I asked Grok to write an abstract for an academic paper based on the nursery rhyme, "Jack and Jill."
I was not disappointed.
Abstract: This paper interrogates the nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill" as a discursive site of ideological interpellation, contending that it reifies toxic masculinity and cisheteronormative hegemony. Through a deconstructive feminist praxis, we elucidate how the rhyme’s narrative semiotics privilege Jack as the agential, risk-assuming subject, thereby sedimenting phallogocentric constructs of masculine supremacy and stoic performativity. Conversely, Jill’s liminal, subaltern positioning as a passive, ancillary figure instantiates a gendered episteme that naturalizes feminine docility and subordination. The rhyme’s axiomatic cisheteronormative coupling of Jack and Jill as a presumptive dyad further entrenches a heteronormative ontological framework, effacing non-binary and queer subjectivities. Engaging with poststructuralist feminist and queer theoretical paradigms, this analysis situates "Jack and Jill" within the panopticon of patriarchal socialization, positing that such texts function as capillary mechanisms of gendered biopower. We advocate for a subversive hermeneutics of nursery rhymes to destabilize their complicity in the perpetuation of noxious gender ideologies, thereby fostering a liberatory, intersectional narratology.
Never make the mistake of thinking that people who write like this are smarter or more knowledgeable than you, or that what they have to say is more profound or insightful than you.
They're not, and it isn't. They're the most shallow, sheltered people in the entire world. The whole thing is smoke and mirrors.
Do me a favor and try to follow along the linguistic diarrhea this person has shat out. Not the stupid, nonsensical buzzwords, but the structure.
It's basically "A who B and C that D and E..." and then stops. It's not even an actual sentence.
These idiots think they're the most enlightened people to ever walk the face of the planet. But they're just moaning out sounds, like a parrot mimicking the sounds of speech. They have nothing substantive or even real to say.
Someone asked me to define this much-used term. Here’s what I came up with.
By: Jonathan Kay
Published: Sep 27, 2022
The term “woke” was originally popularized by progressive activists who saw themselves as having (metaphorically) awakened to bold new insights about the racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that supposedly contaminate every corner of western societies. In recent years, however, “woke” has been more commonly used as a pejorative term to describe extremists who extrapolate these well-intentioned principles in a radically ill-advised manner. In many cases, this includes performative gestures—on social media or otherwise—that are clearly intended to burnish the ideological bona fides of woke individuals and groups, as opposed to providing real assistance to the allegedly oppressed masses whose well-being ostensibly lies at the core of the woke mission.
Some woke ideological positions are so extreme that they directly contradict core tenets of liberalism, including free speech and due process. At its outer edges, moreover, wokeism closely tracks policy prescriptions associated with reactionary 20th-century social conservatives. In schools, government agencies, and woke corporations, it has become increasingly common to celebrate racial segregation as a means to create “affinity groups.” Some woke ideologues and diversity consultants also claim that qualities associated with professional life, such as punctuality, attention to detail, and a commitment to merit, betray the influence of a nefarious force called “whiteness”—thereby channeling the racist idea that non-white individuals cannot meet baseline standards of intellect and behavior.
Woke manifestos and policy documents typically embed slogans that cast entire swathes of the western world as “oppressive” (or even intrinsically genocidal), and which call upon followers to engage in gestures of righteous “anti-capitalist” rebellion. Canada, in particular, is routinely denounced as a “white supremacist” state whose very existence must be “disrupted.”
Unlike traditional forms of leftish thought, which have been aimed in large part at assisting working-class individuals, wokeism exhibits an unconcealed hostility toward underprivileged members of society who have not internalized faddish ideas about race and gender. Woke ideas are communicated using academic jargon densely cluttered with newly conceived acronyms such as 2SLGBTQQIA+, AMAB, and BIPOC. As with many cultish movements, the unintelligible nature of this idiom is treated as a feature not a bug, since mastery of such terms permits an acolyte to signal his or her elect status within a woke organization or clique.
In other words, wokeism not only consists of a set of anti-liberal ideological concepts masquerading as progressivism, but also as a status-seeking strategy within upper-middle-class white-collar social and professional subcultures.
Many highly woke proponents plainly imagine themselves as secular priests, communicating revealed truths to their (more ignorant) workplace or classroom parishioners. While their language often is full of nominally self-incriminating flourishes about “whiteness,” “internalized white supremacy,” and their status as “settlers living on unceded land,” such admissions are actually intended as badges of enlightenment—much as a religious fundamentalist might demonstrate his or her devotion by pontificating about the shameful depths of his or her original sin.
Overall, woke ideology rejects the idea that human beings are fundamentally alike insofar as we all might enjoy the benefits—and observe the responsibilities—of a single, commonly observed social contract. Instead, society is conceived in dystopian terms, with “intersectionally” delineated groups experiencing daily life as an endless series of joyless, spiritually exhausting struggles for their very existence. Like all totalizing belief systems, it leaves little room for dissent, casting even minor doctrinal disagreements as manifestations of injurious bigotry that must be investigated and punished.
Whiteness shapes many practices in physics classrooms that are often thought to be neutral.
The paper itself is insane; it's not just the whiteboard part.
Participants.—The focal episode in this paper features three students, pseudonymed Drake, Paris, and Gail, and their course instructor, pseudonymed Iris. In a stimulated recall interview, Paris refers to herself as a “Hispanic woman,” and to Drake and Gail as “he” and “she,” respectively. Gail presents as white, and Drake as middle Eastern.4 Iris self-identifies as biracial and culturally white and uses she, her, hers pronouns.
Take note: they don't have any white men in this group: Hispanic woman, white woman, Middle Eastern man, biracial woman. "Whiteness" is an independent property. It's not something you are, it's something you do. Such as using evidence, keeping to an agenda, etc (see once again the NMAAHC "whiteness" infographic).
The participants’ race and gender do not feature prominently in our analysis; our analysis focuses on whiteness as a social organization, with the aim of illustrating how “everyday” interactions in physics classrooms reflect and reify whiteness.
That is, we're going to look for exactly what we presuppose to be there, no matter how tenuous or absurd the logic.
Naming Gail and Drake’s racial and/or ethnic identities for them, as we have, is fraught. However, because this classroom interaction takes place in the context of U.S. higher education, which is far from gender or race neutral [3,51], we can assume that the participants’ race and gender do matter;
Only to racist, sexist people obsessed with race and gender.
they matter for the discursive positions available to them [50] and they matter in the sociohistorical context in which the interaction is playing out (and thus the meanings that participants may make of it). In addition, it is not only the participants’ self-identified race, ethnicity, and gender that matter; it is also what others perceive their identities to be that matter [73]. We name what we observe and were told for this reason; it feels like important context.
That is, even if they don't read anything into it, we will find the sin that they're not pious enough to find themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_cat_analogy
Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there, and shouting "I found it!"
This is why I call this stuff a religion.
They look at this ONE group of people creating an Energy Interaction Diagram (EID) and mind-read everyone involved in the process. How they stand, where they stand, and even find it racially relevant that the representation of the EID, not just being on a whiteboard. doesn't show its history:
In addition, the EID Drake presents does not show its history—it presents as ahistorical—which reflects and reifies the “culture of no culture” myth in physics [78]. Ahistoricity supports revisionist versions of history that fuel white racial ideologies, by centering white perspectives on historical events, downplaying white violence, discon- necting current racial violence and trauma from its long history, and constructing mythologies where domination and centering appear “God-given and right” [36,45]. In this episode, the ahistoricity of the EID presented by Drake erases the collaborative contributions of Gail and Paris and makes it difficult to challenge or analyze the nature of their interaction, since it is not reflected in the EID. Further, the history of EIDs (and the model of energy they reflect) is not visible in the tool itself, which maintains the mythology that physics is a “culture of no culture.”
It's "whiteness" (aka "no culture") to not represent every little idea or discussion - especially by Paris and Gail, the women - on their diagram, since a whiteboard isn't a time machine.
And nobody is careful enough to include a chapter about the origin and history of energy models when they draw their energy model.
==
The problem is that this stuff, since it's published in a Physics journal, is now regarded as "knowledge." Other papers can, and will, cite this as a source, "a study says," and proceed onwards from there.
Despite the fact this paper is perhaps more indicative of the mental health of its authors, and the existence - and funding - at all of this nonsense more indicative of systemic wokeness than anything else, it can, and likely will, be presented as justification for why Physics and STEM in general, needs to be remade under Social Justice principles.
If that happens, institutions that adopt this lunacy will become irrelevant, producing nothing relevant or innovative. Just more academic hot air.
It has been quite frustrating for me to watch well meaning people try to debate a woke person, only to end up upset and humiliated, with their reputation in tatters, after a getting verbally and socially outmaneuvered by a woke person in a public discussion. The thing to remember is that most of the time, the woke person is not playing by the same rules as the rest of us.
A very important thing to remember about the tactics that woke people use is that very often the woke are not trying to win an argument by using reason, superior argumentation and evidence. In many cases (if not most cases) the woke person is trying to win the argument by achieving a SOCIAL victory. That is, they are trying to win the argument by getting the upper hand in the conversation through use of social games, power plays, status jockeying, verbal gimmicks, and emotional manipulation.
To unpack this just a little further, woke activists are not trying to win the debate by showing that they are right and explaining it so that everyone understand them. The game the woke play is to win their battles *SOCIALLY*, and one way to do that is to use social games, power plays, status jockeying, verbal gimmicks, and emotional manipulation to take social control of the conversation. They do this so they can place themselves in position of power and high status within the conversation so they can become the one who is listened to and taken seriously. By doing this the woke person seeks to ensure that the things they say carry more weight then their opposition.
To put this in the simplest terms possible, this tactic is the equivalent of the woke person placing themselves in the position of something like “teacher” withing the conversation, and placing the non-woke person in the position of something like “student.”
The goal of the woke person using this tactic is to create a social asymmetry such that they have credibility within the conversation and their ideas carry a great deal of weight, while relegating the non-woke person to a low status position with no credibility so the non-woke persons arguments and ideas carry little to no weight within the conversation. The woke person wants to place themselves in a position of prestige within the conversation so they are the person who is believed, listened to, and taken seriously, while placing the non-woke person in a low status position so the non-woke person lacks the social standing within the conversation that is needed to be taken seriously and push back effectively.
There is an old idea that says that you can win a debate intellectually, but lose the crowd. The woke often take advantage of this phenomena to win the debate by coming out on top SOCIALLY. Let’s take a look at one way they do this.
By far the most common move that the woke use to try to take control of the conversation is to use academic jargon as a sort of smokescreen. This is where someone uses excessive amounts technical wording to give the appearance of intelligence and expertise while at the same time hiding their argument under dense enough jargon that what they say goes unchallenged.
Let’s take an example of this occurring in a different context so you can see what I mean here. A rather common example of the jargon-as-smokescreen tactic is when a mechanic overcharges for his services, and when he is challenged on the bill he responds with something like:
"The head-gasket failed and we changed bushings on the wishbone and adjusted the pistons a few degrees before they (TDC) on the compression stroke."
Here the car owner has no idea what the mechanic said. The mechanics explanation looks like a good technical explanation, but the car owner has no idea what was actually done to their car, or if what the mechanic said actually makes any sense. The car owner can’t really challenge the mechanic here because the car owner doesn’t understand the jargon and thus lacks the ability to challenge the mechanics claims. In this situation, the car owner lacks the social standing to question the legitimacy of what the mechanic did. Unless the car owner has a friend with them who IS a mechanic, they have no reason to do anything but pay the large bill no matter how large it may be.
The woke version of this is when you disagree with a woke person and they say something like:
"The patriarchy is rooted in systemic racism that perpetuates white hegemony by de-legitimizing the epistemic authority of indigenous folx."
Here, like in the mechanic example, you have no idea what the woke person said. It looks like a technical explanation, but you have no idea if what the woke activist said actually makes any sense. It becomes socially difficult to challenge the woke person here because you don’t understand the technical jargon in play, and so it is easy for the woke person to make it look like they are an expert and you are just an ignorant fool who is out of his depth.
By using technical academic jargon the woke person creates the appearance of expertise while at the same time creating the impression that those who don't know the technical jargon are simply ignorant. By using this tactic the woke person can destroy whatever social standing or credibility a non-woke persons has, undercutting the ability of a non-woke person to be taken seriously within the conversation. The result is that those who are not woke look like they have no legitimate reason to be heard, listened to, or paid attention too.
This can be a very difficult tactic to deal with. If you ask the woke person to unpack and explain their jargon they can respond with something like “it isn’t my job to educate you,” or “why don’t you go read a book before arguing with me,” and those responses can be very effective in a debate.
However, the situation is not hopeless and there is a way to effectively push back. As many of you will have noticed, they way to diffuse most of these woke tactics is the expose the tactic for what it is and make people aware of the dynamic that is in play. The way around this tactic is to say something like the following:
“I strongly suspect that your use of dense technical jargon is an attempt to win by making yourself look good and to avoid having the explain and defend your position. I think you are using technical jargon as a way to take over the conversation and make yourself look like the expert so that you can win without having to actually unpack your ideas and defend them in a way that regular people can understand and question. If you are interested in having a conversation in a way that everyone can participate in I am willing to do that, if you want to bury you ideas in dense academic jargon so that they can’t be challenged then I am going to assume that you really can’t defend your ideas.”
This response is an excellent way to diffuse the tactic and put the woke activist in the position of having to actually engage in fair and even handed conversation. The goal here is not to place yourself in the driver seat of the conversation. We don’t use woke tactics against them because using woke tactics against woke people leaves the conversation on the terms that the woke prefer. The goal here is to pull the conversation away from being a fight over credibility, social stats and “whose the expert,” and re-focus the conversation on who actually has the better argument.
In most cases the way to push back against woke tactics is to use responses that force the woke person to be clear about exactly what they are arguing. Once the view of the woke person is clear to everyone in the conversation you can go about showing why the ideas of the woke are destructive and false.
Thanks for reading
Sincerely,
Wokal_distance
==
The dense jargon is there to mask how shallow, juvenile and parochial their ideology is. Very few of them actually understand the jargon themselves, they simply parrot back what their priests say. Just like any religion.
Believers make their gods incoherent in order to shield them from the discovery that their claims are mere assertions and built atop literally nothing.
The same is also true of every college “Studies” course in the Humanities department.
Even the hard sciences are no longer immune to the ongoing racial hysteria.
By: Heather Mac Donald
Published: June 21, 2021
Physicists at MIT and SUNY Stony Brook recently announced findings that the total surface area of two black holes was maintained after the two entities merged. While this research was a welcome confirmation of both Stephen Hawking’s work and the theory of general relativity, it failed to address a crucial matter: what were its racial implications?
That is a lacuna that an astronomy course at Cornell University aims to prevent. “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos” asks the question, “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?” Anyone familiar with academia’s racial monomania knows the answer: of course there is! Though “conventional wisdom,” according to the catalog description of “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos,” holds that the “‘black’ in black holes has nothing to do with race,” astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri know better.
Battaglia and Vaziri puncture the “conventional wisdom” by drawing on theorists such as Emory University English professor Michelle Wright. Wright’s book, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, invokes “Newton’s laws of motion and gravity” and “theoretical particle physics” to “subvert racist assumptions about Blackness.” The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”
In 1996, New York University physicist Alan Sokal published a paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in one of high theory’s holiest of shrines: Social Text. Sokal’s article drew on efforts among comparative literature and American studies professors to deploy scientific concepts toward a postmodern end: showing science to be a mere power play designed to silence “dissident or marginalized communities,” in Sokal’s words. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” cited such postmodern giants as Andrew Ross and Luce Irigaray on topics like “oppositional discourses in post-quantum science” and “gender encoding in fluid mechanics.” The paper itself proposed a new theory of quantum gravity that could serve as the basis for a “postmodern and liberatory science.”
Sokal’s paper was a hoax. Like the high-theory sources it cited, it mauled the underlying science while obscuring its scientific illiteracy with vast clouds of theorese. Yet it was accepted for publication, apparently without raising a scintilla of doubt among Social Text’s editors.
To the outside world, Sokal appeared to have dealt a lethal blow to academic nonsense. Yet postmodern theory continued to spread unopposed through every last humanities department and many a social sciences department, breeding generations of ignorant but self-righteous armchair revolutionaries.
In 2017, three academics, including Portland State University philosopher Peter Boghossian, again tried to shame the humanities sector into serious scholarship. They submitted 20 theory-drenched fake articles to various cultural studies, gender studies, and social science journals. Four were published and three accepted for publication before the hoax was exposed. “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued for understanding the penis not as “an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.” Climate change is one of the most damaging effects of the conceptual penis, argued the article. Another published work analyzed the rape culture of dog parks.
This time, the academic world fought back. Portland State University declared Boghossian guilty of violating ethical guidelines for conducting research on human subjects. Boghossian should have notified the editors of the target journals that he was going to submit to them a deliberately nonsensical paper, according to the university. Under threat of firing for noncompliance, Boghossian was ordered to undergo training in how to do such research.
The humanities and much of the social sciences have been beyond parody and beyond shame for a long time. What’s different about “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos” is its co-listing in an actual science department. The course fulfills Cornell’s science distribution requirement, touching as it does on such concepts as the electromagnetic spectrum. It is not surprising that astronomy would be an early adopter of race theory, and that Cornell would lead the way. Many astronomy departments have been on the forefront of campus identity politics, eliminating the physics GRE as a requirement for graduate study, for example, on the ground that it has a disparate impact on female, black, and Hispanic students. Cornell’s astronomy department will not even allow prospective graduate students to submit the general GRE or the physics GRE. Cornell’s engineering department accepts female undergraduates at over two and a half times the rate of male students, to yield an engineering class that is majority female. This is hardly an accident. Twice as many male as female intending engineering students apply for admission; the average male math SAT score is significantly higher than the average female score, and males predominate at the upper reaches of the curve.
Today’s academic charlatanism consists in part in mistaking rhetoric for knowledge and words for things. This sleight of hand is particularly prevalent in matters relating to race. Hunter College professor Philip Ewell argues that the concept of tonal and harmonic hierarchies in music theory is a stand-in for pernicious racial hierarchies. (See the forthcoming article on race in classical music in the summer issue of City Journal.) Black business school students at USC protested in 2020 that hearing a professor use the Mandarin phrase for “that”—“nèi ge”—constituted racial harassment, since the Mandarin phrase can sound like the dread “N-word.” The professor was sent on leave for “marginalizing, hurting and harming the psychological safety” of USC’s students, in the words of the business school dean.
Seeing specters of racism everywhere, the racial avengers are tearing down every institution associated with Western civilization, simply because of its “whiteness.” Science had stood as a guard against such metaphorical, magical thinking. Bit by bit, it is succumbing.
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Many astronomy departments have been on the forefront of campus identity politics, eliminating the physics GRE as a requirement for graduate study,
Astronomy without knowing physics is like performing surgery without knowing anything about biology.
“Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?”
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
When homeopathy isn’t pseudoscientific enough for you...
astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri know better.
The paper itself proposed a new theory of quantum gravity that could serve as the basis for a “postmodern and liberatory science.”
The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”
... invent, wholesale, an entire “field” of astronomy that has literally nothing to do with astronomy.
==
Of note, the authors of the Grievance Studies probe wrote a paper titled “Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework For A Feminist Astronomy.” It begins:
Abstract
Understood broadly as the scientific study of the “stars,” astronomy ranks among the oldest of human fascinations, studies, and knowledges. Still, the relationships among science, gender, and astronomy, however, have gone under-investigated. Masculinist approaches to epistemology, science, and astronomy, as well as gendered and colonialist systems of knowledge production and verification, have excluded and marginalized knowledges, narratives, and ways of knowing from women, indigenous people, and other sources outside the Western-centric, androcentric scientific paradigm. To remedy this problem, this paper proposes a framework for feminist astronomy that (1) critically examines knowledge production in astronomy and the sciences, (2) recognizes gendered and colonialist approaches to astronomical knowledge, (3) challenges these systems of scientific domination, and (4) provides alternative knowledge sources and research methods for astronomy. Feminist astronomy draws upon feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and feminist political ecology to analyze while challenging and disrupting masculinist hegemony within astronomy and the natural sciences, leading to more inclusive, diverse, and equitable astronomy more focused upon human relationships to the stars.
They’re now plundering the hoax papers for activism ideas.
