So it turns out my colleague is not the only person out there who finds Crooked Timber irritating. Not a bit of it. There is for instance Oliver Kamm who has just posted about his decision to unlink the Timberites. His reasons are strikingly similar to those Jerry S has alluded to in passing.

Of Kant’s observation about “the crooked timber of mankind”, Isaiah Berlin, in his book of that title, wrote:

To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.

Recently the authors of the Crooked Timber blog have excelled not only in the neatness of their uniforms, but also in their eagerness to congratulate themselves on how they

I’m a kind and generous person, and I’ve just been enjoying a good laugh, so I’ll let you enjoy it too. It’s funny how I found this essay. It’s on Alan Sokal’s site, but that’s not how I found it (there are a lot of articles there, happily, and I haven’t read them all yet). No, I found it by typing Sandra Harding and – a certain unkind adjective, into google. What a lot came up! I’ll have to try it with different unkind adjectives in the future. What a pity that life is so short – I’m sure to miss some interesting stuff. Quite a lot. But I found a lot, too.

This essay is about Social Text… Read the rest

More Harding. Why? Because there is more, that’s why. Because you don’t know the half of it. Because that previous comment barely scratched the surface. Because it just keeps getting worse. Because my jaw keeps dropping until I can barely use the damn thing to talk and eat anymore. Because this book was published by Cornell University Press. I repeat – this book was published by Cornell University Press.

And because I’m a woman, god damn it, and a feminist, and this kind of bilge is enough to discredit both categories. Feminist! She calls herself a feminist! She links what she’s doing with feminism! It’s an outrage! Well you see what I mean about the jaw. Same thing with the … Read the rest