Keeping it in the Family
In a recent tweet James Lindsay highlighted the following academic research paper
Many of the responses were predictable, but my favourites were along the lines of
what the fuck did I just read?
Quite. What the fuck did you just read?
Admittedly, this author has quite a way to go before reaching the rarefied level of pseudo-intellectual gibberish that is ButlerSpeak, but he tries his best.
“Specifically, I interrogate two ways in which incest is deployed as a particular form of knowledge . . .” (my emphasis)
How does one “deploy” incest? The mind boggles.
I don’t want to dwell on the content of this, erm, “scholarly” work - but to point out that this deranged and demented drivel appeared in a ‘journal’ and was ‘peer-reviewed’. It has been given the academic veneer of respectability, firstly by the author’s attempt at erudition and scholarship in the vaguely academic-sounding language chosen1, and secondly by the whole process upon which the academic world depends; publication.
James Lindsay first came to prominence for his excellent work alongside his colleagues Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose for exposing the fraud underlying much of this grievance study “scholarship”. They were able to get 4 papers published, 3 accepted for publication, and 7 still under review (with the likelihood that maybe 3-4 of those would be accepted based on reviewers comments) before their program was spotted. These papers were all garbage - the difference being the authors deliberately wrote garbage to test whether they could get it published.
My own favourite is their work taking a chapter of Mein Kampf as a template and replacing the Nazi terminology with modern day feminist terminology. This was published.
Peter Boghossian coined the term “idea laundering” to describe the process by which you can engineer academic respectability. You start off with a bunch of academics with some moral hissy fit about something. They start to write ‘papers’ dressed up in fancy ‘scholarly’ language and start journals up to get those august works published. They organize conferences and the rest of the academic paraphernalia - and in very little time you’ve created a whole new field of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’.
It has to be totally legit coz, like, they’ve got papers and studies and journals and peer-review and conferences, innit?
The whole process is, shall we say, rather incestuous.
Of course, even academic fields with some actual legitimate content, suffer a little bit from this kind of thing too. You get an ‘in’ and an ‘out’ group - and this can affect funding. The people who decide upon research funding are not without their own prejudices. If you want to get funding for an idea that is outside of the mainstream you’ll run into problems because the people deciding where the funds go are largely within the mainstream. That’s not necessarily a wholly bad thing - you shouldn’t just be funding every ‘wacky’ idea out there - but there’s a fine line between rejecting something on academic merit (or lack thereof) and simply rejecting something because it disagrees with your own views on what theories are correct or not.
The almost unanimous pursuit of string theory in physics is a case in point here. The string theorists pretty much had a stranglehold on funding as far as I could tell, and yet the ‘achievements’ of string theory after over 3 decades of research have not whelmed me at all. I’m not a particle physicist so I am not best qualified to make a decent assessment - but it certainly has the feel of an area that suffers from keeping it in the family a little too much.
One of the good things about covid, or rather the insane level of propaganda, official misinformation and lies surrounding covid, has been that an awful lot of people have woken up to the illusion that academics and ‘experts’ rely upon. The illusion is that of infallibility. Yes, of course we know that scientists and experts and medics sometimes get it wrong - but, traditionally, we haven’t really taken that to heart so much. Even knowing that sometimes experts are as clueless as the rest of us many people still, pretty much, act as if these experts are infallible.
You can see this ‘infallibility’ trick played out in the media. ‘Experts say’, or ‘studies show’, are just 2 of the little mis-directions that get used. Well, if an ‘expert’ has said it, it must be true, right? And they can back it all up with a ‘study’ - how about that? You can see the infallibility nudge being employed here (or should I say deployed?).
Then we’re subtly (or not so subtly) encouraged NOT to do our own research - which is just a shorthand way of saying “just accept what we say you gullible arsehole”. As the saying goes - yes, I am patronizing you. How clever of you to notice.
But the credibility of ‘experts’ over the last couple of years has taken a nosedive - and quite rightly so given their appalling record on covid.
The ‘conspiracy’ and ‘anti-vax’ plebs, the great unwashed who, horror of horrors, use the internet (how dare they?) have been right about covid and covid responses overwhelmingly more than the official ‘experts’ have been.
They tried to engineer academic respectability for their covid program - they kept it in the family by having an incest-fest of supportive ‘experts’ and excluding those not in the family - and yet they failed.
They failed because they couldn’t properly suppress the amazing worldwide collaboration that has gone on. Ignored by the media, this army of truth-seekers has decimated the official narrative. And ‘they’ know it.
That’s why there’s been a big push to clamp down on this kind of thing via somewhat euphemistically titled initiatives like “online safety bills” or the “disinformation governance board” or those temples of truth known as “fact checkers”.
In terms of information, governments are hugely supportive of incest. They want to keep it all in the family, so to speak. They don’t want their offspring-messages contaminated by dangerous information genes that come from outside the family. They lost the battle of academic respectability - they tried to engineer it as best they could. Now they’re coming for the reasons they lost so they can ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Although I do note the phrase “fuck the future” is not one I’m familiar with in an academic context. Perhaps it has a deeper, more technical, meaning in the profound scholarly world of grievance studies.
So...incest is fine because the only problem with being disabled is the social stigma? That is going to be very reassuring to my GSD with hip dysplasia. P.S. I am glad a quick search to verify that this is for real revealed that this guy is also teaching "Introduction to Criminology" and is an expert in "porn studies," a discipline which makes gender studies and queer theory look quite legitimate and scholarly by comparison.
The most important skill I was ever taught (shout out to DrB) is spotting informal fallacies. When it comes to trusting the "experts" the fallacy is that of an "appeal to authority." Appeals to authority, when successful, cause the audience to bypass thought. As a result millions rushed out to be injected with the glorious goo even after it had become widely known that it failed to prevent infection or transmission of WuhanFlu. And sadly having just receiving FDA EUA millions more will rush out to have their children 5 and under injected though 90% have already recovered from the virus, many/most never knowing even they had it.
As more side effects become known almost daily these children's parents who's should have protected their children are, in fact, causing unknown harms that will plague many for years to come.
All because of an fallacious argument.