Twitter bans, and the ongoing saga of James Lindsay

 Gather 'round, whilst I tell the tale of a mathematician-turned-indeterminate hat academic hacker-turned-wackadoo conspiracy theorist.  'Tis a cautionary tale, and an important one!  For we should all walk that line between credulity and wackadoodle-do, lest we turn imbecilic, or wrap our heads in tin foil, and if a scholar and mathematician like Lindsay can fall to the forces of foil, beware!

Our tale begins in the far off land of, oh who the fuck cares, and I can't keep up this crap.  It seemed like a fun gimmick for, like, two sentences.  Anyway, who the fuck is James Lindsay?  For those who don't remember, he was one of the co-authors of the "Grievance Studies" hoax, along with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian.  They were inspired by Alan Sokal, who was a mathematician fed up with postmodernist bullshit.  Sokal decided to prank a postmodernist journal by writing a bunch of nonsensical blather, mixed with leftist tropes, just to see if they'd publish it in their peer-reviewed journal.  They did.  "Transgressing The Boundaries:  Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."  Which means nothing, except as a test of whether or not you are going to comment on precisely how much pipe the emperor is swinging.

Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian went so much further.  They wrote a slew of papers, pranking every variation of ___ Studies journals, fields and subfields.  The papers weren't at all nonsensical.  They were just stupid, vile or both.  For example, what happens when you change a few words from Mein Kampf and send it to a feminist journal?  They love it.  What happens when you propose parading the white kids in a classroom into the middle of the room in chains, to experience slavery as a retributive thing?  They love it.  There was the famous "dog park" paper, which claimed having gone to a dog park to count "dog rapes" per hour, and then using the study to propose training men like dogs.  That one won an actual award after its publication.  The list goes on.  And on.  And on.  They tried to come up with stuff so crazy and rubbish that it wouldn't get published.  They couldn't.

Obviously, the various ___ Studies departments responded swiftly by evaluating their peer review processes and research standards and HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, of course that didn't happen.  They've got a great scam going, and the last thing they wanted was to have it exposed so unceremoniously.

Boghossian got run out of Portland State on a mix of charges that ranged from hypocritical to bullshit/trumped-up, but it was really retaliation for exposing the vacuousness of wokeness and the departments that prop it up.  The closest thing to anything they had on him was that he didn't get human subjects approval for this prank, which... is kinda true, but also, seriously?  A white hat hacker exposes major flaws in a bank's security, takes nothing, tells you about it, and you're mad at the hacker?  And you do nothing about the security?  Yeah.

And then there's James Lindsay.  Let's be clear.  James Lindsay is very smart, but sometimes when a very smart person goes down a rabbit hole, he takes a bunch of weirdo drugs which fuck with his head, and it is more than a little appropriate that we make Lewis Carroll references here.  Carroll, too, was a mathematician, and then there's the creepy pedophilia thing, which is where we're going.  No, Lindsay is not a child molester.  He is simply a little loose with the accusations.  (Hence, I shall be particularly cautious with mine.)

When last I checked on James Lindsay, the result was this post, which I wrote after one of his long-form lectures popped up in my youtube feed.  It was... the term I used in that post was "nuclear-grade bonkers."  (This is me, being cautious.)

OK, so nobody reads this blog, but in the hypothetical case that anyone did, I think that such a person would find that I am not exactly sympathetic to the ultrawoke.  So if I say that Lindsay's rant was "nuclear-grade bonkers," as a general rule, I don't like "consider the source," but... consider the source.  It's like George Carlin telling you that a little less profanity might be appropriate at this particular moment in time.  Liberace is calling your outfit a little over the top.  Sam Kinison is telling you to use your inside voice.  Follow?  Yeah, so here's Jimmy-boy.

Basically, it was a wild exercise in connecting dots, like any good conspiracy theory.  Why do you occasionally find a book in a school library or in curriculum that is more sexually explicit than most people would like?  Well, you see, the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) wrote about destabilization of the capitalist system through destabilization of systems like the family, and blah, blah, connect the dots, sexualization of children is a communist/queer theory plot to bring down America.  Not kidding.  Well, it's a joke, but this is seriously what Lindsay is on about, and it all goes back to Gramsci.

Upon hearing Lindsay's excursions into the land of Lewis Carroll, I needed to spend some quality time with data, hence that post in which I looked at the data on the opinions of Gen Z, which really show that there isn't a there there on any of this crap.  I mean, it should be obvious that the dropouts and numbskulls who can't do better than to teach K-12 have never even heard of Gramsci, much less read him, but my point is that whatever nonsense they are doing in K-12 isn't having any kind of an effect.

But I guess Lindsay is still on about this stuff, and there's a word that social media companies have declared the worst word ever, or at least, tied with the n-word.  Maybe worse because rappers aren't even allowed to say it, but I take my Persian cat to one.  The g-word, and it is Lindsay's word of choice for those who ostensibly sexualize children.  So, he isn't supposed to say it anymore.  Nobody is, because activists will bring hellfire down upon you if you ever, ever, ever say it.

I guess he struck a nerve.

What happened?  He started playing the synonym game, he got mass-reported to twitter, and they hit him with a lifetime ban.  Not for saying the g-word, but for playing word games to find synonyms for the g-word, which we're never allowed to say anymore.

O...kay.

So a bunch of things.  First, I think I have been quite consistent that I never liked the dodge, "the first amendment only protects you from the government."  Either you believe in the principle of free speech, or you don't.  Those principles come into conflict with other legal necessities when we enter the realm of threats of violence and incitement, for which we have specific laws, and lies, which are legally relevant in the context of defamation.

If it had been the case that Lindsay had specifically accused a specific person of child molestation, we'd be in defamation territory, but that is not what is happening.

Instead... dude went nuts, but the problem is that it's not for me, nor anyone to say that he is officially nuts.  I mean, right now, it would be nice if those who know that their friends or family might attack FBI offices would get some legal/psychiatric intervention, but nobody actually thinks that Lindsay is going to do that.  He just went down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.  He connected dots that didn't need to be connected, which is what really made people angry.

The g-word is a red herring.  An excuse.  He wasn't banned for using it.  He wasn't using it at all.  He followed the rules that twitter makes up, ad hoc, in response to activists, but the point wasn't the rules themselves.  The point was, ban James Lindsay.  That was the demand.  So they did.  Even though he was following their rules.

Because the point here was to shut down a discussion, such as it was.

And here's the thing about where Lindsay has gone.  While he connects dots, he doesn't just go around quoting Gramsci.  At some point in the last few months, you have encountered the kerfuffle about "drag queen story hour."  If you're on the cultural left, the response is, "what's the big deal?  It's just people reading stories to kids, and who cares how they dress?"

Did you know that there is an academic literature on the practice?  It is small, but growing.  Consider Keenan, H., "Lil Miss Hot Mess," (2021) "Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination In Early Childhood," Curriculum Inquiry Vol. 50, Issue 5: 440-461.

Building in part from queer theory and trans studies, queer and trans pedagogies seek to actively destabilize the normative function of schooling through transformative education.  This is a fundamentally different orientation than movements towards the inclusion or assimilation of LGBT people into the existing structures of school and society.

Just to be clear, James Lindsay did not write that.  That's from queer theory, and the advocates of drag queen story hour.  Perhaps you noticed the co-author, "Lil Miss Hot Mess."  Do you require elaboration?  This is just one example of a quote that crystalizes what Keenan and co-author say drag queen story hour is about.  There are other quotes about teaching kids to "live queerly," and such.

To be sure, this is not quite the same as saying that there is coordination between NAMBLA and the international communist conspiracy to molest kids as a way to bring down capitalism, which really is pretty much what Lindsay says.  Remember:  James Lindsay = nuts-o.  However, the actual literature on this stuff does not make drag queen story hour sound the way it sounds when it is discussed in popular, left-leaning media outlets

This is what is in the academic journals.  I'm just quoting here.  Should this be part of the public discussion?  Go, read.  I gave you the link.  Read that article for yourself, and think about whether or not the public discussion should omit these ideas, because for his faults, Lindsay is the one trying to enter this stuff into the public discussion.  On the left, there is a preference for keeping articles like that Keenan piece in the obscure pages of academic journals, where nobody will read it, save for a few academics, so that different arguments can be made publicly.

Lindsay then gets booted from "the public square," as some have called that wretched hive of scum and villainy, even though he was obeying their rules, fundamentally because he was the one trying to bring the Keenan materials from the academic journals into the public square, when his adversaries-- the Keenan side!-- would prefer to keep such articles obscure.

Is James Lindsay crazy?

Yes.

Is he an asshole?

Yup.

Is he a conspiracy theorist?

Oh, yeah.

But there are different varieties of conspiracy theorists, and Lindsay is a conspiracy theorist with a very high IQ, who reads and understands far too much for his own sanity, and that's actually his problem.  He doesn't know how to separate signal from noise.

Yet if he isn't saying "the g-word," and his adversaries still demand that he be banned, what's going on?  Aside from the problem of incoherent rules (and of course, the need for free speech on principle), James Lindsay is a sort of overly-sensitive alarm.  He blew the alarm with the Grievance Studies hoax, and that was among the more important things anyone has done for academia in many years.  He then appointed himself as a security consultant, but his alarm is not well calibrated.  It is overly sensitive.  Have you ever had a smoke detector go off because of steam from the shower?  It's kinda like that.

On twitter, though, there was always a solution.  Don't be on twitter.

That's my solution.

And even if you feel compelled to be on twitter, nothing compels you to follow anyone in particular.

To generalize, though, this mess demonstrates that it is Lindsay's push-back rather than a word, which he wasn't even using, and that's a problem.

It isn't that he threatened anyone, nor defamed anyone.  He dissented.

Anytime anyone says, "you may not dissent," I dissent.

Randall Bramblett, "Devil's Haircut," from Juke Joint At The End Of The World.