Daily Nous: “Credible Threats Of Personal Violence” Lead To Retraction of Colonialism Paper
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.
So a scholarly article is fast going down the memory hole, not because it was false or lacked academic merit, but because people didn't like it enough to threaten violence over it.
Why did it work? Because people know the Left will in fact do violence when they make these kinds of threats.
The paper itself was pretty darned innocuous, arguing that colonialism had some benefits to the colonized, but of course its now rather hard to find a copy of it extant to argue for or against the author's claims in the paper and to see if its detractors had anything to substantiate their violence-inducing butt-hurt beyond having the word colonialism associated with some positive benefits.
After all, what did the Romans ever do for us?
Of course the thugs' veto, with its threat of violence is being justified by those on the left with the very peculiar theory that "speech is violence". Yes, his detractors actually claim his paper is "violence against their [the colonized] respective communities and cultures." Thus, once the Left has decided that speech, in this case written speech in a scholarly peer-reviewed article no less, is violence, the Left uses this leap of logic to justify threats of violence and actual violence as an appropriate response.
So far, as seen by the cringe-worthy and cowering retraction of the paper, it is working.
This can backfire on the Left rather badly, especially if the Right takes up this "speech is violence" idea and climbs onto the thugs' veto bandwagon.
Just imagine Universities being told:
Look, Communism has killed over 100 million people, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is therefore clearly violent speech and violence against "its victims respective communities and cultures", so any professor teaching it is clearly enabling and inspiring mass murder. If you continue to teach this violence at your university . . . . . .
Well, that's a lovely university you got here, too bad if something were to happen to it.
2 comments:
Hey Aaron;
it kills me(pardon the pun) that the left goes all out to suppress free speech and they are suppose to be the tolerant ones. You want to see how colonialism worked? See Africa after the Europeans left, or was that insensitive, LOL. We on the right side of the aisle regularly don't advocate violence, because if we do violence it is bad. We on the right side of the aisle believe in the rule of law and when that veneer of civilization is ripped away, it will be very bad.
Yes, the leftists need to knock off this "Speech is violence so we can do violence to those who speak" shtick, or it is going to end badly.
I'd much rather they drop the lunacy and return to civil discourse, but they're finding that the lunacy is working for them, and that is the problem at least until the grown-ups get back in charge.
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