I think my effort at keeping my work colleague’s child from going to Berkeley WORKED!
(In fact…she hated it! WooHoo!)
She’s leaning toward becoming an Oregon Duck (“The Quack Attack”!) or a Washington Huskie! (I think that I’ll have no problem keeping her away from Football Players and Frat Parties!)
Get THIS @anon71262119!
She said her student Tour Guide at Berkeley was kinda’ “Weird and Freaky…”!
Ha! @ Oregon, glad she’s not heading for Evergreen State College! Seriously, I think some of these protests and extremists are resulting in backlash. Mizzou has seen enrollment drop for the second year in a row now.
@ Berkeley, SoCal kids always want to head to Berkeley. My son has many, many friends there. I love some of them, but I’m happy he’s not there. NorCal kids want to head to UCLA or the other UCs down here, so we do a sort of flip. Still, lots of this kind of thing at his school on the East Coast so… yeah… Sometimes I question the wisdom of it. Exposure to the insanity is lessened if you’re not in the humanities, social sciences, or education department.
Related, Mufasa we’ve heard a lot about the MSM. I believe it was National Review who ran an article recently predicting that the lack of political diversity, or intolerant ideologies at our universities will become a big political issue in the next election. Half of the country is becoming very unhappy about it. Look at this. All those Republicans holding the purse strings in so many states.
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/07/11/the-mass-defunding-of-higher-education-thats-yet-to-come/
Pitt gave me some money, but not a great deal. I was considering not going.
I got a letter encouraging me to apply to Berkely, so I did… what the hell. Got a free ride, still didn’t take it. I figured I’d get expelled for reading the federalist papers or Friedman anyway.
The “mass defunding” article above, together with these. Looks like the next perfect populist storm to me.
Then this -
"America’s colleges and universities have finally stopped their practice of annually gouging students with price increases for tuition, fees and room and board — to the accumulated tune of a growth rate of 400 percent in the last three decades.
Labor Department statistics collected by The Wall Street Journal show that aggregate tuition increases in 2017 rose 1.9 percent in 2017. This figure accords with the overall rate of U.S. inflation.
From 1990 to 2016, college tuition costs had increased at an average rate of 6 percent annually, which was more than twice the overall inflation rate for the same period."
I have a tough time believing anyone coming from a moderate family or community would enroll at that shit show - even before last year. Hearing about how their curriculum is structured just boggles my mind. That place is a powder keg.
Oh, there’s no way I’d allow a child to apply to Evergreen State. Straight up nuts. If you haven’t seen any of the footage of the faculty and administration there, it’s chilling to watch. I’m not talking about the students.
Brief article below for people following who don’t know about some of the more recent events.
At this point, I wouldn’t pay undergrad tuition at Berkeley either. As it is, we have a kid at one of the more illiberal schools. It’s been wonderful on some levels (small classes, mentors, friends), but not so good in terms of political climate and tolerance. If we were doing it over again, we’d encourage a different school. Honestly.
There are lots of choices, and factors that go into buying an education. In no special order, but I’m thinking of class size, quality of faculty, potential for mentor relationships, quality of program for your major, reputation of school as a whole, social networks and employment for grads, social and cultural factors, peers, student life, cost $$$…). About reputation of the school, we sometimes wonder if this will begin to work in reverse, as in “we don’t want to hire graduates from that school because they are more likely to be caught up in the authoritarian and illiberal aspects of the SJW movement.” Most companies aren’t looking for workers who can organize a protest or find things to complain about or sue over. If conservatives get a bad taste in their mouth when they hear the names of some of these schools, they may choose to recruit elsewhere.
When I see The Onion doing this kind of thing, I’m really encouraged.
You are a noble soul, sir. Saving any mind from that circus is a profoundly good deed.
How attending a Poetry Slam at Swathmore really changed this Trump Supporter’s views. @SkyzykS, do you know this guy? I think he’s from your neck of the woods. 
I’m still laughing, but when I stop I’ll respond properly.
I wanted to answer that, without getting super political in the Off Topic section.
First wave. Think end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Elizabeth Stanton, Sojourner Truth. Women’s suffrage. Basic rights of equality for women. Some of the earlier writers like philosopher John Stuart Mill (who I love), and Jane Austen (who I love) set the stage, but there were many earlier influences.
Second wave. Think 1960s to 1990s.
The era of the Equal Rights Amendment. National Organization for Women formed. Protests of the Miss America Pageant as promoting objectification of women. Abortion rights and the Pill give women more control over reproduction. Expansion of dual income families. Focus on pay male and female pay gaps. Some of this wave got tied into, or sometimes eclipsed by all the other things going on in our country during that time, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.
Third Wave. Think mid-1990s to present.
Note: It’s hard for me to try to be objective here because I don’t have a lot of use for the Third wave.
Post-modernist deconstruction of gender roles. Often sees ideas of sex and gender as too simplistic, or rejects them altogether. Celebration of ambiguity, and blurring gender lines. This is simplistic, but there’s some joining with LGBT agenda issues like the idea that there are no meaningful differences between males and females, but there are 52 distinct genders. Intersectional Feminism, which is a topic in itself. I have lots of problems with it.
Some young third wave feminists embracing symbols of female sexuality like high heels and make-up that the second wave feminists often rejected, while claiming derogatory names like “bitch”, “cunt”, and “slut” as symbols of female empowerment. The Slut Walk would fall under that category, and we had Kim Kardashian defending her nude selfies as a form of female empowerment, as a third wave feminist. Sure.
The idea that America is still every bit a patriarchy, but that the misogyny has only become more subtle, so we now become victimized and offended by smaller infractions and micro-aggressions.
We have long had more female graduates at every degree level, BS, MS, PhD, but the work won’t be done until we’re equally represented in STEM fields, and have equal numbers of women in every top level position, despite the fact that women continue to choose helping professions and humanities at higher rates. The controversial idea that we now have a campus rape culture where one-quarter of women are sexually assaulted. That’s a total garbage statistic, but third wave feminists love it and continue to quote it.
My opinion here. In it’s extremes, third wave feminists believe that male and females are in a zero sum war for power. Any differences between the sexes are seen as evidence of discrimination, rather than looking to other influences. For me, there’s a lack of respect for female choices like stepping away from work to raise kids, sex differences in major choice, a preference for part-time or flexible work.
There was a Pew poll in 2013 where mothers in the US were asked about their “ideal” working arrangement. Sixty-one percent said they would prefer to work part-time or not at all. IMO third wave feminists are out of touch with that reality, or interpret it as internalized female misogyny or of women wanting the wrong things.
About the zero sum war, men are our fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, so for families to flourish, we’re all better if both men and women are flourishing. In many ways, I think Third Wave feminists are a step backward from that. I don’t relate to it at all. Really.
For some humor. I like this quote. “No one will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” - Henry Kissinger
References - The Four Waves of Feminism by Martha Rampton,
and Christina Hoff Sommers, many articles. She’s a feminist who has a lot of problems with Third Wave ideas, and I generally agree with her. She’s not Conservative in any sense really, except she rejects a lot of the ideology of the third wave.
THAT was enlightening- thx.
Women can, and usually do as they please, so my response to feminists is simply “equal us and you’ll be treated equally by us.”
Until then, it’s just a bunch of silliness IMO. My wife chose to stay home with OUR children when it was feasible but went right to work when it was necessary.
Personally, I view that time when women started working outside the home as when the American family started a decline in values. Before then, a man could earn enough to support the family, then the pool of employees increased and dragged it down to where now it almost requires a dual income family to get ahead, sometimes just to survive.
Then there’s that LBGT BS that I detest. Ideals have shifted but haven’t disappeared thank God. It seems a ton of people are only concerned about being discriminated against, or offended, or both simultaneously.
I wish the whiners would just STFU and weren’t on the airwaves really.
And in the digital age it’s way too easy for our children to get involved with the crazy movements. If I had it to do over, my kids wouldn’t have had other than network TV OR internet access until they moved out. It’s a full time job in itself to monitor that activity, and almost impossible if both parents work.
I mean hell, how many kids have been lured into something via the net? Or learned about things from premium cable chsnnels? My wife and I constantly stumble across bad stuff while doing a search for something good, and sometimes simply from a typo.
But it’s just whatever. We deal with what’s in our face today, try to make good choices, and try to plan what we can for the future.
These frickin movements like feminists, LBGT, and <insert “stereotyped group here>” are seemingly endless. And they can all sleep well at night because us honorable men are standing guard.
Sorry
But,
Viva La Barbell
Stay strong & stay safe. Those who lose wars didn’t train enough to fight one during a time of peace…
Now that was a grade A performance. Expressing those ideas while wearing a carhardt jacket and reading with bifocals… just priceless.
“It’s all the guys on the line talk about.” 
If an easily-triggered, hair-dyed, safe-space, everything-is-rape third wave feminist spent a day in a factory, she’d need to leave by 8:30 on a stretcher. #triggered so hard.
I just read the wiki page on intersectionality. Wow, thanks for that btw. That has to be the weakest mindset I’ve ever encountered. “How am I oppressed? Let me count the ways.”
It occurred to me as I was reading that ironically intersectionality is itself a “power hierarchy”. The more grievance groups you belong to the more you must understand oppression.
Old school feminism was about empowerment… This is not empowering.
Sooo funny. Glad that made you guys laugh a little bit.
Oh for sure. The Soviet’s used the concept of “class guilt” to round up and kill people in the Ukraine. Class guilt is very similar to white privilege. And the newest one is “cognitive privilege,” meaning smart people through no real action on their part are born with an advantage/ privilege. Love that one. As if we don’t all know that it’s an advantage to be smarter. Sure. You just didn’t realize that you should feel guilty, and be resented for it. It’s all about idenity politics and dividing people into victims and oppressors. Let’s talk about how Mao delt with that, and what happened to all the engineers and physicians under Mao’s regime. Those people had “cognitive privilege.” There’s nothing new under the sun. This isn’t harmless, not one bit. It’s all the old ideologies.
@Basement_Gainz, you were talking about looking up Intersectional Feminism. I’ve put this clip up before in an old thread we had about Mizzou, but it was before your time on PWI.
This is really very good. Trouble is, it gets very hard to decide who is really disadvantaged and oppressed, and who is going to decide that. You might be a kid from the trailer park, and your dad committed suicide when you were six, and your mom’s an alcoholic, but you’re white, and male so you’re privileged, and the feminists want to tear down patriarchy, so that’s too bad for you. By tearing down patriarchy, it’s really about tearing down anybody with dominance so… it starts to look a lot like Totalitarianism very quickly where we look for the groups who are to blame for any economic or class differences.
Also, for people trying to understand what Postmodern Feminism is up to. If you haven’t been to college in awhile, or don’t have college age children, you’re unlikely to know what the fuss is about. They don’t believe in any absolute truth. Everything is a social construct. And they certainly don’t believe in listening to anyone who disagrees.
Really, it’s deeper than this, and a lot more insidious, but this gives you a bit of an idea.
Gad Saad
Dawkins
Thanks for the vids. I find it incredible that the ‘post modernist’ school of thought took hold anywhere. That doesn’t strike me as scholarship in any sense of the word.
Ever notice how The Factual Feminist and @anon71262119 are never in the same place at the same time? Coincidence? You’re outed puff.
I liked her points on intersectionality basically encouraging oppressive behavior. My biggest problem with modern 3rd wave feminism is that it trivializes actual violence.
While they’re worried about clapping, body positive, men sitting on a bus and pay gaps (that don’t account for job title or hours worked) they are failing to address the plight of women who are actually abused here and abroad. Consensual sex that you regret later is not rape.
They are strangely silent on:
Human trafficking/sex trade (whole world)
FGM (Middle east)
Forced abortions and sterilization (China)
Forced marriage/second class citizenship and acid attacks (ME and India)
Continuing the tangent.
Appreciated your thoughts. Not Sommers, but that was very funny!!
I wanted to come back to this when I had a bit more time.
To clarify, I’m not talking about more moderate, reasonable Dems like my Dad, I’m talking about the far left intellectuals.
There’s a self-focused, looking inward to the third wave that we didn’t see in previous waves. You noticed that victim status and oppression is centered around the self or personal identity, rather than looking outward at solving global problems like sex trafficking or FGM. I agree. They’re far more interested in complaining about being called “sweetheart,” or “darlin’” by an man from an earlier generation, as opposed to being outraged about harms like women having acid thrown in their faces, or having one’s clitoris removed.
We can’t assume to find logic or reason with these ideologies. Really. It’s not like we don’t ever experience sexism. But for third wave feminists, being female seems to be the most important part of their identity since it allows them to define themselves as being members of an oppressed group. As things have dramatically improved, they needed to move to softer targets, or use dubious stats, to maintain their victim status.
Re: The alliance of the progressive left with Islam. Western Civilization is the enemy of both radical Islam and the far left. They particularly despise the Enlightenment, which seems ironic to me because it brought unprecedented equality, justice, open-mindedness, freedom, and opportunity to the West. But notice how they constantly accuse the West as being NONE of those things. We’re all mired in discrimination and oppression. I assume that’s why third wavers are A LOT more concerned with tearing down patriarchy at home, than with standing up for poor women who are the victims of sex trafficking in the third world.
Postmodernists deconstruct, and tear down. They often do that by using rhetoric that accuses the democratic West of being the opposite of everything it values highly. You value freedom? What a joke, oppressed groups here aren’t really free. You value opportunity? The victimized groups have none. You value fairness and rule of law? You’re a hypocrite there too, because everything is unfair and discriminatory for the oppressed groups. Where then do we find a greater abundance of all of those qualities then, if not in the US and Europe? Facts do not matter to postmodernists. Talking about progress detracts from the message that things are still really, really bad for women. It’s fueled by something different than reason.
Judeo-Christian traditions are seen as reinforcing patriarchy, so they’re bad. Capitalist economic systems are seen as vehicles for the privileged to become stronger and to trod on the poor, so bad. Whiteness is bad. Masculinity is toxic. The enemy is the democratic and economically freer West, old white men. Our college students can go through college and hear all about how the founders and Enlightenment philosophers, and Shakespeare were all bigots, etc… And not her anything about how Marxist ideologies resulted in millions of deaths. Wonder why that is?
We know there are literally thousands of schools in places like Pakistan who are teaching a version of Islam that involves anti-Western militancy, funded by the Wahabi (Saudis), and yet we act like there’s no danger, and that it’s only extremists. Why would the radical left care about anti-Western sentiment? “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It’s certainly not all Muslims by any stretch, but it’s not a few guys hiding in caves either.
You can’t say too much about any of the radical aspects without being labeled an Islamaphobe or racist, or alt-right so these supposed deeply compassionate women actually suppress speaking out against atrocities like FGM. The real motives are very telling, when they have problems even empowering the reformers and often villify women who are equivalent to the first wave feminists of Middle Eastern countries. They often label them as extremists and hateful for speaking out against FGM, or talking about the atrocities against women, sometimes hiding behind concerns about “cultural sensitivity.” There was a case in Canada recently where a judge gave a very light sentence, citing “cultural differences,” to an Iranian immigrant who was convicted of repeatedly beating and raping his wife.
Quotes about Linda Sarsour.
There are comments on her Twitter feed of the anti-Zionist sort: “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” she wrote in 2012. And, oddly, given her status as a major feminist organizer, there are more than a few that seem to make common cause with anti-feminists, like this from 2015: “You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?” She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms, insisting she is “not a real woman” and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia.
@Basement_Gainz - I apologize for the long block of text. Sometimes restating or elaborating your points, but I think it’s important for people to understand what we’re up against and to call it what it is.
Back on track. You have to wonder if this kind of thing is just giving the White Supremacists ammunition, emboldening them. Again, they focus on white privilege. I think the left is going to find out that a lot of their diversity training has been counter productive, focusing on identity groups instead of unity and the things we all have in common.
The fact that this point falls on deaf ears among the left is stunning to me. If we continue to fragment society by every available racial, social, gender, religious and other identity then we are left with a zero sum game that leads to civil strife if not civil war. That said, there is a side of me that is not convinced it’s missed so much as an intentional and methodical destruction of democracy.