An Academic Journal Converges To Leftism

By Professor Doom

     It’s no secret that some of our institutions of higher education have been taken over by, well, it’s hard to say what to call them. Much like the walking corpses on The Walking Dead, it seems every group has a different name for them. Bolsheviks, Leftists, Progressives, Bai Zuo…many choices. My own personal choice is Social Justice Warrior (SJW), as this name suggests both what they (supposedly) want and their willingness to aggressively fight to get their way.

     There’s a special word for these takeovers, “convergence.” Many of our institutions and companies, not just in higher education, have been converged. Because the SJW cares about ideology over everything else, these takeovers end badly for the victimized institution. So, we see riots in our converged universities, converged movie studios lose huge sums of money on movies which promote ideology over entertainment, the NFL is showing signs of convergence and losing viewers, and even converged comic book companies slide into the abyss.

     Like a monster from a 19^th century horror novel, SJWs take over a victim and then slouch around wearing its skin, with invariably terrible results.

     Now, granted, sometimes the SJWs simply form their own institutions. I’ve mentioned, for example, the Journal of Urban Mathematics, with a title that pretty much says it’s not about mathematics even with the word in the title—it seems these creatures always must pose as something else, even when they’re just being themselves.

     Anyway, an old established journal is becoming converged, and it’s worth examining how these things happen, one more time:

‘Decolonizing’ a Journal

     Convergence is seldom done quickly, it can easily take a decade or more. The journal in this case is merely beginning the slide, and the convergence here begins in a fairly typical way, with SJWs pointing and screaming “Reee!”:

But it made -- in the eyes of many critics -- a major blunder in early 2017 in asking a scholar who has expressed arguably racist views to review a book on inequality and urban education.

     If you dare to speak heresy, the SJWs do not merely shout you down. They destroy you and pursue you to keep you silenced forever. In this case, we have a scholar with “arguably racist views”…I am so tired of the cry of RACIST.

      So what if he said something arguably racist? As my blog has highlighted, everything from milk to financial prudence to engineering is arguably racist. Any chucklehead can argue anything, and such arguments mean nothing. The word is so broadly applied now that it’s pure lunacy to destroy a scholar for being arguably racist. Moreover, even if he said the most vile, actual racist thing in the past, how does this detract from a book review? This is a classic fallacy, ad hominem.

      Who are these “many” critics? Since they engage in a fallacy here, they’re not scholars, and so this scholarly journal should dismiss them outright as irrelevant to the journal’s scholarly discussion, and ignore anything they have to say.

      One of the issues the critics had was how the “arguably racist” reviewed the book:

Most significantly, Wolters chided Erickson for not considering “sociobiology.” To Wolters’s critics, the term blew like a dog whistle endorsing racial hierarchies.

     At the risk of patronizing my readers, allow me to discuss what is meant by the “dog whistle” reference. Another tactic of the SJW is to induce fear and shame. Nobody wants to be offensive, after all, and the SJW exploits this natural tendency of their enemy, decent human beings, by making them afraid of being offensive without knowing it.

     This is the core idea behind micro aggression, offensive behavior so miniscule you can’t see you’re being offensive. There are hundreds of possible micro aggressions now, and being “micro-aggressive” can lead to forced re-education seminars and even termination.

     So what is meant by “dog whistle” is a secret sound that only racists can respond to, much like dogs are the only ones who can hear a sufficiently high pitched whistle.

     Scary, right? You sure don’t want to accidentally send out secret messages to attract those evil, evil, RACISTS that the SJWs assure us are hiding under every bush.

     These fear tactics and use of logical fallacies are not the acts of scholars, and these “critics” should be ignored as having nothing scholarly to say. Sadly but understandably, the cry of “reeee” is quite annoying, and so this scholarly journal will respond to it:

But the AHR, as the journal is known, quickly apologized.

     So, the journal apologized for the invisible and secret errors it made. It seems harmless enough, but apologies are taken as admission of wrongdoing…and that only makes the SJW more aggressive.

     Now there must be changes in policy:

…that the editorial board be expanded to 16 members, from 13, with an eye to diversity and a “far less rigid adherence to defining board slots solely by geographic and chronological ‘field,’ as has long been the practice, 

     First comes what are often referred to as “diversity hires.” The board is summarily going to be expanded, and the rules will be changed so that the new members need not be scholars, but instead will be Warriors of Social Justice.

     Again, it seems harmless enough, but this is where it always starts. See, the SJW has the fiercest “in group preferences” of any group on Earth. The only people SJWs tolerate are other SJWs. With 3 on the board, they only need 6 more to have a majority and converge this scholarly journal. How to get to those extra people?

     Past this point, I’ll stop quoting from the article, but I’ll conjecture based on the evidence so far, and what I’ve seen in other institutions with my own eyes. Here’s how it will go:

     The 3 SJWs newly added to this editorial board will look at the other 13 members, and decide who is the weakest, most vulnerable to their tactics.

     They’ll target this victim, and in unison point and cry RACIST!

     The last time they did this, they got three SJWs added to the board. The journal apologized before, and ceded to their demands…it’s very natural to expect to get the same results from the same behavior, so you can bet at least one of those board members will find himself quite destroyed, and the newly empty position will be filled by another SJW (because they’ll point and cry REEEE if any other kind of person is selected).

     Then they’ll go to the 12 remaining members. They’ll look to see who, if anyone, tried to defend the previous guy they destroyed, and destroy this person. The others on the board will get the message by then…and then it’s game over for this journal, and it will go the route of every other converged organization: a spectacular crash and burn.

     The comments section doesn’t fail to disappoint—I’m hardly the only one to see this structure time and again, though there is one guy saying it’s all hunky dory and, of course, hinting that anyone who dares to disagree with what’s happening at the journal is RACIST, or what it’s more commonly called now, conservative:

Your one-sentence reduction of "decolonization" to a conservative stereotype…

     I guess we can argue whether my observations are correct here but…I’m making a prediction. Let’s give it a few years and see how it turns out. If creating three new diversity positions means all the complaints stop and it’s all happiness on the journal, I’ll concede I was quite wrong.

     I’ll try to remember to come back to this in 2023 and see what’s happened, though I suspect the validity of my prediction will be revealed long before then.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com