Colin the Barbarian @OXSOC@sciences.social Profile picture
Sep 19, 2022 18 tweets 4 min read
I've read this twice now, once before certain players started to wail, nash their teeth, cry foul & plot revenge. Once after. My views on the issues aren't exactly a secret, but I've looked for & can't see anything in the piece that a reasonable person could complain about. The views of "gender criticals", "genderists" & even those occupying the middle ground are hardly a secret & they all get a mention. Some even write them down so there is a public record. Take wailer in chief Alison Phipps. These are her own words:
Sep 18, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
OK, my serious comment on research ethics. Ethical considerations in research have to be a matter of balancing potential benefit versus potential harm. I have been interviewed for the Crime Survey for England & Wales. It is a victim survey. It provides data that official statistics do not & cannot. It asks folks whether they have been the victim of a vast array of criminal acts. I can well imagine that being asked about some things could well be triggering & upsetting. Some harm may result. Respondents are not forced to take part. They can stop
Jul 17, 2022 16 tweets 3 min read
Let me put this very simply for the beards that are sound on other issues but don't get or just don't want to get the nature of the politics. If you are a fringe interest group the best way to get what you want is quietly. Most people are clueless or uninterested so if you >> want to fundamentally change the way folks perceive & describe reality & get your Pickwickian narrative enshrined in law, go slow, work behind the scenes, capture influential positions in key orgs. Make facts on the ground even if those facts contradict or contravene existing >>
Oct 12, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
Seems to me there is a lot of confused nonsense being spouted by the usual suspects about suppressing student protest at Sussex. I'm sure a lawyer will correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to me that in this jurisdiction an employer has a clear obligation to protect an employee> from harassment at their place of work. The student "protest" is clearly harassment of a named individual. If one is charitable & accords the "protestors" any kind of coherent grounds for their harassment it would appear to be their understanding of Stock's beliefs. It has
Sep 17, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
Toilet wars. Unisex rooms with single occupancy stalls are touted as a solution. Up to a point. I'm a guy, but if I were a gal I wouldn't be ecstatic. 1) Most guys stand up & have poor spray control so, at the least the stall stinks & at worst you have to wipe up someone else's piss before you can sit. If I were female I would not see that as an equality enhancing advantage 2) Security. I recently visited a campus with this arrangement. Unisex room with dark entrance enclosed between two corridor fire doors. Enter large room with lots of loitering >>
Jun 19, 2021 9 tweets 3 min read
A short thread on how scholars should behave when they think they disagree with something. May be of interest to @LSEGenderTweet. 1) Let's assume me & my mates think there is something wrong with a body of thought - say for instance Gender Critical Feminism. 2) First we might>> read & think about some of the work that constitutes that body of thought; 3) We would probably discuss it, first informally, perhaps in a seminar, even in a symposium; 4) We'd discover that, because they are not The Borg, different GC scholars believe and maintain somewhat >>
Feb 24, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
I imagine the blokia are prepping their, hang on, wait a minute, that's just some random person on the internet who got it wrong thing. If only it was. Here is a professor at a major UK university writing the same in an academic journal. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… >> Read the first paragraph. That's all you have to do. The same untruth, the same strategy of misdirection. And when challenged what do the editors do? Nothing. Some waffle about Popperian debate, only an opinion piece, blah blah. Excuse me, but I thought Popper's point >>
Feb 20, 2021 20 tweets 4 min read
I want to tell you a story. It illustrates the low level, but unpleasant hassle faced by academics holding views deemed unacceptable by self-appointed defenders of public safety. I'm not going to name names. I'm not interested in facilitating a pile on. The abused is>> robust and capable of looking after themself. I was sent a screenshot of the abuser's protected twitter narration of the incident. I've also seen it tweeted on here. I've no idea how it was leaked. I've not seen its authenticity challenged. >>
Feb 19, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
A banal thought. The test for the limitation of speech in the public sphere must ultimately be some notion of harm actually or potentially caused. So the important questions are what kinds of harm should we care about, who gets to decide, how do they decide and what sort of >> evidence and argument is admissible. Arguing about abstract conceptions of free speech or preemptively shouting, "no debate" obscures the constitutional conference type of discussion that might help us deal more rationally with the practical issues. Of course if you are wedded to
Feb 18, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
Things ain't simple. It's perfectly consistent to believe the following: 1) a government appointed free speech czar is a terrible idea & undesirable 2) many members of academia don't notice or feel any restriction on the free expression of their views 3) some members of academia are subject to systematic campaigns of harassment because of their views, in some cases simply for stating undeniable facts (not "facts") 4) Circulating lengthy public denunciations, calling for someone to be disciplined or fired, deliberately misrepresenting what they say,
Feb 15, 2021 12 tweets 3 min read
The idea that between 1841 and relatively recently the Census authorities were completely agnostic about what the population thought the target of the sex question was is ludicrous and shows a complete lack of historical imagination. From 1841 the head of household filled in the schedule and a census enumerator checked and amended the return. If you want to call that "self-report" fair enough, but all the questions were answered by self-report in that sense. This does not = self-id. It is completely implausible to believe that historically there
Feb 15, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
Trying to control and manipulate the use of language is part of political struggle, to pretend otherwise is absurd. If we all agreed about what constitutes anti-semitic, islamophobic, racist, sexist or transphobic speech, there would be no problem. But outwith a core of >> shared understanding there is a large zone of contestation. There are zealots that deny that & assert that their & only their understanding is to count. Again, a political rather than a cognitive move. The same can be said of the strategy of taking over hitherto >>
Feb 13, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
Having occasion to think how different the taken for granted world is for my students compared to the world I grew up in, not least because vast majority of my students didn't grow up in the UK. Take schooling. >> I grew up in a large Midlands city. My cohort was last to take 11+ but for boys there were no LEA grammar schools or free places in Direct Grants. For girls there were two. So almost all boys went to "bog standard" comps with the girls that were left after selection. Never >>
Feb 6, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
In 50 years time a PhD student writing about the decline of state capacity will use as a case study the inability of the state to collect every 10 years accurate data on fundamental demographic indicators. One of the causes they'll point to is the outsourcing of thinking about >> compliance with equalities legislation to "outside actors" whose business model is to sell legitimacy by establishing patron-client relationships that serve as a conduit for their own highly selective interpretation of public sector equality duties. Small step by small step