I have never used this longer form, but the ridiculous attacks today on @PriyamvadaGopal for her piece in @@RationalistUK by @NickCohen4 @J_Bloodworth and @LSESUASH can't be untangled in a series of tweets. (cc'ing @DougHenwood and @trilingual)

The attack was predictable, because it's a particular form of Twitter storm.

Firstly, despite (or because of) amassing a body of writing pointing out that a frequently unspecified Left is remiss on X, it's not appreciated when someone outside the Eustonesque echo chamber does actually address the issues that they require their largely imagined Left to shamefully ignore (It's worse when that interloper is both brilliant, and untainted by support for imperial slaughter).

Hence the first stage is always about how thoroughly useless the interloper is: oh look, an academic tangled up in jargon, trying to launder cultural relativism as political complexity. She can't write but we can, we write with clear-eyed RATIONALITY from the shade of our pith helmets.

But of course, this can't sustain the outrage, so then we move to stage two: locating the dishonesty, the ethical flaw, the mendacity that can only explain why anyone would want to question that true universality does not hang in a locket around their necks, nestling in their chest hairs, next to the scapula of Hitchens. This comes naturally enough, as in this genre, a fair proportion of courageous taboo-breaking broadsides against the capacious 'relativist left' depend on some form of handy quotation lifted out of context, or smear by association.

In this instance, the sonorous accusation against Priyamvada Gopal would appear to be the following. This lengthy twitter exchange conflate her specific discussion of a campaign by one organisation, Students' Rights (SR), with a demo that Bloodworth and the LSESU group appear to have been involved in organising. Thus conflated, this is used to suggest that she smeared that demo, and by association, the 'movement' that Bloodworth references in his tweets, as 'right-wing'.

However the piece does not mention this demo, nor those involved in organising it or speaking at it, at any point (whether it should have or not is another debate). It specifically focuses on SR as a way of introducing the wider problem the piece is concerned with - they are clearly the 'right' of the title, and it is their 'hijacking' that drives the political dilemma the piece discusses.

Focusing on the SR campaign - which is mentioned three times in clearly circumscribed ways - as the main driver of significant national coverage is entirely consistent with a reading of the media coverage over the last ten days (other organisations were name-checked and quoted in relation to the debate, certainly, but a scan would clearly show the centrality of SR to media framing).

Writing specifically about one campaign by a named organisation does not imply that other campaigns - unnamed campaigns by unreferenced actors, as far as this piece is concerned - are implicated in the criticisms directed at the named organisation. If you trace back this conflation, there may be much to debate about her analysis, but there is simply nothing here to apologise for or retract.

So why the self-regarding declarations of having been smeared, and the demands for an apology and the threats to contact the publisher?

Because without these demands a certain kind of tiresome performance is cut short. A performance that depends on 'playing the victim', 'searching for offence', 'shutting down debate' and 'not engaging with the actual arguments' - that is, all of those putative legacies of political correctness and multiculturalism that I thought these writers were striving to rescue the left from.

For anyone unlucky enough to have followed this putrid little episode this far, Priyamvada's piece is here:

http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4481/the-right-may-have-hijacked-the-issue-of-gender-segregation-but-thats-no-reason-to-ignore-it

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