Faux-respect

I noticed in a lot of the reviews of the "grievance" articles what I would call "faux-respect." It is the way you write when you know the paper you are reviewing is shit, but you also know the expected tone you take with any paper is respectful. So people are bending over backwards to maintain a respectful tone when really, you know what they are thinking is "this is crap, what the hell can I say about it." It doesn't take a hermeneutic genius to read between the lines here.

So it is rather disingenuous for the authors of the grievance studies fake studies to say "look, we got a respectful hearing for our pieces of crap." I'm sure I've used the faux-respect tone myself.  It is still bad that they got any of this published, at a 35% acceptance rate, but they can't claim that the respectful hearing they got from reviewers who rejected them was a symptom of some deep problem in the field. I would have probably taken a faux-respectful tone with the Starbucks paper which I think is a pig pile of crap. If this had been a hoax paper, then the authors could have turned around and made you look foolish for being respectful toward a paper based on a handful of cultural stereotypes that tries to lend its support to BLM.