Month: December 2019

Medals, Species, and Identity in Star Wars Episode IX

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As you may guess from the title, this contains two or three mild spoilers from Star Wars Episode IX and multiple spoilers from other Star Wars films and books. Do that with what you will.  Episode IX has been out for a week as of this writing and it has encountered mixed receptions from critics and fans alike. On the film critic aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, it is the lowest-rated film of the five new ones (even lower than Solo), but among the audience score, it is tied for first with The Force Awakens. One of the main criticisms leveled Continue reading Medals, Species, and Identity in Star Wars Episode IX→

The “academics don’t have real world experience!” argument is really, really, dumb

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Some variant of this is line comes up from time to time, and it’s always irritating, but I think it’s something that strikes me as dumber the more time goes by. Whether it’s stated implicitly or explicitly, this remark is almost always uttered in the context of dismissing academic expertise or research. The logic here is never clearly stated, but presumably it has something to do with academics not being able to understand the things they study because they haven’t “lived it”. Insert appropriate hand-waving here. First, it’s just descriptively wrong. There are a lot of academics who get into Continue reading The “academics don’t have real world experience!” argument is really, really, dumb→