Adult learners don't get sets! Who knew?
What a bunch of savages surfers are. Sold to the world as an eco-system of fully realised souls dancing atop mysterious bands of ocean energy, a PHD candidate at The University of Auckland in New Zealand has revealed surfers to be nothing more than dirty animals, each using their “cultural capital” to steal waves off the other.
Shinya Uekusa, who is big on the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital where your colour, your cash and your clothes elevate or demote you in the power structure, writes that if you’re white, male and a good surfer you have your jackboot on the head of all the “vulnerable surfers”.
You’re also guilty of the nauseating crime of cultural appropriation.
“Focusing on the experiences of vulnerable surfers, quality waves are not evenly distributed. However, this pilot study revealed that surfers’ social status in the cultural spaces do not necessarily reflect their ability to catch quality waves, and vulnerable surfers negotiate and resist the power structure. Furthermore, some forms of capital are contextual, and advantages became disadvantages as the context changes, demonstrating the fluid nature of the power dynamics in the water. In using Bourdieu’s theories, this article will suggest a fruitful theory for future surfing research.”
Some excerpts (highlighted passages courtesy of Real Peer Review).



Distilled into a sentence: Kooks don’t get sets.
Where’s my goddamned PHD?

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I’m just enjoying how someone looking at wave distribution through the social justice/socialist lens ends up with the same complaints about it as the handful of insufferable conservative adult beginner kooks I know from work.
Velcro and fiberglass are alien tech anyway.
The Guardian -Oz, is currently doing this ‘vote for your favourite beach’ thing. Idiots. Last thing a favourite beach needs is more humans showing up to check it out!!! WTF are they thinking?
It’s a book promotion of course. A comprehensive survey of all (90%?) beaches in Oz, co-authored by a surfer. Must be an Adult Learner with that attitude: “HEY EBBYBODY!!! LOOKEE HERE AT THESE NICE WAVES!!! ALLLLLL IIIINNN!!!”
If you know the guy, punch him for me.
I have to ask.. Is this real?
I liked your comment without reading it!
Nicely put “souls dancing atop mysterious bands of ocean energy”
I get all Mine waves.. every wave is Mine… mine.. get out of my way Kook, the ocean is mine, the land is mine, the world is fucking MINE!! and the world parts for ME.. me.. me.. me… I wear Patagonia in case you wish to know.. great vest, organic and sourced ethically… it is ok to buy one every year, even if you don’t really need it, because it is organic and ethically sourced.. I swear.. give me MINE, you cunts!
Found a filmic representation of the tableau you’ve imagined. The pelican is Nick Carroll!
yep, yep,yep… is it really by the way? my favorite part of the movie is those little fuckers.
White people stealing a hobby they once banned the inventors from doing themselves and then marginalizing minorities from doing? NO WAY! If that were true then you’d have me believe that white people would commit genocide against an indigenous people, steal their land, and then build a wall around it to keep their ancestors out and claim that they’d bill those same people for the trouble!
Thankfully there is no such thing as “White Culture.”
Sorry Wibble , can’t help myself .
What do you call an Adult Learner from Hungary ?
A Budapest .
Well, it’s PhD.
Make surfing hardcore again
Cultural capital at my local is determined by how many beers you drink and joints you smoke with the boys in the lot. Fucking way it should be.
Ugh. Like, I see shit like this and I’m like, maybe I should just give my PhD back? Idk.
Maybe you could sell it on on the black market like a Nepalese kidney in Calcutta!
oh oh or like eggs to a barren rich housewife who’ll just die if she can’t raise ideas of her very own!
by PHD you are of course referring to ” Pool Head Dip”. right?
That’s correct Dr.PWK ( person who knows ) .
Let’s face it, fewer than a handful get sets on any give day in the lineup.
One or two individuals get all the best waves in each set!
Hey Bushy I know you’re trying to be clever with the multiple account, multiple avatar set up, but seriously pick one and stick to it… or I’ll just start binning comments.
“‘Twas ever thus.” Kooks don’t get waves because they don’t have the wave knowledge, timing or ability to know a “set wave” when they see one. We have ALL paid our dues. Anyone that thinks there’s a “Brotherhood” out in the water is sadly mistaken.
Recent evidence suggests that surfers may be so wrapped up in their “teeny, tiny world of aquatic poncing” (Negatron, 2018) that they fail to care what some academic cunt says. Additionally, an expert on the subject has noted that academia needs to “fucking wake up” (Carroll, 2019).
In concise and accurate summation of the topic it has been posed that “kooks don’t get sets” (Rielly, 2019; Beachgrit et al. 2019) and this seems to be perfectly fucking reasonable.
Sign me up for your class, Prof. Chazz.
Don’t worry the coming economic correction will wake up the whole fucking world to reality…them Hungary!
Rich and powerful kooks come to town and play local Neanderthals like fuckin fiddles. It’s just business! The way of the world. No Pollyanna bullsit will change human nature.
Fuck how’s the traffic in here ever since the Ashslap?! (like an ass-slap but to the face and served by one Assface Grogan).
Nice take for the team, Chas, it’s paying dividends!
Long read but a good read – The Tragicomedy of the Surfers Commons
A good analysis of how hierarchies in the lineup are actually a really efficient way of sharing a finite resource (waves). Super nerdy but more core than this article
https://ojs.deakin.edu.au/i…
If you get too many waves and hate kooks, go surf elsewhere, you are overqualified.
If you dont get any waves and hate the ones who do, go elsewhere you are underqualified.
If you get 10 waves per session dont cry.
Will doing a PhD on why oceanic minorities (read:kooks) dont get waves make you overqualified??
Such an irrelevant topic for a phd. King of kooks
Pelado from deep in the comments gets to the most essentially issue. The tax payers of New Zealand are paying Shinya Uekusa for his utterly useless wheel spinning display of heroic self-righteousness. I rekon all in it costs the state half a million easy for this guys PhD, and then millions down the road if they hire him somewhere as a professor.
For what? So the dude can flap his pretty wings at some conferences, loogit me, loogit me, I’m a hero of the oppressed who aren’t getting the sets! There’s literally zero value generated by this bullshit. It produces nothing economically, and in fact drags on the economy. It changes nothing socially.
How ’bout it Negatron? You go to work at a real job most days in New Zealand. Do you feel happier about it if you imagine all of your tax dollars go direct to Shinya Uekusa instead of filling pot holes or feeding the elderly?
If only he could surf properly instead of writing nonsense, he would be happier and the aforementioned state half a million richer.
how do you know the student was not self funded? or funded by an international grant?
Not impossible, but extremely unlikely. Nearly all PhD students are funded by the state in one way or another. Also note that at public universities tuition only pays a small fraction of the actual per student cost to the state (7k NZ dollars in this case, vs likely around 50k all in for the state to accommodate a PhD student for a year).
Lest you think I’m only hating on grad students with bullshit Ph.D. topics, it’s really not entirely their fault. Tenured faculty love to teach little grad seminars on esoteric marginalia. They hate teaching big basic classes to freshman and sophomores. They run the departments; through promotion they’ve largely hold the dean posts in most colleges. They’ll enroll as many PhD students, interested in any sort of bullshit, as is necessary so that tenured faculty don’t ever have teach a course numbered 101. Damn the cost tot he tax payer, damn that there aren’t jobs upon degrees, six of us shall sit around a conference table, and for long hours ponder the centripetal as a trope that queers domesticity in Gertrude Stein’s unpublished letters, in the context of contemporary white male Christian hegemony, as a retrospective revision eliding relatively progressive early medieval social norms, and the activist implications this necessarily mandates. Because they don’t want to explain to freshman what symbolism is.
somewhat different to uk & european & asia-pacific ontexts. you seem to be viewing this through a US lens and the US HE sector is an anomaly rather than norm.
people today would think tolkein was doing pointless shit, and i quite like what he ended up with.
I like Tolkein too. This is arguable, but in my point of view the creative geniuses will create genius work with or without the university/state supporting them. Many people will argue that ultimately the university gets in the way of creative genius. Tolkein would have written what he wrote regardless of the university.
For analytic geniuses though you are right, the greatest of them emerge through university systems. You’ll find though that nearly all of these special scholars are recognized as doing important work quite early on; very few are misunderstood (which is often the case with creative geniuses. For every important scholar, nine others are, from a social justice perspective, disambiguating alternative incest narratives in Pre-Raphaelite painting alluded to in the marginal notes of Wilkie Collin’s early drafts of his later novels. Or uselessly working through, from a social justice perspective, why kooks don’t get sets.
Very rarely bullshit hides a gold nugget, usually it’s just bullshit.