Gucci Little Piggy

Kicking. Squealing.

Links

1.  At the Chronicle of Higher Education, a story about a woman who holds a Ph.D. who is on food stamps on Medicaid.  She blames the State’s underfunding of education for her lack of a well-paying, tenure-track job.  She was idealistic in her pursuit of, what…Medieval Studies.

2.  The affect of sex ratio on female student’s career ambitions.

3.  Restaurants push harder to track server staff and inventory using sales metrics.

4.  A 2009 article by John McWhorter on Black Studies programs:  “The answer common in such departments is that the principle mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present.”

5.  A New York Times op-ed titled “Why Black Women are Fat.”

6.  Pat Buchanan’s entire interview on the Hoover Institute’s Uncommon Knowledge.

 

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11 Responses to Links

  1. Saint Louis 05/07/2012 at 1:28 pm

    From the NYT article:

    “…I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book ‘The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.’ Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman’s body ‘functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.’ By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.”

    So black women are fat to make some kind of political statement?! Only someone really stupid would make a political statement that entails getting diabetes. Oh wait…

    And how do people write crap like this with a straight face? Maybe that’s what Black Studies is all about; teaching you how to say and write the most patently ridiculous garbage without laughing.

  2. Saint Louis 05/07/2012 at 1:33 pm

    To be fair, the author of the article ends up resolving to lose weight, but that doesn’t change anything Miss Shaw wrote in her book.

  3. Matt Strictland 05/07/2012 at 1:55 pm

    re: the medieval studies girl

    This is probably the most liberal thing anyone will see from me but a good sign of social and economic health is that a society can find decent jobs for people with useless degrees. This implies a surplus of wealth and a certain amount of tolerant curiosity.

    These so long as cultural Marxism is kept at bay and colleges do their part (limiting entrance to such programs) provides some social benefit in terms of learning and furthering the culture.

    However as our culture has been debased and our economy and a good chunk of the political apparatus is controlled by the rich , such degrees are largely useless.

  4. brian 05/07/2012 at 2:42 pm

    Black men are not very particular and actually prefer a little meat on their women (esp the derriere), so there’s little incentive for black women to slim down.

  5. Camlost 05/07/2012 at 2:48 pm

    I blame the chubby chaser Obsidian for the obesity epidemic in black women. He’s got them thinking they’re sexy…

  6. SOBL1 05/07/2012 at 4:46 pm

    The fat black women NY Times article was hilarious because I’ve heard my female black coworkers say the same thing about losing weight. Their men give them this, “don’t lose the jit” talk. I guess Diabetes is not enough to pull a black man away from more cushion.

    Food stamps really lost their stigma once they went to the credit card.

  7. Master Po 05/07/2012 at 5:22 pm

    re: PJB… we should be so lucky to have Bollywood take over Hollywood.

  8. totalesturns 05/07/2012 at 6:04 pm

    When I opened that “adjuncts on food stamps” story, I expected to read about thirty-year-old hipsters who had gone straight to PhD out of undergrad without a detour into the real world. But these are middle-aged adults who went back to grad school in their thirties or forties. And yet they didn’t do even the most basic due diligence about the job market! It’s not exactly a secret that there are no tenure-track jobs in the humanities. There haven’t been for twenty years.

    Buried in the middle of the article is the statistic that only 360k advanced degree holders, out of 22 million, receive public assistance. Yeah, they (and their kids) are getting a rough break, but come on. How many of those 360k are STEM degrees?

    Someone in the alt-right sphere observed a while back that the OWS “I am the 99 percent” photoblog consists mainly of people like these. Whether out of conviction or career expedience, they’ve spent a decade or more swallowing their common sense and mastering the postmodern/multicult jargon of contemporary humanities academia. They expected that the system would reward their hard work with a steady if not lucrative position in academia, government or the nonprofit sector. But now the well of patronage is drying up. (Well, mostly. Note the one interviewee who did land a tenure-track job.)

    Reactionaries can play “spot the missing babydaddy” in the life stories of the two female professors. (But my Women’s Studies thesis advisor said I could have it all!) And meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, China is cutting funding for majors that don’t produce employable graduates.

  9. totalesturns 05/07/2012 at 6:19 pm

    I do feel sorry for the woman in the picture. With her sloppy tats and unfashionable perm, she never really had a shot at making it into the SWPL charmed circle of tenure-track academics. My guess is that she was a bright-but-plain girl from a working or lower-middle-class family who read a lot of fantasy novels or historical romances growing up. From there to Medieval Studies is an easy step. (The article says she grew up “upper-middle class,” but in a Montana context that might not mean as much as she thinks it does.)

  10. jz 05/07/2012 at 8:30 pm

    I listened to the Buchanan interview. He is able to chronicle our Western demise objectively without the dour, depressive aftertaste.

    More depressives:
    1) illegal aliens are required by the IRS to report income and pay taxes.
    2) IRS creates ITIN (individual tax ID number) for illegals.
    3) illegals use ITIN to fraudulently scam for Child Tax Credit, netting $4 billion/yr. back to their illegal pockets.
    http://www.wthr.com/story/17798210/tax-loophole-costs-billions

    http://www.irs.gov/faqs/faq/0,,id=199782,00.html

    http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=96287,00.html

  11. Gorbachev 05/08/2012 at 1:02 am

    McWhorter is a genius. Widely loathed, but a genius nonetheless.

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