22 May Laughter is the Best Medicine (for PC Illness, Too)
The leftist stranglehold on acceptable thought in academia–a/k/a political correctness–can feel relentless and oppressive and, because of the lockstep liberal media echo chamber, can seem to be winning the day against the very idea of truth.
But every now and then a Wizard of Oz moment occurs; the curtain is pulled back, and what is exposed is the utter idiocy that passes for leftist thinking. The media/academia/entertainment complex suddenly is seen to be a lot less formidable, and the fear that it is winning dies down. And along the way, it’s almost impossible to avoid a lol moment.
Case in point: a so-called reputable academic journal, apparently operating with a so-called peer review process by which articles are selected for publication, just published an article titled: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct“.
The article was a complete hoax, full of made up footnotes, jargon, and transparent nonsense (including the positing of a connection between conceptual penis ‘issues’ and climate change), and designed by its authors to expose the mind-numbed groupthink that dominates liberal academia…and the article was selected for publication and published by something called the “Cogent Social Sciences” academic journal.
We’ll let our readers click on the link to get full details (and if you’re like us, to have a good laugh). For our purposes, the title is enough by itself to illustrate the absurdity of what passes for academic thought in the ‘gender studies’ world.
We don’t have the NSA recordings of the conversation that took place among the approving editors of Cogent Social Sciences (that’s assuming there are multiple editors, and that they did have a conversation, and that the NSA cares), but we could guess how it went.
Nobody laughed at the title of the article; and if anybody had even the slightest hesitation about the credibility of the content, they were silenced by the fear of being seen as insufficiently enlightened to grasp the importance of that content. And so the article was waved through for publication.
The Cogent Social Sciences journal is probably looking for a lawyer to tell them they can sue the authors of the hoax paper, and no doubt some lawyer will be found who will give them the answer they want. And if they can sue in California, maybe they can find a judge or jury who will think of the journal as the victim.
But more and more Americans, including many Californians, are waking up to the realization that such journals are not victims. Their stupefied condition is actually perpetrating a fraud on American students and American society as a whole, encouraging them to believe there is no such thing as common sense, and pretending to be serious while embracing a leftist worldview built on pure silliness.
Prescribing solutions to this mess is beyond one blog post. But a start toward a solution is to restore the ability to laugh when political correctness in academia gets punked.
Paul Gable