Impersonation

Dear friends and readers, my blog is back online after having been invisible for 8 days. Here is why:

On Monday July 11, I received a message - highlighted in green below - from the administrators of Blogger. Someone or some 'bot' discovered that I was impersonating myself (the message was sent to my email, and my blog is titled in my name). I responded as below, and sent a message to their support desk, which sent me a standard reply via another automaton. The 'review' link responded with an assurance of review within two days. 

Hello, As you may know, our community guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow – and don't allow – on Blogger. Your blog entitled 'http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/' was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our guidelines and have made the URL http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/ unavailable to blog readers. Why was your blog removed? Your content has violated our IMPERSONATION policy. Please follow the community guidelines link in this email to learn more. If we feel that a blog's content does not fit within the expectations of our Policy, we no longer allow it to be publicly available. If you think we've made a mistake, you can request a review at https://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=2597011166656336985, and we'll take another look. Sincerely, -The Blogger team

My message to their support desk:

I am not impersonating anyone and have used blogger for over ten years. I also have bought extra storage space for my blog and for google. Please send me a number where I can call and sort out this matter. I am a teacher and need my blog as a teaching resource for academic material

My blog is non-commercial, has contained no hate speech nor incitement to violence (to the contrary); and I am not a 'bot'. It was designed to be an educational resource. It has had about 1.7 million hits over eleven years and about 9500 posts. All citations are sourced; and all my notes and articles are explicitly owned by me as their author. Hundreds if not thousands of readers have used it for intellectual exploration. Hundreds of hours of labour have gone into it, for more than a decade. The complaint is anonymous. A friend sent me this article; which may or may not be relevant.

Anyway, I am very relieved my blog is available to my readers. My thanks are due to the Blogger team, but I must ask them to be more directly in contact with bloggers who are affected by decisions taken by automatic mechanisms.

I thank all my friends for their advice and support, as well as for their advocacy on my behalf where it mattered. Rest assured I will take care not to let this happen again - at least not without adequate safeguards. 

All the best

Dilip

PS: In case any new calamity should strike my blog, I list a few articles for readers to save - in case they wish to.

Naxalites should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution

Ajay Singh (1950-2020). RIP Beloved comrade and lifelong friend

Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz

Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Ajit Prakash Shah: Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary

Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid

In Naxalbari, forty-eight years later

Salaam Comrade

The Broken Middle - on the 30th anniversary of 1984

Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges // "Borges and I"

Jorge Luis Borges - Deutsches Requiem: a short story (1946)

Sally Bayley: The Shakespeare tragedy that truly speaks to us now

Book review: The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism

Harry V. Jaffa: Macbeth and the Moral Universe

Declaration of the Rights of Woman, 1791

Kelly Denton-Borhaug: The True Costs of America’s All-Consuming War-Culture / Chris Hedges: Chronicle of a War Foretold

Chris Hedges: Heeding James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

Miłosz’s Magic Mountain. By Joy Neumeyer

Mukul Kesavan on the connoisseurs of the unavailable

Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness

Purushottam Agrawal - Absurdity of epic proportions: Are people aware of the content in Jayasi's Padmavat? / Mukul Kesavan - Rajputs redux: Padmini's long afterlife

 

STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis

Julien Benda: Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds

Beginnings and Endings

Timothy Stanley & Alexander Lee - It's Still Not the End of History

Francis Fukuyama on ‘The End of History’, the crimes of the neocons and having the ear of the Chinese leadership

Book review: Francis Fukuyama on democracy imperilled.

Paul Sagar - The last hollow laugh - Francis Fukuyama and 'The End of History’

The Future of History: By Francis Fukuyama

e-flux journal issue 56: The End of the End of History

Behind the mask of revolution. Global separatism in the Russian context

Stuart Jeffries - Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion

The full Fukuyama: the end of everything

 

Friedrich Nietzsche on German hostility to the Enlightenment (1881) / Zeev Sternhell on the price to be paid for cultural differentialism

Margaret Mead on the definition of civilisation

Stephen Marche - The 'debate of the century': what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek

LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN - What Happened to Jordan Peterson? A philosopher, a medical crisis, and a mystery

Slavoj Žižek vs Noam Chomsky

Books reviewed: The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek

Thomas Moller-Nielsen: What is Zizek for?

Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later

 

Jon Henley: Rise of far right puts Dreyfus affair into spotlight in French election race

Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore? By William Davies

Keith Kahn-Harris - Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth

Science, society and related matters: an exchange

Two lectures on time and ideology: January 23 and 24

A pre-history of post-truth, East and West. By MARCI SHORE

VENU SUNDARAM - Uphaar and the Curious Case of the Judges Who Wouldn’t Listen

Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’. By Harriet Swain

A moment of moral and political nihilism: Theologian Adam Kotsko on our current crisis

Stanley Rosen (1929-2014). A great philosopher passes

José Vergara’s “All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature”

Vijay Tankha: On Socrates' birthday, what can be said about the philosopher whom nobody has read?

Socrates: If the whole is ailing the part cannot be well / Ajit Prakash Shah: Darkness at noon, felled by the judiciary

Michiko Kakutani - The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump

Farewell to reality - WHY WE’RE POST-FACT by Peter Pomerantsev

Alexander Klein: The politics of logic

Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)

ALEX ROSS - Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture.

Saladdin Said Ahmed: Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism

Theodor Adorno - Education After Auschwitz (1966)

Milan Kundera's use of Kitsch

Colloquium: The Disappearing Present: Reflections on Ideology - October 16, 2020

Alexander Stern: What the Frankfurt School has to stay about bureaucratic progressivism

Crispin Sartwell: Truth is real

Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left

Helen Pluckrose: Postmodernism and its impact, explained

Jennifer Ruark: How the physicist Alan Sokal hoodwinked a group of humanists and why, 20 years later, it still matters

Michael Rectenwald: Postmodernism, the Academic Left, and the Crisis of Capitalism

Lee McIntyre - The Attack on Truth: We have entered an age of willful ignorance

How capitalism created the post-truth society - and brought about its own undoing. By Keith Spencer

Books reviewed: Tactics, ethics, or temporality? Heidegger’s politics (1995)

Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of the Modern Lie

Bruno Latour - On a possible triangulation of some present political positions

David Foster Wallace - This Is Water

Sander L. Gilman on Nazism, Paranoia, & Language

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

Theodor W. Adorno Study Guide

Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist?

Didier Fassin: The blind spots of left populism

R. Dumain’s Critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment

Marxism & the Jewish Question: Selected Bibliography

L. L. Zamenhof & the Cultural, Religious, Professional & Political Context of 19th-20th Century Eastern European Jewish Intellectuals:Selected Bibliography

The Paranoia Papers: Theory of the (Un)Natural History of Social Paranoia: Selected Bibliography

What happened to democracy in 2020?

My Correct Views on Everything: Leszek Kolakowski's correspondence with E.P. Thompson

Tanya Gold - How materialism makes us sad

Dag Herbjørnsrud - The African Enlightenment

Book Review: Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism in India

Seamus Heaney’s Advice to the Young. BY MARIA POPOVA

Julia Kristava: Interpreting radical evil

Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ

The best books on Hegel: recommended by Stephen Houlgate

Hegel and the mystical tradition: Interview with Glenn Magee. By Stanislav Panin

Book review: The Government of Desire

Mark Neocleous: Resisting Resilience

Society of the Spectacle / 'इमेज' - 'Image': A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid

Book Review: Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

HITLER'S WORLD

Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of the Modern Lie

A Hunger Artist - by Franz Kafka (1922)

Invincible Summer – Albert Camus

Albert Camus's “The Human Crisis” (March 28, 1946) - 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus

Sam Dresser: How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free

Anu Kumar - The stories behind the story of Albert Camus’s ‘The Stranger’

Book review: Albert Camus‘ 'Algerian Chronicles’ // PDF of 'Reflections on the Guillotine'

Book Review: Albert Camus, the Guillotine’s Relentless Foe

Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria?

Book review: Resistance, Rebellion, & Writing - Albert Camus's dispatches on the Algerian crisis

 

Susan Neiman - Evil in Modern Thought // Lecture: 'Hannah Arendt's Disruptive Truth Telling'

Kwame Appiah's review of Moral Clarity

Book review - Seeing reason: Jonathan Israel's radical vision

Graham Harman - Between Truth and Power: Bruno Latour’s Political Philosophy

Interview: Philosopher Bruno Latour on Challenges of Identity Politics in India

Maurice Blanchot : The Infinite Conversation

William Davies: The last global crisis didn't change the world. But this one could // Bram Ieven & Jan Overwijk - We created this beast

LIV GRJEBINE: Politicized science drove lunar exploration — but polarized scientific views are worse than ever

Ravi Bhoothalingam: Coronavirus and the Mandate of Heaven

Gastón Gordillo: Nazi Architecture As Affective Weapon

Beware the destruction of the state! An interview with Timothy Snyder

Charlie Hebdo - Letter to the Left Leaning

The Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals: Written by Benedetto Croce (1925)

Ordinary people. The courage to say NO

The Aporias of Marxism / Archaism and Modernity. By Enzo Traverso

Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’. By Harriet Swain

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The Age of Cretinism

Book review - Svetlana Alexievich: Second hand time // Imagine the tragedy of abandoning Communism without knowing how to live with capitalism

Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1966) 

JIMENA CANALES - This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for Relativity

Einstein’s God: What did the great physicist really believe about the deity?

Shobhit Mahajan - An Infinity of Questions

Shobhit Mahajan: Incredible Indians

Physics is stuck — and needs another Einstein to revolutionize it, physicist Avi Loeb says

Scientists glimpse first direct proof of Einstein’s gravitational waves

Hubble Telescope confirms Einstein's theory of relativity

Keith Huxen - The Mysterious Meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg

Andrew Griffin - Einstein's theory of relativity proved right outside our solar system in huge gravity experiment

Charlotte Higgins - 'There is no such thing as past or future': physicist Carlo Rovelli on changing how we think about time

Alexis Coe - The Nobel Peace Prize For Espionage. Remembering Carl von Ossietzky

MARIA POPOVA - How Lise Meitner Discovered Nuclear Fission and Was Denied the Nobel Prize

WHAT IS REAL? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955

Pervez Hoodbhoy - Pakistani textbooks are teaching theology instead of science

Debora MacKenzie - End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?

Why Socialism? Albert Einstein

Books reviewed: TIM MAUDLIN - The Defeat of Reason