Response to Burston and Nelson

How does one argue against a fantasy?

The paper on which I am to comment should not, in my view, be before you in this venue. It does not meet what I would regard as basic standards of academic integrity, honesty, or evidence. I see it as a breach of academic ethics on the part of Burston and Nelson, and on the part of the editors of this journal, Jacobsen and Morgan. In 2009, the American Association of University Professors, under the presidency of Nelson, revised and adopted a statement of ethical standards for professors. The first provision of these standards includes the imperative that professors must “practice intellectual honesty” (American Association of University Professors, 2009, Section 1). Nelson has failed to uphold the standard he himself approved, as has Burston.

I have approached my response as a kind of peer review that wasn't (False—EDS.) I will begin by demonstrating the extent to which Burston and Nelson refuse to engage in the most basic form of ethical academic practice—making an argument based on evidence. (That one's evidence should be reliable and valid should be obvious, but cannot be taken for granted in the present case). I will illustrate how, when it comes to the core premise of their argument, they make no effort to offer evidence—which, I will argue, is because evidence for this premise does not exist. I will further illustrate how Burston and Nelson's article is an act not of scholarship, but of propaganda, indeed propaganda that is part of a concerted, bigoted effort to turf out Lara Sheehi. I will offer a general discussion of my sense of why targeting Sheehi, and scholars like her (viz: Zeavin, 2022, O'Loughlin & Voela, 2023, O'Loughlin & Voela, 2021) has become a key objective of right-wing propagandists within and beyond psychoanalysis, including Tucker Carlson (Soch Lo, 2021, June 11^th).

In sum, I am arguing that this article is bullshit. I am using the term “bullshit” in a technically specific philosophical sense; I know that