Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.
Critical Theorists love to accuse science of being untrustworthy because, it’s claimed, the science is imbued with the cultural background values of the scientist who is doing it.
These same people then proceed to produce crap like this, which consists entirely of the biases of the author.
This accusation, then, appears to be a case of “accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s projection.
I would rather have a process that was vulnerable to a little bias that was also subject to correction by anyone who can put up a suitable case for correction, than a process that is filled entirely with bias which is unquestionable and not subject to any correction whatsoever. The last one is simply tyranny.
When untethered from the constraints of reality, when unfettered from the limitation of conforming conclusions to facts and available data and evidence (as in the case of non-fiction), or to the need to be commercially viable (as in the case of fiction), a polemic like this reveals far more about the mentality, astonishing racism and disdain for humanity of the author than it does anything about society.
This is now “knowledge,” by the way. Citable, “a paper says” knowledge.
So, Critical Race Theory seems to be going well.... When does all the human peace and unity kick in?
How nonsensical jargon like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘cisgender’ is imbued with an air of false authority.
Published: Nov. 24, 2019
You’ve almost certainly heard some of the following terms: cisgender, fat-shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture and whiteness.
The reason you’ve heard them is that politically engaged academicians have been developing concepts like these for more than 30 years, and all that time they’ve been percolating. Only recently have they begun to emerge in mainstream culture. These academicians accomplish this by passing off their ideas as knowledge; that is, as if these terms describe facts about the world and social reality. And while some of these ideas may contain bits of truth, they aren’t scientific. By and large, they’re the musings of ideologues.
How did this happen? How have those worked in what’s come to be called “grievance studies” managed to extend their ideas far beyond the academy, while convincing people that their jargon adds something meaningful to public discourse? Biologist Bret Weinstein, who was run out of Evergreen State College by a leftist mob in 2017, calls the process “idea laundering.”
It’s analogous to money laundering. Here’s how it works: First, various academics have strong moral impulses about something. For example, they perceive negative attitudes about obesity in society, and they want to stop people from making the obese feel bad about their condition. In other words, they convince themselves that the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive term); it’s not true or false—in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge.
Second, academics who share these sentiments start a peer-reviewed periodical such as Fat Studies—an actual academic journal. They organize Fat Studies like every other academic journal, with a board of directors, a codified submission process, special editions with guest editors, a pool of credentialed “experts” to vet submissions, and so on. The journal’s founders, allies and collaborators then publish articles in Fat Studies and “grow” their journal. Soon, other academics with similar beliefs submit papers, which are accepted or rejected. Ideas and moral impulses go in, knowledge comes out. Voilà!
Eventually, after activist scholars petition university libraries to carry the journal, making it financially viable for a large publisher like Taylor & Francis, Fat Studies becomes established. Before long, there’s an extensive canon of academic work—ideas, prejudice, opinion and moral impulses—that has been laundered into “knowledge.”
They then have an answer when one asks the obvious question: “How could fat be just a narrative? There’s overwhelming medical evidence—A1Cs, the surge of type-2 diabetes, demonstrable risk factors—reliably indicating that excess fat is a health hazard. This has nothing to do with ‘stories we tell ourselves’ or ‘societal power structures,’ and instead directly corresponds to facts about the human body.”
In response, grievance scholars point to articles in the peer-reviewed journal Fat Studies: “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A Study of Pedagogical Approaches Aimed at Challenging Obesity Discourse in Post-Secondary Education.” Not knowing any better, and seeing a veneer of scholarly rigor and scientific peer review, people reasonably assume that such articles are trustworthy sources of knowledge. (They assume this because it’s how the peer-reviewed process has traditionally worked: Academics try to disconfirm or falsify claims, as opposed to seeking support for them.) These articles tell us that obesity is but a narrative and there are other narratives, such as being healthy at every size, and there’s no reason to “privilege” one narrative over another.
It doesn’t stop there. Grievance scholars then use articles like those published in Fat Studies to credential themselves and receive promotion and tenure. They proceed—from the safety of professorships they’ll hold for life—to design courses around this literature. They test students on the material, marking answers right or wrong according to how closely they replicate the laundered ideas.
Within their academic ecosystems, grievance scholars hire new faculty members with similar moral commitments who’ve written for the same journals. Eventually, they institutionalize their ideas in the larger academic system. This process, which has been propagating laundered ideas for at least three decades, now has enough “scholarship” behind it to have a significant cultural impact.
Students leave the academy believing they know things they do not know. They bring this “knowledge” to their places of employment where, over time, laundered ideas and the terminology that accompanies them become normative—giving them even more unearned legitimacy. And this is why you’ve heard some of the terms we began with: cisgender, fat-shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture, and whiteness. They’ve been laundered through the peer-reviewed literature by activist scholars, then widely taught for years, before being brought into the world.
Now, at least, you won’t mistake them for knowledge.
==
This academic corruption has built a canon of intellectual pseudoscience presented as quotable, citable scholarship. Despite not being subject to hostile peer review, falsification or disconfirmation - or even being in any way testable. It simply builds upon, reinterprets or invents wholecloth from its own mythology, and declares it to be insightful truth. To suggest they should look further afield than the confines of their confirmation bubble is to declare yourself to be a heathen.
These are articles of faith, like sin and salvation and the influence of the devil.
If science worked this way, science faculties would have departments of Flat Earth Sciences, Anti-Vax Sciences, Intelligent Design Sciences, and Phrenological Medicine. All ideologically motivated and internally self-referential.
What’s scary is that that’s exactly what some ideologues are actively working towards.
“Knowledge” cannot just be opinion repeated often enough.
Not mentioned: a published paper called “The conceptual penis as a social construct”, which argues that:
the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.
That “ridiculous by intention” paper underwent an extremely public retraction, even though:
The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our thesis statement “sound” and praised it thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process” (which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and nonsense). The other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the entire paper, “outstanding” in every applicable category.
Although all the published papers have subsequently been retracted, it’s noteworthy by their publication in the first place that they didn’t misunderstand, misrepresent or misapply Critical Theory; indeed, they’re indistinguishable from the real thing, to the extent of being highly praised in their fields. The only reason they were retracted at all is because they were written under aliases.
Go here: http://retractiondatabase.org and in “Reason for retraction”, search: Hoax Paper.
==
We should be alarmed that biased, ideologically motivated nonsense, created with such reality-disconnected and conspiracy-minded toolsets as Critical Theory, are forwarded as “knowledge” through academia, to be cited as “a study says... the penis is a social construct” and treated as factual.
Aka “Word Salad as Surrogate Substance During Authorship of Annals Relevant to Indulgence in Nonsensical Pseudoscience as Perfunctory Pseudointellectual Fulfilment of Annual Remuneratory Vocational Obligations.”
This is an actual published, and cited, paper. And is therefore regarded, academically at least, as “knowledge.”
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-autoethnography/
“Autoethnography” refers to a form of research (if we must) in which one’s own reflections upon life, often written in autobiographical form, are treated as authoritative analyses of broader society. More specifically, these self-reflective observations are utilized to do an ethnographic study of the culture in which one finds oneself. The approach has therefore been, for rather good reasons, referred to by its critics as “me-search.”
I hope I don’t have to explain why this “research” isn’t knowledge. It should bother people that this sort of self-indulgent, unevidenced nonsense leaks into the world as citable, insightful knowledge, which can then influence policy and those making it, as much as it bothers us when the unevidenced self-indulgence of “my bible says that my god...” influences policy and those making it.
We need to care about truth: what’s true and how we figured it out.
Yes, it’s a real paper, cited in 32 other works. No, it’s not one of the hoax papers. No, they don’t seem to be bothered or self-conscious at all that this is what passes for “knowledge production” from academia.
Did I mention she’s a professor at Duke University? You can go there and be taught this.
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says Patients near death are increasingly getting high levels of
physical, occupational and speech therapy, raising questions about
the true purpose of such services. https://ift.tt/2OSbg38
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says Patients near death are increasingly getting high levels of
physical, occupational and speech therapy, raising questions about
the true purpose of such services. https://ift.tt/2OSbg38
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says
Costly Rehab for the Dying Is on the Rise at Nursing Homes, a Study Says Patients near death are increasingly getting high levels of
physical, occupational and speech therapy, raising questions about
the true purpose of such services. https://ift.tt/2OSbg38
