Quote: (12-24-2013 09:56 PM)soup Wrote:
I'd never heard of this blimp until reading about her in the manosphere. Does she really have that much power?
The sad thing is that the answer is "yes".
The nonsense she writes is not just for impressing a like-minded circle of lunatics, but also gets used in various "research" that gender studies departments perform and publish. For example, the research cites Jezebel to claim that
"there is a widespread agreement that obese people are discriminated against and subject to hate speech, especially during air travel".
It doesn't matter that it's bad methodology and obvious bias, it still enters the realm of academic publishing. And there are thousands of gender studies academics in USA, pushing for Jezebel's arguments to be used as "research". A 2007 survey conducted by the National Women's Studies Association included
576 institutions offering women's studies or gender studies at some level. It's an echo chamber, with all of these people citing each other to provide relevance in the absence of logic and other arguments.
A few years later, that "research" gets cited by Department of Transportation in a relevant decision. For example, it creates the rule that airlines have to give morbidly obese people two seats for free and justifies it as
"several influential researchers in the field of fat acceptance and gender studies, such as prof. Hugo Schyzer at the College of Pasadena, prof. Andrea Dworkin at the University of Minnesota, et al., have concluded that this discrimination is real and can be hurtful and damaging to the psyches of obese people who are discriminated against."
Is the main problem that USA's universities are filled to the brim with completely pointless departments that specialize in churning out "research" with bad methodology and obviously premade conclusions? Or is it the problem that there are so many deranged people whom these researchers can cite? Or is it the fault of the lawmakers who don't know how to recognize actual research? It's a vicious circle. IMO, the research departments are the biggest problem, followed by the lawmakers. If it were just a bunch of insane Lindy Wests (there's certainly enough of her to divide into two like an amoeba) raving around on the internet, they could be safely ignored.
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