I think you're bang on the money. The physics post-modernist hoax, to me, proves that one effect of this sort of writing is that many people, including editors who have every reason to pay very close attention to submissions, tune out and/or assume you must know your shit if they can't understand you, and that…

Wow, the manosphere, not content with shitting all over actual women, is now going after fictional women.

Oh goddammit. I can never un-read that, and I'm afraid I must hold that against her.

No, but OMG that is AWESOME! Thank you.

Sophia McDougall is awesome. I first knew her as the author of the wonderful Romanitas books (alternate history, based on her study of the Roman Empire), and just recently discovered her as a columnist. Her treatment of rape in movies is one of the most thoughtful discussions I've ever read on the subject, and makes…

I've seen papers rejected for being too concise and straightforward. It is a strange parallel world where being easy to understand is considered bad, because presumably if you're sufficiently clever most people can't understand you.

I've seen papers rejected for being too concise and straightforward. It is a strange parallel world where being easy to understand is considered bad, because presumably if you're sufficiently clever most people can't understand you.

Post-structuralist academic nonsense. Nobody should read it unless they're being paid to (or hope to get a degree out of the process.) Seriously, the point seems to be to mutilate the language in the process of taking a straightforward idea and making it labyrinthine and take 20 pages to set out.

:)

Of course.

I dunno. I feel that it encourages an artificial dichotomy that posits an essentialist determinism in the binary racial schema.

Sadly, the bigotry doesn't surprise me. What does, though, is the stupidity. I find it easy enough to believe there are lots of people with horrid ideas around, but it's hard to believe they still think they can say things like that without consequences.

I'm just mad because I have a week in DC for work, and planned to spend my down time hiking in the national forest near my hotel and going to the Smithsonian. Because this is all about me.

What I've seen, in Canada and the UK and the US, is that it's increasingly rare to see people saying "good people can disagree on this" and work from there. And this is a huge problem, because if you see the other guys as not just wrong, or misinformed, or mistaken, but evil, harmful and actively trying to destroy…

I agree; she's fascinating, and important for any number of reasons.

If the last few years have taught us nothing else, they have taught us that you should never underestimate the GOP's ability to pick loathesome, tone-deaf, offensive-to-everybody candidates.

WTF. That's awful.

Thank you! That is hugely helpful. I shall use that, then, unless corrected, in which case I shall borrow your experience and claim that I've heard it used that way before :)

Ah, good distinction. Thanks. On the one hand, you don't want to incentivize people being ignorant, but on the other, it doesn't seem totally fair to punish the stupid the same way as the wilfully criminal.

Oh, see this confuses me too. I'm reading a book by someone called Gentile right now; in Italian it would be "GEN-tih-leh" but if it's totally anglicized it would be pronounced as if it were the word for a non-Jew. And I have to cite it in a presentation and have no clue which is the less offensive error: using the…