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.

California Law to Teach Homosexual Contributions

I was watching a recent episode of Bill Maher. Someone mentioned this bill then mentioned Alan Turing who as both a math guy and computer geek I’ve admired for some time. I had no idea that Turing was gay. Somehow, maybe I’m not as enlightened as these bill writers, his sexuality never mattered to me.

Outside of his contribution to math and computers, I knew nothing of his biography. It’s quite sad and I’m very sorry that he had to go through the torment that led to his suicide, but when studying his contributions to cryptology and computers, his sexuality is irrelevant. Hell, his fucking gender is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.

Now granted, this bill is for elementary and high school social studies where the biography of the individual is more relevant, but this kind of pandering seems condescending to me. “Wow, look what Turing was able to accomplish despite his affinity for cock.”

Can’t we just educate people that they are not defined by their sexuality? I can see absolutely no conceivable way that a man’s desire to be on the receiving end of a good ol’ ass fuck would make him a better or worse person, a smarter or dumber person. So trying to educate people on the contributions of various minority groups is really missing the point.

A person need not be defined by his sexuality, nationality, or pigmentality (hmm…pigment-ality not pig-mentality). What I’ve found is that when a person is defined by such things stereotypes crop up. When you have a GAY-person not a PERSON who also happens to be attracted to the same gender, you have a person who is out of balance. When you have a BLACK-person, not a PERSON who just happens to be black, you have a person who is out of balance. WHITE-people join the KKK. People who just happen to white lead lives that contribute in some way to family and society. GAY people are in your face flamboyant and enjoy parading their sexuality around to the discomfort of others. People who just happen to be gay live normal lives where they go home to a significant other that they deserve to be married to and they understand that over-the-top sexuality is unpleasant on anyone. Over-the-top straight will get your ass arrested. It is unacceptable to walk around slapping ass and grabbing tit.

I don’t have any animosity for people who just happen to be gay, black, Hispanic, Arabic, Muslim, Christian, Japanese, Native to the Land we call America, etc. However, I get really tired, really quickly, of GAY people, BLACK people, HISPANIC people, etc.

All these lines in the sand do is divide us that much more.

Relationship troubles: It’s MOSTLY his fault

Here’s a b.s. book you shouldn’t bother reading unless you’re in the mood to get pissed: “It’s (MOSTLY) His Fault: For the Women Who Are Fed Up and the Men Who Love Them”. Isn’t that just a great title? Regardless of whatever kind of relationship problems you are having, the title suggests, you can just go right ahead and place most of the blame on him, you’ve probably been doing that anyway, so here is a book that will commiserate with you.

I haven’t made it through the entire book, but I’ll try to come back to it as I feel I can stomach more of its nonsense. I’ll be fair. If the author makes what I feel is a good point, I’ll be sure to highlight it. At the moment, I’m not expecting much.

After ignoring a quote by Michael Moore and another quote that only seems superficially relevant, I read the first couple of paragraphs and was taken aback.

“After thirty-five years of marriage and thirty years of being a therapist and marriage counselor, I’ve come to three major conclusions:
First, the notion that men and women are equally responsible for the problems in marriage is—to use one of my father’s favorite expressions—a bunch of crap. Mostly it’s the men. Mostly it’s us husbands. Mostly it’s our fault.
This is not male-bashing. Don’t even think about going there. That’s not what this is at all. Nobody needs to get bashed, and nobody needs to be bad here. All we men need to do is own up to the fact that we sometimes act like jerks in our marriages, and think and say and do things that create disconnection rather than connection with our wives, and we need to change.”

After three paragraphs, I too have come to some conclusions. First, this book was written either by a mangina or the wife of a mangina. Second, this man is probably a terrible marriage counselor; he begins with a bias toward the male. Third, don’t expect too much in the way of hard evidence or sound logic, we’ve boldly stepped into the “The Emotion Zone”.

The title summarizes the rest of the books introduction. Paragraph after paragraph tries to slam home the point that it is MOSTLY the man’s fault. He attempts to save a what little face he has by saying women aren’t perfect, but follows that up with a reiteration of his titular thesis; it’s men’s fault, men’s fault, men’s fault.

In addition to that, he urges men that the key to a happy marriage is to kowtow to a woman’s version of what a relationship is. I see where he is going with this whether he’d admit it or not, he is saying if you want a happy relationship, you’d better do everything in your power to make that bitch happy, else your life is gonna be miserable, or the prime time television version “Happy wife, happy life” (a phrase I’m sick of hearing).

Men and women are different. Furthermore, men are different from each other just as women are different from each other, yet there are some somewhat standard consistencies among the sexes. That is, men will tend to behave in one way and women will tend to behave in another. That’s just generally true, even where relationships are concerned.

So, the only way to come to the conclusion that it is MOSTLY the man’s fault is to say that the female relationship paradigm is the correct paradigm. That’s such pitifully weak thinking it hardly necessitates an analogy, but since I both think in and love analogies, here we go… that’s like saying the problem with women drivers is that they don’t drive more like men.

Why are a woman’s expectations of a relationship the correct expectations, the correct model? We’re not told, just that they know how and men don’t.

Isn’t the correct relationship model whatever works for that couple? I’m not saying that the correct model is what SEEMS to work, I’m saying what works. It’s not fair for a woman to have to feel unloved but pretend to be cold and distant just to make the relationship work. What I’m saying is if he needs space and distance and his cave and she needs affection and attention then that couple needs to work out a compromise. Saying that he is mostly to blame is flat ridiculosity (I coined a word, feel free to use it). It would be no different than saying that it’s MOSTLY her fault for needing so much damn attention all the time, that the relationship would be great if she’d stop nagging him.

Here is my relationship advice. Step one, stop listening to Oprah and Dr. Phil. Step two, communicate openly and honestly. Sometimes it’s hard to do, sometimes it’s hard to hear. Then truly listen. If you are in a relationship and you don’t want to communicate (especially if you are a guy) then ask yourself why you are in a relationship to begin with.