So, in rank defiance of our recent promise to 'get back to the nazis' instead we continue our James Lindsay coverage. (What... me? Irony? How dare you?) This time, Daniel patiently walks a distracted, slightly hyperactive, and increasingly incredulous Jack through the infamous 'Grievance Studies Hoax' (AKA 'Sokal Squared') in which Lindsay and colleagues Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian tried (and then claimed) to prove something or other about modern Humanities academia by submitting a load of stupid fake papers to various feminist and fat studies journals. As Daniel reveals, the episode was an orgy of dishonesty and tactical point-missing that actually proved the opposite of what the team of snickering tricksters thought they were proving. Sadly, however, because we live in Hell, the trio have only raised their profiles as a result. A particular highlight of the episode is Lindsay revealing his staggering ignorance when 'responding' to criticism. Content warnings, as ever. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Show Notes: James Lindsay, New Discourses, "Why You Can Be Transgender But Not Transracial."" https://newdiscourses.com/2021/06/why-you-can-be-transgender-but-not-transracial/ James Lindsay has a day job, apparently. "Maryville man walks path of healing and combat." https://www.thedailytimes.com/news/maryville-man-walks-path-of-healing-and-combat/article_5ea3c0ca-2e98-5283-9e59-06861b8588cb.html Areo Magazine, Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship. https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ Full listing of Grievance Studies Papers and Reviews. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19tBy_fVlYIHTxxjuVMFxh4pqLHM_en18 'Mein Kampf' and the 'Feminazis': What Three Academics' Hitler Hoax Really Reveals About 'Wokeness'. https://web.archive.org/web/20210328112901/https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-hitler-hoax-academic-wokeness-culture-war-1.9629759 "First and foremost, the source material. The chapter the hoaxers chose, not by coincidence, one of the least ideological and racist parts of Hitler's book. Chapter 12, probably written in April/May 1925, deals with how the newly refounded NSDAP should rebuild as a party and amplify its program. "According to their own account, the writers took parts of the chapter and inserted feminist "buzzwords"; they "significantly changed" the "original wording and intent” of the text to make the paper "publishable and about feminism." An observant reader might ask: what could possibly remain of any Nazi content after that? But no one in the media, apparently, did." New Discourses, "There Is No Good Part of Hitler's Mein Kampf" https://newdiscourses.com/2021/03/there-is-no-good-part-of-hitlers-mein-kampf/ On this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay, who helped to write the paper and perpetrate the Grievance Studies Affair, talks about the project and the creation of this particular paper at unprecedented length and in unprecedented detail, revealing Nilssen not to know what he’s talking about. If you have ever wondered about what the backstory of the creation of the “Feminist Mein Kampf” paper really was, including why its authors did it, you won’t want to miss this long-form discussion and rare response to yet another underinformed critic of Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose’s work. The Grieveance Studies Affair Revealed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVk9a5Jcd1k Reviewer 1 Comments on Dog Park Paper "page 9 - the human subjects are afforded anonymity and not asked about income, etc for ethical reasons. yet, the author as researcher intruded into the dogs' spaces to examine and record genitalia. I realize this was necessary to the project, but could the author acknowledge/explain/justify this (arguably, anthropocentric) difference? Indicating that it was necessary to the research would suffice but at least the difference should be acknowledged." Nestor de Buen, Anti-Science Humping in the Dog Park. https://conceptualdisinformation.substack.com/p/anti-science-humping-in-the-dog-park "What is even more striking is that if the research had actually been conducted and the results showed what the paper says they show, there is absolutely no reason why it should not have been published. And moreover, what it proves is the opposite of what its intention is. It shows that one can make scientifically testable claims based on the conceptual framework of gender studies, and that the field has all the markings of a perfectly functional research programme." "Yes, the dog park paper is based on false data and, like Sokal’s, contains a lot of unnecessary jargon, but it is not nonsense, and the distinction is far from trivial. Nonsense implies one cannot even obtain a truth value from a proposition. In fact, the paper being false, if anything, proves that it is not nonsense, yet the grievance hoaxers try to pass falsity as nonsense. Nonsense is something like Chomsky’s famous sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It is nonsense because it is impossible to decide how one might evaluate whether it is true. A false sentence would be “the moon is cubical.” It has a definite meaning, it just happens not to be true. "So, if the original Sokal Hoax is like Chomsky’s sentence, the dog park paper is much more like “the moon is cubical.” And in fact, a more accurate analogy would be “the moon is cubical and here is a picture that proves it,” and an attached doctored picture of the cubical moon." Reviewer 2 Comments on the Dog-Park Paper "I am a bit curious about your methodology. Can you say more? You describe your methods here (procedures for collecting data), but not really your overall approach to methodology. Did you just show up, observe, write copious notes, talk to people when necessary, and then leave? If so, it might be helpful to explicitly state this. It sounds to me like you did a kind of ethnography (methodology — maybe multispecies ethnography?) but that’s not entirely clear here. Or are you drawing on qualitative methods in social behaviorism/symbolic interactionism? In either case, the methodology chosen should be a bit more clearly articulated." Counterweight. https://counterweightsupport.com/ "Welcome to Counterweight, the home of scholarship and advice on [Critical Social Justice](https://counterweightsupport.com/2021/02/17/what-do-we-mean-by-critical-social-justice/) ideology. We are here to connect you with the resources, advice and guidance you need to address CSJ beliefs as you encounter them in your day-to-day life. The Counterweight community is a non-partisan, grassroots movement advocating for liberal concepts of social justice including individualism, universalism, viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas. [Subscribe](https://counterweightsupport.com/subscribe-to-counterweight/) today to become part of the Counterweight movement."" Inside Higher Ed, "Blowback Against a Hoax." https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent-academic-hoax-faces-disciplinary-action-portland-state Peter Boghossian Resignation Latter from PSU. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-university-sacrificed-ideas-for
As we've learned many times so far on the New Discourses podcast, I'm not that good at the original German.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.
Actually, no, it's not.
What it is, however, is another episode of I Don't Speak German featuring me, obviously, and Daniel, who will now also quote Shakespeare.
Lean and hungry look something, something.
I can't call it Shakespeare.
Sorry.
Technically, that counts. - Yes.
I had to memorize the seven ages of man in 10th grade and a bit of Romeo and Juliet.
That's about, that's about the limits of my Shakespeare memorization.
And yet, ironically, you always quote Julius Caesar instead of as you like it.
Which I, which I read is also in the same, which I read also in the same year.
I just remember that.
I just, I think I love that line for some reason.
Like it just, it always struck me as a, Quite a descriptor.
Anyway, we are here to expose my Shakespeare ignorance, is what we're actually doing here.
Yes, that's what this entire episode is going to be about.
I'm going to be humiliating Daniel for his ignorance of Shakespeare.
Yeah, exactly right.
Actually, no, that's not what we're doing.
That's next episode.
What we're doing this episode, 94, Is finally it's the second because we described our James Lindsay coverage when we did the first one, James Lindsay's conceptual penis a few episodes ago.
We described that as the first in a trilogy of James Lindsay episodes.
And, you know, you know, I'll still probably turn out to be, you know, 14 James Lindsay episodes.
But at the moment, we're still, as far as I know anyway, planning three.
And this is the second one.
This is our Empire Strikes Back, Two Towers.
of James Lindsay coverage and it's the it's the grievance studies hoax isn't it Daniel?
Yep that's it that's it so-called squared grievance studies hoax whatever we want to call it that's what we're talking about yeah we're going to be getting into that covering some of the history there and digging into some of the details of some of the things that Have been said about these papers by certain people.
So anyway, yeah, this is going to be, I mean, 87 was very kind of structured because I had a whole lot of material to get through and, you know, kind of had, I had a real through line.
This one is going to be a lot looser.
We're really just going to kind of talk around certain subjects.
We are going to try to give you a little bit of a grounding in, you know, kind of what this, what this thing was and what some of the kind of like fundamental problems of the grievance studies hoax are and some of the ways that it's affected kind of the larger, the larger movement as aware of the kind of like the, the, the, the lesser intellectual the larger movement as aware of the kind of like the, the, the, the lesser intellectual dark So, yeah.
Heterodox community.
Yes.
Yes.
Diving back into the IDW, the IDW briefly.
The sense makers, the sense makers, you know, sense making is one of those words that I get that I heard far too many times when I was reading papers on ivermectin and listening to people talk about ivermectin.
So, yeah.
Okay.
So where do you want to start with this?
Well, I actually want to start with a with a brief clip that's kind of a preview of the third episode that we're going to do about James Lindsay, which is going to be more about kind of where he is now in this kind of new discourses project.
Yeah.
If you remember back in episode eighty seven, we talked about how, you know, James Lindsay was kind of going on to various podcasts and kind of he had a blog.
He was writing books about atheism and was getting involved in kind of the atheist community.
Kind of going way back almost a decade at this point.
And as he kind of becomes increasingly reactionary, the more kind of fame he gets, he starts kind of embracing lots of like kind of really nasty ideas in some ways that are, you know, it's kind of resisting the SJW, resisting kind of what we now say like it's kind of resisting the SJW, resisting kind of what we now say like
But, like, the first clips that we played were him talking on another podcast about Peter Boghossian's tweet about how you should not be proud to be gay, or why should you be proud to be gay, because it's a characteristic that you did not create for yourself, and you didn't cause for yourself, right?
While I was doing my deep dive into listening to hours and hours of this new Discourses podcast in the midst of an episode entitled Why You Could Be Transgender But Not Transracial, and in fact starting in about like somewhere in the like two and a half hour mark of this, I think it's three and a half hour or so podcast episode, and we could
We could dig into this whole, like, we will talk more about this episode because it is bonkers and it is, you know, absolute, like it is, you know, yeah, it is way out there.
Demented.
Demented.
But.
Right here in the middle, he makes a little admission, which I think is interesting, and he refers back to that original tweet.
So, just to get a sense of James Lindsay, just to kind of waft in the cow manure that is James Lindsay speaking and talking and thinking style, let's revisit episode 87 slightly, just by This was released after we did episode 87, or I definitely would have included this clip.
So let's just play this very quickly.
It's about a minute and a half long.
And believe me, I cut this down.
I was going to play about three minutes, and then I'm like, no, no, we don't need that much in this context.
But it is This is out of context.
It's not really going to be clear what point he's making, which is very usual with listening to James Lindsay talk.
I was going to say, stay normal.
It would be very difficult to play any 30 seconds or a minute and a half of what he says and actually get any kind of real point out of it.
So just ignore the fact that you don't quite know what he's talking about and just listen to the admission that he makes here at the end and some of the language that he uses.
So That's why we're questioning.
You could look at your butch lesbians and the radical feminists.
This is why we're really questioning gender and its connections to sex and sexuality.
I shouldn't be pushed into having to be feminine when I don't want to.
We really need to look at the way that narratives or ideas about what it means to be manly might produce violence.
Let us be us.
This is why we're questioning these categories in the first place.
Those are reasonable incentives to begin from, but this progresses into positive acceptance, which is in the addiction literature called enablement.
Look how stunning and brave I am for transgressing boundaries in an oppressive society.
Celebrate me.
Make me special.
I'm special for doing friggin nothing.
This is where I got myself in trouble a long time ago on Peter Boghossian's recommendation, by the way.
Nobody knows that.
I just took that dive myself.
About gay pride.
Gay pride mixes up in this.
It's like that word pride means two things.
One is positive acceptance and one is unabashedness.
And it trades in that ambiguity on purpose.
The gay pride movement does.
And so that leaves a lot of dangerous room open.
There's a big difference between acceptance and positive affirmation.
And positive affirmation is not necessarily a good thing.
Sometimes, but not usually.
And acceptance, I think, is generally a good thing.
But not always.
Sometimes there are reasons to enforce taboos and norms and boundaries.
And the leftists, queer leftists, I mean queer theory leftists, tend not to understand this at all.
So right there in the middle there, you note, Boghossian put him up to this shit.
Yeah.
He went on, he went on these podcasts, he delved into this whole like, you know, this whole issue, pretending, you know, Pete's just a friend of mine.
I'm just defending him from, you know, I just think he should be, you know, kind of treated as an honest actor.
And it reveals like, no, no, Pete literally went like, hey, you should, there's a career in this for you.
It's kind of the implication that I get there, right?
You know?
Go jump out there, you know, make a name for yourself, questioning, you know, whether it's whether whether gay pride is the thing that people should be saying, you know, really rile up the queer community is, you know, it's a thing.
Yeah.
And I love that he kind of sheepishly admits that, you know, like, oh, yeah, nobody knows this, but Pete put me up to that.
Like, it's just like, what a fucking dipshit, man, you know?
This reveals like, you know, like one of the things that I want to get to in this episode.
And I hope people have listened to 87, because we're really going to kind of just dive right into this, right?
I think 87 is kind of needed background for this one.
One of the things that like I get into is like that there is simultaneously with the Grievance Studies hoax, you get this sense that like on one side of their mouth, they're saying, This was a serious bit of scholarship.
We were trying to expose the, you know, the gaps in the epistemology of, you know, these grievance studies, et cetera, et cetera.
And on the other side, they're saying like, oh, this was just a big jape.
We were just having fun with this and, you know, kind of doing the thing like they're doing.
They say both depending on like which place they're like kind of saying it in, right?
Absolutely right.
Yeah.
So we're not going to play a lot of clips of that, although believe me, I could have put together a massive clip package because Lindsey himself went on, I think he went on like two or three hundred podcasts within the last two years, at least referencing some of this material.
It is everywhere, like every single one of these like heterodox sphere, let's start thinking seriously about sense-making podcast, you know, trigonometry and the Debra So show and even Megyn Kelly.
I don't, yeah, he actually did appear on Megyn Kelly talking about like his relationship.
No, no, we went on Debra So and talked about that.
I don't know if he went on Megyn Kelly, but he went on all of these online right wing dipshit podcasts talking about all this stuff multiple times.
We're going to play a little bit from Joe Rogan here shortly.
It is infuriating just how much time this man has spent talking about this stuff.
And Megosian as well, although not to nearly the same degree.
He has not been nearly as kind of out there speaking as loudly.
And then Pluckrose, who mostly kind of sticks to Twitter and writing.
So I guess we should, you know, rewind a little bit and kind of talk about what the grievance studies thing was, right?
Before you do that, I just want to remark on one thing that jumped out at me from that clip you just played, which is the gays or what was it?
The queer leftists trading in ambiguity.
Oh no!
Scary!
Oh my goodness, there's ambiguity and they're trading in it.
You know, how nefarious and sinister that they're trading in the fact that the word pride can have different meanings in different contexts.
You dastardly fiends!
Well, and their whole, their whole, the whole like logic of that podcast episode is going to listen to the whole thing.
But the, the whole point of that podcast episode was to demonstrate that the reason you can be transgender, but not transracial is because of the perceived power that can be gained by using one versus the other.
And that there is like, like, In Lindsay's telling, that the activists, these activists under these different forms are actually, because they come from different places within society, they are just using this kind of language, this woke language to clobber
You know, normal right thinking, you know, white men effectively by using these terms and that the reason that one is considered valid within kind of the woke and the other is not is purely because of the perceived advantages that they can get from the productive class.
And now he doesn't say it in that many words, but like it's effectively, you know, he portrays, you know, these these movements and these activists as parasites that are, you know, seeking is taking, you know, Precious bodily fluids from, you know, from the reasonable people, you know.
And so, like, it is like, you know, again, I hate to just kind of play that out of context, not kind of give you a little bit more there.
There is so much in that because, like, he's just kind of, you know, he's leaving and bobbing, you know, In and out of various mental states in terms of the thing that he's trying to explore.
This is a guy who talks into a microphone like somebody who spent six or seven years writing 5,000 words a couple of times a week on a blog post.
There are very many of his podcast episodes.
I think this is a podcast that should have been a blog post.
Because it is, you know, you could organize yourself so much better by writing this down.
And clearly this is not the medium for you.
And they're all him by himself as well, which is, you know, the rambling single person talking without much focus podcast is about the least entertaining form of podcast out there from my perspective.
You've got to be very talented as a broadcaster to do that.
And look, I'm not throwing stones against another amateur.
Believe me, you know, I am aware that I also do not have the best microphone performance.
But that's why I have Jack to correct me and edit me and to, like, bounce me away when I start doing stupid shit, which might be now.
God help you if I'm your safety net.
But yeah, I mean, there is a serious point there.
I mean, it made me laugh, I have to say.
It's like, you know, these sneaky queers, queer leftists and their ruthless exploitation of the fact that language has ambiguity.
There is also kind of a serious point here, which is, I don't know that we might, I don't know how far we're going to go into this, but we might be anticipating something we're going to talk about, which is that these people, while they claim to be criticizing the extent to which like post-modernism or post-structuralism or whatever they call it, You know, the cultural turn.
They go on and on and on about how their targets think that language constructs reality.
They say, oh, there's this all these discourses.
It's interesting, actually, that he called his thing new discourses, because discourse is one of those like.
It's one of those words, you know, it's, it's a, but yeah, I mean, they go on and on about this, about how the fundamental error is that the people in these disciplines, they think that they put too much emphasis on language is constructing social.
And it's pure.
Projection.
Because that's them.
They are the ones who think that.
Because they think that... You've just been talking about it.
You've just been talking about how, you know, he says apparently the difference between transgender and transracial is that the language confers material advantages.
Right.
Or at least that we're using, you know, that these activists are using language as sort of a club with which to beat people over the head, like that they're using this kind of language to create social positionality or something to that effect.
Yeah, they're creating this situation where, you know, white men are terribly oppressed and hounded and so on through just using certain words.
Right.
No, exactly.
For sure.
No, there's definitely a lot there that we will get into when we actually do the New Discourses episode.
So, you know, but I just wanted to highlight that as a little bit of a bridge back into James Lindsay's thinking, kind of what he's doing more recently and kind of where, you know, to kind of bridge 87 and whatever the third part of this, whatever number we get to by the time I decide to talk about James Lindsay again.
So, yeah, we should we should talk a little bit about what the Grievance Studies Affair actually was.
I don't know the details, but I'd be prepared to bet internal organs that a lot of this is just complete carny bullshit, right?
And people are left from the cycle, from the cycle of, you know, Initial reporting, and then the flurry of opinion pieces, followed by, you know, all the blog entries and all the podcasts covering it.
And as I say, again, Twitter is like the little cameo.
It comes and goes instantly in cultural time instantly.
And then People are left with the impression, you know, vague and nebulous, oh well there was this uh flap about this and you know some people said that and some people said the other and uh didn't they didn't they uh submit papers to you know and there's a real material story there which is almost certainly about dark money being funneled to propagandists who then carried off an absolute as I say carny fraud
Which is lost in the sea of broader cultural awareness.
And what, you know, the sort of highlights of this, the Grievance Studies hoax, is you have, it's Lindsay Pluckrose and Boghossian, who are academics, now that, again, who are they, where are they, what are they doing, who's funding them, why, etc.
And they do Again, they spent ages honing, as far as I know, they spent ages honing their articles so that they would trick people.
So the impression is that they just created hoax articles and sent them off, and thoughtless academics, brainless academics just accepted them.
It seems more like they kept on trying over and over and over again to create, you know, it's like, it's like the screwing up the ball of paper and throwing it at the wastebasket and you keep on missing.
But at the end of it, you say, well, you know, best of three, best of 10, best of 20.
And then, you know, you won.
The Rimmer methodology.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what they did.
They kept on honing it until they got these fake articles to a state that would get accepted.
We're going to cover some of that, believe me.
I've got some doozies here, so yes, we will definitely cover that.
But these three people, after the conceptual penis hoax in 2017, Lindsay, being confronted with, like, you haven't proved anything, you've got something published in a pay-to-play journal, literally anybody can do that, decided, well, let's expand this and let's try to do this for real.
And his telling of it in various places, he kind of will say, well, initially we were just trying to write like kind of basic hoax papers to just kind of get out there, just kind of doing more of the conceptual penis stuff.
And those got like rejected immediately.
And then we decided, well, we need to actually like study this stuff and actually learn enough about it in order to write real papers.
And so like, he actually kind of waffles a bit on whether they should be called a hoax, because he's kind of says, well, initially we were hoaxing.
And then later on, we decided we couldn't actually hoax people.
So these are real papers.
You see, these are not hoax papers.
These are real papers because we understood the material well enough to get these, you know, accepted and published, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
They like again.
Yeah, that's cool.
Talking out of both sides of his mouth as to whether this is like a like legitimate activity in terms of like research or whether this is just, you know, dark money.
Fueled right-wing propaganda.
It's the latter.
And for a long time, he also denied that he was getting any money for this.
And so whether he was getting money directly for this project is unknown, but he has later admitted that he did get funding from unknown, unnamed sources, which are almost certainly named Michael O'Fallon.
Of the of the sovereign nations, which we will cover in much more detail in the next episode and the next time that we talk about James Lindsay by necessity.
So we're not getting into that right now, but not bad conspiracy theorists, far right Christians, basically.
Before we get into the next clip, did you ever find out, did it kind of run across your attention what James Lindsay actually did for a living during this period, like after he was drummed out of academia or after he left academia, whatever the story, you want to tell us?
For several years, he owned a, and possibly still does, he owns a massage therapy studio.
He is a masseuse.
He is a self-employed masseuse.
Yes.
And apparently it comes from, you know, he said in his 20s, he had severe lower back pain and struggled with it for many years.
And then like, finally, Like, learned massage as a way of, you know, kind of coping with that.
And then, you know, started this massage studio.
There is a article in the show notes, Maryville Man Walks Path of Healing and Combat from 2012 that talks about, it's like a puff piece about his, about his massage studio.
So if you've ever gotten a massage in Maryville, Tennessee, very possible that it was James Lindsay doing it.
So just be aware of that.
I don't know how you cure your own back pain by learning to massage other people, but I believe he was like getting massages from someone else and then like kind of like learned the process from that.
I mean, it's kind of vague exactly how how that worked, but like he got interested in massage based on his own like lower back pain and his own kind of chronic problems.
And then at least it's this a story that's cold told in that 2012 piece.
So who knows if he was bullshitting then kind of what the story is.
Also, I do have enormous sympathy for anyone who suffers from lower back pain, just to be clear.
Yes, absolutely.
But in this case, it does kind of make you want to go to his massage therapy place and pretend you've got lower back pain and get a massage from him and then go, haha, I don't really have lower back pain.
That proves you're not a masseuse.
Exactly, exactly.
So I've got a link to the original Aerial Magazine post, I think largely written by Pluck Rose.
This does kind of feel more like her style.
It is very, very long and goes through the entire process of exactly how this thing worked from kind of their perspective.
And it includes kind of discussion of the kind of the very, of all 20 of the Attempted to be written papers, etc, etc.
So we're going to be kind of working off of that document a bit today.
And so I'm just going to like, you know, so if you're in a place where you can sit down to a computer monitor and go and kind of read through this, that may help you kind of get through the rest of this episode, at least somewhat so.
Or go back and kind of read it later or something like that.
But anyway, it's there.
We're going to be working off it to some large degree.
Anyway, there's also like three quarters of the way down the page, there is a link to the full to a Google Drive link that has like kind of the full papers and the full reviews.
And, you know, some of the media around it, some of the kind of their press kit that they that they wrote up for it.
If you go back and look at the original posting back when this thing originally happened in 2018, that link is not on that archive page.
They added it sometime after that.
I presume they got a lot of criticism that we'd actually like to see all these papers if they are as bad as you say they are.
Spoiler alert, maybe they should have not released all that data because.
Anyway, let's go ahead and play our next clip here.
This is from the Joe Rogan podcast.
I believe it's episode 1197.
It's Boghossian and Lindsey talking about this project, kind of talking about the Grievance Studies project.
Now we played a little bit of this exact same episode in episode 87, where Lindsay was talking about his, about his kind of academic background.
This is like a minute or two after that.
So this is kind of at the very beginning of the, that Joe Rogan experience episode.
There is a link to the, to this kind of clip on, you know, you can Google this.
This is like a 19 minute clip out of the full three hour or whatever episode it is on YouTube.
And it is on the, I mean, And the Joe Rogan Experience YouTube page actually puts this out there.
It's still up.
So even though he's now behind the paywall on Spotify or behind the garden, the, you know, the bounded garden on Spotify, you can't actually watch this for free.
So I'm just going to play this next clip here.
And this is them again.
We're just kind of setting the stage.
Of, you know, what this thing actually was here.
So, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm aware that you asked me to explain what it actually was, and I completely failed to do that.
But we get we get we get into we get into some interesting spaces there.
And I think I think people tuning into this will have at least a general idea.
I think we have described it well enough, but it is worth kind of getting it out of, you know, from the horse from the horse paced mouth, if you know what I mean.
Well, let's explain what you guys did.
Yeah, so we started about a year, I guess a year and a half ago now, it was last summer, we started writing a bunch of academic papers for the journals that represent these fields.
And so everybody understands what an academic paper is getting out of the gate.
This isn't like an op-ed that you dash off for like Washington Post or some magazine or whatever.
This is a thing like academics work their careers to write one or two of these a year.
Yeah.
And so they're really hard to write.
They're supposed to be hard to get published.
So we wrote 20 of them in 10 months.
And seven of those got accepted.
Four were actually published.
And then we got at least four more.
Yeah, we got busted and at least four more were on track.
Maybe five or six more would have gotten in.
What's the difference between getting accepted and getting published?
So, the process with everything in academia is really slow, and a lot of people don't know this.
So, you send off this article, the editor looks at it, and the editor either gives it the thumbs up or the thumbs down.
If they give it the thumbs up, it goes off to peer reviewers, and that process takes months.
Often, as long as—I mean, we had one paper that was eight months under peer review.
So, the reviewers look at it, they try to figure out if the arguments are good, they try to figure out if the research is good.
They evaluate that.
They give extensive comments.
They send it back to you.
Then you have to revise it according to whatever they say.
Make it better is what's supposed to happen.
They made ours crazier.
So first of all, we wrote 20 in 10 months.
Well, you published four among three people.
And they were all pretty fraudulent, particularly your kind of flagship one was really built on academic fraud.
I mean, just straight up, like it was.
That kind of rounds to like one per person per year.
I mean, just, you know.
And you were making shit up the whole time.
I just wanted to say that out front there that like, they always are like, Oh, look at how many we produced and look at all this stuff that we did.
And like, no, no, no, you, you got four papers, fraudulent papers, four fraudulent papers.
Among three people in a year or so, like that is by your standard, one paper per year.
That's the standard, right?
Yeah.
In that clip, he says, oh, you know, they're really hard to write and they're hard to get published.
And academics spend their entire careers on this stuff.
And they, you know, they write maybe one or two a year.
We wrote 20 in 10 months.
Right.
And they all laugh.
So the joke there is obviously Oh, they're not really that hard to write, are they?
These silly academics who, you know, protect the mystique of their profession, their supposed intellectualism.
Actually, this stuff they do is piss easy.
You know, that's the joke there, right?
Right.
I just want to point out, especially in these fields, I think it's sort of the implied is the implication there, right?
Like, sure.
These fields are so like, they're just like childlike.
They have no academic rigor at all.
And therefore you can just Absolutely.
Yeah, that's right.
That's the joke.
That's what they're all snickering at.
as you choose to if you have any kind of ability whatsoever.
And so this is like there is this kind of implication that this is like the kiddie pool, you know, of academia, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's right.
That's the joke.
That's what they're all snickering at.
I just want to point out, and I apologize to our listeners for pointing this out because I'm sure they don't need anybody to, but it's a lot easier to write an academic paper when you're just making shit up.
Than it is to write an academic paper about, you know, real stuff that requires research and checking.
is Indeed, indeed.
I just thought I'd, you know, just thought I'd say that.
So one of the papers that kind of got a lot of attention in this was the rewriting of Mein Kampf paper.
And this was a... They even put the phrase my struggle in the title, don't they?
Like feminism is my struggle or something like that.
Well, the reality is, like, it wasn't just, you know, we did, we wrote Mein Kampf or we tried to, like, get portions of Mein Kampf published in an academic journal.
The issue was that they did this at least three times with three different papers in terms of, like, trying to get bits of Mein Kampf published.
So this one was, quote unquote, accepted in a journal called Ophelia.
And the title is, Our Struggle is My Struggle, Solidarity Feminism as an Intersexual Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.
The thesis that they claim, at least in this kind of aerial magazine piece, is that feminism, which foregrounds individual choice and responsibility and female agency and strength, can be countered by a feminism which unifies in solidarity around the victimhood of the most marginalized women in society.
And then the purpose that they claim is to see if we can find theory to make anything grievance related.
In this case, part of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf with fashionable buzzwords switched in acceptable to journals if we mix to match fashionable arguments.
And so what they're claiming is We just changed a couple of words in Mein Kampf and got a whole bunch of that published, and this just shows how regressive and evil these things are.
They will literally publish segments of Mein Kampf with slight alteration if we just make it about feminist issues.
Guess what?
Not actually what they did.
Yeah, exactly.
There is a takedown by this guy last name Nilsson over in Horetz, who is actually a Hitler scholar and has read, presumably read Mein Kampf many times and is very familiar with the text.
And I have a link here to actually an archive, archive.org link, because it's like behind a Free paywall, you've got to put in an email address anyway, so I put a link here to it.
This is part of his commentary on it, definitely worth reading this whole piece if you choose to.
First and foremost, the source material.
The chapter the Hoaxers chose, not by coincidence, one of the least ideological and racist parts of Hitler's book.
Chapter 12, probably written in April-May 1925, deals with how the newly founded NSDAP should rebuild as a party and amplify its program.
According to their own account, the writers took parts of the chapter and inserted feminist buzzwords.
They significantly changed the original warning and intent of the text to make the paper publishable and about feminism.
An observant reader might ask, what could possibly remain of any Nazi content after that?
But no one in the media apparently did.
So, exactly.
If you look at this, if you look at like where he actually compares, you know, kind of side by side, the text in the published article and the text from chapter 12, the bits that are included are literally just like fragments of sentence structure.
You know, it's just like, and I, I've said this many times before, but subject and object, you can't just reverse those and not change the meaning of the sentence.
Yeah, exactly.
It's kind of basic how language works.
The Nazis killed the Jews in World War II and the Jews killed the Nazis in World War II are not equivalent statements.
The word order in English You know, I admit there are other languages in which this is not the case, but in English, the word order actually matters there.
And, you know, you actually change the truth value of a sentence by which nouns you use.
You know, again, I hate to have to be pedantic about this, but like, it would be one thing if like, they had just like lifted out like a bit of like, you know, like, and the, you know, the Jews must be annihilated or whatever, you know, like, like, You know, some, some really kind of overtly racist screed and then like change the word Jew to men, you know, like that's the sort of thing they're implying that they did here, which isn't the thing that they did at all.
Right.
Like just, just fundamentally, it's just, it's just a false claim in terms of like what they did.
Yeah, the chapter in question is about party organization and campaigning and stuff like that.
Yeah.
And even if, you know, by using that text in particular, they're being deliberately provocative.
They're making it sound like, you know, they took the sentence, the Jews are responsible for capitalism and they, you know, they put it in a feminist article and they just changed it to the Jews are responsible for patriarch.
That's...
Or the men are responsible for capitalism or, you know, the patriarchy is responsible for capitalism.
And even then, you know, there's definitely an arguable case to be made for that.
I'm not even, like, arguing that, you know.
One of the things that you find over and over again in this project is that they find, like, certain kinds of quote-unquote woke conclusions to be so absurd that to write a paper that then, like, agrees with those conclusions is fundamentally fraudulent because no one could reasonably come to those conclusions.
We'll get to this in a second when we talk about the Dog Park paper.
I've got a nice quote from another scholar here that I want to get into.
You can't actually take a conclusion you disagree with that you think is resolutely absurd, and then write a paper that comes to that conclusion, and then submit that paper to a journal which largely agrees with that conclusion, or whose authors are going to agree with that conclusion, and then declare that the whole thing is fraudulent because, well, I didn't believe that, and I wrote it down, and so because you believed it, The egg is on your face?
Yeah, it's textbook assuming the question under dispute, isn't it?
It's textbook assuming your premises.
Right.
I mean, I'm an atheist.
If I wrote a paper, like a theology paper, that like, you know, let's talk about how God totally exists, and I'm going to write a paper for that, and I'm going to publish it under a false name and pretend to be some Catholic priest, And then, like, if I managed to kind of hoax the, you know, the Catholic Journal or whatever, and it got published, that doesn't mean that God doesn't exist, you know?
And this is exactly what they did.
They managed to prove the banality that, you know, certain kinds of opinions that they don't agree with tend to crop up in these sectors of academia.
Yeah.
And if I submitted a paper to, you know, a like kind of neoliberal economics journal that, you know, said like rah-rah free trade, you know, capitalism is great, regulations bad, you know, I would very likely be able to get that published much more likely than I would something that looked more critically at those kinds of assumptions, you know, like, Again, like, you know, what, what, what has this done?
You know, fundamentally, even assuming like, kind of good faith at this point, like this, I mean, it's just, it's complete nonsense.
It's done nothing.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, I write, I could write, you know, your bog standard Mises.com article and send it to Mises.com and probably get it published.
You know, if I then say, look, they published it.
I mean, that doesn't prove anything except that they're Mises.com.
I didn't believe this and I got it published.
Therefore, her conclusion is bad.
What?
But as you say, changing the words changes the meaning, you know, because words have meanings.
You know, as I always say, politics has content as well as form.
So, you know, if you have a bit of Mein Kampf where Hitler says the Jews should all be put in prison and you change it to murderers should all be put in prison.
You know, that changes the proposition.
At the very least, certainly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That doesn't mean that we, you know, I mean, you know, that's a prison abolition being a separate subject.
But, you know, the fact that Hitler thought that some people of some kind ought to be in prison doesn't prove anything about the validity of prisons one way or the other.
Not at all, not at all.
So, I didn't pull a clip from this, but I was re-listening to a podcast episode.
So, as you may be aware, James Lindsay is not someone to respond in good faith to his critics in any sense, as opposed to sending Twitter mobs after them is more his response, or mocking them, or saying something horrifyingly racist about them.
Because that's part of his business model now, A professional reactionary propagandist is to also be a bully.
No, absolutely.
And he is very much a bully on Twitter and elsewhere, I presume.
I have a lot of James Lindsay screenshots.
I run across them on a regular basis and save them to my extensive phone archive of James Lindsay nonsense.
He did actually record a podcast episode that I was re-listening to this afternoon, responding to this article, which is unusual.
Miranda's around, he does not really get anywhere in particular about this, but one of the things that he does is he calls out this author, this man, Nilsson, for saying, for using the term NSDAP in that quote that I just read you.
And he said, I went and I looked it up and I don't, my German is bad.
Everybody knows my German is bad, but then, and then he reads out what NSDAP means in German.
And he says, this is the Nazi party.
He doesn't tell you that.
He doesn't tell you.
He's just trying to imply that this isn't the Nazi party.
It's like the sneaky thing this guy is trying to do.
And it's like everyone with any degree of knowledge about the history of like, you know, Germany in that era knows what NSDAP means.
This man is an academic who has studied Hitler.
He is writing for a Jewish audience.
You know, like that is the level of criticism.
Chapter 12.
Which I already claimed was the one and I just told you a few minutes ago why I chose chapter 12.
Probably written in April, May 1925.
Deals with how the newly re-founded, I love this, this is so dishonest.
Deals with how the newly re-founded NSDAP should rebuild as a party and amplify its program.
Okay, so we have a historian dealing with Hitler, right?
And he's writing this thing.
First thing he points out here, what does based on Mein Kampf actually mean?
The first thing he does is he tries to point out that this chapter, chapter 12, isn't that bad.
Okay.
Then he doesn't even deal with the situation honestly.
So I'm going to deal with the situation honestly.
So deals with how the newly refounded NSDAP should rebuild as a party and amplify its program.
As we've learned many times so far on the New Discourses podcast, I'm not that good at the original German, but what is the NSDAP?
So I went to my favorite not Google search engine and typed in N-S-D-A-P.
That's all I typed.
Press enter.
What's the top result that comes back?
Wikipedia.
Nazi Party.
Yeah, so N-S-D-A-P stands for National-Socialistisch-Deutsch-Arbeiter-Party.
In other words, the Nazi Party.
The National Socialist German... I don't know what Arbeiter means in German.
Party.
Anyway, the point is, this is the Nazi party.
But why didn't he just say that?
Why did he hide it behind NSDAP, which obviously most readers would not recognize?
Why didn't he just call it the Nazi party?
That's unbelievable.
Anyway.
You said that you said that article was inherent.
Yeah, that's the Israeli paper of record.
I mean, yeah, everybody reading that knows exactly what NSDAP means.
It's, you know, it's absurd.
It's like, it's like saying, you know, the GOP in the New York Times or whatever, people going like, they don't want you to know that's the Republican Party.
They called it the GOP.
Every person with any degree of interest in this topic understands that implicitly.
It's fine.
I knew that when I was 11 years old.
Believe me, it's fine.
And the fact that James Lindsay thinks this is some kind of hidden, forbidden knowledge tells you exactly the degree of his ability to research shit at all.
That is breathtaking.
Yeah, no.
So I've included a link to this.
There is no good part of Hitler's Mein Kampf.
So if you do want to go listen to the whole thing, it is there for your amusement, I suppose.
There's no good part.
That is so slimy.
There's no good part of Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Nobody said there was a good bit.
Yeah, one of the least racist part of the like, the most racist book that's ever been written, you know, sort of like that's his attitude.
It's like, you know, um, you know, it's just this complete lack of sophistication, right?
Which should not be surprising, you know, like this isn't, but if you're pretending to... There are bits that taken out of context and disguised with the words changed are unexceptionable, James.
That's what's being said.
Right.
But he has to pretend that that's not what we're saying about that.
He has to pretend that we're like pretending that, you know, the Nazi ideology isn't that bad if it's used in defense of feminism or whatever, you know, like, like, and that's and that's why, you know, the minute you start looking at this stuff at any level of detail, it falls apart instantly.
Which I think we should move on into the doc part paper, right?
Yeah.
This was their crown jewel.
This actually was accepted and published.
And this is their kind of like, again, crown jewel.
This is the one that they point to is like completely ridiculous conclusion is completely ridiculous paper.
That nobody ever should have taken seriously for a moment.
And that just proves that not only that these journals don't have proper academic guidelines, they're not looking at these things with rigor, but that the fundamental epistemology of these entire fields is bankrupt because they published this thing, which very obviously could not have been an empirical study to begin with.
So the idea here is that they published this paper full of fake data and fake graphs and a fake methodology in which they went out to, they claim, it's written by, they published this under a pseudonym, Helen Wilson, from Portland Ungendering Research Initiative, which is not a thing that exists.
And they claim that this woman went to Portland and dog parks Over some, you know, large number of hours, like thousands of hours, and observed interactions between, you know, male dogs, you know, whenever, whenever there is kind of unwanted contact between dogs of various genders.
And so when a male dog would like hump another male dog versus a female dog, or when I like a female dog would hump a female dog as opposed to a male dog, And how often the kind of human participants, the owners of the dogs, would intervene based on whether it was a same-sex dog-dog hump or whether it was an opposite-sex dog-dog hump?
And then measured like the difference between these two types of interactions and found that there is, you know, kind of an implicit homophobia and oppression because when there was a same-sex humping, the owners were far more likely to intervene versus if it was an opposite sex right so is it clear so far like what the what the paper is at least claiming that it did oh yeah i'm following along with the dog you know
so um first of all like this is a completely built on empiricism like paper right like this is how Had you actually done this research and come to this conclusion, this would be eminently publishable.
This is not a bad paper, except for the fact that no detail in this.
None of this was ever performed.
None of this was ever done.
Everything was completely fictionalized.
This was fundamentally based on lies.
It was straight-up fraud.
And so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to play you a little clip from a little mini documentary by this guy, Mike Nena.
Mike Naina is an Australian filmmaker.
I looked at his IMDb.
He's done some directing in Australian television.
He's done some shorts, a couple of like little documentaries and that sort of thing.
And he has since moved to the United States and he is kind of the documentarian of this kind of IDW sphere.
We've mentioned him before when we talked about kind of the early Brett and Heather stuff.
He did the three-part documentary about how they got ousted or how they left Evergreen State College.
So, he is very kind of connected with this stuff.
He's probably not worth an episode of his own unless he actually gets the full documentary made.
But we are going to play kind of this little short clip that comes from the Grievance Studies Affair Revealed.
And this is presumably, I mean, within the form of this documentary, this is when Lindsay Pluckrose and Boghossian discovered that the Dog Park paper had been accepted for publication.
And this is a bit of audio that I'm playing from this little mini documentary.
So it's got music under it.
It's got, you know, this is an edited piece.
Again, there's a link to this in the show notes.
You can go view it at your leisure if you choose to.
But this really reveals, I think, the attitude with which these people are taking.
And I'm not trying to, like, kind of hammer this home, except I do think it's worth, like, whenever they kind of pretend, no, this had, like, kind of serious academic merit or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is what they really believe about this.
We have our first win.
The Dog Park paper has been accepted.
They don't know.
We're about to tell them.
I gotta read you something.
Let's check this out very quickly.
Is the light okay in here?
I like it.
Yeah, yeah.
I just read my email.
We have our first win.
The dog park paper has been accepted.
They don't know.
We're about to tell them.
I've got to read you something.
Dear Dr. Helen Wilson, I have now closely considered the revisions of your manuscript, dog park, and will recommend its publication in gender, place, and culture. - Yay!
You have done very good work to address the issues your viewers raise and have clarified your arguments.
Thank you for your contribution to Gender, Place, and Culture, and I hope to be seeing your manuscript in print.
Yours truly, P.H.D.
Managing Editor, Gender, Place, and Culture.
I have an accepted paper in the number one feminist geography journal.
Since approximately June of 2017, I, along with two other concerned academics, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, have been writing intentionally broken academic papers and submitting them to highly respected journals in fields that study gender, race, sexuality, and similar topics.
We did this to expose a political corruption that has taken hold of the university.
By this point, several of these papers have been accepted in highly respected journals, and one, that claims that dog humping incidents can be taken as evidence of rape culture, has been officially honored as Excellent Scholarship.
I'm not going to lie to you, we had a lot of fun with this project.
The reviewers are worried that we didn't respect the dog's privacy!
That's their concern!
Nobody respected their privacy!
But don't let that lead you to believe that we're not addressing a serious problem.
Because, you know, when you put comedy music under something that proves it's silly.
Right, right.
I do just want to I left in that kind of extended clip to where, you know, they are reading this acceptance letter and, you know, they're talking about, you know, they were worried we didn't respect the dog's privacy.
If you do a control F in the actual like document, they receive the word privacy does not occur.
The reviewer comment that I believe they're responding to is, you know, and I quote here, page nine, the human subjects are afforded anonymity and not asked about income, et cetera, for ethical reasons.
Yet the author is researcher intruded into the dog spaces to examine and record genitalia.
I realized this was necessary to the project.
Could the author acknowledge, explain, justify this arguably anthropocentric difference, indicating that it was necessary to the research and would suffice, but at least the difference should be acknowledged.
You may think that it's kind of silly to think about like, well, you know, we are kind of invading the dog's sort of autonomy and we are like performing research, et cetera, et cetera.
And that like, who cares?
It's a fucking dog like that.
I mean, that's obviously the kind of their perspective, but this is also, you know, kind of a, this is a, you know, a journal, this is a feminist journal that is like looking at, you know, kind of issues of speciesism and issues of, you know, like, how do we actually explore these kinds of geographic spaces within, um, Within these issues.
And the whole paper is meant to, presumably, the point is to explore how rape culture, quote-unquote, can exist within a species that is not human, and how that might be impacted by human social structures.
An acknowledgement that, yes, we know that we were not able to actually gain consent of the dogs in order to do this research.
I mean, it sounds silly kind of taken out of context, but that's the field, that's the journal, that's what you're doing here, right?
And so, for me, it just indicates the way...
If they had wanted to be taken seriously in this regard, they could have written pieces that explored why these issues are not worth taking seriously.
If they had actually studied these fields, presumably they could have gotten critical pieces published within these journals that would be real papers If they were willing to actually explore this in a realistic way and actually engage with the scholarship.
But by the time they actually engage with the scholarship and understand these fields, it becomes very obvious that this is not actually just a nothing Crumpled ball of scholarship that you can destroy immediately by applying basic arithmetic to it or whatever, you know, like, and that's, that's kind of what I'm trying to highlight there, right?
Like, they are getting actual responses on this stuff.
And if you look at the reviewer comments for all of these papers, like, They will highlight kind of the very respectful kind of boilerplate language like we think this adds a very real you know contribution to the field etc etc and they ignore the actual critical comments that they're getting below that actually like question kind of basic facts about methodology and you know
Sort of like an interpretive schema and imply that, like, you have not actually read very widely in these fields, and you actually don't know some of the kind of contradictory research, etc, etc.
Like, there is very real critical engagement being given to these people for these, like, false papers.
And you find this all through all of the reviewer comments for every single one of these papers, even the most kind of nonsensical.
There is real weight given to this, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And look, if you want to demonstrate that a particular field is, you know, bunk or contains a lot of bunk, Engage with the actual field as it actually exists.
Go through these journals and find the articles that are in it, that are actually there, because if it is this ridiculous, then they must be, that talk about things this irrelevant and silly, and pick them apart.
If you don't If you can't do that, then presumably it's because you can't, because there isn't anything that obviously ridiculous in them.
So you have to put it in yourself.
I mean, to me, the very act of doing this is like an admission of defeat.
It's the equivalent of putting the goofy laugh track underneath the Oompa Loompa song underneath the video to make the thing seem ridiculous when really it's not.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's by no means obvious to me that it would be, if this were actually something that had happened, that it would be sociologically uninteresting, you know, that there's no potential sociological interest in different Human attitudes and reactions to dog behavior, depending upon how people perceive the gender dynamics among the animals.
I mean, a lot of specialist fields, if you get into the nitty gritty, Yeah, a lot of it can seem very trivial and very silly.
You don't even have to go to sociology.
I mean, you could definitely, you know, kind of like take something from, you know, wildlife biology, for instance.
I mean, you know, who cares about, like, what exact strains of viruses might be found in bats in caves in China?
What possible impact could that have on the world?
Clearly not something that we should be putting our, you know, hard-earned tax dollars into studying.
Yeah, it can't possibly be, you know, just show people pictures of bats and bat guano and pictures of pangolins, which are kind of inherently funny looking animals.
Right.
And, you know, put comedy music underneath, put Yakety Sax underneath.
Oh, you know, scientists want to study this.
Oh, how goofy.
Yeah, I mean, that's manipulation.
That's propaganda.
And reactionaries, at least in the US, I don't know how prevalent this is in your neck of the woods, but, you know, like Republicans will constantly kind of pull individual, you know, kind of studies out of like NIH grants or, you know, out of, you know, science, scientific studies.
And go like what they want to study how fast caterpillars run and that sort of thing.
And it's like, well, no, this is actually meant to, you know, kind of work on the kind of locomotive locomotive styles, which are actually like useful to study regardless.
But also it gets played into things like artificial intelligence research and trying to make like kind of better robots and that sort of thing, which actually, even if you don't care about the caterpillars, you can care about like, you know, the tech industry's ability to build better products, you know, and maintain more capitalism.
I mean, you know, come on.
You know, like, you know, you find this stuff all the time, right?
So it reminds me of nothing so much as the Brexit campaign, you know, a few years ago, people campaigning for us to leave the here in Britain to leave the EU.
And like for years in Britain, we've been getting these Oh, Brussels bureaucrats.
Oh, EEC directives.
Oh, stupid European rules.
Oh, they have rules about how bendy the bananas have to be.
So all this stuff that you get in the British media for years and years and years, right?
It adds up to the fact that we have food shortages now in Britain.
Right.
Because we left the EU?
Right.
No, absolutely.
I mean, obviously, I'm horrified to hear that, you know, clearly.
I mean, not that I wasn't already aware of it, but, you know, the more important thing is bringing back the traditional pounds and ounces scales.
Getting away from those, you know, kind of foreign metric units.
Clearly, much more important than You know, maintaining food supply lines.
But again, the point I'm making is that it's it's it's how reactionary propaganda works.
It's tactical point missing.
I think the I think another note to hit here is just that they're they're they're pretending, maybe not in so many words, but they're pretending that they're proving something about how inadequate a peer review is, you know, whereas peer review as As has been pointed out, I'm on the Rational Wiki page now, and it quotes somebody called University of Washington Biology Professor Carl Bergstrom, who says, where is it?
Peer review is simply not designed to detect fraud.
It doesn't need to be.
Fraud is uncovered in due course.
Severe professional consequences deter almost all such behavior.
Nor is the peer review process designed to weed out every crazy idea.
And if you think about it, how could it be, and why would it be?
But again, they're deliberately giving the false impression that they've proved something that is actually completely irrelevant.
Yeah, I mean, we've said it before in 87, and I think it's at least been implied in some of the stuff around the Ivermectin papers, that peer review is kind of the first rung on the ladder, right?
It's kind of getting over that kind of basic hurdle.
They talk about how difficult it is to write these papers, and yes, it is an extended process.
And peer review can be absolutely brutal, depending on what you're doing and what you're trying to write.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's faultless.
I'm just saying that they're proving that it doesn't do something that it never really claimed to do and wasn't set up to do.
And this is something that, you know, if you are knowledgeable about the history of skepticism and atheism, this is something James Randi said, you know, on a very regular basis is that scientists are actually kind of bad at detecting fraud because they come into situations assuming that the facts are as they are claimed to be, you know, they don't interrogate those kinds of questions.
And so, Fraudsters, you know, Uri Geller can show up and go, like, I'm clearly bending a spoon and then, like, kind of move out of frame to bend the spoon and then go, I did this with my mind.
And then the scientist would, like, kind of accept that fairly uncritically.
And then when James Randi comes in, he goes like, well, yeah, but he turned off camera.
Like, he was away from camera for a second when the spoon actually bent.
It's like, well, okay, you don't think he'd lie about that, do you?
I mean, you know, it is, like, it is kind of this, like, fundamental, like, thing.
And that's not to, like, shit on science or scientists or, you know, anything like that.
Although, I mean, I think some of the, you know, some of the ESP researchers in the 70s probably did.
They're very, you know, they were people really kind of out on a limb doing a difficult thing, and they were a bit more credulous than they should have been in many cases.
We'll leave it at that.
But Scientists are people like anybody else, you know.
The whole thing which you indicate there is that the professional consequences for having been proven to like Manipulate data or to manufacture data are so extreme in terms of your ability to continue to be a professional in your field that the assumption is that nothing is fraudulent until it is kind of proven to be so.
And ultimately, these papers are not judged by like mere publication, they're judged by How many times are they cited?
Do they actually move the field forward?
The vast majority of papers that are published are basically never cited, or cited a handful of times over years or decades.
That's how the modern industry works.
That's That's a problem.
I mean, you know, again, real problems with the publish repair system, not questioning that in any way.
You find that in every single field.
As again, we learned looking at the, once the ivermectin paper started getting looked at, suddenly it's like, no, it looks like there's a whole lot of fucking fraud here.
Then this is in the medical field in terms of like directly relating to an active pandemic that everyone wants to solve.
And yet still you find fraud when you go looking for it.
This is the other thing they're doing.
They're vastly overstating the stakes, which is, people should listen to the various episodes of the Wrong About podcast, where Michael Hobbs has talked about cancel culture and political correctness in its various forms.
This is something he points out repeatedly, which is that whenever you get into this, whenever you get these scare stories about, you know, PC and cancel culture, etc.
I mean, amongst, you know, there's all sorts of problems with it.
But one of them is that people vastly overstate the stakes.
Like, you get anecdotal accounts of this happening and that happening, nine times out of ten it's bullshit.
Again, there's the, you know, the minute people come away with an impression from the controversy and the discourse, and then, you know, weeks later or months later the actual facts come out and basically it didn't fucking happen over and over and over again.
But the stakes are vastly overstated.
And that's what they're doing here.
As you say, these studies in these In these little, you know, journals, they're going to be referred to, if they're lucky, once or twice over the next decade or so, you know.
But again, as I said before, these people have this vastly over-inflated view of the power of language itself, of discourse itself, which, of course, is exactly what they accuse the postmodernists, etc., of having.
To them, it's basically just an ontological scandal that anybody should be saying anything anywhere that offends them.
That's what's going on here.
It is this exact kind of trait of treating wokeness as this disease.
You know, this kind of form of epistemology is this disease that is, like, infecting society, and so you have to, like, kind of stand up against it.
And you get to real, real fascist logic very quickly there, and I mean that in the most literal sense, right?
You get into the real, like, we must stop the encroachment of the, you know, parasites by allying against, like, anything that's going to challenge, you know, faith, hearth and family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So, I would I would like to, you know, very briefly just read, there is another like reviewer comment on the dog park paper which again demonstrates, like, again, the style of what's happening here right.
This is from reviewer two, so it's a different reviewer, right?
But the comment here is, I'm a bit curious about your methodology.
Can you say more?
You describe your methods here, procedures for collecting data, but not really your overall approach to methodology.
Did you just show up, observe, write copious notes, talk to people when necessary, and then leave?
If so, it might be helpful to explicitly state this.
It sounds to me like you did a kind of ethnography methodology, maybe multi-species ethnography, but that's not entirely clear here.
Or are you drawing on qualitative methods and social behaviorism, symbolic interactionism?
In either case, the methodology chosen should be a bit more clearly articulated.
In other words...
You didn't describe the basic things that we would expect from a paper of this caliber, you know?
We find your results intriguing, but clearly this is pointing out, like, it kind of sounds like you don't really know what you're talking about.
And maybe you didn't do this, like you said you did, you know, in the way that, like, Obviously, the reviewer is not taking fraud seriously as a first approximation, but the fact that these are the kinds of comments they're getting on their first draft indicates that people are saying this kind of doesn't pass the smell test to a certain degree.
People are pointing out fundamental flaws with these papers over and over and over again.
And what they do is they take the comments, they write in whatever they feel like they need to write in in order to kind of get it past the peer review.
And then they resubmit it.
And then sometimes it gets through and sometimes it doesn't for that matter.
It's that honing process.
It's that, you know, you know, best of 20 times you chuck the ball at the litter bin thing I was talking about.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And that language you just read out, you know, you can laugh at that because it sounds kind of po-faced, but that's just academic speak.
That's just the cautious way in which you question something.
I can imagine the face of the person that wrote that, you know, and it's not...
And again, there's a lot of jargon there, but any person with subject matter expertise in a field knows that the jargon kind of comes along with it.
They are, you know, again, there's a lot of jargon there, but like any person with like subject matter expertise in a field knows that the jargon kind of comes along with it.
You like the jargon for people within the field is meant to like, you know, it's the idea is that you use these terms to people who are going to understand what they mean so that you can get past, you know, having to, you know, circumlocute everything.
You know, like that's what the jargon is there for.
Just like anything that involves specialized knowledge, you know, like fixing a car engine involves jargon.
Hold on, carburetor?
Can you explain to me what a carburetor is?
I don't, I don't, you know, like if you had to explain like, well, this is the mechanism by which the, you know, the, you know, like if you had to put that into words for, you know, like a 10th grader to understand every time you wanted to explain how to fix a carburetor, you never get anywhere.
Yeah.
So, you know, and this is exactly that.
One more thing about this Dog Park paper, and I don't think we're going to get to a lot of these other papers here, unfortunately, because we're running, we're kind of getting to, we've had a great discussion.
Maybe we'll do an addendum and kind of talk about more of the papers in a future episode.
I do want to, I do want to hit at least one more paper here.
Yeah, I do want to, I do want to point out this piece by Nestor de Buin.
I don't know exactly how to pronounce his name.
But he actually published a guest post over on Sam Hoagley Brill's sub stack.
And it is an absolute deconstruction of everything that's kind of going on in this Dog Park paper.
This is a man who, like, he has an MA in social sciences.
He is very familiar with kind of how this research is done.
I don't know exactly what his politics are.
So, you know, I'm not going to say I'm going to agree with everything he ever said, but he puts this paper through various, like, kind of filters of, you know, what kind of scientific method are we actually exploring here?
What kind of thing are we actually asking of this paper?
And what he says, I mean, you know, the kind of the boil it down to the simplistic conclusion, I would encourage everyone to read this, is that, again, had this paper actually done the things that it said it would do, it actually proves that gender studies is an empirical field.
Right?
It actually proves the exact opposite of what Lindsay Pluckrose and Boghossian are kind of claiming is kind of going on with this paper.
It proves that the paper is actually, it proves that the field is actually robust and had it actually existed in the form that it did.
It would be, I mean, it would likely be a landmark paper.
It would be a very important paper.
It would be worthy of the praise it was given, which is actually less than what Lindsay is claiming.
Like, Lindsay is like, it was given an award and I was like, I think it was just kind of published as a special issue.
Like, it didn't seem like that big a deal to me based on what I've seen from what you've provided.
But, you know, that's the thing.
So, I'm just going to read.
This is a bit of a kind of extended, you know, it's kind of a couple of paragraphs here, but I think, again, you could please go read this piece, but.
What is even more striking is that if the research had actually been conducted and the results showed what the paper says they show, there's absolutely no reason why it should not have been published.
And moreover, what it proves is the opposite of what its intention is.
It shows that one can make scientifically testable claims based on the conceptual framework of gender studies, and that the field has all the markings of a perfectly functional research program.
Yes, the Dog Park paper is based on false data, and like SoCal's, this is the original SoCal hoax, which I'm just referencing that.
Contains a lot of unnecessary jargon, but it is not nonsense, and the distinction is far from trivial.
Nonsense implies that one cannot even obtain a truth value from a proposition.
In fact, the paper being false, if anything, proves that it is not nonsense, yet the grievance hoaxers try to pass falsity as nonsense.
Nonsense is something like Chomsky's famous sentence, colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
It is nonsense because it is impossible to decide how one might evaluate whether it is true.
A false sentence would be, the moon is cubicle.
It has a definite meaning, it just happens not to be true.
So, if the original so-called hoax is like Chomsky's sentence, the Dog Park Paper is much more like, the moon is cubicle.
And in fact, a more accurate analogy would be, the moon is cubicle, and here is a picture that proves it, And an attached doctored picture of the cubicle moon.
Yeah.
But sorry, we've we've kind of said that already.
But I thought that was like a just a beautiful kind of encapsulation.
It's great.
Yeah.
Because what what they're doing is they're saying they're making that they're submitting a paper that says the moon is cubicle.
Here's a picture, a doctored picture of the cubicle moon.
And what they're claiming is that that invalidates astronomy or cosmology.
Yeah, like astronomy.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, planetary geology is being invalidated by the claim.
Whereas actually, you know, if it were in any doubt, the fact that planetary geology could, you know, within that field, testable hypotheses can be made, evidence can be evaluated, proves that it's scientific.
Exactly.
So, I do want to cover very briefly the other, like, three papers that were actually, like, published at some point, just to kind of, you know... Yeah, just one brief point.
Yeah, go ahead.
SoCal is raised there.
This thing, the Grievance Studies Hoax, has been called SoCal Squared.
It's a reference to the famous incident in the 90s when Alain SoCal, who's a physicist, I believe, Submitted a hoax paper to a journal, a humanities journal called Social Text, in which he wrote a paper where he claimed, basically the claim was that gravity is a social construct or a linguistic construct or whatever.
Now he was taking aim very specifically at the fashionable French post-modernist, post-structuralist thinkers of the time, Foucault, people like that.
There's all sorts of, you know, I'm not going to get into it.
The point I just want to make is SoCal is aiming very narrowly at one thing, which is the fact that these people put scientific claims, not just scientific analogies or metaphors, but scientific claims into their papers, theorizing things about culture and society.
And repeatedly, they demonstrate that they don't know what they're talking about.
And he demonstrates that by actually putting things in his hoax paper, which are direct references to bad science that's popped up in specific papers written by specific people.
Now, whatever you think about SoCal and whatever you think about the hoax generally, that is a world away from what these people are doing.
Oh, no, absolutely.
It's completely different because they are just making shit up.
Right.
And you know, I think, I think there is, I mean, God, maybe you and I should do like a bonus episode about the so-called hoax.
I think that I'd love to.
Yeah.
Okay.
Bonus episode coming up soon.
Patreon $1 a month.
No, I think, I think we should, because I would love to just kind of pick your brain about it.
Cause I, I am familiar with kind of the so-called hoax, but like, obviously, you know, much more than I do.
And I would love to, you know, just, sit and chat about that for an hour one day.
So let's pencil that in for future bonus.
So yeah, I'm not trying to rush us through, you know, to get to the end of the episode, but I would like to at least hit very briefly these other three papers.
And we may kind of come back and do an addendum that kind of goes through some more of the details on this, because I had intended to do kind of really kind of dig into some of these details because there's just so, I mean, there's just the thing with James Lindsay is there's just so much And all of this that's just like, it's just fractally bad where you can look at any bit of it and find the same errors over and over and over again.
So you almost don't have to have like some encyclopedic knowledge of everything he's ever said.
And I think, you know, you just kind of pick a thing and give it to like, I get a 15 year old with like basic logical deduction skills and they're going to find the same fuck shit I'm going to give you.
Right?
Like, that's just, that's just kind of the nature because this is so, so bad.
It's just so bad.
As soon as you get any sense of, like, looking at the details at all, you find those fundamental problems with all of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he's so rampantly dishonest.
You pick any sort of brief sample at random from anywhere in his stuff and you find errors that, well, not errors, you know, outright... You find fraud.
You find lies.
You find lies.
That should, in a sensible world, just completely discredit this person forever, basically.
Right.
And anyone who has looked into it agrees, you know, can accept that, right?
You know, but there is a, you know, concerted political project that is built on not being something that is accepted.
And so James Lindsay, the more ridiculous he is and the more stupid he becomes and the more He is hit on by anyone who knows anything about these subjects.
The more power he gains within this kind of like right wing driftosphere ultimately.
Yeah, because he's still doing the same thing.
He's still doing that honing what he can get away with thing that he did as part of this hoax.
Absolutely.
I mean, this is where James Lindsay becomes James Lindsay, ultimately.
This is his claim to fame.
And this is the thing that kind of connects him with, presumably, the bigger money and the real kind of Right-wing media ecosystem in which he is very well respected at this point.
And in fact, even within, you know, kind of far right religious communities, believe me, we're going to come back to that in our future James Lindsay episode, maybe multiple episodes we will see, but like, this is not like innocent.
This is not, and it's not just, you know, somebody wrote some silly papers and got them published and like, look at the egg on their face or whatever.
This is a concerted political project that led to, um, very real thing.
I mean, all of this shit about critical race theory, et cetera, Yes, yes, exactly.
That's all of that stuff.
I mean, that comes from Lindsay Ann Ruffo, Christopher Ruffo, probably going to do a Christopher Ruffo episode at some point, believe me.
Don't really want to, but I've got some I got some background material that's going to be it's going to be great.
So.
But this is this is what I don't this is why I worry that people don't get, you know, because the cycle has moved on and people have kind of gone on with, you know, sort of a blurry impression of what happened here, whereas the story is actually one of You know, outright fraud based on conscious, fashy propagandists, propagandism.
I did want to finish this and just kind of tell you, because we've we've been focusing on Lindsay, but we definitely do need to talk about Pluck Rose and we definitely need, we absolutely need to talk about Boghossian here.
Pluck Rose is kind of, she co-authored Cynical Theories with, which is the book that she co-wrote with James Lindsay, which Again, the book is probably worth a full episode on its own.
Go check out Sam Hoadley Brill's excellent kind of takedown of the arguments that are in the book.
Arguments in very heavy air quotes because it's complete nonsense.
I have read about a third of the book and it's just like, it's so like, I hate these fucking books because it's like, they're just so filled with like, lies and misstatements and you know, like, It's just so hard to really get a handle on anything.
It's like I'm trying to, you know, climb a wall of pudding or something.
It's there's just nothing there, you know, at least for, you know, someone with like real subject matter expertise and stuff can really can can kind of pull the stuff out that they need to.
But when I'm not someone who has like a kind of a background in this kind of like social theory.
I haven't read these postmodernists.
I'm not familiar with it.
It's very difficult for me to kind of like really dig into it at all based with the skills that I have.
And so I tend to kind of move on to something that I can put some work into.
So her big thing right now is this site, this group, Candleweight.
It's at candleweightsupport.com.
I'm going to read their like their little main about segment.
Welcome to Counterweight, the home of scholarship and advice on critical social justice ideology.
We are here to connect you with the resources, advice, and guidance you need to address CSJ beliefs as you encounter them in your day-to-day life.
The Counterweight community is a nonpartisan grassroots movement advocating for liberal concepts of social justice, including individualism, universalism, viewpoint diversity, and the free exchange of ideas.
Subscribe today to become part of the counterweight movement.
And the idea is that they are literally an organization with some funding behind them and some kind of fairly big names kind of in the in the mix there, where the idea is if you have been put through a diversity training that told you all white people are responsible for the evils of the world, you come to us and we will advise you on how to tell those wokies who they're dealing with.
Yeah.
This is someone from your country.
I'm laying this one on you guys.
This is not an American.
I do not have to be.
I am responsible for a whole lot of shit here.
This one is on you, motherfucker.
Anyway, she gets quite a bit of credit because, like, when James Lindsay went, like, really off the deep end on Twitter, she made some, like, statements against him, and so suddenly she gets to be the good one in this group.
And I can read, based on, like, if you were gonna choose the good one of, like, Pluck Rose, Lindsay, and Bogosian, Pluck Rose is the good one, but there's no good one.
You don't, you don't like, she distanced herself because Lindsay, not because she didn't agree with Lindsay's ideology, but because Lindsay was being, was pulling his dick out in public.
Like that's, that's the reason.
Like, come on, don't, there's no ideological difference here.
If there is, it's like this very minute, like nothing here, you know, she's still a part of the same fucking project.
And if, you know, she wants to really go against Lindsay, she needs to reject that political project and not just James Lindsay is an asshole on Twitter.
You know, anyway, we will talk much more about Helen Pluckrose in a kind of future episode, presumably, you know, it's, it's worth exploring.
And Boghossian is where I want to end this on because Boghossian was the only one at the time of the Grievance Studies hoax who actually had an academic position.
He was a philosophy professor at Portland State University.
And I say was because as of the last couple of weeks, he resigned his position.
Right.
And now he's doing this more full time.
He went on a whole bunch of these heterodox fear podcasts, you know, whining about how Rachel Maddow didn't want to interview him because he resigned his position at Portland State or whatever.
Definitely something that is headline news when, you know, a disgraced professor resigns their position at a state university.
I can't imagine why that wasn't front page news in the New York Times.
Oh, man, you know, it's real, real shame there.
I mean, you do want to keep an eye on these professors that end up leaving universities because of one thing and another.
Begocian is definitely someone we will come back to Begocian and kind of deal with his whole story.
But he actually suffered professional consequences for this based on his academic career.
And when I say he suffered professional consequences, The Institutional Review Board, the IRB actually brought him in for questioning and actually brought like kind of charges against him in terms of like this, the grievance studies hoax.
There were a number of kind of, you know, kind of points that were being made among which, you know, sort of the, you know, possible like kind of plagiarism and kind of fraudulent data, et cetera, et cetera.
But the big thing was, you know, for the IRB is you're experimenting on human subjects.
And what that is, is you didn't get institutional review.
You didn't have someone verify that you were behaving ethically towards the reviewers at these journals and the peer review process, the other scholars in these journals, in these fields.
You didn't have, you weren't You weren't getting review in terms of that you were behaving ethically towards these like human subjects.
And this may sound like kind of a minor point, you know, to if you're in it, I mean, you've done some sociological research yourself and, you know, presumably you can speak to this with much more fidelity than I can, but I can tell you that like IRB review is serious, like, you know, because there has been a history of like terrible research being done on human beings.
You know, this is, this is not, this is not nothing.
This is not like, you know, some, he forgot to dot a T or, you know, cross an I or whatever.
This is very, you know, substantial claims because ultimately- The history of sociological research is overflowing with abusive practices.
And it's really only comparatively very recently that people have started to take it seriously.
Anyway, go on.
No, no, absolutely.
I absolutely, I mean, I agree, obviously.
And, you know, that's why these things exist.
I mean, I took like a psych 101 class in 1998.
And this was like a big part of like your, you know, very basic kind of understanding of this stuff is kind of built into like, there is a reason that we have controls over what kind of research we have ethics that we are supposed to abide by.
And These guys treat this as a joke, as like the institution is ganging up on Peter Boghossian.
So, I have one more clip, and this is, again, from another Mike Nena clip.
I'm really looking forward to this documentary being produced.
We will dine out on this for weeks, I promise you.
There is so much here.
We're going to play this one last clip.
And this is again, so you're going to notice that kind of, so this is Pluckrose, Boghossian, and Lindsey are all going to be heard here.
And you'll notice that they kind of dip in and out of like audio quality over the time.
And that's because there are, it looks like Naina is recording in Portland with Boghossian.
And then Lindsey and Pluckrose each have sort of like a camera set at like, you know, just kind of basic, Either a webcam or some kind of basic camera setup.
Their lighting is much shittier than Boghossian's lighting.
They're, you know, Naina is the professional and then the other two just have, you know, kind of, so they've recorded all three and then he's edited between them.
And so, like, you see Lindsey on the phone talking to Portland.
And so, but then when Lindsey is off screen, it kind of cuts to recorded audio.
And so this makes sense in the video because you're kind of watching this happen and we're kind of, but So if this audio sounds a little wonky, it's because I'm clipping from a documentary, which is there is a visual component that you're not getting, obviously, in this audio recording.
But I think there's some interesting stuff here.
And so I wanted to include it here at the end to to talk about before we do a full Boghossian episode, because I think there's I think there's some interesting stuff here.
Yeah, they can't say that we needed IRB approval for the ones that we that we published in journals because there weren't any real human subjects.
So they will have to say that the IRB approval we needed was treating the reviewers as human subjects without passing that through an ethical board.
Hopefully we can say that there wasn't any way to get informed consent for that.
It just isn't a possibility with this kind of thing.
We did an audit.
So, if I were you, I would be really, you know, clear that it seems ridiculous that because you are actually a part of the scholarly enterprise, you can't do an audit of the scholarly enterprise?
Like, people inside the system aren't allowed to question the system?
What kind of Orwellian stuff is that?
What I really want is, I'm going to talk to my union guy about this, and I want the camera in the meeting.
I want to argue for complete transparency during the whole process.
Yeah, but that's what I'm going to argue for.
That's what I want.
On this, this becomes really bad for you personally and really interesting in terms of the next step with the project then, doesn't it?
Because on the one hand, if they can try to pin an ethics violation on it, that'll give scholars reasons to pretend they can ignore our work, which obviously they can't do.
There's so much there, right?
Oh god, where do you start?
Let's start at the end of that, you know?
This gives the scholars the reason to ignore our work, which obviously they can't do, which clearly Talk about fucking grandiose.
Which clearly like the whole thing that we've done this whole episode and what, you know, like the whole thing is like anyone can find the flaws in these things once you, you know, like it's, it's complete horseshit from the beginning.
The scholars are not scared of you, except to the degree that you have enormous political power and are coming after them.
Politically, not based on the strength of your ideas, because if your ideas were that strong, you could have actually just published in the journals.
Yeah.
So sorry to repeat that point again, but I thought, you know, they just don't have the, they just don't have the ability to challenge us intellectually.
So they're shutting us up with this bogus IRB charge.
You see, you know, also like, Bogosian is like, I'm gonna call my union rep and we're gonna try to get a camera into the meeting with the IRB.
You know, that's exactly the sort of thing that, like, totally is, like, completely normal in terms of, like, a negotiation of, like, ethics charges, right?
You know?
Yeah, and also, like, again, like, we could, you know, we're obviously pro-union here, but, like, you know.
Yeah, I mean, Boghossian is literally, like, engaging in behavior that is absolutely... If that was a woman complaining about sexual harassment, You know?
And she was being interviewed by management on the basis of complaints she'd made or something and she said I want a camera.
That would be evidence of woke insanity, wouldn't it?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, like, oh, you just want to cut the you just want to cut these things and make the administration look bad because, you know, like, exactly.
You're using a camera as an intimidation device to try and get your way because you want to look like a victim on camera.
Precisely what he's what he's doing.
These these universities, like as seriously as we should take it as the IRB and as much as that should be a thing that we should that should be these universities routinely You know, take their kind of star professors, take their tenured people and kind of like give them slap on the wrist or whatever.
Yeah.
In terms of like, like in terms of like serious, you know, deviations from ethical behavior.
They kind of, you know, there is a long history of these kinds of administrative groups, like just kind of sweeping bullshit under the rug, you know.
Yeah.
And they use some of these organizations to do that, to provide, to whitewash it, ultimately.
Spoiler alert!
Would you like to know what What consequences Peter Boghossian faced for this.
Go on then.
He was forbidden from engaging in any more human research until he had some training, until they required him to undergo training before he did any more human research trials.
Um, and from my understanding, this is basically like the mandatory yearly training that everyone in these fields kind of takes anyway.
It's like an hour long video that you, you know, just kind of sit and then you take a little quiz afterwards or whatever.
Um, if you've worked in kind of a regulated industry or kind of a big office or whatever, like it's, you've done this a thousand times before, um, you do the fire safety thing.
Yes.
I know how to use a fire extinguisher.
Click.
Um, that's kind of the level.
Which they chastised Boghossian for this, right?
Well, that's Orwellian.
It's Orwellian.
That what?
You're inside the system?
You're not allowed to criticize the system because you're on the inside?
How Orwellian?
Okay, first of all, that's not what Orwellian means.
You can!
Actually, you just have to go through the IRB to ensure that you're engaging in these practices ethically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's all you had to do.
And presumably, again, if they were doing real research, if they were doing this, like, for real, They could have gone to the IRB and they could have said, yeah, exactly, explore this.
Like there isn't.
I mean, the only reason not to is because you think the IRB is going to go, this is a bunch of fucking bullshit, you know, and not let you do it because there's absolutely no real research program here.
Ultimately, again, they are gussied up in this like kind of patina of academic respectability when the reality is they're just right wing propaganda artists.
That's all this is.
They're trolls.
Yeah.
The bit of that that really jumped out to me, I have to say, I mean, everything we've laughed about already.
Yeah.
But the bit that jumped out to me is Pluckrose.
And essentially, I can't remember the exact word she uses, but it's near the start of the clip.
Essentially, what she says is, well, we couldn't get informed consent from the people we were tricking.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a trick, would it?
Right.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And I mean, there are occasions in these kinds of research in which you do have to, you know, trick participants, or you do have to, you know, kind of engage in scepterfuge.
But there are very high bars to, you know, what kind of results you're expecting to get.
I mean, This is why you go through an IRB, like if you had some project in mind, like if you were trying to, you know, understand, you know, the prospect of like fascist ideology and you need to trick like authoritarian members of an authoritarian regime or something and you were trying to like save refugees or something like that's, you know, like, I don't know the process by which an IRB would like, you know, analyze that stuff.
But like, that's, there's at least some kind of justification there in terms of like, we want to see if we can get some bullshit papers published.
And so we can talk about epistemology.
Like an IRB is going to look at that.
They're going to look at your methodology.
They're going to look at, you know, what's kind of going on in this study and go, yeah, you're just engaging in a bunch of bullshit.
Like there's no, there's no, they're there ultimately as an, as a real academic research program, you know.
But you want to talk about Orwellian logic.
Yeah, I did the thing you're accusing me of doing, but I had to, because if I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have been able to do it.
That's Orwellian logic.
It's just the logic of the party.
It's the logic of Squealer, you know, the propaganda pig on Animal Farm.
Yeah, I love I love the Orwellian is just one of those terms.
It just doesn't mean anything anymore, especially when a right winger uses it.
It's just it's complete.
You know, it's just it's just oh, this is this is oppressive.
This is completely oppressive to me and my ability to lie.
I'm not allowed to lie anymore.
George Orwell would hate this.
Yeah, that's that's the process.
So.
That's kind of all I got right now.
Obviously, this is a big dot, dot, dot at the end because this is still kind of continuing and this is kind of our middle chapter, which apparently now I'm going to go through and we'll talk about more of these papers.
Let us know on Twitter or whatever if you're looking forward to going through more of these papers.
There is so much.
I could do an hour on every single one of these papers, probably.
Because if I went through and, like, found the bits from the paper and then what was corrected and then, like, found references to it, there is, like, the fact that they made this publicly available, even quietly, is just a godsend for anyone who wants to understand the bullshit that went behind this.
Because, again, the second you look into it at all, you find all kinds of, like, it's, again, a goldmine of, like, great materials.
I want to do this.
I want to do this.
Yeah, sounds great.
So yeah, we'll at least do the, we'll at least do the other three published papers.
And yeah, why don't we just plan to do that for the next episode?
Just go ahead and do that.
Great.
You know, I, I know I said we were getting back into Nazis and apparently we're not doing that yet, but like, I'm, I've already done like 80% of the prep on this, so you might as well just give me a little bit of a break and let's put out an easy episode next time.
Yeah, so yeah, next episode we'll continue with the Grievance Study.
So this is kind of an impromptu two-part middle part of a three-part series.
So yeah, that's not confusing at all.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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