Readers are no doubt grateful that I've said nothing about the unhinged Richard Painter for many months now.  Alas, he remains the same:  still completely dishonest and vindictive.  Amusingly, he's now running a carpetbagger campaign for Congress in a special election in a Minnesota district he doesn't even live in (God help those folks!).  I do wonder whether he's still collecting a salary at Minnesota, given that his full-time job seems to be politics and tweeting. 

In any case, what apparently set him off recently was this New York Times article about the Berggruen Prize in philosophy (which my colleague Martha Nussbaum won early on).  I was quoted making the banal observation that giving the prize to Justice Ginsburg, who is not a philosopher, rather devalued the prize in the eyes of philosophers.  Here's how the Tweeter-in-Chief responded, after calling me a "sexist":

There is, indeed, someone who knows nothing about political philosophy in this discussion, but it's not me.  The irony of the rest of his smear is brought out by what I actually wrote on the subject:

It turns out there were only three living philosophers worthy of [the Berggruen Prize], so now it has gone to a judge, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court….Her most significant contributions to the law were in the 1970s, when she pioneered arguments, in both the law reviews and the courts, for ending gender-based discrimination. This was important work, but a far, far cry from the original declared purpose of the [Berggruen] prize. (Catharine MacKinnon would have been a more plausible choice, since she has both a more substantial theoretical corpus, and substantial practical impact as well.)

One of the curiosities of Richard's disturbed psyche is that, as Jonathan Klick (Penn) put it to me last year, he lies about both the big and the small.  Less than two days after the preceding, something possessed him to make the following story up out of whole cloth:

He's referring to the photo on my Twitter account.   Put aside the juvenile suggestion that I'm holding my pants up:  he never "suggested" I should "buy a better belt," and I never "went away," since I was not the one doing the trolling (look in the mirror, Richard!). 

What an ongoing embarrassment for the University of Minnesota to have such a childish imbecile on the faculty.

(Thanks to the reader who flagged this display, who asked not to be named for the obvious reasons.)