I hate Citizens United, but here is a post where a Liberal makes a very interesting case in defense of it. Tell me what you think if the issue interests you.
Generational Theft: what is it and does it exist? I see everything that is based on the word “generational” or the idea of a conflict between generations to be suspect but many people seem to find the concept appealing. What interests me in the whole thing is why the Boomers embrace this idea so passionately.
Obama’s pre-K plan: “Also expanding Nurse Family Partnerships, a program that has also earned top marks in randomized trials, and which provides regular home visits from nurses to families from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday, intended to promote good health and parenting practices.” What I’m getting from the language is that this doesn’t exist or isn’t ubiquitous yet. Is that true? Does anybody know?
“Of course one worker families with children have a hard time managing for different reasons. But the lack of affordable childcare, school hours/days which don’t match work times, ratcheted up expectations about 24/7 helicopter parenting…” Ratcheted up by whom? Have we gotten to the point where helicoptering parents only helicopter because they are some evil entity’s victim and not because they enjoy victimizing their children? Jeez. . .
So you can get sued for saying that a press is nothing but a vanity press? Seriously?
I read these posts from a person who claims to be a sex educator because there is no comedy show that can provide more laughs per second. The blogger must be faking this because it is not possible that an adult person with at least a primary school education could be so egregiously ignorant about. . . well, everything.
One of the American cultural traditions that I find extremely creepy: “Last night was the town Daddy-Daughter dance, so I took The Girl. We both dressed up — I even bought her a wrist corsage, the first time I’ve bought one of those since the Reagan administration — and we went to a local country club for the annual event.” Just the idea of a father referring to his daughter as “The Girl” is already very disturbing. And before anybody starts to yak, I defy you to prove that you have seen a better relationship between a father and an adult daughter than the one I have with my father. So these vaguely incestuous creep-fests are in no way necessary for healthy relationships.
Hugo Schwyzer writes yet another post promoting the lifestyle of people who force themselves to remain faithful and use others as props to make this fake and painful loyalty possible. If my husband wrote this kind of desperate post, I’d just stop torturing the poor guy and move the hell out. But I vaguely remember Schwyzer writing about the wife’s numerous relatives that he supports, so here is the answer to the mystery of why some women are perfectly fine with letting their husbands torture themselves with forced chastity.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yay, some reading to distract me from my grading!
I shared a recipe for lentil-stuffed acorn squash. Because I like food that tastes good. 🙂
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This sounds phenomenal. I really want to try making it.
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Most people notice beauty in others after being married too. If you had a loving husband, who could hypothetically say that had he and co-worker X been single, he would have been attracted to her, why divorce? I do not mean dwelling on it or even thinking on the topic in very busy life, but just being able to honestly say “person X is attractive”, if you asked them to stop and think on the topic. Why is loyalty of such a person “fake”? Btw, there is a huge difference between noticing and desiring to sleep with other people, even had such person’s partner been open to the idea.
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” If you had a loving husband, who could hypothetically say that had he and co-worker X been single, he would have been attracted to her, why divorce?”
– The ONLY purpose behind such statements is manipulation. What other purpose can they possibly serve?
” if you asked them to stop and think on the topic.”
– And the person who makes such requests is a passive-aggressive.
“Why is loyalty of such a person “fake”?”
– I’m not discussing any hypothetical person but a specific blogger whose endless posts about how hard he “works” not to cheat on his wife are notorious.
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Do you think H.S. really has that many serious offers from women who would “cheat” with him? I don’t — I think it is all fantasy and bluff, and that if he has such offers they are not from very desirable types.
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Those Daddy-Daughter dances weren’t a tradition where I was raised. I got along fine with my dad, and something like that would have grossed us both out. Also, haha the “Reagan Administration,” when all the stupider customs of the 50s, like wrist corsages, were dragged back into style. Spare me.
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Ah, that’s when this made a comeback!
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And while I’m inflicting this site with myself I’ll weigh in on this supposed “generational conflict” that is supposed to be so set in stone as an aspect of human behavior. It’s not. It’s a cultural phenomenon specific to the West (and that has infected other cultures due to imperialism). It may have started as a result of sudden technological and sociological changes in the 19th and 20th centuries, but I believe that it’s currently being artificially induced because a conflicted people will spend money fighting each other. However, I think that it’s also dying out: most people I meet these days don’t think that their parents are dumb old farts to be ignored and/or that their children are alien beings from space any more.
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I agree!
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I think so too! I was actually so taken with how strange a concept this was that, when I was in high school, I wrote a paper on it, trying to locate the “generation gap” in history. (I put it in the mid-20th century, with the huge difference in the experiences of the generation that went through the Depression and WWII compared with their children, but I can see placing it earlier, too, because there certainly were rapid social changes before then!)
Clarissa, do you think there was ever a “generation gap” brought on by rapid social change in Soviet countries? How did the pre- and post-Revolution generations relate to one another?
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What I’m getting from the language is that this doesn’t exist or isn’t ubiquitous yet. Is that true? Does anybody know?
Are you asking about the Nurse Family Partnerships or the preschool plan?
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Nurses coming over on a regular basis to help attend to newborns.
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An idle idea I used to have but never worked on (for lack of a medium) was a comedy built around fictitional (I hope!) Soviet governmental institute dealing with sexual issues (tenatively named Совсекс). The idea was that they would do to people’s sex lives what the Soviet system did for everything else.
It wasn’t about making things political (beyond a few buzz words) but rather a bureaucratic soviet-technocratic approach to sex that would drain sex of any emotion or pleasure and instead make it awkward, inconvenient and dull (with a hint of stupid brutality around the edges).
The link from the sexual ‘educator’ reminded me of that and I think with a different haircut and some different buzz words she could have fit right in.
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Ha ha ha! I now realize why this article bothers me. It does, indeed, remind me of these very clinical Soviet classes where a severe old lady (childless and perennially single) taught us to be good wives and mothers. Maybe I should write a post about those classes.
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That would indeed be funny.
I remember elements of that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with Winston’s wife having absorbed the idea of sex as a disgusting, uncomfortable thing she only undergoes for the sake of the Party, and the kids all belonging to the Junior Anti-Sex League.
Of course, that was only a minor part of the story, so I don’t think your idea would be at all redundant!
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Orwell was so spot-on in this part of the book that it was scary.
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RE sex ed post, I don’t understand what is the criticism about. Do you thiink that state of body = state of mind? What with victims of rape, whose bodies reacted in all kinds of ways? Or you only criticise the 2nd part of the post, in which she says Sahara desert body is OK in supposedly desiring woman? I disagree with the latter statement, but think the first may be true.
// Maybe I should write a post about those classes.
Great!
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She is struggling with completely childish issues. There is such a thing as subconscious and sexually repressed people who, for instance, have been brought up to think that oral sex is evil, will have a different physiological response because the subconscious has a tendency to break through when repression is particularly harsh.
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Now that’s what I call an unintended consequence.
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// Despite awarding As to all the students who participated in the boycott
What? This is ridiculous. I personally disagree with curve policy for several reasons, but university grades are supposed to mean something to employers in and outside of academia.
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He did the only right thing. As a prof, if you mess up, the only way out is to admit that as loud and clear as possible in front of students. This happened to me once. I had to come into class and say, “I;m sorry, the information I gave you last time was incorrect and people who pointed it out were completely right, so I apologize profusely.” It was very hard to do but students really respected me for doing it.
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Cool students. What a great way to organize to get back at an idiot of a professor. I like seeing this kind of solidarity.
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// As a prof, if you mess up, the only way out is to admit that as loud and clear as possible in front of students.
Agree 100%.
However, your example of correcting info is one thing. His “messing up” was not includind the idiot cause of “what happens if nobody takes the exam”. Why is he “an idiot of a professor” because of that?
University’s job is not to give grades for free because a prof “messed up”, which he even didn’t in this case. I am surprised his Dean didn’t interfere and gave everybody 255, or whatever the code is for not completing the course’s requirements, untill they take the exam.
“To get back”? Is it a university or a kindergarten? Students study for themselves and take exams to demonstrate employers their knowledge. If students didn’t like grading policy, there are adult ways to deal with that.
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“University’s job is not to give grades for free because a prof “messed up”, which he even didn’t in this case. I am surprised his Dean didn’t interfere and gave everybody 255, or whatever the code is for not completing the course’s requirements, untill they take the exam.”
– Academic freedom means that a prof has absolute discretion on how s/he structures, organizes and grades courses. The principle of the matter is hugely more important than any grade for any course. Those grades are ultimately quite meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But the second Deans begin to opine on how we grade or what readings we assign, the universities are done for. Gosh, you really scared me with this suggestion. If the Dean interfered with my grading, I would be organizing collective action, like these students.
“Students study for themselves and take exams to demonstrate employers their knowledge. If students didn’t like grading policy, there are adult ways to deal with that.”
– Employers don’t care about grades. And the students demonstrated a very mature way of resolving conflict. Everybody behaved in a very respectable way in this situation. As for the students, I am convinced that knowing how to organize collective action to negotiate with the employer will be of a far greater use to them in the workplace than any silly grade.
” If students didn’t like grading policy, there are adult ways to deal with that.”
– What is more adult than organizing a union and engaging in collective action? This is not a rhetorical question. I really think that this is the most mature way of handling work conflict.
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