Smacking Down the Dumb-ass Rebuttals to “Sokal Squared”

These ‘Prank Professors’ are spies for the right!

Even if that’s true, who cares? This is just the old George Dubya Bush line about, “Anyone who points out why Al-Quaeda attacked us, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy! America never did anything wrong ever!” . . .but dressed up in PC clothes.

If you really thought the fate of the oppressed was at stake, and it was important for your field to build public credibility, in order to decisively influence public opinion. . .? You’d have called out the weak links long ago.

But we do call each other out, all the time!

No, I mean in public. And not over petty ego disputes or wrong pronouns — calling professors in your fields out because their scholarship is not actually helping the marginalized masses in a material way.

In public??? That’s . . . ew!

Yes, the public are awful. And what’s worse, they’re not even grateful to you guys for your pioneering work in “Post-Semiotic Agend(er)ism”. They must all be bigots, that’s the only explanation for why they’re pointing and laughing at you.

Those journals weren’t that important anyway!

Whoa! Way to throw your own team under the bus! Jesus, where’s the loyalty? If the Prank Profs are racist/sexist/phobic for criticizing these fields, then what does that make YOU, for saying your journals suck?

It’s these kinds of double-standards that make people not trust you.

But, OK. Let’s assume these journals weren’t important. Maybe these sub-sub-genres like “Fat Theory” are marginal and ‘not representative of what we’re about’.

But are the students in those fields paying non-theoretical money? Are they taking out real loans? Are they spending years of their actual life learning it? Do they think this investment is worth it, because they’ve been constantly told that these fields are going to help save the world?

Here’s the thing: the Prank Professors took an average of 2 weeks to write a paper. That means in fourteen days, they taught themselves what it is SUPPOSED TO take 8 or 10 years to learn. And they didn’t need teachers or student loans to do it!

Did they learn everything? No. But they learned enough to get published, and getting published is the Boss Goal of any academic: even getting published in a small journal can make the difference between getting your PhD or not.

Some of the joke papers were rejected! Most, even!

So what. The ‘real’ papers that have been published in these journals for years are even sillier.

The usefulness of these types of Sokal pranks is that they get the attention of normal people. Unfortunately, the media isn’t going to report on all the academic BS, unless the media has a ‘hook’. So, even if only one single paper was accepted, if that’s enough of a hook to get the media to notice, then. . . good.

Maybe I’m being mean. Maybe it’s not my place to judge. Here’s a very un-scientific experiment you humanities professors can do at home: have your friend show you two pages: One page is from one of the Sokal Squared papers. Another page is from a “real” paper. If even you can’t tell the difference, Doctor, then you have no business saying , “Don’t listen to these pranksters, people!”

It’s just a juvenile prank! This isn’t science!

. . . said the professor who wrote 5,000 words on “Libidinal Cathexis and Queered (Per)spectives In ‘Family Guy’”. You’re the one pranking your own students on a daily basis, and now you’re mad that the Prank Profs exposed you. You don’t like the competition.

Your italics are getting irritating.

I’ll grant you that one.

This only happened because MOST journals make inexperienced, overworked young professors decide what papers get in!

How does admitting that even make you look good? Do you understand how arguments work?

But. . . Normies aren’t qualified to judge fields like “Feminist Poetry” or “Post-Scrotal Queer Textualism”! So snitching to the normie media about what goes on is unfair! They’re brainwashed by society, and obviously not going to take our side.

This was literally an argument made on the website N+1 .

It’s also the number one defense of Scientologists, and other cultists.

It’s bizarre to claim that your field is important because you’re going to save the masses from injustice. . . . but cry when the actual masses poke their noses into your affairs.

It’s weird when you justify your program by saying you’re standing up for the marginalized, while writing in a language designed to exclude them.

Yeah but it’s negative attention! It’s conservative outlets! We HAVE to circle the wagons!

Well, maybe if you wrote in regular language and reached out to the people you’re supposedly representing, maybe you’d have a more receptive audience.

But if you never invite normies in to have a friendly discussion, then by definition the only time that normies will hear about you is when you get negative press.

So when exactly IS it ok for normies to pay attention to you?

Compare your attitude to that of academics like Chomsky, or Bill Nye, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson: they want to share their knowledge, even if it irritates people. Even if they get pushback. Even if the concepts are difficult to break down to a normie.

Same with engineers like Musk or the hated Peter Thiel: they might be awful humans, but they’re proud of their work and want average people to know how that work might benefit the average people. That’s how science and shit is supposed to be.

But, why are you knocking academics who only want to end racism, sexism, transphobia?

Because they’re doing a shitty job of it.

Name one trans auto-worker whose life has been made measurably better because some dweeb wrote a thesis about “Cathexis of Transgressive Body(ies): Deconstructing Beyonce’s New Video Or Whatever”?

I’m knocking this academic cult, because their highest priority is not Overthrowing The Man. Their highest priority is claiming all the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-transphobia turf for themselves.

Anyone — teacher or student — who wants to explore social justice in a university setting . . .It’s not enough that they agree that various –isms and –phobias are Bad . . . there’s a lot of pressure to only criticize those –isms and –phobias within this particular snobby, hegemonic, ineffectual framework.

And if you’re more concerned that I said ‘hegemonic’ than ‘ineffectual’, that’s exactly why you bozos are ineffectual! The obsession with language!

Yet you’re the first to yell “problematic!” at people who are trying to find other ways of social justice, ways which might be more effective than spending 20 hours debating how to rank all the new genders in your ‘progressive stack’.

You’re holding back progress, I’m saying.

You professors. . . you’re more interested in protecting your hustle than actual change, so anyone who threatens that hustle gets painted as a bigot. Despite the fact that the hustle has never actually helped anyone but your little circle.

Whoa! That’s a bold claim, dickface.

Here’s what I mean, bottom line:

How many Womens/Gender/Race/Theory graduates are — at this very minute - trying to pay off their debts by working at Subway?

I’m not saying all professors are living high on the hog, driving ‘sick foreigns’ and so on. Far from it. You’re not all Peggy MacIntosh.

I’m saying that, while using rhetoric that you’re “Empowering the community”, you’re actually DIS-empowering them, by putting them in debt. The people you’re claiming to help — your students — they’re in debt because they believed your constant insistence that ‘Theory-speak’ is an effective, practical way to change society — if not the only way.

You’re dis-empowering them by making them spend 8 years learning something that the Prank Profs learned in two weeks.

Yeah, but education shouldn’t be about the money. That’s corporate thinking! University should be more than job training. . . It’s about the knowledge and broadening your horizons.

This one’s more tricky. That certainly ought to be true, in a just society (Go Bernie!).

But since YOU’RE CHARGING THEM MONEY, it’s kind of weird to say it’s not about money.

OK, I’ve about worn myself out thwacking my straw man.

Heh.

Thanks for reading!