MLA-BDS Aftermath: A Star Is Born

Accuracy in Academia ^ | January 23, 2017 | Malcolm A. Kline

[Academiadotorg]

Just as political careers are often launched from electoral defeats, so too do academic careers blossom when Left wing movements fail.

Examples of the former abound, from Ronald Reagan's rise in the wake of the Goldwater defeat of 1964 to Barack Obama's in the wake of John Kerry's loss in 2004. For illustrations of the latter trend, one need look no further than the Modern Language Association's recent meeting in Philadelphia this month.

Though the vote to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel went down by about two to one, one graduate student from the University of California gave a thesis in a panel promoting BDS that, from what we've seen of academe, may not only land her a job but launch a whole new field of study.

In a presentation entitled "Gendered Death and Political Discourse at the United States—Mexico Border and the Israeli-Palestine Border (s)," Cinthya Martinez Perez described for an attentive audience how women's bodies were analogous to land borders.

She relayed that both the U. S. and Israel had a "dread of having their borders penetrated" by "missiles, rockets and tunnels." With this "feminine land" went the "construction of the nation-state as the good masculine patriarch."

Truly, this kid is going places in academe!

[Academiadotorg]

At the Modern Language Association, you can watch academic stars rise, and it's depressing.

[Da Coyote]

“At the Modern Language Association, you can watch academic stars rise, and it’s depressing. “

Nothing academic about that collection of colossal ignorance.

If we in real academia (e.g., STEM) were cursed by MLA types, they’d be saying that 2 + 2 = 6 for large values of 2 - as 2 approaches 3.

[Red Badger]

These are people who cheat at Scrabble....................

[Red Badger]

...they’d be saying that 2 + 2 = 6 for large values of 2 - as 2 approaches 3.

That's what my calculus professor said.......................

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If we in real academia (e.g., STEM) were cursed by MLA types, they’d be saying that 2 + 2 = 6 for large values of 2 - as 2 approaches 3. - Da Coyote

That's what my calculus professor said…………………..

Puts me in mind of the trap that used to exist in Fortran, which my brother described to me. In Fortran, you call a subroutine with arguments, which are variable names. The trap was that any number explicit in Fortran would be assigned a space in memory. In this example, 2. If you made 2 be an argument in a subroutine, that was bad practice but the compiler would let you do it.

If the argument going in to the subroutine were “TWO” that would be a legitimate variable name. If that subroutine then proceeded to make the command "TWO = 3” then you can understand how when the subroutine returned command to the main program then if you printed out the value of “TWO” that the printout would be the digit “3”.

But the exact same thing would happen if you called that same subroutine with the constant “2”.

That is, the memory word to which the compiler assigned the value 2 (because it was mentioned in the code) it also associated with the name 2. When you called the subroutine with the name 2 (which you naively think of as a constant value 2, the subroutine would be about the variable named “TWO” but as far as the main program was concerned, the name of the parameter was “2”.

The upshot was that if you had your program print out “2” after that action, the value displayed by the printer would be 3.

Thus there was no difficulty, using that procedure, to get your program to tell you that 2 + 2 was 6.