The Dumbest Thing You'll Read This Week: Timothy Laurie, "Against Freedom of Speech In Academia" (on the Germaine Greer Controversy)

   If you want a glimpse into what's wrong with a big chunk of the university--in particular much of the humanities, the social sciences, and the trendy, highly-politicized nouveau quasi-disciplines like women's studies, gender studies, etc.--look no farther than this astonishing terrible offering by one Timothy Laurie. Laurie is a lecturer in "cultural studies"--one of the dankest parts of the swamp of stupidity to which I refer--at Melbourne.
   Somebody on the internet is always wrong...but rarely this wrong...
   But I'm trying to do more productive things with my time than explain in detail why idiots are being idiotic.
   So I'm just going to post this and try to move on.
   It's a slow-moving target and all...
   But look...this kind of patently fallacious, politically-motivated argument is not merely tolerated in much of academia; rather, employing such reasoning is considered a kind of cutting-edge scholarly accomplishment. This is a disastrous mass of confusions that a decent grad student in philosophy should be able to absolutely shred. But it is the order of the day in great huge swaths of the university.
   If you wonder why the humanities are in crisis, here's at least a part of your answer: the humanities are genuinely in a crisis brought on largely by the widespread adoption of various intellectually rotten varieties of pseudophilosophy. It's not merely that bad methods of reasoning are employed because practitioners are slipshod. Rather it's that they have enthusiastically adopted invalid methods of reasoning as valid.
   What a damn mess.