The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond (Submitted Fake Papers that got published)

Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.”

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia. (Emphasis Mine)

Rud Dreher has more including excerpts from the troll papers published: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-bankruptcy-of-grievance-studies/ How about this one: Here is the conclusion to a paper that argues for using dildos to penetrate the rear ends of politically incorrect straight men, to cure them of their troglodytic attitudes:....Particularly from this data, transphobia and transhysteria in straight men exhibit such a close thematic relationship to receptivity to penetrative anal eroticism that intentional anal penetration in “safe” environments may remediate them..

Editors published a paper in favor of forced sodomy, i.e., rape, as a cure for transphobia.

I love this one:

Jolly old Adolf was just a little ahead of his time. And I'd bet it didn't take a lot of rewriting.

Postmodernism is intellectual styrofoam - it looks great but you can't build anything out of it. Foucault himself denied that his work could be described that way, preferring "post-structuralist", and it's difficult to read Derrida without entertaining the suspicion that the guy was putting us all on. Baudrillard actually appears to believe all that stuff depending on what it turns out to be day to day.

The real difficulty with making the premise of any school of philosophy "there are no universal truths" is that the statement undoes itself - it doesn't work if it isn't a universal truth itself. The same applies to objective truths. If they don't exist it's useless to posit that. "All truth is contextual" has the same problem. In the latter category is the weird conviction that 2+1=3 is somehow affected by the race, sex, or ethnicity of the speaker. It's simply baffling that anyone could possibly buy into this who hasn't serious mental issues.

Someone on Reddit made a comment that the effects of this stunt go beyond the immediate moment. It’ll have the editors of these journals second-guessing each and every paper from now on—”Are we being duped again”? And since all the papers are BS anyway it’ll be hard to tell!

Truly masterful work! Next-level trolling, as the young’uns say. :)

These guys are exposing who the “peers” are.

Just goes to show that in an organization filled with idiots, idiots get their papers published.

When you stop and think about it, isn’t the whole concept of peer review a bit incestuous?

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