From Marxism through “New Criticism” to Academic Nonsense 4 (Column 181)

Contents of the Article

With God’s help

From Marxism through ‘the New Criticism’ to Academic Nonsense 4

In previous columns I discussed the development of postmodernism, from Marxism through deconstruction to our own day. At the beginning of the first column (178) I noted that the motivation for this discussion is the phenomenon of nonsense articles, which in my view are an integral and expected part of postmodernism and deconstruction. I further noted that it is no accident that these articles grow precisely in the beds of the social sciences and the humanities, for those fields contain an inherent problem. True, nonsense articles are esoteric wild growths that do not necessarily teach us about those fields as a whole, but still, that correlation demands explanation. I said this was an opportunity to sharpen my recurring claim regarding the ‘junk’ character of these fields.

I will now enter into the issue of nonsense articles, and try to explain why, in my view, despite their esoteric nature, they contain something that teaches us about the social sciences and the humanities in general.

On the Problem Itself

It is rather difficult to justify a general claim about an entire field of knowledge. To determine that these are ‘junk sciences’ is a fairly vague statement, and it is hard to provide a justification for it on the basis of quantitative or even unequivocal criteria. Who decides what counts as junk? What is valueless material? What has meaning and value for one person is devoid of meaning or value for another. After all, every article claims something, does it not? And is everything that is not scientific therefore valueless?! Beyond that, how much inferior material must be present in order to disqualify an entire field and treat it as ‘junk’? These problems make it very difficult to ground such a determination.

Not by chance, this recalls similar claims about abstract or modern art. Many criticize it (with Kishon, of blessed memory, at the forefront)^[1] on the grounds that it is the second great fraud of the century (after alternative medicine, of course). Meaningless scribbles and nonsense are displayed in respectable museums as works possessing conceptual and artistic depth. On the other hand, the usual defenses are always heard: who told you it is meaningless?^[2] You probably do not understand it. For someone else it is deeply meaningful. To those who understand, it says a great deal, and so on. And indeed, it is difficult to define, and certainly to quantify, the artistic value of a work. As our sages said, there is no arguing about taste and smell.

A third example is texts in Jewish thought and Hasidism. My claim (see columns 104–6, 113) is that a considerable portion of them is valueless chatter that does not say very much. Undefined concepts, fuzzy claims, wordplay, speculation, distinctions between positions that do not really differ, and many banal claims that anyone knows even without learned research, and of course innumerable unsupported assertions. And again the response is: who appointed you?! Many people find great taste and depth in this. Is everything you dislike valueless? And again, is everything that is not scientific therefore valueless?! To that I will repeat here as well that all this is indeed true. It is not plausible that everything I dislike is valueless. Nor is it true that everything that is not scientific is valueless. On the other hand, it is also not true that everything I dislike and that is not scientific necessarily has value. So how can one determine the value of such a text? Is it merely that I do not like it (that I disagree with it), or is it truly valueless? Again, the lack of standards works against us.

And above all, there are postmodern texts in general. Here, however, it makes no difference at all what field they deal with, because as we already saw in previous columns, absence is absence, no matter what is being rendered absent. These texts are, of course, extreme cases of the first three examples. With respect to them as well, I have often argued that they are meaningless and valueless nonsense: an embarrassing collection of sentences, some of them fallacies and some tautologies (in the best case, mixed with some meaningful element, which by definition is not postmodern)^[3]. And again, one can ask me how I can determine such a thing. After all, one can always provide an interpretation that pours meaning into the text. The more meticulous will say that interpretation is always created by the reader or interpreter, and is not a characteristic of the text itself (sound familiar? That is, of course, the ideological justification of the purveyors of nonsense themselves. I explained this in the previous column). So how can one really determine, in a well-grounded way, that a text is valueless? What are the criteria? Apparently, what I am saying here may itself be pure drivel.

What Is Quality?

This takes me back to Phaedrus, the hero of Pirsig’s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As a lecturer in rhetoric, Phaedrus graded his students’ essays and wondered what the criteria are for determining the quality of an essay, and quality in general. Can one assign grades and evaluate such a paper or such a text without criteria? Is that not merely an arbitrary subjective judgment? The other side of the coin was that he felt there were different levels of quality among the essays, even though he had no objective measures. That is the tension that accompanies statements of this kind, and indeed the ‘junk sciences’ as a whole.

One of the difficult problems here is that in fields where it is hard to present criteria for quality, charlatanism can easily hide. There is no doubt that this is fertile ground for presenting a heap of rubbish as works of depth (and if someone does not understand them and does not see that, that is of course only due to the poverty of his understanding and the depth of the concept). The postmodernism described in previous columns is based on the claims of the professionally aggrieved, such as: ‘Who appointed you?’ or ‘Who gave you the monopoly?’ and the like. It is true that in these fields there are no clear criteria, but the question is whether this necessarily means that anything goes, or whether even in such fields there is room to employ common sense, precisely because they lack sharp criteria. The absence of criteria for quality does not mean there is no quality.

The Junk Problem: The Core of the Claim

I now come to academic research. Unlike the positivist approach, which criticizes the various junk fields for their very lack of scientificity (Popper’s criticism of psychoanalysis is well known)^[4], for me the claim that something is not science is not an accusation, and certainly not when directed at the social sciences and the humanities as such. The nature of these fields probably does not allow them to be studied in the way the natural sciences are, and it is hardly surprising that there is no certainty there of the sort found in the natural sciences. I do not know how to do it better or more precisely. Work in these areas is by nature saturated with assumptions, and it is very hard to isolate parameters; therefore it is sometimes difficult to identify clear laws and to distinguish between assumptions and research findings (the researchers themselves do not always trouble to make these distinctions, and that is certainly regrettable). Therefore claims in these fields, even if they appear well founded, are not truly so. Many of them are vague and undefined, or trivial, mainly because most of them cannot be subjected to an empirical test of falsification. But all these are consequences of the nature of these fields.

My main claim is directed at some of those who work in these fields, and at the public attitude they receive. Because of their imprecise nature, speculation in these areas flourishes like mushrooms after the rain, and in many cases is presented as scientific truth set in stone. At times, sensation replaces serious research (some researcher has discovered that the kingdom of David never existed, or that the Book of Genesis was written by Maimonides, who in fact converted to Islam and immersed himself in yoga and transcendental meditation, that women are more resilient than men, and so forth). The agenda dictates the research results and the manner of their presentation (that there is no such thing as conversion therapy for homosexuals, that homosexuality is neither deviance nor disease, that there are no differences of talent between races or genders, and the like).^[5] In many cases, word games replace arguments. When there is no way to make precise claims, one moves to logical pilpul and empty conceptual analyses. Word games whose only criterion is logical consistency. They need not have any substantial content. It is enough that you compare the nonsense of one scholar to that of another. The main thing is that you make a logically valid claim on the basis of some arbitrary assumptions.

A common phenomenon is that discussion of the positions of other scholars (who themselves discuss the positions of other scholars) becomes the thesis, and it is not entirely clear what exactly is being researched there. In many cases, the researchers study mainly themselves and the differences between them: the approach of so-and-so differs from that of someone else or resembles it, without any reference to the world of facts, that is, to the objective reality they are supposed to investigate and describe. Entire fields are created through mutual citation and comparison among scholars themselves. Facts do not really interest them.

In certain cases, researchers in these fields do not distinguish between facts and assumptions, norms, values, worldviews, ideologies, and agendas. They present themselves, and are likewise seen by others, as full-fledged disciplines and as experts in every sense. The attitude toward those who work in these fields is also that of experts in their domain whose statements carry standing and validity. Just as there are experts in physics, nuclear science, economics, biology, and medicine, so too there are experts in politics, education, and gender. My claims are mainly on these planes.

My Claims: ‘Junk Sciences’

It is important to note that even in these fields one can from time to time find things of value, but the vagueness and the absence of criteria allow charlatanism and the production of garbage to a degree beyond the tolerable. Usually even the valuable things do not deserve the title of science, but not everything of value needs to be science. If they were trying to produce things of value there without laying claim to the crown of scientific expertise, many of the claims against them (apart from the positivist ones) would disappear and everything would fall into place.

My main claim against the ‘junk sciences’ is not that they lack criteria and are not science. The claim is that this lack of criteria leads to the corruption of research in all the ways I have described and more. Above all, I protest against using research as a spade with which to dig. As we saw in previous columns, agenda has become a criterion for quality. Another claim is that the respectful treatment they receive is unjustified. The ‘experts’ there are usually experts in nothing. Just listen to interviews in the media with experts in psychology, education, political science, politics, and the like, and you will see that you learned nothing at all (beyond perhaps a few facts that only the expert knows). The discipline has no added value. The discipline is a dime-store analysis of phenomena that any person on the street could have produced at the same level and with the same quality, at least in the best case.

In sum, my claim is that these are ‘junk sciences,’ and mark well: when they are treated as sciences, that is usually junk. If one sees them for what they are, these fields also contain intelligent things, even though they are shrouded in no small amount of valueless trash. It is not the field that is junk, but the ‘scientificity’ within it (and even that is not all of it, and not always).

Consequences

The problem with this scientific pretension is not only that it is a kind of agreed-upon lie. Beyond that, it carries heavy costs, and harms first and foremost these very fields themselves. Once there are no clear criteria for quality (such as falsification tests), the need to be regarded as scientific compels people to invent criteria as they please, and this opens the door to the takeover of agendas and fashions of various kinds (political correctness) in place of impartial research or discussion. If they were not pretending to create binding scientific criteria, one could examine articles and claims using the tools of common sense in one direction or another. True, that leaves room for debate, but that is the nature of these fields. But once one tries to manufacture a discipline where none exists, what happens is that people focus on those marginal things that can be proven (that is, on trivialities), or on tautological word games. And of course what matters most is the way the references are written (in boldface or plain type, whether the year comes before the place and publisher or after them, whether you cited so-and-so or not), the presentation of quotations, the number of words, the division into sections, and so on and so forth. Content is secondary. Content is hard to judge, and therefore the focus is on form rather than content, and on tendency rather than claims.

Back to Well-Grounded Arguments

So how can I substantiate my own claims? Are they not afflicted by agenda and composed of a collection of unfounded generalizations? Indeed, this is an impression, and as noted, in these fields it is hard to do anything more well grounded (at least nobody pays me for the ‘research’ I do in these columns, and I also do not claim that it is ‘science’).

But fortunately for me, in these junk fields, because of the lack of criteria and the inherent problematic nature of them, especially extreme wild phenomena are bound to grow. Ask why I am happy. Because these wild phenomena make life very easy for me. About them, one can argue in a quantified and scientifically grounded way that they are junk. These are postmodern weeds, marginal phenomena of those fields, but they have two salient advantages: 1. Claims about them are measurable. 2. In my estimation they reflect and express a broader problematic inherent in these fields generally.^[6]

Nonsense Articles

The first person to become famous through such a nonsense hoax was the physicist Alan Sokal, who sent a nonsense article entitled: ‘Transgressing Boundaries: Toward a hermeneutics of quantum gravity’ (Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity),^[7] for publication in the journal social sciences, published at Duke University. This was an issue devoted to the ‘science wars’ (criticism of science by sociologists). It is important to note that this journal was regarded as a respectable journal in its field, and Duke University is one of the leading academic institutions in the United States. And lo and behold, the article was accepted for publication and was indeed published in May 1996.

After the publication of the article, Sokal published an article in the journal Lingua Franca in which he wrote:

The long article, laden with footnotes, was fundamentally absurd and consisted of a mishmash of nonsense, banalities, and mistakes in basic arithmetic. One of the absurd claims in the article was that pi (the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference) and G (the gravitational constant) are historically contingent. The article also claims, among other things, that just like social reality, physical reality is a social construction and linguistic construct, and that quantum gravity shows that spacetime is not an objective physical reality.

After the publication of the article and Sokal’s above response, a fierce controversy ensued over the quality of articles and research in these fields, and over criteria that make use of postmodern terminology and a ‘critical’ spirit in place of the quality criteria one would expect.

But if you thought anyone learned lessons, you were mistaken. Twenty years after Sokal, in recent weeks a similar experiment by three fellows—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, who are connected in various ways to the academic world—was published. These three wrote around twenty articles and sent them for publication to various journals; according to them, these were journals regarded in their fields (which of course does not mean much). Allow me to go into some detail about everything that happened there, because it is both highly amusing and instructive, and I fear that some of you will not go through, in proper detail, the article in __Calcalist__ that I linked above, and will thus miss sheer delight.

The New Nonsense Articles: The Rape Culture of Queer Dogs

I will begin with their important article, entitled: ‘Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Behavior in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.’ Does that sound to you like the titles of a Resling book or an article from __Theory and Criticism__, and like the examples brought in previous columns? Indeed it does. We saw that this is the canonical definition of a title for compositions from this bizarre genre: a combination of words from the standard basket (rape culture and queer behavior) attached to a banal word from everyday life (an urban dog park in Portland).

They sent this article, with its fashionable and typical nonsense title, in the hope and expectation (well founded) that it would be accepted for publication through no fault of its own. They expected it to be accepted solely because of the standard structure of the title and a few fashionable sentences inside it, even though, as stated, it was all nonsense.

To sharpen the important findings presented in the article, it is worth bringing a few of their revolutionary claims (from this point onward, the quotations are from the aforementioned article in __Calcalist__):

The study claimed that dog parks are spaces permissive of rape and that they contain an aggressive rape culture of the ‘oppressed bitch.’ One of the conclusions was that men should be trained with a collar and leash like dogs, in order to teach them to stop behaving violently.

This ludicrous idea was signed by ‘Helen Wilson,’ a nonexistent academic from an invented research institute, who never observed 10,000 dogs in public gardens in Portland and never examined (‘politely,’ the study promised) their genitals.

By the way, that is not actually a real problem in my view, since it is simply fraud. The editorial system has no way to check whether the researcher is lying or not, and therefore דווקא here I do not see a genuine problem.^[8] My problem is with the content of the claims and the absurdities in the article, not with the fraud. True, given the lack of content and the absurdities in the article, I would have expected suspicion to arise regarding the ‘research’ itself and the possibility of fraud to be examined. That is, once you see such nonsense, it immediately calls for checking for fraud. That, of course, was not done, and we shall return to this.

You are surely asking yourselves what the reaction of the editorial board of that esteemed journal was. Here is the news.

After a careful reading of the article by two learned and independent academic reviewers (blind review, as is customary), their report included the following evaluations:

‘This is a powerful, innovative article, rich in analysis and well written,’ wrote the first reader, who also described the study as ‘intellectual’ and ‘exciting.’ The second reader thought the article would be ‘an important contribution to feminist animal geography,’ whatever that means. And not only was the article published and crowned as one of the best in the journal’s 25 years—‘Helen Wilson’ was invited to evaluate four other articles submitted to the journal.

In other words, this was not a chance oversight by two infantile reviewers. They not only failed to notice that this was nonsense. They derived from this text lofty academic insights and classified it as a model work. This is no longer merely a chance event to be ignored, a weed. There is a phenomenon here whose significance is much broader.

And to conclude, you are surely wondering what the editorial board wrote to them after the article passed review. Here are the words before you:

The journal ‘Gender, Place, and Culture’ is celebrating its 25th year. In honor of the occasion we will publish 12 leading articles in the 12 issues of 2018. We want to publish your article, ‘Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Behavior in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon,’ in the seventh issue. It draws attention to many subjects from previous research on feminist geographies and shows how some of the work now being done can contribute to invigorating the field. In that sense, we think this is a good article for the celebrations.

By the way, there is no doubt that this is indeed a good article for the celebrations, especially in the developing field of feminist animal geography. It is also a typical article (similar to previous works and past ‘research’), and despite that still manages to be distinctive, creative, and thrilling. No small feat!

The fact that it is nonsense does not bother any of the peer reviewers or the editorial board itself (apparently all the other learned compositions published there are of a similar level). It is not that the article merely slipped through and that was that. They simply did not notice. On the contrary, they did notice it. It was singled out as exemplary and chosen as one of the journal’s classics over its twenty-five years. It is worth noting that we are not speaking here about a literary work, which is published solely on the responsibility of its owner. This is an academic article that passed the scrutiny of the journal and its various reviewers (usually more than one), and none of them noticed that it was nonsensical drivel. What do you think that says about the other articles published there (the ones written seriously by their authors)?

If you want a few enthusiastic responses they received by email, beyond the enraptured editorial board of the journal and the scholarly community of queer bulldog geography, there is also a video, part of a documentary they are currently making about their experiment, in which several gushing emails about the studies they invented are presented.

Want more examples of these model studies? Here are a few more:

One of the articles presented a study claiming that if men masturbated through anal penetration they would be less transphobic and more feminist. Do you not believe it? It was published in the journal ‘Sexuality & Culture.’ In another article, accepted by ‘Affilia,’ a journal of social work and feminist criticism, they rewrote part of ‘Mein Kampf,’ Adolf Hitler’s political manifesto, and argued that neoliberal feminism can be refuted by a feminism that unites women around their victimhood. In yet another study they wrote, it was claimed that oppressive cultural norms cause society to admire muscle building and despise fat building, and they proposed the term Fat Bodybuilding to describe the professional sport of constructing a fat body. The idea was accepted and the article was published in the journal ‘Fat Studies.’

Note also the names of these journals. Combinations of standard basket terms: theory, criticism, culture, along with other general terms (social science, sexuality, fat, and the like). Everything according to the standard described in previous columns. One cannot mistake the affiliation of this phenomenon as extreme cases of the cloud of postmodernism that obscures our surroundings.

I cannot refrain from bringing here a picture containing a list of seven of their ‘studies’:

In my opinion, some of this was copied directly from Resling and from __Theory and Criticism__, and if they do not sue them for copyright infringement they are simply suckers. Read and judge.

The Motivation

Keren Tzuriel Harari, who wrote the report in __Calcalist__, cites the authors’ words about the motivation that drove them:

It was the climax of the prank by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, who wanted to expose the weakness and hypocrisy of the humanities. For a long time they had gone around with the feeling that there are things one may and may not claim in studies dealing with weak minority groups such as women and LGBT people, and in race studies; that academic research, which purported to be the place where people debate human rights and negotiate over the society we want to be, had become a narrow-minded and conformist place where there is room only for very particular opinions; that the more you complain about the deprivation of a minority group, the more successful you become. Therefore they called these fields ‘Grievance Studies.’

They did not want merely to assert their claim, so they decided to prove it using the tools of good science. Over the course of a year, until last summer, they wrote 20 academic articles (an average of one article every 13 days) and sent them for publication to the highest-ranked journals in their fields. Their success is impressive by any standard: within a year, seven articles were accepted for publication, four of them actually published and three awaiting their turn. To provide proportion: at many American universities, publishing seven articles over seven years is enough to receive tenure. Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian had another seven articles that had already entered the journals’ review process when the experiment was stopped. Only six were rejected outright for publication.

Good thing they stopped in time, otherwise by now the Ministry of Education and the Adviser on Women’s Affairs in the Chief of Staff’s office would already be in the midst of a comprehensive examination of all our basic conceptions about gender in light of the up-to-date research findings on the masturbation of queer dogs in public parks and its effect on coffee drinking in the streets of Dimona, the exclusion of women, and the hyperbolic chauvinistic paternalism of hegemonic men in the narrative-khaki periphery.

You think I am imagining this? Look at what Pluckrose writes about how such ‘studies’ are cited by others and thus entire ‘bodies of knowledge’ and fields of research are built:

This shows how the corruption of knowledge is based on building mistaken ideas from the outset, carrying them forward in wrong directions, and receiving an entire structure of shaky research. One terrible article is published, then another article relies on it, and another, and another—and this whole structure is created without foundations, which people present uncritically. And if you try to argue something else, they will tell you that you are going against years of research.

That is exactly what I wrote above. Such ‘studies’ create entire fields out of thin air (like queer geography of animals). From that point onward, what is done there is what is done in the social sciences and the humanities generally. One will cite another, disagree with him, compare him to a third, and thus articles will pile up and millions of acres of forests in Brazil will be felled (and then all these people still claim that Trump is the one harming the environment), for the advancement of knowledge in the feminist geography of queer bulldogs in Portland. Sorry, in dog parks in Portland (for it is well known that in private homes queer dogs behave quite differently. Please preserve academic and scientific precision and rigor, and do not leap to stereotypical, hegemonic, and rash conclusions and generalizations).

Conclusions

Lindsay explains the meaning of their experiment as follows:

We learned how to get articles published, and what is required for them to pass the academic review process…

The secret is to create and fake problems in a direction that has already bothered researchers, and where all the reviewers are moving in the same direction. Instead of displaying intellectual seriousness, you need to navigate through a series of rules that tilt the discourse toward grievance: for example, are you speaking in the right way about transgender people? Are you positioning yourself correctly as a white person? The trick is to dehumanize privilege as consistently as possible, and to lean on theory that allows this to be done in an ‘academic’ way. Our studies were intentionally strange and bad, but they fit almost perfectly with other studies from those same disciplines.

Our method was to begin with a terrible conclusion: for example, in the article about the dogs we began from the conclusion that men are like dogs, and then worked backward and found that the existing literature is capable of supporting that claim. Another excellent example was that we wanted to show there is a serious problem in education. This is something that should worry everyone, because that is where our culture begins. So we wrote an article arguing that privileged white men in college should undergo correction by being made to sit on the floor, be shackled in chains, and be forbidden to speak—and ‘Hypatia,’ a feminist philosophy journal, warmly accepted the idea.

Here are more examples of crazy and immoral ideas around which they fabricated research that in most cases passed the quality review of ‘Grievance Studies.’ For example, they argued that when a man masturbates privately and fantasizes about a woman without her consent and without her knowledge, he sexually harms her; astronomy is considered a male and Western science, so it can be corrected by adding feminist and queer astrology to it—the idea was accepted, and the fictitious author, Dr. Maria Gonzalez, was asked to make several revisions prior to publication. In another scandalous study they argued that men tend to frequent restaurants like Hooters, which built their reputation on large-breasted waitresses, because of nostalgia for an authentic masculinity in which the dominant man enjoys sexual conquests. The study relied on completely fabricated data, which did not prevent the editor of the journal ‘Sex Roles’ from writing to the author, Richard Baldwin (an emeritus professor from Florida who allowed the three to use his name), that his article was ‘an important contribution to the field’—and from publishing it.

‘As we progressed, we realized that almost anything would work, as long as it fell into the main moral current and displayed familiarity with the existing literature,’ they explain. ‘That is, if we only fit ourselves to the existing literature in the proper way—and there is always a citation that allows it—we can say any fashionable or political thing we want. We were always dealing with the same basic questions: what do we need to write and what do we need to cite so that this academic madness will be published as research?’

It is worth noticing several important points. The field is built through mutual references by these ‘researchers’ to one another. If there are enough threads in this network, you have made a significant contribution to the field. That is its very essence. There are no facts from the world there, only fabrications linked to one another in a tangled web of vague terms, studies that say nothing, and fashionable conclusions (such as shackling hegemonic men in chains in university lecture halls so that they may undergo a corrective experience). Absurd!

Responses

You are surely wondering how those editors and reviewers responded (for some reason, apparently none of them was dismissed in disgrace from his post). So here is one example:

Nicholas Mazza, editor of ‘Journal of Poetry Therapy,’ sounded consumed with remorse. His journal published an article that was a bitter poetic monologue of a divorced feminist. Most of it was produced by a poetry generator to which the three added fashionable messages such as thoughts about self-pleasure. The entire text was written in less than six hours and was accepted for publication as is. Mazza told the Wall Street Journal that the article had undergone blind peer review and expressed regret that he had not made an effort to verify the identity of the author. He said it had taken years to build the journal’s credibility, which is now collapsing. ‘I can understand how journals and editors like me can be fooled,’ he admitted.

Notice: his only problem is the fraud (that is, that the author’s identity was fabricated). But what about the fact that nonsense written in a few hours passes the review process of his editorial board and receives academic credit? If it had been discovered that the author was Joseph son of Simon and not Moses son of Levi, everything would have been fine? Nicholas Mazza presumably has the answer. It is indeed strange that the journal may instantly lose the tremendous credit that was built over the years. Really not nice. He is not even capable of understanding that all this credit (assuming it exists) is not worth the paper it is written on. The problem is not with the article that was published, but with the criteria it passed, and therefore with all the other articles that were written seriously and passed review, which are probably not worth much more.

What does this say about the IQ of the editor himself? If the editor of the journal is not even capable of understanding the nature of the problem that has already been exposed in his own journal, it is no wonder he is incapable of exposing existing problems on his own, and of course it is no wonder that this is the product he and his colleagues produce.

Here is a description of another response:

Lindsay: ‘There has been very little response from them so far. ‘Gender & Society,’ the largest journal in the world in gender studies, demanded that we apologize, and I made clear that we would not apologize: we tested the system, they are the ones who accepted or rejected our articles, and ‘Gender & Society’ in fact rejected the article we sent, so good for them. But others did not. ‘Gender, Place and Culture,’ which published the article about the rape of the female dogs, announced that they would change their policy to minimize the chance that a fictitious author would pass their filter. That is exactly the wrong response, because it does not change the research practices we set out to expose.

The editor of the journal that rejected the article demanded an apology, and from his point of view rightly so. But the second editor, who accepted it for publication, was not even capable of understanding the problem that had been exposed אצל him, and he too is looking for how it was not discovered that the author was a pseudonym, exactly like our friend Nicholas above. A considerable part of the problem is probably the IQ of these people.

None of these people even entertains the possibility that the entire field and its journals require a serious shaking-up (in fact, grinding to dust: breaking it is its purification). They are apparently not at a stage of development that enables them to understand this. Postmodernity and critical deconstruction have taken over their gray cells, which perhaps once originally had the potential to become a functioning brain, and turned them into mush that randomly emits standardized slogans. Think about the fact that all these are respected academics, journal editors, and academic article reviewers, professors interviewed in the media as experts (in the queer geography of four-legged rapists), who certainly also submit expert opinions in their field (to the Adviser on Women’s Affairs) and shape public opinion on these matters. This is how one arrives at the point that in New York more than thirty different genders are defined by law, and everyone must respect the other’s gender according to that person’s choice, and perhaps also allow that person to relieve himself in a stall dedicated to that gender and no other. Run to study restroom-stall architecture; it is the profession of the future.

All this is done, of course, for handsome salaries and generous budgets at the expense of the stupid public (= us). And then people still say that full-time yeshiva students are freeloaders who deal with irrelevant subjects, and they search the budget book for places to cut. You do not understand what quantities of garbage are produced in these fields, and how many hundreds and thousands of people receive salaries to engage in them and budgets to conduct armchair research and conferences where they exchange with one another verbal expressions utterly devoid of meaning. Truly modern art.

1.

Footnotes

1. He even took the trouble to write a very amusing book about it (published here almost at the time of his death): Picasso’s Sweet Revenge. Search for it online and you will immediately find the rage of those very people I am talking about here (especially readers and writers of Haaretz).
2. A casual look at the above responses to Kishon’s book will immediately show you these claims.
3. For further discussion, I argued that a typical postmodern text is composed of two components: one meaningful component, which is modernist, and another component (postmodern), which is nonsense. The value of such a text is determined by the proportion of the first component relative to the second. A distinctly postmodern text is one composed only of the second component.
4. For a balanced description of this criticism and similar ones, see here.
5. By the way, this is probably true in both directions. Those who claim that there are such treatments are, of course, driven by an agenda as well, except that in their case this is obvious. By contrast, the ‘scientific’ community presents its statements as objective claims and scientific findings, whereas the truth is not entirely so.
6. Physicists who want to deal with the dynamics of a donkey begin with a point donkey. This may be amusing, but with such a donkey one can perform calculations and fully understand its physics. From there one can advance slowly toward understanding a realistic donkey. Nonsense articles too are explicit, point-like junk that can be well understood, and they provide a clear model for the less explicit phenomena.
7. What a waste! He could have proposed this as a title for a Resling book.
8. See Mordechai’s argument on Column 179 and my response to him precisely on this point.