NYT: Is Pilates Political? The Method of Bullshitting on the Pseudo-Philosophical Left

Well, yes, of course...it's an axiom of the totalitarian left that everything is political.

   From the same faction that brought you women have penises and feminist glaciology:

Ms. Monaco-Vavrik studied political science and communications at Davidson College. It became a habit, she said in a recent interview, to “always connect random things that don’t seem to relate.” In that moment, she juxtaposed two concepts that had been on her mind: Pilates and President Trump.
Grinning at the camera, and lip-syncing to a popular TikTok clip about the Broadway musical “Wicked,” Ms. Monaco-Vavrik made her case: “Does anyone want me to explain the connection between the popularization of Pilates & running instead of strength training… and the rise of extreme American authoritarianism?”

This is a great example of the continental literary/sophistical/pseudo-philosophical method:

[1] Take two unrelated things, and, via sheer bullshitting, make up some faux-plausible--and preferably political--connection between them.

[2] Assume the authoritative attitude of the possessor of esoteric knowledge: not Is there a link between these things?, but: Would you like me to explain the link to you?  I.e.: There is a link (we do not question this); I know what it is; do you want to know?

   Ms. M-V also admits that this is the method she was taught in the seething vat of stupid that is the leftist humanities, social studies, etc.:  "Connect random things that don't seem to relate."

Such a method will, on average, yield bullshit. Which, as we know, it does. (And, note, this was the upshot of the Sokal II hoax: it's easy to use the method of bullshit to get whatever predesignated political conclusion you want...and the "scholars" "working" in such areas can't tell bullshit from non-bullshit.) There are no links of the kind sought by Ms. M-V's intellectual faction between the vast majority of things chosen specifically for their apparently irrelevance to each other.

   Also note: any other method founded on the first method will have to emphasize the production of bullshit. If you choose n things specifically because they seem to be irrelevant to each other with respect to some kind of relation, R, and then try to link them with respect to R, then, in order to avoid the conclusion that they are unrelated (and that is never the conclusion--negative conclusions are even less welcome in the non-sciences than in the sciences), you're absolutely going to have to bullshit.

   And, again, this is exactly what we see, and what we have seen for 50 years, from the pseudo-philosophical left.

[Addendum: Of course this method of bullshitting shows up over and over again specifically with respect to the left's obsessions with race and sex/"gender." The left can and does argue e.g. that everything is racist (a) because it is politically committed, antecedently, to the proposition that everything is racist, and, (b) because the method of bullshitting means that any link at all, no matter how tenuous and ridiculous, counts as a link. This is also how they argue for the proposition that everything is political.]