Quelques mots

Recently, on a methodology & practice listserv for professionals, the discussion was transformed by a few people (one driving individual) into an exercise in shaming and attempting to conform all members toward obsession about white supremacy and the overwhelming, impenetrable, permanent guilt of (a) all who haven't yet groveled at the altar of self-negation for evils ascribed to their account, on no evidence and with no justification; and, equally, (b) all of those who have groveled, even joined in escalating and amplifying the shaming of and contempt for their unrepentant peers, because no matter how much you abase yourself on every dimension, these thugs have one skill: moving the goalposts.

On the internet, no one knows you're a dog - that doesn't stop these people. I watched adult conversation shift into shame/blame (including a pathetic semi-doxxing, inconsequential but no less rude for being feeble) and from there into personal confessions, then a growing number of people personalizing attacks on some of the people who had tried the hardest to be the nicest, and finally the Cultural Revolution thread going meta and critiquing the few remaining other threads in which people were discussing normal things - anything besides mob-defined oppression and guilt - thus circling back to the core agenda: Shutting down reason and respect, and indeed working very hard to ensure that no methodology & practice discussion ever again will lack Maoist confessions, aggressive re-education, and hyper-emotional frenzies. The administrators are literally re-writing the listserv guidance now. It will be interesting to see how far the kowtowing goes.

The whole conflagration started from a very brief remark, commenting on another post that asserted reason and facts are white supremacist concepts. (And these few words here were originally intended to be about one assertion in the ensuing maelstrom, that the economically precise and neutral term, free rider, is a white supremacist term.) The spark was simply the observation that this attitude embraces collective suicide for methodology & practice professionals. 

Too late, at least for that collective. They're bailing in the rising tide swamping their boat. Apparently, a boat full of people who identify as lemmings.