On academic "collegiality" à l'européenne

Conclusion of the "science of Finnish antisemitism"

As this week is the Eurovision song context — an annual explosion of Eurotrash, European trash, typical nauseating fakeness, and Israel(i) hate — it is a fine opportunity to conclude my series on antisemitic experiences in Finland; and this time also Europe in general. As it so happens, recent experiences with the ESEB — European Society of Evolutionary Biology — have also been opportune for this blog entry. But first things first, let us begin, again, back in 2008.

In August 2008, I helped organize, with the rest of my research group, the first Helsinki Summer School in Mathematical Biology. During that week I had the dubious pleasure of meeting a student, who repeatedly harassed me, as soon as he heard that I am from Israel; including comments as "we should organize this summer school next time in Tel Aviv and invite the Iranians", and such. At the concluding dinner of that summer school, he happened to sit not far from me, and of course could not help himself to blurt another piece of "wittiness". At that point I gave him a fake smile, took my plate and moved to another table. Being his senior and part of the organizers, it gave me great pleasure to see terror replacing the arrogant smugness on his face. He later came to apologize, out of fear that I would say something to someone, not really out of genuine regret. There can be very little genuine in such hateful Eurotrash piglets.

No doubt, that arrogant, obnoxious, antisemitic prick went far in European academia. These are exactly the qualities that this academic culture selects for and breeds, in addition to dishonesty (later below).

I have already recounted my experiences with LGBT+++ students and so-called educated gay men in Helsinki (here), and the truly insulting visit to the University of Jyväskylä in 2011 (here). I will add here then that during three years of postdoctoral research, despite repeated attempts, the only "professional" feedback I got from colleagues at the University of Helsinki was whether I put the ordinate of a couple of graphs on the right, instead of the left, because in Hebrew one writes from right to left. After that, I increasingly did not bother with asking for any opinion or feedback. My published collaboration was with Israeli and American colleagues. Then, there was that occasion where a student in the group thought it a good idea to joke about, of all things, my first name. Go figure! Even after 17 years, I still don't get their "humor".

And then there is the old-money bully. Yet another realization of what kind of place Finland really is was in 2009. When discussing the approaching Darwin's day with the entire group, that person made an error about the date, and I corrected him automatically, without giving it a second thought. At that point, to my true amazement and shock, began an exchange, in which that person insisted on the wrong date. I eventually ended the exchange by saying "well, I don't know about Darwin's day, but Darwin's birthday is Feb 12." Funny how Finns think they are an egalitarian meritocratic society, rather than corrupt like everywhere else, with all the required ass-kissing of old-money Eurotrash. But then, Finns are very much full of bullshit in that respect.

Same bully, a year or so later, decided to discriminate against me in pay. When I decided to not immediately sign any piece of paper handed to me, and check the matter myself, I was subjected to threats, such as "I will not forget that!". Old-money bullies simply cannot cope with even the slightest resistance. I have no doubt that that was part of a scheme to make the department look more egalitarian in male-female pay differences. Whose raise better to withhold than the (non-EU) foreigner's who will soon be out of Finland (and Europe); one cannot do that to one's Finnish buddy-buddies. After all, said foreigner still has to write papers and publish, so to be able to move on.

A far more recent episode was when sending a manuscript to Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB), some months ago. In that paper, I reanalyzed data and countered conclusions of some other study. As expected, I opposed the authors of that paper as reviewers. Nonetheless, my paper was sent to that person. Editorial policy in JEB, towards non-gang-members, is spite. Unsurprisingly, that person showed nothing but pettiness in reviewing my work. It was more of a rant than a review. More importantly, that person outright lied by claiming that I did no statistical analyses. The editors behaved throughout like small-minded technocrats, who just passively accept any rubbish thrown at them by reviewers, and happy to participate in the deceitful behavior. When I appealed and complained, the editor-in-chief just gave an excuse of “where their expertise seems particularly relevant, we will reserve the right to use opposed reviewers”, without even acknowledging the dismissive disrespectful language in which that review was written, or the dishonest misrepresentation of my work. That was a pathetic excuse, whose sole purpose was to close ranks with the handling and associate editors.

In the second submission I explicitly showed the error and misanalyses of the other paper. In which case, I was accused of being "uncollegial", while editors completely ignored the dishonest name-calling of my work as "unprofessinal" and not relating to "real" data, etc. The latter, by the author that concocted the misanalyses in the first place. Another reviewer, who was also in the first submission, and who smelled fishy already then, lied to the editors by saying there was no error in the misanalysis of the other paper, referring to some symbol in a figure. That reviewer, however, purposely withheld the fact that that quantity was arbitrarily fixed to 0, as explicitly described in the methods of the original study. Alternatively, even after a second round of reviews, that reviewer still did not read the relevant paper, beyond looking at tables and figures.

Another, graver, piece of dishonesty was in reference to approximating √1+x² as 1; an obvious result that any high-school student can do, and whose approximation error can be exactly calculated by just substituting values. But that's apparently too simple for a JEB article. With a typical pompous and grotesquely overconfident style, that reviewer complained on not expanding this basic algebraic expression with Taylor series! 🤦 Candide and Martin's visit to senator Pococurante comes to mind here; or those monks arguing about number of teeth in a horse's mouth. The same bullshit repeated in comments about another approximation. There, Taylor series was, in fact, a grossly inferior approach to doing approximations. But as long as one gets to throw the buzzword "Taylor series" to impress editors, it is enough. The monotonous, narrow- and small-minded, totalitarian mindset of the "humanities" and social "sciences" has taken over the natural sciences as well; at least in some places and (sub)cultures. In JEB and ESEB, there is only one "correct" way! And as long as one sticks the word "rigorous" in front, any rubbish goes for academic review or writing. One cannot help but envision a Hollywood caricature of a scientist reciting technobabble.

In contrast, what joy it is to read Feynman. I have recently reread the three chapters on rotational motion in mechanics in his Lectures on Physics. In the lecture on moment of inertia, Feynman manages to squeeze an insightful discussion of how Newtonian mechanics is the "tail end" of the atomic laws, and to conclude with a simple and exceptionally lucid explanation of the Coriolis force. In between, after showing a third method to calculate the moment of inertia, he concludes: "There is always another way to do it! ". But I guess that might be a Jewy thing.

So, the editor-in-chief of JEB can decide to "kauft nicht bei Juden", based on repeated dishonest reviews by corrupt liars. The journal and society can hardly even be called "European", given that the head of the ESEB, the JEB editor-in-chief, the managing editor, the publisher, and the reviewer are all UK based. And we all know what's the attitude towards Israel, Israelis and Jews there. Given the level of review, the Country Club and street gang mentality, and the rampant dishonesty, ESEB and JEB are nothing but a monoculture and a cult of caricatures of scientists, who can only recite ready-made indoctrinated repliques at each other. "Collegiality" in Europe means keeping and maintaining lies, errors, and misanalyses, while participating in endless empty banter about "community". The outright inflational use of the word "rigorous" in communications with reviewers and editors, compared with the reality of lack of familiarity with literature, and overconfidence in which rubbish "methods" were insisted on, is outright comical!

To my Israeli and Jewish sisters and brothers, avoid any organization, journal, or publisher that are UK based! Avoid anyone or any organization associated with DEI, FAIR, and other such buzzwords! While you may share similar liberal beliefs in principle, their version is a horribly distorted, anti-liberal, vindictive, childish, petty and hateful one, brought by social media addiction, old-fashioned antisemitism, particularly its ages-old academia version (apropos to Feynman), and "humanities" and social-"science" totalitarian indoctrination. There is more "humanism" in one page of Darwin, D'Arcy Thompson, Feynman, or Stephen Jay Gould, than in all the lifeworks of charlatans from Berkeley, Columbia, and elsewhere, whose crap is also being peddled by (pseudo)academic parrots in Europe and Finland. Absolutely avoid all the attention-junkies in the so-called art and so-called literary/journalistic world. Luckily, I am in the natural sciences, and so do not have to be in any contact with such "humanistic" morons (enough morons in the natural sciences as it is). But others may not be that lucky.

It is best to use services that do not depend on any gatekeepers. Many such gatekeepers have an overgrown self-righteousness organ, and are sure that their antisemitism is not harassment and hate crime, but an act of "activism". Abusing positions of trust is anyhow standard practice in academia. Heck, much of academia is inherently build on it. Luckily there are enough services nowadays, such as Zenodo and ResearchGate, in which one can disseminate one's research independently.

The happy days of Jews as scapegoats for anything and everything are back again. Be it in the most genocidal nation in the entire history of mankind, or in strongly insinuating (just enough to make it still legal) that the "Jews" are conspiring to take Greenland from Europe. (Helsingin Sanomat has truly become a modern Protocols of Elders of Zion.) In two-cent antisemitic "psychoanalyses" of Israeli society by unqualified "art" types, or in portraying Israel as an enemy of the environment and Earth. Israel, not the orders of magnitude larger and more consuming and populous USA, China and Europe. Apropos to China, you won't hear anything about Hong Kong protests or Uyghur ethnic cleansing in Finnish media or academia. Finnish academia in particular is very much dependent on China. Similarly, nothing about Sudan. Non-whites happily killing each other is a big no-no subject in today's totalitarian academia. So much to "Finnish principles" of law and "equal treatment". Finns are truly so full of bullshit!

Heck, all masks are off now. Finnish media is fully committed to antisemitism, fueled and written by (and for) hateful social-media junkies. The unholy trinity of JSN (so-called overseeing committee), STT (so-called news agency), and the media outlets, who are all essentially the same people, ensures that the situation will just get increasingly worse. It is occasionally "funny", how Finns are truly unaware of how xenophobic, racist and antisemitic they are. As for me, it is time to leave Finland and Europe. They are already brain-dead, and their impending physical death will only be a technicality. But that is certainly not my war. It seems that, after all, I have become a Wandering Jew.