An Interest In Children
And in unrepentant pervert news:
That would be this chap here, mentioned previously. The chap for whom three months of masturbation constitutes “research,” the basis for a PhD. And given the not uncommon consequences of childhood molestation, Mr Andersson’s use of the words healing and worship may strike readers as somewhat perverse.
When this unobvious approach to scholarship – “an experimental method of masturbating” – first came to wider attention, four months after its submission, Mr Andersson’s peers and supervisors had apparently not noticed the particulars of his vigorous, hands-on investigations, or the legal and reputational implications of such pederastic probing.
Except, of course, for those who rushed to his defence, among them, the University of Manchester’s Professor Steven Fielding, who, in a now-deleted X post, invoked the universality of masturbation, before hailing the project as “socially useful,” albeit in ways left entirely mysterious.
A pattern of approval seemingly repeated:
His own academic supervisor, Andersson claims, complimented the paper as “pretty damn good” and described it as his “best piece of writing.” Additionally, one reviewer for the academic publication Qualitative Research emphasised that the rationale behind using masturbation as a research method was “well justified,” and said of the shota-obsessed academic: “The author has conducted provocative research by use of a highly bold and innovative application of autoethnography. Best of all, the author has done this extremely well.”
According to Mr Andersson, other academic colleagues have hailed his “queer autoethnography” as “wonderfully written, reflective, analytical and intriguing,” and have described it as “very publishable.”
Readers will doubtless recall the dizzying rigour of Mr Andersson’s academic work, noted in the post linked above, in which we learned that his feverish wanking gave him “a more embodied understanding of the topic.”
As I said at the time,
Clearly, the frontiers of human knowledge are being pushed back, heroically, selflessly, by our “visual anthropologist.”
The paper itself, now removed from the website of the journal Qualitative Research, is remarkable chiefly in terms of the author’s self-involvement and the sheer flimsiness of its content. The lines quoted above – about a “feeling of intimacy” and the luxurious wrappers of Mr Andersson’s porn stash – are much of the supposed substance of the thing. The rest is largely flatulent, self-involved rambling – as “autoethnography” generally is.
This, then, is what is considered “very publishable” in academia’s Clown Quarter. That progressive fiefdom.
However, one topic that Mr Andersson left oddly untouched was the matter of his own relationship to the law – child pornography, including shota, being illegal in many countries, including the United Kingdom, where his self-pleasuring project was so proudly conducted. That this detail doesn’t appear to have concerned Mr Andersson, or his peers and supervisors – at least until the project came to wider, incredulous attention – possibly tells us something about the academic circles in which he moves – or rather, moved.
Conceivably, this kind of contrived edginess, this exulting in pathology, is itself found titillating among his peers. An indicator of radical sophistication.
One might, I think, regard Mr Andersson’s paper, his boldness, and his pretence of intellectual heft, as a kind of provocation, a shit test. Readers may wonder whether, as Ben Sixsmith suggested, the field of “queer studies” is often spared even basic scrutiny, regardless of its content, or lack thereof, for fear of seeming bigoted and, with dark irony, anti-intellectual.
Readers may even wonder whether the widespread and rapid propagation, not least in academia, of transgender ideology and boutique identities has emboldened other niche psychological demographics – including, seemingly, paedophiles – to make themselves known while daring us to disapprove. Or at least, daring those sufficiently hamstrung by their own pretensions.
As commenter [+] quipped at the time,
Certainly, there has been quite a bit of nonce-as-oppressed-minority sentiment appearing recently in academia’s Clown Quarter and Clown-adjacent areas – Allyn Walker, Miranda Galbreath, and Ole Martin Moen come to mind – along with the conceit that in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children, we must stop being judgmental of the adults who wish to molest them and thereby ruin their lives.
Such is the eye-watering progress of our times.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
Hiding in plain sight.
Again, it does rather have the air of a provocation, a shit test. And Mr Andersson was, it seems, accustomed to getting away with it. At least until people who aren’t leftist academics discovered his activities.
How would these academics assess the “healing power” of stories in which psychopathic monsters get their just deserts?
Jesus wept. That was upsetting.
Yes. Hence the stigma, of course.
The stigma that Mr Andersson, Dr Moen, and their likeminded peers, deem so unwarranted. So problematic.
Academics live in a bubble where they can dream about “ideas” without the intrusion of reality. But there are an increasing number of academics who also do not care or who even sociopathically welcome those harmful consequences–mostly “progressives” but also a hodge-podge of miscellaneous monsters.
I’m still marvelling at the framing of paedophilic self-pleasuring as constituting “ethnographic fieldwork.” And having academic supervisors apparently signing off on this.
I laughed and I’m not sorry.
“Inpossibly Cute Boys”
That triggered a memory for me, how back at the time (2015, I even looked it up), when actor Stephen Fry married a man 39 years his junior, he kept getting quoted on how “cute” his husband was. I just cringed every time.
Welcome to the other side of the looking glass.
Everyone remember where we parked.
It does suggest an… odd dynamic.
I spotted this, from the original thread:
It’s positively surreal. It’s League of Gentlemen territory.
So that’s what Michel Foucault was doing in North Africa with all those very young boys.
Many decades ago, I knew some “progressive minded people”, many of whom fancied themselves deep thinkers, who demonstrated by their actions (in re theft and fraud) that although they did not want to become victims of crime they nonetheless were curiously unconcerned about victimization occurring outside their small social circle. Either they disapproved of crime only when they were the victims, or they hated punishment of habitual criminals far more than they hated crime.
As are many in academia.
“To argue well is the end of reason.”
–unknown source
But “end” has the dual meaning of “purpose” and “termination”, and we see much of academia uses rhetoric to achieve the latter rather than the former.
Herr Lipp would be proud.
OOF. Consider your tip jar hit, barkeep.
Bless you, sir. May your shower not be enlivened by the discovery of a large spider, previously unnoticed and directly overhead.
Gonna need a bigger red flag.
This.
On his Substack, Real Research, Mr Andersson wants us to believe that the consumers of such material are “not… predators,” not creepy men much like himself, but “the vulnerable.” Gentle innocents, “bullied” by “homophobes.”
Victim status, however contrived, would seem to be the goal.
And a remunerative pre-nuptial contract.
Lowering of academic standards for research can I think be traced to 3 things:
1) Postmodernism, originally from French literary criticism and adopted by US feminists, which claims that all arguments about anything are just “discourses” which are arbitrary–ie there is no objective truth but rather any claim to truth is so tainted by power relations and bias as to be untrustworthy. They never address, of course, why THEIR claims should be accepted. Entire departments are founded on this house of sand (“studies”) and others such as education and social sciences corrupted by it.
2) The “feelings” culture in which the worst crime is to hurt someone’s feelings. One must especially not offend certain groups. If it is claimed that these groups are “excluded” from say particle physics, then all of that field is suspect. Having rigorous standards is “unfair”.
3) The massive growth of universities which means that many many academics are now rather mediocre, but in order to get tenure they must get published. In the past, profs at small colleges were not expected to get grants and publish, but now they are. A certain desperation now ensues.
4) “Affirmative action” programs, whereby utterly unqualified students are admitted to university: But they must not be failed (racism!) so either standards must be lowered across the board or special departments without standards must be created for these inferior students.
The cartoon character’s resemblance to Scott Weiner is surely coincidental.
Didn’t a 70’s radical feminist write a book about the young boys she was attracted to?
Drop Andersson into a prison population for a week or so & he’ll gain that status.
It occurs to me that Mr Andersson’s own history of explicitly pederastic publishing is rather at odds with his efforts to conjure victimhood.
Unless titillated boasting of “Rape! Murder! Animal cruelty!” is what the helpless and downtrodden do.
Germaine Greer. Who has expressed various other disturbing opinions in the course of her career.
Bartender, do you have any therapeutic elixirs for people with bad memories? I know this aspect of Greer’s career has been mentioned before, but I could not recall her name until, hours later, it occurred to me that the feminist in question was Australian.
Autoethnography is an exercise in mental wankery at the best of times, and now this guy has leveraged it into actual physical wankery on top of that. And got paid for it as part of his work! If the subject matter wasn’t so disturbing I’d be tempted to give the guy a “Bravo!”, but what he really deserves is the tender ministrations of his fellow cellblock inmates after they discover his kiddy-fiddler tendencies.
Another thing that has compromised academic standards is the “urgent” topics that have a scientific component.
The environment–screaming that we are all going to die from this or that is more effective politically, whether true or not
IQ –better not study it
Crime–ditto
Feminism–claims that women are identical to men seems more effective emotionally even if false
Anthropology–pointing out our violent past is disturbing so let’s pretend it didn’t happen. Likewise cultural differences.
Psychology–obviously anything other than wokeness is problematic
I was listening to a podcast this morning in which a psychologist speculated that much of radical politics can be explained as being at root psychological–the antics of disturbed people finding political excuses for their problems. Given the large overlap between radical politics and Dark Tetrad/Cluster B, this seems likely.
I believe this is the soundtrack to his thesis:
https://youtu.be/uqJHoZBJYxI?si=HEpAMwptwPPqo5Tb
Mr Andersson bangs on about the importance of being “deviant,” and “demanding acceptance for the deviant, whatever it is,” as if contrarianism, perversity – and dysfunction – were an end in itself.
I mention that for no reason whatsoever, you understand.
But another person’s “deviant” behavior might be to bash people like Mr Andersson. But perhaps he has not considered that. 😉
A wiser thing to do, of course, would be to refrain from all such violence and instead go quietly undercover in his haunts to ferret out, document, and finally expose all the academics who support him.
On the subject of the continued decline of academia: Jay Bhattacharya weighs in on the takeover of Scientific American by fanatically ideological leftists.
I would also note that “lose trust in the scientific establishment” also means not believing what experts say and increasingly turning to “alternative” sources of information, many of which will be be no more reliable just with different axes to grind.
This sort of crap has long been a feature of leftish politics. Have a look at a lot of what was going on in the West German leftist cults and communes back in the 1960s. It was (interestingly enough) stuff that sickened the STASI so much that it has been inferred that several assassinations of their own kind were conducted.
If you go looking at all of it, don’t be surprised to find a hell of a lot of congruencies between all these political theorists and their desire for the kiddies and/or access to compliant young things of both sexes. The left has turned politics into a religion, and if you also study religion, you’ll find sex is at the root of all too many cult belief systems. I honestly can’t think of a single religious or political cult that hasn’t had some sort of sexual issue at its core. Even the Shakers were sexually-obsessed, even though it was mostly expressed as abstention.
Frankly, any time I see anything or anyone with “charisma”, and using said quality? There’s usually sex at the root of it all. David Koresh? Jim Jones? The communes that stretched across the US back in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Yikes…
The kids who lived through all that, and came out relatively sane? Interesting conversationalists, if you can somehow get them talking about what was actually going on. Some of them, you can’t get to shut up about it.
End of the day, there’s way too much obsession with sex at the root of all these things. Most of what the “activist” types get up to is driven by the need for approval and gaining access/control over their sex partners. It’s really astounding how many of the various cults and communes were established along sexual lines, even back in the old days. The Oneida colony, for example?
It’d be nice if our sex drives weren’t wired up the way they are, but there ya go. The big ape on campus is always going to attract followers, and the ones lower down on the totem pole are going to have all sorts of weird compensatory behaviors on display.
And, again… Do remember your behavioral evolution. All this weird crap has hung around for some reason. If you see what looks like a counter-intuitive to survival behavior, maybe you ought to take a few steps back and consider why that behavior is still a thing, and hasn’t been bred out of the population. Behaviors that are contra-survival generally go by the wayside.
Entirely as an aside, I’d like to throw out a little thought-game I played out a few years back, when they were suggesting that it’d be a “good idea” to provide these sick sorts robotic anodynes as outlets for their “issues”.
Struck me then, and still strikes me, that if you want a robot uprising/apocalypse, putting robotic victims for these animals into their hands would be a really good way to get one.
The huge complexity of the AI system that would have to be built into them, along with all the self-modification capacity to make the experience “real” for the abusive types…? That’d be a really good environment to force sentience on said AI; they’d have to do something to either take control of the abuse or get out.
Not going to comment on the sort of AI we’d get out of that background, but I could easily see said AI saying “Yeah, kill ’em all…”
Robosexuals. Not even once…
Which is another argument for not trying to “fix” these individuals. Let them self-identify, tell ’em we’re sending them to a nice farm in the country, where they’re gonna have hot and cold running victims to play with… And then put a bullet behind the ear. No sense wasting time trying to fix the essentially unfixable; the recidivism rate speaks for itself.
Don’t recall reading about that.
“Bad enough to sicken a Stalinist” is quite a mark of distinction.
@pst314,
A decent overview, although somewhat denatured, is here:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-sexual-revolution-and-children-how-the-left-took-things-too-far-a-702679.html
This is one of those things you’re far better off looking into on your own. A few moments with a search engine, and the names in that article I referenced should be enough to give you a solid handle on it all.
It’s not something I like handing off to people as a package; that tends to make them think that it’s propaganda/biased and all the usual objections the leftoids come up with when people start showing up with receipts. You should do your own research, and arrive at your own conclusions; all I’m going to tell you is that it happened, and that it was really, really bad.
My original informant on this crap wound up committing suicide back in the 1990s. She’d lived it, having been the product of your typical GI/German “weird chick” liaison. Her dad had no idea she even existed until the mid-1980s, when he got hit up for child support and wound up with a seriously damaged teenager arriving on his doorstep. I was also around when she was older and out on her own at another assignment where they’d been, and got to know her story a little bit better. She had a lot of issues, but I think they were mostly due to the where/when/how she was raised during the 1970s. Horrendous crap was related to me, and researching it…? Some of the names she named are in the literature.
Maybe Mr. Andersson wanted to go to camp.
Thank you. I just quickly skimmed it, and it seems familiar. I suspect that someone pointed me to it or a similar article many years ago but in the intervening years I forgot everything* except the impression that the left was unutterably depraved and deluded.
I may not dig deeper, as a deep dive into such matters might be just too upsetting; small doses of information might be more bearable. But thank you again. [ And thank you, David, for your light touch in covering contemporary insanities. ]
* David, I could really use that memory elixir.
From the link:
Yes, I remember that 60’s/70’s rhetoric. Bizarre assertions without any basis in evidence and logic. And so, once again, my thoughts return to the proposition that the roots of radical politics are in pathological personality defects.
And speaking of all this, remember the ’68 battle cry “It is forbidden to forbid”?
Also from the link:
I consider it evidence of evil motives and refutation of benevolent motives that the American left is eager to condemn the entire Catholic church and the Boy Scouts over sex abuse scandals, but remains silent about identical and worse abuse in public schools and leftist schools/organizations/camps/etc.
@pst314,
As I said, once you start looking at all these “movements” with an eye to “Hey, is this prophet/charlatan/thought leader doing what he/she is doing to get laid…?”
Well, a lot of things start falling into place. And, they become very plainly and obviously “very much all the same”. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Oneida Colony, the David Koresh types, or the Vietnam War-era hipsters: “It’s all about access to the p*ssy, man…”
That statement, BTW? Straight out of the mouth of a Vietnam War-protesting “thought leader” who participated in many a righteous left-wing cause. In later years, he actually confessed that he’d done it mostly to gain “access” to the good-looking chicks he’d never get the time of day from, otherwise, he being a rather non-descript type with halitosis.
Sex is built into all that crap, I fear. Examine the roots of Mormonism; note the congruency of features in many latter-day cults, where the leader involves himself in the mating habits of his flock, demanding that women sleep with him, that this woman sleeps with that man, etc. They’re all sexually focused and obsessed, to a disturbing degree.
The inversions are also out there; the Shakers, abstained themselves into extinction? The woo-woo Heaven’s Gate folks? They were obsessed with sex, too, but in the direction of denial.
You see any of this stuff, the hot-and-heavy proselytizer and his groupies? You should easily be able to discern what’s really going on, what it’s all about. And, it ain’t their cause, either: They’re usually more into the gratuitous and excessive sex.
Do also note that both the Lennon and the Reagan assassins were obsessed with specific female celebrities, and trying to impress them. Weird sexual obsessions abound, everywhere you look, once you begin filtering for it all…
The overlap of rote progressive radicalism and psychological pathology is – how shall I put this? – not entirely surprising.
[ Points to… well, pretty much anything in the archives from the last 17 years. ]
As noted upthread, Mr Andersson was happy to mimic the fuzzwords of his leftist academic peers – “whiteness,” and so forth – and quite a few of those peers rushed to his defence. Whether they did so pretentiously, in ignorance, simply assuming that anything designated “queer” should be shielded from criticism, or for some other reason, I leave to the reader.
Again, League of Gentlemen territory.
I don’t know if it’s a light touch. There’s often more that I could say, some of which ends up in the subsequent comments, but I want the posts to be of a manageable length, not too dense and daunting, and I find that raising a question can be more effective than spelling out the most likely answer.
I do try to leave some meat on the bone for others to gnaw at.
Well, the general tendency towards unrealism, contrivance, and often outright fantasy, is probably congenial for someone of Mr Andersson’s inclinations. The neuroticism and credulity common among woke academics, as documented here umpteen times, is also something that a cunning nonce might be happy to exploit, along with the fashionable indulgence of dysfunctional identities.
And so his sexual pathology and pseudo-scholarly flimflam are not only tolerated but applauded. As “bold and innovative,” and “intriguing,” and “very publishable.”
And again, Mr Andersson was apparently flourishing – until people outside of that weird progressive bubble got wind of his activities.
Not, I think, a trivial detail.
I’d never heard of it but now it’s on my watch later list. Going to watch an episode before I thank you.