian, so you need to look at "cause" here as a... Multiplicity!).

>>20530815
The world would be better if people like you just read self-help books instead of pretending to be interested in philosophy.

>>20531023
Also, for funsies, I am going to post a Deleuze quote from Richard Dawkins' 1998 review in Nature of Intellectual Impostures:
>In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.
Ponder that quote in light of my prior post there, and be the judge of whether it's nonsense or not.

Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and all of the "Anti-Marxist Post-Modernists", write in a particular style that chains large numbers of clauses together, and which largely centers around, in the Aristotelian tradition, creating some piece of jargon and then explicating how it works. Thus, Foucault will drop "bodies" onto page 1, and it will show up seven times on every page after that as he explain just how bodies work, what they do, how they interlink with "spaces" and "lines", etc. This is particularly irksome to a certain type of Analytic who prefers that a term be rigidly and entirely defined in its first usage.

As for whether Deleuze is worth reading or not, A Thousand Plateaus is all about he and Guattari engaging with Georges Dumezil. They cite Oswald Spengler three times, and get their "Nomads don't move" hot take from Toynbee. The reason that Sokal doesn't like Deleuze is that Deleuze points out that Marx is wrong about how Capitalism works (it is fueled by desire, not Hegelian Dialectics concerning Labor).

>>20531061
Sauce on the quote:
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html

He's also got a pretty scathing review of his book by Val Dusek on his university webpage there:
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dusek.html

>>20526179
How is that ironic?

>>20529048
> I have read articles by Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Frankfurt School authors, Barthes, Genette and others who are frequently grouped among these evil postmodernists and they were all rather clearly written. Derrida is a little more obscure, but clearly that was just a stylistic choice of his, as his writing is a bit more humoristic (he enjoys using puns, for instance) than is common among academics.
I'm not a very experienced reader of philosophy, but I disagree. Sokal/Bricmont quote a bunch of french writers (off the top of my head, Latour, Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze/Guattari, Virilio. I'm pretty sure they actually don't pick on Derrida in the book). All the parts they quote, even if we set aside the issue of misusing physics jargon, I found very hard to follow. I also tried Death of the Author some time ago and also had a hard time following it.
However, I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with postmodernism per se. I also tried Hegel and read Stirner, and I felt more or less the same. Stirner was a little more transparent than the rest. Maybe this has to do with some general continental phil trend towards writing flowery prose?

>>20530147
>This is just sad. I don't know what's worse, your ahistoricism or your pseudery.
err.. you said yourself in the same post I responded to that Newton was into alchemy.

As for the notion that nobody implicitly understood gravity or thermodynamics prior to his writing about it in overly technical language is genuinely ridiculous. But this ought not even need to be said to prove my point as Newton was an Alchemist; he believed in magic spells and transmutation through magic spells.

I forget where Newton came up in this thread, oh yeah, >>20528996 people pretending to be smart and impressing dumb people by writing lots and lots of empty nonsense.

It's also genuinely darling that you conform to the projection narrative; "X explains how Y is fake-intellectual" your response, believing this is a cutting put-down and not understanding the argument, "NO U ARE THE PSEUD!"

this was kind of the point, you know.

I'm going to have to qualify this, I suppose:
> gravity or thermodynamics

thermodynamics principle understood implicitly by ordinary persons proved in:
Masonry, Shipbuilding (anything to do with gauging weight and tension), Fuel usage of any type, Cooking, Greek Fire (pressure valves), Guns (combustion and trajectory), etc.

"gravity" principle understood implicitly by ordinary persons proved in:
Artillery (i.e. catapult, ballistae, siege works) Archery, Shipbuilding (propelling via sail and rudder), Masonry (see above,same reasons).

Archery ought be the most obvious.

The way Newton is cast is as if prior to is writing nobody had any idea what they were doing in these areas, yet the prevalence of the application of these principles demonstrates wide practical awareness of a therefore common subject.

I'm going to have to qualify this, I suppose:
> gravity or thermodynamics

thermodynamics principle understood implicitly by ordinary persons proved in:
Masonry, Shipbuilding (anything to do with gauging weight and tension), Fuel usage of any type, Cooking, Greek Fire (pressure valves), Guns (combustion and trajectory), etc.

"gravity" principle understood implicitly by ordinary persons proved in:
Artillery (i.e. catapult, ballistae, siege works) Archery, Shipbuilding (propelling via sail and rudder), Masonry (see above,same reasons).

Archery ought be the most obvious for both.

The way Newton is cast is as if, prior to his writing, nobody had any idea what they were doing in these areas, yet the prevalence of the application of these principles demonstrates wide practical awareness of a therefore common subject (of which Newton 'added' nothing to).

>>20532633
>your ahistoricism
You are at least correct here in that I see no need to pretend to be 'smart' by talking about the merits of people who were idiots and lived in backwards times.

e.g. let us say that every human on earth understood the principles of gravity apart from Newtons local contemporary Academics who had foolish errors baked into their own institutions; their contemporary dogmas etc.,
1) what possible use is it to come down to their poor level where the "(new) theory" is somehow new and "answers things" (if it was a false dilemma in the first place, i.e. only academics pretended to be confused)?
2) what use is it, then, to pay any attention to anybody writing under such a climate? We already know 99% of their work will be tap-dancing to avoid the gibbet, which invalidates them as being serious people.

>2) what use is it, then, to pay any attention to anybody writing under such a climate? We already know 99% of their work will be tap-dancing to avoid the gibbet, which invalidates them as being serious people.

This is quite relevant to the topic of this thread.