among the things for which i am grateful to my fifteen years of commitment to academia is a deep fidelity to evidence and citation and argument. like, you cannot just say ‘i have read this thing and therefore what i say about it is right and true’. ‘i was there’ is not sufficient! you have to make your case! especially if you are also claiming to be on the ethical side of a controversy over the meanings of things! you can’t just say shit! you gotta give evidence! reasons! you gotta take actual material from the actual, you know, world (book, object, archive, event, whatever), and synthesize it into a fuckin argument! you gotta!