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Then where did she and the infrastructure supporting and defending her come from? IIRC, she's a lifelong academic.
I'd agree that it's a tricky business, but it seems to me there's no way to avoid engaging with that business. Further, it seems to me that we've been engaging in that business routinely more or less forever. I engage in that business every time I consider an argument about strutural racism or sexism or colonialism or any of the other basic arguments of the progressive worldview. I reject the progressive arguments not because the question is too nebulous to draw a conclusion, but because I examine the evidence and draw conclusions. It seems to me that the sort of uncertianty you describe seems to pop up when the sort of critique that is usually applied by progressives is instead turned on them, and it seems to me that it pops up even when those applying this critique to progressivism have much, much better evidence to support their critique than the progressives generally do.
For an example, it is routine in our society to attribute violent crime rates to socio-economic factors, and to claim that these violent crime rates can be increased or decreased by various policy interventions. Well, we just witnessed an extremely powerful cluster of policy interventions, and we can observe that it was immediately followed by the largest change in violent crime rates ever rigorously observed. And yet when I suggest a causative linkage, the same people who have spent years telling me that I should take the impact of socio-economic factors on the crime rate more seriously suddenly start claiming that the whole issue is an impenetrable fog, and real knowledge is simply impossible.
Likewise in this case, I observe that there's a long and quite sordid history of involvement in communist activism on the part of Academia, that academia seems to be ground-zero for the current crop of communist thugs, and that academia takes public steps to organize and defend their thuggery. I'm not sure where the uncertainty is coming from, or how we might reduce it. Would an analysis of association between Antifa and Academia be sufficient?
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