Luboš Motl

Your humble correspondent realizes that many readers are left-wing, anti-string-theory fighters. So they probably smoke marijuana and this is my modest attempt to help them.

Luboš Motl is a Czech physicist specializing in string theory. During his active career, he was a competent scientist and an author of mathematics textbooks. Now he is mostly a raging asshole from hell.

Between 2004 and 2007, Motl was an assistant professor at Harvard University. He got the job through competence and talent, and lost it by being a raging asshole. He has not held a university position since. Motl's Wikipedia article is anodyne, but proudly lists all his arXiv submissions. He has not published a single paper there or anywhere else since 2007, when he split from Harvard. He originally got his Ph.D. scholarship because of a paper he posted on the arXiv as an undergraduate.

In 2019, many members of the physics community decided to boycott Luboš Motl's blog.

The Reference Frame
His blog, The Reference Frame, consists of abuse and insults hurled at anyone he disagrees with, mostly concerning physics. He has an annoying habit of continuing to edit posts for months after making them, making citation difficult, but at least he doesn't change his stated opinions and makes the abuse and insults more refined. If you disagree or dissent from Motl's own opinion, even in the most mild and engaging manner, Motl will ban your disqus account from commenting at his site and then reply to your comments such that you're unable to rebut or engage in any kind of debate with him. He will even go so far as to post your comments to him elsewhere at his site, editing them to change their meaning and tone. PZ Myers has called Motl a "crackpot" (which is also Motl's favoured word for anyone who disagrees with him). It is true that Luboš is willing to embrace crackpot ideas  when it suits his politics. However, his science is generally good within his sphere of competence. The problem is his refusal to recognize that his sphere of competence is finite.

And God help you if you've ever implied anywhere that string theory is anything less than the revealed secret of the Universe, particularly if you're Lee Smolin, Peter Woit or "similar breathtakingly dishonest far-left anti-scientific subhuman activist garbage". Motl has so far failed to keep their papers entirely off the readable categories of arXiv, but not for want of effort.

Physicists' boycott of the Reference Frame
In 2019, after Luboš Motl's misrepresentation of work by a junior female physicist, among others, many members of the particle physics community decided to boycott Luboš Motl's blog. Below is a public statement by M.I.T. faculty member, Daniel Harlow.

Abolishment
In April 2022, Motl stated he 'canceled and blocked' the blog owing to 'censorship pressures'.

Political views
Sorry, Greek reader who lives outside the reality, but an average Greek surely doesn't deserve and shouldn't have money for a "good German car". It's just your fantasy. The real question is how many millions of Greeks should starve to death and not which good German car they should buy. Motl defines himself as a "Christian atheist." This seems to be due more to anti-Islamic sentiment and belief in "Western values" than the religion itself.

Feminism
He's a not a big fan of feminism, either: Science has been done without women for centuries, and it obviously worked. Show me a single influential scholar in a department of women's studies who understands the very basic insight about that discipline, namely why virtually all of scholarly feminism is intellectual garbage.

Racism
Motl doesn't understand the point of Martin Luther King Day celebration. Apparently, black people had to sit in the back of the buses for entirely sensible reasons: The average U.S. black earns some 65% of the salary of the average white. (…) Some "disadvantaged tickets on the bus" sound rather sensible. Second, the degree of hygiene and safety is simply lower in (black people) It would be silly to suggest that a random black American has the same likelihood to do physics (or something similar) well as a random white American. (…) In practice, almost all science in recent 500 years has been done and found by the white people and/or the West.

Feminism, homosexuality and the Muslims
But needless to say, this is exactly what feminists, homosexualists, and other radical leftists want to do to all inconvenient biological human beings, too. If these individuals are not kept in check, like the Muslim communities, they will simply do their best to kill anyone who realizes that this left-wing ideology is cancer.

Climate change
Motl is a climate change denier, having realized that "left-wing groups want to use this carbon theme as a tool for wealth redistribution." His very… distinctive comments can be found on climate change blogs all over the internet (for example, at Stoat, Deltoid, etc.)

While commenting on William M. Connolley's blog, Motl wrote:

I think that trash like yourself cannot be debated. It must be destroyed. What is written on the "climate denial" page [in Wikipedia] is just crime, the people who are responsible for it are criminals, and as soon as I get the opportunity to collaborate with someone on their liquidation, I will do it.

In a later comment, Motl clarified:

When I say to liquidate them, I don't mean anything illegal. I just mean the same thing that was eventually done with the Nazis during the second war.

Connolley responded with:

Amusingly, I was reading Popper on the Marxists just last night. He lays into them very strongly for using ambiguous language to avoid explicit advocation of violence, but the implications are clear. How odd to find Luboš having this in common with them.

Skeptical Science has extensively attacked Motl's "arguments".

On race and picnics
There was a picnic on Harvard Quad's lawn, with 60 students, primarily black. Police were called in to check their IDs. Motl reacted thus:

On his own greatness
Motl is smart, though not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. (It's impossible for anyone to be as smart as Motl thinks he is.) This means everyone who disagrees with him is stupid, probably to the point of criminal negligence:

I am myself under significant pressure from large groups of crackpots and an effectively infinite sequence of online idiots, many of whom are anonymous and possibly using many pseudonyms to improve their case according to optics of people who are not capable of independent thinking and who judge the truth according to the number of pseudonyms signed under a particular opinion, without realizing that one Motl signature is still more than 50,000 signatures of idiots.

Let me politely assume that your sentence has been just a typo.

[Y]ou are absolutely wrong and still apparently missing all the basic points I wrote.

[Y]our impression that the battle between crackpots like you and high-energy theoretical physics is the only example of these issues is an artifact of your extremely limited knowledge, intelligence, and partially a consequence of your attempts to promote yourself.

I assure you that I am not making any mistake in the analysis of the relation of capitalism and the planned economy. I have checked and rechecked the texts, and if you have a feeling that something is incorrect, then be sure that the error is on your side. ;-)