Fiddling While Rome Burns

As a change of pace, our Swedish correspondent CB has prepared a report on the postmodern gender-normed absurdities that pass for learned academic discourse in 21st-century Sweden.


Fiddling While Rome Burns
by CB

Gates of Vienna readers will be familiar with the plight of Sweden, the country that — together with the UK and the Netherlands — leads the way into dissolution, chaos, widespread breakdown, and dhimmitude. Only last week, four malls in Södertälje — famous as the town that has accepted more Iraqi refugees than all of North America — burned down as local jihadis, aided and abetted by the extreme left wing organization “Global Intifada” — made good on their threats against shops stocking “Zionist produce”.

You’d think Swedes have some serious issues to ponder. As it turns out, this is what preoccupies the academic elite of the country: the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet reports on the latest round of project grants from the Swedish Research Council in an opinion piece entitled “Science or madness?” by Tanja Bergkvist, PhD in mathematics.

A translated excerpt:

The Swedish Research Council has granted over USD 100,000 to a three year project in musical sciences, “The trumpet as symbol of gender”, which intends to seek suspected gender-specific vocalities of the instrument. The gender insanity reaches new heights, writes Tanja Bergkvist.

The Swedish Science Council is the largest public finance institution for non-applied research at Swedish universities and science institutes. I recently criticized the influence of gender ideology at the preschool and primary school levels, but it doesn’t end there.

A small clique of experts in this county that has established a position of disproportional influence has a public agenda consisting of foisting the “gender perspective” on all public and private works in the country, including the sciences.

The Swedish Research Council employs a special dedicated “gender committee” tasked with “safeguarding that the gender perspective permeates all scientific research”.

Council’s grant data base reveals how far the gender insanity has gone

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The Council has granted over 100,000 USD to a three-year project in musical sciences, which, among other things, seeks to “problematize the notions of male and female and examine in detail the concepts that are at work and create the trumpet as a marker of manliness.”

The project abstract speaks for itself; I will quote some passages:

“The overarching question is to determine what mechanism and social and cultural connections in time and space form, create, and are re-created through the trumpet as a gender symbol. In order to discern these, it becomes necessary to problematize the notions of male and female and to examine closely the notions that are at work and create the trumpet as a marker of manliness.

“Which norms are behind this? How are they expressed and what force do them seem to exert? The questions that guide me are: Which vocalities in the broad spectrum of trumpet vocalities are the norm and which vocalities are considered to be deviations and called female and male, respectively? What happens to the vocality when the trumpeter plays with a “female vocality”?

“To be able to uncover the construction of the image of the trumpet, I will also analyze trumpet debate in the academic tradition and in popular context. A similar study has never been done. The gender perspective has not been examined in trumpet research. In that way, the planned project will add an important new body of knowledge to the field.

“The gender science interested is satisfied in that the project will examine how gender is constructed in the musical context, as related to the instrument of the trumpet.”

Science or madness? You be the judge. I’m well beyond even amazement at this point. While I would like to make a quip about tooting your own horn — or trumpet, as it were — the instrumental simile that springs to mind immediately is fiddling while Rome burns.