On the “Sokal Squared” hoax by Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose – Three authors submitted 20 hoax papers 48 times to “grievance studies” journals, and 7 of them were accepted.  I am so unimpressed, for reasons discussed in many locations.  I’m choosing to highlight this particular take, because it shows the dishonesty of Boghossian et al., who have made very misleading statements about the content of the papers, which papers were accepted or rejected, and about how friendly the peer reviewers were.  Usually peer reviewers will be polite and say a few positive things, even as they demolish and reject a paper; they’re supposed to.  I’m not on board with this crusade to make peer reviewers more hostile.

Ozy also has a post detailing several of the papers that were accepted.

Note that I myself have been critical of papers in gender studies (which I occasionally read in my role as an ace activist).  The “Sokal Squared” hoax does not come anywhere close to identifying any of the problems I would identify, it just muddies the waters.

YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (for fun and profit!) (video) – Lindsay Ellis talks about the desire for authenticity in content creators, and how this creates emotional labor for them, similar to how workers at Disneyland are required to maintain a friendly affect as part of their job.

Although there’s an obvious analogy to be made between blogging and vlogging, I feel like blogging really isn’t the same because one’s personality doesn’t come across quite so clearly, and often it isn’t expected to.  And the giants among blogs tend to serve as news sources, not as expressions of personality.  But perhaps there are some big shot bloggers who feel otherwise.

Critique of Just Love, Part Two – Ozy has a direct discussion of consent.  I really appreciate the parts about having sex while intoxicated.  The majority of rape involves alcohol, and I think we are massively failing by not discussing the specifics of what that looks like.  I think we avoid talking about alcohol, because it leads to some ambiguous cases and we’re afraid of the prospect of having to disagree with one another on so important an issue as rape.  Not to mention how people in power publicly exploit ambiguity to avoid accountability.

The truth about false rape accusations – an old article, but new to me.  Rather than harping on the statistics of false rape accusations (statistics that are very difficult to verify), this article talks about the most common characteristics of false accusations.  For example, most (?) of these accusations are made by teenage girls who need alibis to avoid getting in trouble with parents, and it’s the parents who file the charges.  Sometimes revenge is a motivation, but not for getting dumped as is commonly imagined.  In practice, accusers do not invent stories that involve ambiguous consent, and why would they?  I’ve been saying that rape doesn’t look like what you think it does, and the same goes for false rape accusations.