Saturday, June 14, 2014

David Graeber makes me Google his TinyURL

A hallmark of your typical Social Justice Warrior is that they are cowardly little weasels, which is why they don't contact you directly with their complaints - or say, when they wish to hint to their Twitter followers that you have defamed them. They just whine about you on Twitter.

Starting this morning my blog post from a couple of days ago entitled Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendzior, David Graeber and friends edition was blowing up in my blog analytics. I didn't have time to investigate until now, I was running the Brooklyn Pride LGBTQ + Family 5K this morning and then had brunch, and then I had to do my weekly NYCPlaywrights emailing duties, and then had to nag an actor about a production issue relating to my play JULIA & BUDDY.

So I only finally had time to find out what's going on this evening.

Most of the traffic coming to the blog post is from this TinyURL   http://t.co/BSPNKny2rX, so I did a search on Twitter and found David Graeber talking about me. (Although oddly the link seems to be different, perhaps created from another URL shortening service?)



He didn't contact me. He just talked about me on Twitter. As I said, that's what SJWs do. Because they're cowardly little smear-mongering weasels.

My response:



I included @KathaPollitt - if you aren't familiar with Twitter, it's basically like I cc'd Pollitt in my response. I felt it was appropriate since the reason I got into this kerfuffle is because SJW Sarah Kendzior was smearing Katha Pollitt. Again.

I assume that what Graeber is referring to is Item 3 on the blog post:

So to recap:

  1. Joshua Foust falsely claimed that writers at Salon and Jacobin were sending rape threats to Sarah Kendzior.
  2. Sarah Kendzior apparently did not correct Foust although she was often on Twitter during that time.
  3. David Graeber accepted Foust's false claim.
  4. Katha Pollitt questioned David Graeber about it.


Now the reason I said he accepted Foust's claim is because Katha Pollitt seemed to think he did. And I certainly have no problem making that explicit. So I changed it to:

3. David Graeber seemed to have accepted Foust's false claim, according to Katha Pollitt.
But that is such a typical SJW move - deliberate obtuseness used to attack someone. Although admittedly you do have to wonder sometimes if it is truly deliberate.

David Graeber and Sarah Kendzior are both anthropologists, so I assume that's how they know each other. An anonymous commenter informed me that Sarah Kendzior's number one Twitter sycophant "Perfectly Cromulent" (mentioned on the "smear campaign" post) turns out to be Kendzior's husband Peter J. Blackwell. Now I didn't even think to question the possible personal connection between Perfectly Cromulent and Kendzior, but then, I'm not a professional journalist. Certainly Blackwell and Kendzior don't bother to make the connection plain.

And that's the point I've been making about SJW Twitter wars - it is so easy to create false accounts, or sock puppets, or in Kendzior's case, a pseudonymous cheering section, and journalists seem to be very unconcerned about investigating the identities of SJW celebrities and their allies. Very disturbing.

Now Katha Pollitt seemed to think that David Graeber had accepted Foust's claim, but didn't have evidence because, allegedly, he deleted the Tweet. Unfortunately it is not possible to recover deleted Tweets anymore, (but if anybody out there knows different please let me know) but certainly Twitter still has them somewhere, so if David Graeber wants to get all litigious I'm sure somebody's lawyer can subpoena Twitter. I tend to trust Katha Pollitt, a well-known writer who works for media that actually bothers with fact-checking, over the SJW Twitterati.

I'm no more a professional anthropologist than I am a professional journalist, but I know several anthropologists thanks to my interest in Marvin Harris. I was going to write a bio of Harris but that project has sadly been back-burnered with nothing but an almost-never-updated web site to show for it. If only I had the time. Maybe after I retire from my day job, or hit the lottery. Sigh.

Anyway, I'd never heard of David Graeber before. I'll have to ask some of my anthropologist friends about him. He appears to be of the postmodernist branch of anthropology, though, something I thought had pretty much died since Harris documented their doings in his Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times in 1998.

But the SJWs seem to get their theories of human cultures via postmodernists, and we see Flavia Dzodan name-dropping Jacques Derrida here.

Will Shetterly makes some amusing observations about "Jacobinghazi."