Introducing... the journal that dare not speak its authors' names
https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/ 

There are some funny things about this idea.

Perhaps the funniest is that "controversial ideas" are a coherent focus for a journal... or that they can be made into one without a series of controv-, ahem, dubious assumptions.

Leaving that aside for the moment, however, let's consider this passage -- which promises the Careful and Rigorous discussion of... certain... things... that... some people... might find... offensive... in some ways.

Sorry, I can't hear you over all that rigour

If you thought academic interdisciplinarity was hard, try pandisciplinarity.

Questions:

1. Who decides a subject's "relevance" to society?

2. What makes "rational argumentation" the sole criterion of value in any given field of academic research?

3. Since you've just identified all subjects relevant to "society at large" as your field, why would you need to specify that you will include "non-Western cultures"?

It's *almost* as if some assumptions about relevance are being made... possibly even some, er, political ones

4. Would a left-wing academic who presented their scholarship as a way of "reforming social and cultural paradigms" get away with saying they had no politics and supported no beliefs or doctrines in the very next paragraph?

Or is it different when you're a "centrist"?

5. This "editorial" policy is a hot mess. The criterion is "controversy"... in the *author's* eyes. Or it's "relevance to society", in the *editor's*. Or it's "originality" (in terms of the discipline, I guess?). Or *excitement*. (Whose?)

Is this rigour?

6. Apparently, "controversial" ideas are whatever anyone finds controversial. Is that a rigorous definition?

7. Hell, what are "ideas"? What does it mean to say you're OK with people being critical of *ideas* in the abstract? What does it mean to be *civil* towards *ideas*?

8. I'm betting that "controversy" is going to have a much more specific meaning in practice, that it'll have a much more specific politics than is clumsily pretended here, and that both "originality" and the advancement of knowledge in actual fields research will go by the board.

9. I'm also genuinely curious about whether this won't roll out the red carpet for frauds, sock-puppets and plagiarists... but I'm excited to find out!

10. Anyway, though I find the sum of the thing amusing it is always at least a little annoying to see gutless and clumsy obfuscation presented as boldness, objectivity and rigour -- all the more so when it's fringed with insinuations both of superiority and of victimhood.

11. I mean, we already have Quillette.

/end