posted
Well, she does have a PhD, and is certified as a marriage counsellor. From Wikipedia:
quote:She received a bachelor's degree from Stony Brook University. Moving to Columbia University for graduate studies, she earned a Master's and Ph.D. in physiology in 1974. Her doctoral thesis was on the effects of insulin in rats. After she began dispensing personal advice on the radio, she obtained training and certification in marriage and family counseling from the University of Southern California, and a therapist's license from the State of California. In addition, she opened up a part-time practice as a marriage and family counselor.
As I mentioned, in physiology. I fully grant she would likely be fully qualified to be a nationally renown source on issues related to that field, but it's not a degree in anything remotely related to her field of promoted expertise.
The other licenses grant her more credibility than what she gets the Dr. moniker for. Though, like I had noted, it's easy for terrible therapists to get a therapists' license and in and of itself is little guarantee of quality. Fortunately, thanks to her show, I have little ambiguity on the matter: she sucks. She's a known quantity.
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posted
Dr. Laura bills herself as a Jewish mother who nags people to do what's right. That's it! Take it or leave it.
Her listeners have known for a long time that she's not a doctor of psychology or a licensed therapist. She's pointed this out herself many times and has advised people to seek professional help when the situation is beyond her.
You can dislike her show all you want. There are times I find her too confrontational for my taste and tune her out. But I take issue when you speak in absolutes. Not all of her advice is wrong or harmful. Many people have benefited from it. At her worst, she's noisy and argumentative, and people are turned off by her. At her best, she's on the phone finding a local women's shelter for someone who needs to get away from an abusive husband.
Edited to change "her" to "an."
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quote:But I take issue when you speak in absolutes. Not all of her advice is wrong or harmful.
quote:wrong and harmful, like Dr. Laura's advice often was.
quote:Her advice was often fabulously poor and ruthlessly adopted to the single 'crux' you mentioned
These are not absolutes. I'm not saying that Laura's advice is 'always' bad. If you are taking issue with people speaking in absolutes, you might want to wait for that to actually happen, at least in my case.
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quote:Well, she does have a PhD, and is certified as a marriage counsellor. From Wikipedia:
Yes, I know, Scott. She is technically accurate. But given the content of her show, calling herself Doctor Laura sends a pretty specific implied message. I can tolerate that kind of implied deception in, say, advertising. It's to be expected there. And the smart thing to do is to expect it in mass media in general, after all. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make her any less sleazy for doing it. If she called herself 'Counselor Laura', I would have no complaint, at least not any complaint not tied to her rhetoric. But she doesn't. 'Doctor' Laura-not, y'know, in the things I actually broadcast (preach) about, but am I mistaken or does she mention that at the beginning of her show, as a bit of helpful information to her listeners?
quote:Dr. Laura bills herself as a Jewish mother who nags people to do what's right. That's it! Take it or leave it.
No, she bills herself as a Doctor. It's right there in the name. My next door neighbor growing up had a phD in some mathematical field, maybe engineering, I forget. He was also very much involved in his church when I was a kid - I know this from many attempts to rope me in when I was a kid, only a couple of which were successful. But when he spoke to his fellow church-goers, he didn't say, "I'm Doctor ______," he just said, "I'm Stephen." I'm sure one of the reasons was, aside from it being silly and pretentious to refer to himself as 'Doctor' outside of conversations where it's relevant, he didn't want to convey a false image.
quote: Her listeners have known for a long time that she's not a doctor of psychology or a licensed therapist. She's pointed this out herself many times and has advised people to seek professional help when the situation is beyond her.
It sounds like you're a regular or at least a not-infrequent listener. How often, in a typical broadcast, does she point this out vs. the number of times she is referred to in that same span as 'Doctor Laura'? I would be very much shocked if the proportion was incredibly skewed towards the latter instead of the former.
quote: You can dislike her show all you want. There are times I find her too confrontational for my taste and tune her out. But I take issue when you speak in absolutes. Not all of her advice is wrong or harmful. Many people have benefited from it. At her worst, she's noisy and argumentative, and people are turned off by her. At her best, she's on the phone finding a local women's shelter for someone who needs to get away from an abusive husband.
Who is speaking in absolutes? Who has said all of her advice is wrong or harmful? You're speaking against arguments that haven't been made, FoolishTook.
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posted
Dr. Laura is interesting to listen to you if look at her advice as global standards instead of solutions to the specific problem of the caller.
I don't believe anyone can give really relevant advice to a complex problem in a 30-120 second phone call. However, Dr. Laura is a great defender of children, stresses honest communication, the need to stand up for yourself, goals, and values, and tries to get people to not be so selfish in relationships.
I think she is horribly wrong on gay issues. I think her directive to not marry or date once you are divorced is unrealistic and meaningless. Her specific advice might be toxic to the caller--but she is good at setting out a standard for other people to try and implement in their lives.
I tend to listen to talk radio. I don't have many cds, our music stations are aweful, and I travel a lot in my car.
I would rank our little towns line up as:
Dave Ramsey (I actually like him a lot)--Dr. Laura (tolerable, interesting to listen to, I am not a hater or a lover)--Rush Limbaugh (I agree on fiscal conservative issues BUT I DISLIKE him a lot. He can be funny but he is a master deceiver, manipulator, and he makes me mad)--Hannity (can't stomach him for more then 5 minutes--Levine (I honestly wonder how he has a successful show). I can't rate Beck or Savage. *shudder*
I don't know the other air personalities like Colmes or the satellite people like Stern. I don't listen to anyone a lot. I wish Ramsey had the 10-1 slot--that is when I am in my car the most.
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posted
Given that she renounced her conversion, I'm pretty sure she hasn't billed herself as "Jewish" anything in quite a long time.
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posted
I'm pretty sure "Dr. Laura" was a marketing idea in the beginning, and it stuck.
She doesn't announce that she's not a licensed therapist or has a PHD in psychology at the beginning of every show--with the exception of the one show when she addressed criticism from people about this very subject--but if the subject is ever brought up, she doesn't hesitate to point this out.
quote:Samprimary: These are not absolutes. I'm not saying that Laura's advice is 'always' bad. If you are taking issue with people speaking in absolutes, you might want to wait for that to actually happen, at least in my case.
The statement itself, that her advice is wrong and harmful is what I'm getting at. You don't know that any of her advice has ever been harmful. You're assuming it is and stating with confidence that, most of the time, her advice is wrong and harmful.
Does it hurt people's feelings sometimes? Yes. But so do a lot of things--positive and negative.
quote:I tend to listen to talk radio. I don't have many cds, our music stations are aweful, and I travel a lot in my car.
Same here. If it's not an audiobook, I go for talk radio, news, whatever I can get a hold of.
I don't care much for Hannity. I like Glenn Beck the most. I dislike Savage. Limbaugh is okay.
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quote:You don't know that any of her advice has ever been harmful.
All I would have to do here is insert a quote of her giving advice recommending reparative therapy for homosexuals, or 'keep your children away from gay relatives! don't you know that gays are predatory biological errors!'
It's a gimme.
yes, I can be sure that she has given harmful advice.
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posted
You like Glenn Beck the most, hm? Well, I can see why. It was people like him who 'did' the Civil Rights Movement in the first place, and thank goodness he's gone to Washington to reclaim it.
Different strokes for different folks and all that, FoolishTook, but I cannot understand how anyone can appreciate Beck or Limbaugh for that matter as anything serious. They're hacks in a thousand and one ways.
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quote:You don't know that any of her advice has ever been harmful.
All I would have to do here is insert a quote of her giving advice recommending reparative therapy for homosexuals, or 'keep your children away from gay relatives! don't you know that gays are predatory biological errors!'
If you could find such a quote I'd be interested, it doesn't mesh with advice I've heard her give on the subject.
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Huh, that seems so different from what I've heard her say, but then again, those quotes all seem to stem from 1998-2000. I didn't listen to her show at all until this past year.
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posted
As far as I know, Dr. Laura she supports gay people as long as they are monogamous and committed to one another.
So it sounds like she had a change of heart. Or maybe she just stopped fighting the issue. It's a giant can of worms.
quote:Different strokes for different folks and all that, FoolishTook, but I cannot understand how anyone can appreciate Beck or Limbaugh for that matter as anything serious. They're hacks in a thousand and one ways.
*Shrug* I don't understand how people can watch Rachel Maddow and take her seriously. But I also think her show has value as a counterpoint, and it's obvious where she stands.
Every time I hear something from Glenn Beck or Limbaugh that seems irrefutable, I want to hear the other side's view of it. Usually, the circumstances are far more complicated and less cut and dry as either side presents it.
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Huh, that seems so different from what I've heard her say, but then again, those quotes all seem to stem from 1998-2000. I didn't listen to her show at all until this past year.
She had been hammered into keeping mum on the subject of homosexuality, for the most part, because of advertising pressure, but that hadn't kept her from saying dumb things about homosexuality on occasion.
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quote:Every time I hear something from Glenn Beck or Limbaugh that seems irrefutable, I want to hear the other side's view of it. Usually, the circumstances are far more complicated and less cut and dry as either side presents it.
Example? Maybe about how people like Beck were the ones who did the Civil Rights Movement?
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quote:*Shrug* I don't understand how people can watch Rachel Maddow and take her seriously. But I also think her show has value as a counterpoint, and it's obvious where she stands.
I don't believe shows have value as counterpoints. Aping the obnoxious, imperious format of serial misinformers on the other side doesn't give you value as an informer, only a demographic niche. I think that Maddow, Olbermann, Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc, should primarily be viewed in terms of whether or not they are actively informing or misinforming, and whether or not they improve the public discourse.
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posted
I want my news to actually be news. I don't want partisan rhetoric. Baring that, I want humor, which is why I am one of those Americans who counts the Daily Show as their news source. At least they know that it isn't like real news.
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posted
I used to listen to "Dr." Laura back when she was one of the few voices supporting my lifestyle choice (which, as it turns out, was also the lowest period of my life to date) but I stopped listening for a couple of reasons.
One day I heard her badger a woman with children into not taking a class to better her life because it would 'take too much time away from her kids.' Basically, she said if this woman wanted a life of her own, she should not have had children, because when you have kids you're not allowed to do anything for yourself.
It bummed me out so badly (I was fighting post-partum depression at the time) that my husband (who hated Dr. Laura anyway) begged me never to listen to her again.
It seemed to me that if she had followed her own advice, she wouldn't have a freaking radio show. That was ten years ago, or more. I feel no particular enmity toward her, but sometimes you have to cut things and people that hurt out of your life. So I did.
On the original topic of this thread, it wasn't her point about the n word that was offensive to me. She's right. It's not okay for whites to say that word, and it is a double standard (for very understandable reasons as Darth _Mauve pointed out). To hear her chanting the n word was shocking, but what was <I>offensive </I> was the idea that if you marry out of your race and your spouse's friends use racial slurs, you should just suck it up because you have no sense of humor. (I wonder if the caller had been Jewish and her spouse's friends used the k word, or if it had been a white couple and the friends had used the c word, if her response would have been different.
Here is a video that is circulating as a part of a movement among African Americans to persuade other African Americans not to use the N word:
So the word is not without controversy among people of color, either.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
It's not about having a sense of humor or not, it's clear from context that the friends were being abnoxious and almost certainly refused to stop.
If it's used in a funny context then any comedian will tell you that part of the rules is that if its offensive, and someone actually personally gets offended then you have to apologize and stop. (On a personal level, there's no helping it if your doing it on a stage and 1 out of 100 gets offended)
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quote:One day I heard her badger a woman with children into not taking a class to better her life because it would 'take too much time away from her kids.' Basically, she said if this woman wanted a life of her own, she should not have had children, because when you have kids you're not allowed to do anything for yourself.
I have no idea which, overall, was her worst angle: her stuff about gays, or this whole deal where families are always supposed to work this way and if you a mom, you get back in the kitchen right the heck now.
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posted
I think the in group argument is nonsense, but she also shouldn't have repeated the word. Do people do the in group thing? Yes. Does that make it good and something educated people should defend? No.
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quote:Example? Maybe about how people like Beck were the ones who did the Civil Rights Movement?
This comes the closest to providing context, and yet there are still those pesky little dots that leave questions:
quote:“This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights movement … we will take that movement because we were the people who did it in the first place.”
For either republicans or democrats to claim the movement for themselves is a bit silly. I don't agree with Glenn Beck. But I also take issue with the notion that only liberals can support Martin Luther King's ideas.
quote:I don't believe shows have value as counterpoints. Aping the obnoxious, imperious format of serial misinformers on the other side doesn't give you value as an informer, only a demographic niche. I think that Maddow, Olbermann, Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc, should primarily be viewed in terms of whether or not they are actively informing or misinforming, and whether or not they improve the public discourse.
It seems that the public discourse is getting more and more extreme. Both sides have a tendency to misinform, to jump to conclusions, and assume the worst of their opponent, but I feel that's endemic in this culture. Did the likes of Limbaugh and O'Reilly create this, or is it the natural consequence of solipsism?
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quote:For either republicans or democrats to claim the movement for themselves is a bit silly. I don't agree with Glenn Beck. But I also take issue with the notion that only liberals can support Martin Luther King's ideas.
I agree that it's silly, though it's less silly for liberal democrats to do so than it is for conservative republicans by a not inconsiderable margin. But in any event, this is neither here nor there. Glenn Beck said 'people like him' 'did' the civil rights movement in the first place. Now, FoolishTook, take what you know of Beck's politics now, and imagine him back in the 50s-60s. Do you really think he would have been anything north of neutral on the matter?
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quote:It seems that the public discourse is getting more and more extreme. Both sides have a tendency to misinform, to jump to conclusions, and assume the worst of their opponent, but I feel that's endemic in this culture.
Since you like talk radio, I strongly recommend that you try out NPR. Personally, I find it to be the best source to get both sides of an issue. They also fact check and steer away from "sound bite" stories. Independent studies have also found that listeners of NPR are more likely to have the facts on a story correct than listeners of any other news source.
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quote:But I also take issue with the notion that only liberals can support Martin Luther King's ideas.
I think many conservatives support Martin Luther King's ideals. But I don't think that Glenn Beck is one of them. King was pro-labor, anti-war, pro-affirmative action, in favor of federal assistance to the poor, in favor of health care, and generally a supporter of the very types of social action Beck famously called on Christians to denounce, asking them to leave their churches if the words "social justice" were used since apparently those are super secret code words for big-C Communism. (He's since backed off a bit from that last after many of his Christian supporters objected.)
I agree that there are extremists in media on both sides of the political spectrum, and idiots willing to follow anyone who tells them what they want to hear. But I submit that the right wing nutjobs are better at it, with larger followings of people willing to ignore facts if they contradict what they've been told, and their ratings prove it.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Now, FoolishTook, take what you know of Beck's politics now, and imagine him back in the 50s-60s. Do you really think he would have been anything north of neutral on the matter?
I'm curious, Rakeesh, if there is anything specific Beck has said or done that make you confident you know what side he would have been on? Maybe I'm misreading you, but it seems like you're pretty sure you know how he would have behaved, had he been around back then.
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posted
I think the real loser in this whole mess is the musician Beck, because every time someone quotes Glenn Beck and says, "Beck said..." I think "I can't believe Beck would say that, he seems pretty cool... OH!"
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
I think that Affirmative Action is a positive thing, but it is not working the way it should.
Affirmative Action should be used to help the disadvantaged. It is primarily being used to promote diversity. This hardly promotes a "Color-Blind" community.
An interesting article on Affirmative Action on Stanford:
The fundamental unfairness and arbitrariness of preferences -- why should the under-qualified son of a black doctor displace the qualified daughter of a Vietnamese boat refugee? -- has led supporters to shift rationales in recent years. Instead of a remedy for disadvantage, many supporters now claim that preferences promote "diversity." This same push for "diversity" also has led Stanford to create racially segregated dormitories, racially segregated freshman orientation programs, racially segregated graduation ceremonies and curricular requirements in race theory and gender studies.
posted
Affirmative action for racial minorities is a pretty awful thing. It can only make other racial groups resentful AND the group that's supposedly benefiting resentful as well. After all, if you have a good reason to suspect that the only reason you have a job/are attending a particular school is because of your ethnic identity and not because of your qualifications, wouldn't you feel bad? In flagship state universities and elite schools, the grade and standardized test scores of non-asian minority students are lower than those of other groups. This leads to the issue of self-segregation: after all, if the minority kids just hang out only with each other, they can avoid contact with those who would make them feel ashamed about how they got in...
Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray made a point in "The Bell Curve" about something creepy that's happening in our society: cognitive stratification. This is why "class based" affirmative action can't really ever work too. Upper class people are smarter than upper middle class people, who are smarter than just middle class people and so on, due to the meritocracy. I mean how would it work -- would elite colleges select kids from working class backgrounds with high test scores -- i.e, the sort of people who probably would have been most likely to rise above their background anyway or are they going to select the sort of person who inherited the behavioral qualities (short sightedness, low conscientiousness, perhaps low IQ) that lead to being stuck in the working class/being poor?
Here's an alternative solution to affirmative action: we offer free housing/food stamps/health care to ANY woman who would have needed Affirmative Action to just to make a living. In return, SHE GETS HER TUBES TIED AFTER HAVING ONE KID. By the same token we make a deal with any male who would need affirmative action in order to find a job: You will get free health care, food stamps and housing so long as you get a VASECTOMY after fathering one child. This would be fair for everyone. Society would avoid being burdened with further people who are a net drain and those who need help just to live a decent live would get all the help they need. By the way, it seems that in the future a greater number of people will need to be receiving welfare:
Wouldn't it be fair of those citizens who are paying for this to demand from those receiving this help not to breed too much?
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quote:In flagship state universities and elite schools, the grade and standardized test scores of non-asian minority students are lower than those of other groups. This leads to the issue of self-segregation: after all, if the minority kids just hang out only with each other, they can avoid contact with those who would make them feel ashamed about how they got in...
This is absurd. Yes, there are a lot of Asian students here (I'm at Cornell), and (for a large portion of them) they are here because they worked really hard, are motivated, have excellent work skills, and are excellent students. And while some of them hang out in cliques, they are typically organized by language. It helps to have someone to talk to who speaks your native tongue, I'm sure.
But for the most part (vast majority) the Asian students mingle with everyone else. We talk often about the (growing) percentage of them and how their experiences are different from Americans or Europeans. It is absurd to state that they "self-segregate" because they want to "avoid contact." It is not the case at all.
Ah, and then you go crazy. I don't know why I try.
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posted
I was speaking of non-asian minorities(hispanics/blacks.)
At the elite universities, there's actually discrimination against Asian students. There's an unofficial quota against them. On the other hand, those types of schools tend to be something like 20% Jewish. It's okay to say "too many Asians" but it's not politically correct to say "too many Jews." (Going by merit alone would lead to more Asians/christian whites, less hispanics and blacks and Jews down to about 6%.)
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posted
The problem with the meritocracy is often people aren't rewarded based on merit. I went to college with a lot of rich kids. One did a crappy job and his dad donated money to the professor's research. I am sure that kid so deserved his grades so much more than the black kid who got in to "fill the quota." Also, even looking at success, I currently tutor kids. I would like to think that their parents paying $50 an hour are getting something for it. With some kids, I have seen huge improvements (Cs move up to As) with kids who still aren't that smart, but with that extra boost are able to handle the work. But a kid in the inner city whose parents can't afford that help, well, they would probably be sitting at Cs or even Ds, despite same intelligence level and same motivation on their parts. We also have some students who are brilliant- absolute undeniable geniuses so if you go with IQ genetic argument, they should be breeding tons except they are so lazy and have such bad behavior, they are getting horrible grades and frankly I have no pity for them.
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posted
Oops. Well, the same goes for non-Asian minorities. The ones that are here deserve to be here. And, from my experience (I can't find a break-down by race/religion), non-Asian minorities make up a fairly small percentage of the total student body.
At Cornell, minorities (self-declared African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans) make up 30% of the undergraduates and %16 of the graduates (link)
Have a link on that Jewish number? Because it sounds paranoid.
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posted
It would be interesting to see education practices among Asians compared to those from other groups. A lot of the asian friends I had in middle and high school had very strict parents when it came to education, especially if those parents immigrated here from another country.
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posted
I'm amused by the assertion that we live in a "meritocracy," when very clearly nothing of the sort is remotely true -- for any meaningful definition of the word "merit."
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posted
Tom, if I am lucky enough to be born to rich parents, I have merited all the advantages I get. And if I am born to poor, uneducated parents, I clearly did something to merit that as well.
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: Tom, if I am lucky enough to be born to rich parents, I have merited all the advantages I get. And if I am born to poor, uneducated parents, I clearly did something to merit that as well.
It is sad that this is true.
I can't think of a good way to even the playing field. When it comes to school, there will always be those with less merit, money, and opportunity. Is this the childs fault? I don't think it is.
Likewise, I don't think the poor student with less opportunity is at fault for their condition.
And this is the problem with Affirmative Action. It is always going to be unfair to SOMEBODY.
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posted
Again, we need to take a look at the veil of ignorance. What world would you design if you didn't know which child you would be?
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posted
The other problem with eliminating affirmative action is that proving you weren't hired for being a woman or black is almost impossible. I once went to a meeting (where my voice meant nothing) discussing who to hire. An equal number of males and females had been invited to interview and all the applicants had pretty similar resumes. But in the interview portion, the women had somehow all managed to fail to impress. Things like too nice, not enough determination, not enough backbone, etc were cited. Some just missed the special something that was needed. My response at the end of this- I think the special something was a Y chromosome. Until that meeting I had always thought that the soft sexism didn't exist, that people were being overly sensitive. When I mentioned it to someone else, I was told women were one the hiring committee so it couldn't possibly have been sexist. So what if in the end, 6 of the 7 jobs were filled by men. Pure coincidence- after all at the resume stage, it was 50/50. If there had been an anti-female bias, it would have shown up there since the names were pretty gendered. I was pretty convinced after that meeting that the gender bias existed, the numbers look like a bias exists, but could you take them to court and prove it? I doubt it. Which is why sometimes quotas are the easiest thing to combat bias.
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That is an interesting experience you had. I have been involved in hiring as well, and I believe there is gender bias as well.
I worked for a big box computer store, and 90% of the positions we hired for in the computer hardware, software, networking, and home entertainment positions were male, while 90% of the people we hired for store greeters and cashiers were female. Granted there were more males applying for those positions that female, but still. I was the HR manager and performed all of the first interviews, but the decision on what department the person was to work in was determined by the sales manager.
I did have the final say in who was hired as cashiers. Again, almost all of those that applied for a cashier position were female.
We always had a good mix of minorities at our store as well now that I think about it. We never really gave it much thought though. We never determined who got hired based on skin color. It seemed to work out.
There are no Affirmative Action quotas though. That would be illegal. The only exception would be if it was ordered by a judge because the company had been guilty of discrimination. Now there are goals based ont he percentage of minorities living in the area. If a company does not reach their goal but makes a good faith search in order to reach that goal, they aren't penalized.
I sent out letters every month to about six local minority publications announcing that we had job positions open as part of our outreach program. I think in the three years I worked there we had only one person that came in due to those postings. She turned out to be an awesome employee and actually became our business sales manager after a year.
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: The other problem with eliminating affirmative action is that proving you weren't hired for being a woman or black is almost impossible. I once went to a meeting (where my voice meant nothing) discussing who to hire. An equal number of males and females had been invited to interview and all the applicants had pretty similar resumes. But in the interview portion, the women had somehow all managed to fail to impress. Things like too nice, not enough determination, not enough backbone, etc were cited. Some just missed the special something that was needed. My response at the end of this- I think the special something was a Y chromosome. Until that meeting I had always thought that the soft sexism didn't exist, that people were being overly sensitive. When I mentioned it to someone else, I was told women were one the hiring committee so it couldn't possibly have been sexist.
This sort of phenomenon is psychologically pretty well recognized (see Why So Slow?, can't remember the author). Both men and women consistently, and subconsciously, rate men higher than women in situations where their performance has been carefully set up to be equivalent. The same resume with a man's name instead of a woman's will be consistently more successful at gaining notice.
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quote:Originally posted by Sa'eed: I was speaking of non-asian minorities(hispanics/blacks.)
At the elite universities, there's actually discrimination against Asian students. There's an unofficial quota against them. On the other hand, those types of schools tend to be something like 20% Jewish. It's okay to say "too many Asians" but it's not politically correct to say "too many Jews." (Going by merit alone would lead to more Asians/christian whites, less hispanics and blacks and Jews down to about 6%.)
Bullshit. Where are you getting this crap?
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
Good timing, though. As Sa'eed ramps up the provocative topic generation phase of his operational lifespan, it's important to remember things like these (and the 'gay and female ghettos') to remind us, ultimately, who we are 'conversing' with.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: Bullshit. Where are you getting this crap?
Oh I can see the thought process- I suspect you understand it as well. Aside from addressing the complete and utter-bogiocity of his statements of fact, you can't reason with this character about the idea that "merit" insofar as it exists within his conception is not an adequate measure of academic performance to provide useful tools for actually choosing entering undergraduates for admission. There are enough 4.0+ students with excellent references and extracurricular work to comprise manyfold more entering classes than any of the ivy leagues have room for. People like him don't want to accept the idea that a state could possibly exist in which making all the right decisions for all the right reasons is pretty much right out the window- but even more, he needs to believe that the reason why it's not possible is because those pesky Jews are just getting him and his people down. He sees a number like "28% of Ivy Leaguers are Jewish," and looks at the number of Jews in the US, 2.2%, and his head explodes. Never mind that the 28% is part of a really small number, and that the 2.2% is a really big one, and that a number of really powerful social, economic, and geographic factors are in play. I'm sure his head doesn't explode with thoughts of a NY/CA conspiracy when he finds out that 30% plus of the student populations are probably from those states- (along with 30 percent of the US population.)
And, for the record, through the much of the 20th century Ivy League schools *had* an anti-Jewish quota system, which quite naturally furthered the corruption in the admissions process, and also led to increased attention to non-discriminatory institutions like NYU.
What I find interesting here is that essentially, the anti-Jewish quota system seemed to do nothing but make the Ivy Leagues a prized target for Jewish hopefuls, who obviously must work harder and in greater numbers to get admitted- thus the high numbers. So, good job buddy, your anti-semetic forbears can be proud to have made the Ivy League a bastion of brilliant Jewish students.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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