This is one of the most delightful, yet ethically challenging, follow-ups I’ve ever had the chance to write.
Recall the piece and video I wrote and shot in June, entitled, “Social Psych Report: Frisky Dogs in Parks Are Part of America’s ‘Rape Culture’”? It was the story about a self-described “serious” academic journal called “Gender, Place, and Culture,” that published a “social psychology” study by Helen Wilson. The study itself was entitled, “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon,” and it purported to make a serious connection between male and female dog owners’ reactions to their frisky dogs and what was purported to be a “rape culture” in the US.
I noted how poorly it was written, and, evidently, edited (after all, it got published) and how absurd it was to even consider it a serious academic journal exhibit. I also noted that the assumptions about “patriarchal rape culture” fit perfectly in line with the almost religious zeal with which postmodernist social justice warriors ascribe negative connotations to the free market and the individualist principles that bolster it.
As I wrote at the time:
…the field of ‘social psychology’ has produced yet another winning report, this time a year-long study of hanging out in a park, watching dogs attempt to mate each other, and checking on the owners’ reactions to whether the canines were “straight” or “gay,” and if the interactions were ‘rape’ or ‘consensual.’
I also noted:
Given the numbingly-sensible title, "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon," and drawing on a truckload of multisyllabic nomenclature that postmodernists have erected like a wall to ward off anyone interested in readability, author Helen Wilson embarks on her mission bogged down with biases from the start.
And now, I’m amused to report that Helen “Wilson” faked it.
This is some of the best, and most valuable, trolling in years, and probably fulfills the dreams of thousands, be they people who have been upset by the ever-lower standards of “modern art” descending to a point where children’s finger paints could pass for award-winning pieces, or those who have been upset by the near-demonic practice of “critical theory” in literature, where powerful professors “read into” work ideas and “social influences” that were never there, or cannot be supported by author statements admitting such intent. Those ideas are typically found to push a collectivist and/or identity politics (also collectivist), and/or “Cultural Marxist” agenda.
In fact, “Helen Wilson” is really Helen Pluckrose, one of three academics who recently revealed that they have been stealthily infiltrating so-called “academic journals” with fake, poorly written, pseudoscientific “studies” uniquely tailored to expose not only the nonexistent “standards” of the journals, but the SJW “grievance studies” agendas driving their editorial and publishing teams.
We perceive a large number of people, both inside and outside of academia, who are aware of the increasing power grievance studies scholars wield, and we wanted to provide for these people to feel safe enough to speak out and say, ‘No. I am not going to go along with that (until it has had more thorough and rigorous review),’ and for them, along with others, especially on the left, to say, ‘These people do not speak for me.’
This is a powerful refutation of a pernicious orthodoxy in academia, and the authors, who also include James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, have much, much more to say:
This problem has arisen within a culture in which dissenting ideas have not been admitted or tolerated, often resulting in legitimate criticism being denigrated on moral grounds. For example, questioning tenets of feminist philosophy might get you branded sexist or accused of carrying internalized misogyny…
Yes, it might, and it has, over and over and over and over… Individualist moral philosophers and free market economists have been hit with this hammer for decades.
In videos just posted on Youtube, the trio of intrepid scholars chronicled their work, and James Lindsay said, in part:
To be clear up front, we think studying topics like gender, race, and sexuality is worthwhile, and getting it right is extremely important… A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed, like those that make ‘whiteness’ and masculinity problematic. The fields we’re concerned about put social grievances ahead of objective truth.
So the trio embarked on a one to two year effort to publish material (now up to 20 papers) that would expose these gatekeepers in the fields of social “studies.”
The best I can tap into is that there’s this kind of religious architecture in their mind where ‘privilege is sin’, ‘privilege is evil’, and they’ve identified education as the place where it has to be fixed. So you can come up with these really nasty arguments like, ‘Let’s put white kids in chains on the floor at school as an educational opportunity”, and if you frame it in terms of overcoming privilege… then you frame that (the resistance of the students) in terms of ‘oh, they only complain about that because they’re privileged, and they can’t handle it because they’re privileged and they’re weak,’ then it’s (the paper is) right in.
And the frightening thing about the results that Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian have produced is that this mentality is not only observable, predictable, and pervasive in academia (as many of us who’ve had to deal with academia, either as students or professionals, already knew), it is similar to the mindset of most collectivist despotisms throughout history. In fact, as Jillian Kay Melchior notes for the Wall Street Journal, one of their spoof studies used a rewritten portion of Hitler's "Mein Kampf", yet the editors never noticed.
This should chill anyone interested in academic rigor, or, in fact, individual liberty. For the editors and publishers who were fooled, collectivist ideology trumps truth, and labeling is a tool to gain political power. Once a cadre of the population can be framed as “weak and needing fixing”, or “evil and needing correction and silencing”, the tyranny follows, for “the sake of society” and for the sake of those poor sloppy sods who don’t know any better – who need to be controlled by the enlightened.
This was an idea that Plato promoted in “The Republic," with his idea that the "Guardians” would rule, based on the “Noble Lie” that they were born with gold in their systems.
The lies never end, and these three brilliant people have exposed it. I’m happy to say that in June, I got to read one of their so-called “studies” and thought it was as bizarre and absurd as they intended it to look.
But I’m frustrated to note that they had to do it in order to expose how bizarre and absurd are the work of many academics and academic journals today.
Kudos to these three trollers. Let’s hope their work gets shared far and wide. The problem they’re exposing is immense, and deserves attention.