Irrational Feminism

My best friend works as a prison guard and he volunteered to be on the Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT).  This team is called when there is a situation that requires a little extra oomph.  To join, he had to pass a physical and take some training. 

He recently told me about a couple of fat ass women that somehow got on the team. Apparently the female version of the physical was a quarter-mile in sixty short, cardiac-arrest-inducing minutes followed by a fifteen minute kneel and wheeze topped off with a tank of oxygen and a gurney.  Two invaluable additions, to be sure.

There are three kinds of women:  skinny and weak, fat and weak, and body builders.  So, what does up to two-thirds of the female population have in common?  They’re morons.  They think they can do a job that requires a significant amount of strength like fireman, policeman, soldier, or prison guard yet more often than not they can’t even twist the top off of a jar of pickles.

When is this ridiculousness going to stop?  How much longer do I have to pretend that some wildebeest can gallop across the courtyard of the prison to help protect my friend?  Being on this team doesn’t come with any extra pay, no extra benefits, not even any preferential treatment as far as where he’d like to be stationed on his shift.  All he gets is a higher chance of getting hurt on the job by some prisoner who’s angry he got caught beating off in the broom closet.  With no perks and a higher chance of danger the last thing that any of the men on the team need is to depend on a squishy sack of cottage cheese to ooze to the rescue if something were to go terribly wrong.

Ladies, be realistic in your expectations.  If just walking to the bathroom generates enough heat between your thighs your zipper melts, prison guard is probably not the job for you.  Can you imagine this woman running to an emergency?  She’d show up ten minutes late with enough smoke billowing up from her crotch she’d look like the Tasmanian Devil had Pigpen from Peanuts in a triangle choke.  the one positive is prisoners would think the smoke was tear gas and would instinctively hit the deck.

Ladies, all I’m asking is that you realize that your physical stature and overall weakness does present certain limitations.  For you petite little ladies:  do you remember that time you were sitting on your boyfriend’s chest and he easily threw you off when your husband came home?  What makes you think you can control an angry and violent prisoner?  The only possible benefit the big girls have is they could sit on the inmates.

If you are going to even consider being on a team like that, think about losing weight and picking up something heavier than a Haagen-Dazs filled spoon and make a minimal effort to get your BMI out of the holy shit range.

Before someone accuses me of being a misogynist, understand this: putting someone’s life in danger because you are physically incapable of performing certain duties is utterly irrational.  Believing that you’re able is different than actually being able.  Society has kissed your ass on this long enough and it’s high time that stops.  Feminism claims to be about equality, but it’s not.  It’s about parity in a best case scenario (you have three coins and I have three coins, but yours are gold and mine are bronze).  More often than not, it’s about privilege and that disgusts me because when someone comes along to point this out, that person is accused of all sorts of fun things except for the one thing that matters, clear thinking.

Gay Adoption

A few of my liberal friends have asked me what my beef with liberals is.  I assure you, I have no beef, not even some Whole Foods soy-based beef-like substitute, with liberals.  It’s stupidity I hate.  And while stupidity doesn't discriminate, it certainly seems to lean left and south.  I don’t know, maybe it’s me, maybe I’m missing something; the passion, the understanding, a soul, but just because something makes someone feel good doesn't mean it is good (think LSD or pretending there is a direct link between explosives and virgins).

I don’t give the left credit for much, but occasionally they blindly feel their way along and through what appears to be nothing more than dumb luck, fall into the right answer.  Most of what the left proposes is bound to fail because they think with their hearts and not their heads, unless it’s Clinton who thinks with his dick or Michael Moore whose thoughts, according to scientists, come from an ass canker.  But, gay adoption, a leftist cause, to me at least, makes sense. 

Here’s why.

First, the argument that gay couples will screw up a child’s delicate psychology just doesn’t hold water.  We’re all screwed up.   I’m shaking hands with crazy and my parents made me the old fashioned way, accidentally.  There might be some stigma through the high school years for kids growing up in certain parts of the country—what I like to call the Redneck Belt—but those are just the jocks afraid they can catch queer like they catch a cold, by licking each other’s balls in the locker room.

Second, outside of meeting a drunk and horny Kimbo Slice in a dark alley or becoming a prison bitch, you just can’t make people gay.  You can make guys effeminate so that they think tight jeans look good and you can make girly-girls lose some of their girly-ness so that they become tolerable, but you can’t make someone gay.  Even if you tried, at some point biology is going to kick in and they are going to throw out the drawer full of panties and start wearing men’s bikini briefs.  Heterosexuality… ease into it.  As a matter of fact, if the current rate of pusification of American boys continues at this alarming rate, we won’t know who’s sporting what kind of pee-pee parts until we see them naked. 

Third, I’m going to defer to the professional wisdom and ethics of the adoption agencies that they aren’t going to put a kid into the hands of a creeper (gay or straight) and I hope that their background check on potential adopting parents includes questions like: are you an ass-raping, creeper pedophile?  Check yes or no.  I’m also hoping the hoops the adoption agencies make you jump through makes the windowless 1970’s van with the word “Candy” spray painted on the side the best shot that these sick-o’s have at getting children.  Hey kids, don’t go near that van. 

I know that’s a lot of hopes, but if adoption agencies are putting kids in the hands of freaks that’s a fault in the system not reflective of homosexuals in general.  Also, I think that when most people think of gay they think of Mardi Gras gay and in a sense that sort of serves them right for all the years of in-your-face pseudofeminity with the affected lisps we’ve had to…erm… swallow.  But, there are also a lot of normal people out there who just happen to be gay and would like to adopt.  So as an adoption agency, unless one of the people sitting across from you is wearing a leather hat, no shirt, and ass-less chaps and his partner has a dildo strapped to his forehead, pass them on to round two.

Diversity: Operation White Guilt

Mention diversity to a liberal academic and watch their eyes light up.  It’s cute like baby farts.  Diversity is the hippy-dippy buzz-word of universities these days.  Google the word “diversity” by itself and look how many search results link to a dot-edu site.  This diversity issue is another example of libs placing their feelings over reality, or as I’ve said before, looking at reality as they’d like it to be rather than as it actually is.  Or even more simply, libs are on crack.

With every university harping on diversity, I knew there had to be mountains of evidence showing that as a university becomes quantifiably more diverse, grades and retention rate show a marked increase as well.  I was sure somewhere in the bottom of a filing cabinet there was one of those CSI pubic hair baggies sitting on top of a coffee stained manila folder labeled “Evidence” and all I had to do was find it.  They wouldn’t just make something up, right?

The first scholarly article I found said:

Educators in U.S. higher education have long argued that affirmative action policies are justified because they ensure the creation of the racially and ethnically diverse student bodies essential to providing the best possible educational environment for students, white and minority alike. Yet until recently these arguments have lacked empirical evidence and a strong theoretical rationale to support the link between diversity and educational outcomes.

I’m sorry, I slipped into a coma.  Allow me to strip this of its self-congratulatory syntax and zero in on the key parts.

“Educators have LONG argued that… diverse student bodies [are] essential [for] the best educational environment for students.”  (Of course it’s for students did anyone bother editing this thing?)  “Yet until recently these arguments have…” been baseless claims we pulled straight out of our collective ass. (Caps-lock shouting and italicized smarm mine)

Essential?  Like water is essential for life, essential, or maybe they meant something like “perhaps possibly of some minor benefit to be exposed to a not-so-representative cross-section of the few cultures with people who can actually afford to study in our universities which are increasingly overpriced thanks largely to artificial inflation brought on by the explosive diarrhea rate at which the government craps money out in the form of student loans”?

I would say the ability to decipher a professor’s heavily accented ramblings would be essential for the best educational environment, not which exotically dressed person is responsible for today’s distractingly weird smell.

Diversity.

~Wide-eyed amazement~

How cute.

After reading that article I began to wonder about those institutions that take a hard turn at diversity and either officially shun it or, at least—to continue the smelly theme—turn their noses up at it.

How do women’s colleges and universities feel their lack of diversity affects their students?  Do they just bury their heads in the sand while mumbling something about misogyny?  This collegeview.com article said that “women at single-sex institutions were more engaged in effective educational practices…” and this Guardian article said girls do better without boys in the class.  This Science 2.0 article also claims that single-sex classrooms are better.

I can hear the academic decision makers now, “Well… that’s sex or… erm… gender… grumble grumble grumble”.

So maybe diversity doesn’t extend to sex.

Okay then, what do historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have to say about diversity?

This National Bureau of Economic Research article says that minority students do better if taught by a minority professor.  And in this Urban Education article Clark and Crawford say "the greater the compatibility between the student and the institution, the higher the probability that the student will complete all degree requirements" suggesting, again, that a lack of diversity (at least between professors and students) is to the black student’s benefit. 

So what happens when the liberal diversity advocates meet the often liberal women’s colleges and HBCUs?  Is it some sort of an unstoppable farce meets an immovable feeling?  Does it get resolved or does everyone get a trophy?

Lucky for you, dear reader, I have an answer.   A high school in Pennsylvania tried segregating black students.  Angela Tilghman “suggested that the school separate black students and pair them with black homeroom teachers of the same gender” because there was actually supporting research as opposed to what the universities use, which from the outside appears to be The Force.  By the way, the fact that a k-12 school used any research at all before plowing willy-nilly over the nubile minds of today’s youth with some moronic, hair-brained scheme is wholly deserving of a handshake and a smile even if you completely disagree with them.

But the idea of segregating the students sent the nation into a tizzy of white guilt and confusion over why the hell the blacks would want to segregate themselves so the school canceled the program.  Who cares whether the homeroom segregation helped the students, it’s not about what works, it’s about what made the administrators feel good, right Professor?

This is why I keep saying that as long as we tip-toe around race and refuse to talk about it openly, we will never identify those areas where race may play a critical role.  Even if we agreed to collectively sweep race under the rug, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen.  Consider this: the racist mentality isn’t necessarily about race.  It’s the fundamental operational mechanism of the human mind to lump people into groups (think the Wal-Mart crowd as brought to us by The People of Walmart).  What if that simple homeroom segregation plan helped those black kids more than any other hackneyed program that’s been vomited up by these people?  If the research said it might work, why not try it?

It’s not fair to entirely blame the liberals for this, but it certainly does feel good.  ~wink~

Racism Is Just a Bogus Claim Away

I stumbled across this money.cnn.com article showing a drastic difference in the median net worth between the races.  The author calls particular attention to the differences between whites and blacks ($110,729 vs $4,955 respectively).  To put that in tangible numbers, that’s the difference between a fairly nice mid-western house and a year lease on a U-Store It unit.

The data and the presentation are intended to elicit an emotional response.  And it succeeds.  But, I’m all about separating facts from emotion so let’s tear into what “median net worth” tells us.

The median of a set of data is a bit dodgy.  Knowing the number that’s in the exact middle doesn’t necessarily give you a picture of the entire set of data.  To get the median, you put the data in order (let’s say increasing left to right) and then find the number in the middle.  Who said math was hard?  What if every number to the left of the median value is 0 (zero (nada (zilch))), the median is 4,955, and then every number to the right of the median is a million-bajillion?  The median really wouldn’t reflect any of that information.  So the median without a mode (most repeated value) and a range (lowest and highest values) doesn’t paint a very detailed picture.

What is “net worth” really?  Consider this:  My brother and I both get a job and we both get paid a dollar a day.  Every evening, he dutifully squirrels his crumpled and sweaty dollar away in a piggy bank that he keeps buried in the back yard and I invest mine in a combination of pizza and midget(x1) porn.  At the end of the year I’ve got 0 dollars and I’ve gone blind from all the porn (mom tried to warn me) while my brother has 350 dollars.  I had to steal 15 bucks to pay the North American Pride Association for Little Men and Women (NAPALM)  for the right to use the word midget(x2).  It costs $3 a pop.

What kind of information about our environment can you glean by looking at our—grammatically awkward— individual net worths?  What does my net worth say about my neighborhood or how my employers treated me?  What does it say about my brother?  The only thing that’s for certain is my brother has some assets and I don’t.  Comparing these assets over time could reveal some additional information about the economy—or the midget(x3) porn industry—perhaps, but we couldn’t honestly glean any useful sociological data that contrasts my brother’s life with mine.  We could, however, investigate why I preferred midget(x4) porn over savings and the sociological ramifications of that decision (and perhaps someone should).

Median net worth, therefore, is a bogus foundation for an inequality case.  I found even more fodder for this when I considered the income distribution stats from the U.S. Census.  65% of white people make over 50 thousand dollars per year whereas only 50% of black people fall into that category.  There is obviously some disparity here and now the question of why blacks are earning less money becomes more immediately relevant (though not necessarily indicative of racism) and we are forced to look into that disparity.  As for why this is more meaningful than “median net worth” consider that even though Asians had a net worth of roughly half that of whites, 70% of that population (5% higher than whites) makes 50 thousand dollars or more per year.

Midget(x5).  Money well spent.

U.S. Gay Population.

I was recently exposed to a feminist liberal who said that roughly 10% of the US population is gay.  Oh really? 

Before we delve into the statistics, I want to repeat something that I’ve often said.  The problem with the average far left leaner you’re likely to meet on the street is that they function under a reality as they’d like it to be rather than reality as it actually is.  Rather than collecting data, applying logic, then coming to a conclusion, they—the person who leans to the left because to do otherwise is uncool and closed minded, man—emotes first, thinks never.  Forget the data, ten percent just feels right.

Prior to the 2010 census, no census data was gathered regarding the sexual orientation of our population.  Sometime around 2007 or 2008, I scrounged around for some data and roughly calculated that about 2 to 3 percent of the population identified as homosexual.

Now, the 2010 census snapshot for the LGBT community shows that in the in the areas most densely populated with homosexuals, somewhere between 9 and 27 per 1000 households identify as homosexual.  A quick look at that map of the US and it is easy to see that the majority of the United States does not fall into the highest category.  Some of the more populous areas of the US do, but that observation is irrelevant because the maximum would be that 2.7% of the US population is gay.  Because population density isn’t equally distributed, it’s likely that the actual number is significantly less.

A Huffington Post article estimated that about 1.7% of the 18 and over population is gay.

Either set of data ballparks the actual percentage of homosexuals in this country at significantly less than the asinine 10%. 

I do want to point out that I simply do not care whether someone is gay or not.  What consenting adults do in the privacy of their residence (emphasis on the privacy for every orientation) is up to them.  I also support gay marriage.  If marriage is not a religious institution, then religions cannot monopolize it.  If marriage is a religious institution, than subscribers to any religion or set of beliefs from atheism to Zoroastrianism should have the right to marry whomever they choose.  I also want to point out that the percentage of homosexuals in my circle of friends is significantly higher than the national percentage.   

My beef here is not with homosexuals, just with people making baseless claims.

Teachers Unions: Friend or Foe?

Teachers unions formed for roughly the same reason that any labor union formed: to give a voice to the working individual. Though labor unions as a whole have been in decline in the US for some time now, teachers unions are staying strong. Is this a good thing?

Teachers unions purport to want to improve education in the US, but, as usual, actions speak louder than words. Teachers unions protect sexual predators, Teachers unions protect the bottom of the barrel performers. Teachers unions artificially suppress wages.

The net effect of these actions is easy to track down. The first two links show how difficult it is for schools to get rid of dangerous and/or bad teachers. In fact, a back of the envelope calculation (based on numbers from the Dance of the Lemons article) shows that it can be cheaper for schools to leave a bad teacher in place for up to 10 years than it is to attempt to fire that person. This is not isolated; consider the New York  Rubber Room fiasco.

 How can teacher unions say education is important for them yet burden school districts with legal fees and the cost of keeping such bad teachers on the employee roster and waste students’ precious academic hours?

So tick-1 is that teachers unions lead to significant waste for school districts unfortunate enough to be in such a position.

The second link begins to build the case that unions think that all teachers should be paid the same and as a result teachers’ wages are artificially suppressed. Teachers in the math and science fields are in higher demand, yet there is no pay incentive to attract people with those degrees to education. People with math and science degrees have far more potential to obtain lucrative careers elsewhere, thus a shortage.

I don’t think anyone would deny that a degree in math and science is harder to obtain that a degree in other fields. There tends to be a function of collegiate difficulty to post graduation pay. The harder degree you get (engineering, science, math) the more you get paid (engineers, doctors, pharmacists). The effect of the teachers union is that for those individuals with the more difficult degrees and where earnings potential is important (compensation important to most people) a career in education is not even a viable option.

Tick-2, then, is that teachers unions prevent education from being considered as a career for those who do well in the harder university disciplines.

 Tick-1 + Tick-2 = bad news for American students. How many poor teachers are teaching kids right now simply because the school knows it would not be cost effective to try to fire them? How many collective hours of kids’ time are being wasted?

What about all those teachers that leave? The statistic is that about 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years. I have a degree in math and went into education. The revolving door was still spinning when I left.

The overall net benefit of teachers unions goes only to those teachers who perform so poorly that they would have otherwise long since been fired.