@tsarina-anadyomene - Tumblr Blog

I'm not quite happy with it, but I never will be. Enjoy!

Goethe, Sex, Idealism, History, BDSM, and More

#kind of just wanted to say fuck it before i travel

I sometimes feel like I have a really good life going for me. There are people I love a lot who also love me a lot. My research is going in a really promising direction and I feel like others in the department have been gassing me up and saying there's something really good here. I'm starting to see that I'm putting a few things together in a way that allows me to do really original research. The novel is coming and going. It's hard to figure out what to do with it sometimes, but it's quite pretty without being empty, I think. I have been a lot cleaner and more organized. And if I get the grant, I won't have to be horribly worried about funding.

Like there's this narrative I see forming that high ranking professors are plagiarizing material all the time and I just don't think that's true! A lot of these people do just work really hard and are very clever, very gifted people. Do brilliant people sometimes throw away their lives on problems that aren't that interesting or fruitful; on research programs that are boring or uninspired; on methodological tools that are ultimately going nowhere productive? Yes. Are there non-merit tracking social facts that lead to some people occupying these positions rather than others? Yes. But I just don't think, at least in the fields that I have experience in, that plagiarism is a hugely widespread problem. It is taken deeply seriously in the rare cases that are caught. So I just think it's a bit dishonest to frame it that way. I mean it's purely anecdotal but I can't shake the feeling that we're spinning a narrative without a clear picture of the facts. I think a lot of people on tumblr just kind of assume that everyone's a fraud because of, well, ressentiment.

not now sweetie mommy's watching the top moments from the 2026 barred owl cam season

at least the tumblr rationalists are kind of like... normal guys. they believe in normal guy-ism to an extent. that's nice. i miss normal guy-ism.

Another quick remark: usually when a department has one of the Big Two scandal types (plagiarism and sexual misconduct) what happens is someone files a report, there's an investigation, and someone is quietly fired. (However, this usually takes a few months). I have watched this happen in a sexual misconduct case. It does seem like the departments and people involved can make the problem much worse for themselves when they try to brush it under the rug. If you fail to fire someone who is sexually harassing students, then the harassed students will inevitably go public in order to get some justice. The publicity route is much more confrontational and invasive than the academic process. In that sense, universities and their constituting departments should have rather strong incentives to investigate concerns and carry out disciplinary actions before they get to that point. Administrators, in other words, can make their jobs easier by actually doing their jobs.

My sense is that plagiarism in philosophy is considered a very serious offense. If you were found to have plagiarized your dissertation, there is a very strong chance you would have your degree revoked. Findings of plagiarism in published papers would seriously hurt your chances of career advancement. I also have the sense that it is incredibly rare and, in most fields, very easily caught. Maybe because philosophy is just a lot of writing and it's really hard to hide if you've plagiarized another person's writing. People can also be incredibly vigilant about this because they want credit and subfields are small. Everyone knows everyone, so it's easy to find anyone who's ripping off your work.

Being a graduate student is a little weird, at least in sufficiently selective fields at major institutions, etc. People from all over the world apply and it's only a handful who get in, which means a lot of people are moving huge distances without much of a support network (maybe they bring a partner along.) So the natural thing is for all of these people to be friends with each other, or at least vague acquaintances. And then you're all in classes together, but it's much smaller and more intimate than other classes. But you're also coworkers as well: you're all doing research and TAing for the university and most of the time you share an office. As a result I feel like we end up with this weird blending of work, classmate, and friend status that make upholding "professionalism" between graduate students a kind of Herculean (or maybe just Quixotic) task. And I suspect that just means a lot of grad students are going to have really weird intuitions about what it's okay to say to a colleague, etc. At least, it means that discussions in the department office feel much different from a work office downtown.

"Is dada gonna die?"

"No dada's not gonna die. Dada's gonna live a long, healthy life."

i think some of the replies are maybe underestimating the number of people who have killed themselves on the basis of academic failure 🤷‍♀️

#like it's a very very competitive world with a lot of people's sense of self worth riding on it #not me though. my self worth is riding on it and i'll be fine though

i do feel like "don't have kids" is completely fair to treat as a blockable offense sorry

The whole Jason Arday chronicle is really quite sad. Many in the know seem to think the evidence of plagiarism is quite strong, but I really think it was bad that this was made such a public spectacle. If this weren't a global news story maybe this guy would still be alive. I am reminded of the online backlash discourse of the 2010s that presents this need for restraint that we're unlikely to get: you should be able to criticize someone for doing something wrong, but tens of thousands of people hounding you with criticism is completely destructive to the psychological well-being of just about anyone. The institutional safeguards should have prevented anything like this from happening and people should have perhaps kept more of their criticism private and let the investigative process go to work. Just a lot of really unfortunate layers of social failure. Really tragic.

Like I remember reading a post by someone on tumblr who recalled seeing a little kid making faces at people on the train. The child's mother told them to knock it off. And the poster was like "Oh my god, it was so sad to see someone be forced to lose their childlike spirit and whimsy like that." And I just don't feel that way! Their mother should tell them to knock it off. You should be told to be courteous to other people. It's moral development!

I just like think we're working with a really hypertrophied sense of autonomy here and a kind of naive idealization of the subject before it is "molded" or "corrupted" by society. We are not born, but rather become agents. Cultivation, good judgment, a basic sense of the world—these are the kind of things needed to be a participant in the deciding of what you do. It is not as though we come into being fully formed. We are not perfect just the way we are and then taken from that state of perfect grace by the demands of society. Society is what shapes you into an agent and gives you the necessary scaffolding to be an eccentric individual. It is good to be forced to learn how to read. It is good to be forced to understand the respect and courtesy that living among other people demands of you. And we in some sense have to be forced to understand these things at a young age.

bangs?

trans girl, have bangs

trans girl, don't have bangs

not a trans girl

Voting ended on21h

tsarina-anadyomene

i guess it just seems a little lame to me to be edgy in the edginess echo chamber

tsarina-anadyomene

it's just like. if you want to be the shocking, transgressive guy you have to be shocking and transgressive to your audience (okay maybe for your audience it's more in a "wow makes you think" way and a little less than "mainstream society" but like it's still gotta shock them if you want the cred)

it looks like what summer eternal is doing right now is releasing a book of manifestos and developer diaries that are also a game announcement? for 70 euros?? this is all a little too zine-coded for me

kind of sad that Zero Parades didn't take off. It was really good

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