Sep
5
2025

Experts

An interesting tweet from Paul Graham:

I don't exactly disagree. And it's more general than trusting experts; we tend to take the wonders of everyday modern life for granted. As wiser people than I have pointed out: for most of homo sapiens timespan, we lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short.

But using "expert" as a bullying thought-terminating cudgel has been on the upswing for a few decades, hasn't it? It can be amusing though: Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: "Back off. man; I'm a scientist."

For another example, David Harsanyi has his tongue embedded deeply in his cheek when he pens An Open Letter to My Esteemed Colleagues at the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Friends,

As a member in good standing of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, I am simply appalled by our beloved organization's resolution declaring the conflict in Gaza a "genocide." This elite group of academics, researchers and complete randos — I mean, I paid $125 to join this very week — has allowed our once-sterling reputation to be forever tainted.

Why do I speak up? Need it be said that as a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, I am apparently one of the "world's top scholars" on the matter of genocide.

It's not just me saying this! It's the BBC, as well as virtually every major news organization in the world. An impressive-sounding organizational name is all one needs to get into the papers. None of the reporters bothered to investigate who the "scholars" voting on this resolution were. Not even the names of the draftees were shared — a lack of transparency that undermines our credibility.

Also on the IAGS beat is Jeff Maurer, a little (OK, a lot) more R-rated than David: Constant Lying About Gaza Makes It Hard to Know What’s Happening in Gaza.

Assume a humanitarian tragedy — this is a pure hypothetical, I’ll talk about how much it applies to Gaza in a minute. Your goal is to alert people to the tragedy. Should you:

A) Relate the facts as you know them, holding yourself to the highest possible standards of honesty and objectivity so that your account is credible. Or…

B) Constantly lie, exaggerate, and misrepresent the situation until no thinking person believes anything you say.

When it comes to Gaza, many people have chosen “B”. Their latest Highly Visible, Credibility-Incinerating Fuckup involves the International Association of Genocide Scholars. If you’re thinking “I’ve never heard of the International Association of Genocide Scholars,” don’t worry — that’s the correct answer. Nobody had heard of the group before Monday, at which point their declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza got reported in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NPR, Reuters, the AP, the BBC, The Guardian, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and countless other publications. But it seems that not one single person at any of those news organizations bothered to google “What in heavenly fuck is the International Association of Genocide Scholars?”

But someone at The Free Press DID google it, and now there’s a major scandal. Because it turns out that for the very reasonable price of $30, any dickweed can join the International Association of Genocide Scholars. And many-a-dickweed has now done exactly that; in the wake of the Free Press story, people signed up their dog, Cookie Monster, Emperor Palpatine, and Hitler — all of those figures were, for a brief time, International Genocide Scholars. And some of the non-joke scholars were kind of a joke, like activist Nidal Jboor, who recently called the “freedom fighters” of Gaza “heroes”. The Free Press says that 80 of the group’s 500 members are listed as being based in Iraq, which is odd, since nobody has ever called Baghdad “Boston on the Tigris”. The group seems to basically be a bunch of randos who gave themselves a distinguished-sounding name, which reminds me of this Clickhole headline:

So, go ahead and hop on that plane to Chicago, but you might want to make sure your skepticism filters are in place when venturing into the MSM swamp.

Also of note:

  • As Tom Wolfe said long ago… "The "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." And assuming England is at least geographically near Europe, as Charles C.W. Cooke notes, Wolfe's observation remains true: England’s Arrest of Graham Linehan Was an Act of Calculated Tyranny.

    Here is the first line of a story in today’s Guardian, a British newspaper:

    The writer of TV’s Father Ted has been arrested at Heathrow over three social media posts on transgender issues.

    If you click the link and scroll down, you’ll see that there is more to the piece than that one sentence. But there doesn’t need to be. The whole tale is contained within those 19 words. If you read on, you will find no complicating factors or exculpatory details or sins of omission. The news is exactly as it appears: In England, yesterday afternoon, the police deliberately arrested a man who was flying in from the United States because he had expressed views on Twitter that the British government does not like. England — not North Korea, or Russia, or China. England — the land of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine and Monty Python. For tweets on transgender issues. Tweets — not threats of imminent violence, or a credible vow to blow up the airport upon arrival. Tweets — on issues about which people profoundly disagree.

    Also dismayed are Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein: Yes, the UK really is that bad for free speech. Greg and Adam have the tweet (apparently) in question, from back in April:

    As should be obvious, this wouldn’t meet the standard for incitement within the U.S.. In the U.S., for something to be incitement, it must be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Linehan is talking about a hypothetical future person in a conditional set of circumstances. It’s hard for something to be imminent when we don’t know where, when, or if it will ever occur.

    And we should be skeptical about whether this tweet is “likely to produce” the outcome it suggests. It’s hard to envision a gatekeeping woman in a female-only space saying, “I was going to ignore this person, but then I remembered what the co-creator of Black Books said, so I gave them the Van Damme special.”

    I gotta admit I'd never heard of Graham Linehan before.

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