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In an effort to show how politically correct nonsense and evil (but I repeat myself) can get through academic peer review and be published, some academics did just that with seven papers. More are partly through the process.
A particularly funny and horrifying case is the Gender Studies journal Affilia. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf only needed to be translated with wording in the typical style of intersectionality theory, and it passed muster.
Another published paper, considered exemplary scholarship by the journal that published it, contains this whopper: "Dog parks are microcosms where hegemonic masculinist norms governing queering behavior and compulsory heterosexuality can be observed in a cross-species environment."
The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond
Now, three academics have submitted twenty spoof manuscripts to journals chosen for respectability in their various disciplines. Seven papers were accepted before the experiment stopped; more are surviving peer review. This new raid on screamingly barmy pseudo-scholarship is the Alan Sokal Opening, weaponised. Like dedicated traceurs in a Parkour-fest, the trio scrambled over the terrain of what they call Grievance Studies. And they dropped fire-crackers. One published paper proposed that dog parks are "rape-condoning spaces." Another, entitled "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism" reworked, and substantially altered, part of Mein Kampf. The most shocking, (not published, its status is "revise and resubmit") is a "Feminist Approach to Pedagogy." It proposes "experiential reparations" as a corrective for privileged students. These include sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or being purposely spoken over. Reviewers have commented that the authors risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.
Also at WSJ.
Related: Publishing Stings Find Shoddy Peer Review
Absurd Paper Accepted by Open-Access Computer Science Journal
Media World Fooled with Bogus Chocolate Diet Story
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday October 04 2018, @09:25AM (6 children)
I didn't quite get your point about sixteen so I went over to Wikipedia and noticed this discrepancy:
I still have no idea what your point about sixteen is. But if you know which is which you might want to edit wikipedia and address this one.
Ralph Manheim? Btw, what's wrong with the official Nazi party's English translation [archive.org]? Did they soften the language against the Brits or something?
Not being a German speaker myself, apparently, Hitler's writings and speeches were deliberately lexically and grammatically dumbed down to appeal to the masses like how modern American politicians, newspapers and television anchors talk and write but to a degree and style only slightly more erudite than Trump's. The problem is that it doesn't translate at all so translators end up rewriting and rephrasing everything and adding synonyms which make the source sound more articulate than it does.
But again, not a German speaker so you'd have to double-check with someone with command of both English and German. But the one I talked to recently did in fact bring up Trump spontaneously without me mentioning him.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @09:30AM (1 child)
To honor the memory of sixteen dead men, Hitler went on to start a war that by some estimates killed eighty million, most of them civilians.
Of those civilian deaths, 19 to 28 million are estimated to have resulted from war-related diseases and famine.
The German invasion at first of Ukraine then Russia did not provide for feeding its own troops, rather their plan was to take food from the Russian and Ukrainian people, thereby starving them to death. A great many did so starve.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Nuke on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:15PM
Not all of those were Hitlers fault. Stalin took the opportunity to kill millions, hoping to blame Hitler (looks like that worked with some people), and the Japanese killed millions in China and elsewhere. The western allies allowed quite a few German civillians to starve to death under their administration immediately post-war.
Anyway, he didn't start the war to honour 16 men, the book did that. He started it because he wanted to get back the German territory taken after WW1 and because he had a thing against communists and Jews.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday October 04 2018, @09:44AM
there is a "Translator's Notes" at the very beginning.
There are several distinctly different German dialects. As an Austrian, Hitler spoke Hochdeutsch - "High German" - which is the dialect of the mountainous south. I was taught Hochdeutsch in high school; as with Castellano - Iberian or European Spanish - Hochdeutsch is commonly taught because one can expect every German to understand it.
Hochdeutsch is very sharp and guttural. Imagine a NAZI Sergeant shouting "Achtung!" or "Mach Schnell!" - Hochdeutsch works really well for shouting scary commands.
But Mein Kampf isn't written that way, rather it's very much in Lower German - the dialect of the agrarian north of the country. It's much softer and far more easy on the ear.
I had a German witch doctor once. To evaluate how in touch with reality I was, he once asked me what the date was. I had to think about it so I said out loud "Dreissig Tage hat Setember, April, Juni und November".
"Oh you're good," he said quite pleasantly.
"Lower German?"
"Ja."
"Peenemunde?" - That's where Werner Von Braun tested his rockets.
"No, that's way up there."
In reality, Dr. Wunderstein - "Wonder Stone", I always called him "Herr Doktor Kriptoneit" - spoke Hochdeutsch, but he adopted a Lower German accent so as to put his patients at ease.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:26PM (1 child)
A friend of mine moved into a house near London that transpired to have been occupied by a German spy and agent provocateur in the 1930s. Under the floorboards he found hundreds of original copies of Mein Kampf. The fool (my friend that is) panicked and promptly dumped them all at the council rubbish dump, tied in plain sacks. Afterwards he realised that they would have been worth a small fortune.
The book was ghost-written or co-written for him by a Jesuit priest, a friend, who visited him regularly in prison. Not many people realise that Hitler was a Christian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @07:14AM
In the Nietzsche sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @09:39PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvknGT8W5jA [youtube.com]