Hitler's and Stalin's Misuse of Science by S D Tucker;

Author:S D Tucker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Conspiracy Theories
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2023-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Illegitimate Grievances

To satirise modern-day Western me-searchers, a minor industry has developed in recent years of pranksters submitting pseudoscientific papers about deliberately ridiculous things to actual academic journals to see whether they will actually be printed – which, predictably, they often are. Most famously, in 1996 New York University Physics Professor Alan Sokal had his nonsensical Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics published in US social studies journal Social Text, so exposing the poor scholarship which often occurs when humanities scholars tackle the hard sciences. Sokal abused quantum mechanics to propose an über-Machist world-view in which the physical reality of our world was nothing more than ‘at bottom a social and linguistic construct’, a biased pseudoscientific product which ‘reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power-relations of the culture that produced it’, as Foucault believed. For support, Sokal cited genuine (or not) academics like Luce Irigaray, a Belgian theorist who infamously proposed the field of solid mechanics was more well-developed than that of fluid mechanics as science was traditionally a male realm, and men understood solid and protruding things like erect penises better than they did things which flowed with fluids like menstruating vaginas, a theory so irrational I can only assume Irigaray must have conceived of it whilst on her own period. For such disgraceful efforts Sokal was accused of the hilariously Orwellian thought-crime of ‘an attempt at consensus-building … founded on notions of the real’.62

This being 1996 Sokal could not yet talk about transgenderism, but by 2017 things were different and suspicious Oregon-based Philosophy Professor Peter Boghossian decided to update Sokal for our strange times by submitting a fake paper to low-rent journal Cogent Social Sciences, entitled ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’. Boghossian argued, Indya Moore-style, that penises were not truly male items but mere products of the human mind, yet simultaneously said such phantom phalluses were nonetheless also still somehow responsible for causing climate-change. The paper, unlike the journal, was deliberately awful, but still it got printed; in return, Boghossian had his name written upon swastikas scrawled across campus, and received some free bags of leftist-laid shit outside his office door one day in order to teach him the true meaning of the word ‘tolerance’. With two other academics, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, Boghossian next repeated his trick with higher-status journals, hoping thereby to help deconstruct The Emperor’s New Clothes. The trio were actually liberal-leaning themselves, feeling issues like race, gender and sexuality were important, but that the increasingly ridiculous ‘scientific’ papers they saw published every day in humanities journals only undermined minority rights by making their sane proponents look lunatic by association. Whilst the hoaxers’ arguments were overtly absurd, all the academic citations they used to back them up were 100 per cent genuine; so convinced were some editors by such fine scholarship that their authors, operating under pseudonyms, were invited to peerreview other professors’ genuine future submissions for inclusion. Not all of their highly unethical and surreal papers were

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