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Academia Science Shakedowns

You Will Pretend It Has Great Value

December 14, 2022 62 Comments

Or, Grifters Gonna Grift.

At Montreal’s Concordia University, even light is being “decolonised.” Because “colonialism in contemporary physics” is a thing, you see. No, really, it is. A thing that must be “countered” in the name of piety. By people with salaries and lots of taxpayer subsidy:

The effort, funded by the Canadian government, seeks both to explore “ways and approaches to decolonise science, such as revitalising and restoring Indigenous knowledges” and to develop “a culture of critical reflection and investigation of the relation of science and colonialism,” according to the project’s website.

The project occupies the time of “equity, diversity and inclusion advisor” Tanja Tajmel and Associate Professor of First Peoples Studies Louellyn White, and draws on the magical almost-brownness of Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf, a member of the Turtle Clan from Kahnawà:ke, and who was hired by Concordia to “facilitate anti-colonial training.” Combined, their efforts will be,

presenting western science in its historical and sociocultural context

I suspect this is where the words bad whitey will be inserted. After all, there ain’t no grift in a context that isn’t heaving with pretentious guilt.

and treating indigenous knowledge about concepts such as those related to light as bodies of knowledge with which physicists and other scientists should be familiar.

Apparently, “all physicists and other scientists” should divert time and effort from their actual work, the important stuff, the thing that pays the bills, in order to become familiar with indigenous “bodies of knowledge.” Presumably, on grounds that one simply can’t do physics or astronomy without a detailed knowledge of magical talking beavers and rival chiefs stealing the Moon. 

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Written by: David
Academia Anthropology Media Politics

An Inexplicable Dislike

December 4, 2022 77 Comments

At Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, a panel of journalists and media professionals declare their priorities. 

The full two-and-a-half-hour video, which begins with a land acknowledgement and rumblings about “settlers” and their “racial guilt,” and “white supremacist colonial mindsets which we have internalised both collectively and individually,” can be endured here. 

Following this lengthy declaration of innate racial wrongness, the panellists begin to ruminate on “how best to confront the corrosive force of online hate targeted at journalists.” Being a journalist on Twitter, where the public can talk back, sometimes bluntly, is equated with surviving in an active warzone and other “hostile physical environments,” with women, the majority of the panel, apparently hardest hit. Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on Twitter. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

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Written by: David
Academia Parenting Pregnancy

Let’s Do That Thing That Doesn’t Work

November 30, 2022 48 Comments

Janice Fiamengo pokes through the outpourings of Sophie Lewis: 

Only a Marxist-feminist could pledge with a straight face that children will be better off when they are raised by a shifting coalition of non-relatives—or that being paid (by the state, one presumes) to raise someone else’s children will be more gratifying and less tiring than looking after one’s flesh and blood.

But Lewis’s utopianism is undeterred by evidence or common sense. “To abolish the family,” she has stated reassuringly in interview, “is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them.” To prove this point, Lewis’s book includes a historical survey of Marxist and queer imaginings of new types of social-family.

Given that such ideas stretch far back into the nineteenth century, one is struck less by the radicalism of Lewis’s propositions than by their tired predictability and centuries-old lack of viability. Does Lewis ever stop to ponder why attempts to replace the family have never managed to sustain themselves, even on a small scale? […] Does Lewis ever ponder the fact that it is mainly Marxist-feminists and queer radicals who seek a world in which caring for children could be farmed out to acquaintances?

Ms Lewis and her fever dreams have of course been mentioned here before: 

So far as I can tell, and despite Ms Lewis’ theorising, mothers-to-be don’t generally feel a need to parse their pregnancy in terms of “abolishing the private nuclear household” and “global regimes of colonial and commodity exploitation.” Or indeed to champion abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, as a form of “anti-violence.” But that’s probably because – to borrow a phrase from Joan – they haven’t been tugging on the intersectional crack pipe.
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Written by: David
Academia Dating Decisions Free-For-All

Our Betters Stroke Their Pets

November 28, 2022 69 Comments

I’m just going to leave this here, I think: 

[Kathy] Rudy seems uncertain as to whether she is sexually attracted to her own dogs: “I know I love my dogs with all my heart, but I can’t figure out if that love is sexually motivated.” For some reason, I’ve never grappled with this problem, but then again, I’m not versed in Queer Theory.

Other questions generated by means of Queer Theorising include, “Do I think I’m having sex with my dogs when they kiss my face?” Apparently, for Dr Rudy, a Professor of Women’s Studies, being licked by a dog is difficult to distinguish from kissing grandma on the cheek or being lost in a full-on erotic fever. And thus, we’re told, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.” 

Previously in the land of Queer Theory. 

And of course this rather eye-widening example.

Also, open thread.

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Written by: David
Academia Pronouns Or Else

Butter My Crumpets To Get A Gold Star

November 24, 2022 24 Comments

Lifted from the comments, where much of the fun happens:

Old and cold: Preferred pronouns.

The hot new thing: Preferred adjectives.

Says Min,

I can’t tell if it’s a piss-take.

Well, we live in unhinging times, so it can be hard to tell. It did occur to me that maybe the parent, the one seeking pre-approval for adjectives, could have been indulging in some elaborate wind-up, one that passed undetected by its target. Or maybe the anecdote is a fiction, a self-flattering fantasy. Again, it’s hard to be sure. As the archives here illustrate, a thing being farcical doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

But either way, it must be quite strange to go through every day with your own “identity” foregrounded, forever in mind and endlessly referred to, and always craving an affirmation that is at best a polite lie. And with unending deference and flattery as an aspiration, an ideal, an ‘A-plus.’

And oh yes, the adjectives expected.

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Written by: David
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In which we marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.