Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Dangit, I can’t find it. Sometime late this week, Friday evening maybe, I saw an article about girls and women being unfairly burdened with the majority of college degrees that are found to be worthless. For awhile now the girls have been kicking boy-butt in the paper chase overall, but the degrees are losing value. Even worse than that though, if you start looking at which degrees are more likely to actually count for something in the hard sciences — called STEM degrees, for science/technology/engineering/math — the guys are still keeping all those for themselves.
The alarms sounding off about the oncoming college-degree bubble-bursting are by now becoming a constant thing. Some have managed to find, with a little bit of research, a measurable skew to the problem:
I spent the [morning] laughing and being intrigued by a book called Worthless: The Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by a guy named Aaron Clarey…The book takes aim at “Big Education” and in non-PC terms lets the reader know what is happening inside higher ed. Clarey has a wicked sense of humor and his graphs and charts just add to the fun. There is one that shows the breakdown of what he calls “worthless degrees.” “Nearly 70% of worthless degrees are awarded to women” he states along with a chart showing the breakdown of 68% of women to 32% of males who get these worthless degrees. Worthless degrees include those such as Women’s studies, sociology, philosophy, psychology, education and the liberal arts and humanities. In other words, those majors that avoid math.
It does seem to me at times that colleges are becoming finishing schools for women. I wonder if this is why many men avoid them?
The Clarey book is here. I may snag that.
This guy even goes so far as to say: Stop requiring the degrees.
As a male child-of-the-seventies, I have no problem seeing what’s been happening here at all and I can sum it up in one word: imbalance. Not discrimination, I have to emphasize. Discrimination and imbalance are as different as justice and revenge. You’ve heard the saying that justice, unlike revenge, has to make sense to someone who isn’t involved. Well, discrimination typically only hurts the person who is a victim of it, while imbalance, which can be a long-term result of sustained discrimination, brings harm to the organization practicing.
For fifty years give or take, our organizations and institutions have kept a sharp eye out for any practices, patterns or trends, that might indicate the girls are getting a raw deal in something. Any indicator that the same thing might be happening to boys, just doesn’t seem to interest anyone who’s in any position that matters.
So the girls are finally way ahead of the boys in enrolling in college, and completing degrees. Yay, let’s have a parade with confetti and everything…but…when it’s found the degrees are worthless, it is once again an occasion for hand-wringing and a new round of self-inspection in how we’re victimizing the girls. Again. Ah, but the victimization is real and not imagined. Having a worthless degree hurts, you know. What is to be concluded from this, over the long term, other than that sycophantic thinking is a lousy remedy for helping females, or anybody for that matter?
Meanwhile, the Drug War on Boys continues.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week that nearly one-fifth of high school-age boys have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Doctors eventually medicate two-thirds of them. The diagnoses represent a 41 percent increase over the last decade.
The primary gateway drug for teenagers isn’t marijuana or beer. It’s prescription medication. As the New York Times piece breaking this story points out, feeding a child a daily diet of Ritalin increases the chances of dependency, anxiety, and psychosis. Sports once channeled the energy of testosterone-fueled teens. Now our overprotective culture complains of the dangers of sports as it fills children with chemicals.
“First, do no harm,” a med school lesson so basic that even high school dropouts know it, gets tossed down the memory hole by script-happy doctors. As any street pusher will tell you, it’s all about the Benjamins.
Silly, selfish boys, hogging all those practical and effective degrees. How dare they. They can’t even get through fifth grade without medication.
The medication explosion is both a cause and a symptom of the forced female-friendliness. It is a cause because drugging a boy so that he can pay attention to what he’s being told, is a different thing entirely from drugging a boy so that he will engage the problems and make effective decisions. Our drugs yield passive, not active, participation. This difference has deep meaning. I wonder why more people don’t make something of it.
And it’s a symptom because — again, I speak from personal experience — participating in any class structure that is female-friendly, when you’re a boy, is boring as snot. That, too, is another deeply meaningful point that people don’t talk about as much as they should, if they really want to make the situation better, and I’m left wondering why.
It’s difficult for me to use actual English words to describe the utter lack of respect or sympathy I have for people who claim to have difficulty capturing the attention of boys. Oh, I suppose I can relate to it a little bit. The problem comes about when they conclude that it can’t be done, and it’s time for some little blue pills. Have you ever taken a gaggle of zoned-out boy kids outside, and moved the subject matter around to something they want to learn? It’s quite a striking effect. Think of an old metal three-pound coffee can filled with mice, with a blowtorch put under it. It’s like that — but reversed, approach instead of avoidance — lots of writhing and jostling as everyone struggles to get a look. What we should be studying here, is not what drugs force the boys to concentrate on girl-stuff, but what subject matters bring about this writhing and jostling and sudden interest.
Remote control seems to have a lot to do with it. And not just with the teevee. The male mind seems to be inexplicably drawn to apparatus that allows him to do something, way over here, which produces a direct change in the situation, way over there. It’s somewhere deep in the brain, near the stem; may have something to do with how we produce urine, I dunno. But whether it’s piddling on the leaf floating on the river from a high bridge, or dropping a rock from an even higher bridge, or changing the channel, or target shooting, or hunting, or fishing, or detonating an explosion, or flying a remote control boat, plane or helicopter — or just tossing a nickel into a drinking glass across the room — males like remote stuff. We’re not allowed to notice this in our new, polite society, because we’re not allowed to notice differences in men and women, unless they’re differences that make the women look good.
And we’re not allowed to notice things that make boys bored, and want to zone out. If you’re noticing the opposite, though, something that turns off the chicks, annoys them, frightens them, bores them, repels them in any way, then that’s noble. You’re solving a real problem. And, you should prevail. But if the boys are bored, well who cares. But you know, after a few decades of this micro-evolution, with the classes becoming ever more female-friendly, and further & further cleansed and purged of anything the chicks might not like…to the male mind they get very, very boring. Again, words cannot express. We could use the movies as an example. Men who actually enjoy being around their wives will take them to see Titanic, The Notebook, The English Patient, even the latest Barbra Streisand Farewell Tour. But a Twilight movie crosses the line into “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”
Well, when it works for the movie house, it works for school. If the clock and the window are the most interesting things to watch in the classroom, there’s a problem.
During the period discussed, we’ve become quite fond of giving women “equal rights.” We’ve been a bit slower with equal-responsibilities. That, too, may be a source of the problem: It’s easy to stand up and say “I’m for more women going to college” but it isn’t quite so popular to say “When women go to college, they should choose a vocation that will lead to good, strong livelihoods, so they can pull their weight” — even though that’s what we’ve been saying about boys for, literally, hundreds of years.
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I know it’s only part of your essay, but it can’t be repeated enough: ADHD is boooool-sheet. Of the purest ray serene.
And yes, I know that some kids really do have the kind of brain-chemical imbalance that “ADHD” is supposed to represent. But –and this is crucial — your kid doesn’t have it.
I have lots of experience in the ed biz, both firsthand and tangential. The first thing that happens at the start of every semester is the parade of kids with “learning disabilites” up to the front of the classroom, to arrange their special accomodations — extra time on tests, copies of the teacher’s notes, whatever. 99 times out of 100, these same kids can be found playing World of Warcraft or something for hours on end after the bell rings. They have the cognitive ability to memorize a whole fictional universe’s worth of data, to plan complex strategies with hundreds of other kids in real-time, and the powers of concentration to do it for several hours at a pop….. but they can’t memorize a list of English vocabulary words without a study guide, or write a two-page essay for history class without a tutor and a three-day extension.
What. the. fuck.
And don’t even get me started on that “Asperger’s” nonsense. It’s the closest thing real life has to an honest-to-god Catch-22. If you think you have it, then you don’t, because by definition anyone who really had it would lack the social perception necessary to realize he had it.
Half the time, the problem is brain-dead liberal parents, to whom their kids’ “learning disabilities” are trump cards in the endless Virtue Poker game they’re playing with every other member of the suburban booboisie. The other half of the problem is the age-old one: Boys are tough. They’re full of energy and pep and don’t sit still for anything. So turn ’em into drug-addled zombies and tell them they have “learning disabilities;” what’s the worst that could happen?
/rant.
- Severian | 05/05/2013 @ 15:39“Anyone with a child in school knows the signs all too well. I have children in school, and I am intrigued by the faith parents now invest—the craze began about 1990—in psychologists who diagnose their children as suffering from a defect known as attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this “disorder” is an actual, physical, neurological condition or not, but neither does anybody else in this early stage of neuroscience. The symptoms of this supposed malady are always the same. The child, or, rather, the boy—forty–nine out of fifty cases are boys—fidgets around in school, slides off his chair, doesn’t pay attention, distracts his classmates during class, and performs poorly. In an earlier era he would have been pressured to pay attention, work harder, show some self–discipline. To parents caught up in the new intellectual climate of the 1990s, that approach seems cruel, because my little boy’s problem is…he’s wired wrong! The poor little tyke —the fix has been in since birth! Invariably the parents complain, “All he wants to do is sit in front of the television set and watch cartoons and play Sega Genesis.” For how long? “How long? For hours at a time.” Hours at a time; as even any young neuroscientist will tell you, that boy may have a problem, but it is not an attention deficit.
“Nevertheless, all across America we have the spectacle of an entire generation of little boys, by the tens of thousands, being dosed up on ADD’s magic bullet of choice, Ritalin, the CIBA–Geneva Corporation’s brand name for the stimulant methylphenidate. I first encountered Ritalin in 1966 when I was in San Francisco doing research for a book on the psychedelic or hippie movement. A certain species of the genus hippie was known as the Speed Freak, and a certain strain of Speed Freak was known as the Ritalin Head. The Ritalin Heads loved Ritalin. You’d see them in the throes of absolute Ritalin raptures…Not a wiggle, not a peep…They would sit engrossed in anything at all…a manhole cover, their own palm wrinkles…indefinitely…through shoulda–been mealtime after mealtime…through raging insomnias…Pure methyl–phenidate nirvana…From 1990 to 1995, CIBA–Geneva’s sales of Ritalin rose 600 percent; and not because of the appetites of subsets of the species Speed Freak in San Francisco, either. It was because an entire generation of American boys, from the best private schools of the Northeast to the worst sludge–trap public schools of Los Angeles and San Diego, was now strung out on methylphenidate, diligently doled out to them every day by their connection, the school nurse. America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!”
–Tom Wolfe, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died” (Forbes ASAP, 1996)
- Rich Fader | 05/05/2013 @ 17:32Some problems I see
The author paints with too broad a brush often. I am not willing to cede my culture to the left because someone without realizing that they are in fact making a philosophical statement says that philosophy and sociology are worthless degrees. Such people are simply speaking idiots
Science is based upon PHILOSOPHY, Rationalism to be precise
I am unwilling to let my cultural heritage be defined by the left.
I am unwilling to to let ethics and morality be defined by the left.
I am unwilling to let history be misrepresented by the left
Instead of abandoning those the non-sophist and the modern left is nothing if not sophistry (A philosophical position)the believers in truth should take the academy back. That is why education was founded by the Greeks to oppose the forces of Sophistry. Plato and Aristotle disagree with each other in many ways but they were both trying to defeat sophistry. I refuse to abandon the battle field
The left love this kind of thing because they know, as evidently scientist do not that the world is controlled by the people that create and place ideas into culture. Those ideas do not come from science but the people that tell you how to interpret the science.
Conservatives should beat some sense into this guy
- Fai.Mao | 05/06/2013 @ 02:31This has actually been a huge issue in the major Christian denominations.
It’s not a popular observation, but as orthodoxy and concreteness grow lax, inevitably so do the standards. Today, for example, my own church (Roman Catholic) is considered retrograde and patriarchal and all that bad ol’ nasty stuff. But go back to our grandfather’s time, and all the mainline Protestant churches would sound exactly the same in their positions on just about any social issue.
What happened? Well, despite the Second Vatican Council and the damndest* efforts of the Squishy Marshmallow crowd, the Church of Rome largely held fast to their doctrines and orthodox teaching. As a result, they largely held onto the standards as well. (As the Rush-man once wrote, people tell the RC’s to get with the times, and the Church rightly answers, “We are the standard. You have to get with us, not the other way around. We’re not wallpapering the truth so you can feel better about your sins.”)
* “Damndest” in this context is not in the vernacular sense, but in the literal and religious – the effort is completely worthy of damnation.
It’s not perfect, of course. The culture of the Church, as exemplified in worship, has been badly-damaged by liturgical abuses, horrific misconduct, and generally wishy-washy behavior. But the standards are still there. If you want the classically-Christian position on just about anything in the world, the Pope is about your only modern-day option among the big churches. (Evangelicals in general are also socially conservative, but they’ve split into so many splinters over these issues that they have no single unified voice.) The Church of Rome held onto much more of its masculine character, and thus much more of its appeal to the world at large. They still have something different to offer that the world doesn’t have and needs badly.
- nightfly | 05/06/2013 @ 08:36the believers in truth should take the academy back
I’d love to agree with you, but the culture there is so solidly entrenched (I speak with lots of experience) that it’s impossible without blowing the entire thing up and starting over.
Fortunately, the market’s going to take care of that for us, sooner rather than later. These days, your typical Research-I university is a leftwing propaganda clearing house attached to a football team. When the real austerity crunch hits… well, despite Pharaoh Barack’s very best efforts, football is still a lot more popular than leftwing propaganda.
That being the case, soccer moms’ obsessive quest to find a learning disability for everyone (that is so fucking odd…..) may actually get the ball rolling. If you need seventeen special accomodations just to turn in your homework in high school, then what possible benefit are you getting out of college?
- Severian | 05/06/2013 @ 14:33