Bellesiles Returns

Totally agree. Would that academia would take the same attitude towards all those who have demonstrably falsified a great deal of the climate data purporting to demonstrate AGW.

Virg, way to take an axe and swing it right into the overhead wires.

So I guess people will be checking Bellesiles closely before taking him seriously this time around? But really, is it worth the time at this point?

Y’know, I know essentially nothing about academic history and academic historians, and only those popular historians I’ve read. But I’m pretty sure that the New Press could have found dozens of excellent historians and writers who’d have gleefully sacrificed their firstborns (well, at least, spent a lot less time with their firstborns) for this kind of publishing opportunity. Why would anyone publish a book by Bellesiles? Even if it were by happy chance to turn out to be a good book, it wouldn’t matter, because it would come pre-discredited by Bellesiles’s fame as an academic fraudster. Any book he writes can serve only to call discredit on our side of the debate for not only tolerating but rewarding this charlatan, and that’s even before it’s determined whether the new book contains any flaws of its own.

Re John Fund, and “their side does it more” – sure it does. And they get away with it an awful lot. But accepting that imbalance is the price we pay for remaining in what one of their apparatchiks famously and disdainfully termed “the reality-based community”. I’d certainly like for them to join us in sanity and argue against our preferences in good faith, but I’m with Steve LaBonne in not holding my breath until that happens, and I’m with Lemuel Pitkin on insisting that we hold ourselves to a standard we can be proud of regardless of how they may wallow in their shamelessness.

Oh, and while I’ve never heard of them before – shame on Central Connecticut State University for employing this disgraced liar as an Adjunct Lecturer. I’ve heard enough about the academic job market to know that there are always far more plausibly qualified candidates than teaching jobs, and it’s doubtless worse in these tough times. They could have given that job to someone who doesn’t leave a trail of slime wherever they go.

AH! That’s it, I stupidly confused John Lott w/Fund. I see Lott on Fox as an expert in Voter Fraud, as well as guns and crime. I think he and Bellisles are parallel cases, but one was a dishonest liberal, and not a member of the punditry.
Must fact check more..

No, in the US adjunct means a per-class contract, very low-paid and contingent work, but paid. The publications of an adjunct mean nothing to an institution and don’t figure in rankings, so that is not the motivation. Most likely it is charity by someone who knows B. and is wishing to allow him to keep a toehold in academe. It is a very minor and inconsequential toehold.

Three points:

1) The key, devastating points made by those who opposed Bellesiles were made by good historians who relied on actual evidence in a Rankean stylee. Yes, he was also on the receiving end of a horrible shitfest from nasty wackos. But he was still wrong, and the people who pointed this out were not nasty wackos.

2) I’m not aware that there’s anything special about history which means that no redemption is ever possible. It’s not child abuse. He got it wrong. He admitted that he had. Perhaps now he’s going to get it right. He’d better, because I imagine that people are going to be checking his references really thoroughly. There are excellent historians around who have published some terrible stuff at the start of their careers, who have gone on to publish some brilliant stuff. MB deserves a chance.

3) While we’re talking about people who let their views on gun overship cloud their historical work, Joyce Lee Malcolm’s output on this topic, insofar as it relates to the UK in the C19th and C20th, is also largely worthless nonsense.

The publishers’ blurb is a worrying sign that Bellesiles hasn’t changed, because I don’t think they would put stuff out without having consulted him first. And the blurb is trying to claim that Bellesiles wasn’t engaged in fraud. And when in addition Bellesiles’ reply to Scott McLemee is to imply that the problem was just that his referencing was sloppy, there has to be a strong presumption that he hasn’t learned his lesson.

Now I like Moby Hick. At least he displays originality in his descriptive inventive phrasing without churlish nastiness. Labonne, by contrast, reveals himself to be a manner-less, obtuse clod hurling the kind of personal invective to which types like him are the very first to loudly object if directed at themselves. Moby gives me inventive Hell (tho in a lost cause) and I smile. Labonne causes me to further solidify my worst prejudices /beliefs about the humorous-less, un-civil left. But then those who believe themselves to have acquired/deserve the mantel of the “Vision of the Anointed” need not show anything but contempt for we mere lesser mortals…

Labonne@18

LOL, I thought all the kool-aid drinkers died at Jonestown. I guess religious zealotry is timeless. But when one is. like the gnostics, convinced one is possessed of the final “WORD” where man is the measure of all things, I shouldn’t be surprised. There is no savage irony in reflecting that those on the left used to view the European settlers of the North American continent as despoilers of nature who wrongly viewed/deceived themselves as humans exogenous to the rest of the natural world–that the world revolved around them for them to shape and mold–only to seize upon this self-same formerly despised egocentric concept of man as all-powerfully capable of single-handily shaping the planet with inputs supposedly dwarfing not only the mass of the planet but those TRULY exogenous bodies such as the sun and it’s solar radiation. With guys like you Labonne, ideology obviously trumps recorded history, exposure of falsified data and shameless collusion to deceive, all quite obviously for ideological reasons–those being the desire to save mankind from it’s delusions; to march us all to virtue–at bayonet point if need be. Utopian leftists ALWAYS end up with authoritarian/totalitarian solutions.

And the only xenophobic types around here seem to be those like you, Labonne. If any “idea” is welcome in the ideal of the civic public square of open debate, is not any idea’s ADVOCATE equally so welcomed?

Keep it up, VX – I love the satrire.

“1) The key, devastating points made by those who opposed Bellesiles were made by good historians who relied on actual evidence in a Rankean stylee. Yes, he was also on the receiving end of a horrible shitfest from nasty wackos. But he was still wrong, and the people who pointed this out were not nasty wackos.”

Pretty bluntly, you’re just playing right into the right-wing’s game. They’ve got you by the balls, and you don’t want to admit it.

Why do these type of attacks (Turner/Feldman’s attack upon Abraham is yet another instance out of many) only occur from the Right to Left? If we could see that the attacks are happening in both directions, then that would be a sign of a healthy debate around the scholarship. Instead, the Right publishes the most absurd nonsense and rarely does their incredibly poor scholarship ever get mentioned. If, god forbid, you publish something that goes against one of their shibboleths, they’ll attempt to trash you. You may survive, but your work is going to go through the ringer.

Take a look at Turner / Feldman’s work – it’s trivial crap (wow, now we know that not absolutely all of German business contributed to the Nazis! Like we ever actually thought that before?) and was essentially funded by German industry to be a whitewash (Feldman also wanted to preserve his Chicago School buddies’ infatuation with capitalism, which is why he became a prominent economic “historian” without knowing any economics). When people started digging through Feldman’s work, they found similar errors to Abraham’s, but that didn’t hamper Feldman’s reputation at all.

“Re John Fund, and “their side does it more” – sure it does. And they get away with it an awful lot. But accepting that imbalance is the price we pay for remaining in what one of their apparatchiks famously and disdainfully termed “the reality-based community”.”

The problem is the accusations flow one way, and the Right is never disciplined. Of course, their “work” is so bad that it’s only worth would be to beat them with it, but still, nobody really bothers to do that work so they will lose their jobs.

(Reply to Moby Hick.)

Responding to Burritoboy, it’s true that, in lots of ways the Right has “got away with it”. But there has been a big price to pay
(i) credibility is a capital stock that takes a long time to build up, and only erodes gradually. Twenty years ago, the institutions of the right (WSJ, AEI and others) had a lot of credibility, even, grudgingly from the left. Now that credibility has disappeared as far as anyone left of centre is concerned, and even professional centrists recognise, at some level, that these guys are hacks
(ii) the effect on the intellectual right has been disastrous, as witness the recent discussion of epistemic closure/agnotology

JQ is exactly right.

Why do these type of attacks (Turner/Feldman’s attack upon Abraham is yet another instance out of many) only occur from the Right to Left?

Perhaps because in the present political moment, left and right have fundamental differences of epistemology. This is also why Bellesiles must be thrown to the wolves.

@34 AEI had a lot of credibility on regulation, for example, to the point where Brookings felt it appropriate to set up a joint center with them (now abandoned). Similarly on crime (this was before Lott, of course), welfare reform and so on. And while people on the left argued strongly against them, the general feeling was that we were losing ground intellectually, not gaining it. Now, AEI is a joke, as is the entire intellectual right. Your own efforts in attempting to downplay the Iraq body count are as good as anything the intellectual apparatus of the right can produce (and, no, that’s not intended as a compliment).

My acquaintance with the WSJ was second-hand or worse in those per-Internet days, but my impression is that in 1990, its support for supply-side econ was seen as an isolated eccentricity in an otherwise strong (though of course strongly rightwing) paper. As of about 2000, the standard story was “News reporting good, Op-ed pages barking mad”. Now (post-Murdoch), it’s garbage from one end to the other.

I don’t know steven, but probably there are a couple of scholars who couldn’t be found to have made up a huge percentage of the crucial research. And the “significant qualifications” section means that you have to disclose problems with your methodology, which Bellesiles didn’t. (Of course he covered up the methodological problem of “the records I want to rely on don’t exist” by fabricating them, which is part of the problem.)

John Quiggin wrote, “@34 AEI had a lot of credibility on regulation, for example, to the point where Brookings felt it appropriate to set up a joint center with them (now abandoned). ”

Brookings was definitely not on the left as early as the 1980s. Much more accurate to describe it then as centrist. (Right now I’d call it center-right.)