But isn’t the theme du jour “look, but don’t touch” ?

Steve participated (as an alleged expert on the sociology of science, who favored counting ‘intelligent design’ as science).

Steve also commented (at multi-page length) and guest-posted on Michael Berube’s blog.

Well, that might be… intentional. Water under the bridge, right? It sounds to me like Chris laid out the context of which you speak with even-handed clarity and frankness (and I say this having watched it all unfold in real time, and having taken some incidental participation in the drama at various points).

I did interpret your comment #30 as a more or less direct response to my comment #29, which is why I responded. I was the one to (playfully) call for egging (since I don’t have any knowledge of Jeremy Clarkson, I will have to trust that I’ve been well and truly 1-upped).

So, out of everyone at that point, I was the one most straightforwardly susceptible to your critique (perhaps everyone but Doctor Science). I still don’t accept “but a woman commissioned it and liked it” as a valid negation of the offense I took.

Really? I’m assuming that by “grand satire” we mean “as in Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’”, the gold standard for satire.

Well, absolutely anything could be called a “attempt” at grand satire (see below). I do agree comprehensively and categorically with your judgment of, and your interpretation of, the article. The piece is not coherent as grand satire.

Yeah, Salient, if you are not aware of the entire commenting oeuvre of Fuller, you have no place commenting here.

Heh. Alright, I’ll get my coat.

The Collected Works are available at a Google Search near you.

Actually not, or at least not completely, ever since the Great Server Collapse of 2009. The bytes of History got bit!

I think I see the problem just there.

bluff no-nonsense, ‘well we know what we’re supposed to say, but that’s not really what we think, is it?’ A kind of consciously politically incorrect self-confessional session.

I contend that there is in fact no such animal. What you describe is not confessional in any meaningful way, it is self-praise. In Kealey’s case, it is the self-praise of the powerful: he is being “bluff, no-nonsense .. politically incorrect” to make it clear that he in fact has no respect for the feelings or humanity of the less powerful.

Kealey’s article, as others have pointed out, is even more about power than it is about lust. From his POV, it’s funny that the sub-humans ever imagined that he thought of them as scholars instead of meat. It’s funny the way this LOLcat is funny: those goofy women! they’re sitting at the table of learning like people, thinking they’ll get fed! lolz.

I think what he (and presumably the commissioning editor) were aiming for was a kind of bluff no-nonsense, ‘well we know what we’re supposed to say, but that’s not really what we think, is it?’ A kind of consciously politically incorrect self-confessional session. There are some writers (and I’d include Mary Beard among them) who can get away with that because she’s prepared to puncture pretension wherever she sees it (including in herself). But Keaney comes across more like Jeremy Clarkson, simply revealing his unconstructed views.

I am actually someone who has been treated with contempt here in the past, having had to defend myself from hostility that was not of my own creation (i.e. I suddenly found myself subject of a blogpost here).

Our first interaction with you was to invite you to participate in an on-line seminar on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science. Hardly a mark of contempt or hostility.

Subsequently we discovered that you were posting insulting personal comments about members of our collective under a pseudonym. Comments which (a) might put some of your comments in this thread in perspective and (b) were contrary to our comments policy about sockpuppeting.

We warned you, but allowed you to continue to post comments here. Pretty generous of us, I thought.

We thought one of your books was crap (hence: “I found myself the subject of a blogpost here”). Sorry, but when you publish something, you open yourself to the evaluation of the public. Get over it.

Oh and the present, Steve.

Perhaps you mean well, but you write as if you were born yesterday—at least as far as this blog is concerned. All of your questions and remarks, like so many blog postings in general, display a complete lack of context beyond what has been going on in the immediate thread. I am actually someone who has been treated with contempt here in the past, having had to defend myself from hostility that was not of my own creation (i.e. I suddenly found myself subject of a blogpost here). I also see that this is part of a pattern, which I think is especially disgraceful coming from a blog that claims to be of the centre-left. I realize that it may be fruitless to fight fire with fire in this context, but that’s how I’ve been proceeding here. I am sure that in some other life—indeed, perhaps even real life (insofar as it still exists)—we could be friends.

Salient:

I get that Kealey’s article was an attempt at grand satire.

Really? I’m assuming that by “grand satire” we mean “as in Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’”, the gold standard for satire.

To me, Kealey’s article does not read as satiric by Swiftian standards. It is not satire but a joke, along the lines of Dr Johnson’s A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Kealey, like Johnson, is using humour for one of its core purposes: to emphasize the lines between ingroup and outgroup, and make the ingroup feel good about it. Kealey’s article, like Johnson’s quip, functions to reassure men about an apparent blurring of the lines between “what men can do” and “what women can do”. Johnson said, “don’t worry, such women are just like performing animals”; Kealey says, “don’t worry, such women are masturbation aids, particularly attractive blow-up dolls”.

Both Kealey and Johnson reassure men that women need not be taken seriously as, you know, real human beings or anything. This is a relief for those on the inside, they “get the joke” and laugh. You can see why feminists would get the reputation of being humourless.

True, Swiftian satire does not reassure like that. Swift does not try to make his readers feel better about the division bewteen the English ingroup and the Irish outgroup, he tries to make them feel worse. He exaggerates the already-extant implication that the Irish were not quite human to its full-fledged, logical corollary: treat them like livestock, then. Eat them, nom nom.

I see no indications that Kealey or his supporters intend or feel anything other than Johnsonian humor from his article. Do you read it otherwise?