Liberals have no boundaries when it comes to their actions. When one of their half baked ideas ends in failure, they blame the process. There was nothing wrong with the goal, the method used to reach that goal was all wrong. When facts are presented that they don’t like, they ignore the result. Instead they focus on the process, must be something wrong somewhere.
Occasionally they make up a process to justify attacking a result they don’t care for. That is the route Portland State University is taking to attack one of their professors.
Here is the latest installment, followed by my original blog on the topic.
For those too lazy to hit the links here is a quick recap. Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, are all self identified liberals and academics. They got together and composed (remember that word) a series of articles for submission to a variety of juried publications. The articles, in a word, were total bullshit.
Juried publications are a academic journals that nobody reads. It is what passes for work in the world of the Ivory Tower. It is an opportunity for allegedly smart people with too much time on their hands, to show off to other smart people with nothing to do. Prior to publication the prospective article is evaluated for academic rigor, methodology, and content. The person doing the evaluation is supposedly an expert in the field. All of the participants get Brownie Points for their role.
Our three academics suspected that some of these publications would publish anything that agreed with the particular bias advanced by the publication. They set out to prove or disprove their theory by submitting some god awful papers. These papers were accepted and published. This isn’t new it has been done before, with the same result. Talk about not learning from one’s mistakes.
The three admitted to the scheme and embarrassed a wide range of their fellow liberals. Was there a call to toughen standards?
The Reaction Was Immediate!
Portland State University has decided that Peter Boghossian has potentially violated policy in regards to human testing. Researchers are required to submit a proposal to a standing committee describing the proposed study, methodology and scope. The committee must then approve or modify the proposal prior to the study commencing.
We don’t like the results. So here we come with Catch-22. Boghossian must pay.
I can see the proposal now. We intend to show that some juried publications and those that participate in the process are frauds, ignorant, lazy and unfit to occupy a classroom. Keep in mind that everybody on the committee is likely affiliated with a juried publication as a supplicant or evaluator. Yeah, that ought to slide right through for approval.
My advice to the three is to Catch-22 the university’s ass back. There was no research. The papers they submitted were pure bullshit. There was no scientific process for measuring the result. No human testing, no need for protocols, no ethical violation.
While a professor at Merton College, J.R.R Tolkien wrote one of the most influential series of fiction in the 20th century. He didn’t need no “stinkin” committee.
Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, didn’t write a fiction work of high drama. It was more like low comedy. More to the point, what they composed and made up was a body of work justifiably within the realm of satire.
What they produced was not scientific research, that required vetting by a committee, but a literary exercise.
Famous Satirists Through the Ages
- Aesop (c. 620 – 560 BCE) – Aesop’s Fables
- Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) – The Canterbury Tales
- Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) – Don Quixote
- Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) – Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Tale of a Tub
- Charles Dickens (1812–1870) – Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities
- Mark Twain (1835–1910) – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
- Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) – The Devil’s Dictionary
- George Orwell (1903–1950) – Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Joseph Heller (1923–1999) – Catch-22
- Dave Barry (1947) – Pulitzer Prize winning humor columnist
At this point I’d throw up the First Amendment, but that won’t work in this context. The First Amendment doesn’t apply on higher education campuses anymore.