On college campuses, a shortage of [virtue]

February 6th, 2010 by Jim

The new math on campus

Oh go fuck yourselves. According to this article, upon finishing high school more men have to work, fight wars, go to prison or insane asylums, or do something of actual value to society at an engineering school, leaving women in the majority at college, where they have to…put out at school…or else they find they can’t put out…what is the complaint again? “Wah, wah. I don’t have a boyfriend.” I suppose that some day women will make up a majority of corporate executives, and we’ll have to hear about their dating problems, too.

Let’s go through the article and remark upon some of the more infuriating statements.

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Fuck you, Jane. I wish they had printed your picture and your application essay.

But at some schools, efforts to balance the numbers have been met with complaints that less-qualified men are being admitted over more-qualified women.

Seriously? Are you serious? As usual, the Times’ editor-in-charge-of-irony is asleep at the job. Let’s play with this sentence thus: “Efforts to balance the numbers have been met with complaints that less-qualified [blacks] are being admitted over more-qualified [whites].” Remember also that when the Times invokes the passive voice (”have been met with complaints”) they’re talking about themselves. Apparently affirmative action is a moral imperative when it helps the right people, but an unconscionable blow to fairness when white men are involved. Fuck you guys.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Your “friends”, eh? I get it. Ms. Lynch, your “friends” are whores. What do you want me to do about it?

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

Ms. Lynch, your “friends” are children who apparently can’t make decisions for themselves in the face of “pressure.” Tell them to grow up.

“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” [Kathleen Bogle, a woman and a sociologist] wrote. “This results in more casual hook-up encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.”

Bogle seems to be assuming many things here that I do not take for granted, but we’ll move on for now.

Women on gender-imbalanced campuses are paying a social price for success and, to a degree, are being victimized by men precisely because they have outperformed them, Professor Campbell said.

I see: women are being “victimized” by men while at the same time complaining that there are too few of them to go around.

“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

This establishes what, exactly? That if groups of “women” dress and act like sluts they’ll be treated that way? That sounds like a pretty good lesson, actually.

At colleges in big cities, women do have more options. “By my sophomore year, I just had the feeling that there is nobody in this school that I could date,” said Ashley Crisostomo, a senior at Fordham University in New York, which is 55 percent female. She has tended to date older professionals in the city.

I’m also amused by the Times’ insistence on the word “women” (outside of direct quotations), despite the description’s generally unwarranted connotation of maturity or adulthood. The diction employed does not afford “guys” this measure of dignity, deserved or not.

But in a classic college town, the social life is usually limited to fraternity parties, local bars or coffeehouses. And college men — not usually known for their debonair ways — can be particularly unmannerly when the numbers are in their favor.

“A lot of guys know that they can go out and put minimal effort into their appearance and not treat girls to drinks or flatter them, and girls will still flirt with them,” said Felicite Fallon, a senior at Florida State University, which is 56 percent female.

What’s with this gratuitous jab: “college men — not usually known for their debonair ways…” Is this in contrast with the Audrey Hepburns that comprise the sorority rolls? Give me a break. Also please excuse me while I weep over Ms. Fallon’s indignity—talking to a man who hasn’t seen fit to bestow booze or flattery on her.

Girls, shut the fuck up and hit the books. Stop dressing like prostitutes and stop doing whatever your vaginas tell you to from moment to moment. If some of you can’t get a date in college, all the better. Maybe you’ll actually learn something at school (though given what they “teach” there I wouldn’t count on it) that will interest a genuine adult you meet after you graduate. Guys, find the girls quoted in this article and take them for whatever they’re worth. Oh and don’t be like this pussy:

Indeed, there are a fair number of Mr. Lonelyhearts on campus. “Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status,” said Patrick Hooper, a Georgia senior. “It’s the same as high school, but the women are even more enchanting and beautiful.”

Any wonder he’s not getting any?

And me too

January 31st, 2010 by Jim

Founded in 1901, Brooklyn Law School was the first law school on Long Island. Brooklyn Law School continues provide legal education to minorities, women, and immigrants.

That’s the blurb introducing the Brooklyn Law School Library Facebook page. Incidentally, Brooklyn Law School also continues to provide legal education to white citizen males, though I guess that’s nothing to brag about.

Bats in the belfry

January 26th, 2010 by Jim

From the comments at this Marginal Revolution post:

“More dead white men economics, even in a progressive musical format. Why not include the economics of women of color, Latinos, and the transgendered community?”

Hmm. Economics of color. What could that be? Well, maybe there’s something peculiar to the social sciences that renders the quotation sensible. I mean, the kooks would never offer a feminist critique of physics, would they? Ahhh.

Shut up or else

January 25th, 2010 by Jim

Robin Hanson commenting on a Times article.
I happened to read the same article and think the same think. I’m sick of hearing that we could all get along if only I would change my views.

Laptops and the fall of the Times

January 24th, 2010 by Jim

Also absent from these discussion [about the fall of print media] are the working poor. If you want to know why the internet is not yet the future prototype of journalism, it’s because not everyone has the disposable income to purchase laptops and Kindles, and a significant number of people also lack the free time to chill out at the local Starbucks, reflecting on the day’s news.

Lots of problems in this one. First of all, what working poor? As Mike O’Connell likes to say, if you’re working, you’re not poor (at least in America), the less provocative converse being true as well, that if you’re poor in America, it’s probably because, for one reason or another, you’re not working.

But never mind that for now. I dispute that “not everyone” can afford a laptop. Laptops are very inexpensive. They are cheaper than dishwashers, cheaper than plane tickets to anyplace cool, cheaper than what the quoted columnist pays for a dinner date. They are cheaper, in fact, than daily subscriptions to newspapers. I therefore have no doubt that the fall of print and the rise digital will benefit the lower classes. This is just one application of the general principle that the benefits of technological and social progress redound disproportionately to those in the lower end of the nominal income distribution—a principle that seems beyond liberal comprehension.

I think there’s also this sort of fallacy, on the part of some middle-aged people especially, that people avail themselves of consumer goods in the same order in which they were made available historically, which explains my mother’s surprise that, say, my roommates in Hungary, owned computers but did the laundry by hand, or that many in Africa have mobile phones but not running water.

What else. About the only insightful point David Brooks has ever made is that most of the people in America who “lack the free time to chill out at the local Starbucks” are very wealthy and lack that time because they’re working. Very few of us fail to “reflect on the day’s news” because we are chained to our looms.

Bankers should

January 24th, 2010 by Jim

Editorial: Bankers’ Sense of Entitlement

Bankers should stop trying to avoid paying a fee to the government for its efforts to save the economy from their reckless behavior.

“Bankers should roll over and take it while we steal from them.”

Great business plan, assholes. No wonder your company is going under (see third paragraph especially).

Get…out of the kitchen?

January 24th, 2010 by Jim

Op-Ed Contributor – My So-Called Wife – NYTimes.com

And she’s a divorcée…who could have guessed?

Haiti

January 23rd, 2010 by Jim

This is what I’ve been wondering since the whole thing started, and especially since reading this and failing to experience what I imagine was the expected level of sympathy.

Ok, that second link doesn’t work because I couldn’t find the article again. It was about some people in New York with ties to Haiti and some of the appropriate skills who were complaining because the military/government aid missions were making it difficult for them to get down there and render their services. I was thinking, first, looks like government doesn’t even like competition in giving shit away, and second, that, won’t these people need to eat food and drink water once they’re down there, thus by definition making the most serious problem facing the population worse? I rather think we should just land planes there, leave crates of food, water, and fuel on the tarmac, and fly back for more, and not humiliate them further by our bureaucratic fetishes.

Robots go home

January 16th, 2010 by Jim

From the electronic documentation for wget, a GNU utility for “non-interactive download of files from the Web”:

Wget can follow links in HTML and XHTML pages and create local versions of remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site. This is sometimes referred to as “recursive downloading.” While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard.

I love coming across funny shit like this in the docs. Goddamned robots, stealing our jobs! Bully for the Robot Exclusion Standard.

If you think more laws will help you are probably wrong

January 12th, 2010 by Jim

Don’t Carry Condoms in D.C. — You Could Be Charged With Prostitution | Women’s Rights | Change.org

Jist of this article is that police in the District of Columbia have apparently declared “Prostitution Free Zones” and that they are arresting women found carrying three or more condoms.

The next paragraph focuses on the harm that this practice will do to sex workers. It accurately observes that the District’s enforcement practices will discourage prostitutes from carrying condoms, contributing to the “rampant problem with HIV/AIDS.” This has always been strange to me, the rhetorical practice of focusing on the secondary harm a law will do to those who continue to violate it. All laws make life harder on those who break them. One way hookers and johns could protect themselves from these consequences would be to…follow the law. The focus should be on what you might call the primary harm the law does to parties interested in breaking it. I should probably write this up in a separate post with some numerical examples. Let’s move on.

Anyway, so far so good. At this point in the article I agree that the policing policy discussed is stupid, and that so is prohibiting prostitution. But then there’s this: “If you want to criminalize something, stick to pimping[.]” What this shows is that liberals actually think whoring is more virtuous than entrepreneurship. Their knee-jerk criminalize-anything-I-don’t-like attitude runs counter to their expressed interest in the safety and well-being of prostitutes: in a world of legal prostitution, pimps would be more important than ever as guarantors of prostitute safety and health. But, that would have taken more than five seconds of thought and required the author to imagine that the government is not the sole or even the best guarantor of our health and safety, so this author shoots himself right in the foot, and nary a reader of his is likely to catch it.

Nice work, liberals, missing the point again. Freedom is the answer; I hope you come around some day.