What better way to celebrate a blog’s “Terrible Two” birthday than by provoking a bloodthirsty mob? I ask because of the latest profile in journalistic courage, in response to this.
If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered…has made it.
Ms. Riley was right. Though she could have added gender studies, women’s studies…hang on, where’s the list?
…whoa.
(Oh, good lord, there is a “men’s studies”. Dudes, you should be very ashamed.)
That is a lot of academic fields. Seriously, click the link. And guess what? In academia’s enormous dog’s breakfast, the least legitimate is “black studies” ( it’s tied with “latino” and “chicano” and et ceterao studies). Even “Queer theory” and men’s and women’s studies deserve more respect than “racial” studies.
Of course, none are legitimate in the first place. This was determined using my totally awesome field, wormmology. And as the Principia Wormmathica states, “shave only with Occam’s Razor”. Do not multiply entities needlessly.
This is why it’s wrong to present “Queer Theory” as equal to biology or anthropology or sociology or psychology. These mock fields are all specialties within existing academia, somewhere between “sub” and “sub-sub-sub” specialty.
(It’s also wrong to think of anthro-socio-psycho as peers to biology, of course. “Academic field” and “science” are not synonymous. As geeks and nerds we must never confuse anthro-socio-psychos with real scientists. Don’t let a-s-p’s fool you just because they do statistics.)
Whoops, drifted off-topic, didn’t I? A good, smart woman just got fired because blowhard moron grad students got their feelings hurt. So…black ”community”? Really? Since when does “community” equal “mob”?
Well, black and academic communities, read my lips: “black studies” is as stupid as things can get. Its idiocy is matched (“latino studies”) but not surpassed. “Black studies” is the very antithesis of knowledge.
Why? It’s a quantum thing, because my using the word “quantum” proves that I am smart. “Man” and “woman” are quantum units. “Black” is not. Can you subdivide or dilute “man” or “woman”? You can try. Transgendered? Nope. Changing the plumbing doesn’t change the genes. Hermaphrodite? That’s more like the exception that proves the rule.
Can you dilute “black” or “latino”? You can try. Can a black and a latino come together and make a baby? Of course not! Everyone knows that human racial groups are not cross-fertile. Black is black and white is white, and never…
…the twain…
Shall meet.
So if a female “black studies” professor married a PhD in “chicano”…what would their kids study? There are only two choices: “blacano” or “chack”. Wait, “chick” also works. Which maybe explains “women’s studies” after all.
There is nothing of value in “black studies” that can’t be gotten by considering “black” in an actual field of study. Are you concerned with genetic differences, societal or psychological ones, what? There’s already an app for that.
And so the only reason to focus on “black studies” is because you want “Dr.” in front of your name and “PhD” in back of it, but can’t brave the rigors of sociology. God help you.
But first may He give your backside a good whuppin’ for making the old “Piled Higher & Deeper” joke a reality.
World's Only Rational Man 
I’m pretty sick of calling this stuff “sciences”. It’s not.
In Japanese Studies we work with plenty of statistics. Only if you actually pull a Donald Shively (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Shively) or a Sepp Linhart (http://kenkyuu.eas.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=13) can you get close to being a scientist. Needless to say, most of them don’t do it. And I know from Linhart that he never calls himself a scientist. I’m sure Shively was the same.
At best we’re scholars. At worst we’re… a waste of air.
Btw, there’s now this too:
http://www.luc.edu/ips/academics_masj.shtml
https://asunews.asu.edu/20080523_socialjustice
Gotta disagree with both your conclusions. I don’t think either goes quite far enough.
At best, social “science” can do more than just scholarly work. It can identify problems and suggest solutions. But at its worst, it does a lot more than just waste air. It enables tyranny. It’s like any other tool. A scapel is a scapel whether in the hands of Christian Bernard or Springheel Jack.
True. I was thinking more form my own point of view, cause those are the two extreme opposites that the kids coming in can basically chose from in Japanese Studies (90% chose being a waste of air, since they drop out, roughly 10% manage to get a bachelor, from those maybe 50% get a master and from those 25-50% go for the PhD, currently we have 2 guys working on their dissertation, and roughly 250 start every year.) I can’t do anything evil with Japanese Studies. I can hit you with a statistic that says that so and so many Japanese natives hate natto. Oh my! The horror! Of course, if I do it like our gender-studies girl, who also teaches history, I can go can go ahead and simply throw around lies and anti-Americanism as fact.
(note here: gender studies in itself wouldn’t really be an issue, if it wasn’t abused as a political tool by otherwise unemployed wannabes; especially in a historic context it’s mighty interesting and tends to go hand in hand with archeology and forensic medicine, as some excavations of head mounts on several battlefields in Japan show -which produced unexpected results-, but of course, get actual research like this past the hordes of rabid feminists, it’s impossible.)
Of course, if you go into stuff like sociology (which is really a tool used to the worst these days), then we can quickly reach a SHTF situation. Sociology and similar are, after all, actively used and abused to drive home dangerous and retarded agendas pretty much everywhere in the West.
That doesn’t sound like the Edo I know. Surely you can think of something!
See… if I could, would I tell you?
I find “gender studies” to be a particular waste of time. With sex covered by biology and viewpoints by philosophy and psychology, what the hell use is “gender”?
Well, it’s all part of the feminist agenda. Women are equal! Well yeah, they are, or better said, should be in the face of the law and in daily life, but this stuff isn’t there to push gender equality, it’s there to get special sausages from the fridge.
I had a little talk with my mother recently. Now, let me digress a second. My mother was born shortly after the war. She went through hard times as a child and even young adult. She was a very good sales woman, always working hard, always being on top of her game. In every shop she worked she was usually the most well liked and successful sales woman.
And my mother hates feminists. Really, really, REALLY hates them.
Our female politicians, well, she tends to call them “useless hags”, when she’s nice and has a couple of expletives for them when she’s not so nice, and honestly, those female politicians aren’t exactly the smartest in the bunch (one of them said last year that she wants more women to learn trades like roofer, to which my mother said “yeah right, cause so many girls want to work such a hard job”.) Her respect for the average female police officer over here is effectively zero, and I can’t blame her.
So we were talking about the girl cops who joined the station where my father used to work. The new station CO calls them useless. If they do something wrong, they start crying. And my mother is less than impressed by this. In her opinion they’re blackmailing the male colleagues with stuff like this. Not to mention that a police officer represents the law and the those little girls run around in uniform? Don’t get her started on the police academy’s entrance exams, where women don’t have to fulfill the same physical requirements as men, which, to be honest, is a bit ridiculous. A male cop has to deal with 50 kilo weight. Women only with 30. Push ups? Men have to do more than women.
How is this equality?
Oh, I know, women are generally smaller and weaker than men… uh… but the feminazis tell us they’re 100% equal… Does not compute!
And the result are then girl cops who make Kuriyama Chiaki look big and fat. I kid you not. Police officer is still a partly very physical job. I grew up in a steel town. Weekends usually had police action against drunk steel workers who were having some fisticuffs in a bar. Cops had to and still have to go in there and deal with it. The station used to have a 7 feet tall proper Germanic officer. The guy just went in there alone and silence befell the place, cause everybody was scared by the imposing shadow of this officer. Now, what are the cops doing to do if one of them is a girl? Nobody will take her seriously. In fact, the male cops say that they can’t take the girls to such an incident, because they have to be worried about them too. So most of the stuff they do is do paperwork and harass drivers on the road with checking their cars. Not kidding, they meticulously dig through the first aid kits. A friend of mine just recently came into their clutches, was stopped for a routine check. Too bad for them that he’s a doctor who rides on the NAW, the “Notarztwagen” (a normal ambulance with a doctor trained for emergencies on board, usually an anesthesist), and he tends to carry a few “extras” in his trunk. Meaning: he has the full set of tools in there, infusions included. That shut them up and left them lost. But he could see then how they dealt with another guy, went through is first aid kit and ended up berating him and what not.
tl;dr version: it’s part of the feminist agenda that tries to tell us that women are 100% equal to men in every aspect, while working on making sure they’re off better.
It serves no purpose.
It would be interesting as a sub-field of history, which is really the only place where it could belong. But a “discipline” on its own? Ridiculous!
Btw… the draft in Austria is only for men. Women can’t be drafted into the Austrian Army. The feminists scream “equal rights!” but shirk from equal duties.