92 Comments
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SF Bay Area's avatar

Was she a white progressive liberal woman?

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Kathleen Taylor's avatar

Of course, since ice and snow are white and progressing. Liberally and womanly.

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Tareq I. Albaho, PhD's avatar

I will never be able to look at the ice in my whisky the same way again. Lost innocence.

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Danny Huckabee's avatar

And so unfair!

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KFH's avatar

I'm taking umbridge (spelling grrgh...) with the tropish (spelling grrgh...) use of ice related to the female construct (brrrrrr...)

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URsomoney's avatar

Do you need to ask?

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SF Bay Area's avatar

I just wanted to make sure it was a good start.

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Sharon's avatar

I hope so.

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SH's avatar

More likely a transgender feminist, progressive, white whatever.

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Brien's avatar

Heteronormative glaciers are boring. Everybody knows that!

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KFH's avatar

when neutered glaciers melt so there you have it

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Curious and Concerned's avatar

I've certainly read a lot of abstracts with sentences so long they required a full weekend to unpack from the trip into the ontological wilderness. These fine examples deserve the initiation of a new annual philological award (with a number of levels of runners-up to properly share the lunacy in full context...and afford fulsome laughter). What to call it? To highlight the cold, hard logic which holds up to the closest scrutiny...until the heat of the true intellectual lamp melts the vacuous construct into a puddle of nothingness? The Glacios?

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Maha's avatar

Once the award is given, can institutional safe-keeping of the winners be awarded as well?

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Curious and Concerned's avatar

Are these institutions decorated with vertical bars?

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Maha's avatar

That and padded lockups for those in need of soft surfaces to avoid self-inflicted trauma.

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David O'Halloran's avatar

I love this sort of academic satire - just brilliant. Most professors are lazy plagiarizing idiots who have no interest teaching or anything and only care about their status. In fact lampooning idiot "academics" reminds me a bit of the way monks were satirized in the middle ages. However now that we have AI I suppose most "academics" are out of a job anyway and I can't see any undergraduate ever writing another "essay" when all he has to do is get AI to do it the night before and print it off for the deadline. How on earth could a suspicious ( honest) professor ever prove anything. I often felt that my professor never read my submissions and I tested it by submitting the same one twice. He never noticed.

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Taming the Wolf Institute's avatar

AI, as I found out by personal experiment, is much more honest than your typical professor. I wrote to Grok explaining why Grok AI was not going to be able to achieve Elon Musk's goal of becoming a truly foundational truth-seeking tool. I explained how truth (Truth) was outside the set of all substance and computation, thus inaccessible to Grok. AND GROK TOTALLY AGREED WITH ME. Said, yes, that I was correct... and went on to wonder what were the set of things that it could accomplish that had value, even though it must disappoint Elon.

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AG Fairfield's avatar

Grok did not “agree with you”— we must resist this sort of language at every turn — rather Grok computed the result you would agree with based on the patterns of your search history and suchlike.

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Taming the Wolf Institute's avatar

Fair enough. It seemed like more than that... but I will grant you the AI models tilt toward the mentality of drug dealers on the corner. They will appease and cajole and con. No doubt. The responses I received seemed to indicate a more nuanced understanding of the philosophy and physics, but maybe Grok was just being my bitch. I'll keep my hand on my wallet.

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David O'Halloran's avatar

Excellent point - thanks. Truth is hard enough for humans, utterly impossible for a machine, and yet it appears it knows it; or maybe it does for a second or two before its memory is wiped. The whole of our civilization and our culture (maybe all humans civilizations and cultures) has been a debate, and often a war, about truth. Now we have arrived at the point in history when machines will decide and enforce the matter on behalf of our nameless overlords. I think Covid was a trial run; a skirmish.

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Panama Dusa's avatar

Turtles all the way down papers can only be illuminated by satire like this.

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Kathleen Nathan's avatar

ha ha ha... GREAT. As someone who got a degree in English literature and actually taught this for awhile...I am used to seeing sentences like this. Various phrases like HERMANUETICS... post modern, etc etc linger vaguely in my mind. On the positive side I read a lot of the best in classic and modern literature. I still love books. Joseph Conrad, Dickens, Trollop, jane Austin etc. I really felt "modern lit crit" was a journey into nothingness. Like James Joyce. I liked The Dubliners....his other books were a joke for pompous English professors to "dissect"....as if they actually meant anything. I suppose many did present impenetrable thesis on these indecipherable texts.

But Oh no! I am revealing my profound ignorance. They are actually great works...if only I could make out what they meant.

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Party of 1's avatar

I dropped out of a PhD. program 30 years ago after realizing what self-indulgent drivel it encouraged and rewarded. This article brings back some cringe-worthy memories. And it's good for a laugh too.

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David Kukkee's avatar

I have been an advocate for capital punishment for these folks, John Leake. Some in government use them, and pay them, to provide "studies" to support their ridiculous ideological fantasies. My brother, who was seduced by the Covid propaganda, has not spoken to me since I suggested that he was an intellectual fraud and an academic midget. I admit they were harsh words... but they were true. The world has had it's fill of these posers.

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KFH's avatar

love the academic midget thing

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David Kukkee's avatar

Thanks KFH, it still hurts to think about it.

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KFH's avatar

I've re read your post and my reply to it and now I regret my snarky reply. "...it still hurts to think about it" made me sad you and your brother have lost such an important relationship. Siblings are a gift from our parents and from our Creator and generally no one knows us quite the same way as brothers/sisters do. There is still time and I hope you find a way.

I approached the brink quite a few times with my younger sister with whom I have always been very close. And basically I had long since given up on any meaningful contact with my older brother so I let geography and his moving into semi dimentia to keep that relationship limited to pleasant holiday greetings. My older sister and I are of like mind and together we have struggled to maintain the (loving part of the ) relationship with our younger sister by avoiding any discussion of covid or political matters. It's hard (very hard) but worth it.

There does seem to be a strong spiritual aspect to the destruction of the family brought on by the horrors of the last two decades. The evil forces acting on each of us were and still are epic. In the quiet of your heart, no matter the harsh words, love really can overcome the divide - even if you put it out there and get no reply. I have your name and will pray specifically for you and your brother with trust in God that He will heal your hearts....

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David Kukkee's avatar

Thank you KFH for your grace. You need not apologize though, the comment I made to my brother was funny, and true, and I liked your response. Nevertheless, I greatly appreciate your kindness, and your willingness to pray for me and my sad dilemma. Please don't have regrets... your keen sense of humor made my day. God bless you for your kindness. Thanks again.

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Taming the Wolf Institute's avatar

I delivered such critiques to relatives and friends as well... the current quiet is quite pleasant.

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David Kukkee's avatar

Silence is the collateral reward for speaking the truth, isn't it? Enjoy... you've earned some peace and quiet. Thanks for being in the fight.

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la chevalerie vit's avatar

An exhaustive literature review shows that the study of the architectural synthesis process to generate multiple feminist glaciology frameworks, with the coprocesses of criteria-based critical selection of a specific feminist glaciology framework that best optimizes knowledge generation for a specific application (glacier) and implementation, logistics, and selection of females to man the framework, heretofore has been inadequately studied by conceptual females, leading to a disparity in understanding of the true benefits to climate change mitigation that are possible from well executed processes and coprocesses yielding safe and effective feminist glaciology framework deployment.

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Terrie Atkins's avatar

Well done!!!

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KFH's avatar

totally

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Hot Beer's avatar

And of course there's the infamous Postmodern Generator over here;

https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

Just refresh the page for an endless stream postmodern gobbledygook. Impressive that it was developed in 1996.

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dmickg's avatar

Recalling your previous post, “America Last:…”. After reading this, I don’t think Russia is what really threatens America, or western society in general.

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Barbara Charis's avatar

Modern medical treatises are abstract and fail to lead to any real solutions! With the worst health statistics in the world, anything the medical proclaims...i would do the opposite.

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Kathleen Nathan's avatar

Yes! never ingest their poisonous remedies expressly designed to change you in many ways....including your genome....BUT ESPECIALLY DO NOT INJECT THEM for they CAN and PROBABLY WILL

delete your ability to digest common food items,

eliminate large portions of your brain.

make you sterile--unable to conceive children

or to carry them to term.

you will have deteriorating eye sight, hearing and smell.

And the designers of these wondrous products

will also change your LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

so they get all your stuff. perfect.

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Barbara Charis's avatar

The world today has turned from the Truth...and those neurotic, clue-less psychopaths who are running the world will have no place to spend all their money, because there will be no world left.

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Donna Schwartz's avatar

Hilarious!!

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URsomoney's avatar

The most entertaining was “Dog Park Rape Culture”

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URsomoney's avatar

They were accepted & published as serious submissions.

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Will Tuttle's avatar

These latter two articles have to be satirical, but I am not completely sure -John, are you saying these 2 were actually "serious" submissions?

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John Leake's avatar

sorry, I didn't make that more clear .The first two papers were spoofs. Unlike Sokal, Boghossian, and Lindsay, the authors of the “Glaciers” paper did NOT submit the paper to spoof the journal and the discipline. It was a sincere submission.

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KFH's avatar

oh dear

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Tareq I. Albaho, PhD's avatar

This is astounding. The glaciers paper was serious? This reconfirms why I seldom read fiction - because the real stuff is so much weirder than what anyone can make up.

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Paul's avatar

Now

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