Hoax Articles Expose Grievance Studies as Total B.S.

Three scholars who describe themselves as “left-leaning liberals” but who know enough to be appalled at what academia is degenerating into — James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose — have been exposing runaway moonbattery by publishing hoax articles in academic journals. Looks like they are having a high old time.

One article studied canine sexual misconduct in Portland parks:

The author admits that “my own anthropocentric frame” makes it difficult to judge animal consent. Still, the paper claims dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’” and issues “a call for awareness into the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.”

Clearly the #MeToo movement is speciesist if it does not address the oppression of dogs.

One of the trio’s hoax papers, published in April by the journal Fat Studies, claims bodybuilding is “fat-exclusionary” and proposes “a new classification . . . termed fat bodybuilding, as a fat-inclusive politicized performance.”

Peer reviewers apparently had no problem with this.

A hoax paper for the Journal of Poetry Therapy describes monthly feminist spirituality meetings, complete with a “womb room,” and discusses six poems, which Mr. Lindsay generated by algorithm and lightly edited.

The art of poetry succumbed to moonbattery some time ago.

Affilia, a peer-reviewed journal of women and social work, formally accepted the trio’s hoax paper, “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” The second portion of the paper is a rewrite of a chapter from “Mein Kampf.”

The hoax articles are intended not as pranks but as ethnography.

The trio say they’ve proved that higher ed’s fixation on identity politics enables “absurd and horrific” scholarship. Their submissions were outlandish—but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals. …

The trio say the biases in favor of grievance-focused research [are] so strong that their hoax papers sailed through peer review, acceptance and publication despite obvious problems.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in politics and the media, where even someone as lacking in credibility as Christine Blasey Ford is taken seriously on the grounds that she claims to be the victim of a politically incorrect oppressor.

Studies often prove what everyone already knew anyway. Here it is confirmed that liberal arts scholarship consists largely of nonsensical B.S. of no constructive use. Yet society pays through the nose for it through stratospheric tuition and massive taxpayer support for higher education.

On tips from 1-Bodhisattva and Steve T. Hat tips: David Thompson, The Other McCain.

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