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The Response To The ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Has Been Mixed
Hotair.com ^ | 10-5-18 | John Sexton

Posted on 10/05/2018 6:33:08 PM PDT by DeweyCA

Wednesday I wrote about a trio of academics who wrote bogus papers and submitted them to supposedly serious journals to see if nonsense could be passed off as insight given enough earnest social justice framing of the ideas. What they found was that seven of the 20 bogus papers they wrote were accepted for publication. Apparently, the line between serious feminist scholarship and complete sophistry is pretty thin.

Dubbed “Sokal Squared” after a similar stunt by Alan Sokal in the late 90s, the hoax has generated a lot of feedback among academics. One of the most positive take came from Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer, who praised the hoax on Twitter and wrote a piece about it for the Atlantic:

If certain fields of study cannot reliably differentiate between real scholarship and noxious bloviating, they become deeply suspect. And if they are so invested in overcoming injustice that they are willing to embrace rank cruelty as long as it is presented in the right kind of progressive jargon, they are worsening the problems they purport to address.

It would, then, be all too easy to draw the wrong inferences from Sokal Squared. The lesson is neither that all fields of academia should be mistrusted nor that the study of race, gender, or sexuality is unimportant. As Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian point out, their experiment would be far less worrisome if these fields of study didn’t have such great relevance.


(Skip)

I’ll let Bret Weinstein, who has faced the practical outcome of grievance studies as few other academics have, give the last word: [Weinstein Twitter feeds follow]

@BretWeinstein Many who are new to this battle are confused about why some academics want to banish others

Here's why: these fields promote educational malpractice--been going on for decades. Now they are staging a coup to impose political fiction on the sciences using intimidation and stigma.

@BretWeinstein Replying to @BretWeinstein Oppression is real. If you want to help the oppressed, educate them. Don't induce them to obsess on injustice. Arm them to escape it.

These fields should never have been created, and they should have been shut down as it became clear they had no interest in genuine inquiry.

@BretWeinstein There is a way that the academy's meltdown is karmic. Students have been maleducated in gender and race studies all along. That should have been enough. But most academics are timid and busy, and so this intellectual infection was foolishly allowed to fester.

@BretWeinstein Replying to @BretWeinstein We now face the need for amputation, and that might not be enough.

What if it isn't? The academy plays a vital role in steering civilization. And we have allowed it to be crippled by facile assertions like: men and women would be the same but for the oppression of women.

@BretWeinstein It's a childish notion. Equality does not require us to be identical, nor is it difficult to understand how and why we evolved to be different. It's all up for debate, of course, but scientifically, not emotionally. Not under threat.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Philosophy; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: academicbias; academicfraud; academichoax; bretweinstein; sciencetrust
Bret Weinstein is the self-admitted progressive professor who was run out of Evergreen College in Washington state. He has seen first-hand the violence and intimidation that the progressive students feel justified in using. Progressive feel entitled to fake their research, as well as use violence. Their claims to intellectual superiority are bogus. It is nice to see a progressive prof acknowledge this.

Decades ago, David Horowitz, one of the major writers of the New Left in the 1970s, converted to conservatism and said that the "studies" departments in universities were nothing more than a payoff to the radical students and faculty. He said long ago that they are an academic sham and are nothing more than activist training centers for radical Leftists. He was right.
1 posted on 10/05/2018 6:33:08 PM PDT by DeweyCA
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To: DeweyCA

As Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian point out, their experiment would be far less worrisome if these fields of study didn’t have such great relevance.
****************************************************

All those fields of study are only relevant to those who’ve stupidly invested tens of thousands of dollars in a college indoctrination, and the degenerates and pathologicals that draw their paychecks from being indoctrinators in it.


2 posted on 10/05/2018 6:52:28 PM PDT by Grimmy (equivocation is but the first step along the road to capitulation)
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To: DeweyCA

It’s not about education. It’s about destroying critical thinking, indoctrination, and censorship.

Who would do something like that? And how patient would they have to be to accomplish it?

Read, “The Naked Communist,” published over 60 years ago. They revealed their plans and goals. They listed the detailed objectives needed, to accomplish their takeover. There are over r0 of them. Many have been accomplished.

The Courts are one of the biggest goals. Hence, what we are witnessing now.

It’s all tied together. And they never give up, but keep marching.

And they never stopped.


3 posted on 10/05/2018 8:12:59 PM PDT by Basket_of_Deplorables (Q: Believing Is Seeing!)
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To: Basket_of_Deplorables

THE NAKED COMMUNIST: 45 COMMUNIST GOALS

http://restoring-america.com/Documents/THE%20NAKED%20COMMUNIST%20GOALS%20WITH%20NOTES.pdf


4 posted on 10/05/2018 8:14:58 PM PDT by Jane Long (Praise God, from whom ALL blessings flow.)
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To: Basket_of_Deplorables

From the list:

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the U.S.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions, by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV & motion pictures.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural and healthy.”

Etc.


5 posted on 10/05/2018 8:19:57 PM PDT by Basket_of_Deplorables (Q: Believing Is Seeing!)
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To: Jane Long

“On Jan. 10, 1963, Congressman Albert S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read a list of 45 Communist goals into the Congressional Record. The list was derived from researcher Cleon Skousen’s book “The Naked Communist.”


6 posted on 10/05/2018 8:21:24 PM PDT by Basket_of_Deplorables (Q: Believing Is Seeing!)
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To: DeweyCA

There are academic ‘disciplines’ like Semiotics that are rich for pulling off hoaxes, because no one has any idea what the jargon used in it means.

It’s really just academic gibberish intended to sound impressive, as if it actually means something. It means nothing. Well, nothing other than that you’re not going along with the con if you identify it as bull$#!t.

The following is an example; try not the think of The Emperor’s New Clothes as you read it:

“Semiotics is the theory of the production and interpretation of meaning. It’s basic principle is that meaning is made by the deployment of acts and objects which function as “signs” in relation to other signs.”


7 posted on 10/05/2018 8:38:13 PM PDT by Pelham (California, how mass immigration transforms America into Obamaland)
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