Baseless charges
About the list of charges in the ban announcement, or more conveniently here, I don’t find them credible enough to bother taking time to refute. What’s the point?
This page will not have a temperate tone. I believe posting that list was all of unjust, immoral, and unethical. I will not pretend otherwise. It’s bullying, and a gross abuse of power by all involved. It’s wrong.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” - Hitchens’s razor
Any system of “justice” that won’t even bother to present evidence is not a system of justice at all. Stalin-era show trials were more transparent and fair-minded.
If you must, Chris McDonough’s blog does about as good as can be done at guessing what they might be getting at.
I’ll just look at one here, because - to my eyes - it may be libel under US civil law, or defamation under some EU countries’ criminal law. But I have no intent of dragging lawyers into this.
The alleged offense:
Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”, concepts not backed by empirical evidence, which could be seen as deliberate intimidation or creating an exclusionary environment.
That’s garbage. It doesn’t even pass a “sane person” test, misreading the plain meaning of plain English.
I have never, in my life, addressed the concept of “reverse sexism”. I did happen to use the phrase once, but only by way of that the phrase was copied verbatim as part of quoting a post I was replying to. I said nothing about it. In fact I reject the doctrine of “reverse sexism”, but never said a word of my own about the doctrine. “Defense” cannot be sanely inferred from silence. That claim is garbage.
I did briefly address the doctrine of “reverse racism”, here. Read it for yourself. I linked there to a “100% woke” article that rejected the “reverse racism” doctrine entirely. And explicitly said I still thought that article largely made good sense. So, sure, I defended the article - but defending an article that utterly rejected the doctrine cannot be sanely read as defending the doctrine. There’s nothing difficult, subtle, or remotely arguable about this. Again, the claimed offense is plain garbage.
It’s true that I also objected to the PSF dogmatically insisting that ours is the only possible “good faith” view. The CoC in fact requires respecting other views, and I do. I’m not the hypocrite here.
Don’t even start to give me a cartoon level misreading of Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance”. It’s irrelevant here - study the adult version for yourself. Even Google’s “generative AI” has a more nuanced view:
Popper believed that a society should fight intolerance with reasonable arguments, but that it also has the right to be intolerant if the intolerant are not ready to debate.
Where intolerance cannot be tolerated is in people with power. Every accusation hides a confession.