Once again, the endlessly tedious arguments about academic bias in humanities departments at universities are to the fore, with a Senate Report on same just released. Mark over at Larvatus Prodeo has an interesting discussion going, which I recommend. Some of the lefties (but not any of the LP posters) are doing themselves no favours by being rude to a couple of conservative (not classical liberal) interlocutors, and the whole thing is becoming rather tangled.
The main problem in much university education – as far as I can see – is simply lack of rigour, not bias. Mark Richardson, one of the conservatives, drags up a truly hideous course list from the University of the Sunshine Coast in the comments. Even the lefties don’t try to defend it very much. That said, it’s not so much evidence of systematic bias as systematic incompetence. Who dreams up these anodyne excuses for universities and then funds them out of the taxpayer’s pocket? Why do we inflict them on young people? I seriously suspect that you’d be better off digging ditches than getting a ‘degree’ from an institution whose course offerings are so deracinated.
In terms of the bias issue, my view is the young Libs (who instigated the senate report) have missed the boat. There was a fair bit of unthinking leftism in arts faculties in Australian universities in days gone by, but it’s pretty much gone now. Various studies in the US have shown that older faculty often cling pretty grimly to the arguments that animated their lives in the 60s, but younger faculty – of all kinds – are more interested in ‘what works’ and being good teachers and researchers. I’d be very surprised if Australia were any different.
At different times I’ve had to write essays that were designed to piss in a particular academic’s political pocket. At the time I viewed them as an opportunity to practice the art of rhetoric, and to improve my writing skills. Yes, I’d have been pretty annoyed if my whole course had been like that, but I’ve studied/taught at four universities in two different countries, and it never, ever was. Subjects where parroting the lecturer’s ‘line’ was essential to get good marks were always ’statistical outliers’. There were more of them in the early 90s, when I did my first degree, and far, far less of them when I came to study as a mature student.
I think, too, that people are getting political conservatism and intellectual conservatism in a not very useful tangle. I’d describe Oxford as intellectually conservative. I’ve seen, for example, a notable academic (very politely, but very clearly) completely destroy a group of students making the fashionable ‘identity politics’ argument that it is impossible for people from one gender or ethnic group to understand or speak for people from the other gender or other ethnic groups. For those political conservatives about to cheer the hallowed halls of academe at the oldest university in the world, I should point out that the academic in question is a Marxist. Wanting academics to ‘do’ political conservatism (or any other political ideology) in the name of ‘balance’ is fairly pointless, like demanding equal time for creationism in a biology class, or a spending a term on the labour theory of value in first year microeconomics.
I do think there is something to be said for intellectual conservatism. The exchange I witnessed above indicated that some new ideas are just not particularly rigorous. That doesn’t make them wrong per se, just intellectually flabby. A good university education will allow its graduates to keep their heads above the flab and see clearly – at least most of the time. Anything else is surplus to requirements.
44 Comments
Interesting perspective there SL. I’ve always been somewhat perplexed by the concept of “bias” in academia. Assuming academics have proved their mettle, just what do we mean by “bias”, particularly in an arena where ideas should be contested and hopefully(!?) free speech is more than an empty gesture? Yes I know there are trends and fashions in academia but that is part and parcel of being human. We are all subject to these problems and sometimes I wonder if those proclaiming bias are engaging in some sour grapes(ie. we lost the argument, the masses won’t believe us!).
As I have bugger all experience of tertiary education(I am probably one of the most unschooled bloggers in existence), any elucidation on these matters will be greatly appreciated.
Read the thread over at LP, and the report. The overwhelming thing that came across to me (especially in the report) was just how crap so much education actually is. Sold, rolled gold crap. I’m sure it comes from having too many universities and then trying to shove nearly everyone into them (whether suited to study or not).
Strange you should say that SL. A couple of years ago I came across an old school friend and said to him that I feared something has happened to academia in Aus because the democratisation of education, led by the “Dawkins revolution”, seems to have watered down the quality of education and student. He replied, “Our old schoolmate, Michael X, now a lecturer at a NSW Uni, said that process started in 1985.
Yes, I know this sounds elitist, but I have met too many post grads and wondered: How did they get a post grad? My view is much more cynical: Tertiary education has become a factory for churning out clones to keep the commercial industrial sector going. Education, latin root: leading into the light? Now it is leading into the cubicle at the end of the hall.
Why are we educating so many people at so much expense to perform roles that are that can be learned on the job? A friend of mine is a clinical nurse ward manager and commented that it will soon be expected that anyone in that position must have have a post grad. Yet she has only just finished her degree and her ward was highly praised by a recent hospital review. She didn’t need the degree to be a great nurse but credentialism is soon going to demand it.
Again my usual cynical self: we are placing far too much emphasis on “schooling” and far too little on “education”. I am a great believer in high quality schooling, it can be an invaluable experience and provide a vast range of valuable skills but all this talk of an “education revolution” bespeaks more of a worship of credentialism rather than the appropriate training of minds.
I wrote about this last time it was an issue.
Of course lecturers are going to come from a particular viewpoint. The important questions are: do they allow others of a different viewpoint to express their opinions, and do they mark people with a different viewpoint fairly?
For example, I don’t like the fusion fallacist school of thought in Equity. But I encourage my classes not to accept my word for it, and they are welcome, nay, encouraged, to question my viewpoint. If I read a well-researched well-written essay from a fusion fallacy point of view, I’d give it a good mark.
“The main problem in much university education – as far as I can see – is simply lack of rigour”
I agree with this, and even if there is bias, it’s only in a tiny speck of the university system in any case (sociology being almost dead in Australian universities — where I work, I believe there are a massive 6 full time staff members). The other thing it ignores is that most of the important stuff being taught now to undergraduates is really relate to more basic stuff (how to write well, how to perform a very basic analysis of more complex problems etc.), and people would be better off worrying about what’s going wrong in degrees there (multiple choice everything, no quantitative skills at all being taught etc.).
Based on this, I think it should have been apriori clear that the whole senate report was basically a waste of money which could have well been spent (or not spent) on something better.
Conrad, hear hear. Many students come to university with little idea of how to write an essay or how to conduct analysis. That’s not their fault – most people don’t just pick it up from the ether. But everyone really should be getting that kind of an education before they get to uni.
John, I agree that the modern world requires qualifications for EVERYTHING when it’s not necessary. In some areas, the best way to learn is by doing, not by studying a course. Particularly if there is a practical aspect.
Isn’t part of rthe problem to do with the nature of conservatism? The dialectical nature of university humanities courses appears to be in conflict with the distaste for analysis inherent in the conservative tradition (or at least it’s recent manifestations). An analysis of the US role in the world since WW 2 that ignores the significant difficulties it found itself in in conflicts like Vietnam and the morally questionable decisions it made to try an extract itself would be so gutted of content as to be useless. Yet this is the type of carping that the committee is accepting in submissions. I’d prefer it if my tax dollars weren’t wasted on recording the winings of intellectual cripples.
(Interesting turn of phrase “being rude”, very conservative)
Quite a few of the complaints – lecturers who simply stuck fingers in their ears and went lalalalalala when presented with evidence contrary to their position, lecturers who failed to grasp comparative advantage and so advocated economic autarky – were treated as ‘academic bias’ in various submissions.
Neither are evidence of bias; they’re evidence of incompetence. Both Labor and Coalition senators danced around this issue, as addressing it would mean addressing what both parties have done to the universities. That said, the complete failure to grasp comparative advantage is very common – Paul Krugman (no righty, he) has an excellent essay on the phenomenon, available here.
Lets ground the scepticism in human ecology!
My limited life in academia in some respects was marvellous, exposing me to perspectives I never even imagined. However I could never get inspired about a career there; because by and large it appears to be such a self serving culture, not subject to much critical scrutiny from outside.
It has I feel, in the public view, cornered the intellectual high ground and such a way as to put its culture largely beyond rigorous scrutiny.
I find it helpful to analyse this phenomena through the frame work of human agency: We all have power; which we seek to use to our advantage at every opportunity. If we are lucky we are somewhat aware of its many permutations, the practical and ethical consequences of its use. But the Unconscious being what it is, we are very unlikely to be aware of all its manifestations.
So it is this agency manifests itself in the institutions which we create and belong to. Who is not going protect the membership of their treasured institution; by if necessary for ever raising the bar. Hence ever more credentials. But does it matter?
Yes it does, very much; if one aspires to the sustenance of humanity as an enlightened species that has some control over its suffering. In this context, the capacity of our ecosystem to sustain our species is without doubt a pressing issue.
If the pursuit of fantasies about enlightenment does become too elaborate and ecologically redundant, we may have to seriously address deconstruction or at least serious pruning of all our institutions; if humanity is to persist with dignity.
SL, I’d agree with you that those complaints deal with incompetence rather than bias.
I would also agree that there is a difference between presenting a radical point in an intellectually rigorous manner (all good) and presenting a radical point without proper analysis or evidence. The latter is simply another example of incompetence and/or laziness.
I don’t mind what point of view students present to me, as long as (a) they back it up with evidence and (b) they argue it cogently.
I have a bit to offer here, currently being a student and all. For now, I’ll just say that SL is bang on. The whole issue is about RIGOUR.
This “left” vs. “right” crap is really shitting me up the wall. It has nothing to do with Labor vs. Liberal or Left vs. Right (in any meaningful sense). But it does have a hell of a lot to do with rigour. And as the obssession of blogs like LP with this issue over and over, there is a huge “Left” affiliation in the humanities, especially the further down the food chain you go.
Once you get out of the G-8 it starts getting nasty. The Dawkins universities are the worst offenders. But the real kicker is their version of “Left” has nothing to do with revolution, changing society, redistributing wealth, new systems of production and exchange, etc. It is ALL about fricking culture war garbage, overhwelmingly race and gender.
Having said that those Young Liberal students are an even worse embarrassment. The fact that our parliament has dignified these bogans with taxpayer-funded response is the greatest scandal of all!
Of course, one positive outcome here is we have even further evidence for why the government should get the hell out of education.
BTW JG, one of your comments over at Andrew Norton’s place finished up in the report – the one about where you very gently taught a nice but clearly not very bright lecturer some basic economics.
FMF! Really?
Do you have a link?
Nope that wasn’t me.
I thought it was. I know you’ve said something similar, either at AN’s or maybe here.
My contribution the last time this came around.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/2008/Campus-Bias.html
I think the main problem rests with a great change in the attitude of universities and academics to their competence to teach about the present.
SL, I’d be interested in your thoughts on an older friend of mine’s experience studying and teaching at Oxford. He did a D.Phil in English and stayed on for a year afterwards to teach and has been back on sabbatical.
He said that Oxford was extremely reluctant to include contemporary – or faddish – ideas, positions in the undergraduate curriculum, preferring to wait to see which ones are victorious in the natural selection of ideas. This strikes me as being very wise.
What can university humanities academics tell us about the present, about today? This is for living; we are ALL making it up as we go along. We can only reflect on the past in a scholarly fashion.
The rest is just gossip and group therapy.
John H – Education, latin root: leading into the light? Now it is leading into the cubicle at the end of the hall.
Heh! get thee to a veal fattening pen.
The response to Mark Richardson over at LP is disgusting. The guy’s polite and reasonable and gets rebutted with witless sarcasm and the inane assertion that he’s the one full of hubris.
There are people saying: “Oh I can handle comments that challenge my views but just not in that way.”
What? Courteous and reasonable?
I’ve had my fights with dogmatic academics. The best one was the crusty old Cambridge pseudo-Marxist who tried to tell me that I don’t like John Ford movies or that if I did it was because of visual style. I suspect the guy didn’t know that Ford was a liberal. Or maybe he was offended by the mixture of paleo-archana and classical liberal associationalism expressed by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But he was an exception, a dude for whom life had been one downhill slide ever since the PhD.
He was purged.
And if he’s out there: Steven I don’t like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance because of its ‘politics’. I like it, ’cause, it’s like a great movie.
‘Great’ – a bourgeois word that. Boo hiss.
John Ford: the only man who could make John Wayne cry.
The rest is just gossip and group therapy.
I was sitting in a Melb Uni lounge and overheard a staff member talking to a student. Some arts course. The student was stressed about missing the deadline and the staff member was telling her it isn’t a problem and how she and everyone else at the faculty loved her.
Out in the real world if you miss deadlines you don’t get paid.
Then two economics lecturers came in. One was irritated by emails from students who’d failed. They had a catalogue of sob stories: my parents will be disappointed, I want to succeed, it costs so much money blah blah blah.
The commerce lecturer said he sent back a standard reply. I know it costs money. I know you want to succeed. I assume your parents do too. That’s not my business. My business is telling you if you passed. You didn’t.
Harsh. But so is life.
This is very true, and has been my experience as well. There’s quite a bit of rather trendy stuff floating around among post-grads (and not just political stuff – all sorts of stuff), but that’s the point of post-grad study. There was an attempt a couple of years ago by post-modernists to storm the classics citadel; it was not only rebuffed but cut to ribbons. The Oxford way is to invite leading proponents of theories that ‘lack rigour’ to debates and then (very nicely) chop them to bits.
BTW ‘lacks rigour’ is just about the worst thing to have written on your work.
The Oxford way is to invite leading proponents of theories that ‘lack rigour’ to debates and then (very nicely) chop them to bits.
And that’s how the empire was formed. In Edinburgh it’s different. They chop you to bits and then they chop you to bits. Literally.
I wonder why those Oxfordians don’t want courses like: Jesus Christ, The First Gay Libber. Fascists!
I’m re-reading Brave New World</i now and was most amused to see that Eton’s still around in AF 600. Probably will be too.
On the other hand, you can go too far in terms of being ‘traditional’. The “natural selection of ideas” has to happen somewhere. Which, I humbly submit, is why America is where a lot of the intellectual action is.
The problem in Australia is an inability to distinguish ‘new/modern’, and ‘good/worthwhile’, and an assumption that they are the same thing.
However I strongly believe we would be as badly off, and probably worse, if we went back to compulsory latin and that kind of “education”.
I am reading about Montaigne at the moment – although being incredibly learned in every sense, he felt that what should be taught in universities is ‘wisdom’, not ‘knowledge’. Traditional subjects tend to focus a great deal on information at the expense of genuine critical thinking skills, IMHO. He also believed that it was relevant to question how particular learning would actually benefit the student, either in terms of happiness or in terms of practical advancement. Without conflating this with the faddish “vocational” obsession that some universities now have, I think this is a valid way to consider things.
I must say that while I know what you mean, this is rather suggestive of institutional arrogance – i.e. the test of whether a theory is valid is whether it survives the gold standard of Oxford.
Paul – Montaigne may have been learned but how do you teach wisdom?
…the test of whether a theory is valid is whether it survives the gold standard of Oxford.
No I think the test of a theory is whether it survives criticism. The test of Oxford is whether it keeps producing people who can take spurious theories down.
Adrien,
one of the reasons everyone is so nice to students who may not deserve it is that course ratings matter at some places and one of the big factors in these ratings is just being likable (hard for some, easier for others!). The other thing about denying people extensions is that all you are doing is basically categorizing people who hand stuff in late into deserved, undeserved but got some bogus note, and undeserved categories. Given the second of these is so easy to get, its hardly equitable to be nasty to the few who are honest enough to admit they didn’t do something on time because of laziness.
Also, I agree with you about the comments on LP — I think they are a good example of one of the things wrong with the left in most places I know — they’ve basically been taken over by middle-class whingers with an extremely high sense of entitlement. That of course has nothing to do with the poor. It’s the same as the Greens — they’ve been taken over by a bunch of socialists when they would have had more success if integrated into the mainstream like Germany.
“they’ve basically been taken over by middle-class whingers with an extremely high sense of entitlement.”
Uh oh sounds like this thread has been taken over by elderly whingers who don’t like not be taken seriously.
I find JG’s comment amusing. It’s not about left/right he sagely intones and then goes on to trash a range of issues he claims are the province of the left (that’s all the left, including me, an amorphous left, undifferentiated and lacking any diversity whatsoever, I have to say JG – LACKS RIGOUR)
LE said: “Many students come to university with little idea of how to write an essay or how to conduct analysis.”
So… it’s not just incompetence in tertiary institutions, but secondary. (And even in 1980, doing the one philosophy unit at MU mandatory for law students, I was shocked how many of the general BA students couldn’t find the flaw in the “all cats have tails, fido has a tail, therefore fido is a cat” false syllogism). 1980!!! Melbourne!!!
Of course, you can’t go past xkcd’s 263 take on this:
textual version for the visually impaired or graphical version.
And… hmmmm…. on tearing things down at Oxford??? Do they still teach theology?
“Intellectual conservatism”? Perhaps you mean what used to be called the “intellectual virtues”?
Conrad – Because I am hard you will not like me but the more you hate me, the more you will learn.
Saint – Intellectual virtues are not synonymous with conservatism. Such virtues are and have been possessed by people from across the spectrum.
Actually I just read some of the discussion on LP. I think the Mark Richardson pretty much got what he deserved. It’s very poor debating form to rest your case on “I choose not to believe things the other side have presented evidence for and I think you should believe me” (although this is a customary conservative “technique”). His statements re patriarchy and gender are ludicrous. Doesn’t he watch any TV? Hasn’t he seen an advertisement?
Indeed they still teach theology, combined as ‘philosophy and theology’, which gets the course in question the appellation ‘philthy’. Richard Dawkins (also at Oxford) complains about it, but it’s unlikely to disappear any time soon. It is unwise for any atheist or skeptic not extremely sure of their ground to take on one of the philthy students in a debate, as much of the teaching focusses on the casuistic reasoning perfected by the Jesuits, and the clever little buggers can argue black into white.
And on JG’s comment, I got the impression he was concerned about lefties who were insufficiently Marxist
It depends whether you ascribe what’s on television or in adverts to patriarchy (Adrien, our resident ad man, may have something useful to say). Apart from proving that patriarchy in the form described by some feminists exists, a causal link between it and what appears on the tube or at the tip of Adrien’s pen then needs to be made. That’s easier said than done.
“That’s easier said than done.” Indeed, but it has been done many times and, in some cases, with rigour. As we know there are whole disciplines devoted to cultural studies. If the only counter argument offed to this work is “I don’t believe it” then it’s game over. With regard to JG, his position is confusing, angry and contradictory. A traditional Marxist then.
SL: On “philthy”, at least they won’t cut Dawkins to ribbons the way they did Abelard, even tho he was just as arrogant and never lost an argument (reference at Stanford).
And the easiest way to attack them is with theological arguments, which is why Abelard was so dangerous.
Patrick, that’s not the sort of work that cultural studies theorists do. Of course, that may be changing, as criminology is changing due – as Krugman says – to the invasion of the discipline by aliens with computers and equations.
The last debate I watched in the Sheldonian between Dawkins and a chap from Templeton (another Don) was pretty much a draw, to be fair. The problem is that you can’t definitively prove God doesn’t exist, just as you can’t prove definitively that he does. Once that was out of the way, the theologian had quite a bit of fun with Dawkins’ argument that there has never been mass killing in the name of atheism. I suspect the Christian had been hanging out with the Russophiles and Sinologists in the History Faculty, because he was able to quote – chapter and verse – directives to kill vast numbers of people signed off on by Stalin, Beria and Mao in the name of ‘achieving atheism’.
While the types of Young Liberals who pushed for the Senate enquiry are downright reactionary, the academic response has been appalling. Calling what the Young Liberals did an attack on academic freedom, as Paul Norton did at Larvatus Prodeo, is just ridiculous.
As I said in this article last October:
“What they [Norton, the NTEU et al] don’t do is put forward an actual case saying why the public should fund courses that critically examine such things as gender, class, race, sexuality and so on. There is absolutely no recognition of the fact that universities are largely paid for with public money, and there is a disdain for the idea that the grubby public or their representatives have any place questioning what happens in universities…why don’t these (using the term broadly, as Paul Norton is a member of the Australian Greens) left social-democrats put up a spirited counter-attack based on what they do and why it is good for people?”
What we have is a new orthodoxy in academia. It’s certainly an improvement on the old conservative one, but like all orthodoxies it leads to people who assume they are right and are unwilling to defend their position, and in fact regard any criticism of that position as beyond the pale.
We need academics who are prepared to fight for their side in the court of public opinion, instead of ones who resent any questioning of their orthodoxies.
“Uh oh sounds like this thread has been taken over by elderly whingers who don’t like not be taken seriously”
Actually, I’m not elderly
. Are you saying there isn’t an an abundance of people that think that they shouldn’t have to work any jobs that are somehow “degrading” (e.g., 7-11) and think the government should pay for every last one of their expenses? Just check out any survey of the number of people who claim to be poor and therefore think the government should give them assistance (vs. reality — most Australians aren’t poor). As for the Green party in Australia, the obvious example of them being socialists over environmentalists is when they were offered a trade-off between Telstra being privatized with the money used on the environment and Telstra not being sold — as we know, they chose Telstra over the environment (!).
Patrick B – His statements re patriarchy and gender are ludicrous. Doesn’t he watch any TV? Hasn’t he seen an advertisement?
Well I’ve made similar ones. I have my doubts that you can describe Australia as a patriarchy: a society where men rule women. Just because there’s sexism, or sexist advertising or whatever doesn’t mean there’s a patriarchy. The existence of racial stereotypes isn’t proof of apartheid
A lot of the account execs, copywriters, art directors making these ads are women. A lot of the consumers of the products are also women. There’s this knee-jerk and very dogmatic tendency amongst academic feminists to insist that ‘patriarchy’ is to blame without substantiation or even toleration of debate.
As David writes:
This is true. And like all orthodoxies when it enters this phase it begins to lose relevance. After all using patriarchy to describe the behaviour of women who are spending their own money on what they want is somewhat lacking in rigour.
This view is based on the assumption that certain choices women make, are somehow indicative of self-degradation, subservience or powerlessness. If a woman wears high heels she’s a slave somehow. It doesn’t matter how successful, confident, educated, powerful she is. She’s a slave. Why? Because ‘we’ don’t approve of her tastes. The opposition to tastes that are seen to be too attractive to men is a feature of a certain academic sub-culture that results in, amongst other things, some of the most hideous hairstyles I’ve seen, (and I used to be a punk rocker).
There’s an assumption here that some feminist vanguard is empowered and entitled to pronounce judgement on what women wear, buy etc. A somewhat ironic take on a movement that seeks to enable women to wear what they bloody well want to.
Doubtless sexist notions exist and are exploited by the advertising industry and the rest. However the rather blunt notion that ‘it’s patriarchy’ which at once is both a heterogenous ‘discourse’ and an oppressive monolith doesn’t really provide one with any useful analytical instruments. But what it does do is create a nice comfortable dogma that renders unnecessary any need to actually go out there and investigate what actually happens, what choices women make and why.
It also fails to understand one very important thing about the advertising industry. It desperately seeks to appease the consumers. Yes it manipulates them. But when they change the advertisers better bloody well too quick smart or there’s the door. You listen to some of these people and you’d think they were talking about the Sov Kultural Kommittee. There is no such monopoly, nor is there any need to spread a political message. There’s only the need to move merchandise and they do this by plugging into peoples’ self-indulgent whims not their aspirations to political hegemony.
Instead of being a dynamic and ever growing body of investigation we see it becoming a stagnant doctrine which is protected under the umbrage of ‘women’s studies’. If one dares to criticize, especially if one is male, one is told that one has no business telling women how to be feminists. This is despite the fact that one is doing no such thing but is in fact calling bullshit on preposterous assertions.
That’s what you get with cloistered academic wagon circles. No outside challenges. No challenges, no need to excel. No need to excel – mediocrity and eventual death.
David is right. Being told that one is not competent to discuss ‘postmodernism’ if one hasn’t read the entire works of Jacques Derrida is the sort of thing you expect of the Inquisition not the 21st century democratic world.
Paul
Could you flesh out a bit more the distinctions between “genuine critical thinking skills,” “knowledge,” and “wisdom”?
The getting of “wisdom” strikes me as being beyond the remit of a university teacher. Yes, it is of course a desirable result of studying for a degree, but a mistake to burden universities with it as a first priority.
I read a hell of a lot of luvvie lemmings banging on about this “critical thinking”. But what does that mean? Surely, universities have ALWAYS performed this role, as have schools all the way from K-12.
The imparting of knowledge is the KEY role of the university for me. Remember, knowledge is a bit further up the intellectual food-chain than mere information and data.
p.s. I didn’t men to infer that YOU were a luvvie lemming.
There’s a difference between a well-grounded generalisation and a strawman argument about a grouping – be it academia, left-right wing, feminism, what have you. Not only did Mark Richardson seem to be unaware of the distinction, he appeared to be contemptuous when the distinction was pointed out to him. That’s not sign of a person arguing in good faith. I think ridicule is appropriate for someone acting that way. Yep – he got what he deserved.
SkepticLaywer – I don’t really care
[Woops.]
… for strawman arguments myself.
Ahhh… I see what you did there. The double comment got caught up in the spaminator (which probably doesn’t like the accents, either – Jacques was saying the other day that it plays merry hell with Irish names containing an apostrophe).
I didn’t think he was arguing in bad faith, Down & Out. I thought he was in error, but he’d been called all sorts of nasty names before Cast Iron Helen came along and pointed out the extent to which he was confusing aspects of feminism with aspects of libertarian ideas. I then fleshed the libertarian bits out further to make it very clear. I know there is a tradition in the blogosphere not to ‘teach’ people who are in error, on the grounds that it’s patronising, but I’m not sure that’s always the best thing to do.
Frankly, I’d rather be taught (and I have been, over the years, by the likes of Jason Soon and Andrew Norton) than pilloried. Tigtog and Pavlov’s Cat are also excellent teachers, and I don’t mind learning from them at all. The blogosphere may be a great leveller, but pretending that all people are of equal knowledge and skill and mocking them in lieu of improving their understanding seems most unfair.
If the interlocutor then comes back and shows either (a) that they refuse to learn or (b) that they do not understand, then one may react accordingly – to (a) with dismissal and to (b) with (perhaps) a second attempt at teaching or just ignoring the comments in question.