Is this an attempt at communication?

You need a laugh button,

Joke 1, and then joke 2.

The pre apocalyptic intersectionality of hegemonic socially transformative obstrification inevitably reinaugurates the structured articulation of unsustainable altruism.

There. Now I am also an elite and erudite expert gender theorist (whatever that is).

Butler is a notoriously poor writer, she's actually won awards for bad writing.

What's worse is that she's inspired a generation of likeminded students and academics to write the same way.

And here's the thing, the ideas she's promoting aren't that hard to explain. But they're not very persuasive when they are explained plainly. That's the real reason that she and her allies resort to obscurantism.

OK, time to make sense of this sentence.

But I have absolutely nothing to do for the rest of the night, so there might not be enough time.

To start:

Butlerese "relatively homologous"

In English: "relatively relative"

Distilling everything before the second "to".

"Social relations are relative to capital."

Or, more memorably:

"Those who have the most capital can grab the most pus*y."

What's worse is that she's inspired a generation of likeminded students and academics to write the same way.

Aka The Official Style, or the University Style. It's not only bad writing, it can make promising writers bad.

Amy Winehouse famously sang "There's nothing you can teach me/That I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway." I feel the same way about Raymond Chandler.

I feel the same way about Raymond Chandler. ~ Kevin at January 6, 2019 10:24 AM

Chandler began his career writing advertisements. He had to learn to be direct and economical with words.

"What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it." ― David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man

In politics and social science, the opposite is true.

Butler and other academics seriously believe that text (words) define our reality. By this account, their self-proclaimed mastery of language is a revolutionary act which can otherthrow unjust power structures. Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate blows this up nicely. Merely changing the language, as these progressives want to do, does nothing to change beliefs because the new words soon take on meanings that reflect how people feel. Then new words are needed. This is the euphemism cycle, going from Negro (which simply meant black in Latin or French) to colored to African American to People of color and so on forever. Toilet becomes privy becomes restroom. Because contrary to their claim, changing the words does not change the people.

Hidden within this gibberish are all sorts of unproven claims about reality, which the facile use of words tries to hide. Nothing is ever demonstrated, but merely asserted. All the stuff about hegemony and power structures and so on is never even defined, much less proven. Thomas Sowell is great at picking out these unproven claims.

It is verbal vomit that makes me feel all icky when I read it.

Disjointed obfuscation designed to flim-flam those who just can't bring themselves to make the effort to try to figure out what is actually being said -- which is generally nothing of any real substance. As effective communication, it is functionally gibberish.

That Judith Butler chick uses words that only George Will, William F. Buckley (RIP) and Crid could understand. Although I would suspect, that to understand her well, you would have to open your own mind so wide that you would risk falling in.

"Butler and other academics seriously believe that text (words) define our reality. "

And in that they regard themselves as having the greatest talent with words, they are therefore privileged (or want to be, at least) to define reality the way they want it.

But I think this still gives them too much credit. I reduce it further: in their heart of hearts, they know the whole enterprise is intellectually bankrupt. Therefore, it's all just linguistic peacocking: "Hey, look at all the big words I know! I must be smarter than you!"

Oh, man, I can't believe I didn't see this. Of course the way you say things influences people.

You don't want your brain surgeon using a Southern accent to drawl, "What we gonna do is saw this hole in your hayed" - and Orwell has already shown you how to reduce thought by limiting vocabulary.

You need to be shown what to do, subtly. Go watch "16 and pregnant" to learn how you can do that, too!