“Butterflies and Wheels” purports to be “fighting fashionable nonsense,” and they do some of the time.

So why are they posting prominent links (this used to be on B&W’s front page) to tabloid trash like this, which misstates Foucault’s views from top to bottom, and offers no rational criticism of any view he actually held, while offering up a series of fallacious arguments (ad hominems primarily–you would think Ms. Benson of B&W might notice that references to Foucault’s homosexuality do not refute his ideas).

And I say this as a Foucault skeptic! Foucault’s corpus is, to put the matter gently, a mixed bag; his reflections on matters epistemological are a muddle, yet at the same time he did more than anyone since Max Weber to fill out our picture of “the iron cage of modernity.”

So what is going on at “Butterflies and Wheels”? If this were an isolated incident, one would not think much of it. But, alas, it is not.

More on the topic soon.