Maarten Boudry

Why do people believe crazy stuff? It's because they fall for “fallacies”, we're told. Memorize the classics (ad hominem, post hoc, straw man) and you’ll be inoculated against error.
It's a neat little story, and I used to believe it too. But I've become a fallacy apostate. 🧵/1

De Oekraïense pianiste Anna Fedorova speelt de stormachtige vierde beweging van Chopins 3de Sonate (Chopin had zelf een band met Oekraïne), in het Concertgebouw van Amsterdam. Geweldig concert, veel dank aan Protect Ukraine! 🇺🇦

Dit is nu al mijn favoriete donatie! 😅 Het spiegelbeeld hiervan kom ik ook vaak tegen: mensen die mij volop steunen i.v.m. het Midden-Oosten, maar mij een "complete lul" (dan wel complete idioot) vinden over Oekraïne. Oef, zo weet ik tenminste dat ik niet lijd aan "audience capture".🙃

A year ago, I published a long essay in @Quillette debunking the “Gaza genocide” calumny and exposing the disingenuousness of its proponents.

It was translated into French by the magazine @LePoint, as well as into Polish and German. And in my own language Dutch? Every single newspaper I pitched it to in Belgium and the Netherlands turned it down. No dissent on this question is tolerated in the Low Countries — not in the press, and certainly not at the university, where my rector declared that anyone questioning the genocide narrative was “crossing a line that should not be crossed”.

But I have finally found a way to publish at least part of the essay in Dutch: it will appear as the foreword to Genocide en Gaza, the Dutch translation of an excellent new book by political scientist and genocide expert Joël Kotek of @ULBruxelles.

Did I mention that this internationally renowned genocide scholar (fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%ABl…) happens to agree entirely with my thesis? Are you listening, rector De Sutter (who deleted her account @pdsutter)?

"It has become common to lament the public crisis of trust in science, experts, and institutions, but much of the decline in trust is deserved. When the public senses that researchers and academic journals are attempting to leverage their scientific authority to advance particular political goals, it ironically undermines that very authority." (@PatrickTBrown31)