Posted on 07/18/2016 12:40:08 PM PDT by jazusamo
If there were a contest for the most stupid idea in politics, my choice would be the assumption that people would be evenly or randomly distributed in incomes, institutions, occupations or awards, in the absence of somebody doing somebody wrong.
Political crusades, bureaucratic empires and lucrative personal careers as grievance mongers have been built on the foundation of that assumption, which is almost never tested against any facts.
A recent article in the New York Times saw as a problem the fact that females are greatly under-represented among the highest rated chess players. Innumerable articles, TV stories and political outcries have been based on an "under-representation" of women in Silicon Valley, seen as a problem that needs to be solved.
Are there girls out there dying to play chess, who find the doors slammed shut in their faces? Are there women with Ph.D.s in computer science from M.I.T. and Cal Tech who get turned away when they apply for jobs in Silicon Valley?
Are girls and boys not allowed to have different interests? If girls had the same interest in chess as boys had, but were banned from chess clubs, that would be something very different from their not choosing to play chess as often as boys do. As for chess ratings, that is not subjective. It is based on which players, with which ratings, you have won against and lost to.
Are women and men not to be allowed to make different decisions as to how they choose to spend their time and live their lives?
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
Are women and men not to be allowed to make different decisions as to how they choose to spend their time and live their lives?
I have been beaten in chess by exactly 5 people. EVER.
One was a female. Dang was she good! (Another was a male officially rated as a Grand Master. Wow was it fun when I managed to beat him!)
The female is also gorgeous.
She could play competitively, as could I. We both have other things on our plates though. More lucrative things. No discrimination here.
IOW, the article makes very good sense.
I see this in the STEM field.
A couple years ago, I coached a high school robotics team. We had several girls and with one exception, they all filtered over to the marketing and administrative areas of the team. While they loved the team and frankly, the girls were the ones more responsible for some awards the team got, not the on field performance, they didn’t really care about the programming, electronics and mechanical aspects.
My son majors in aerospace engineering. Virtually every college brochure he got featured young students on the front cover. He attends a very small engineering university where he knows nearly all the students. He told me that they either use stock photo’s or bring in models for any student life promos.
For one, he doesn’t recognize and of the girls and secondly, there are less than a dozen females students on campus.
A woman that’s very good at chess and gorgeous to boot gives her an edge playing against men. :-)
This follow the bell curve. There are more men at the high points on both ends of the curve while women tend to follow a smoother curve. Take intelligence - there are more male geniuses and also more morons, idiots, pyschopaths than female. But in general women score better...men tend to the highest highs and the lowest lows. This “rule” is true across the board (with the occasional exception.)
A noted bridge player was asked once who were the better players: men or women. He replied, “Women are better but men are best.”
Man, I wish I had it here with me, but I went to a small, private university in the middle of Vermont, and they actually did use student pictures for the Engineering brochures. I was in a couple of the pics, but seeing as it was a military school, only about 3 percent of the students were female, yet they were in more than half the pics. Well, except for the one really big and beastly girl, she was only in one of more than a dozen.
As we all know, the answer to Dr. Sowell's question "How long will we continue to take something that has never happened, and never had much chance of happening, as a norm?" is
True, but even an average looking woman can, at least temporarily, turn your average male brain into oatmeal by just flashing her private parts. Men? Not so much.
They're not even allowed to have separate bathrooms.
My passion for football means I should definitely be allowed to play in the NFL. The fact that I’m an out of shape, over 50 female should have absolutely NO bearing on my ability to be recruited, drafted, and signed to a huge long term contract. After all, I love football. Oh, and nobody on the any of the other teams we play better hit me, tackle me, or go after me, because that would be racist.
All men are created equal...................but it goes downhill after that....................
I hear ya, life just ain’t fair. :)
I saw a commercial this weekend that showed a symphony orchestra with a black conductor. I am sure black orchestra conductors exist, but they have to be extremely rare. I’ve watched many orchestra performances through the years and I do not even remember seeing a black orchestra member, let alone a conductor (unless Wynton Marsalis was a guest trumpet player). So many commercials now feature the intelligent black people and the dumb white people (like the investment commercial where the black people are calmly reviewing their portfolios while the white people across the street do a lot crazy stupid, hysterical things to keep from reviewing theirs), I guess I should not be surprised. I wonder if orchestras will start to suffer in quality and become affirmative action havens for mediocre musicians?
When my auntie studie ME at UB Berkeley in the late thirties, there were two other women in the department
Those numbers haven’t changed over the years. EE and computer science have more women in them but most of those are Asian or Eastern European
That would probably be Norwich University.
Years ago, the Detroit Symphony orchestra came under fire for having too many white members. Their audition process included a screened divider so the musician could not even be seen by the judges. They were hired solely on talent.
They were forced to hire less talented players due to political correctness.
I knew a guy who was on the losing end of that deal. He was a better player of his instrument but the wrong skin color.
Yep. I wasn’t a cadet though. I was already a veteran before I went.
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