The government has to work very hard to protect us from ourselves, and one of the most important areas where we troglodytes just don’t get it is the “settled science” that industrial generated gasses are causing Earth to warm at a rate the planet has never seen and cannot handle.
Our federal overlords know that we're too thuggish to realize that global “climate change” is attributable to human activity, rather than, say, solar activity (which seems to be the factor with the strongest correlation). Heck, polar bears are exploding, glaciers are melting, Barbara Streisand keeps singing, and we don’t get the magnitude of the problem! In fact, we’re so gosh-darned dumb, we don’t even know that the study of glaciers could better be conducted if it were given a whole new spin backed by nearly half a million dollars of taxpayer cash…
What might this “better way” be?
To quote the authors of a new, ground-shaking step forward in science, it is to create, get ready: “A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research.”
Really.
According to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the geniuses at the University of Oregon (also known as “U of Oh, man, are you serious?”), four U of O scientists recently received an NSF grant worth $412,930 to produce a paper entitled, “Glaciers, Gender, and Science” and given the gloriously post-modern, faux-intellectual subtitle you saw above.
It looks like “progressive” jackals finally have surrounded the carcass of the scientific method. Now, each beast gets to feast, and every bite comes with a different left-wing flavor, a new, absurd, Dadaesque label to lend it some kind of pseudo-authenticity.
As if the politically-connected scientists and students peddling fudged temperature data, and plots to change models in order to push “anthropogenic climate change” weren’t insulting enough, now, somehow, in some way that we simpletons could only grasp if we were “enlightened,” these politically-funded sucklings want to slather a facade of gender and feminism onto glaciers…
Yeah, glaciers.
The abstract, written by “Mark Carey, M Jackson, Alessandro Antonello, and Jaclyn Rushing,” tells us why this is so monumentally important. Again, get ready, because it starts to read like absurd homework:
Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers.
The above contains so many asinine terms and silly statements that it’s almost impossible to imagine an end to one's potential responses, but isn’t it quaint to see infants intent on peddling nonsense use big terms like “epistemological questions?”
If only we underlings could understand complicated words like epistemological, we, too, could be members of this exclusive club of “Big Word Users” and communicate in super-special ways. We could climb into the ivory tower tree house and enjoy explorations into nonsense like “gendered science and knowledge” and “systems of scientific domination” without feeling like grammatical Sisyphus toiling under the ceaseless pain of burdensome, clunky, drivel.
There’s nothing quite as fun as the bloviating pontification of people who tell us that our systems of scientific inquiry and knowledge are based on a misogynist worldview. If only we were enlightened through their tax-funded efforts, we’d understand that there can be alternative feminine representations of things like, you know… frozen water. Good thing we’re forced to pay for it to the tune of over $100,000 per author.
But before you think this is all over, before you decide that the blathering, ape-like gibberish is done and you can clean out your ears, the “feminist glaciology framework” creators aren’t through!
There’s more wonderful pseudo-intellectualism on tap in the abstract, and it gets even better than what’s already quoted:
Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.
Seriously. This is not a joke. These people actually used terms such as:
Feminist postcolonial science studies…
Feminist political ecology…
And it all “generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies (again, high-powered word for the win!) in dynamic social-ecological systems…” And the capper, “…leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.”
Human-ice interactions. As if the ice is conscious? As if it “acts” in the same self-aware, self-directed manner as humans? Have you ever heard people use the language in such a tortured and downright silly way? When someone slips on an icy sidewalk or gets hit on the head by a falling icicle, does that person say, “Wow, man! I just had a really bad human-ice interaction?”
And, “equitable science?” Isn’t science a pretty well established process of inquiry based on empirical data collection, the creation of a hypothesis, the testing of it and collection of more data, and the establishment of conclusions? If the theory is not borne out by the test, then the theory is unsound and the scientist begins again, right? What is “equitable science?”
To add insult to injury, when asked about people’s disapproval for this tax-funded attempt to politicize glaciers and add a layer of feminist armor to what should be studied as water responding to temperature, pressure and other natural factors, the lead author, “science historian” Mark Carey, had the gall to tell critics it was their fault they were upset, it was their prejudice that was being exposed by reacting negatively to being ripped off! Seriously, check out what he offers, from an interview by the Absurdists at ScienceMag.org, and remember, you’re too stupid to understand:
Professional research is published in journals for specialists in a given field. When removed from that context and described to nonspecialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented.
See? You’re not in the treehouse. You’re not enlightened. In fact:
People and societies impose their values on glaciers when they discuss, debate, and study them—which is what we mean when we say that ice is not just ice. Glaciers become the platform to express people’s own views about politics, economics, cultural values, and social relations (such as gender relations).
Yes, Mr. Carey, they sure do become platforms – when people like you get hundreds of thousands of Dollars to fund articles letting you do just that. The bulk of people on the dang planet never, ever, ever thought of glaciers as anything more than... ice. Big, big blocks of ice topped with snow that will soon become ice. You, Mr. Carey, and your “colleagues” who have been the recipients of cash taken by government force, have a lot of guts to tell people that they politicize blocks of ice when it is you who are overtly engaged in doing just that, and doing it with pseudo-intellectual language that we actually do understand and find childish, slavishly post-modern, and pedantic at the same time
This project is so silly, Mr. Carey, one almost forgets it is a result of not just the people who wrote it, but also of people at the National Science Foundation funding authors with other peoples’ money.
The situation would be laughable if it weren’t so immoral and if reading the tedious wording of the blowhards weren’t so utterly, spike-to-the-brain painful. The sheer awfulness of it is reminiscent of a few scenes in Douglas Adams’ groundbreaking “Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy,” in which the main characters encounter the Vogons, an alien race which acts as a cipher for officious bureaucrats, and who are famous for their disastrously bad poetry. This poetry is so bad, that if read aloud, it can inspire listeners’ internal organs to strangle the listeners in order to put them of their misery.
Douglas Adams passed away in 2001, so we can’t ask him, but one wonders, if he were alive today, would the Vogons envy the sheer sophistic, anti-intellectual power of the authors of “Glaciers, Gender, and Science”?
Perhaps the NSF can fund another ridiculous study to figure it out.