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There's now a veritable subgenre of petition written by academics trying to get other academics' work retracted on strictly ideological grounds. This one, like so many others, doesn't locate any actual falsehood in the article in question. https://twitter.com/arazz75/status/1252642659912634368
2/ By the usual standards of... well, everything, the most extreme an argument you're making, the more evidence should be brought to bear. Calling for an article's retraction is exceptionally serious in academic circles. And yet these petitions tend to be very close to evidence-
3/-free. Instead, they pain in very broad, motive-impugning strokes, flooding the zone with morally charged claims so as to make it less likely anyone would want to bother defending the targeted article/academic. The Tuvel 'controversy' was the clearest example of this I've seen,
4/ and it certainly feels like an increasingly common knee-jerk response, especially among younger and less thoughtful academics, to immediately seek the retraction of anything that makes them uncomfortable or which questions their priors.
5/ Final point: If you put your name on a document that impugns another academic's work in a manner that clearly misrepresents that work's contents, that should obviously be a black mark, or at least a smudge, on your professional reputation. If it isn't, nothing means anything.
