Interesting. The University of Colorado has released a report on its investigation of Ward Churchill. And?

Among the violations that the committee found Churchill had committed were falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, failure to comply with established standard regarding author names on publications, and a “serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.”

Uh – that’s bad. That’s what you don’t do. You know like when you go to the dentist? The dentist isn’t supposed to take the sharp things and jam them into the roof of your mouth on purpose. That’s contraindicated. Same thing with this. Academics aren’t supposed to falsify, fabricate, or plagiarize. It doesn’t matter whether they’re controversial or offensive or rowdy or longhaired; they don’t … Read the rest

Here’s some, shall we say, flexible thinking in action. Someone (the name sounds male so I’ll decide it is male, in order not to have to say s/he, which I do not like to say) admitting in the first words of a ‘review’ that he has not read the book he is reviewing, then blithely and absent-mindedly proceeding to discuss said book quite as if he had indeed read it and taken detailed notes. I can tell you he hadn’t and hasn’t and didn’t, though, because everything he says about it is flat wrong, and I know that on account of I co-wrote the book.

Behold his artless frankness at the beginning –

I can imagine, and i’ve heard

So, where were we. Here’s one thing JS said in the discussion.

The other general point is that I think people make the best cases for
scientific method when there are genuine threats to the scientific process.
I don’t think having imaginary arguments does the job nearly as well. So,
for example, Dawkins, Dennett, Jones, etc., are all doing what they’re doing
at least in part because they think that evolution is under threat as an
accepted truth. So there’s an instrumental reason for wanting dissent.

That did make sense to me, and since that made sense to me, I was better able to see what he was getting at in the interview. (The interview, being so brief, was a … Read the rest

So, about those puzzling issues to do with what B&W’s basic commitments are and how one goes about figuring stuff out – I’ve had a chance to discuss them with JS now and it turns out we don’t disagree all that much and that he wasn’t saying quite what I thought he was. It all turns – as I said in a comment but didn’t make enough of – on the word ‘adopt’. I thought he meant adopt as in ‘decide to believe’, but he meant not ‘believe’ but ‘act as if I believe’ – which is a whole different thing, as we said in those comments. So that clears that up!

There are some interesting issues involved, which I … Read the rest

Okay how can I do this without being repellent and awful. I can’t. Okay I’m going to be repellent and awful. But hey, there’s such a thing as marketing and advertising, you know – don’t think of it as being repellent and awful, think of it as advertising. What am I supposed to do, co-write a book and then not say anything about it? Well then!

Right, so Johann Hari wrote this review of Why Truth Matters. It seems fair to say he thinks it’s good. Boastful and repellent, but fair.

He concludes pleasantly.

In Why Truth Matters, Benson and Stangroom answer the clotted, barely readable sentences of the postmodernists with sentences so clear you could swim in them.