Monday, January 02, 2006

Stay Dumb

Interesting set of comments going on at Althouse. Ann herself puts her finger on an annoying tendency in the reporting of much modern research:

Let me tie this to my usual point that whatever is discovered to be true of the female is portrayed as superior. Here, we see characteristics discovered in the male portrayed as a deficiency in "noncognitive skills." But isn't this because the scientists are defining "noncognitive skills" to fit what they find to be true of girls? Once could just as well spin what the boys seem to have as "noncognitive skill." You can easily translate Jacob's diagnosis into a positive one for the boys: Boys have wide-ranging, active interests and the capacity to deftly shift from one area of interest to the next. They resist becoming bogged down in details and meaningless exercises and hold fast to their independence. They are not subservient and are straightforward in their criticisms of authority figures.
Exactly.

Twenty years ago the femiloons were stamping their little feet over supposedly pervasive - yet completely unverifiable - bias against girls in the classroom. Now, there's no need to retreat into voodoo science to find evidence of a system biased against one gender. So what say the soi dissant proponents of 'sexual equality' now ?

Of course, this is a common theme where the femiloons are concerned. As Laban hints at, their current doctrine on prostitution is the exact mirror image of that of the Victorians. Or consider how the courts deal with child custody cases ? Apparently, there are no differences between genders, except women are better.

Incidentally, this feeds into something Lord Snooty was babbling about last week. The Wothless One professed to be worried by the alleged gap in wages between men and women. Leaving aside minor points (like, he was talking rubbish), this takes us back to AA's point: how come girls doing well at school means boys are STOOPID, but boys earning more in work means that every business in the country is in a dark conspiracy to overpay men ?

It's that thing again, the metacontext. Sure, some young lad may have a good knowledge of, say, chemistry, but he’s being assessed not only on his ability in that particular subject, but also on a bunch of overarching criteria that, wouldcha’believe it, just happen to favour girlies. No matter how well he knows his nitrates, the dice are loaded against him. Ambitious young boys find themselves faced with a horrible dilemma: try to fit in with a system even at the expense of being forced to act in a way totally alien to their nature, or drop out and use their talents somewhere with a more level playing field.

It's our old friend Gramsci again, and the L3 obsession with dividing the world into the oppressed and the oppressors. Girls are victims and boys are bad, and the fact that Joanne ends up earning less than John proves the company is secretly discriminating against half the workforce. A-huh.

The L3 have presided over the perversion of our educational system into something that overtly discriminates against half their customer base. Not only are boys discrimated against in the marking criteria, they're not even allowed to act like boys. Hell, the L3 keep yapping about discrimination against women in education, but I'd like to know when exactly female students faced anything equivalent to the massive prescribing of Ritalin to modern boys. Say what you like about Lady Thatcher, but at least she didn't want to turn young kids into zombies. That took the rise of Liberalism - just something to be aware of next time someone mentions how nasty Conservatives are.

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