The Left is Having an Identity Crisis
The Left is in crisis. We no longer present a cohesive movement, and we no longer form coherent political parties. We are a fractured and ill-defined mess, our goals are…
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Posts by author
Helen Pluckrose
40 posts
Helen Pluckrose is an exile from the humanities with research interests in late medieval/early modern religious writing by and about women. She is editor-in-chief of Areo. Helen took part in the "grievance studies" probe and her upcoming book with James Lindsay, Cynical Theories, looks at the evolution of postmodern thought in scholarship and activism.
Calm the F*** Down About Brexit
Dear Fellow Brits, You are upset. I get that. I am hardly sanguine myself. Leaving the European Union is a massive undertaking that cannot help but have profound consequences for…
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What Social Justice Gets Right
Social Justice ideas and the postmodern thought that underlies them are extremely difficult to critique in a balanced way. This is largely caused by black-and-white thinking: many people wrongly believe…
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Letter From the Editors: On Retracting the Essays of John Glynn
Dear Areo readers. As many of you will now know, Areo was one of several outlets to have recently published pieces by a person calling himself “John Glynn.” It seems…
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The Anatomies of Two Academic Scandals
Recently, much attention has been drawn to several methodologically vacant papers in molecular and cellular biochemistry. They were all written by the same author, Dr. Yan Xin, and argue for…
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No, Secular Humanism is Not a Religion
I was recently surprised to read in Quillette an essay which argues that secular humanism is a religion. Although a number of thoughtful arguments for and against the similarity of secular…
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Areo and Letter: A Message from the Editors
Greetings! We at Areo are very excited to be trialing a partnership with the new conversation site Letter. Areo prides itself on being a nonpartisan site. This doesn’t mean that…
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Teaching to Transgress: Rage and Entitlement at Evergreen College
What happened just under two years ago at Evergreen State College needs to be seen to be believed. It also needs to be made sense of because, without an understanding…
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The Influence of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism on Evergreen College
Core Tenets of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism. Racism exists today in both traditional and modern forms Racism is an institutionalized, multilayered, multilevel system that distributes unequal power and resources between white people…
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Academic Freedom or Social Justice: What Kind of University is Portland State?
On October 2, 2018, the Wall Street Journal broke a story that detailed an unprecedented audit of certain sectors of academic research, specifically those we—its authors—called “grievance studies.” In that…
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A Response to Portland State’s Vanguard’s Anonymous Letter.
Prof. Boghossian and co-authors’ reception of the letter. On November 9th, Vanguard, Portland State University’s student newspaper ran a very strange article written not, it claims, by students but by…
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“Cultural Marxism” is a Myth. The Threat Comes From Elsewhere.
This is a lightly edited transcript of Helen Pluckrose’s opening statement on the panel “Cultural Marxism: Threat or Myth” at the Battle of Ideas. “Cultural Marxism” in common usage is…
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Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship
This essay, although hopefully accessible to everyone, is the most thorough breakdown of the study and written for those who are already somewhat familiar with the problems of ideologically-motivated scholarship,…
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Identity Politics Does Not Continue the Work of the Civil Rights Movements
It is nearly beyond dispute that the Civil Rights Movement, second-wave liberal feminism, and Gay Pride were liberal projects, both in the broad philosophical sense and in the narrower meaning…
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“Not All Men” is Not a Fallacy. It is Humanism.
It is customary within feminist discourse to treat the response #NotAllMen as something akin to a logical fallacy, which, once identified, can then be simply dismissed as an error of…
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No, Liberal Lefties are Not Right-Wing
Left-wing liberals who are opposed to the identity politics developments on the left increasingly find ourselves accused of being right wing, referred to as “right wing” and scornfully urged to…
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The Liberal Spectrum: Cultural Libertarianism to “Call Out” Culture
The term “liberal” is wide-ranging and potentially confusing. This is unsurprising considering that the label ‘liberal’ is culturally specific to the extent where it is often understood to refer to…
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Where Now for Areo?
Yesterday, Areo said “goodbye” to its creator, Malhar Mali. In his farewell, Malhar said, “I started Areo because I was frustrated; I was disappointed at what many outlets deemed to…
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