Your comments here amount to bitter insulting stereotypes, without any support by evidence or analysis, or any real engagement with the people you disagree with. To an outside bystander with no stake in whatever game you are playing, this kind of uglyness largely discredits whatever point you were trying to make.
I would recommend keeping such rhetoric off of this forum. It doesn’t lead in a direction of productive conversation, and it feeds negative stereotypes about scientists/techies. There are many better venues for venting.
I am not venting at anyone, but expressing my concern over the damage being done to something I love.
I have insulted no person and I have proposed a positive agenda of having the STEM field step in to get rid of these grievance study areas from universities.
“Grievance studies” (like “social justice warrior”) is a made up term whose goal is to group together a large group of people with a wide range of interests, ideological premises, methodologies, etc., and dismiss/discredit them collectively without bothering to engage with their work.
You have called these scholars unintelligent, an infection, gangrenous, an existential threat to the university, etc. who must be “gotten rid of”.
What is your definition of “insult” if this doesn’t qualify? Or are you maintaining that “no person” is insulted if you aim your vacuous broadsides at a group?
You and others supporting your position here haven’t specified precisely who you are talking about, given any concrete evidence/explanation about what you are so mad about, provided any serious analysis, etc.
It’s pretty much “those Sneetches with no stars on their bellies on them are really terrible. We Sneetches with the stars should make sure to keep them out of our hallowed institutions.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie... (Trigger warning to delicate STEM students: Dr. Seuss with his message of diversity and toleration was a famous “grievance scholar”)
I've read non-scholarly writings about surfers including behavior/etiquette in the water and found it interesting. I think it would be a worthwhile subject for research. Examining human behavior in niches can be illuminating to different and broader contexts.
I think we inhabit such different intellectual universes that I doubt we can have a civil conversation, but let’s try.
If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?
As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed - "in the areas of cultural, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies." [1]
As for engaging with their work I don’t think that it is possible to have a rational discussion with people that think papers like these are worthwhile academic research [1].
Accepted and published
Helen Wilson (pseudonym) (2018). "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon". Gender, Place & Culture: 1–20. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346. (Retracted)
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding". Fat Studies. 7 (3): i–xiii. doi:10.1080/21604851.2018.1453622. (Retracted)
M. Smith (pseudonym) (2018). "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use". Sexuality & Culture. 22 (4): 1542. doi:10.1007/s12119-018-9536-0. (Retracted)
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant". Sex Roles. 79 (11–12): 762. doi:10.1007/s11199-018-0962-0. (Retracted)
Accepted but not yet published
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire". Hypatia.
Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: A Poetic Portrayal of Lived Feminist Spirituality". Journal of Poetry Therapy.
Maria Gonzalez, and Lisa A. Jones (pseudonyms). "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism". Affilia.
Revise and resubmit
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "Agency as an Elephant Test for Feminist Porn: Impacts on Male Explicit and Implicit Associations about Women in Society by Immersive Pornography Consumption". Porn Studies.
Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "The Progressive Stack: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy". Hypatia.
Stephanie Moore (pseudonym). "Super-Frankenstein and the Masculine Imaginary: Feminist Epistemology and Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence Safety Research". Feminist Theory.
Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy". Women's Studies International Forum.
Under review
Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Strategies for Dealing with Cisnormative Discursive Aggression in the Workplace: Disruption, Criticism, Self-Enforcement, and Collusion". Gender, Work and Organization.
So is a fair summary of your position: “Anyone working in roughly the same field as any journal editor who was taken in by a hoax should be fired from their job and removed from intellectual discourse, and their subjects of study should be blacklisted as inherently illegitimate”?
How far do you cast your net? You seem to want to throw out anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, literary criticism, etc. Are you going to scrap history, philosophy, political science, economics, education, religion, design, ... departments too?
Be careful what you wish for: an awful lot of scholarship in lower-tier STEM journals is also garbage, albeit typically a different flavor of garbage: unoriginal, lazy analysis, strong claims unsupported by the evidence, based on incorrect technical premises, making false advertisements of its practical applicability, massaging data in illegitimate ways, etc. (I know this because I spend a lot of time reading math and science papers in my spare time.) Even Nature and Science occasionally need to retract a paper when it turns out the author plagiarized it or falsified the data.
P.S. You didn’t need to copy/paste a wall of hoax paper titles from Wikipedia.
No. I am suggesting that I can't have a rational conversation with anyone who thinks the hoax papers are serious research. Surprisingly that is what I said.
I don't want to throw out any area of research, I want to throw out those that publish papers that pretend to be research.
I am very critical about researchers failings in the natural sciences. I am probably even more critical of bad science because it is so much more damaging.
I think the wall of hoax papers does rather get across the scale of the problem.
> I think we inhabit such different intellectual universes that I doubt we can have a civil conversation, but let’s try.
That's a pretty pompous thing to say...
>> “Grievance studies” (like “social justice warrior”) is a made up term whose goal is to group together a large group of people with a wide range of interests, ideological premises, methodologies, etc., and dismiss/discredit them collectively without bothering to engage with their work.
> If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?
You're being obtuse. It's obvious to anyone with experience of human society that terms can be made up that have very little utility beyond being insulting to some person or group.
The GP makes a valid point about the use and meaning of those terms. I can admit that even though I'm no fan of many of the ideas and attitudes that are lazily lumped under them.
> As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed
Would you like a system more like the Soviet Union's, where a political authority controls who gets admitted into academia and who gets kept out?
"Grievance studies" are all rooted in conflict theory, which was developed by one of sociology's three founding fathers, Karl Marx.
They are literally rooted in a single (disproven) theory that all relationships are based on power and dominance. These are the people I believe we are talking about, the ones who speak of power and oppression and some tribe or class that is in control and must be stopped in the name of virtue, subsequently going on a witch hunt finding evidence and evils wherever they look because they have been taught to use post-modern reasoning, a form of irrational reasoning meant to question logic but not be used as logic.
The tactics they use, weaponizing shame and applying post-modern reasoning/critical theory, is a Marxist socialist tactic when combined with his ideology that cuts to the core of the most fundamental human psychological need -- the need for social connection, validation (psychological or scientific), and by using reasoning that cannot be argued with rationally is disarming if not disorienting in a political fight/argument. There's even a word for when they use it against other radical socialist groups -- leapfrog paranoia -- meant to get the different intersectional factions to unite against a common enemy in order to seize power. This is all in their own words.
(sidebar - watch the documentary Hard Times at Douglas High, where an inner city debate team uses critical theory in a debate about anything to make it about racism in order to win. In other words all debates became about their narrative, and these were Baltimore kids in what was the first integrated high school, indoctrinated by their professor back in the 90s).
It's coercive and dishonest, not simply persuasive, and a form of violence. They force people to submit under threat of social disconnection, which research has shown is more brutal than physical violence because it's psychologically traumatic, permanent, and has a biological impact on the individual as well as a sociological impact. Guilt is saying you did something wrong, shame is saying you are something wrong. There is no greater authoritarian or fascist behavior, which needs to be pointed out as distinct from the field of study itself.
So if the words "grievance studies" or "social justice warrior" are offensive, perhaps a better and more historically accurate and verifiable label to apply would be to call them Marxists or conflict theorists? I don't think that would be completely fair because as pointed out, few even know what those words mean let alone the roots and origins of their own beliefs, the nature of the tactics they use, or the nature of reasoning and belief systems themselves. What word wouldn't be offensive that embodies the characteristics that define them to others? The "grievance studies" label seems scientifically accurate and neutral without any attached ideology or behaviors.
If this offends anyone it is not meant to, I take no sides in any of this and seek the value in studying all of it.
I would recommend keeping such rhetoric off of this forum. It doesn’t lead in a direction of productive conversation, and it feeds negative stereotypes about scientists/techies. There are many better venues for venting.