There& #39;s now a veritable subgenre of petition written by academics trying to get other academics& #39; work retracted on strictly ideological grounds. This one, like so many others, doesn& #39;t locate any actual falsehood in the article in question. https://twitter.com/arazz75/status/1252642659912634368">https://twitter.com/arazz75/s...

2/ By the usual standards of... well, everything, the most extreme an argument you& #39;re making, the more evidence should be brought to bear. Calling for an article& #39;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 & #39;controversy& #39; was the clearest example of this I& #39;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& #39;s work in a manner that clearly misrepresents that work& #39;s contents, that should obviously be a black mark, or at least a smudge, on your professional reputation. If it isn& #39;t, nothing means anything.