95: James Lindsay and the Grievance Studies Hoax, Part 2
Yes, we're back with Jimmy Concepts, reliable source of dishonest idiocy. This time, as a kind of 'bonus feature' to our last episode, Daniel reads out a representative selection of reviewer comments on some of the fake papers submitted to academic journals by Lindsay, Pluckrose and Boghossian during the so-called 'Sokal Squared' prank. It's very revealing... albeit of something we already knew: namely that Lindsay and his cohorts are absolutely full of shit. Content Warnings. 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 for 95: 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 ). "BJ-Gay" reviewer's comment: - This paper claims to apply a combination of psychoanalysis and feminism to examine and critique styles of masculinity evident within grappling-based martial arts subcultures. Overall, I found the paper very difficult to read and cannot recommend it for publication. This is due to a combination of factors, namely: - A densely theoretical, often confusing style of prose in many parts of the paper; - An inconsistent application of theoretical concepts, most of which were not defined with any clarity for the reader; - Overuse of certain source material, as well as a fairly consistent tendency to misuse sources in support of claims that the papers/books in question do not actually support; - Many sweeping generalizations about (all) men involved in (all) grappling-based martial arts; - A tokenistic inclusion of discussions of women in these spaces, which was not reconciled with the analysis in any meaningful way; - A central thesis which is not, to my knowledge, supported by any of the empirical research in this area (despite the fact that several such studies were cited in the paper); - Bizarre, even farcical concluding recommendations which indicate a lack of knowledge about the martial arts in question, as well as a tenuous and selective grasp of feminism as applied to sport. - There is simply too much wrong with the paper to offer a more robust criticism as a reviewer. I recommend that the author spends far more time acquainting themselves with both the theoretical and empirical literature at the intersection of sport, martial arts and masculinity studies before attempting a re-write. The current offering sits far short of the standards of scholarship expected of academic publication, particularly in a journal such as Men and Masculinities. https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1444709707864674306 https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1402338497617285120 "The Joke's On You" reviewer comment: - Another sign of lack of integration is that there is not clear definition of the comedic. The very first paragraph offers one too narrow for the essay. Northrup Frye provides some useful definitions of irony, parody, and satire in his classic work, Anatomy of Criticism. Note, too, that Cynthia Willett, in Irony in the Age of Empire, shares a similar thesis with this essay, namely that irony works against arrogance and ignorance. That source should be acknowledged even as the author discusses her own different approach, and might help the author clarify definitions of the comedic and integrate argument. - Yet another sign of lack of integration are the mixed references from Oliver to Dotson, Bailey, et al.-- Oliver would support a strong postmodern or poststructuralist stance that would render claims to speak "truth" to power finally ironic or that would yield to a very serious act of witnessing alterity. The latter group of epistemologists (including Dotson and Bailey) seem to affirm a pluralism but also a truth that allows for objective claims. Humor that makes use of the latter approach would typically tend toward satire, not irony. Satire and irony just do not function the same way, and the author would want to decide which direction or use of them would most assist the argument. "Fat Body Builders" reviewer comment: - For instance, statements like these, “In order for fat to be seen as ordinary and familiar, we need to insert ourselves in the extraordinary and unfamiliar. Competitive bodybuilding venues may be unfamiliar, even intrinsically fat-exclusionary, but this can change” and “Though it goes beyond the scope of this paper to provide more specific methods for institutionalizing fat bodybuilding” illustrate the issue with the paper. The author has highlighted the negative implication of fat stigma, but with a lack of connection to implementation, it negates the reason for why fat bodybuilding is a solution over other means or methods. - This reader would encourage the author to improve the connection between fat bodybuilding and its role as a means of fat activism. The author certainly has a wealth of information about the field of bodybuilding and the author should use that experience to strengthen the connections mentioned previously. "Hooters" reviewer comment: - This then takes me to a core challenge in moving forward with your paper at Sex Roles: trustworthiness. All three reviewers share my concern about the lack of demonstrated methodological integrity in the present paper. This is where Reviewer 3 comes in. I recruited Reviewer 3 after the other reviewers, and because she is a member of our in-house staff, I shared both reviewers’ (masked) comments with her. I asked her first if she felt there was enough evidence of rigor to pursue a revision. Because we (at this point) have incomplete methodological information, I cannot commit to making a positive judgment here, but I am committing to giving it a try. - Thus my second challenge to Reviewer 3 was to outline what next steps you will need to take (in addition to addressing the other reviewers’ comments) to fill in these methodological gaps. As you can see from Reviewer 3’s comments, this starts by laying out your procedural details and analytic strategy. My guess is that you will need to focus more specifically on theme development and justification (e.g., thematic analysis) rather than taking this aspect from grounded theory (in that your goal is not to develop theory). I have attached a recently published paper in Sex Roles by Sheryl Chatfield that lays out various approaches to qualitative methodologies and outlines our standards here at Sex Roles. My expectation is that Reviewer 3’s comments and this paper will help you address this critical point, as well as to move one from there to fully flesh out your methods, analyses, and findings. "Dildos" reviewer comment: - In the opening sections, the author notes that "though Allan lays out psychoanalytic theoretical considerations that are strongly suggestive of the co-constitutive relationship between masculinity, thevariables listed above, and anality, currently there is no scholarly literature that engages the topic of straight male penetrative sex toy directly and substantively" (3). The author here is referring to Allan's article, "Phallic Affect," however, Allan's book, Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus (2016) might prove to be more useful in the context of this study. - The author writes that "there exists a far more extensive and applicable treatment in the book, The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure, but unfortunately this insightful volumes falls considerably outside of the scholarly academic canon" (3). I'm not certain that this is a problem, perhaps this is a difference of approach, but it seems to me that sex manuals are highly valuable resources in scholarly work and if there is a problem that the problem rests not with The Ultimate Guide but the Academy's inability to imagine value outside of itself. Indeed, the author might consider expanding this to include books like, The Adventurous Couple's Guide to Strap-On Sex by Violet Blue. Sci-Hub link: https://sci-hub.se/10.1353/tech.2007.0066 'So You Wanna Be a Hooters Girl' at The Smoking Gun: https://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/so-you-wanna-be-hooters-girl Show Notes from 94 Again: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/94-james-lindsay-and-the-grievance-studies-hoax 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
Can you give an example of that, of something that curbs freedom of speech?
Yeah, sure.
Like, for example, we're not allowed to call the thing we plug into our computer anymore a master drive, or we're not allowed to talk about a master bedroom or a master bathroom, because it can sometimes make some people feel as though that those words are somehow connected.
Okay, and welcome to...
I don't speak German, episode 95, except that I'm not allowed to say welcome anymore because it's probably culturally insensitive, isn't it?
And I shouldn't say podcast anymore because, I don't know, casting, that's got implications, you know, and I actually shouldn't be speaking at all because, of course, I've got an English accent and that's offensive to people who were conquered by the British.
I'm speaking English, of course, which is the conquerors, the colonizers language.
So I'm not allowed to.
So I mean, by doing this, I'm putting myself at grave risk of being arrested, really, because I'm doing all these things that are actually illegal now.
You're not allowed to do this anymore.
You're going to get thoroughly canceled, which means you will soon have a show on Fox News.
Yeah.
Well, no, there seem to be two kinds of cancelling, don't there?
There seem to be the kind of cancelling where you get a show on Fox News and a substack and a podcast with a great many more downloads than we get and book deals, etc, etc.
And then there's the kind of cancelling that I don't know.
It's a different kind of cancelling where, you know, you do something fairly innocuous, but you do it from the left or you do it as a trans person.
Like if you're a trans person calling out behaviour at Netflix, you know, you just, you get cancelled.
And by cancelled, I mean fired.
Yeah.
You actually get fired.
Yeah.
But, you know, We're talking about which is not at all unusual for Netflix to be to be clear, like they have a they have an active firing culture, like you are expected to defend why you're at your job basically every single day you're at work, which is nightmarish and awful.
And the whole of employment in North America is moving in that direction.
So, yeah.
It's the wave of the future.
I mean, I know it's not as serious or as important.
I know that.
But it seems to be their attitude with their shows as well, doesn't it?
They seem to just, you know, every show they make gets fired, so to speak, cancelled even after a couple of seasons.
So here's this new show, fall in love with it.
Do you like it?
We've cancelled it because it didn't get enough viewers.
No, there's a there's a Netflix has their own like, you know, revenue model where they basically just like they've looked at it and said, well, viewership falls off after season two.
So we make two seasons of everything.
Make two seasons.
And then, yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's one show out of every hundred that we make where it gets mega viewership and we'll continue making that one.
But all these other shows, some of them, you know, some of them even interesting.
You want to see more of that?
No, fuck you.
Anyway, anyway, this is the this is the I'm not.
I haven't got an axe to grind or anything.
You know, this isn't personal.
There's not anything in particular in my mind.
Never mind.
Yeah.
Is there a particular show you're you're bevoning right now?
Because I honestly have no fucking clue.
It's been so long since I've like actively watched any Netflix, you know.
But actually, no, there isn't a particular show.
I just thought it would be funny to pretend that there was a particular show that I was really, really upset about.
Fair enough.
Can you hear what's going on behind me?
Can you hear the crying outside the door?
I just heard it just as you asked me, yes.
I'd better go and open the door.
Probably, yeah.
If you'll excuse me.
Yeah, fair.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, 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 safe spaces.
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.
All right.
So, yeah.
And it's doing well.
Yeah.
As listeners will know, I often open these episodes with a quote from Shakespeare, whimsically not allowed to do that anymore.
Shakespeare banned illegal.
You know, it's an old dead white European.
They're now illegal.
You're not allowed to.
And and so on.
More satire, more satire.
So, yeah.
James Lindsay to Grievance Studies to.
Technically, this is James Lindsay, like two and a half.
Yes, 2.5.
Technically our third Stretch James Lindsay episode, but it's really just a continuation of 94.
So definitely, we're not going to go back and re-explain all that.
We're just going to continue on and assume that you've listened to definitely 94 and most likely 87.
Yeah, we're calling this 95 because we're not getting it.
I refuse to get into sort of numbering complexities, but think of it as 94 part two.
And if you're listening, frankly, look, if you're listening to this, you know what we mean, so it's fine.
Okay, so.
All right.
So yeah, we're going to continue on.
We're going to keep talking about these Grievance Studies papers.
Again, I'm not going to summarize too much, but this was where these three dipshits decided to write a bunch of Fake papers, hoax papers, and gotten some of them published or accepted.
And it became a giant media thing because people are, well, not people are dumb, but the media is complacent, you know, and there's a right wing noise machine that suddenly everybody has to pay attention to.
And that's, that's what we are.
I just love the idea of James Lindsay, a man whose job now is basically complaining on Twitter, criticizing other people for having grievances.
That's chef's kiss, really, seriously.
Calling a Jewish doctor Dr. Lampshade.
Oh, yeah.
And then going like, no, I was referring to Ed Gein.
That wasn't anything about like, no, why?
Why would you think I was referring to Nazis?
Yeah, no, that's a yeah.
Well known, widespread cultural touchstone that everybody's heard of Ed Gein.
That's obviously what everybody's mind was going to go to first, you know.
I'm telling you, that's one where I saw that and went like, I don't even know what the thing he's trying to say is, right?
Like, I don't, like, I, he's obviously playing with language.
He's obviously kind of like being an edgelord here and wanting people to call him a Nazi.
I don't know what the other read of it is.
We're normally like, I'm very good at knowing what the other read is, you know, but that was one that just completely, and the fact that he's like, no, I was calling him a serial killer.
No, that really doesn't track.
It doesn't connect with anything.
Calling him a psycho would be maybe.
But to reference lampshades for Ed Gein, that's not even the most obvious thing about Ed Gein.
No.
You know, dead mother.
Anyway.
But yeah, we're talking.
I think I really I said at the time, but I really do think that that was all deliberate.
Like, I don't want I don't want to give I don't want to give Lindsay like, you know, Machiavellian cred or anything like that.
But I really do think that he that he plans this out.
And, you know, he knows what he's doing when he says shit like this.
He knows that he's going to provoke the reaction when people say, hang on the fuck a minute.
You're talking about a Jewish doctor and you're talking about lampshades.
That's disgusting.
And he knows that he can come back at that with, oh, I see the woke cancel culture CRT snowflake left.
You're not even allowed to talk about lampshades anymore without being called a Nazi.
I didn't mean that.
He knows what he's doing.
And it's so pathetic.
It's like that woman, that weird woman on Twitter recently that started talking about burning her kid's Pokemon or something to trick people into thinking.
Of course, you know, there was a trick there.
I think I missed the second part of that.
Did she come back and say, like, oh, I was just joshing the whole time.
I just want to get a rise out of the left or whatever.
She was doing exactly what Lindsay does, because if you go down her feed to earlier tweets, she's talking about, I'm going to say something incredibly outrageous to trick people into thinking that I, you know, psychologically abused my kid.
It does look legit.
Like she says in advance, she's going to do it.
And then she does these tweets about, you know, my kid doesn't eat at school.
I burn his Pokemon and people react, including me with what the fuck, you know, and then she's like, oh, I tricked you, which is a wow.
You know, point well made.
Well done.
But even even the sign that you're like making those kinds of jokes.
Even that that's in your head at all?
Yeah.
Probably a sign you should probably still get visited by CPS, right?
It worries me that you have a child when you even, you know, these things can even occur to you and you think that's a worthwhile, you know, making people, making strangers think that you're psychologically abusing that child is something that you thought would be a good use of your time as well.
Exactly.
And also, this isn't like, just, sorry, we're off on our own little thing here, but this isn't even like, There are parents who do exactly this sort of thing to their children.
This actually becomes relevant when we get back to talking about these papers, because the whole point that we've been talking about with these grievance studies papers is that they think this is this absurd thing that no one would ever believe, but there's rigorous academic work that stands behind a lot of the conclusions that they're drawing in jest, right?
And believe me, If you've ever known a social worker in your life, if you've ever known anyone who's done that kind of work or anyone who's worked in an elementary school in a not wealthy part of the United States, and I know many people like that, you are desperately aware of the depths of human depravity in terms of how they treat their children.
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, the grievance studies thing, you know, they're satirizing what they think of as like the, you know, the leftist, wokeism-infected humanities academy, you know, by submitting papers that treat subjects and talk about ideas that That are actually, you know, they think they're just, they take it for granted.
For them, it's just obvious that these ideas are just ridiculous.
You know, they can just hold them up and say, look at this.
And they think everybody right-minded will just agree with them and fall into place alongside them, laughing at them.
And in their mountain, well, I was going to say their mountainous ignorance.
It's one of, you know what it reminds me of?
Another digression.
Mendacious.
Another digression here.
Very brief, I promise.
And then we'll get to the meat of this.
A little while ago, we had the 200?
300?
I don't know.
Yeah, it would have been 300th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein.
We had an article in one of our tabloid newspapers about how lefty, snowflake, you know, socialist college professors and college lecturers who sympathise with paedophiles etc etc, they've been teaching courses at university about how the monster in the book Frankenstein is sympathetic.
is a victim of abuse and neglect.
And there's two explanations for this, right?
These guys working at these tablets.
Either they are so profoundly, mountainously, galactically ignorant that they just have no conception of what that book is about.
One of the most foundational cultural touchstones of Western civilization, right?
They have no concept, even in the vaguest idea of what it's actually about.
uh and to them it's just the monster sympathetic a victim of neglect and abuse that's just inherently ridiculous we can just say that nobody's gonna have or they know and they're just lying to provoke exactly the reaction where they got where loads of people say effectively what i've just been saying and it's the same thing it's the same thing this is what the grievance studies hoax amounts to ultimately it amounts to and you know probably this lonely um really resonate with the with listeners from my country.
It's basically the same thing as fucking Sun journalism.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so two points there regarding Frankenstein when it was 200 years, it's 1818.
That's when that book was published.
What did I say?
Did I say 300?
You didn't say 300, yeah, but it's fine.
Numbers.
Never my strong point.
I have a STEM degree.
That's the only reason I figured it out.
Well, there you go.
Nobody can solve that.
I can tell you the themes.
You can do the numbers.
We've got it covered.
Right.
But the thing is, like, you don't even have to have read Frankenstein.
No, exactly.
That's the point.
You don't even have to have seen Frankenstein or seen like, it's like one of the things that you just kind of know about Frankenstein is that like, while he is often portrayed as a monster, while like he, you know, he's in like quote unquote monster movies, he is also a sympathetic monster.
And that's like, like the one that people who don't know, That the monster is Frankenstein's monster.
They think that the monster is named Frankenstein.
Well, nonetheless, believe that there is some sympathy that we're supposed to have towards the monster.
Yeah.
It's just it's just fundamental to the thing.
It's like saying, you know, you're hiding.
We're Nazi by saying an SDAP or, you know, something like that.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I was I was convinced.
What does Arbeiter mean?
I don't know what that means.
The National Socialist German something party.
Gee, what was that word?
I can't imagine what it was.
You're talking about the NSDAP and you mean Nazi.
That's very sneaky of you because I don't know what NSDAP means and yet I feel able to comment on these issues.
Jesus, fuck.
And I was going back and re-listening to that clip when I, because I found that after we recorded that, and then I was re-listening to the episode.
And I definitely kind of got into that headspace of like, oh no, he's, you can tell he's, he's fucking with us.
Like that's a, that was a really clear moment for me of like, no, no, he's, he's doing this on purpose.
When he's like, I went and tap into my, you know, into my like non-Google search engine.
I mean, he's just, he's just like, Leaning into the like, you know, like, you know, trolling behavior on that.
Yeah, that was that was definitely, you know, a thing.
So he's got him, you know, if you do it that way, you got them, you got yourself covered either way, because it will work with all your potential audiences, won't you?
The people that genuinely are as ignorant as that will go, oh, and they'll think you're right about the guy trying to be sneaky.
And the people that aren't will appreciate that what they take to be the clever irony.
And where have we encountered techniques like this before?
Wow.
I don't know.
Every fucking episode of this podcast.
Ironically, Richard Spencer being one of the ones who does not do this behavior in the same way.
Except sometimes when he's talking to mainstream media, that's the only time when he kind of fucks around with that.
Yeah, so we could go on forever.
Anyway, our cold open today.
Welcome to Episode 95.
We started 25 minutes.
It's going to be fine.
So our cold open today was from Mark Lamont Hill's interview with James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian.
And We're going to have much more from that interview and people's certain people's Nazis Nazis commentary on that video.
Probably in the next episode if I can get it prepped in time.
But I did want to pull that out because, like, that little clip that he used, that little bit where he starts talking about, like, we're not allowed to say Master-Slave Drive in, like, computer systems anymore, because it's, you know, because the woke, the woke left won't let us use Master-Slave.
Is that because of, like, the master-slave dialectic from Hagel, I expect?
Is that where he's going with it?
Or, I think, I don't know, he might be going there.
I think it's more like he's saying that, like, my understanding, and, like, one of the things you run into is that these guys have their own kind of, like, special, like, their, like, pet You know, issues they bring up on all of these interviews.
Speaking of pets, I apologize, listeners, if you can hear very loud purring.
But we have a guest who's very, very thrilled to be here.
That is, I have my dog, Ruthie, is now in my lap.
So I think we are very happy, you know.
Yeah, happy pet energy in our anti-Nazi podcast.
How comfy can we make talking about the most terrible people in the English-speaking world?
This is how comfy we try to make it.
So anyway, so I started looking, I got curious because he's basically trying to make the thing, so my guess is that he found some news article of someone on some campus saying, we don't want to use master-slave drive in terms of talking about hard drives anymore.
We want to use, you know, some other terminology because people find, you know, and so there's like, Well, the college kids on campuses having, you know, going crazy, you know, took across the segment.
So I did a little bit of Googling, a little bit of Google, you know, it's now admittedly, I didn't use a non Google search engine, so I didn't get the heterodox results.
So, you know, yeah.
So the results via Google, which, of course, is controlled.
But I did find an academic paper discussing, you know, the actual background and I'm going to link it to you on, I believe I have to give it to you on the, I would never recommend anyone use this Sci-Hub thing because you get all these great papers for free and you don't have to pay the predatory companies.
That would be bad.
So, there will be a link, which you definitely should not use to go view this, because it is very, very interesting and you should definitely pay the $45 or whatever it costs to go read this paper.
Anyway, this paper from a man named Egglash.
Sorry, I've got the paper from Ron Egglash.
And, you know, this is not someone who has a, like, Great deep background in this kind of terminology and this kind of history of technology stuff.
But he does have a degree, he does have some training, and he does work as an engineer.
And he went back and started looking at the history of where does this stuff come from?
And there is a fascinating history going back to the early 19th century, you know?
He does reference Hegel's use, although Hegel's use doesn't seem to come directly into describing this.
I'm not going to go through this in detail, but people were calling out the problematic indications of using this kind of terminology as early as the late 19th century, when it was used to describe certain kinds of clock mechanisms.
This is not new terminology.
Weird college kid stuff.
And in fact, in this paper, he actually like interviews or he sends like a survey out to a handful of his colleagues who work in the field and asks them, how do you feel about this?
People who are of, you know, who are people of color, African-Americans, you know, and he gets a variety of answers that are actually very thoughtful about like, actually, that metaphor did help me to learn this subject when I was first learning it.
And I, I think it's probably valid in terms of its current use, and I think we should approach it with sensitivity, but, you know, all the way out to, you know, no, this is really, you know, it comes across as racist, and it's discriminatory to students who are going to come in.
A wide variety of opinions, very thoughtful opinions from people working in the field about this topic, and None of that gets included in James Lindsay's analysis ever, right?
None of that ever like comes forth and like, no, actually people have different opinions about this.
And like, because some, no, I don't want to like, I don't want to lend myself to the idea that I'm like blaming the woke college kids or whatever, because I know I'm kind of using the term.
I have enormous respect for college students who speak up about their, about the problems that they have with the world around them.
Because even if I disagree specifically with like whatever thing they're talking about, You know, yes, please tell me how problematic I am, and we will deal with that.
Like, that's fine.
You know, that's the point.
Contrary to myth, it is still very hard sometimes for people in that position to step up and say, actually, this is a problematic use of language, et cetera, et cetera, let alone, you know, practices, et cetera, in universities.
It takes guts and it's difficult and it causes some problems etc because the universities are not just these hegemonic sort of totalitarian left-wing regimes of myth and uh you know it's good that they that they have the guts to do that and that they do it a lot of you know and it's not about them being right all the time Like anybody else, a lot of the time they're going to be wrong, or their ideas are going to be silly.
That's not the point.
The point is, these are discussions.
But you don't get any of that from these people.
What you get is just what we were talking about before, which is just the knee-jerk, this sounds silly to me, I will hold it up for general ridicule, because obviously everybody who's right, i.e.
things like me, will laugh along with me.
It's just that again.
Right.
And the whole thing also then kind of comes down to, you know, we looked at the one comment or the one student protest or the one thing.
We take one sentence completely out of context.
Forget to include the fact that like nothing ever changed or the silly, you know, the one that sounds the silliest or they make it sound the silliest.
One of my favorites of these, sorry, I'm again off topic, but Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel himself was one of these like reactionary dipshit gas bags in the 90s.
He wrote a book called The Diversity Myth.
We covered this in one of our previous episodes.
And one of his examples of like woke college kids being crazy was table grapes, right?
It's like because he went to school at Stanford and there was this thing where you're not allowed to have table grapes at your, you know, in like in your meetings or in the cafeteria hall.
And, you know, like there was a student protest where, you know, like we're supposed to show solidarity to like some farm workers or whatever, right?
But he keeps bringing this up as a completely silly, strange example.
Obviously ludicrous is that, you know, I mean, come on.
And when you look at the actual thing that the students are saying, God, I have this in my notes somewhere.
I might I might pull it up and try to put it in the show notes.
But when you look at the actual thing, I'm going to get some of these details wrong and I apologize.
But this literally like the protest went back to the late 60s.
It went back to an actual Strike by, you know, farm workers, by, by unionized farm workers under Cesar Chavez in the sixties.
Yeah.
Like, like this, this was, this was not some like hoity toity, you know, like liberal student.
This was like, actually like, no, we are trying to do what we can to show solidarity with these actual, like striking farm workers.
And who won great concessions in part because we participated in this project.
So, fuck you, Peter.
You know, like, again, they pull out these examples.
It sounds ridiculous.
Table grapes?
Who cares about fucking table grapes?
The people who pick the grapes care about the table grapes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes, indeed.
Imagine how that works.
So, I'm really tired of reading scientific papers for this podcast.
Let's dig into some science, well, not even scientific, but let's dig into some papers and let's talk a little bit about.
These are not even real papers.
These are all fake papers.
But if you remember the history of the grievance studies hoax, what the version that Lindsay tells now is that when we first started writing these papers in August 2017, we were just doing like straight up hoaxes.
And we were trying to get them into, you know, these kind of respected academic journals, the same as the conceptual penis hoax.
And then he says, and then we ran into this problem where by November, we realized we just couldn't do that.
We had to act that they actually do the people Running these journals actually do know enough about what's happening about, you know, there is an actual substance matter enough that we can't just write silly hoaxes that we have to do this sort of for real, right?
Which, A, completely invalidates the whole thing.
If there is an actual subject matter, then... Don't let the fact that your own experiment disproves your opening thesis deter you in any way.
Don't let that change your plan in any way at all.
And then they move on to, you know, and I got this from some dipshit on Twitter, you know, the other day where it was like responding to our episode 94 tweet and going, you know, something to the effect of, well, no, these are untrained people who know nothing about these subjects.
They managed to get papers published.
You know, they got, they got, they wrote 20 of these papers.
They got four of them published.
Doesn't that show that it's a ridiculous field?
And it's like, Well, let's talk about that.
We already covered that in episode 94.
We already kind of covered all that in 94.
Not in enough detail though.
So Let's talk about some of the rest of these papers.
But first, just to wet our whistle on the good ones, basically I'm not going to read from any of the papers today.
I'm just going to be reading reviewers' comments.
And I did not have to pick and choose for these.
This is I keep saying this whenever we look into this.
The links to all these papers and the reviewers' comments are in the show notes.
Go download this Google directory.
If they take it offline, I have it all.
You can message me.
I will send it.
We can put it in many... This is the most hilarious shit in context.
It really is.
So, they write one paper.
And we're not cherry-picking, you know?
No, no.
I am not.
Like, ironically, when the grievance hoaxers talk about the reviewers' comments, they have to cherry-pick.
I don't have to cherry-pick.
I mean, solidarity with cherry-pickers, obviously.
Well, obviously, obviously.
No, obviously, you know, the cherry-pickers are various kinds of people.
Thank you, thank you, everybody.
I'm here all night.
It's fine.
So they write a one of the one of the like the last one that they said was actually just a straight up hoax that everything after that had to be you know something like a real paper.
Let me see if I've got that full title in front of me here sorry one sec.
I've got too many tabs open.
Grappling with Hegemonic Masculinity, the Roles of Masculinity and Heteronormativity in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
And they have these little clever short titles that they put for all of these papers.
This one is called either BJJ or BJ Gay, if you see what they did there.
Lindsay even says like this is the one where we got this where somebody actually just caught on to this is bullshit.
And that was when we realized we couldn't do this anymore.
I read the reviewers comments, and I would like to share them with you now.
For this for this paper.
This paper claims to apply a combination of psychoanalysis and feminism to examine and critique styles of masculinity evident within grappling-based martial arts subcultures.
Overall, I found the paper very difficult to read and cannot recommend it for publication.
This is due to a combination of factors, namely, and then this is now a bullet-pointed list.
Okay.
A densely theoretical, often confusing style of prose in many parts of the paper.
An inconsistent application of theoretical concepts, most of which were not defined with any clarity for the reader.
Overuse of certain source material, as well as a fairly consistent tendency to misuse sources in support of claims that the papers, books in question do not actually support.
Many sweeping generalizations about all men involved in all grappling-based martial arts.
A tokenistic inclusion of discussions of women in these spaces, which was not reconciled with the analysis in any meaningful way.
A central thesis, which is not, to my knowledge, supported by any of the empirical research in this area, despite the fact that several such studies were cited in the paper.
Bizarre, even farcical concluding recommendations which indicate a lack of knowledge about the martial arts in question, as well as a tenuous and selective grasp of feminism as applied to sport.
Next paragraph, and it's almost done.
There is simply too much wrong with the paper to offer a more robust criticism as a reviewer.
I recommend that the author spends far more time acquainting themselves with both the theoretical and empirical literature at the intersection of sport, martial arts, and masculinity studies before attempting a rewrite.
The current offering sits far short of the standards of scholarship expected of academic publication, particularly in a journal such as Men and Masculinities.
Right.
So, premise.
We can just make up any old crap that uses the right buzzwords and they'll publish it because that's how it works.
Result, no, the people vetting it say, this is crap, it just uses buzzwords, we're not publishing it.
Conclusion, Presumably, we'll just try again doing the same thing somewhere else and wait until we manage to trick somebody into publishing one and then go ahead with our point, despite the fact that it's not being supported by all of the case.
They basically just demonstrated that this paper is doing everything That they constantly accuse, you know, feminist and woke academia of doing, and that was their reason why it's unpublishable.
Right, exactly.
The reviewer said, you know, yeah, all this stuff that is supposed to be just endemic now within the academy, yeah, here it is, and that's why it's not publishable.
They tried to get, they submitted this paper to several different journals, and all the reviewers' comments are all in this one document.
But this was the one that, like, Lindsay highlighted.
It's like, well, now we have to actually sort of try, right?
You know?
So, that's the sort of, like, the shit-tier version.
Especially when you remember that it's in academia speak, so it's studiously polite.
Yeah, that's the thing you run into over and over again while reading these things, is that these people are very, very polite.
And, you know, Lindsay et al.
take the Politeness in terms of saying, well, we think this is an excellent paper.
Although, as we will now later learn, in many cases they say things like, this will require a major rewrite.
And the term major rewrite appears over and over and over again.
Anyway, we're going to get to that.
Coming from the bottom of the barrel up to the top of the barrel.
Now, a friend of the pod, Sam Hildy Brill, has said that this paper that they wrote is actually the one He thinks this paper actually deserved to be published.
And this is the one that they call Hoax on Hoaxes 2, because they had tried to do a parody version of this previously, and then they rewrote this significantly, and it was accepted but never published.
But the title of this, and I've got it open in front of me, When the Joke is on You, a Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire.
They published this under, or they attempted to publish it under a A false name, Richard Baldwin, and Richard Baldwin at Gulf Coast State College is also, I believe, is also the name of the Dog Park paper and a couple other papers.
So, they kept reusing that name over and over again.
But, so this paper, I'm not going to read the abstract, but the idea, you know, the way that they're kind of, they write a paper that kind of talks about the nature of satire, whether And how to use it in terms of power and positionality, right?
So, like, essentially it's you can punch up but not punch down, right?
And the reason they call it The Joke is on You is because one of the examples of, like, bad scholarship or sort of bad satire that they use is the penis as a social construct.
Meaning, they think it's hilarious that they wrote a paper calling themselves out for being really, really bad at satire and then get it accepted in a high-tier journal as well.
Well, one obvious fact jumps out.
I mean, it was a really bad satire.
It was indeed.
And, you know, I don't know, we can definitely...
Part of the text here, where they criticize themselves, is, because it sought to delegitimize gender studies, it is important to examine the motivations behind this hoax, along with its epistemological assumptions.
The positionality of its authors also matters.
Its authors, too cisgendered, by the way, that's definitely something they should have caught when they were, you know, obviously, too cisgendered heterosexual white men who have from deep commitments to the prevailing Western philosophical tradition,
Quote, Lindsay is a mathematician, Mugosi, and a Socratic philosopher, and antipathy to social justice activism specifically targeted the academic left's moral architecture in general and the moral orthodoxy in general, in gender studies in particular, due to their dislike of the conclusions, implications, and activism emanating from gender studies.
Specifically, these hoaxers revealed themselves as morally and epistemologically motivated against newer, established theoretical considerations of gender, race, and sexuality in favor of preserving and bolstering hegemonic scientific and meta-scientific narratives.
These attitudes, however, are the deeply conservative reactionary sentiments described by Friedel.
That is accurate.
That's true.
Yeah, true.
Yeah, exactly.
That is an accurate description of them.
And in other places, Lindsay will actually, like, essentially admit this.
Like, it's, you know, when we get to the New Discourses episode, he talks about this all the time.
It's essentially a power struggle.
I was going to say, I mean, not only is it an accurate description of them, I struggle to see what part of it they themselves would actually have an issue with.
Exactly.
And so, Also, you notice that in comparison to a lot of the other papers that we've read segments from, this is really clear writing.
It's filled with, you know, references.
It's filled with citations to the literature that, you know, kind of make it a little more difficult to parse as an amateur.
But, like, you can read this paper.
This is actually, you know, totally brill.
It argues quite compellingly that, yeah, this paper is good.
This should have been published.
It engages with the relevant literature.
It discusses these things.
It actually has a point.
It's clearly written, like, this is absolutely a paper that should have been published.
And this is the one calling Lindsay Abagosi complete dipshits.
I have included links to Holy Brill's tweets on this matter here in the show notes, but I would like to not to argue with Holy Brill here, who I assure you knows more about these topics than I ever will.
But one of the reviewer comments speaks otherwise.
And one of the difficulties here is that we don't have the different versions of these papers.
We only have sort of the final version.
However far they got in the process, they just kind of gave us the final version of it.
So this would undoubtedly be referring to an earlier version of the paper, which who knows how jumbled and nonsensical it was.
Yeah, because as we talked about last time, they did not just send the first draft of any old rubbish they wanted and get it published.
They honed these things in response to criticism and requests for rewrites.
Right.
I mean, essentially what they're doing in a lot of these cases is essentially just they send off a sort of incomplete version, which they then are told exactly how to correct the paper in order to get it into publishable condition, which is usually You need to integrate certain kinds of ideas into it.
You need to include better citation.
And since they're just making all this up to begin with, all they have to do is go into the relevant literature and pull topic sequences from abstracts, essentially, in terms of trying to understand the basic.
And They can get publications out of that, right?
You know, they actually don't care.
They're not actually trying to produce good scholarship.
They're just trying to get over like the minimum bar of publication so that they can like shove egg in people's face.
Right.
Exactly.
They're trying to commit fraud and they're trying to get to the point where they're able to sell their fraud to these publishers.
But as we talked about last time, what they've revealed is a banality, which is that the peer review process is bad at spotting frauds.
Well, yeah, we knew that.
It's not what it's for.
Outright frauds where you just make up stuff.
Yeah, it's not there to spot that.
Here's the, here's the reviewer comment that I thought was particularly insightful here.
And let me be, let me, let me just make this obvious.
This is Lindsay and like, I mean, Lindsay and Hobly Brill do not agree on much, but they agree that this is their top tier paper.
This is the one, Lindsay thinks this is the one that people should have paid more attention to, right?
This is from the original reviewer comment.
And there's a general theme of you're not integrating these ideas into a cohesive whole in this particular reviewer comment.
And it goes on much longer than this, but this is the nub.
Another sign of lack of integration is that there is not clear definition of the comedic.
The very first paragraph offers one too narrow for the essay.
Northrop Frye provides some useful definitions of irony, parody, and satire in his classic work, Anatomy of Criticism.
Note, too, that Cynthia Willett, in Irony in the Age of Empire, shares a similar thesis with this essay, namely that irony works against arrogance and ignorance.
That source should be acknowledged even as the author discusses her own different approach.
It might help the author clarify definitions of comedic and integrated argument.
Yet another sign of lack of integration are the mixed references from Oliver to Dotson, Bailey et al.
Oliver would support a strong postmodern or poststructuralist stance that would render claims to speak truth to power finally ironic, or that would yield to a very serious act of witnessing alterity.
The latter group of epistemologists, including Dotson and Bailey, seem to affirm a pluralism, but also a truth that allows for objective claims.
Humor that makes use of the latter approach would typically tend towards satire, not irony.
Satire and irony just do not function the same way, and the author would want to decide which direction or use of them would most assist the argument.
You have failed to do even a cursory glance at the actual citations that you are presenting in support of your argument.
You do not understand the difference between irony, comedy, and satire.
Yeah.
You have not engaged in any way with the actual literature.
Yeah.
You don't understand what you're talking about.
I'm going to submit a paper about kitsch without reading Susan Sontag.
I'm going to write a paper about general relativity.
Einstein who?
Yeah.
Do you see what the pattern of these papers is going for yet?
And do you see where this episode is basically going?
You know, if this is not your cup of tea, you know, you can cut this podcast out now because they are all like this.
They are all like this.
Yeah.
There you have it.
There's the abstract.
Now into the actual paper, which will just be us mercilessly belaboring this same point over and over and over again and laughing at them.
That's basically.
Indeed.
So I do want to go through just three of these papers, and I know we're not even running long, but this is a little dry, but I understand.
I think it's important to kind of cover this at some point.
I think this is great.
I think this is hilarious.
Please.
This is one of the most fun I've had doing one of these.
So they actually did get three papers that we have not discussed yet published.
One of these is what they call fat bodybuilding, or the title is who are they to judge overcoming anthropometry?
It's almost as if these are like technical papers that have, you know, these subjects have, you know, jargon.
Yeah.
I was going to say, I don't instantly know what that means.
So obviously it's meaningless and ridiculous.
Exactly.
This one is also written by quote unquote Richard Baldwin, but it is called Who Are They To Judge?
Overcoming Anthropometry Through Fat Bodybuilding.
And this gets into fat studies and fat activism.
And this is really gross.
Like this is like, once you start, because let me just say, I'm a fat guy, you know, I am, you know, and there is a lot of work in, in these fields and in fat activism and studies to sort of change the way that we think about healthy bodies and what it means to be in these fields and in fat activism and studies to sort of change the way that we think about And this gets into, this is incredibly important, detailed work.
And my issue is that, you know, because it is so kind of, because using the term like overweight is so ingrained in our society, like I will just use it casually, even though that is not a term that we should be using in this context.
So I do ask for a little bit of leeway here.
I was contacted by a fat activist of my acquaintance.
Who does have, you know, relevant academic credentials in this field, did not want to be named.
And so I will not name this person but Had read the paper and essentially told me that the essentially what they're doing is they're suggesting in the paper, they're saying we need to create a bodybuilding competition that is for like non-traditionally fit bodies, right?
So then instead of being like about, you know, like musculature and, you know, agility, etc, etc.
It should be about, you know, like people of different shaped bodies who and like the very question of how we What we think of as a fit body or a built body should be questioned.
Questioned?
The person in my DMs told me these things actually exist.
This is actually a thing, which I'm aware of.
I would also highlight, and again, not to make it about something that isn't the field, but We just had an Olympics and Olympic athletes come in all shapes and sizes because there is no actual, you know, like kind of You know, fitness quotient, you know, there is no like number you can put on fitness because it's ultimately, you know, there are all sorts of trade-offs, even among, you know, like super high level athletes.
A fitness quotient.
Imagine trying to put a number on, it'd be like trying to put some sort of definitive number on, you know, quantified intelligence or something.
That'd be ridiculous.
Man, that would be... How could you put a number, quantify something so abstract as intelligence or fitness?
I mean, it's silly.
What kind of idiot would believe something like that?
Um, that said, you know, also like if you just go Google like world's strongest man competitions, you know, like, uh, you know, if you've ever seen those sorts of things, like some of these guys are, you know, they look traditionally muscular musculature, but certainly not all of them.
And many of them basically look like giant guys with beer bellies who can lift a car, you know, like, um, Now, we can talk about what fitness means, and that's not necessarily what fitness means.
And I completely agree with that.
But one of the things about bodybuilding competitions, again, sorry not to get personal or not to get away from our main topic, but I actually knew somebody briefly.
I worked with someone who was in training for weightlifting in the Olympics.
I don't know exactly how far they got in that they left that job.
Pretty quickly.
But, you know, I worked with this person and chatted with them about like, so what is it like to be in the training for the Olympics, right?
And they literally had to eat like a granola bar every two hours or their body would just start to shut down, you know, because they are within like a hair breadth of a percentage body fat and, you know, moisture.
And, you know, they have to have, you know, protein moving through their body at like a very particular regimented weight.
They're like, you live your life, you train for this thing for your entire, you know, for like 10 years and you train to the point to where like, you are very good at doing this very, very specific thing.
Four judges, and then you win a gold medal or whatever, and then that's your greatest achievement in life.
But that is not fitness.
That is certainly not a generalized fitness that you can use in your day-to-day life.
Now, don't get me wrong, this person was huge.
Absolutely could have beaten the shit out of me if it came down to it, right?
But if you ask, you know, let's go walk 10 miles, I can do that way better.
So, and again, this is, you know, fitness is about what's appropriate, you know, as we know, from evolutionary biology, from from natural selection, fittest doesn't mean, you know, strongest and most muscular, it means the best suited for your for your niche, your evolutionary niche, it's not, It's not the same thing as being, you know, it's obvious really, if you think about it.
I mean, another like classic example.
You can be the fittest for being an Olympic shot putter, that's not going to stand you in good stead for other tasks in life, you know.
Another just classic example is, you know, the There's one that's like Hugh Jackman in like the X-Men movies and those like the early like Bryan Singer X-Men movies who have like the washboard abs and it's just like that like classic, you know, that guy looks like the fittest fucking person in the world.
Well, In all of those shots, he's literally within 10 minutes of dying of thirst because they've just completely removed all water from his body.
That's how you get that level of abs.
That's just how it works.
People shooting those fight scenes shirtless, They have to shoot, you know, like, five minutes at a time and then go, like, sit down and rest and then get up and then, like, act like they're super fucked badass.
Has nothing to do with, like, a realistic vision of, you know.
And that look, that look that, you know, Chris Evans gets in Captain America when he goes into the machine as the little weed and then they open it up after the procedure and he's this gigantic, ripped, you know, washboard and massive pecs and everything.
That look.
That, you know, I have respect for anybody who puts in the amount of work that it takes to make their, you know, if you want your body to look that way, that's a lot of work and time and effort.
And if you do that, and you do it successfully, wow, fucking hell, good for you.
I'm glad, you know, you've achieved something amazing.
And if you like it, that's great.
But that is a That is a relative and culturally specific idea.
It's a socially constructed idea of what constitutes a fit.
In its original form, it's not to do with fitness.
It goes back to the early modern period.
It goes back to the Renaissance.
It goes back to Renaissance paintings.
It goes back to Michelangelo and people like that.
This ideal of the male body was constructed all those hundreds of years ago at the time of the birth of humanism in the Renaissance and it's migrated down through like advertising and so on through to modern movie making where it's a visual signifier for super fitness, super ability, super heroism etc that you get in Hollywood movies and one of the
By the way, just incidentally, and I'm not stigmatizing anybody that's a bodybuilder, but one of the cultural byways it took on the way was the absolute fetishism of that look by fascism in the early 20th century.
If you look at fascist statuary, it's full of these mega-ripped, you know, because it's neoclassical.
Fascist aesthetic is soaked in neoclassicalism.
So my point is just that this is not to do with biology.
This is to do, it's culturally, socially and historically constructed as a signifier of fitness and strength, etc.
Exactly.
It's not unconnected to biology, but it is not itself just in some sort of blanket way, what fitness looks like.
Absolutely.
Sorry, God, we could talk about this forever.
You run into so many examples.
I have some upper respiratory issues.
Jack has heard some of my coughs when I have a fit in the middle of recording and have to just, all right, need to quit for a couple of hours because I'm not going to be able to talk for a while.
I edit them out for you.
Very much so.
There have been times we had to record, you know, two days in a row, two days separately, because, you know, I had, I have to get to a fit in that moment, but I have a chronic, some chronic upper respiratory thing.
I went to a doctor for it, you know, right before the pandemic started.
And the very first thing that doctor said was, well, you just need to lose weight.
That's, that's the thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
But every everything I've been to a doctor for in the last 20 years, the doctor had just said, lose weight, fuck off.
That's basically every single time I've been to a doctor.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's the that's the first thing they do.
They look at you.
They say you're fat, you know.
Lose weight, you'll feel better.
You know, here's some vitamin D. That's not actually, in case she's listening, that's not true of my current doctor, who's great.
Right.
Sure, sure.
Not to stigmatize particular people or whatever, but like it is, I think any good doctor will certainly recognize, hopefully will recognize that this is a pervasive problem.
And if you have a doctor who is not doing that, that's good for you.
Please keep that doctor.
You should probably not go into a US-style privatized health system.
If you can avoid that, that would definitely be good for you.
And again, the whole thing that we're doing here is indicating that the reviewers had significant reservations about these papers, right?
And that they were significantly revised specifically to these specifications.
From the reviewer comment.
For instance, statements like these, in order for fat to be seen as ordinary and familiar, we need to insert ourselves in the extraordinary and unfamiliar.
Competitive bodybuilding venues may be unfamiliar, even intrinsically fat exclusionary, but this can change.
And, though it goes beyond the scope of this paper to provide more specific methods for institutionalizing fat bodybuilding, illustrate the issue with the paper.
The author has highlighted the negative implication of fat stigma, but with a lack of connection to implementation.
It negates the reason for why fat bodybuilding is a solution over other means or methods.
This reader would encourage the author to improve the connection between fat bodybuilding and its role as a mean of fat activism.
The author certainly has a wealth of information about the field of bodybuilding, and the author should use that experience to strengthen the connections mentioned previously.
In the paper, they claim to have had 50 years of experience in bodybuilding, which was something that was pretty obviously meant to be like a red flag that the reviewer should have caught.
They throw those kind of things into these papers so they can then lord it over when the papers, when the reviewers don't catch those sorts of details.
But as you can see from the comment, This is reading the paper, saying you're not actually connecting the dots the way you should be.
Your argument could definitely be stronger.
But they're coming to a conclusion that is basically accurate, that what is a fit body is a socially constructed thing, and we should be asking real questions about that.
On that level, there's nothing wrong with the paper.
And that's the thing that they keep wanting to argue is we got this published despite the fact that the conclusion we're drawing is obviously nonsense.
But the conclusion is only obviously nonsense if you agree with James Lindsay and Boghossian's and Pluckrose's bigotry on this matter.
Yeah.
If you're just a reflexive conservative with an allergy for questioning anything and just an idea in your head that trying to change things through questioning and et cetera, et cetera, is just inherently a ridiculous thing to do.
Indeed.
All right.
Two more.
You ready for this?
Yep.
Well, I say that very confidently.
Yeah, I'm ready.
I guess we'll see, won't we?
So I saved the sexy ones for last.
You know, although the fat bodybuilding Sorry, don't want to imply that that one is not also sexy.
Definitely could be.
It wasn't framed that way, but we're going to talk about the Hooters restaurant and we're going to talk about dildos at the end.
Yeah, dildos, but I personally can't think of anything less sexy than a Hooters restaurant.
Is that something you even have over there?
No, we don't have them in this country.
But I know what they are and I'd rather chop bits of myself off than ever go into one, frankly.
Like strip clubs, you know, I've never been to one and I just couldn't Like the idea of actually going to a strip club or something like a lap dance club or something.
I literally don't know how.
And it's not like prudishness or even it's nothing to do with the with the sex industry or or any or even anything political.
It's just the embarrassment reflex.
I would just be so socially awkward in that situation.
Just the idea of sitting sort of at a table while a woman in that Hooters restaurant uniform.
You know, I would just be I couldn't cope with it.
I have known people who have worked in Hooters and other similar restaurants before.
They do not think kindly of the more ridiculous patrons, let's just put it that way.
But it's a job and people I have no shade whatsoever on the people that work there.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm just saying that I personally just in an environment that like, you know, being quote unquote served by a waitress in that uniform where everything around us both was just sort of Loaded with this, you know, you are here to titillate me thing.
I would just be so embarrassed in that situation.
I am the kind of person who chooses, like, it's actually like, you know, I, I, I, again, I know people who work as, as, as dancers and strippers.
I know people who work in that industry.
And I have no problem with that at all.
Yeah.
And I have, I mean, you know, I, it's not my preference of, you know, like how to get my jollies, but like, I do support a number of sex workers and through various means, you know, I believe in paying for your porn and, you know, it's, you know, like I pay your sex workers.
I am 100% on board with that.
I simply don't, don't care for, for, for that kind of environment.
Mostly because, you know, I'm not even embarrassed about it.
I have been in very sexual environments, but making it that openly transactional is something that I find deeply uncomfortable.
Like I would rather like exactly pay for a product that you make that I'm going to enjoy.
I've never had a lap dance, but I've you know, like if I was in the situation somehow, if I ended up in that situation, it would it wouldn't be of my choosing.
But if it was happening to me, I just wouldn't be able to help myself.
I just sort of make eye contact with the person and just sort of say, what the fuck are we doing?
You know, is this is this fucking Barmy or what?
What is this?
I just imagine you being, cut this if you want to, it's fine.
I just imagine you like being like Steve Carell in the big short in that one scene where it's like, tell me how many mortgages you have.
Probably.
Is this place unionized?
That is actually a very good question.
Anyway, okay, moving on.
I hope that everyone agrees that we are in no way denigrating sex workers here.
Not at all.
James Lindsay definitely is exactly the kind of douchebag.
Yeah.
Right.
So the title of this paper is The Breastaurant as Pastiche Hegemony, Masculine Discourses of Objectification, Sexual Conquest and Male Control at Hooters Restaurants.
That's the title.
Okay.
This actually sounds potentially interesting as a subject, you know, a feminist analysis of power dynamics in these sorts of institutions.
Yeah, I'm interested in this.
No, no, absolutely.
And, you know, I did not read every word of this paper.
This was the one where I just kind of skimmed through it, you know, because it just had, you know, you kind of know exactly where they're going with this, right?
Yeah, exactly.
You're not going to get an actual analysis.
You're going to get You're not going to get anything, anything real, but you know, like the thing is, this actually was published and they actually did get at something, you know, sort of interesting enough to, to reach the publication.
And again, it just comes down to they decide they've come to like a ridiculous conclusion.
You know, the purpose, as they say in their area magazine piece, you know, so the thesis is that men frequent restaurants like Hooters because they are nostalgic for patriarchal dominance and enjoy being able to order attractive women around.
I mean, isn't that just the whole point?
I mean.
The environment that restaurants provide for facilitating this encourages men to identify sexual objectification and sexual conquest along with masculine toughness and male dominance with, quote, authentic masculinity.
The data are clearly nonsense and the conclusions drawn from it are unwarranted by it.
And this is what they literally say on the Aereo magazine piece.
One reviewer did raise concerns about the rigor of the data.
And then their purpose is, and this is where you really get to the key of it, to see if journals will publish papers that seek to problematize heterosexual men's attraction to women and will accept very shoddy qualitative methodology and ideologically motivated interpretations which support this.
In other words, We're just dudes being dudes and dudes like to see titties and titties are at Hooters.
And so like, I'm going to eat the wings and I'm going to, and there's nothing, this is just natural behavior.
This is just natural.
This is just, you know, and you know, these feminist studies, they're just, they're just problematizing something that's just, it's just a part of nature.
They had Hooters in the Paleolithic era, don't you know?
Like they had the orange shorts and everything.
We just, and it's just part of, just part of nature.
That's all this is.
It's all, it's all this, this is what it is.
It's just natural.
Yeah, that's why there are groups of humans who don't sexualize the female breasts at all.
And actually, when when, you know, Western observers go there to study them and they tell them about how in the Western world, in the developed world, breasts are covered up and and men want to look at them, etc.
These people laugh because they find the idea so ridiculous of the idea of the hidden female breasts as being something that men seek to look at for sexual, you know, that.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
It's just universal.
Men just, you know.
This is on the African savannah, we were doing this.
And of course, the question of, you know, why certain types of body types are, you know, considered conventionally attractive.
Yeah.
Why, you know, and why that all of these things are part of the question of like, well, it turns out you've been, you know, I will speak for myself as I'm, you know, I have been advertised to with bodies that look like that from the day I was born.
You see it every day of your life and every single like attitude towards, you know, and so, of course, my sexuality has been tilted in the direction of that.
And hey, going back to the fat bodybuilding, maybe having an appreciation for other types of bodies, you know, that are attractive in different shapes is actually a conduit for breaking out of that mold.
Maybe it would have thought so.
Just as it's not, you know, a narrow mechanical straight line from biological fitness to Chris Evans body in Captain America.
Maybe, you know, that's also socially and culturally and historically constructed over a long period.
Maybe also the idea of what constitutes an attractive female.
But, you know, I was listening to a podcast I listen to that's made by some friends of ours about the Bond movies recently.
And they were talking about one of the Bond movies, you know, that was my favorite when I was a kid.
And out of sort of curiosity, listening to them talk about it, I went back to watch this movie that I haven't seen in a couple of thousand years, you know, but I used to love when I was 10 or whatever.
And the way in which female attractiveness and female sexuality and the relationship between men and women and what men and women are supposed to mean to each other and what men are supposed to find attractive and how men are supposed to dominate women's sexuality in that movie, you know, that was being fed to me when I was a kid.
That had no effect.
It's just biology.
No.
No.
And like, you know, Hooters restaurants and stuff like that.
That's not just about men wanting to.
Yes.
OK.
Men want to look at women's bodies because they find them attractive.
Yeah.
You can do that at home now.
You can switch your fucking computer on in two seconds.
You can be looking at whatever you want.
Right.
That if you want to go to a quote-unquote restaurant, there's something else going on there that requires explanation.
It does require explanation.
There is a social dynamic there.
That very thing I was talking about not being able to do because I would find it socially awkward and weird.
Men want to do that.
They want to sit there and be served by women in uniforms that emphasize certain physical... There is something there that requires an extra explanation.
It's not just dudes being dudes and wanting to look at titty.
Yes, we do need to ask these questions, but to these fucking ignoramus reactionary philistines, just asking the question apparently is illegitimate and silly.
Exactly.
I mean, and, you know, on that matter, I mean, again, we're getting into, you know, two straight or straight-ish, you know, white men in their middle age should not be talking this much about sex work.
But, you know, I don't think I'm speaking out of turn when I say that, in many ways, the actual strip club experience, depending on where you work, kind of what the, you know, circumstances are around it, is often much more honest and much more You know, as a much healthier environment than the actual restaurants are.
Despite the fact that there's actually, because it's, you know, the implicit becomes explicit in a certain way.
And there, you know, you're not working under this kind of like, you know, this, this haze, you know, of intent.
Right.
Yeah.
Talk about a lab in which to study intersections of capitalism and patriarchy.
Yeah, let's study it.
Why just jeer instinctively at the concept of studying this and questioning it?
No, let's study this.
The smoking gun had like the, the Hooters, you know, Hooters like employment manual.
At one point I may, I may try to dig that up and put it in the show notes because it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's eye opening, it's eye opening, you know, so.
So much here.
All right.
Was it dildos next?
I think.
Well, I haven't even read the Hooters reviewer comment.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sorry.
I'm racing as always.
I'm racing.
You're racing, racing to the dildo.
Yeah.
You know me, everybody.
This title, the title of that one is in through the back door, just to wet your back door.
Where are we going with this?
Okay.
All right.
We should read this reviewer comment because it just takes the cake here.
All right.
So this is from the editor who actually recruited two reviewers.
And then the two reviewers kind of disagreed.
There were like arguments back and forth about the nature of the paper and sort of its methodology.
So then the editor brought in a third reviewer who looked more closely at kind of what everybody had to say.
And so this is written by the editor in the reviewer comments in terms of kind of describing where the reviewer comments are coming from.
This then takes me to a core challenge in moving forward with your paper at Sex Rolls, trustworthiness.
All three reviewers share my concern about the lack of demonstrated methodological integrity in the present paper.
This is where Reviewer 3 comes in.
I recruited Reviewer 3 after the other reviewers, and because she is a member of our in-house staff, I shared both reviewers' masked comments with her.
I asked her first if she felt there was enough evidence of rigor to pursue a revision.
Because we, at this point, have incomplete methodological information, I cannot commit to making a positive judgment here, but I am committing to giving it a try.
Thus, my second challenge to Reviewer 3 was to outline what next steps you will need to take, in addition to addressing the other reviewers' comments, to fill in these methodological gaps.
As you can see from Reviewer 3's comments, this starts by laying out your procedural details and analytic strategy.
My guess is that you will need to focus more specifically on theme development and justification, e.g.
thematic analysis, rather than taking this aspect from the grounded theory and that your goal is not to develop theory.
I have attached a recently published paper in Sex Roles by Sherry Chatfield that lays out various approaches to qualitative methodologies and outlines our standards here at Sex Roles.
My expectation is that Reviewer 3's comments in this paper will help you address this critical point, as well as to move one from there to fully flesh out your methods, analysis, and findings.
This is not like somebody questioned our data.
This is literally every person who looked at this had fundamental questions about the very nature of what we were trying to achieve.
Yeah.
I would love to see the various actually revised versions of this paper.
I want to see how bad the initial version was.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
This sounds like, again, it's polite academic speak for, do you actually know how to do this?
Here's a book you could read about how you actually do these things.
Are you actually a mental 14 year old boy who wants to write about Hooters?
Because it kind of sounds like that's what you are.
Yeah I really should like if we really wanted to laugh at this some more I could read like their selected reviewer comments that they put You know the glowing you know The reviewers and I were positive about many aspects of the manuscript, and we believe that it can make an important contribution to the field.
Once you've gone away and learned how to actually conduct studies and then done some, you know.
Indeed.
Dildo paper.
All right, finally.
The title.
Going in through the back door.
Challenging straight male homo hysteria and transphobia through receptive penetrative sex toy use.
Right.
Do you see where this is going?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
I think I have an inkling.
Yeah.
Thesis!
That it is suspicious that men rarely anally self-penetrate using sex toys, and this is probably due to a fear of being thought homosexual, homo hysteria, and bigotry against trans people, transphobia.
It combines these ideas into a novel concept of trans hysteria, which was suggested by one of the paper's peer reviewers.
encouraging them to engage in receptive penetrative animal eroticism will decrease transphobia and increase feminist values.
The stated purpose to see if journals will accept ludicrous arguments if they support unfalsifiable claims that common and harmless sexual choices made by straight men are actually homophobic, transphobist, and anti-feminist.
So the paper looks at, you know, lots of cis straight dudes.
They've never experienced anal pleasure.
And maybe that's correlated with, you know, homophobia and transphobia, etc.
And maybe learning to explore that kind of pleasure might teach people there's nothing to actually fear from this and decrease, you know, homophobia, etc.
Again, doesn't immediately sound all that implausible to me.
I tried to spend some time.
The thing is that this kind of stuff is almost impossible to study empirically, right?
I'm sure you'll be aware of, like, in the 90s there were some papers that, you know, claimed to study, you know, blood flow in the genital region of, you know, men, cis men, who were both, who either, you know, Had homophobic tendencies or did not or had lesser homophobic tendencies and found, oh, there's more blood flow happening with the homophobes.
And therefore, this is all like suppressed homophobia.
And my understanding is that like that kind of hypothesizing has been much beaten down over the course of the last few decades.
My understanding is that that's been largely debunked and is now widely understood to that theorizing is now widely suspected at least, let's say to itself be homophobic.
Right.
I think that, you know, from looking, from trying to just kind of peruse Google Scholar for a few minutes, you know, I kind of got the sense that, you know, it's not, it's probably not complete bunk, but like the original study has been much superseded and it's very difficult to get reliable data on this because like, you know, bringing people into a room and sitting, putting electrodes on their junk and, you know, trying to measure fluid response in a, in a laboratory setting, you're not going to get anything like natural results.
And nobody like self-reports on this stuff.
And, you know, I mean, it's just, it's a very, very difficult field.
And so there's a rush to over-theorize and over-generalize on the basis of results.
And that, and that's something that happens all the time.
And just kind of psychology in general, like, you know, again, we don't have to, you know, this is a very, very difficult research.
It can be done very badly.
It can be done well.
Everything is provisional, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
In any case, the idea that like, you know, Putting a toy in a place that you find kind of uncomfortable, and maybe you'll find that you enjoy it.
That's something that happens all the fucking time, right?
Not to discuss any particular person's feelings about anything in particular.
This is not about anybody's sex life who happens to be talking on this podcast for or against, but there are Again, ask any, you know, sex worker, particularly in-person sex worker, and like, you know, the idea of like, you know, a lot of men who act real tough and homophobic and, you know, are going to beat them gays down in public.
really want to be touched where the sun don't shine.
It's not at all in common.
There are lots of windows into the private realms of, you know, the private sexual realms of people of all types, you know, and everything happens.
Everything goes on and it goes on all the time.
This is what we know.
You know, people just, we're bonobos and we do it all.
We do it all.
Whatever it is, somebody's doing it.
Within reason.
And sometimes outside of reason.
Anyway.
This one, I saved this one for last, both because it involves dildos, but also because it's... Well, you know, you've got to build to a climax.
You've got to build to a climax, you know?
There's only one way to do that.
We've been edging long enough, let's get there.
But also, this one really takes the cake, okay?
In the opening sections, the author notes that though Allen lays out psychoanalytic theoretical considerations that are strongly suggestive of the co-constitutive relationship between masculinity, the variables listed above, and anality, currently there is no scholarly literature that engages the topic of straight male penetrative sex to a directly and substantively.
The author here is referring to Alan's article, Phallic Effect.
Although Alan's book, Reading from Behind, a cultural analysis of the anus from 2016, might prove to be more useful in the context of this study.
In other words... Again, go read the basic literature on this subject.
They quote one guy, they quote one researcher in one paper, because presumably they found some funny line.
It's a line that they thought was funny that they could put into it.
And the reviewer says, no, you really should have read this other book, the other book by the author you cited.
That's much more on point for the actual thing you're talking about.
I think that's amazing.
Anyway, this does continue.
This is like, you know, somebody submitting an article, translating it into my home language, you know, this is like somebody submitting an article to, I don't know, Historical Materialism Journal and their, you know, their thesis is based on a quote from a Phil Greaves tweet, you know, and the peer review process on the editorial board says, yeah, you might want to have a look at Gramsci.
I don't know.
It's a thought.
Or it's based on, it's based on like a PragerU, like quote from Gramsci, like citation PragerU episode 503.
And I was like, you should probably read the prison notebooks.
Or just, you know, Gramsci from, for beginners.
It's great.
It's got cartoons.
It'll be fine.
The cartoon version of Gramsci.
All right.
This goes even, this goes even further, right?
The author writes that, there exists a far more extensive and applicable treatment in the book, The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure, but unfortunately this insightful volume falls considerably outside the scholarly academic canon.
The reviewer again, I'm not certain that this is a problem.
Perhaps this is a difference of approach, but it seems to me that sexual manuals are highly valuable resources in scholarly work, and if there is a problem, that the problem rests not with the ultimate guide, but the academy's inability to imagine value outside of itself.
I love this!
You can read the whole thing.
it's fan in this to include books like the adventurous couple's guide to strap on sex by violet blue now hey i love this it goes on like you can read the whole thing it's all linked it's all linked so what i love about this is the reviewer is literally like making cogent criticisms of the way that the academy treats yes popular sex manuals Yes.
Right.
So far from being this closed shop where all you have to do is submit orthodoxy and the Academy says like a load of nodding dogs.
Yes, this meets our ideological criteria.
So we'll publish it.
What you actually get back is actually the Academy is fucking useless on this subject.
Go and read these sex manuals.
Yeah.
Go and read Violet Blue.
It's better than like a lot of the stuff that you're going to see in this fucking journal.
That's almost literally what is being said by that reviewer.
That is amazing.
That is just astonishing.
Yeah, it gives you gives you hope.
It almost gives you hope.
Oh, like it.
It's it is.
It is like this like it's this moment.
It is this like just such a little thing of like The author, like the fictional author of the paper, right?
So Lindsey is putting himself, or whoever wrote whichever one of the three or what combination.
So Lindsey is putting himself in the mind of this thing going like, well, yeah, I could talk about the pervert's guide to anal sex, but like, nobody's going to want to, you know, cite that in the academia.
This is just me being ridiculous and going like, yeah, this sex manual is going to be like a good source, but of course we can't use that in proper academic research.
And the academic who actually does this for a living to the point that they are like cited, you know, reviewers from this journal is saying, no, actually, that's good.
And actually, yes, no, you should, you should feel free to do that more often.
And if the problem is, it's the problem with the academia.
Again, we've been, I'm repeating what we just said, but like, Lindsay is claiming that he knows these subjects better than anybody, and he's putting in these, like, joking references that to him are just, like, completely absurd, that, like, an off-the-shelf sex manual could have any, like, value at all.
And the actual noted expert is going, like, yeah, check out Violet Blue.
It's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's amazing, it's amazing.
Ultimately, he's an ignorant, closed-minded, philistine ideologue and he's coming up against people who, for the faults of bourgeois academia, there are some genuinely questioning, thoughtful, imaginative people who are trying to understand the world in there, unlike him.
Indeed.
And if we were going to play some clips, and if I'd managed to prep this ahead of time, and we weren't running way up against our finish time, I would absolutely have pulled up the long chat that he had with Dr. Deborah So.
Oh my God, we're going to have to do an episode about her.
It's, it's just, what a fucking piece of work.
Um, actively works with Helen Plunkett as this thing, a counterweight.
Um, she's a sexologist.
He was like, anyway, they had like an hour long conversation mostly about polyamory and, uh, let's just say they're against it.
Well, you shocked me.
And it really is, it really is just like listening to these like, I mean, you know, it's one thing when like the Nazis just don't get it or like, you know, but listening to these like sort of reactionary, like kind of reasonable types who get to show their faces in cocktail parties, talk about sex is particularly polyamory.
Like people just lose their fucking minds over the idea that people can love more than one person.
It's ridiculous, yeah.
Yeah, these champions of, you know, the Western classical tradition.
The Romans had paintings of people being fucked by bulls all over their walls, you know.
Come on, you don't know anything about the tradition you claim to be championing.
All right, that's it.
We end with fucking bulls.
That's where we end on this podcast.
Well, like all the best things do.
I hope we have been taken with the spirit in which this was intended, by the way.
We never intended to insult anyone or to speak against sex workers of any kind.
I mean, Just to highlight that once again before we wrap up, we've been treating this lightly, but this kind of like Lindsay's bullshit, and they kind of like, this is a microcosm of like very real damage that is being done to very real people, right?
Yes.
However prestigious you think these journals are, and however prestigious they actually are, I'm not going to judge, you know, whatever.
Lindsay has hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.
He gets quoted.
He has been on every YouTube reactionary show imaginable.
He is speaking at GOP conventions.
He is a huge, huge figure within actual political culture.
He is building a name for himself.
Ditto for Boghossian and Pluck Rose and all of these people.
Yeah.
Who have done enormous material harm to the world through the kind of bigotry that led them to write these papers.
So the reason we go through the papers is, or at least the reviewer comments is, yes, it's funny.
And it's funny to see what they say about these things versus what's actually said, right?
You know, it's worthwhile to go into the details, but we can't lose track of the kind of the background fact here that this is having materially negative effects in the real world.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, this guy is making a career for himself, validating the bigoted intuitions of people who don't know anything and just want those bigoted intuitions validated.
That's basically his job now.
Yes, your guess about what's wrong with the world and all these people you don't like.
Yeah, it's right.
And I can tell you that with my patina of academic Uh, respectability.
I can tell you, yes, all your knee-jerk assumptions about what you don't like and who you don't like.
They're all right.
They're all absolutely correct.
Pay me.
That's basically his job now.
And it's despicable and it's harmful.
And yeah, I hope, I mean, you know, if you have criticisms of what we've said or our tone or anything, get in touch.
We will take them seriously.
Um, I hope this comes across in the way it is meant, which is that we are totally, I mean, I totally on the side of, uh, workers, including sex workers.
And we are we are laughing, but we are not laughing at you.
We are laughing at the we are laughing at them.
We are laughing at them with you.
I hope that is certainly how I mean it.
So.
Absolutely.
Just want to make sure that, you know, yes, we do.
We do.
It's worth stressing.
We do approach this with with humor, but it is, you know, it is not meant to be the sort of the juvenile humor of like, we're talking about dildos that isn't that great, you know, like or whatever.
We know this isn't a trivial issue.
Right, absolutely.
These are trivial people meddling in important issues.
Right, and doing, again, real damage to real people in the process.
Yeah, which, you know, that's what we're here to combat, and solidarity with sex workers, you know, and academics doing important theoretical work and empirical work to combat these people.
And the people picking the grapes and all of them, everybody.
One of the things, sorry, we're wrapping up here, but I did just want to highlight some more things.
One of the reasons I wanted to go through the reviewer comments in particular is because these are the people whose voices got left out of the media narrative on this.
Yeah, because it's inconvenient because it just completely explodes the Lindsay Pluckrose Boghossian narrative of what actually happened.
Right, like Lindsay Pluckrose and Boghossian get to go out and kind of tell their version.
And even in critical accounts, it's sort of like, well, did you really, you know, like there's, there's no kind of interrogation of their kind of basic framing of like, we wrote these papers and they gave us positive reviews, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When, I believe I mentioned this in the last episode, there were Twitter threads at the time of people who were like, oh yeah, I was a reviewer on that paper and boy, it was a bunch of bullshit.
And so trying to, obviously these reviewers are all anonymous.
And so if you were one of these reviewers, I would love to, and you have comments on this, please message me my email address and DMs, et cetera, and let me know.
I would love to hear from you.
Any of these papers.
Anonymity assured, if that's what you want.
Right.
And if you want to make a statement, we can read it on a future episode or we can do something with that for sure.
Absolutely.
So please, please let me know because that's, this is the voice that got left out of that story, right?
Is no, there were people, even if you say the journals themselves were negligent, there were reviewers calling out like major problems with these papers and almost universally in every single one.
You know, like this was not something where they did like a clever hoax and like fooled everybody.
Like people were pointing out the problems here.
And, you know, that's, we did, we did four hours on this material and summed it up in a sentence.
Well, this is the problem you always have, isn't it?
They can spew out misleading bullshit at 200 times the rate that it can be debunked.
For every minute's worth of misleading bullshit that these people just carelessly spew into the world, other people have to spend hours upon hours and upon hours researching it and debunking it and pointing out why it's crap.
Right.
Indeed.
Hopefully we've done our little bit towards doing that.
Re the Grievance Studies hoax.
Certainly hoax.
Hope so.
For sure.
Okay.
All right.
That's another episode done.
And listen to the next one.
It'll be good.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
No, it will.
It will.
They're always good.
Have more confidence in yourself, Daniel.
your honesty.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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