As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know what most of my departmental colleagues’ politics are. There are definitely a lot of Snooze Hour devotees who quote David Brooks to me, so I’m guessing that they’re primarily standard issue Vichy liberals with a few DFHs (me, the few women in the department, and one guy who meditates, for example) and maybe one or two neocons (at least two are straight-up AIPACers when it comes to the the Middle East) thrown in. But I don’t know for sure. I don’t see how it’s all that relevant. I do know that the mathematician whose papers I’ve learned the most from is a Berlusconi supporter, and that doesn’t make his papers any less brilliant.
That’s why I find the conservative obsession with LIBERAL ACADEMIA a bit puzzling. Metavirus at Library Grape points me to the latest, a conservative study on why conservatives don’t go to graduate school:
The key moment, Gross maintains, is the decision whether or not to go to graduate school. Young conservatives may not know all that much about academia at the faculty level, but popular stereotypes and a few off-putting experiences in class can sufficiently discourage them from pursuing academia as a site for success. A freshman orientation session that divides white males from everyone else, incessant talk about diversity, multiculturalist reading assignments, and so on may not bother them that much (and they can always find safe spaces such as College Republicans), but such things do convince young conservatives that staying on campus as a career move is foolish. An English major who reveres Great Books needs only one occasion of a teaching assistant ridiculing him for a dead-white-male fixation to decide, “I don’t need this.”
I don’t buy this, because in the hard sciences, nearly everyone is a white male (or an Asian male), there’s nothing multicultural going on, and not that much talk about diversity…yet there are still very few conservatives. (Overall, about 6% of scientists are Republicans and I suspect it’s about the same in the life sciences as in the hard sciences.) My guess is that the big reason that there are few conservative scientists is that science is a reality-based endeavor that doesn’t pay very well.
There’s also this sort of thing:
What message did Sarah Palin send to her CPAC ’13 audience Saturday, and thence to the world, by sipping from a Big Gulp soda during her speech and, in conclusion, brandishing it as if it were a trophy? Oh, I know what message she intended to send: Don’t tell us real Americans how to live our lives. We’ll decide what’s best for ourselves and our children. Stop treading on our liberty.
But that’s not the message Palin sent. Amazingly for someone who still must harbor some kind of desire for a second act in American politics, the message Sarah Palin sent was this: Republicans will start winning elections again by telling Americans they should be proud of acting stupid.
When I was in school, there was a lot of talk about population groups (classified by gender, ethnicity, class, income, etc.) not performing as well as they could academically because society — in some cases, other members of the population group — sent them the message that they must be stupid because they were poor or women or black. I think there’s something to that, people are affected a lot by what society tells them to think of themselves. And I think it probably is happening to conservatives today, to some extent.
Math is hard, let’s go drink big gulps.
Tone in DC
The Snowbilly Grifter had a BIG GULP??
WTF?? Didn’t CPAC offer coffee, tea or Jim Beam?
Epicurus
It’s the inborn right to be stupid, as enshrined in…which Amendment again? Oh, yeah, Caribou Barbie is still just making up shit. I’m glad that she is now showing her true colors to the world, and we all know just how dumb this woman is. Nor is she aging gracefully, but that’s a whole ‘nother matter. I must agree with you, however, that some people are proud to be ignorant.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
What Caribou Barbie was saying is nothing new. You can trace the exact thing back to the letters of Rose Wilder Lane in the 30s and 40s, she being one of the three “mothers” of modern ‘Murkan glibertarian thought, and if you believe one English prof at the Univ of Missouri, the ghost writer of her mother’s “Little House” books.
I see it around me in red, rurl Misery on a daily basis. Tell the dumbass neighbor who tops her trees how bad that is on the trees and her response is “those people aren’t really all that smart.”
FonzieScheme
Also the pay in academia is balls, and Conservatives tend to go into more lucrative careers/safe career paths.
In short, conservatives only have themselves to blame for not going to grad school.
schrodinger's cat
What about law school and Econ departments? Plenty of conservatives there.
Frankensteinbeck
Read the whining above carefully. This is a conservative thing. They cannot endure ANY suggestion that their racism is not justified. Multiculturalism you barely notice and consider grossly insufficient makes them feel oppressed. I put it to you: Is this not completely consistent with their rhetoric AND their policies?
Cassidy
Boogeyman for the rubes. “Look at those elitists with their education and their reading and their discernment of quality over the shit you like.”
Cassidy
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I’ve been having the same type of conversation on MMA forums. There is a female fighter who was recently outed as transgender. So now people are outraged she didn’t disclose it, concerned she has an unfair advantage, want definitive proof she’s not too manly, etc. Two Doctors who specialize in transgender surgery and hormone therapy have weighed in and said that it is very likely her body is largely female due to the length of time she’s been using hormones. Of course, they must be trying to sell their services, etc.
Baud
Fake science is more lucrative than real science. Easier too.
Litlebritdifrnt
OT can’t find a link for this right now but this was just tweeted
I’m sure Betty Cracker is delighted.
Davis X. Machina
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think you mean ‘law school and theology departments’. That’s what Econ is these days — a paycheck and a path to salvation.
Blessed be the Market, the righteous judge.
srv
Jeffy Goldstein had a major rager for Sarah’s performance last week. And ranting about how CPAC shows we only have one democrat party now.
I think he’s the real T&H, must get boring being so isolated from reality.
Sly
More to the point; science depends upon public institutions and a healthy skepticism of our own intuitions, both of which are not valued in mainstream conservatism and outright anathema to wingnuttism. Particularly the latter: any good scientist is an atheist at least in the laboratory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the levels of religiosity in, say the National Academy, matched the levels of conservatism.
The extent to which conservatism values science is the extent to which someone in a business suit can make bank off of it. That generally isn’t the scientist. Otherwise its talking about human-animal hybrids in the State of the Union or saying we should do less fruit fly research (that leads to breakthroughs in neurology) and focus on neurological illnesses more. In other words, its something for politicians to mock in order to get the votes of know-nothings.
Mnemosyne
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about how the public school system is sooo bad for white boys, and yet they used to excel in it. Is the problem really that they get Martin Luther King Jr. Day off, or is the problem that white boys are getting the message that they’re supposed to be stupid and lazy, and they’re listening to it?
(Also, too, I think eliminating recess from schools has been a total fucking disaster for all of the kids, but that’s a slightly different topic.)
Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal mistermix
I think most of the LIBERAL ACADEMIA rage is aimed at the humanities, especially programs like Women’s Studies, African-American Studies and the like. Those two examples, among others, would be a hard push for a conservative white male, to put it mildly.
Violet
Can’t believe you didn’t show this photo.
Yutsano
@Violet: Oh. Mah. Gawd. Get it out of my brain. GET IT OUT!!
Cris (without an H)
Scott Galupo just now noticed this? Sarah Palin began sending that message no later than September 3, 2008.
Davis X. Machina
@Mnemosyne: Take it from a teacher of white boys (High school, mostly.) If you study hard, your dick will fall off.
Sometimes I can’t fault their reasoning. The deal used to be “Study hard and get called a fag a lot — but later on you’ll have a good job and a nice life, and they’ll all be working up at the plant.”
But now you study hard, get called a fag a lot, and wind up working the counter at the NAPA parts store, and the guys who used to work up at the plant don’t even have that, and hate you even more for it.
oldster
“they can always find safe spaces such as College Republicans”
Oh, god–comedy gold!
We have already heard the right-wingers try to pretend that they are the real oppressed minority–now it turns out that they are the real victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, too.
Can Take Back the Night for Republicans marches be far behind?
West of the Rockies
@Violet: Great photo… I wonder what she was paid to speak to the CPAC morons. I know she’s tryin’ to be a real ‘Murican and all, but she’s an idiot in blue jeans hoisting a Big Gulp aloft as a symbol of freedom. (Maybe I’m going all curmudgeon here, but would it hurt, Sarah, to dress up just a little for a speech given before hundreds of people and live television?)
Yes, she is looking ever more brittle and dumb.
maya
And here I thought legacy MBAs was all the rage in conservative circles and squares.
Violet
@Yutsano: It really is jaw-dropping, isn’t it? I think I threw up a little when I saw it.
? Martin
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Ah, but they’re missing the key statistic there. Much more than $60K went to the clinics that Rick Scott owns. So it worked perfectly.
Davis X. Machina
@Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal mistermix:
This would carry some weight if business, far and away, two-to-one, wasn’t the most popular undergraduate major.
How many universities do you know with a B-School? How many with a school of industrial relations, or labor studies?
The notion that American academia is a forcing-house for the next generation of Marxist-lesbian guerrilla performance artists just doesn’t pass the giggle test.
Xecky Gilchrist
Republicans will start winning elections again by telling Americans they should be proud of acting stupid.
Worked for Reagan.
The reason Republicans denounce academia as liberal is they want to kill it. Doesn’t have anything to do with actual composition of academia.
TR
It’s a real puzzler why conservatives — who accept so much in faith, who ignore evidence that challenges their presuppositions, who sneer about the “reality based community” and who go so far as to “unskew” inconvenient poll results and dismiss economic data because “it doesn’t feel right” — somehow don’t feel at home in the empirically driven world of academia.
Violet
@West of the Rockies: There’s no way she’s getting paid as much as she used to get for such speeches. Didn’t she turn down speaking at CPAC a year or two ago, when she was a really big deal?
I figure it’s only a matter of time before she shows up on Celebrity Apprentice. She’s Trump’s kinda gal.
Yutsano
@West of the Rockies: Not if you consider she was playing to her audience. They luvs them some down home Merikan white trash Bible Spice!
@Violet: I was gonna try to go to work sick today. That picture almost made me change my mind.
West of the Rockies
@Cris (without an H): But don’t you think her “message” is even more pronounced nowadays? If she had a twinkle in her eyes in 2008, those peepers are now just flashing red orbs of resentment.
Of course, I am astonished that anyone can take Limbaugh seriously — I would think the 8,000 photographs of him chomping on a cigar like some 1920’s mogul would be a turn-off for at least a few listeners.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Xecky Gilchrist:
This.
They spent 30+ years doing the same thing to the judiciary (well, not killing it but totally changing it). They spent 30+ years doing the same thing to journalism. They’ve spent 30+ years trying to gut public edumacation and killing higher ed (or making it unreachable or if that fails, scaring the shit out of anybody thinking about going that route) is simply part of that plan.
Baud
@oldster:
I foresee Sarah McLaughlin singing In the Arms of an Angel in a future GOP campaign ad.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
nothing new under the sun, Adlai Stevenson was an Egghead, Al Gore was a know-it-all, and so on back to, I’m sure, whispers in Philadelphia that this Jefferson fella can get on your nerves with all his references to Greece and Rome. George W Bush’s gentleman’s Cs were an asset. I’ll never forget the CNN focus group woman, who gave no appearance of mouth-breathery, who said after a debate that “Vice President Gore seems to think he has to have all the answers, while Mr Bush seems willing to let others do the thinking”
Villago Delenda Est
@Yutsano:
The ass that Gramps McCain publically ogled.
Svensker
@Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal mistermix:
Yes. The hate for the humanities is amazing although pretty consistent with how they want to live. Back in the 90s there was a big movement in the home schooling crowd — particularly conservatives — to do classics: Latin, Greek, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, etc. Sadly, that died out pretty fast, prolly cause that stuff is hard. Now they’re all about Jesus riding dinosaurs and shaking their Big Gulps at The Man.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cris (without an H):
“What newspapers do you read?”
“All of them!”
artem1s
Some analyst hack on NPR was discussing the messaging of the gun control fight on this morning’s drive time. Seems certain groups prefer to have argument couched as individual rights rather than a cause for the common good (let’s say, energy research = good for the community, for example). The really hysterical part (by which I mean pathetic) was his rebranding of those particular groups who hate the ‘common cause’ arguments. He referred to them as European Americans. So I guess that’s how we are now referring to that demographic. I’m assumin now too hurtful to point out the obvious, that its old dead white guys who can’t stand being pointed to as the roadblock to having a reality based discussion on difficult policy issues. Talking behind the backs of the wingnut-o’sphere is getting harder and harder.
quannlace
If you’ve ever listened to Dennis Prager, this is practically the daily subject of his radio show.
Academia as nothing more than a nest of liberal vipers.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Hey guys, whoa, big gulps huh? Alright. Well, see ya later.
brantl
As long as he sticks to hard math, I’ll buy that, for normal use math Berlusconi sucks multiple, dead monkeys through an 8 inch pipe.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Non-eggheadedness was part of Andrew Jackson’s appeal against John Quincy Adams.
Villago Delenda Est
@Svensker:
Not only is it hard, it leads to the devil’s own work:
CRITICAL THINKING!
West of the Rockies
@Violet: The Palin family has thus far been connected to three reality TV shows: Sarah Palin’s Alaska, Dancing with the Stars, and Life’s A Tripp… I believe that one of the low-wattage networks recently passed on another offering put forth by Pinhead Palin. Maybe appearing with Trump would be a step up for Sarah.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
That, and the fact that Conservatives have been mocking intelligence, ridiculing intelligentsia, and denigrating academia for decades.
Conservatives are trained, almost from birth, to hold academia in low disregard. It’s little surprise that they choose to enter the field at such low rates.
Furthermore, people who enter academia are likely to vote in their own self-interest — which you would think all those Randian objectivists could understand, but you’d be wrong — and, one would assume, that includes not voting for people who are consistently dismissive of your profession, and consistently vote to cut funding for it.
Why the fuck would ANYONE in academia vote for a Conservative? I’m shocked they could find as many as 6% in the sciences willing to self-identify as Republican.
.
Roger Moore
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Of course saving money wasn’t the point. The point is to make welfare recipients do something demeaning before they can get their money. If we can make the process unpleasant enough, maybe they’ll give up. That and it made Rick Scott and his buddies a truckload of money for running the tests.
smintheus
Not long ago most scientists seemed to be conservatives. I think that they’ve been so turned off by Republican hostility to science and empirical facts that they’ve migrated away from the GOP.
The Moar You Know
@Davis X. Machina: Every word is true.
The bonus, if you’re a non-white, is that you also get smeared as “acting white”, in addition to being called a fag.
OT, sorta: Higher education is about to have a real problem on its hands for the reason you note: used to be, you got the degree and you got a good job.
That’s not happening anymore, and people are starting to ask “why bother?” If 25% of the kids say “fuck it, not worth it” that’s the end of most higher ed in this country.
West of the Rockies
@Yutsano: By the way, did you notice the teleprompter in front of her in that photo? What, she run out of Sharpies?
CaptMaggie
Those young republicans are a delicate bunch, aren’t they? My college freshman daughter called a few weeks ago spitting fire because her Econ professor referred to the growth in the debt since 2008 and ignored everything else like the debt prior to ’08 and spending obligations committed to before then contributing to the current debt. Did she every think, nope, I guess college isn’t for me because of it? Not for a second. Why are college republicans so fragile?
cckids
@? Martin:
Hey, hey, hey, I believe that his wife owns them. So, no personal benefit, its all cool, right?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus: There’s a great quote from an illiterate Holy Roman Emperor, I think Barbarossa but google isn’t helping me, something to the effect of “I am the Emperor of all Christendom and grammar is beneath me”. It’s even better in Latin. I don’t read Latin, but the sheer arrogance shines through.
ranchandsyrup
Race to the bottom writ large.
quannlace
I hope the CPAC attendee’s who paid hundreds of dollars, feel they got their money’s worth.
skeeball
@schrodinger’s cat:
Harvard Law School has more Socialists than it does Republicans. Ted Cruz said so and he’d never tell a lie.
Davis X. Machina
@Svensker: The homeschoolers are still doing that stuff hard — and badly.
As the local classicist I field over-the-transom emails regularly from home-schoolers in the district with questions re this sort of stuff. The trivium is big, too.
This is a notch above the run-of-the-mill buy-a-box-a-Beka homeschoolers, mind you.
aimai
If what you get out of studying T.S. Eliot or Shakespeare is “my tribe of white guys rulez” you are totally missing the beauty and importance of studying literature. The idea that conservative white guys are turned off of grad school in art, or history, or poetry, or English because it doesn’t necessarily serve as an affirmation of white pride is pretty damning. They are projecting onto the imaginary grad student/lesbo/feminist/antiracist/multicultural cardboard cut out their basic belief: if my race/class/gender doesn’t give me an unearned privilige I won’t bother to study this shit.
My oldest daughter is pursuing a classic “classical education” including reading tons of dead white males and learning Latin. She has not learned from it that white people are being insulted by other voices being added to the Canon. But then, she’s not a conservative.
JGabriel
via Litlebritdifrnt:
Umm … does anyone else think the math on that looks a little suspicious?
I mean, I’m sure it cost more to test than they saved, but if $60K is 3%, then FL annual expenditure on welfare is only $2 million/year … which seems kind of low.
Unless that’s $60k/month?
.
Davis X. Machina
@quannlace: There’s a ‘happy endings’ joke in there somewhere but I’m not going in after it.
Villago Delenda Est
@smintheus:
They might have been conservatives in the original sense. But modern “conservatives” hate conservation. They hate caution. They’re about the quick short term buck, not worrying about any long term consequences, because Jeebus is coming back soon and it won’t matter anyways, you know.
US Secretary of the Interior James Watt, appointed by the shitty grade Z movie star, actually said that, you know.
cckids
@The Moar You Know:
Yes. I’ve got one kid 2 years into college & one starting in the fall, and they (as well as I) are questioning its value. Especially in a world where many businesses seem to want everyone fully trained before any hiring; why not just run everyone through a trade school & be done with it?
Kip the Wonder Rat
My experience suggests that there are plenty of conservatives, neo-cons, and neo-libs on med school faculties, mainly the crowd that has “M” and “D” behind their names. And yes, many straight-up AIPACers.
The PhDs tend to be more liberal, but there are plenty of conservatives even in that group.
Villago Delenda Est
@JGabriel:
The important thing here is Lex Luthor’s wife’s company made a mint on welfare recipient drug testing.
Everything else is beside the point.
Thomas F
Doug only touched on this subject indirectly, but I’d like to ask one of the resident feminists the following: what precisely did Larry Summers do wrong in his famous speech a few years back? I’ve read about that event repeatedly and have always failed to see his error. He seemed to be making a few uncomfortable, and yet empirically-supported, observations about gender dynamics in the hard sciences. If Doug is still following, I’d appreciate him weighing in as well.
I realize the purpose of this thread is to ritualistically thrash the conservative pinata (as this is Balloon Juice, I might as well observe that the sun rose in the east this morning). But I think the Summers business is more interesting.
raven
@The Moar You Know: Ever read “A Hope in the Unseen” by Ron Suskind? It’s about a high achieving African American male in a inner-city DC school. When he wins a monetary award for academics he won’t go on stage to receive it because he knows he’ll get his ass kicked later on. John Ogbu did some interesting work on what he called “cultural inversion. Basically it is resistance to the dominant culture by stigmatizing peers for success.
schrodinger's cat
@Davis X. Machina: How is home-schooling even legal? My mother was a school teacher (not my school, thank god!) and I cannot even imagine being only taught by her. How do the children learn social skills about how to interact with their peers.
raven
@cckids: The only reason I went to college was to get the fuck out of Vietnam 30 days early and then to get every dime of the GI Bill I could. It wasn’t until well into my 30’s that I actually thought I might DO something with the education. Now I are one.
Omnes Omnibus
@cckids:
I would start by deciding what the purpose of an education is. Is it purely job training for a first job? Is it to prepare you for a career? Is it to make you a more knowledgeable person with critical thinking skills? Is it all of the above? Something more? Something less?
I subscribe to the Faber College motto: Knowledge is good.
cckids
@schrodinger’s cat:
As a liberal, homeschooling parent, I point you to the teens of Steubenville for an example of prime “social skills” learned in schools.
schrodinger's cat
@Thomas F: Just because there aren’t enough women on the faculties of hard science departments does not mean that women can’t do math. There are so many examples of women who were brilliant at math but were shut out faculty positions just because they were women. I will start you off with two prominent examples.
Maria Mayer, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics did not have a faculty position till she won her Nobel Prize. Emmy Noether is any another example.
Fuck that fat bastard Summers.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: It helped me continue my life work of “gettin over” as Mr Mayfield said!
Violet
@West of the Rockies: You forgot Todd Palin in that NBC military reality show–the one with Wesley Clark as the host or whatever. “Stars Earn Stripes” or something.
They’re the political version of the Kardashians.
FlipYrWhig
IMHO academia slants liberal not just because of habits of questioning and skepticism but also because the whole enterprise has long been a refuge for dorks (like me), creative people, and other outsiders. There are also more liberals than conservatives among artists and performers for much the same reason. If you were a happy, well-adjusted person whose highest value was material success, you would have a world of more fulfilling options, so the misfit toys end up here.
This may be more of an origin story for academic men in particular, because academic women are much better adjusted as a whole. My generalized and reductionist impression of what academics are like is this: it’s full of driven, composed women, and nebbishy men who love cartoons.
cckids
@Omnes Omnibus: My motto as well; knowledge for its own sake is one of the joys of life.
But when you are counseling your kid about the wisdom of taking on $$$ in debt to get a state-school degree that may or may not let them get a job in their chosen field?? Then it is harder. They don’t want to be eating Top Ramen all their lives.
Edit to add: Also, my son, especially, wants to WORK in his field; (gaming design/art) and many employers seem to hire more from some of the specialty schools.
DougJ, Friend of Hamas
@Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal mistermix:
But they have the same proportion of Republicans as the sciences, if I recall.
Omnes Omnibus
@cckids: Have you considered private schools, which often have more grant and scholarship money available. My alma mater, a top tier liberal arts college, is often cheaper, or at least no more expensive, than the flagship state university once the financial aid packages come into play.
raven
@cckids: Just be careful of those proprietary schools, ya’ll do you homework.
schrodinger's cat
@cckids: One example does not negate my concern. Besides how long can a parent shield their child from all the bad things in the universe? How do you prevent a home-schooled child from turning into a hothouse flower who wilts at the first sign of conflict, when they are in college or dealing with the world at large?
ETA: A dear friend of mine, took her daughter out of her school and is homeschooling her because someone other girls were mean to my friend’s daughter. This was a few years ago. My friend has become progressively nuttier ever since.
geg6
Oh my, where to put this massive pile of bullshit? I don’t think my entire campus of 90 acres could suffice. The delicate flowers get criticized in class and go pouting off to Wall Street instead of academia? There is no such thing as an orientation session that divides students into groups that are white males only, though you’d think conservative assholes would see this as a bonus. And their resentment of the women, blacks and browns around them are the only reason they hate talk of diversity and multicultural readings. They don’t go into academia, I’ve found based on my 20 years of experience on a college campus, because the vast majority of them are too stupid and closed-minded to actually make it in academia. We have exactly three conservative instructors here, one an adjunct in math and the second an associate professor in chemistry and the last a full professor in economics. The math woman is an idiot, which is why she’s an adjunct. The chem guy is the fundamentalist-est of fundies but he only knows about chemistry so I just ignore him. The econ guy is the one I LOVE to needle. Just a few weeks ago, he was spouting off very disrespectfully to our chancellor in a campus town hall about how our students have more loan defaults than all but three other schools in the entire county and were worse than the proprietaries. Just complete and utter bullshit and, because he’s such an asshole and will talk over anyone else who might want to make a point, I didn’t say anything at the time. But when I got back to my office, I emailed the chancellor the real numbers and, surprise!, it turns out that we are below average in terms of percentage of students who default on student loans. The chancellor called me and grilled me a bit about what I’d sent and I gave him the link on the University website where we publish default rates and one to the U.S. Department of Education where default rates are posted and the phone numbers of the Vice President for Student Aid at the main campus. About an hour later, he sent out an email on the faculty and staff list serve, taking apart everything asshole econ prof said in the meeting and giving me credit. Asshole econ prof pretends I don’t exist now. And it’s doubly bad because I’m just a staffer and not faculty and I made him look bad. LOL!
BruceFromOhio
@Litlebritdifrnt: The 178 million figure is so laughably wrong, tweeter does not get a Girl Scout cookie.
Try this instead.
rb
@Thomas F: what precisely did Larry Summers do wrong in his famous speech a few years back
1. He indicated that the smartest of the smart / the most successful of the successful are usually male, which (a) is probably false, (b) ignores pressures against women and girls that push them away from the ‘smart’ fields, (c) buys into the bullshit notion that ‘smart’ is a unidimensional thing, (d) ignores all sorts of biases in the ways we have tried to measure ‘smart’ and ‘successful,’ and (e) conflates success on the academic ladder with ‘smart.’
But MUCH more importantly, in my opinion:
2. He said in essence “well, having an academic career is hard if you also want to have a family, so of course fewer women are cut out for it” – and presented this as if it were value-neutral, when in fact it is a huge indictment of the supposedly progressive and enlightened academic career system.
In other words, he shit a whole boatload full of beds in one go. He demonstrated that at the very highest levels, academia is unconcerned with correcting historical roadblocks to the success of women and girls, to the great detriment of science and human knowledge in general.
The data he was describing may or may not be interesting; it was the lack of acknowledgment of the context and historical biases that pervade the whole discussion that was the biggest issue.
Need I go on?
(ETA: I’m a male academic, if that matters.)
Pinkamena Panic
@cckids: Wow, that’s completely illogical. Please eat a big bag of flaccid dongs.
West of the Rockies
@Violet: I’ve never heard of that show (but then again, I don’t have cable or satellite or even old bunny ears). Wow, four reality shows connected to one damn family. Well, that’s reality TV essentially, isn’t it: a close-up inspection of pointless drama, meaningless confrontation, and the egrandizement of mediocrity — a perfect fit for the Palins.
Violet
@schrodinger’s cat: From friends who are home schooling their kids, they have their kids involved in a lot of activities. The religious family has their kids involved in church choir and youth group, in addition to scouting, dance, ice skating, music lessons and basketball. It’s not the same environment as sitting in a classroom, but the home school group they’re involved with meets as a group every week or so for group type learning on specialized subjects and they also do field trips for additional learning.
The non-religious family lives in a different part of the country in an area where apparently most affluent families home school their kids. Both parents in this family are high educated (MD and PhD in sciences) and their kids are very, very smart and well above their grade level peers in their academic knowledge and achievements. They’re also involved in many outside groups and activities, from sports to dance to art class to music.
Home schooling can work and the kids can learn a lot. But it can also be a way for everyone to slack off and the kids to learn about Jesus riding dinosaurs.
Suffern ACE
It’s 1989 and I’m a freshman in college and the college republican yahoos are calling themselves liberterians and inviting white nationalists to campus to show us who the real intolerant folks are. Herr D’Souza is starting to work his way up the right wing welfare line and will be writing illiberal education soon, but needed to stop first to wiretap a meeting of the gay lesbian group at Dartmouth to show that those homos really were all about the sex. The closing of the American Mind is a discussion book in my freshman seminar. And if we have an event on campus for black history month or women’s history month, we need to deal with the running republicans interrupting discussions about what we don’t discuss black crime or get real about the truth about women’s ability.
And now 20 odd years later I find out that the White Students Union at Towson state is inviting white natonalists to campus and showing up at even CPACs little diversity seminar to complain about black crime and the real victims of slavery.
It seems like we are in a little bit of a rut in our national discussion topic here.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Nice!
The saddest thing about that Todd Palin reality show was the participation of Wes Clark. I’ve never been offered a massive check in exchange for my dignity, and I can’t say for sure I wouldn’t take it, but that was a seriously sad move on his part.
kc
“The liberals say smoking is BAD for you! Well, suck on this!” Palin exclaimed, before inserting burning cigarettes into her ears, nostrils, and mouth, to thunderous applause.
schrodinger's cat
@Violet: My friend has multiple masters and her husband has a PhD and an MD. She has given up her career for home-schooling her daughter. She has picked up a lot of nutty libertarian stuff from the other home schooling moms in her group. I don’t know about the daughter, but homeschooling has changed my friend into a person who I no longer recognize.
Violet
@schrodinger’s cat:
Your friend removing her daughter from a situation that was bad for her daughter is hard to understand from the outside. A similar thing happened in my family and it didn’t seem that bad, but my relative’s kid was struggling a lot and removing her from the school and the situation allowed her to thrive.
Baud
@kc:
Lends credence to the theory that Obama should come out against drinking bleach.
rb
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve never been offered a massive check in exchange for my dignity, and I can’t say for sure I wouldn’t take it
No kidding! Being fully honest, I wish the universe would present me with this dilemma. They say everyone has a price – let’s get to work figuring out mine.
geg6
@cckids:
Perhaps it’s a function of geography. Our students who graduate from our campus get jobs, mostly right here in Pittsburgh. I don’t know a graduate from the last two years who isn’t working in his or her field. Of course, we aren’t allowed to start any four-year degrees to be finished on our campus (my campus’s and university’s structure is that about 2/3s of all freshman do the 2+2 plan, two years at our campus and two at the main or another campus) unless we can show that major companies in our area want to hire students in that major, so we may be unusual in that way. We may be the second most expensive public university in the nation, but we are continuously in the top 5 of the universities that the WSJ’s employer/recruiting survey says are the best prepared for their jobs. We were number one the last time I paid attention to it. We are also in an area that wasn’t as hard hit by the recession as many others (we still hadn’t come out of the one that started back during the Reagan administration) and is now a mecca for Marcellus Shale, health care, and IT.
In addition, choice of major makes all the difference. Every kid who like computers and computer games want to be game designers, but the market there is rather crowded. A better choice for someone interested in IT here would be in the health field. We have a 100% placement rate for our campus major, Information Sciences and Technology. Our business degree’s rate is about 85%. Even our psychology majors (two paths: human services and human resources) have a placement rate over 70%.
DPS
As someone who works in the humanities, I have to say that it’s painful to watch most conservative critics (and there aren’t many) try to deal with literature. It’s like watching a rhinoceros try to do needlepoint.
Peter
Anyone who thinks without a shred of irony that the study of literature should be about a body of ‘great books’ by dead white men deserves to be roundly mocked. That question’s been settled for twenty years.
Violet
@schrodinger’s cat: Yeah, it can happen. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all way to describe home schooling families. I met a couple in a complete crunchy granola gardening class I took last year that are home schooling their kids. Remember, I live in a red state, and they could not be more liberal and said their home schooling group was also liberal.
Apparently there are a lot of home schooling groups out there and they all have different styles, some are religious, some are not, and so forth. You find one that works for you and your family.
cckids
@schrodinger’s cat: There are examples in both public & homeschooling parenting decisions that can be pointed out. Many homeschoolers form groups, co-ops, teams, etc., that get their kids out with others. The majority, at least that I know, play on teams, join community choirs or bands, are in girl or boy scouts, church groups, etc.
People who homeschool their kids do it for hundreds of personal reasons, from the excellent to the mundane to the stupid. Not all of us are trying to shelter our kids from the real world. It would be nice to not be judged by the worst examples of our groups.
I don’t judge people who send their kids to public schools by the worst parents out there. And I have 2 sisters who are teachers, so I know the stories. It would be nice to be afforded the same courtesy.
rb
@DPS: Heh, like Soviet scientists in the 20s and 30s. No quantum mechanics for you.
West of the Rockies
@Violet: I’ve had the same experience, Violet. It strikes me that a major factor in a child’s academic success is parental involvement. Maybe in the case of those who homeschool their children primarily for religious/anti-science reasons, the involvement is not such a great thing necessarily. And if you are an involved parent but your child goes to a bad public school, well, then your involvement can perhaps off-set some negatives (bullying classmates, dispirited teachers, cuts to programs), but you’ve definitely got your work cut out for you.
Parental involvement is not a panacea, but it sure is an important factor I find.
? Martin
@geg6:
And the pay sucks for quite a lot of them. I know a ton of people that work for Blizzard, and the coders and systems guys do okay to quite well, but the 3D artists, level designers, and the other folks working at the content level don’t earn much at all. You can pretty obviously tell what division everyone works in just by where they live. None of the content guys own a house. None of the coders/systems guys rent. And the kids who want to be game designers are usually thinking of the content level. At the systems level, it can be hard to tell Blizzard from Yahoo or Goldman Sachs.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@DPS: I remember Pat Buchanan’s apoplexy a few years back that one can actually get a BA in literature without taking a course on Shakespeare. Because I’m sure Pat and Bay get together all the time to discuss MacBeth and Falstaff over a small snifter of Grand Marnier.
cckids
@Pinkamena Panic: Not illogical, just a response to an actual situation. Kids should learn social skills from their whole lives, not just at school.
If you want to look at it “logically”, where & when else in your life are you segregated by age away from the rest of the world, your life run by bells & whistles, unable to pursue your own interests, forced to eat, pee, exercise on someone else’s schedule? Prison? Nursing home? The Army?
Seriously, if you read this blog, you are most likely a liberal. Open your mind.
/rant off.
schrodinger's cat
@cckids: I am not judging you, I just had questions about how the whole home-schooling stuff works.
jonas
@Thomas F: He didn’t just point out the (obvious) dominance of men at the highest levels of the math and physics fields at a place like Harvard, but also suggested that we have to be open to the idea that it might be because the ladies just don’t have a head for numbers.
Svensker
@Davis X. Machina:
Yeah, they were all into doing the trivium. Glad to hear some are still doing that but judging by sales on ebay of classics homeschool stuff, the market has dropped off considerably.
Lucky you re emails!
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
In my experience, this is almost never true. Privates are always more expensive as far as I’ve seen and I’ve seen plenty since parents love to bring in the packages from other schools to challenge me to MATCH THIS BECAUSE I KNOW YOU CAN’T!
Bullshit. I love to show them how our $13,000/year (tuition only) for PA residents plus any scholarships we provide (2/3s of our freshmen are offered scholarships of varying amounts and many are renewable) plus their federal and state aid kicks every other local school’s ass. We have two privates less than 15 minutes from our campus in either direction and they both give about $6000 “scholarships” to freshmen (all freshmen, not just the academically talented or financially needy, so I can these tuition discount programs because that’s what they are). Since both school’s tuition is over $20,000/year (not counting housing or food), even with the “scholarship,” we cost less. There’s another private in the region that has tuition (no room or board) set at $40,000/year. They give $16,000/year “scholarships.” That still is almost double what we cost.
West of the Rockies
@cckids: Home schooling has become the butt of a lot of jokes; the go-to line is that the parents are always and inevitably mouth-breathing fundamentalists or whacky-back-to-the-earth types. It is reductionist thinking. I teach at the junior college-level and have found the majority of my home-schooled students are mature, motivated, and responsible; they tend to be good contributors. A handful of them do seem a bit sheltered and conservative. A mixed bag really, just like everything.
Trollhattan
I cannot believe you didn’t haul out this tag:
Haven’t our Sullys suffered enough from liberal oppression?
Violet
@cckids: I completely agree. It’s one of my pet peeves about schools–and I’ve worked in several in various roles–is that they are so segregated from the way the rest of the world works. It’s one of the advantages that the “one room school house” has, is that all ages are together and older kids end up coaching or teaching younger kids. You learn a lot by teaching and the older kids learn and reinforce their knowledge by helping the younger kids. Younger kids learn from the older ones, both academically and socially.
The large schools filled with hundreds kids who are all within three years of age of each other is just unnatural. It never happens again and those kids aren’t really prepared when they go get a job and have to work with people of all ages.
cckids
@schrodinger’s cat: It has its ups and downs, like the rest of life. I got into it because the noise & pointlessness of so much of school was giving my 3rd grade son migraines & he was getting suicidal. And that is not overblown exaggeration.
We try our best; we definitely got our kids out & into the world as much as possible; they surely had more interactions with people of varying ages than their peers. For my son, at least, getting him away from the pressure of being surrounded by 37 other kids in a small room for 6 + hours a day gave him back his enjoyment of being with others, and he made more friends.
For the school work, for me, the best part is that they can incorporate their own interests into their work, and that if they are having trouble with something, they can take the time & effort to get it right, not just cram it in until the test is over; they can master it.
And thank you for the acknowledgement, the judging gets old.
jrg
Conservatives have had problems with academia since at least the Vietnam war. Academia promotes class stratification that manifests itself in nasty ways (like creating entitled pricks like Dubya that send kids off to war for no reason, because they had deferments and never had to worry about it).
…And academia can be entirely full of shit. Take UNC’s African and African American studies department. For over a decade they were not even holding a number of 400-level classes, and no one even noticed. How can you argue that something has value if it’s not there for 10 years and no one notices? Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I’m not disputing Dougj’s larger point, because I think it’s true. I’m just suggesting that contempt for academia has a justifiable basis in many cases, even if modern conservatives are too dumb or insane to state any kind of case.
rikyrah
WHY would a scientist be a Republican?
The party that denies their life’s work has any value?
sure, I’d wanna be in that party.
schrodinger's cat
@rikyrah: Word! They are anti-science and anti-scientific method. Its all about the gut.
BruceFromOhio
@cckids:
And here is the pot with the kettle on speed-dial.
Generally, you get the same courtesy you illustrate.
I’ve personally known two sets of homeschoolers. One labored as a single mother to teach her two children well with a science-literature-math-minded curriculum: both kids are now adults, fending for themselves in the cold, cruel world. The other set was born-again-holier-then-thou, and the adult kids are now also off fending for themselves. Whether that makes them better or worse or the same as everyone else, who knows? None are dead or in jail AFAIK, and that’s a plus where I come from.
But if you feel like ‘it would be nice to be afforded the same courtesy,’ I suggest examining your motivations as to why you feel that way. What you do with your offspring is your own Gaia-damned business.
gnomedad
@Tone in DC:
Doesn’t NYC lack a law against toplessness? This should be remedied immediately.
johnny aquitard
@Omnes Omnibus:Or the motto engraved on the side of the dorm I lived in, “The end of learning is gracious living”.
cckids
@BruceFromOhio: I admit, the first comment was a throw-off response to the oldest, lamest critique of homeschooling; the “socializing” trope. But herding ever-larger groups of kids into small spaces, eliminating recess & most outdoor time plus the intensifying role of tech & social media & you pretty much have a recipe for building kids without much empathy OR real social skills.
schrodinger's cat
@cckids: If someone disagrees with you, that is a trope, got it.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: I will defer to your expertise. My only knowledge of this is my undergrad’s stated policy of making sure that anyone they admit can attend – for no more than the FAFSA family contribution amount.
cckids
@schrodinger’s cat: No, but every homeschooler in existence has had the socializing thing thrown at them unendingly, no matter how they are educating their kids. And never, AFAIK, do parents sending their kids to standard schools get the same treatment; “your kids are going to public schools? Aren’t you afraid they will be bullies?” It gets old. And I used “trope” wrongly, in a definitional sense, I am embarrassed.
I was trying to get a different picture of homeschooling out here, as most of the portrayals in the comments are negative. Did not intend to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Trollhattan
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah, lots of extrapolation in this one. Having a kid in 5th grade today, and having gone through school myself with the boomers, I maintain it’s ninety-percent teacher and curriculum and ten percent environment. And the bridge to resolving educational impediments is parental involvement in the school.
My kid’s school consistently tests among the best elementary schools in the state (and tops in the district), in a district where three-quarters of the kids qualify for subsidized lunches. Nobody is going to tell me a good education can’t be had in today’s public schools (okay, let’s leave out Texas).
Interrobang
When I was in school, there was a lot of talk about population groups (classified by gender, ethnicity, class, income, etc.) not performing as well as they could academically because society — in some cases, other members of the population group — sent them the message that they must be stupid because they were poor or women or black. I think there’s something to that…
Yes, there is. It’s called stereotype threat, and you can actually make someone’s performance on a test worse by reminding them that they’re a member of a group stereotypically associated with being stupid or bad at something. It’s entirely possible that conservatives get stereotype-threatened out of academia, but hardly plausible, frankly.
Tod Kelly
“There are definitely a lot of Snooze Hour devotees who quote David Brooks to me”
Why do I find the notion of your fellow professors wandering the halls quoting David Brooks strikingly similar to Brook’s anecdotes about his time spent at Applebees?
Maude
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Mediocrity was brought into popularity by Reagan.
The result is the anti intellectual crowd howling at anyone with a brain.
Even the far left uses Harvard against Obama.
@Peter:
The Humanities broaden understanding. It is a wide range of study. That’s why it’s hated by the conservatives.
Seanly
RE: only 6% of scientists are Republicans, I think most of the Republicans who are good/enjoy math & science go into engineering (particularly civil engineering). Almost all of my fellow engineers are very economically conservative. The only saving grace is that a fair number are socially tolerant. Maybe it’d be different if I got a job in San Fran, but I am usually the only liberal.
Engineering is also very, very male & white dominanted.
Heliopause
I don’t quite get the complaint that colleges are hostile places for conservatives. Hostile to capitalism? They all have departments of business (business is the most popular degree, by the way). Hostile to religion? The big ones all have departments of theology. Hostile to maleness? They all have departments of physical education. And that just covers the stereotypical stuff that conservatives are interested in. Health related fields are politics-neutral, as are most of the hard sciences, and if it bothers you that the people standing next to you happen to be politically left, well, so sorry you have to experience what it’s like to be a minority in our society. If you’re a conservative who wants to be a doctor but are so put off by the liberal students that you quit the program then you probably weren’t cut out to be a doctor in the first place.
That leaves the “soft” sciences and liberal arts, which conservatives scoff at a priori anyway, so there should be no conflict here.
Hey, conservative college student, Jackie Robinson didn’t quit after a year in the majors and neither should you. Go get ’em, tiger.
FlipYrWhig
@Seanly: is the thinking there that governments would be able to afford more cool bridges and desalination plants if they didn’t waste all their money on “welfare,” or something? Because otherwise it’s pretty fucking crazy for a group of people dependent on public works projects to be conservative in the modern American sense.
gene108
@FonzieScheme:
There are two kinds of conservatives, who shun academia.
One has the intellectual mettle to get a PhD from the Sloan school of business, but opts for an MBA and decides to work on Wall Street or with a VC firm or go to Med school or other career that requires strong academic credentials.
Then you have the folks, who are not that intellectually curious.
This includes, in my experience, a significant number of engineers and other technical types/business professionals or people who just don’t like book learning in any capacity and aren’t about to go to college. These groups have some desire to have faith in getting their personal beliefs reassured, with regards to religion, American exceptional-ism, right-and-wrong, etc. and don’t like dealing with things that are different than what they are accustomed to.
The intellectual curiosity and willingness to challenge what you know to learn something new about a subject just isn’t in the make-up of most conservatives. Either they have the intellectual ability to get into academia and opt for the money or they just don’t have the capacity to try in the first place.
Chris
@Sly:
I think this is very true, but allow me to get even more to the point: the study of science already rests on a ton of discoveries that most conservatives, as a matter of (literal) religious faith, refuse to acknowledge.
You cannot enter the field of biology if you still believe that species evolution doesn’t happen, period. You cannot study the universe if you think it’s no older than 6,000 years old, period. For a True Believing Conservative to try and enter these fields while holding the “beliefs” that he does would be equivalent to trying to enter the mathematical field without “believing in” addition and subtraction; or the literary field without “believing in” the existence of the book “Hamlet.” It just can’t be done. You’ll flunk out as early as your freshman biology and astronomy courses, and never even get close to a career position in the field.
Chris
@Sly:
I think this is very true, but allow me to get even more to the point: the study of science already rests on a ton of discoveries that most conservatives, as a matter of (literal) religious faith, refuse to acknowledge.
You cannot enter the field of biology if you still believe that species evolution doesn’t happen, period. You cannot study the universe if you think it’s no older than 6,000 years old, period. For a True Believing Conservative to try and enter these fields while holding the “beliefs” that he does would be equivalent to trying to enter the mathematical field without “believing in” addition and subtraction; or the literary field without “believing in” the existence of the book “Hamlet.” It just can’t be done. You’ll flunk out as early as your freshman biology and astronomy courses, and never even get close to a career position in the field.
Jado
@Seanly:
As a white male CE, I find that a lot of my fellows are economically “conservative”, but in the old-fashioned sense. I have found that there is a lot of puzzlement as to why we are not doing a WPA program to fix infrastructure and get people working again. While technically “conservative” in the respect that it addresses economic issues based on historic actions, it isn’t exactly in keeping with the current CPAC attitudes.
A lot of CE’s I know identify as “conservative”, but not Republican in the national sense. It’s hard to identify with a national party that won’t fix bridges.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
Anecdotal, but this argument’s never held up for me in real life. I’ve met homeschooled kids before, often conservative or religious, but ideology put aside, they never had any problems in day to day interactions with people.
Plus, I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I think there’s more than a few people for whom socializing via school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, if, for whatever reason, you just don’t click with the rest of the kids there. I had few friends in my middle and high school and there are exactly two people from there that I considered worth keeping in touch with after graduation.
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
My guess is that they don’t admit many who either can’t afford the EFC (which is really not a measure of what a family can afford but simply a result from a formula that determines what kind and how much aid one can receive) or who aren’t at the top of their class in high school. Harvard says the same thing. Now, how many lower income or middle income kids are at Harvard, do you think? What your school said about EFC is a bit misleading. What if your EFC is over 10,000, like my sister and her husband? My niece’s tuition room and board is about $23,000 a year at her just-across-the-border university in Ohio (they get a discount because they live so close to the border; it’s not the in-state rate, but it’s not the full out-of-state rate either). What that means is the EFC cuts my niece out of any of the federal grant programs, the federal work study program, and the PA state grant program. She gets the freshman level of subsidized and unsubsidized student loans ($5500/year) and mom and dad have to borrow from the federal parent loan program to pay for the rest of it (although she does have a bit of money in a 529 plan). Even if she went to your alma mater, they’d have to borrow at least $10,000/year. And to give you an idea, my brother-in-law is a teacher in a borderline low-income school district and my sister is on SS disability. Suffice it to say, they are not wealthy or even mid-middle class.
This is what quality public universities are for. To provide a cost-conscious high quality alternative to the back-breaking debt that privates will put you in.
geg6
@Chris:
My experience at the post-secondary level with home schooled kids is that they tend to not do very well here, either socially or academically. But that may be because the only home schoolers I’ve ever met or had as students were religious freaks. The same goes for the cyber schoolers. All religious freaks, all total academic and social wipeouts. It may be different in other places, but that’s pretty much the way it’s gone here. I can only remember one exception and he wasn’t a religious freak or in a family of them. He was just super advanced, a real prodigy who was too smart even for GATE classes.
Chris
@Seanly:
@gene108:
I’ve heard that about engineering, that it skews really conservative. What’s the explanation for that? Is it just that they’re working with man-made systems as opposed to murkier things like biology or astronomy that don’t come with a user’s manual?
Chris
@geg6:
Like I said, anecdotal for me too, but purely in terms of social interactions with people, nothing wrong with the folks I met, even if they were “religious freaks” too. Academically, I’m sure it would’ve been harder, but only one of them was in college.
drlemur
Academic scientist here (social/behavioral/neuro) and I think the post misses a big piece of why there are few Republicans in academia — it doesn’t pay well compared to what smart people can earn in business.
Everybody I know with a Ph.D. could earn at least double what they make at the university working somewhere in the business/ real world (finance, management, consulting, etc.). People who are really good at writing, analysis, number crunching, etc., are in very high demand in those worlds.
So the people who stay in academia are essentially forgoing part of their earning potential for the good of building societal value through human capital (teaching & research). That requires altruism. If you are individual-incentive motivated, you just don’t go into academia, or at least you don’t stay.
Relevant personal anecdote: famously conservative grad student in my own program defends his masters successfully. I was on the committee but I avoided talking politics with him (as did most people) because it wasn’t relevant to the fact that his science was good. But I did point out after congratulating him on his defense that he had just taken the first step towards lowering his life-long earning potential. It was intended as a joke, but he dropped out of the program to become a stock broker within 3 months. I bet he’s doing just fine money-wise and hanging around with others complaining about the moochers.
JCT
@drlemur: My eldest had planned to work for a few years and then go to grad school (Islamic Studies/Arabic sociolinguistics) — but she was so disappointed with her job prospects with just a BA that she decided to go to grad school early. Was accepted at a fantastic program with full financial support. The horror over her decision from our more wingnutty relatives has been really something else. They just don’t respect academia — mind you, the kid want to go into public policy, not be a professor… but oh no, GRAD SCHOOL? Totally bizarre.
This thread needs an Elvis Costello quote: “Never mind there’s a good film showing tonight where they hang everyone everybody who can read and write. Oh that could never happen here but then again it might… From 1983 or so. Sigh.
ruemara
@cckids: If you’ll pardon my interjecting on this subject, your son would do well to get a good foundation in art and game theory, but his best time spent will be in doing a low/no pay internship. In fact, he’d do better to have programming and business with a formal degree and take the summers to do an internship. It’s not easy to get into game companies (being white and male helps as diversity for those companies seems to mean varieties of beige and range of take away tastes). And only the upper management levels have a promise of stability. Plus he should start perusing game design mags and read Gamesutra.
gvg
Todays “conservatives” are yesterdays radical extremests. The labels don’t match up. Anyway they didn’t used to be this stupid and historically the matchups weren’t this bad. It used to be the “left” had a bunch of know nothings idiots. Go with your feelings and hate logical. Certain still played rock songs remind me from time to time and are really irritating. What happened is that type led to some real stupid results and “we” chose other leaders and paths.
What we are making fun of (rightly) is a current events type called a conservative right now.
If conservative is being cautious and always having a safety plan, never risking everything, then I am conservative. I can’t even understand why anybody gambles or plays the lottery. I would never put my money in a high risk investment. At the moment conservative means religious bigot. A group who think they are the real majority and that they would like a world where they could impose their religious views-knowing nothing of history or the real reason the founders separated church and state. I wish they could find out what mistake they are making without impacting those of us who know better, but that’s not possible.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
@Svensker:
No Catullus or Juvenal? For shame.