Posted on 01/02/2023 1:46:45 PM PST by DeweyCA
It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at the sheer idiocy of academics, but it would be a mistake to dismiss their cultural power. The academia to established practice pipeline isn’t 50 or 100 years now, but a decade or less.
Niche academic theories such as critical race theory have become standard fare in elementary schools, and every corporation has a DEI department. The society we live in was first designed in obscure academic departments and became reality once it filtered through the MSM, Hollywood, corporate America, public schools. The insanity we see everywhere today has been born out of academic theories that used to be obscure.
Who, even 10 years ago, would have predicted that we would be fighting a losing battle to prevent the mass sterilization and mutilation of a generation of kids? Did any of us expect to see a full blown pro-censorship movement being pushed by politicians and the MSM in America? I didn’t see it coming 10 years ago, although there were certainly hints. I assumed our culture could withstand the push, not collapse like a house of cards.
The COVID “emergency” accelerated everything, with the “Great Reset” coming out into the open. Surprising to me, again, was the collective shrug of the educated elite. I guess they figure it won’t be them condemned to eat bugs for protein.
All this, I believe, is at least partly the result of the credentialization of our economy. With few exceptions, entry into vast swathes of the American economy and climbing the societal ladder requires getting a college degree, and by definition getting a college degree requires submitting to the whims of academics. It is difficult to survive 4 (or more) years of college without at the very least mouthing the platitudes required by the institutional leaders. The DEI Stasi controls your fate, with expulsion from the economic elite if you dissent.
That’s one of the reasons why I keep up with, to the extent possible, the happenings in academia. If you want to know what things will look like in the near future culturally, look to academia.
Which brings me to this article I found in the BMJ. “The times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities.”
I have written before about how the British Medical Journal has gone totally woke, and I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Unlike the decline and fall of Scientific American, it matters quite a lot what our medical students are taught and what our doctors are reading. And when the AMA and the BMJ go woke, the consequences are dire.
In a sane world any doctor caught mutilating and sterilizing minors would be jailed, not hailed. But the opposite is true, and that is because critical theory has invaded the sciences. The results are clear: medical murder, surgical mutilation, the tyranny of COVID “emergency” measures, public health officials endorsing riots, and even medical schools embracing witch doctors (“indigenous medicine”).
It should scare you that the BMJ–one of the most prestigious journals in the world–publishes this:
With a focus on Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, this article explores how transplantation is part of the ongoing transformation of being in a body that is of the world. That is, it examines how we may require other ways of thinking bodies as constituted by histories, spaces and times that may be ignored in the biomedical arena. The Tiger Flu, I argue, calls for an intra- and inter-connected way of thinking how we treat bodies, and thereby ways of working with bodies affected by environmental disasters (both acute and ongoing capitalist and colonial projects), multiple selves and time as more than linear. I turn to queercrip as a way of defying a curative imaginary that dominates transplantation and in so doing examine the colonial, capitalist violence of present day living. I move through Eve Hayward’s and Karen Barad’s work to examine how the cut of transplantation is a transformation, as integral to the ongoing experience of having a body in the world and yet potentially unique in its force of bringing inter- and intra-relatedness to the fore of one’s existence. Rather than sick or cured, I argue that transplantation is a transformation that captures our bodily changes, how the environment constitutes the self, how parts may feel integral to the self or easily disposed of, how viscera may tie us to others, and how the future may only be forged through a re-turn to the past (of the donor and a pre-transplant self). Transplantation is not about loss of self or gaining of an other, but rather about rendering apparent our multispecies, multiworld ties, and thus how we are bound by the histories we forge and the futures we re-member.
This is, of course, pure nonsense. And as with all academic nonsense it is easy to dismiss. And doing so would be a mistake. That is exactly what we did when academics began deconstructing the concept of male and female–and doing so led us to the point where medicine became a principle tool for dehumanizing our children.
And dehumanization is the point here. Buried in all this mumbo-jumbo is a very basic idea: what we conceive of as “human” or “healthy” are mere constructs. Replacing a diseased organ with a healthy one doesn’t make one healthier (“sick or cured”), because these ideas are constructs of the “colonialist, capitalist violence of present day living.”
The article itself is hideously long, boring, borderline incomprehensible, and would have been perfectly in place in any number of critical theory journals a couple of decades ago.
But now it is in a medical journal. And not an obscure medical journal, but the BMJ. By itself the piece will have no impact, but as part of a movement to redefine what constitutes medical training it is significant. The goal is to undermine what we understand to be medicine, and more importantly the goal of medicine. When you make biology and bodies mere extensions of human will, personhood disappears. One becomes a mere social construct.
By denaturalizing the body and turning it into a vessel that has no inherent health or illness, no definition other than as something to be manipulated by human will, it undermines medicine and intentionally subordinates it to the ideological agenda of destroying contemporary society. This is how we get to the point that even doctors will consider euthanasia a cure for depression or even poverty.
The infection of the sciences with critical theory is no longer an abstract threat, but a present reality. The sciences have been the last bastion where academia and hence our cultural elites have been connected to something like reality, so it’s hard to maintain hope for our future as a society.
The author is correct in saying that it is hard to maintain any hope for American society. It appears that God has "given us over" to the natural consequences of our nation's rejection of Him. Only a massive spiritual revival will save America from it current downward trajectory.
As long as you’re not a biologist...you should be good to go...
Science like Josef Mengele practiced. For the betterment of mankind, don’cha know.
The author of this article wrote “The article itself is...borderline incomprehensible”
“Borderline”?? That one paragraph he quoted alone is so turgid, so convoluted, so thoroughly incoherent that it is TOTALLY incomprehensible. I can only imagine what the rest of the paper must read like.
The logical end of this is the hard sciences and engineering become so polluted with this crap that there will no competence anywhere and planes will fall from the sky, buildings and bridges will crumble, agricultural productivity will crater, power plants and refineries will blow up...NOTHING will work. Nothing will be produced or delivered. But we will feel real good about ourselves.
Ayn Rand and her short novel Anthem come to mind.
Maybe we are only now learning why alchemists were burned at the stake in Medieval times.
Science is what the government pays them for
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