An anonymous reviewer of my article criticized me – get this – for quoting a book by a scholar who many years after publishing the book became “transexclusionary.” Meaning, she criticized Spanish laws regarding trans issues. Among other things, these laws allow 12-year-olds legally to change their sex. It’s the first and the most aggressive such law in Europe. The scholar I quoted apparently expressed disagreement with them. Shocking, I know.
The book I quoted and my article are in no way related to trans anything. I’m writing about Spain in the early 1950s. Clearly, nothing trans was much of an issue.
The reviewer says my article is excellent but I should remove the citations of the “transexclusionary” scholar. Which, obviously, I’m not going to do.
It’s so upsetting, though. I’m really proud of this article. It’s quite poisonously sarcastic. I’m adopting this writing style in my scholarly work that readers of this blog greatly enjoy. It’s where I start kind of praising a book and then absolutely demolish it with venomous fake compliments. I was hoping that reviewers would give me suggestions on how to improve the article, take it deeper into the text I analyze. I tend to be more superficial than is good for me, and I need to be pushed to go deeper.
Instead, I got many compliments and this weak-sauce suggestion about the ideologically unsound scholar.
Clarissa's Blog 
Oh look, the Maoist identitarians have completed their long march through the institutions!
But hoping for constructive criticism from random passersby?
That ship sailed around the time of the Titanic.
My solution to identitarian hate is to choose to do more of what they don’t like, because I am not fair, impartial, unbiased, or even cordial to my enemies.
So to the reviewer: I’d tell you to get fucked on Clarissa’s behalf, but that’s not your problem now, is it?
BTW whatever was done with the comment plug-in, please revert it: simple HTML markup is easier and faster anyway, plus this new one has substantial input lag.
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I didn’t do anything, I swear. These digital platforms get “updated”, and it’s always in the direction of clunkiness and unusability.
For example, the system we use to post final grades was “updated” right at the end of the semester. As a result, we lost the capacity to enter graded in bulk. Each grade has to be entered manually.
This isn’t a big deal for me but a colleague in Chemistry has 700+ students. It took him hours to enter each grade by hand. Why was this “update” necessary? Nobody knows. But we are forced to have them and pay for them.
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So it’s probably the developer’s bad ideas because after all their code runs so awesomely on their new 32 CPU BitzBanger Android 42 mobile with built in wish fulfilment apps. :-)
Maybe as you have time you can go into your admin panel and choose another comment plug-in to install?
Otherwise, the solution to messed up data entry via Web browser: iMacros for Firefox or Chrome.
Record an action once, turn it into a template, make a short script to take the bulk data and turn it into repeated instances of the template, then let it run.
There’s a verification phase but iMacros will stop if it doesn’t see what it expects for any prompt or input.
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Can you refuse to change it? I often refuse to change things (claiming that the reviewer misunderstood something, for example)…
V07
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Oh, of course. I’m not changing it. I’m way too important for that at this point. :-)))
But it’s the principle of the thing.
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