I can't shake the feeling that if these papers had all been rejected, they would have declared that they were being "deplatformed".<p>These journals exist to consider off-the-wall, wacky, outrageous ideas. It's not physics, where every new idea is first subjected to the ability to reproduce a long history of existing experiments. The question of how humans should think about their lives is entirely open, and any progress will almost necessarily question things that seem obvious.<p>That makes them easy prey for hoaxes. It also means that the vast majority of people take no notice and have no interest. Even when not being trolled, a lot of their ideas will go nowhere.<p>This is such a weirdly one-sided war. Most people have never heard of any of the journals being trolled. They have no influence. Some people seem to have decided that they are nonetheless a bitter enemy and count coup on defeating them. The postmodernists, meanwhile, do not not care and have no interest -- just as practically nobody cares about or has any interest in them.