* You seem to conflate citation rings with self-citation and confuse the latter with self-referentialism. It is interesting to think in what way could your comment thus be considered topical...

* Citation rings are, indeed, horrible.

* "post-modernist fields like grievance studies" - WTF?

* While I, too, abhor scientific misconduct, the Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian stunts/attacks were themselves unscientific and unethical to say the least. The thing most people fail to realize when exposed to these attacks on certain little-loved fields is that academia is just as people/relationship based as any other business, and maybe most of the scholarship does not contribute anything significant. What I am trying to say is that the fields the three targeted are not necessarily special. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair