My fellow second class scientists or proles…
Can you hear the hordes of Germans academics chanting fight, fight, figth in the background? Apparently the argument stems from the German Wikipedia newsletter Kurier which contained a this text:
Im besten Fall werden Blogs von zweitklassigen Wissenschaftlern betrieben, im Normalfall vom Prekariat.
For those of us language-challenged non-German speakers, there is google translation which gives:
At best, blogs are run by second-rate scientists, usually from precariat.
Damn as a blogger I don’t even understand when I am being insulted. I needed to look up precariat and with the help of German Wikipedia and Google translate I get:
Precariat is a term used in sociology and defines “unprotected end of the work and the unemployed” as a new social grouping. The term itself is a neologism that is fragile from the adjective (difficult, dangerous to dubious) analogy to derive the proletariat. Etymologically, the word “precariat comes” from the Latin precarium = one bittweises to revoke granted tenure status
So as a blogger I am either a second class scientist or a prole?
All I can do from over here is to support my fellow German second-classers or proles and chant fight, fight, fight… or as google translate would have me say:
kämpfen, kämpfen, kämpfen…
They’re saying that science bloggers tend always to be second-rate scholars and usually to have no steady job. Of course, somebody who has no job has more time to blog and is less likely to have access to the resources necessary to produce first-rate science.
No, sorry, you were right. They’re saying that most bloggers are unemployed people and that if you’re really lucky the blogger is a second-rate scientist.
Having had considerable experience with what passes for first-rate science nowadays, I’m not sure that second-rate is necessarily that bad. Plus, my blog comes close to a top rate scientific journal. It’s out of date and out of touch with the lived reality, and it’s read only by a handful of people
Brilliant Domen!