'Classifying pregnancy as a disease comes with some risks … serving to reinforce and entrench social pressures on women in particular.' ∽ Anna Smajdor & Joona Räsänen
This is why using allegory and metaphor is dangerous to minds to small to comprehend the actual reality the allegory or metaphor talks about in a simplified manner. Smajdor and Räsänen are the kind of people to whom Aesop's fables are literal tales, and who understands Zeno's paradox to really be about Achilles (or an arrow dep. on version).
Combined with their (erroneous it looks to me at a cursory glance) use of reification and their post-modern (or post-deconstructionist even) ontology of reality being created by communication, they can end up anywhere, at any conclusion, simply by freely associating concepts.
It's a useful method and I often use it too, but without grounding and empiricism or at least a modicum of logic and humility, all you do is enter the realms of madness. The usefulness lies in coming up with ideas you'd never think of if you followed the established pattern in your field, but then the idea is to be checked and tested and ground down to its constituent parts before being built up again, and - most of the time - discarded as useless in reality.
I looked up Smajdor and Räsänen's respective pages at their sites of employment, and their list of published works yields more of the same:
"Why not coercive pronatalism?" was one that caught my mind.
A charitable interpretation of it all is that the two young women are trying to do something new in the field of ethics (which is borderline impossible, has been for ages) and are being provocative on purpose to get attention, using Reductio ad Absurdum as a way of pushing things to where they might actually go thanks to technological developments (there's an article about the ethics of artificial sperms and gametes f.e. and another one about OnlyFans vs DeepFake pornography).
They might simply be "institutionsskadade" as we say in Swedish, implying that working at an institution has institutionalised their way of thinking to the point there's no connection to reality.
funny though, to compare pregnancy to measles ("...To answer the first question, we can compare pregnancy with measles..."): with measles being considered a contagious disease, next thing you know they'll suggest pregnancies are a communicable disease ;-)
perhaps the article is a test, to see how clever its readers are in detecting being bulls***tted around.
At least it's a step up from comparing the fetus to a parasite, as I have seen some feminists claim, not as simile or metaphor but as biological reality.
But it's been an overall trend in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in all of Scandinavia for over two decades now, that instead of starting with reality and forming a hypothesis (or vice-versa), more and more academics start out with creating some postulate or comparison of disparate things connected only via language.
There's an infamous report in Sweden called "Sandvikenrapporten" (the Sandvik report") about how a small industrial county (25k residents) made a lot of money thanks to migration. The report claimed that Sandviken earned 500 000 000:-/year net gain.
To arrive at that number, the writer (and economist tied to the Socialist Democrat party) simply made baseless assumptions in order to arrive at a net positive.
In other words, he made it all up.
It is the same with too many so-called reports, essays, thesis-papers, even doctorate and professorial degrees, that they are based in assumption alone without a shred of evidence beyond pure semantics.
Ah, the next step, in terms of logics, would be to invert 'health' and 'disease', which is done rather easily: humans are, by default, 'prone to disease', hence 'being healthy' becomes the exception while 'being prone to disease' is declared the norm--et voilà, everybody must be saved by way of allopathic intervention.
Synchronicity - just as I decide to check my inbox several new mails drops into it.
Maybe I'm being to charitable in my thinking but if I was to play Climate Saviour-Neosapiens-Futurist-Eugenicist-Dr-Frankenstein, I wouldn't put people on medicines to make money.
I'd invent a scheme where eugenic tampering and selective breeding became the dutiful virtue:
"Why curse your children if you are fit enough to have them with anything less than their optimum genetic potential, limited only by what science can provide at present?"
...
"If each generation can be further improved, and the offspring born to term in artificial wombs, and the entire DNA and chromosome-mess put together using AI-assisted Super-CRISPR, then you too can be the forebear of superhumans who will live forever without hurting the planet!"
...
But what will happen is, some idealists will try for that, perhaps sonsored with big money behind them. And some other idealists will go for the Great Culling. And some for the "let's go neolithic"-approach.
But the controllers of capitalism will obey rational choice logic and aim to keep it all going as long as they themselves stay on top while they are alive: "Après-moi, le déluge".
I went to the 8 week ultrasound of my (alleged) daughter in late 1990. She was born in May 1991.
She was fully formed with fingers and toes, she had a heart beat.
I was so furious when I got home that I had to go out for a run. That night I ran, and ran, and ran, and ran....for about 2 hours.
I just had to burn off my anger that my wife and all the other women I knew had sold me "it's just a clump of cells" at 8 weeks of age.
I had trusted all those women to tell me the truth and very clearly they had lied to me in order to be able to kill their babies if they wanted to. I was just so angry.
My wife and I had a VERY stern conversation when I finally got home.
It is not about health,or disease. It is about control and profit. The notion that a healthy woman can normaly handle her pregnancy all by herself, therefore, is anathema to the medical establishment and the pharma industry. Even more horrifying: A healthy woman with no risk factors, the child being in a right position, may giving birth without the oversight and intervention of a doctor?! At home? Only with the help of a traditional midwife? It may even ease the process!!?? Not to be allowed. Individuality and self empowerment are the ultimate enemies of every dictatorship.
Health, or disease, are, of course, the means to control and profit (the ends).
The next step, in terms of logics, would be to invert 'health' and 'disease', which is done rather easily: humans are, by default, 'prone to disease', hence 'being healthy' becomes the exception while 'being prone to disease' is declared the norm--et voilà, everybody must be saved by way of allopathic intervention.
Call it elite overproduction, publish or perish, or, which I'd rather point to, 'the university', much like other 'systems', is subject to the (economic) 'law' of diminishing returns.
If you'd apply that method to 'the university', the turning point in terms of its marginal utility was likely the atomic bomb (c. 1945), at the latest whatever 'we' did just a moment before '1968'.
Everything we observe in the present is the increasingly wild downward ride.
And women get angry at me when I call them stupid. When we implement sharia law in the west we will not allow women to speak in public. This is a good example of why.
Actually no. The men in academia dont believe any of this crap. They just say they do to gain access to what they want. We call them sympanzees. You can also call them sex pests or predators. Not all left wing men are sexual predators. But all sexual predators are left wing men.
And men teaching at universities are overwhelmingly left now, more than 90 percent in most western countries.
Well, I'm in academia, I'mma lot of things but left isn't one of these (most colleagues are), and the pressure to conformnis absurd. I could tell stories you wouldn't believe (perhaps you would), but doing so would bore the readers, I fear.
yes, you are one of the 10% who is married with children (not sure how many) and you have decided to not pretend to believe all this crap. And I am sure you have been persecuted for doing so in some way, shape or form.
But look around at the men in academia. A LOT of them are not married and have no kids. Sure, some of them are. The vast majority of the ones who spout all this commie nonsense are sexual predators.
I went to university in Australia in the 1982-5 period. It was well known which lecturers would give a woman a higher grade for, lets say "favours".
Hell, when I was working at IBM women bragged about getting their pay rises and promotions on their back. It wasn't even secret, they bragged about it at lunch in the cafeteria. LOL!
Universities have become MUCH more far left since the 1980s and I can tell you in the 1980s it was bad enough. The so called "male feminists" have always been the men who could not attract a woman with his "manliness" and so had to play "sneaky bastard" and pretend to be a feminist.
I hit puberty in the summer holidays of 1975-6 in Australia. I had no idea what had happened to me because no one warned me. Just very suddenly one of my girl cousins looked a LOT more interesting than she did the last time I saw her! LOL!
Anyway, I went to my first day of high school and in the quadrangle where we were being sorted into our classes I saw this girl and I fell in love. I actually nudged my mate and said "See that girl? I am going to marry that girl." I mean it was love at first sight from 10 meters away. That's how much my hormones were pumping! LOL!
My mum had constantly been asking me if I had a girlfriend yet for the last 2 years and I told her girls were yucky and smelled funny and I didn't like them. Well? This day I came home and told my mum that I had met the girl I was going to marry and I was in love! LOL!
My mum tried to look not too surprised. But do you know what she did? She sat me down and said words to the effect:
"Now that you have met the girl of your dreams I have a very important lesson to teach you. To win her heart you must be honest. This is the most important thing she will be looking for. Honesty. You must never lie to her. You must never flatter her unjustly and never say things to her that are not true to try and persuade her to like you. You must be your self and be honest.
And I am telling you this because I can assure you her mother is telling her that the most important thing she must look for in a boy is honesty and that she must run a million miles from a boy who is dishonest to her in any way."
My mum gave me a lot of advice about how to get Susan to like me but she sat me down that day and made sure I didn't make the mistake of being dishonest with her and trying to flatter her too much.
And we all knew by the time we were 14 that many girls were susceptible to flattery and had not learned that lesson from their mothers.
So yes, all those "male feminists" don't believe a word of what they say. They know that some women didn't learn the lesson of "run away from any man who lies to you or flatters you unjustly." That is who they are after. And some of them are just after women wanting to get higher grades as a "trade". It's the worlds oldest profession regardless whether the exchange is in money or grades or promotions or movie parts.
Oh, it's not 'just' men who are often childless--it's also a lot of 'high-powered women (bossgirls)' who, having sacrificed ± all of their fertile years on the altar of a career™, are becoming increasingly resentful of anything and anyone who hasn't; it's bearable as a man, and judging from what I observe, it's beyond good and evil for many women.
As an aside, among the most funny insights into this, I point you to what an American (childless) female colleague told me about a decade ago: the prime indicators for such political stances as feminism are a) middle-aged women who still want to look like women vs. b) those who proudly wear, e.g., no make-up, borderline inappropriate clothing, and let their hair grey as soon as possible.
In terms of my own expertise/specialisation (in European post-mediaeval, pre-modern history), the best analogy of academics and their relationship to 'the state' is--Renaissance humanists with inky fingers who, much like musicians, artists, and charlatans, were collected, much like pieces of art etc., by wealthy dukes and kings, partially for their personal edification (e.g., having some famous musician play while the king is feasting) but also as a form of 'display', as in: look what I can afford, or, look, I'm so smart because I have [insert name] reading to me.
It's but a variation of the oldest profession in the world.
yes, a LOT of women do the whole "muh-fab-boo-luss-kar-rear" thing in their 20s and...then they get to 30 and hit the wall and they try very hard to get some sympanzee to marry them. Then they don't find a sucker and hit 40 and then it's all mens fault they never had children.
If you watch the response videos men are making now there a so many women crying in their cars about how expensive it is to be single and life would be so much better if they could "share the cost of living" with a husband.
I am loving watching the videos of all these former "boss babes" crying in their cars.
That this type of academic paper is even is acknowledged as such, shows that the Science is "off the rails" and the taxpayers "contributions" to Universities need to be firstly questioned in an Academic paper,
Call it elite overproduction, publish or perish, or, which I'd rather point to, 'the university', much like other 'systems', is subject to the (economic) 'law' of diminishing returns.
If you'd apply that method to 'the university', the turning point in terms of its marginal utility was likely the atomic bomb (c. 1945), at the latest whatever 'we' did just a moment before '1968'.
Everything we observe in the present is the increasingly wild downward ride.
Female pregnancy is a disease but male pregnancy is not! Here in the States they have replaced ’pregnant women’ with ‘pregnant people’. That is because they need to allow for male pregnancies, which by very definition cannot be a disease, but instead, is a special miracle of Woke religion. ;-)
This is why using allegory and metaphor is dangerous to minds to small to comprehend the actual reality the allegory or metaphor talks about in a simplified manner. Smajdor and Räsänen are the kind of people to whom Aesop's fables are literal tales, and who understands Zeno's paradox to really be about Achilles (or an arrow dep. on version).
Combined with their (erroneous it looks to me at a cursory glance) use of reification and their post-modern (or post-deconstructionist even) ontology of reality being created by communication, they can end up anywhere, at any conclusion, simply by freely associating concepts.
It's a useful method and I often use it too, but without grounding and empiricism or at least a modicum of logic and humility, all you do is enter the realms of madness. The usefulness lies in coming up with ideas you'd never think of if you followed the established pattern in your field, but then the idea is to be checked and tested and ground down to its constituent parts before being built up again, and - most of the time - discarded as useless in reality.
I looked up Smajdor and Räsänen's respective pages at their sites of employment, and their list of published works yields more of the same:
"Why not coercive pronatalism?" was one that caught my mind.
A charitable interpretation of it all is that the two young women are trying to do something new in the field of ethics (which is borderline impossible, has been for ages) and are being provocative on purpose to get attention, using Reductio ad Absurdum as a way of pushing things to where they might actually go thanks to technological developments (there's an article about the ethics of artificial sperms and gametes f.e. and another one about OnlyFans vs DeepFake pornography).
They might simply be "institutionsskadade" as we say in Swedish, implying that working at an institution has institutionalised their way of thinking to the point there's no connection to reality.
funny though, to compare pregnancy to measles ("...To answer the first question, we can compare pregnancy with measles..."): with measles being considered a contagious disease, next thing you know they'll suggest pregnancies are a communicable disease ;-)
perhaps the article is a test, to see how clever its readers are in detecting being bulls***tted around.
At least it's a step up from comparing the fetus to a parasite, as I have seen some feminists claim, not as simile or metaphor but as biological reality.
But it's been an overall trend in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in all of Scandinavia for over two decades now, that instead of starting with reality and forming a hypothesis (or vice-versa), more and more academics start out with creating some postulate or comparison of disparate things connected only via language.
There's an infamous report in Sweden called "Sandvikenrapporten" (the Sandvik report") about how a small industrial county (25k residents) made a lot of money thanks to migration. The report claimed that Sandviken earned 500 000 000:-/year net gain.
To arrive at that number, the writer (and economist tied to the Socialist Democrat party) simply made baseless assumptions in order to arrive at a net positive.
In other words, he made it all up.
It is the same with too many so-called reports, essays, thesis-papers, even doctorate and professorial degrees, that they are based in assumption alone without a shred of evidence beyond pure semantics.
Ah, the next step, in terms of logics, would be to invert 'health' and 'disease', which is done rather easily: humans are, by default, 'prone to disease', hence 'being healthy' becomes the exception while 'being prone to disease' is declared the norm--et voilà, everybody must be saved by way of allopathic intervention.
Change my mind.
Synchronicity - just as I decide to check my inbox several new mails drops into it.
Maybe I'm being to charitable in my thinking but if I was to play Climate Saviour-Neosapiens-Futurist-Eugenicist-Dr-Frankenstein, I wouldn't put people on medicines to make money.
I'd invent a scheme where eugenic tampering and selective breeding became the dutiful virtue:
"Why curse your children if you are fit enough to have them with anything less than their optimum genetic potential, limited only by what science can provide at present?"
...
"If each generation can be further improved, and the offspring born to term in artificial wombs, and the entire DNA and chromosome-mess put together using AI-assisted Super-CRISPR, then you too can be the forebear of superhumans who will live forever without hurting the planet!"
...
But what will happen is, some idealists will try for that, perhaps sonsored with big money behind them. And some other idealists will go for the Great Culling. And some for the "let's go neolithic"-approach.
But the controllers of capitalism will obey rational choice logic and aim to keep it all going as long as they themselves stay on top while they are alive: "Après-moi, le déluge".
LOL, at first I read 'logistics' where it says 'logic'!
Hi Rikard,
yes, "fetus as a parasite" or a "clump of cells".
I went to the 8 week ultrasound of my (alleged) daughter in late 1990. She was born in May 1991.
She was fully formed with fingers and toes, she had a heart beat.
I was so furious when I got home that I had to go out for a run. That night I ran, and ran, and ran, and ran....for about 2 hours.
I just had to burn off my anger that my wife and all the other women I knew had sold me "it's just a clump of cells" at 8 weeks of age.
I had trusted all those women to tell me the truth and very clearly they had lied to me in order to be able to kill their babies if they wanted to. I was just so angry.
My wife and I had a VERY stern conversation when I finally got home.
It is not about health,or disease. It is about control and profit. The notion that a healthy woman can normaly handle her pregnancy all by herself, therefore, is anathema to the medical establishment and the pharma industry. Even more horrifying: A healthy woman with no risk factors, the child being in a right position, may giving birth without the oversight and intervention of a doctor?! At home? Only with the help of a traditional midwife? It may even ease the process!!?? Not to be allowed. Individuality and self empowerment are the ultimate enemies of every dictatorship.
Health, or disease, are, of course, the means to control and profit (the ends).
The next step, in terms of logics, would be to invert 'health' and 'disease', which is done rather easily: humans are, by default, 'prone to disease', hence 'being healthy' becomes the exception while 'being prone to disease' is declared the norm--et voilà, everybody must be saved by way of allopathic intervention.
papers like this are caused by the pressure put on academics at universities to publish to keep their jobs..
Call it elite overproduction, publish or perish, or, which I'd rather point to, 'the university', much like other 'systems', is subject to the (economic) 'law' of diminishing returns.
If you'd apply that method to 'the university', the turning point in terms of its marginal utility was likely the atomic bomb (c. 1945), at the latest whatever 'we' did just a moment before '1968'.
Everything we observe in the present is the increasingly wild downward ride.
Change my mind.
And women get angry at me when I call them stupid. When we implement sharia law in the west we will not allow women to speak in public. This is a good example of why.
There's plenty to such-stupid men in academia, too, and the issue isn't men vs. women, but sane vs. insane.
Actually no. The men in academia dont believe any of this crap. They just say they do to gain access to what they want. We call them sympanzees. You can also call them sex pests or predators. Not all left wing men are sexual predators. But all sexual predators are left wing men.
And men teaching at universities are overwhelmingly left now, more than 90 percent in most western countries.
Well, I'm in academia, I'mma lot of things but left isn't one of these (most colleagues are), and the pressure to conformnis absurd. I could tell stories you wouldn't believe (perhaps you would), but doing so would bore the readers, I fear.
Hi Epimethus,
yes, you are one of the 10% who is married with children (not sure how many) and you have decided to not pretend to believe all this crap. And I am sure you have been persecuted for doing so in some way, shape or form.
But look around at the men in academia. A LOT of them are not married and have no kids. Sure, some of them are. The vast majority of the ones who spout all this commie nonsense are sexual predators.
I went to university in Australia in the 1982-5 period. It was well known which lecturers would give a woman a higher grade for, lets say "favours".
Hell, when I was working at IBM women bragged about getting their pay rises and promotions on their back. It wasn't even secret, they bragged about it at lunch in the cafeteria. LOL!
Universities have become MUCH more far left since the 1980s and I can tell you in the 1980s it was bad enough. The so called "male feminists" have always been the men who could not attract a woman with his "manliness" and so had to play "sneaky bastard" and pretend to be a feminist.
I hit puberty in the summer holidays of 1975-6 in Australia. I had no idea what had happened to me because no one warned me. Just very suddenly one of my girl cousins looked a LOT more interesting than she did the last time I saw her! LOL!
Anyway, I went to my first day of high school and in the quadrangle where we were being sorted into our classes I saw this girl and I fell in love. I actually nudged my mate and said "See that girl? I am going to marry that girl." I mean it was love at first sight from 10 meters away. That's how much my hormones were pumping! LOL!
My mum had constantly been asking me if I had a girlfriend yet for the last 2 years and I told her girls were yucky and smelled funny and I didn't like them. Well? This day I came home and told my mum that I had met the girl I was going to marry and I was in love! LOL!
My mum tried to look not too surprised. But do you know what she did? She sat me down and said words to the effect:
"Now that you have met the girl of your dreams I have a very important lesson to teach you. To win her heart you must be honest. This is the most important thing she will be looking for. Honesty. You must never lie to her. You must never flatter her unjustly and never say things to her that are not true to try and persuade her to like you. You must be your self and be honest.
And I am telling you this because I can assure you her mother is telling her that the most important thing she must look for in a boy is honesty and that she must run a million miles from a boy who is dishonest to her in any way."
My mum gave me a lot of advice about how to get Susan to like me but she sat me down that day and made sure I didn't make the mistake of being dishonest with her and trying to flatter her too much.
And we all knew by the time we were 14 that many girls were susceptible to flattery and had not learned that lesson from their mothers.
So yes, all those "male feminists" don't believe a word of what they say. They know that some women didn't learn the lesson of "run away from any man who lies to you or flatters you unjustly." That is who they are after. And some of them are just after women wanting to get higher grades as a "trade". It's the worlds oldest profession regardless whether the exchange is in money or grades or promotions or movie parts.
Oh, it's not 'just' men who are often childless--it's also a lot of 'high-powered women (bossgirls)' who, having sacrificed ± all of their fertile years on the altar of a career™, are becoming increasingly resentful of anything and anyone who hasn't; it's bearable as a man, and judging from what I observe, it's beyond good and evil for many women.
As an aside, among the most funny insights into this, I point you to what an American (childless) female colleague told me about a decade ago: the prime indicators for such political stances as feminism are a) middle-aged women who still want to look like women vs. b) those who proudly wear, e.g., no make-up, borderline inappropriate clothing, and let their hair grey as soon as possible.
In terms of my own expertise/specialisation (in European post-mediaeval, pre-modern history), the best analogy of academics and their relationship to 'the state' is--Renaissance humanists with inky fingers who, much like musicians, artists, and charlatans, were collected, much like pieces of art etc., by wealthy dukes and kings, partially for their personal edification (e.g., having some famous musician play while the king is feasting) but also as a form of 'display', as in: look what I can afford, or, look, I'm so smart because I have [insert name] reading to me.
It's but a variation of the oldest profession in the world.
Hi Epimethus,
yes, a LOT of women do the whole "muh-fab-boo-luss-kar-rear" thing in their 20s and...then they get to 30 and hit the wall and they try very hard to get some sympanzee to marry them. Then they don't find a sucker and hit 40 and then it's all mens fault they never had children.
If you watch the response videos men are making now there a so many women crying in their cars about how expensive it is to be single and life would be so much better if they could "share the cost of living" with a husband.
I am loving watching the videos of all these former "boss babes" crying in their cars.
That this type of academic paper is even is acknowledged as such, shows that the Science is "off the rails" and the taxpayers "contributions" to Universities need to be firstly questioned in an Academic paper,
Call it elite overproduction, publish or perish, or, which I'd rather point to, 'the university', much like other 'systems', is subject to the (economic) 'law' of diminishing returns.
If you'd apply that method to 'the university', the turning point in terms of its marginal utility was likely the atomic bomb (c. 1945), at the latest whatever 'we' did just a moment before '1968'.
Everything we observe in the present is the increasingly wild downward ride.
Change my mind.
Female pregnancy is a disease but male pregnancy is not! Here in the States they have replaced ’pregnant women’ with ‘pregnant people’. That is because they need to allow for male pregnancies, which by very definition cannot be a disease, but instead, is a special miracle of Woke religion. ;-)