I think that this is so important. People have legitimate reasons to be burnt by the woke movement but it does not justify bullying. I also worry about people looking for groups who it is ok to be ugly to. Once this was disadvantaged minority groups. Then it became "TERFs" and those who challenged woke orthodoxy no matter how respectfully they did. I started to worry about the backlash to wokeism in 2016 as the movement became more extreme and authoritarian and now that the backlash is here I worry that we'll vacillate between two extremes marked by authoritarian behaviors.
I also have to wonder how many of those people being ugly to Dr. Louks would have been ugly to J.K. Rowling a few years ago but now that the tide is turning are switching sides. While there are true believers in wokeism (I have family members who are true believers) I also think there are people who switch sides depending on which one allows them to be ugly to people. Overall I see this as fueling a vicious grievance cycle with no end if people do not speak out against it.
Thanks for taking a strong stand against this behavior!
Thanks, Kassandra. I'm glad you see it as important. I have well-intentioned people telling me that I could just not go on social media and then I'd not have to see any of this happening and could be relaxed and content. I am trying to explain that:
1) It would still happen if I were not there to see it and it would still affect the world I live in because X is a reflection of all the most strongly politically opinionated people and tribes and they vote and are also the ones who create organisations and movements and narratives that shape culture. It is important that people engage with these popular currents in real time, understand them and address them in real time from a liberal standpoint.
2) I am a weirdo whose brain is fired up by conflict and narratives and arguments and I like to get my teeth into them and untangle narratives and test my own arguments and counter other people's and also try to bring people together to find common ground and generally simmer things down a bit.
I'm glad you also see this cycle repeating and repeating and speeding up or the pendulum swinging as I often think of it. I think people often do thrive on conflict in an unhealthy way, feeding on outrage and wanting an enemy to be vicious about and are motivated by trying to escalate it. We need people like you who oppose the authoritarianism, tribalism and bullying wherever it comes from and want to help cool things down, restore some calm and reason and find common ground, reach resolutions, relate to each other as humans again.
You know your limits better than anyone, and we need people to challenge themselves with opposing arguments. Some people have a stronger stomach for conflict than others and that is ok and we need people who take a strong stand for respectful disagreement and anti-authoritarianism. If you need a break that is also ok and if you feel a sense of purpose from charging on then we certainly need more people like you being a voice for reason.
Astonishing behaviour, not least in that it’s gross self-righteousness from people who doubtless see themselves as protesting against gross self-righteousness. The piquancy of the irony is that it’s so perfectly self referential. The tragedy of the case is that the vile abuse is directed against a human being with a family, life and feelings.
As always, there’s rarely anything quite so dangerous as conceiving oneself to be on the side of the angels.
Thanks, Helen, for getting to the bottom of what disturbed me about all of this. I am not “woke” but the pile on dismayed me. I admired Dr Louks’ calm in the face of it. A very sensible and measured unpicking of the whole incident.
NB: I gave up on History honours (I was a medievalist) after I was told that certain theories were compulsory. Now - I continue history in my own time, or in legal history contexts.
Yes, indeed. I was quite startled to read your account - so similar to mine. I don’t have a problem with other people doing theory, if they want to. I do have a problem with being forced to adopt particular theories. I wonder how many good history scholars have been put off by this? It’s a shame. Although, of course, I continued as a legal scholar…
Alas no. One of my best friends was very active in it in Oz, and remains skilled with a bunch of weapons. But I didn’t know him back at the time when I would have been physically mobile enough to join in. I guess I could now be someone who sits on the side and embroiders, but the problem is that I might get frustrated. I have the soul of a shieldmaiden.
"The problem within English Literature is not that scholars are allowed to do such analysis, it is that they are often not allowed to do anything else." Thank you, it is not Louks's fault that academia squeezes the plain language out of writers. That's one very big reason I have no interest in a PhD.
An ongoing and enthusiastic "thank you!," Helen, for your brilliant and clear writing and thinking. You help all of us understand the complicated dynamics churning around us. Thank you!!!
Happy to condemn authoritarianism on the right (once again!) Forty years ago I fought Reagan-Bush Christian fundamentalist bullshit from which the wokies drew their own religious paradigm. Authoritarianism is ALWAYS wrong. Rally the masses, Helen!
Thanks, Helen. The threats are certainly abhorrent and it’s unfortunate that one dissertation should be singled out when, as Colin Wright is showing, there are so many more people out there “marrying the shrimp”. I think you and the Cynical Theories movement have done us a great service by simply bringing this kind of scholarship to light. I live on the science side of academia and, even there, it wasn’t until I started doing inter-college reviews and IRB work that I discovered that a dissertation could be a collection of irrefutable musings based on “theories” that generate no testable hypotheses which, in my world, is sorta what a theory is supposed to do.
Perhaps Lit Crit has always been full of irrefutable claims, but what, exactly, is “defended” when a thesis like this presented? In the months leading up to my defense, I would lie awake at night chasing the ghost of that one test that I failed to run or that one obvious (to everyone but me) fact that I overlooked. I had seen presenters demolished by a single question that exposed a fatal flaw in their reasoning and the possibility that such a question awaited me was terrifying. It was always possible that I was WRONG! This is what it’s like to work with the assumption of an objective, shared reality.
I never realized that so many people walked into their defenses with the intention of just saying stuff. I don’t think they ever felt my terror. I don’t think that makes me angry, but it does make me a little resentful.
(And all this “Olfactory Oppression” talk without one fart joke? C’mon, people!)
I think this is the common conflict between STEM and the arts. The arts don't have to be right. They can be exploratory, fanciful and even counter-factual and I do think there is merit in that for humanity even if it is a luxury addition to the human experience rather than a direct benefit to its thriving. Two problems arise from the dominance of critical theories in English literature:
1) It is formulaic and always reaches the same kinds of conclusions about different things. It is essentially reading with the express purpose of indulging confirmation bias. By doing that, it is 'anti-art."
2) It positively discourages, if not forbids, doing anything else. Some of us, like me, wish to use literature as a way of studying history and establishing things that are true. I am interested in late medieval social history especially the roles of women. I am particularly interested in looking at what is nature and what is culture which involves looking at what changes and what is constant and bringing in evolutionary psychology to do that. I would like, for example, to look at 13th century Christian concepts of 'sins of the tongue.' Male sins of the tongue are understood to be about heresy and the sin of pride in trying to know things outside of what is taught by the Church. Female sins of the tongue are to do with verbalising emotion especially anger, arguing, gossiping. They map very closely onto differences in communication style revealed by studied in evolutionary psychology. "Mansplaining" is a present day version of 'male sins of the tongue' but are actually best explained by evolutionary pressures which cause men to speak more in concise exchanges of information than women do and knowledge as both important for survival in roles that men played due to being the larger, stronger sex who hunted and fought and thus also a resource that is useful and attracts mates. This is a positive and not a character flaw but it does have a downside which is that men are more likely to be overconfident about and overstate their knowledge. Greater emotional expressiveness and interest in the feelings, doings and relationships of others that are common to women are also not character flaws but have been important in making good mate choices and also detecting and either averting or escaping conflict within a group which is also important to the survival of offspring because a battle for power and a change of leadership typically lead to the death of young which are not the new leader's for our human and earlier primate ancestors. This also has its downsides which can best be understood as 'reading too much into things' and malicious gossiping. But I have to look at differences presented in male and female ways of speaking as a social construct only and this results in analyses of these historical concepts that are false or severely flawed.
Conversely, having an understanding of what is nature and what is culture helps us to better understand culture. Christianity is very useful for looking at how people perceived things differently over time. It is ongoing commentary about the same story over 2000 years. Take the story of Lot who handed his daughter over to rapists to prevent them from raping male strangers and was lauded in the New Testament as the one good man in Sodom. This makes little sense to us now, but then it indicated a belief that men were more inherently valuable than women. It is akin to a situation in which someone had the opportunity to save an unknown human from drowning or his beloved dog and he chose the human even though the loss of his dog would cause him much more personal grief. By the early modern period in Milton's Paradise Lost, it is not that women are worth less than men but that homosexual rape is a far worse sin than heterosexual rape. By the current day, this is not considered morally right either and some efforts have been made to explain the story of Lot being a good man by saying the people of Sodom were so evil that a man who cared more for strangers than his daughter was the best of the bunch.
I want to look at that and I want to be factually correct about both details of history and any evolutionary psychological analysis I apply to it, so, like you, the horror of being wrong is with me. Being wrong occasionally is inevitable, of course, and we simply correct, feel shame but know that this does not ruin our reputations provided we thank whoever has found an error and correct it. But what if I am wrong on something that is well established and that I could be expected to know if I had researched thoroughly? What if, despite researching thoroughly, I somehow missed something important and huge? I share your terror and your position that the fear of being objectively wrong in your research is an important element of rigorous scholarship.
The development of a woke/illiberal/authoritarian right is, unfortunately, a somewhat predictable development. One of the profound lessons of the interwar period was that revolutionary left-progressivism provoked responses who adopted their techniques, including Jacobin model politics, for other projects. Whenever conventional centre-right politics seemed inadequate—i.e. the more of an unanswered threat revolutionary left-progressivism seemed—then one ended up with authoritarian traditionalists (Horthy, Franco), Fascists (Mussolini) and Nazis (Hitler). I discuss this pattern here.
Universities, especially in the Anglosphere, are an increasingly failed institutional form. While cancel culture is certainly part of what is going on, so is the use of migration as a weapon against the local working class; the attack on free speech by state actors; the devaluing of culture heritage (including the degrading of popular entertainment franchises); the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors; the lies of careerist feminism, seeking to systematically privilege educated careerist women. The utter failure of the Tories (i.e. of conventional centre-right politics) coupled with the authoritarian incompetence of the Starmer Govt (both threatening and dysfunctional) creates the space for taking the techniques that have been working for illiberal left-progressives and apply them against them.
If I were a conspiratorial type I would suspect that this whole thing is a staged publicity stunt - would anyone have otherwise heard of Ally Louks (or seen her well-cultivated and professionally styled headshots)? She looks like she is jumping on the SocMed grifting express. Her thesis subject is so far fetched that I wonder if that was actually a deliberate choice from the start. If she starts shilling deodorant & cosmetics soon please remember I was right.
We had this in Australia recently where a totally incompetent Olympic BREAK DANCER (!!!) was humiliated by performing poorly and unleashed a hatestorm online. Soon emerged that she was also a CritTheory academic who was using the whole controversy for career advancement.
I'm assuming you mean about the b-grrl... Her name is Rachel Gunn and she's all over the internet, or was as her 15mins may have run out. Also known by her performance-alias RayGun.
I’m Canadian and was vaguely aware of a breakdancing fiasco. I don’t think our press followed up much there. But you’ve really peaked my curiosity, so I’ll check it out. Thanks.
The distinction I find inescapable is that academics, like many others, have descended into personality. No longer Beings connected to the Divine they have been subsumed. They are the beast.
yes, the last place to learn about or to appreciate Literature is in modern Literature depts. these have now become some weird game of Foucault Mad Libs that repurposes all Literature as a tool for academic career advancement and for them to continue play-acting as radical rebels.
...for a moment thought u wrote "word" crushing tyrants lol—works just as well?
The conquest of our culture and cultural patrimony by the theorist class, who degrade everything they touch in their quest to sniff out oppression in every person, place or thing, living or dead (though ironically they live at the top of the social pyramid and use Oppression-ology as a means to stay there) has taken what should be a refreshing meadow of the Muses and turned it into a foul toxic waste dump polluted by tons of dead jargon and pseudoradical pseudoscholarship.
The conquest of our Literature Depts (and Literature in general) by this army of zelaous drones and their dreary formulas and politicization of everything has helped render the West more coarse, ugly and philistine—they have simply stolen what should be the source of beauty and regeneration and warped it for their own career and social needs.
Academic theorists are the enemies of free thought, speech, expression and their cold dead words have created nothing of value.
Musing on words and original meanings ; power over language and who gets to use and caste meassaging of identity over public square and the democratic economic models of existing ?
Fact is the "neo con neo-left" are worse than the sexist old guard right winger misogynists - denying our very humanity of being born woman; but due to myopic as they begrudge women economic and power ;equality ; both are fake all are tull of vile little hypocrities- the woman haters and woman colonisers are in all colours;aided and abetted by handmaidens ; women are socialized to be liked ; it is why we are screwed over by the vile misogny of fake neo cons in right and left ; in business; in Arts; in government..: the Blackrockered "free ( ahem) tradered cartel squad know middle Western classes and Mothers stand in the way and they are attempting to ERASe womens reproductive and social underpinning
This poor woman was hit between the eyes with three of my four “essential fearures of internet” - cesspool of melancholy, suppuration of trolls, and demonic speed. She naively broadcast a message which guarantees horrible responses to gain attention, by trolls who exist only to say such things, and the misery is spread demonically faster than humans can fathoming.
It didn’t matter that the work was a permutation of non-sequiturs which many might find humorous, because hermetic writing does that effortlessly. I mean, Judith Butler, William Burroughs.
I think we’re similar, I enjoy Byzantine writing as exercises in pure style. I share that which I produce only with friends and make $2.95 a month from a few dozen books on Amazon only a few people would find and read.
Don’t use X or social networks professionally. It’s very easy rule.
[in 1986 I made a sarcastic flippant post on quite early gay internet social networks (how gays pick up straight men) and it appeared on physical bulletin boards at universities around the world within 2 days. I realized this was not a good thing. I can still summon the damn thing in 2 seconds though Google almost 4 decades later - thus my 3rd essential feature of internet, it’s not a conversation it’s a recording. The worst person will get a copy of what you say at a speed proportional to how nasty they will get.]
I can't condemn strongly enough the terrible abuse this poor woman has suffered. I also can't escape the irony that the only instances I recall seeing similar abusive behavior has been from so called "trans activists" who are threatening rape and violence while demeaning biological women for simply defending women's safe spaces and rights. It would appear there are certainly amoral idiots on all sides of the "woke" issue.
A chunk of the sensible center-right transmogrified into an *actual* far-right, comprised of medieval Christian metaphysicians, Nietzschean UNTermensches, misogynist incels, hatefully racist enthnonationalist, and "The Nose Knows" esotericism, held together by a shared culture of repudiation. It's as awful as it is tiresome. Thanks for the article.
It's a truism that "revolutions" eat themselves. Or, in the vernacular, leopards, faces, etc. Many nice "anti-woke" intellectuals metaphorically promoted the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, which largely consists of anti-intellectuals demagogues who have a visceral hatred of all things academic, or at least not raving right-wing academic. And these intellectuals were so surprised when the Leopards didn't just eat the faces of some particular types of opponents, but rather went after "innocent" faces. But this was entirely predicable, based on the beliefs of leopards that faces are to be eaten.
I think that this is so important. People have legitimate reasons to be burnt by the woke movement but it does not justify bullying. I also worry about people looking for groups who it is ok to be ugly to. Once this was disadvantaged minority groups. Then it became "TERFs" and those who challenged woke orthodoxy no matter how respectfully they did. I started to worry about the backlash to wokeism in 2016 as the movement became more extreme and authoritarian and now that the backlash is here I worry that we'll vacillate between two extremes marked by authoritarian behaviors.
I also have to wonder how many of those people being ugly to Dr. Louks would have been ugly to J.K. Rowling a few years ago but now that the tide is turning are switching sides. While there are true believers in wokeism (I have family members who are true believers) I also think there are people who switch sides depending on which one allows them to be ugly to people. Overall I see this as fueling a vicious grievance cycle with no end if people do not speak out against it.
Thanks for taking a strong stand against this behavior!
Thanks, Kassandra. I'm glad you see it as important. I have well-intentioned people telling me that I could just not go on social media and then I'd not have to see any of this happening and could be relaxed and content. I am trying to explain that:
1) It would still happen if I were not there to see it and it would still affect the world I live in because X is a reflection of all the most strongly politically opinionated people and tribes and they vote and are also the ones who create organisations and movements and narratives that shape culture. It is important that people engage with these popular currents in real time, understand them and address them in real time from a liberal standpoint.
2) I am a weirdo whose brain is fired up by conflict and narratives and arguments and I like to get my teeth into them and untangle narratives and test my own arguments and counter other people's and also try to bring people together to find common ground and generally simmer things down a bit.
I'm glad you also see this cycle repeating and repeating and speeding up or the pendulum swinging as I often think of it. I think people often do thrive on conflict in an unhealthy way, feeding on outrage and wanting an enemy to be vicious about and are motivated by trying to escalate it. We need people like you who oppose the authoritarianism, tribalism and bullying wherever it comes from and want to help cool things down, restore some calm and reason and find common ground, reach resolutions, relate to each other as humans again.
You know your limits better than anyone, and we need people to challenge themselves with opposing arguments. Some people have a stronger stomach for conflict than others and that is ok and we need people who take a strong stand for respectful disagreement and anti-authoritarianism. If you need a break that is also ok and if you feel a sense of purpose from charging on then we certainly need more people like you being a voice for reason.
Astonishing behaviour, not least in that it’s gross self-righteousness from people who doubtless see themselves as protesting against gross self-righteousness. The piquancy of the irony is that it’s so perfectly self referential. The tragedy of the case is that the vile abuse is directed against a human being with a family, life and feelings.
As always, there’s rarely anything quite so dangerous as conceiving oneself to be on the side of the angels.
Thanks, Helen, for getting to the bottom of what disturbed me about all of this. I am not “woke” but the pile on dismayed me. I admired Dr Louks’ calm in the face of it. A very sensible and measured unpicking of the whole incident.
NB: I gave up on History honours (I was a medievalist) after I was told that certain theories were compulsory. Now - I continue history in my own time, or in legal history contexts.
Thanks, Katy. Yes, she was remarkably resilient and calm, wasn't she!
It seems we have some common experiences then!
Yes, indeed. I was quite startled to read your account - so similar to mine. I don’t have a problem with other people doing theory, if they want to. I do have a problem with being forced to adopt particular theories. I wonder how many good history scholars have been put off by this? It’s a shame. Although, of course, I continued as a legal scholar…
Were you ever in the SCA? Oh, never mind, Ozzie...we never encountered each other lol
Alas no. One of my best friends was very active in it in Oz, and remains skilled with a bunch of weapons. But I didn’t know him back at the time when I would have been physically mobile enough to join in. I guess I could now be someone who sits on the side and embroiders, but the problem is that I might get frustrated. I have the soul of a shieldmaiden.
"The problem within English Literature is not that scholars are allowed to do such analysis, it is that they are often not allowed to do anything else." Thank you, it is not Louks's fault that academia squeezes the plain language out of writers. That's one very big reason I have no interest in a PhD.
An ongoing and enthusiastic "thank you!," Helen, for your brilliant and clear writing and thinking. You help all of us understand the complicated dynamics churning around us. Thank you!!!
An excellent explanation of the truly liberal (anti-totalitarian) perspective in today's emerging context. Thanks Helen!
Happy to condemn authoritarianism on the right (once again!) Forty years ago I fought Reagan-Bush Christian fundamentalist bullshit from which the wokies drew their own religious paradigm. Authoritarianism is ALWAYS wrong. Rally the masses, Helen!
Thanks, Helen. The threats are certainly abhorrent and it’s unfortunate that one dissertation should be singled out when, as Colin Wright is showing, there are so many more people out there “marrying the shrimp”. I think you and the Cynical Theories movement have done us a great service by simply bringing this kind of scholarship to light. I live on the science side of academia and, even there, it wasn’t until I started doing inter-college reviews and IRB work that I discovered that a dissertation could be a collection of irrefutable musings based on “theories” that generate no testable hypotheses which, in my world, is sorta what a theory is supposed to do.
Perhaps Lit Crit has always been full of irrefutable claims, but what, exactly, is “defended” when a thesis like this presented? In the months leading up to my defense, I would lie awake at night chasing the ghost of that one test that I failed to run or that one obvious (to everyone but me) fact that I overlooked. I had seen presenters demolished by a single question that exposed a fatal flaw in their reasoning and the possibility that such a question awaited me was terrifying. It was always possible that I was WRONG! This is what it’s like to work with the assumption of an objective, shared reality.
I never realized that so many people walked into their defenses with the intention of just saying stuff. I don’t think they ever felt my terror. I don’t think that makes me angry, but it does make me a little resentful.
(And all this “Olfactory Oppression” talk without one fart joke? C’mon, people!)
I think this is the common conflict between STEM and the arts. The arts don't have to be right. They can be exploratory, fanciful and even counter-factual and I do think there is merit in that for humanity even if it is a luxury addition to the human experience rather than a direct benefit to its thriving. Two problems arise from the dominance of critical theories in English literature:
1) It is formulaic and always reaches the same kinds of conclusions about different things. It is essentially reading with the express purpose of indulging confirmation bias. By doing that, it is 'anti-art."
2) It positively discourages, if not forbids, doing anything else. Some of us, like me, wish to use literature as a way of studying history and establishing things that are true. I am interested in late medieval social history especially the roles of women. I am particularly interested in looking at what is nature and what is culture which involves looking at what changes and what is constant and bringing in evolutionary psychology to do that. I would like, for example, to look at 13th century Christian concepts of 'sins of the tongue.' Male sins of the tongue are understood to be about heresy and the sin of pride in trying to know things outside of what is taught by the Church. Female sins of the tongue are to do with verbalising emotion especially anger, arguing, gossiping. They map very closely onto differences in communication style revealed by studied in evolutionary psychology. "Mansplaining" is a present day version of 'male sins of the tongue' but are actually best explained by evolutionary pressures which cause men to speak more in concise exchanges of information than women do and knowledge as both important for survival in roles that men played due to being the larger, stronger sex who hunted and fought and thus also a resource that is useful and attracts mates. This is a positive and not a character flaw but it does have a downside which is that men are more likely to be overconfident about and overstate their knowledge. Greater emotional expressiveness and interest in the feelings, doings and relationships of others that are common to women are also not character flaws but have been important in making good mate choices and also detecting and either averting or escaping conflict within a group which is also important to the survival of offspring because a battle for power and a change of leadership typically lead to the death of young which are not the new leader's for our human and earlier primate ancestors. This also has its downsides which can best be understood as 'reading too much into things' and malicious gossiping. But I have to look at differences presented in male and female ways of speaking as a social construct only and this results in analyses of these historical concepts that are false or severely flawed.
Conversely, having an understanding of what is nature and what is culture helps us to better understand culture. Christianity is very useful for looking at how people perceived things differently over time. It is ongoing commentary about the same story over 2000 years. Take the story of Lot who handed his daughter over to rapists to prevent them from raping male strangers and was lauded in the New Testament as the one good man in Sodom. This makes little sense to us now, but then it indicated a belief that men were more inherently valuable than women. It is akin to a situation in which someone had the opportunity to save an unknown human from drowning or his beloved dog and he chose the human even though the loss of his dog would cause him much more personal grief. By the early modern period in Milton's Paradise Lost, it is not that women are worth less than men but that homosexual rape is a far worse sin than heterosexual rape. By the current day, this is not considered morally right either and some efforts have been made to explain the story of Lot being a good man by saying the people of Sodom were so evil that a man who cared more for strangers than his daughter was the best of the bunch.
I want to look at that and I want to be factually correct about both details of history and any evolutionary psychological analysis I apply to it, so, like you, the horror of being wrong is with me. Being wrong occasionally is inevitable, of course, and we simply correct, feel shame but know that this does not ruin our reputations provided we thank whoever has found an error and correct it. But what if I am wrong on something that is well established and that I could be expected to know if I had researched thoroughly? What if, despite researching thoroughly, I somehow missed something important and huge? I share your terror and your position that the fear of being objectively wrong in your research is an important element of rigorous scholarship.
Thanks again and please share if you do develop this further. I’m scheduled to teach Evo Psych in the spring.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/ebs/consilience?utm_campaign=apa_publishing&utm_medium=direct_email&utm_source=businessdevelopment&utm_content=gc_callforpapers_ebs_consilience_12052024&utm_term=btn_middle_learnmore
Priceless. The best serious funny post I have read in a while.
The development of a woke/illiberal/authoritarian right is, unfortunately, a somewhat predictable development. One of the profound lessons of the interwar period was that revolutionary left-progressivism provoked responses who adopted their techniques, including Jacobin model politics, for other projects. Whenever conventional centre-right politics seemed inadequate—i.e. the more of an unanswered threat revolutionary left-progressivism seemed—then one ended up with authoritarian traditionalists (Horthy, Franco), Fascists (Mussolini) and Nazis (Hitler). I discuss this pattern here.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/the-fable-of-progressive-innocence
Universities, especially in the Anglosphere, are an increasingly failed institutional form. While cancel culture is certainly part of what is going on, so is the use of migration as a weapon against the local working class; the attack on free speech by state actors; the devaluing of culture heritage (including the degrading of popular entertainment franchises); the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors; the lies of careerist feminism, seeking to systematically privilege educated careerist women. The utter failure of the Tories (i.e. of conventional centre-right politics) coupled with the authoritarian incompetence of the Starmer Govt (both threatening and dysfunctional) creates the space for taking the techniques that have been working for illiberal left-progressives and apply them against them.
If I were a conspiratorial type I would suspect that this whole thing is a staged publicity stunt - would anyone have otherwise heard of Ally Louks (or seen her well-cultivated and professionally styled headshots)? She looks like she is jumping on the SocMed grifting express. Her thesis subject is so far fetched that I wonder if that was actually a deliberate choice from the start. If she starts shilling deodorant & cosmetics soon please remember I was right.
We had this in Australia recently where a totally incompetent Olympic BREAK DANCER (!!!) was humiliated by performing poorly and unleashed a hatestorm online. Soon emerged that she was also a CritTheory academic who was using the whole controversy for career advancement.
Frederick can you give me a lead on where to find out more please?
I'm assuming you mean about the b-grrl... Her name is Rachel Gunn and she's all over the internet, or was as her 15mins may have run out. Also known by her performance-alias RayGun.
I’m Canadian and was vaguely aware of a breakdancing fiasco. I don’t think our press followed up much there. But you’ve really peaked my curiosity, so I’ll check it out. Thanks.
Piqued is the word you want, not peaked. Homonyms with different meanings.
TYPO!!! 😱
I remember that now that you mention it.
Frequent bathing in the classics will wash away academic BO.
Thanks for responding. It seems to boil down to, if you listen to them, you deserve what you get. Yule Blessings to you and your family!
The distinction I find inescapable is that academics, like many others, have descended into personality. No longer Beings connected to the Divine they have been subsumed. They are the beast.
yes, the last place to learn about or to appreciate Literature is in modern Literature depts. these have now become some weird game of Foucault Mad Libs that repurposes all Literature as a tool for academic career advancement and for them to continue play-acting as radical rebels.
Sadly, what was academic hijinks become world crushing tyrants.
...for a moment thought u wrote "word" crushing tyrants lol—works just as well?
The conquest of our culture and cultural patrimony by the theorist class, who degrade everything they touch in their quest to sniff out oppression in every person, place or thing, living or dead (though ironically they live at the top of the social pyramid and use Oppression-ology as a means to stay there) has taken what should be a refreshing meadow of the Muses and turned it into a foul toxic waste dump polluted by tons of dead jargon and pseudoradical pseudoscholarship.
The conquest of our Literature Depts (and Literature in general) by this army of zelaous drones and their dreary formulas and politicization of everything has helped render the West more coarse, ugly and philistine—they have simply stolen what should be the source of beauty and regeneration and warped it for their own career and social needs.
Academic theorists are the enemies of free thought, speech, expression and their cold dead words have created nothing of value.
Musing on words and original meanings ; power over language and who gets to use and caste meassaging of identity over public square and the democratic economic models of existing ?
Fact is the "neo con neo-left" are worse than the sexist old guard right winger misogynists - denying our very humanity of being born woman; but due to myopic as they begrudge women economic and power ;equality ; both are fake all are tull of vile little hypocrities- the woman haters and woman colonisers are in all colours;aided and abetted by handmaidens ; women are socialized to be liked ; it is why we are screwed over by the vile misogny of fake neo cons in right and left ; in business; in Arts; in government..: the Blackrockered "free ( ahem) tradered cartel squad know middle Western classes and Mothers stand in the way and they are attempting to ERASe womens reproductive and social underpinning
This poor woman was hit between the eyes with three of my four “essential fearures of internet” - cesspool of melancholy, suppuration of trolls, and demonic speed. She naively broadcast a message which guarantees horrible responses to gain attention, by trolls who exist only to say such things, and the misery is spread demonically faster than humans can fathoming.
It didn’t matter that the work was a permutation of non-sequiturs which many might find humorous, because hermetic writing does that effortlessly. I mean, Judith Butler, William Burroughs.
I think we’re similar, I enjoy Byzantine writing as exercises in pure style. I share that which I produce only with friends and make $2.95 a month from a few dozen books on Amazon only a few people would find and read.
Don’t use X or social networks professionally. It’s very easy rule.
[in 1986 I made a sarcastic flippant post on quite early gay internet social networks (how gays pick up straight men) and it appeared on physical bulletin boards at universities around the world within 2 days. I realized this was not a good thing. I can still summon the damn thing in 2 seconds though Google almost 4 decades later - thus my 3rd essential feature of internet, it’s not a conversation it’s a recording. The worst person will get a copy of what you say at a speed proportional to how nasty they will get.]
I can't condemn strongly enough the terrible abuse this poor woman has suffered. I also can't escape the irony that the only instances I recall seeing similar abusive behavior has been from so called "trans activists" who are threatening rape and violence while demeaning biological women for simply defending women's safe spaces and rights. It would appear there are certainly amoral idiots on all sides of the "woke" issue.
A chunk of the sensible center-right transmogrified into an *actual* far-right, comprised of medieval Christian metaphysicians, Nietzschean UNTermensches, misogynist incels, hatefully racist enthnonationalist, and "The Nose Knows" esotericism, held together by a shared culture of repudiation. It's as awful as it is tiresome. Thanks for the article.
It's a truism that "revolutions" eat themselves. Or, in the vernacular, leopards, faces, etc. Many nice "anti-woke" intellectuals metaphorically promoted the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, which largely consists of anti-intellectuals demagogues who have a visceral hatred of all things academic, or at least not raving right-wing academic. And these intellectuals were so surprised when the Leopards didn't just eat the faces of some particular types of opponents, but rather went after "innocent" faces. But this was entirely predicable, based on the beliefs of leopards that faces are to be eaten.