"Life's tough. Get a helmet, man."

submitted by P-38lightning from twitter.com

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[–]JulienMayfair 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

My question: Why is it always the same fat, unattractive, moon-faced white woman with weird hair playing this part? I've seen it for 30 years now. It's like they come off an assembly line.

[–]notafed 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (5 children)

They do. It's called "Humanities". These people aren't typically in the Science department. They're in the "General Studies" or some other Arts/Humanities department. Or possibly Law, but likely not. Law students are too busy studying.

[–]OuroborosTheory 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

"studies" technically: humanities still makes you refer to something outside your "autoethnographic" experience and expose you to at least two interpretations: geography, linguistics, and anthropology also go heavy on every academic fad, but it's "studies" departments that give you a degree for saying "I should get two airline seats" or "someone looked at me funny last week, she was probably a Jewess, and here's a 20-page paper on incidents like that"

in history I've seen this desperate grasping for political relevance/present-day applicability in pre-1800 history and arthist--the records of the Greco-Hunnish kingdoms of Afghanistan/Pakistan HAVE to be hollowed out and made to serve a point about immigration; Hadrian's Wall HAS to do with Brexit now; barely-comprehensible Anatolian warlocks HAVE to be made proof that watered-down queer theory from the 2010s US is an eternal verity

[–]notafed 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

That last bit is it. Nothing can exist because it exists; it MUST serve the correct narrative.

[–]OuroborosTheory 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I mean there's also a famous counterpart in the sciences--biologists popping off on why we need to invade Iraq right now, minor astronomers screaming at Renaissance historians that they outrank them, science vigilantes threatening to get anyone investigating that big 65MA crater in Mexico fired for woo-woo: they have to be not just an expert, but a guru

it's basically a pretension to universality: someone's mastered some arcane psychoanalysis, now they think they should tell chemists how to do their job; someone knows physics, now she's an expert in US culture or the Syrian Civil War (yes, I can give names)

[–]JulienMayfair 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I saw a video of a former Shakespeare professor of mine delivering a paper where he tried to make Shakespeare relevant to the whole George Floyd/BLM/Defund The Police hysteria. I felt embarrassed for him. It was such a transparently desperate attempt to make his scholarship "relevant," and it fell flat.

[–]OuroborosTheory 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I mean "controversy over highwayman killed by town watchman attracts hypocrites and hangers-on that muck up the already-mucky issue" does sound like a workable Shakespeare play

but I bet that wasn't it at all, of course ...

but I've noticed this in the least "applied" departments: geography, anthropology, language (most Anglo-Saxonist activity seems dedicated to forbidding students from using the term and ranting about how 8th-century England was FULL of B.A.M.E. enbies: at least debunk the "Ostara" Tweets that get passed around every Passover, that'd be more useful): someone who's actually worked with guerrillas is gonna be the least sanguine, since most (surviving) ones aren't humanities academics with fat pensions

it's like when everyone and their auntie piles on the Thing of the Week: no, I don't want CVS to Have An Opinion on the Donbass War: it's just a "fart at a funeral" levels of inappropriate