(AP Photo/Miguel Tovar)
DAVID STROM | HotAir
This, I admit, amuses me.
A bunch of “scholars” published an article in the Summer 2023 edition of the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, which is based at Northwestern University.
The scholars were conducting a survey of undergraduates studying engineering because they wanted to understand the perspectives of transgender students in the STEM field.
Naturally, they sent their questionnaire out to the engineering students and were surprised that not everybody was thrilled by having to discuss their gender, their politics, their sexual orientation, and private matters.
Many, in fact, found the whole thing absurd. Because they were studying engineering and wanted to know…engineering stuff. Why is this nonsense being shoved at them?
The researchers were appalled and decided to write about how evil and fascist engineering students are. And that is the subject of their paper: fascism in American engineering students.
What tripped their trigger initially was this hideous missive from one of their respondents, which was so disturbing that they fear that a concentration camp might be next.
Trigger warning: unapproved opinion ahead!
Subject: TGNC Resiliency Question
… I believe that is what is wrong with higher education. Students should be taught to focus on their chosen field and not their gender. In my program I’m sure there are students that fall into the categories you are researching, but their performance is how they are judged. Stop trying to push gender and convince people that they are more important or discriminated against because how they identify. Let people choose their own path and don’t force them into fields because you think a group isn’t represented enough. In today’s world people can be what they want to be regardless of their gender or race, all you’re doing is propagating a stereotype and pushing a divide between groups. Also, the fact that you are funded by the NSF is an enormous waste and not science, that money could be used for real research that could actually better things.
Good luck with your research,
[Name Redacted
HATE! FASCISM!
Woke scholars wanted to survey engineering students.
— The College Fix (@CollegeFix) July 20, 2023
They responded with snark.https://t.co/iVDU6FxnJG
Things got much much worse, proving how irredeemable America is. The College Fix provided the dirty details of the responses that so triggered the researchers:
Titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interesting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” the paper reported on “individuals exercising discursive power in their language to target researchers and tamper with data.”
The authors wrote that the “backlash” to the project “reflects characteristics of contemporary far-right or fascist political movements in the U.S., such as the synthesis of antisemitism with anti-Black and anti-feminist rhetorics.”
About 25 percent of the “malicious responses” provided some airplane-related response to gender, including several who specifically identified as an “Apache helicopter.” Identifying as an “attack helicopter” is a meme that goes back to at least 2014.
Other responses included a “V-22 Osprey” and a “F-16 fighter jet.”
Some gender responses appeared to express frustration with the survey, such as “homophobic biggot, yes we exist,” “Cis gender lizard king,” and “F*cking white male.”
Other mocking answers were much more detailed, with responses to the gender prompt that included “Quasi-Demi-poney; bankai-released state queercopter with a hint of faggotdrag lesbian and homosexual upside-down Frappuccino cake” and “on-cookie-cutter cis-furry dragonkin. Don’t judge.”
I will give you a screenshot of the responses, all of which are intended to ridicule the researchers and the research, and none of which were hateful or threatening to them.
It was college students mocking their professors, not professors leading violent protests against conservative speakers coming to college campuses, as happens seemingly every day in America.
And the professors are utterly mockworthy. They claim that somebody identifying as an Apache Helicopter (a common meme that makes fun of self-assigned genders) on a survey is indicative of White Supremacy, when in fact it indicates nothing more than a healthy contempt for their supposed betters who are so disconnected from the study of engineering that they are conducting this survey.
Which, by the way, was administered by, you guessed it, engineering professors at Oregon State who got a National Science Foundation grant to do it, along with some gender studies profs.
If I were studying engineering I would be pissed that NSF money was being wasted this way too.
Sometimes the proper response to stupidity is to mock it because ridicule is the only proper response.
Ridiculing people who have no power can be cruel; ridiculing people in power–and those “powerless” and “oppressed” researchers have all the power, not the students–is often the only means you have to be heard.
The researchers fielded 723 responses. Of those, 299 normal responses came in from undergraduate students in engineering education, there were 374 invalid or incomplete responses, and 50 so-called malicious responders, or roughly 15 percent of the questionnaire’s responses, the paper stated.
“Importantly, the themes and repetitions serve to mark shared references and signify an existing community with a shared political agenda and racist, trans-antagonistic, and online political meme commentary,” the researchers wrote.
One respondent put “pansexual attack helicopter” as their gender. That same person also listed their race as “kangz.”
Some of the other “malicious responses” included respondents saying their race was “Afro/Klingon-Asiatic Galapogayation” and their gender was “Aerosol.”
Another listed their race as “Native American (Elizabeth Warren)” and put down “airplane” for the gender. The disability listed was “transgenderism” for this particular respondent. Multiple respondents listed being transgender as a disability.
Other “malicious respondents” listed “[t]here are only two genders” and “[p]edophile” as gender.
Leave aside the absurdities and take the professors’ ideological commitments seriously. How do they know these responses are malicious?
If identity and gender are entirely determined by self-designation, how can they possibly KNOW that these people are lying? Perhaps somebody does think they are an Apache Attack Helicopter. You, I, and the professors all know that the intent is to ridicule them of course, because we have common sense and understand that identifying as an Apache helicopter is absurd.
But that same principle applies to every one of the self-identities the professors honor and exalt in celebrating. Obviously so. Our common sense puts things into categories for a reason, and once you throw that and every objective standard out the window, Apache Attack Helicopter is no more absurd than Agender trisexual who marries a doll, which would likely be accepted by the professors.
This is why the ridicule works: you are ultimately revealing that the emperor has no clothes. If their categories are just fine, why not mine? It is all self-assigned. Prove I am NOT an Apache Helicopter using your own standards. You cannot, without asserting an external reality.
QED.
So what were the White Supremacist responses?
I admit that the last one is offensive, but then again they were describing THEMSELVES and not the researchers. The insult was implied, of course, but I can’t imagine how the professors by their own standards could object to somebody saying they were a homophobic bigot since the professors themselves call them a homophobic bigot in the article.
Intellectually the alphabet ideology is a mess. There are literally no solid ideas and there is no solid ground upon which to evaluate things. It is all solipsistic nonsense.
When a professor can classify somebody answering a question about identity as a racist White Supremacist for answering “human being” or even “male” as their gender, what ISN’T White Supremacy? And if everything is, what’s the point of doing the research? You already know the answer.
What is height? White Supremacy.
What day is it? White Supremacy.
Now it is not surprising that this nonsense takes place. It is a day ending in -y.
But don’t forget: the National Science Foundation funded this. This is what classifies as worthy of funding to promote “science.”
Original Here
DM’s View: I take this as a good sign that not all of the youth in this country are buying all the DIE crap. That said, I have to wonder how many of the responses were just shitposting.