severe critics

And I’m not even sure WHO THESE PEOPLE ARE, but one thing I’m sure of is that they have no idea what they are talking about in 85% of the cases. (The commenters, I mean.) I’m not even sure what they are referring to in most of the comments. At least the usual trolls know who we are and have heard of some of our concepts; these people are simply throwing darts while blindfolded, laughing about their good aim even as they strike cats and pitchers of beer.

Sounds to me like they are mostly students of analytic philosophy who have heard that there’s another ridiculous new fad coming in continental philosophy and have decided to mock it in the ways they have already learned to mock Derrida, Foucault, etc. In fact, it’s a bit confusing to read because there is clearly no familiarity here with any of the texts. Oh well. Many people put up with much worse.

ADDENDUM: A friend writes, about the aforementioned post…

“I’d actually consider this positive publicity because it is introducing the SR to the wider public, as opposed to the usual circle of people who already know about it and care about it in one way or another. (Metafilter is not the blog of any particular group but a generic discussion board.) If it gets new people talking about it and buying the books etc., I think the negative comments here and there can be safely ignored… So this is good publicity, especially if you consider the initial post, the author of which had defended open-mindedness about it all along…”

I don’t think it’s bad publicity (see my preceding post), nor do I think the original post was bad. I was simply surprised and disappointed at the level of ignorance reflected in the comments section. Normally, if I am completely unschooled in some topic, I wouldn’t make a snarky comment about it, and I think 15% or fewer of those commenters had even a remotely accurate sense of what SR is about.