Microsoft may be harassing youall in the same way it's started doing me, with demands that I "finish setting up a Microsoft account" by, among other things, feeding the Internet more information evildoers can use to harm me. Don't even start on the "but maybe they won't, or maybe you can fend them off" line of whine. The Internet should not be allowed to have information like home addresses, far less any "biometric data." On the Internet, your writing style should be the only way people can tell whether or not you're a dog. I'm not willing to participate in the destruction of what's made the Internet worth having; I'd rather participate in the collapse of the whole Internet craze and the return of entry-level jobs. So, will I be able to work with Linux, or will I blink out of cyberspace? Remains to be seen...
Silver came home, but then she left again. I'm still concerned that she may have been petnapped. Meanwhile, I had expected the twins Drudge and Dilbert to be adopted first, but when the time came, Drudge's independent personality worked against him. Dilbert and Diego have moved out. Drudge is still here. He seems less independent, and much more "talkative," without his brothers. He's not very social or, so far as I've seen, very intelligent, but he's a nice, gentle, not clingy but pettable, cat with a soft fluffy coat. Purrs when petted. He's no substitute for Silver.
Art
Architecture, glasswork, needlework, and stonework in old English churches:
Education
Harvard has lost all credibility by admittedly discriminating against introverts. Other universities are admittedly discriminating against Asian-American girls:
Not because Asian girls aren't a familiar sight on those campuses. They are. The problem facing Asian girls today is that, if academic achievement alone were the basis for admissions, all the big-name universities would be overrun with Asian girls. Boys, even Asian boys, would feel discriminated against when the reality would be that they're outclassed. Girls would have to date less educated boys from town. So...read the article. If people like you do something well, under today's Race Bigotry 4.0, you have to do it much better than the rest of the world do it to be allowed to do it at all.
Without discrimination--even segregation--boys will win nearly all the trophies in athletic competitions. Yes. And without discrimination--even segregation--girls will win nearly all the academic awards, and a majority of those girls will be introverts. And a disproportionate number of them, if not a majority, will be Asian, and if anyone bothers to break down the demographic studies by specific ethnicity they'll find other disproportions. Who'd have thought? People who not only grew up in, but had ancestors in, English-speaking countries tend to do better at English-speaking schools than people whose ancestors spoke other languages. Though people of Jewish and/or German descent show a higher incidence of special talent for math than other Europeans do.
There's a silver lining, though. When quotas are obvious as the first-year class enter a school, the demographic token types tend to drop out anyway. When I was at Berea, the school had four or five times as many overachievers to choose from as the campus had room for; many well qualified people, of all ethnic types, weren't chosen. Entering classes represented specific counties in specific States with a preset percentage of Black, White, and Asian students. And yes, the Asian students were without exception super achievers, probably because they had to have SAT scores a few hundred points ahead of everyone else to be considered. And plenty of White and Asian students dropped out because the academic work was meant to challenge the superachievers, or because the emotional climate on campus was unpleasant, but the disappearance of Black students from the freshman class was conspicuous. Asian girls may be unfairly denied places at the big-name universities, but the Asian girls who are admitted are still more likely than other demographic types to graduate. And be hired. And succeed.
What happens to the boys who are admitted with lower scores and poorer preparation so that the entering class looks demographically balanced? Nobody's told them that they were admitted as tokens. In fact the teachers are likely to tell them, emphatically, that they won't be allowed to stay on campus as tokens. They have to do the work. And if they had another five or ten years of life experience, or if our high schools prepared students for the possibility of going to university and having to study to prepare for lectures that begin where the books leave off, I'd guess that most of the Black boys who left Berea in such an embittered condition would have been able to do the work; they were intelligent. As things are, they're served worse than the Asian girls who didn't get into the big-name school, who can go to some public or church school and be superstars.
It feels nice and p.c. to say that demographic factors should make a difference in who gets into a big-name school, but it's not. The fair way is either to admit every student who is literate enough to fill out admission forms and sign cheques, as public universities do, or to admit the ones with the top test scores and hope the teachers can keep up with them, or--in the case of church-sponsored schools--to enforce the oldest, strictest version of the church schools on campus residence (e.g. not all Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians, but SDA campuses used to be meat-free) and let the students select themselves for willingness to follow the rules.
Will that make everybody happy? Of course not. People will still feel that someone or other didn't liiiike them because they're Black, or Jewish or Asian or Polish, or they come from the place where person had a bad experience twenty years ago, or the shape of their chins reminded somebody of the mostly forgotten day-care center where their diapers weren't changed promptly. People will still fail to get what they want. People will still feel dissatisfied when they do get what they want. To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man has long been sore, and long 'tis like to be. But hey, a Black dude was smart enough to write The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Young people will think of something.
Politics
How much should our government downsize?
(Discovered at MOTUS. Lens traces it to Scott Hughes on Instagram)
Pop Culture
Earlier in the week someone said he'd never seen or heard the President laugh. I don't know whether he laughs loudly like his last opponent, or chortles quietly, but it's hard to have this facial expression without at least chuckling:
(Discovered in a Google Images search during their first administration. Google has no explanation for the acronym in the photo itself, but traces the photo to NPR.)
No comments:
Post a Comment