Talk:Brian Leiter/Archive 1
PLease delete "right wing causes" from the description of what Leiter attacks. Intelligent design is not "right wing", and nor necessarily is the Iraq War. Michael Ignatieff supports the Iraq War -- is he a "right winger"? I think not. It is plainly editorialzing to agree that whatever Leiter calls a "right wing cause" necessarily is one.
And of course, to call Keith Burgess Jackson "mentally ill" is not appropriate here, no more than it would be to apply similar characterizations to Leiter himself.
Leiter attacks right-wing causes; it goes without saying that these are causes he deems to be right-wing, and his characterization is perfectly plausible. Your repeated re-writing of this sentence just makes it awkward. No one on the left supports Intelligent Design and Ignatieff is widely considered to be on the right.
Calling Keith Burgess Jackson "mentally ill" is rude, but so is calling Leiter a "thug." As this blogger notes http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2006/02/mildly-amusing.html Burgess Jackson comes across as mentally ill when he sets up a whole blog devoted to complaining that leiter isn't nice to right-wingers like him.
Wikipedia adheres to the principle of NPOV, Burgess-Jackson on his blog clearly does not. It is preposterous to compare the two! As for Burgess-Jackson calling Leiter names, Leiter does just as bad, if not worse, with others himself. And it is better for a sentence to be somewhat "awkward" than it is for it to be inaccurate and not NPOV.
There is no need to make a judgement about whether the "causes" attacked by Leiter are "right wing" or not. This is quite debatable. It is clear he opposes what he thinks to be "right wing", so it is fine to record that. But it is debateable whether Intelligent Design or the War in Iraq are "right wing" or not. Actually, I don't think it is debatable whether Intelligent Design is "right wing" -- clearly it is not. There is nothing to stop a very left wing person from being very religious in a traditional sense. A person who is religious is a traditional sense is very likely to believe God played a detectable role in the creation of what we see around us. That's Intelligent Design.
Of course, in the current "political climate" those who are mouthing off about "intelligent design" are almost all conservative Christians which tends also to imply being "right wing" (although not necessarily). But I would suggest you read Thomas Nagel's latest paper for clear indication of the conceptual separation between Intelligent Design and the "right wing". Nagel's defense of a more polite attitude toward those accepting Intelligent Design is based entirely upon the theological position of such people and not their political attitude. See his "Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament" at http://www.law.nyu.edu/clppt/program2005/readings/. For example:
"Although I seem to be constitutionally incapable of religious belief, I find the contemptuous attitude toward it on the part of prominent secular defenders of evolutionary naturalism intellectually unreasonable. Unless one rules out the idea of divine intervention a priori (and setting aside the problem of evil), some version of the argument from design seems to me a perfectly respectable reason for taking that alternative seriously – no less so now that Darwinian theory has been elaborated through the great discoveries of molecular biology.
"To a Christian, the possibility of divine intervention in the natural order is not ruled out in advance. Therefore the fact that such intervention would render certain observed facts probable is evidence in its favor, and it becomes one of the possible explanations of facts that might also be explained naturalistically, but that are by no means rendered more probable by the assumption of pure mechanism than they would be by purposive intervention. Perhaps on Christian assumptions it is a question left open by the available evidence, but it will certainly not be reasonable to think, as atheists naturally do, that there must be a purely mechanistic explanation of the origin and development of life."
As for Ignattief, I believe he is a liberal, strong on a wider reading of human rights, and supports a state with an amount of redistribution for the less-well off that would be considered excessive by any typical right-winger. I suppose Rawls is also right-wing? Rawls is indeed considered right wing by extreme leftists...
Can we reach any consensus re brianleiter.blogspot.com?
An anonymous user of a computer named lib-lawee004.law.utexas.edu (located in or near Austin, Texas) has removed all mention of this blog from the article. The edit summary was "It's not a 'major' site, it's a personal vendetta by a crazy man. It has no relevant information."
(I had just changed the description from "An attack blog by Keith Burgess-Jackson, an associate professor of philosophy at the Arlington campus of the University of Texas System" to "A blog which attacks Leiter, mostly by quoting from his own attacks on various people", on the grounds that what this blog is about is more relevant than who runs it.)
I would argue that this blog provides substantive, relevant criticisms of Prof Leiter largely using his own words, and therefore should be mentioned in the article (but only briefly). Clearly at least some Wikipedia editors will disagree. I would appreciate it if people would record their opinions here, preferably signed.
- I agree fully that it is the blog that counts, not the author of the blog. And the blog simply provides good evidence to support the comments made in the text of the article itself about how his "style" has won detractors as well as fans, by providing an example, a major example which when one Googles for "Brian Leiter", appears in position eight of the results. I would say that its claim that it criticizes Leither "largely using his own words" is a bit of an exaggeration, but not all that much. Note that the apparent Austin resident, also associated with the law school, does not really understand or care for NPOV. (At one point he argued that it made sense for the wikipedia text to attack Burgess-Jackson simply because Burgess-Jackson attacks Leiter!) Wikipedia articles are not supposed to be hagiographies. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by User:65.92.146.233 before the words "preferably signed" were added above.
- Having revisited the blog, I agree that "using his own words" is wrong. How about "An anti-Leiter blog which often discusses Leiter's attacks on people"? (Also, BTW, the lib-lawee004.law.utexas.edu host has only been used for one anonymous contribution to Wikipedia.) Chris Chittleborough
- Yes, I'm a law student at UT, but why does that matter? (I have also not edited this thread previously, contrary to the comment above.) Burgess-Jackson's attack blog (that's what it is from a NPOV) is just a personal vendetta because Leiter finally criticized him here http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/keith_burgessja_1.html after Burgess Jackson had been abusing Leiter for two years. The attack blog barely quotes Leiter at all, it mostly misrepresents him (see dangerousidea.blogspot) or makes crazy comments like "When we're done with this sorry excuse for a human being, he'll be crying" (see atopian.org) It currently shows up on Google because everyone ahs been laughing at it or noticing that Burgess-Jackson is a nut. A few examples (from different ends of the political spectrum, found with Technorati):
http://decrapulasedormiendo.blogspot.com/2006/02/kbj-does-it-again_04.html http://genericheretic.blogs.com/generic_heretic/2006/01/seriously_thoug.html http://atopian.org/node/210 http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2006/01/brian_leiter.html http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/01/keith-burgess-jacksons-anti-leiter.html
Does Wiki include a link to any site set up by a random nut?