Op-ed in science journal Nature disses science and “scientism”, questions Enlightenment values

Nathaniel Comfort, author of the risible Nature essay at hand (click on screenshot below), is a professor in the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. We’ve met him three times before on this site; he seems to be a postmodernist who dislikes genes, New Atheism, and Richard Dawkins.  Now he’s written about. . . . […]

Postmodernism explained—and criticized

The title of this 2017 article in Areo by Helen Pluckrose (also editor of the site) pulls no punches, and the piece is well worth reading—unlike the tedious and impenetrable lucubrations of the postmodernists themselves. Pluckrose not only explained postmodernism clearly—well, as clearly as one can—but also outlined the dangers it poses to academic education […]

More science-dissing: WaPo’s misguided criticism of “scientism”

There’s never an end to science-dissing these days, and it comes largely from humanities scholars who are distressed by comparing the palpable progress in science with the stagnation and marginalization of their discipline—largely through its adoption of the methods of Postmodernism. (Curiously, the decline in humanities, which I believe coincides with university programs that promote […]

Big academic scandal brewing: three researchers deliberately publish seven bogus papers on “grievance studies” to highlight abysmal academic standards in the humanities

Yesterday three academics, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, announced that they’d engaged in a year-long project submitting “intentionally absurd papers to leading scholarly journals as part of an investigation to expose extreme bias in fields that study race, gender, sexuality, and other politically charged topics.” As the media release says (links to all […]

Psychology professor and her two cats write po-mo article on “multispecies inquiry”

This is just for grins: I don’t know whether the journal Qualitative Inquiry, where this travesty was published, is taken seriously (it is, however, a SAGE journal); but I am pretty sure this article is NOT a joke or a hoax. The article is free, and may not even require the legal unpaywall app; click […]

Paper of the month: Postmodernists on “doggy bio-politics” as exemplified by Obama’s Water Dog Bo

You know what? I don’t care if the paper below was published is a predatory journal, or an obscure journal or whatever: it still gives scholars the opportunity go cite a publication on their curriculum vitae, thereby advancing their careers. I have no idea how Organization rates among scholars, but Wikipedia does suggest that it doesn’t […]

Postmodern Poo: A Harvard course on scatalogical literature (“the canon is a chamber pot”)

An anonymous reader sent me this announcement for a course at Harvard, and at first I thought it was an enormous joke. Now I’ve learned it’s for real. For one thing, there is indeed a professor at Harvard called Annabel Kim: she’s an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. And her c.v., here, lists […]

An academic explores the performative social construction of masculinity among South Texas Hispanics by analyzing the size of their barbecues and spiciness of their condiments

If you looked at Heather Heying’s tw**t in this morning’s Hili dialogue, you’ll see this: What’s got you down? Shadow banning at twitter? (@Project_Veritas)Censorship at google? (@JamesADamore)Salsa accused of constructing masculinity? (@RealPeerReview) Take comfort in nature's beauty: a deep-sea glow-in-the-dark shark with extendable jaws.https://t.co/raE4XBYKnN — Heather E Heying (@HeatherEHeying) January 12, 2018 The “salsa accused […]

Postmodernism and its effect on politics and prose

Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, has managed to both be an LGBT activist and queer studies professor and at the same time demonize Israel at the expense of Palestine. She does this, of course, by claiming that gay rights in Israel (there are none in Palestine) is […]

Is health a “social construct”?

Oy, the kids are at it again, and it just gets worse and worse. In fact, this one is so bad that I can barely bear to write about it. Yes, it’s from the ultimate Hierarchical Oppression site, Everyday Feminism, always a way to gauge the Regressive Left Zeitgeist. Since the site loves listicles, this […]