@cspam What the heck is wrong with these people?
If these were all Twitter Blue subscribers I could write these people off as just random sycophants. But they’re not. Every one of these people is “legacy verified”.
Richard Cooke, who arguably is the most nakedly awful person in those images aside from Musk, is from what I can tell an author featured in such outlets as The New Republic. You’d expect him of all of these people to at least be able to do a little research and figure out that who Haraldur is and why Musk is lying through this teeth, but I guess he just preferred to reveal his true colors instead.
Looking at Boghossian, I thought I recognized the name. Turns out I did: he was part of the trio behind the “Sokal Squared” hoax. At the time that came out I thought the fact they were able to get blatantly nonsensical articles published in journals for certain very specific fields carried some weight as indicating a possible lack of rigor in said fields [1]. However, it seems every one of those three people has fallen off into fatuous (or worse) territory since then. It’s really disappointing seeing Boghossian sucking up to Musk, especially like this.
I have no idea who Nick Flor is IRL, but I remember seeing him and I remember him being a jerk as well, so him being one isn’t surprising.
[1]: Please note that I absolutely do not support the “culture wars” or the right’s authoritarian crusade against “woke-ism”. Assuming the Sokal Squared hoax is valid, it is so only as a criticism of a lack of rigor in those specific fields at the time, as was the original Sokal hoax with sociology around 2000. Since the original Sokal hoax, sociology has massively improved in rigor; I would be surprised if that hasn’t also happened in the fields Sokal Squared affected. Moreover, lack of rigor in a field is a problem that should be addressed by dialogue in the academic community, not by political action; indeed, government attempts to legislate the bounds of academic discourse, especially for partisan or ideological reasons, should always be viewed with extreme skepticism. Finally, there are a lot more important things people should be worrying about; indeed, lack of rigor in obscure fields of the humanities is probably the least concerning thing affecting academia at the moment — and right-wing attacks on education and research probably the most concerning.