Sort of political: Remind me why we are paying for these people's education?

It was about the worst case I have seen in recent years of bad ad placement. The ad on the bus was from the Ontario Federation of Students and it said that "Education is a right". By which they meant post secondary education.

What made it bad placement? The fact that the bus was fully of drunken, howling, destructive university students. One of whom, a girl in a torn singlet and nothing else, had passed out. (Except for a moment when she roused herself, looked out the window and gave someone the finger. I couldn't see anyone in the bagel shop she gave the finger to looking our way so she was either a) cursing a former employer or b) angry at the pink elephants running alongside the bus.)

It was ten o'clock in the morning. They'd gotten hammered at Saint Patrick's Day breakfasts. The old rule was no drinks before the sun crosses the yardarm—getting so hammered you lose consciousness by ten in the morning is quite an achievement.

Usually the argument for funding education is that these young people represent our future. Living next to a university and seeing students every day, the thought that this is my future makes me shudder. (At least they didn't riot and throw bottles at police here as students did elsewhere.)

By the way, anyone else notice that having girls become a majority on university and college campuses hasn't exactly improved things?

On that subject, approximately 70 percent of current students will be graduating (assuming they graduate) in fields where there is little employment opportunity. That has actually gotten worse as the number of women at university has increased. The vast majority of that 70 percent are women. And it has gotten worse for a very simple reason: the fields that do offer reasonable employment opportunities require mathematics and women tend to either not pick degrees with a mathematics requirement or tend to drop out of such programs.

If you'll permit a further digression, most people who graduate with STEM degrees end up in jobs or eventually move into jobs that don't actually require the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math skills they get at university. So why are these degrees so useful? Because it's hard to inflate grades in these fields because they require objectively measurable skills so the related degrees actually provide a reasonable measure of the student's intelligence and work habits. A student with straight As in Anthropology, on the other hand, is just as likely to be nice, easily malleable and responsive to her professor's attempts to indoctrinate her into their political views but not very smart as anything else. Employers know this.

CBC reporter Kady O'Malley tweeted on Sunday that the walk of shame the next day was something else. It's one thing to be going home in the same clothes you wore to the dance club the night before and another thing altogether to be going home wearing "Saint Paddy's" gear when it's no longer Saint Patrick's Day. One combo I saw on a hung-over girl climbing on the bus at seven AM featured skin tight green running shorts with panty-hose and sky-high heels (a bizarre combination that seems to very popular this spring) and a tank top that with "Kiss me I'm Irish" only the "Kiss" has been crossed out and replaced with another suggestion of what you could, and someone obviously did, do to her.

Final digression: I found myself wondering if this sort of phenomenon isn't related to the hypergamy issue. If women already outnumber men on campus and if being seen as too successful further hurts women's chances to get a hook up (never mind a date), then one possible solution is to dress and behave in a way that reassures every man that you are just a stupid ____.

But, to finally get back to the point, why are we funding this? Yes, you can read about wild behaviour by young men at universities going all the way back to the middle ages but their education wasn't paid for by the taxpayer. Do we really need to be giving young people who could be learning on the job a four year vacation from reality so they can behave like irresponsible jerks on the grounds that this will make them better citizens? Our future?

This needs to stop.

The obligatory Fifty Shades of Grey comment

There are three lessons here.

The first lesson is that women are more driven by shame than men are. This book took off because of e-readers. It's porn, by the way, and it is selling in huge numbers to women. But, and this is the really important part, the vast majority of copies sold are for e-readers.

The difference between men and women is not that women aren't any less enthusiastic about getting dirty than men are. What a woman doesn't like is the thought that the everyone else on the bus knows she is getting hot and wet reading porn. Actually doing it doesn't bother her at all.

The second lesson is that a lot of women are turned on by the idea of being dominated sexually. Like or hate it, and I know a lot of people hate it, the evidence is overwhelming. Every single study ever done of women's sexual fantasies confirms this. Which is not to say that every woman wants to actually do it but the percentage of women who get turned on by the thought is probably about the same as the percentage of men who like watching professional sports.

The final lesson is that, to her eternal credit, author E.L James spells "grey" the better way.

"Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?"

This was referenced on Althouse where today's theme is happiness. The question was originally asked of John Tierney over at a blog called The Happiness Project. Tierney's answer is a good one:

Years ago, when I was researching an article on research into stress, one social scientist passed on a simple tip: “At some point every day, you have to say, ‘No more work.’” No matter how many tasks remain undone, you have to relax at some point and enjoy the evening. 

My own was something I found in article in Esquire in the early 1990s about stress. The line that really helped me was this:

Stress isn't the car that cuts you off on the highway, it's your reaction to it.

A little light culture

As the complacent chronicler of cathedral cities and mildly erring parsons, Trollope has charmed and repelled modern readers in about equal numbers.

That bit of condescending twaddle is the way the blurb on the Penguin edition of The Last Chronicle of Barset begins. But not to worry because modern academics have to come to thee rescue and found a "darker" side:

In recent years critics have discovered in his later novels a gloomier, more profound, less comfortable Trollope hitherto neglected by his most ardent admirers.

Notice the values being pushed here: happy people are complacent whereas gloomy people are profound. I've never seen any evidence of this in real life. Gloomy people actually tend to be bores because they keep getting gloomy about the same small set of complaints over and over again. (The most untrue sentence ever written is Tolstoy's canard about happy families.) Happy people, on the other hand, live varied and interesting lives. And I've never seen ordinary middle class people half as smug and complacent as your typical intellectual. As exhibit one, I give the two sentences above and put it to you that only a very complacent person indeed could write such silly crap and only a very smug person would so casually assume that all those "ardent admirers" weren't smart enough to spot the gloomy profundity that only "critics" can help us find.

In a similar vein let me tell you about the conversation I overheard yesterday on the bus. The bus was packed and everyone standing cheek by jowl (that turns out to be an important detail). A couple of graduate students were discussing some social experiments they had students doing. This experiments required the students to "violate" what the two called "social norms".

One of the two was concerned they might have to modify the experiment, however, because some of the ordinary citizens who were the unwitting subjects of these experiments had reacted badly to some of the things they had been subjected to. What sorts of things you ask? Well, some of the students had been asked to cut into lines ahead of people and others had been walking right up to people and standing very close to them and "invading their personals space". It seems some people took this badly and actually, imagine this, criticized the students for what they were doing and suggested the might act so as to stop them doing what they were doing.

Again, notice the moral values being pushed here. Students at universities are being taught that being a rude and inconsiderate jerk is just "violating social norms".

And it's not just stupid cultural relativism. There is a complete inability to do even the most basic critical thinking that goes along with it. The grad student went on to say that other cultures weren't so touchy about personal space as we were. She particularly seemed to think that Europeans were better about this than we are. This is where I had to resist pointing out that we were crowded onto this bus and that no one was complaining even though everyone was standing so close to everyone else that we were all in physical contact, suggesting that North Americans aren't quite so uptight about this as she thought and that perhaps our notions of personal space are context specific; that maybe people who live in crowded cities are more tolerant of others standing close to them in places where everyone realizes it is inevitable and less so in places where there is lots of room. I wonder for example, what would happen if you went to rural Europe or rural Africa and went and stood right close to people?

Actually, I don't wonder at all—they'd take it badly—for this isn't a social norm at all but a universal value.

This sort of stuff is what you're paying thousands of dollars for your kids to learn folks.They are learning to be so wrapped up in theory that they cannot see what they are actually experiencing.

One related note from else where. James Taranto caught a good bit of nonsense yesterday. Here is the first quote from Roseann Lake writing in Salon who is discussing how hard it is for university-educated women in China to get married:

In China, there's a deep-seated tradition of marriage hypergamy which mandates that a woman must marry up. 

Notice it's a "deep-seated tradition". That means there is nothing natural about this, it's just a cultural value that can be changed. Now read the second quote, which we have discussed before, Stephanie Coontz discussing how difficult it is for university-educated women in the USA to get married:

 From 1940 to the mid-1970s, the tendency for men to marry down educationally became more pronounced and the cultural ideal of hypergamy — that women must marry up — became more insistent. 

Notice that this also is merely a cultural "ideal", and one that should be changed, in Coontz's view. I'll let Taranto field this one:

What are the odds that two so different cultures would somehow develop a "tradition" or "ideal" that is so similar?

Good question. Particularly as you also find hypergamy in Africa, South America, Iceland even, as Taranto notes in answering his own questions, among other species. It's not a cultural trait at all. It's an absolute certainty that human beings will react this way. You know that woman with multiple degrees and still single in her late twenties and early thirties? Be gentle with her because she is probably going to end up single. She and whole lot of other women.

They'll probably also be poorer, a lot less happy and lonelier than they figured too. But at least she won't be smug and complacent like those people who dare to like Anthony Trollope's mildly erring parsons. 

White girl singers who sound black

There is a long tradition of these things. You can, if you are so inclined (I'm not) get upset about this on the grounds of racial injustice. If you do, however, blame the audience not the singers. That these artists got to sound the way they did was a labour of love.

Here are some examples beginning in the 1950s and moving forward to the present day.

The British Isles crank out a fair number of these women. Here is Ottillee Patterson from Ireland back in the 1950s:



Dusty Sprinfield from the 1960s, also Irish: her real name was Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien.




Here is Lisa Stansfield from the 1990s



And here, of course, is the badly over-exposed Adele



And one more not from Britain, here is Madeleine Peyroux from Athens, Georgia



I think there are two things to note here.

The first has often been noted and that is that there is a particular set of role models here. None of these women started out wanting to sound "black" but rather were heavily influenced by particular singers who were black. Ottillee Patterson obviously listened to a lot of Bessie Smith, Dusty Springfield, Amy Winehouse and Adele learned from the Stax-Memphis soul singers and Madeleine Peyroux has listened to a whole lot of  Billie Holiday.

Compare that with Celine Dion who was obviously heavily influenced by Whitney Houston but doesn't sound at all black.

The second point flows from the first and it is that the "black" sound isn't actually black. It's entirely a matter technique, a performance style. It's something anyone of any race can learn to do provided they have talent. Its origins are from a particular set of black subcultures but these things can now belong to anybody who wants them.

Manly Thor's Day Special: The uses and misuses of hypcrisy

This wasn't meant to be hypocrites week but it's worked out that way. In that light, I'd like to take a look at a kind of argument that is peculiarly modern that uses hypocrites—that is to say it uses the hypocrisy of others—to make a point. It's not hard to come up with an example, it is a far too common move in modern argumentation, but I thought I'd use an example from James Joyce.

Here is the set up. A wild argument about Parnell has broken out during Christmas dinner at the Dedalus household. On one side are the adult males of the family who believe the church's condemnation of Parnell when his adultery became known robbed Ireland of it's great chance for freedom. On the other side is Stephen's Aunt Dante Riordan who believes the church did right in condemning immorality and if that had unfortunate political circumstances, tough. In the bit I cite here, young Stephen is thinking about the argument he has just heard:

But why then was he [Stephen's uncle] against the priests? Because Dante must be right then. But he had heard his father say that she was a spoiled nun and that she had come out of the convent in the Alleghanies when her brother had got money from the savages for the trinkets and the chainies. Perhaps that made her severe against Parnell. And she did not like him to play with Eileen because Eileen was protestant ...

You get a picture of Dante here that makes you want to dismiss her side of the argument.

That is, as I say, a favourite move in modern moral argument. The television show M*A*S*H pulled this trick hundreds of times (that isn't hyperbole). The solution was never that one side was shown to be right and the other side wrong but that each and every person who opposed Hawkeye on a moral point turned out to be a hypocrite.

That this is a stupid way to make moral evaluations is easily shown. Ask yourself two simple questions: 1) Do you think there were other people in Ireland who took the church's side who were not hypocrites? and 2) Do you think there were other people in Ireland who took Parnell's side who were hypocrites? And the answer is "Yes, of course there were," in both cases. That the person who preaches a moral view might be a hypocrite proves nothing at all.

The fact that someone is a hypocrite doesn't preclude the possibility of their being right and the fact that someone is a pillar of integrity doesn't preclude the possibility of their being wrong. And we might further ask, who isn't a hypocrite?


In addition to handling this sort of moral argument with suspicion, we should be doubly worried when we see this sort of thing in a work of fiction because the Author has set it up this way; James Joyce's heavy thumb is on the moral scale.





(In the case of Dante Riordan, we might also wonder that Joyce has given her the name of the medieval poet who wrote a great vision of hell and its torments. Why? Because in a section to come in that book young Stephen is going visit prostitutes and then be confronted by a Dante-esque vision of hell during a religious retreat. How is he going to get out of that one? Answer: I don't know yet as I'm at the exact half-way point of the book and the last time I read it was in high school because Sr. Dodd assigned it and I can't remember much about it now. I'll keep you posted.)

What lying hypocrites look like Pt2

Read it and weep:

REJECTED! What the NY Times WON'T Run: Counter-Jihad Facts What the NY Times Will Run: Anti-Catholic Smear Ads

Part one is here.