This past Saturday morning, I woke up early and had some time to kill, and so when I checked twitter, instead of blocking the usual jerks and knuckleheads there, I actually engaged some of them.  Before I get into the delicious details of what ensued, a reminder about a long-standing meme here, the idea of "condescension from below."  I owe the brilliant phrase to Stephen Stich.  We were both attending a conference where a philosopher (who shall remain nameless, except to note that no one would consider him a major figure) delivered what he took to be a devastating critique of Quine.   But the paper was not simply critical–that would hardly make it notable, this being philosophy after all–it was remarkably condescending in tone and substance–hence Stich's quip to me, "Condescension from below":  this philosopher was feigning an air of superiority towards a philosopher he was plainly inferior to.

"Condescension from below" is a staple of twitter, and for the obvious reasons:  the lack of barriers, group polarization effects, and the limits of the medium are all conducive to it.   And now for Saturday morning's amusement:

A philosophy grad student directed me to a couple of the more irrational twitter responses to some of the essays about transgender women, including Robert Jensen's essay, that I linked to last week.  One that stood out was by Christa Peterson, also a philosophy grad student (I linked it here), which included the memorable line, directed at Jensen, that "𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝒶𝓃'𝓉 𝒷𝑒 𝒶 𝒸𝒾𝓈 𝓂𝒶𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒶 𝓇𝒶𝒹𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝒻𝑒𝓂𝒾𝓃𝒾𝓈𝓉" [her font] and went on to suggest that Jensen, Dan Kaufman, and me were not even allowed to think or make arguments about these issues because we are "cis men."  (Jensen made clear why that description is nonsense.)  Perusing Ms. Peterson's twitter feed I came upon another tweet in which she apparently agreed with my criticism of Singer's take on Marx but had to append to it the condescending observation that "a very annoying feature of Brian Leiter is that he is sometimes right."  (Even more annoying, I suspect, is that I'm always right!)  This bit of condescension from below brought out an even better one from Joshua Stein, a grad student in philosophy at the University of Calgary (embarrassing behavior on twitter seems to be a thing there), which prompted my tweet that began the real amusement:

Brian Leiter‏ @BrianLeiter May 19

Brian Leiter Retweeted Joshua Stein

An example of "condescension from below," a staple of twitter:

Joshua Stein @thephilosotroll

Replying to @christapeterso

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. Though Singer writing about Marx isn't new; he's been doing Marx and Hegel (albeit not great, from my limited understanding) for a loooong time.