I’m a kind and generous person, and I’ve just been enjoying a good laugh, so I’ll let you enjoy it too. It’s funny how I found this essay. It’s on Alan Sokal’s site, but that’s not how I found it (there are a lot of articles there, happily, and I haven’t read them all yet). No, I found it by typing Sandra Harding and – a certain unkind adjective, into google. What a lot came up! I’ll have to try it with different unkind adjectives in the future. What a pity that life is so short – I’m sure to miss some interesting stuff. Quite a lot. But I found a lot, too.

This essay is about Social Text… Read the rest

More Harding. Why? Because there is more, that’s why. Because you don’t know the half of it. Because that previous comment barely scratched the surface. Because it just keeps getting worse. Because my jaw keeps dropping until I can barely use the damn thing to talk and eat anymore. Because this book was published by Cornell University Press. I repeat – this book was published by Cornell University Press.

And because I’m a woman, god damn it, and a feminist, and this kind of bilge is enough to discredit both categories. Feminist! She calls herself a feminist! She links what she’s doing with feminism! It’s an outrage! Well you see what I mean about the jaw. Same thing with the … Read the rest

I mentioned that I’ve been reading Sandra Harding. I have. Therefore I need to vent. I also need to write in short simple clause-free declarative sentences, because that’s the way Harding writes, and it’s catching.

Reading Harding is a very strange experience. I keep wondering – huh? What happened? Why did this book get published? Why didn’t anyone shove it back at her and say (at the very least), ‘I’m sorry but you’ll have to re-write this for grown-ups. Children don’t read books about epistemology.’ Why does she write the way she does? Why do people let her? And then publish it? And then why do other people buy the books and read them? And why, godgivemestrength, why do people … Read the rest

Just to gather them all in one place. Jonathan Derbyshire has a post about the vexed (especially around here – we vex the damn thing to death) matter of the, shall we say, tender-mindedness of some parts of the left toward Islamism.

There seems to me to be an essential continuity between the stance adopted towards radical Islam by the intellectual left broadly conceived (and not just the SWP), and certain of the attitudes that characterised the so-called ‘New Left’ in the 1960s, and which were brilliantly diagnosed by Irving Howe in a wonderful 1965 essay entitled ‘New Styles in “Leftism”‘…

Yes, I like Howe, and he looks better all the time. He nailed the anti-intellectual aspect of the New … Read the rest