This was very educational. I was not familiar with the conceptual penis concept. I am familiar with the detachable penis concept as described by the band King Missile in their eponymously named song “Detachable Penis”:
These wokesters are academic frauds being indulged for their Neo- Marxist activism as opposed to any real scholarly advances. Defunding, rather than rewarding, the universities who promote this ersatz crap would go a long way toward detoxing the academy, both improving the median level of scholarship and reducing the malign influence of half-baked Commie ideologues.
"Cis-genderism and intelligence quotient predominance in quantum gravity research: a queer theory critique with reference to the exclusionary criteria which do not comply with intersectional considerations of the offence suffered by vulnerable minorities,including subaqua aerobics participants and Sami reindeer herders, not forgetting those persons unfairly targetted by prejudicial BMI measurements."
I have absolutely no idea what this means, even though I concocted it myself, but it might find a home in the wilder reaches of wokeademia.😵💫😵💫
Thank you Max and I regret to say that The People's Republic of Scotland has been more or less entirely captured by this poisonous nonsense,as the Holyrood Commissars have defeated an attempt to have the Hate Crime Act repealed and primary schools are now going full steam ahead with the indictrination of the very young-all at public expense of course:
I also read recently that even Air Traffic Control is now capitulating to the demands of DEI criteria, so passengers now have even more reasons to be fearful.
"What we’re talking about is an absolutely prime example of credentialism. Namely, the reliance on (largely bullshit) qualifications or certifications to determine whether someone is permitted to undertake a task, speak as an expert or work in a certain field."
The worship of credentialism outsources critical thinking skills to others and never challenges ideas that are presumed to be impervious to criticism -- precisely because they are advanced by someone who has the right credentials.
And credentialism has proven remarkably invulnerable across political, social, and academic spheres.
- It gives license to the technocrat, who can overlook the question of values inherent in their favored policies, and instead act as the agent of change they think the world needs. See: the deep state.
- It empowers the fact-checker and the cult of disinformation studies to point to either their own credentials or the credentials of those they cite as the final word on matters pertaining to morals, values, and ethics. See: probably everybody who leads and works for left-leaning newsrooms, think tanks, NGOs.
- It gives comfort to first-year college students, who now have an authority-backed intellectual framework that explains their pain, insecurities, and the things they see as wrong in the world, and tells them that outside forces are the problem. Never mind that the credential itself is driven by a self-serving value system and is selective in its application of principles. See: nearly every professor and administrator working on college campuses.
- It empowers the media/entertainment matrix to openly hate and ridicule those who exercise the right to doubt, to question, to be suspicious of motivations. See: practically everything on MSM news stations, talk shows, television series.
Taken together, you have this superstructure of likeminded people, each vouching for the other's expertise, and creating a self-perpetuating rule by elites that seems, to those doing the ruling, to be entirely just and unquestionable.
This is such an important piece of writing. Because it's an expose. An expose of academia evolved to its worst, an expose of academic snobbery and the heisting of universities by those who give the word 'intellectual' a very bad name indeed, as in their most abstract concepts they seek to promote the inverse of what universities have been in the past, indeed the origins of university study and intent: intellectual acuity, open debate, curiosity, excellence, learning that is always open to more learning. What a truly terrible state of affairs ... what a let-down ... that such idiotic clap-trap prevails. We need a revolution to turn it all upside down and start again, making academic study the passion it used to be, the exciting, enriching place it used to be, and open to all. That universities also now harbour hatred, racism and injustice is the icing on the cake, poisonous, dangerous icing.
How can such a pitiful insane deluded world produce such an excellent article? Is this enclosed self-reinforcing chunk of an articulate - and yet at the same time utterly stupid and devoid of common sense or balanced perspective - academic world something hilarious, or tragic, or just pathetic, or what? I can't even decide. I've been too busy wondering about oh-so-tolerant youngsters chanting for Hamas, and all of the apocalyptic climate change eco-panic-anxiety crowd who don't seem to know about the writings of Patrick Moore or Michael Shellenberger or Bjorn Lomborg or Ross Clark. If we've got all this sense and knowledge and understanding in the world, how come all these loony academics aren't in straitjackets instead of universities? And on the climate situation, why is it that people who were saying "why doesn't the world wake up and do something about this?" two or three years ago are STILL saying it? Have they been asleep for two years? Don't they know about the international levels of reforesting, conversion of energy sourcing, ocean clean-up projects, etc, as if there haven't been hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers and policy makers doing everything they possible can to change the world for the better - perhaps because all those thousands aren't chanting with placards and gluing themselves to roads, but doing some things that are practical and useful instead? I know young people have to be young and ill-informed first, but what the hell are we doing with our educational system and our media?
Another thing that occurred to me is this hangover of referring to "left" and "right" as political views, when nowadays the distinction seems blurred at best - "radical left", when used as a description by Jordan Peterson a handful of years ago, was a fair description, but now the phrase seems to be wielded as a mindless weapon by the likes of Donald Trump - it's hardly a preferable alternative to vote for a power-mad relentlessly-lying egomaniac rather than a bunch of often well-meaning, but woefully ill-informed, "activists". (Until they get hold of power and turn into the Bolsheviks, of course.) Meanwhile, those woketivists seem to wield "far right" or "alt right" as an equally mindless weapon, as it's rather difficult to identify the nature, evidence for, or identities or existence of, their enemy. I think it was Bill Maher who pointed out something along the lines of how the choice these days is no longer between being right wing or left wing, or even between being "right" or "wrong", but between being sane or insane.
Loved the Sokal Hoax, sadly too many of us at the time treated it as just a laugh rather than a warning.
Disappointed with the "Daily Sceptic" though. Some excellent points made against preposterous targets, but also seems to be guilty of the same political distortion of science that it (quite rightly) attacks in others:
I know Wikipedia isn't Gospel either, but some serious criticisms raised there.
We can't be selective in the war against Pseudoscience, we have to attack our own beliefs & assumptions (especially our own!) as well as others, & sadly I feel Toby Young & co. have failed to do this.
After I got my PhD in relativity, the white male profs took me aside & whispered to me that the invariance of the speed of light (regardless of gender, race, class, culture) was a just a colonialist lie to pacify certain populations & keep them from wanting more out of life. /s
A gloriously funny piece about the travails of intersectional environmentalists, queer theorists' heavy social burdens and the particularly unfair risks posed to the LGBTQ++ community by imminent meteorological armageddon.
How refreshing to cackle gleefully at the sheer idiocy of some of the claims made.
Iragaray is one of the ignorant pseudofeminists in the asinine identity politics herd, along with Judith Butler, who won an award for gobbledygook a few years ago. I cant believe anyone can take them seriously. Their writings are unfathomable but their pretentiousness fools a lot of people. Please shove her aside.
Excellent article on how research can be skewed to a particular point of view to support the researcher's theory. Independent review of such research should catch and eliminate this skewed research, but if the reviewers are of a like mind than they just support such research and it goes on
"often what is held up as ‘expert opinion’ is little more than highly politicised work by progressive activists that has been laundered through the academy."
Yes most things that drive people mad in the 21st c. West have been the result of 50+ years of our aspirant young professional classes having been drawn through a leftist academia sheep-dip. On the 'expert' virus specifically: "In 2024 it feels like we now have ‘experts’ advising you (always for your own good mind) on every single aspect of your daily life from the moment you can talk till the moment they carry you out of the care home in a box. And it seems like you cannot get more than two sentences into an MSM article or broadcast these days without an ‘expert’ being invoked as an authority on whatever is being discussed...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
And for the record, I don't normally simply insult others, or those with whom I disagree. But there is a level of malicious stupidity, like this, which needs to be called out, and insults seem appropriate, plus you KNOW that the kind of person who would claim Einstein's equations are 'problematic' is the same kind of person who would want to prohibit the use of the word retard.
Camille Paglia warned us about these people in the '90s.
True!
This was very educational. I was not familiar with the conceptual penis concept. I am familiar with the detachable penis concept as described by the band King Missile in their eponymously named song “Detachable Penis”:
https://youtu.be/NQBPgJQhQHc?si=wZyIpiii7WIltEh0
These wokesters are academic frauds being indulged for their Neo- Marxist activism as opposed to any real scholarly advances. Defunding, rather than rewarding, the universities who promote this ersatz crap would go a long way toward detoxing the academy, both improving the median level of scholarship and reducing the malign influence of half-baked Commie ideologues.
I love that you remember Detachable P !
It's Pseudoscience, claiming scientific validity without scientific method, & is therefore intellectual fraud.
The "E=mc2" quotation is insane - presumably the equation "2+2=4" privileges 4 over other numbers & is therefore invalid.
Haha yeah you’re right, it’s pseudo-science beyond belief. Sort of hilarious they’re able to get away with it, but also pretty troubling
Problematic and deserving of a trigger warning
Don't. I'm still boiling about the E=mc2 thing. Seriously.
Here's one I made earlier:
"Cis-genderism and intelligence quotient predominance in quantum gravity research: a queer theory critique with reference to the exclusionary criteria which do not comply with intersectional considerations of the offence suffered by vulnerable minorities,including subaqua aerobics participants and Sami reindeer herders, not forgetting those persons unfairly targetted by prejudicial BMI measurements."
I have absolutely no idea what this means, even though I concocted it myself, but it might find a home in the wilder reaches of wokeademia.😵💫😵💫
"
Nothing wrong with Reindeer herding. I ate some once, it was very nice.
Far more useful than intersectional inquisitors
It demeans the 2's as well. Soon as they get together, people start calling them 4 and 6 nad 8 and so on. They lose their 2 identity.
Thank you Max and I regret to say that The People's Republic of Scotland has been more or less entirely captured by this poisonous nonsense,as the Holyrood Commissars have defeated an attempt to have the Hate Crime Act repealed and primary schools are now going full steam ahead with the indictrination of the very young-all at public expense of course:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/scottish-primary-schools-appoint-children-as-lgbt-champions/ar-BB1lOmPm
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/12/03/concerns-degrees-like-middle-east-queer-politics-used-as-immigration-route-into-u-k/?highlight=queer%20tesearch
https://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/events/2023/83647-decolonising-physics-in-a-scottish-university
https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/school-of-mathematics/about-us/equality-diversity-and-inclusion/resources/decolonisation-in-mathematics
I also read recently that even Air Traffic Control is now capitulating to the demands of DEI criteria, so passengers now have even more reasons to be fearful.
No probs. And yes what's going on in Scotland is a joke.
"What we’re talking about is an absolutely prime example of credentialism. Namely, the reliance on (largely bullshit) qualifications or certifications to determine whether someone is permitted to undertake a task, speak as an expert or work in a certain field."
The worship of credentialism outsources critical thinking skills to others and never challenges ideas that are presumed to be impervious to criticism -- precisely because they are advanced by someone who has the right credentials.
And credentialism has proven remarkably invulnerable across political, social, and academic spheres.
- It gives license to the technocrat, who can overlook the question of values inherent in their favored policies, and instead act as the agent of change they think the world needs. See: the deep state.
- It empowers the fact-checker and the cult of disinformation studies to point to either their own credentials or the credentials of those they cite as the final word on matters pertaining to morals, values, and ethics. See: probably everybody who leads and works for left-leaning newsrooms, think tanks, NGOs.
- It gives comfort to first-year college students, who now have an authority-backed intellectual framework that explains their pain, insecurities, and the things they see as wrong in the world, and tells them that outside forces are the problem. Never mind that the credential itself is driven by a self-serving value system and is selective in its application of principles. See: nearly every professor and administrator working on college campuses.
- It empowers the media/entertainment matrix to openly hate and ridicule those who exercise the right to doubt, to question, to be suspicious of motivations. See: practically everything on MSM news stations, talk shows, television series.
Taken together, you have this superstructure of likeminded people, each vouching for the other's expertise, and creating a self-perpetuating rule by elites that seems, to those doing the ruling, to be entirely just and unquestionable.
Excellent comment! I am actually planning to write an article on this
This is such an important piece of writing. Because it's an expose. An expose of academia evolved to its worst, an expose of academic snobbery and the heisting of universities by those who give the word 'intellectual' a very bad name indeed, as in their most abstract concepts they seek to promote the inverse of what universities have been in the past, indeed the origins of university study and intent: intellectual acuity, open debate, curiosity, excellence, learning that is always open to more learning. What a truly terrible state of affairs ... what a let-down ... that such idiotic clap-trap prevails. We need a revolution to turn it all upside down and start again, making academic study the passion it used to be, the exciting, enriching place it used to be, and open to all. That universities also now harbour hatred, racism and injustice is the icing on the cake, poisonous, dangerous icing.
Thank you and great comment
How can such a pitiful insane deluded world produce such an excellent article? Is this enclosed self-reinforcing chunk of an articulate - and yet at the same time utterly stupid and devoid of common sense or balanced perspective - academic world something hilarious, or tragic, or just pathetic, or what? I can't even decide. I've been too busy wondering about oh-so-tolerant youngsters chanting for Hamas, and all of the apocalyptic climate change eco-panic-anxiety crowd who don't seem to know about the writings of Patrick Moore or Michael Shellenberger or Bjorn Lomborg or Ross Clark. If we've got all this sense and knowledge and understanding in the world, how come all these loony academics aren't in straitjackets instead of universities? And on the climate situation, why is it that people who were saying "why doesn't the world wake up and do something about this?" two or three years ago are STILL saying it? Have they been asleep for two years? Don't they know about the international levels of reforesting, conversion of energy sourcing, ocean clean-up projects, etc, as if there haven't been hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers and policy makers doing everything they possible can to change the world for the better - perhaps because all those thousands aren't chanting with placards and gluing themselves to roads, but doing some things that are practical and useful instead? I know young people have to be young and ill-informed first, but what the hell are we doing with our educational system and our media?
Thanks Graham!
Spot on!
Another thing that occurred to me is this hangover of referring to "left" and "right" as political views, when nowadays the distinction seems blurred at best - "radical left", when used as a description by Jordan Peterson a handful of years ago, was a fair description, but now the phrase seems to be wielded as a mindless weapon by the likes of Donald Trump - it's hardly a preferable alternative to vote for a power-mad relentlessly-lying egomaniac rather than a bunch of often well-meaning, but woefully ill-informed, "activists". (Until they get hold of power and turn into the Bolsheviks, of course.) Meanwhile, those woketivists seem to wield "far right" or "alt right" as an equally mindless weapon, as it's rather difficult to identify the nature, evidence for, or identities or existence of, their enemy. I think it was Bill Maher who pointed out something along the lines of how the choice these days is no longer between being right wing or left wing, or even between being "right" or "wrong", but between being sane or insane.
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_sokal_hoax/
A pioneering spoof on the pompous lunacy now in the ascendant.
Loved the Sokal Hoax, sadly too many of us at the time treated it as just a laugh rather than a warning.
Disappointed with the "Daily Sceptic" though. Some excellent points made against preposterous targets, but also seems to be guilty of the same political distortion of science that it (quite rightly) attacks in others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Sceptic
I know Wikipedia isn't Gospel either, but some serious criticisms raised there.
We can't be selective in the war against Pseudoscience, we have to attack our own beliefs & assumptions (especially our own!) as well as others, & sadly I feel Toby Young & co. have failed to do this.
After I got my PhD in relativity, the white male profs took me aside & whispered to me that the invariance of the speed of light (regardless of gender, race, class, culture) was a just a colonialist lie to pacify certain populations & keep them from wanting more out of life. /s
I knew it!
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/18/the-insane-world-of-intersectional-climate-change/
A gloriously funny piece about the travails of intersectional environmentalists, queer theorists' heavy social burdens and the particularly unfair risks posed to the LGBTQ++ community by imminent meteorological armageddon.
How refreshing to cackle gleefully at the sheer idiocy of some of the claims made.
Thanks Max. I "sorta knew" this but you've really spelled it out for me. The graphic nails it.
Cheers
Iragaray is one of the ignorant pseudofeminists in the asinine identity politics herd, along with Judith Butler, who won an award for gobbledygook a few years ago. I cant believe anyone can take them seriously. Their writings are unfathomable but their pretentiousness fools a lot of people. Please shove her aside.
Horrifying and hilarious at the same time. I will share widely.
You are my people.
Thank you!
Excellent article on how research can be skewed to a particular point of view to support the researcher's theory. Independent review of such research should catch and eliminate this skewed research, but if the reviewers are of a like mind than they just support such research and it goes on
"often what is held up as ‘expert opinion’ is little more than highly politicised work by progressive activists that has been laundered through the academy."
Yes most things that drive people mad in the 21st c. West have been the result of 50+ years of our aspirant young professional classes having been drawn through a leftist academia sheep-dip. On the 'expert' virus specifically: "In 2024 it feels like we now have ‘experts’ advising you (always for your own good mind) on every single aspect of your daily life from the moment you can talk till the moment they carry you out of the care home in a box. And it seems like you cannot get more than two sentences into an MSM article or broadcast these days without an ‘expert’ being invoked as an authority on whatever is being discussed...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
Haha leftist academia sheep dip - about right
Only a retard would claim e=mc2 is 'sexed'.
And for the record, I don't normally simply insult others, or those with whom I disagree. But there is a level of malicious stupidity, like this, which needs to be called out, and insults seem appropriate, plus you KNOW that the kind of person who would claim Einstein's equations are 'problematic' is the same kind of person who would want to prohibit the use of the word retard.
Bingo