Crooked Timber censors me

Professor Jon Mandle: philosophical censor

They have a thread going on over there about the Jared Diamond/New Yorker scandal. I tried to post a link to my articles but the moderators blocked it.

I stopped posting there in 2006 after they removed a comment about Yugoslavia that did not fall within their State Department liberalism parameters. Here’s what I had to say about it at the time.

Now I don’t bother posting there except under exceptional circumstances. Not long after Peter Camejo died, they posted an item about him that I decided to follow up with a link to something I had written. I had only known Peter for close to 40 years and considered myself a disciple.

This time I wanted to post some links to what I had written about Jared Diamond and the New Yorker only because I had been in contact with Rhonda Shearer long before the news of the scandal broke. She considered my articles on Diamond both before and after the scandal useful and I thought that people who read Crooked Timber might as well, at least those unlike about half the commenters who hate Rhonda Shearer and adore Jared Diamond.

I really wondered what got into the head of the moderators when my post showed up. Did they think that by releasing it they would be endorsing unrepentant Marxism? The guy who wrote the piece on Diamond there is the chairman of the philosophy department at Albany State, one Jon Mandle. He is the author of “What’s Left of Liberalism? An Interpretation and Defense of Justice as Fairness”, a book that ostensibly prepared him for the role of censor.

Drop him a line at mandle@albany.edu and let him know what you think of his actions.