Gender studies that have hurt our country

I read an online article the other day that talked about Camille Paglia, dissident feminist. She is an interesting person who doesn't share many of my values, but she makes sense when she talks about gender and women's studies.

 She believes women’s studies programs were rushed into existence in the 1970s partly because of national pressure to add more women to faculties that were often embarrassingly all-male.  Administrators at many colleges and universities were less concerned with maintaining scholarly rigor in these new women's studies  programs than with solving a prickly public relations problem.  The message from these classes was the same-- all gender differences are due to patriarchy, with its monolithic enslavement and abuse of women by men.  Male scholars at these schools, sensing which way the wind was blowing, were reluctant to challenge the new power structure and shrank back out of fear of being labeled sexist and retrograde.  

Paglia also discussed what happens to boys in school these days. Our present system of primary and secondary education should be stringently reviewed for its confinement of boys to a prison-like setting that curtails their energy and requires ideological renunciation of male traits.  When men graduate from college, the years of indoctrination have smoothed and ground down these males to obedient clones.  She charges the elite universities have become police states where an army of deans, sub-deans and faculty committees monitor and sanction male undergraduate speech and behavior if it violates the establishment feminist code. 

Finally, she discusses what this all means for our society. Her claim is that extreme gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany.  Like late Rome, America too is an empire distracted by games and leisure pursuits.  She worries that there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force.  Can we defend ourselves if we have bought into this new gender world the universities have indoctrinated us into?

More jokes to relax a bit

A logician’s wife is having a baby. The doctor immediately hands the newborn to the dad.

His wife asks impatiently: “So, is it a boy or a girl” ?

The logician replies: “yes”.

A Photon checks into a hotel and the bellhop asks him if he has any luggage. The Photon replies “No I’m traveling light”

Your mother is so classless, she could be a marxist utopia

A German walks into a bar and asks for a martini. The bartender asks “dry?”, he replies “nein, just one”

An engineer, a chemist, and an economist are marooned on a desert island. They start to brainstorm a way off the island.
The engineer says, “we can lash together some branches and make a crude raft and try to make our way back to land somehow.”
The chemist says, “with the right materials we could build a really smokey fire and try to signal a plane.”
The economist says, “okay let’s assume we have a boat…”

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

A Buddhist monk approaches a hotdog stand and says “make me one with everything”.

The vendor makes the hot dog and hands it to the Buddhist monk, who pays with a $20 bill. The vendor puts the bill in the cash box and closes it. “Excuse me, but where’s my change?” asks the Buddhist monk. The vendor replied, “Change must come from within.”

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

To.

To who?

No, to whom.

The barman says, “We don’t serve time travellers in here.”

A time traveller walks into a bar.

How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A fish.

Silver and Gold walk into a bar.

Bartender says “‘ey you, get outta here!”

Gold leaves the bar.

Q: How was Louis the XIV feeling after completing the Palace of Versailles?

A: Baroque

What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

Some fun during tough times

OK, we all know what tough times we are in the middle of--Congress inaction, bad economy, world threats. But once in awhile it's good to take a deep breath and relax. So, here is a collection of jokes that are a bit more cerebral in nature. Hope you enjoy them.

It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.

“is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?”

A physicist, a mathematician and an engineer were each asked to establish the volume of a red rubber ball.

The physicist immersed the ball in a beaker full of water and measured the volume of the displaced fluid. The mathematician measured the diameter and calculated a triple integral. The engineer looked it up in his Red Rubber Ball Volume Table.

Who does Polyphemus hate more than Odysseus?

Nobody!

A physicist, a mathematician and an engineer stay in a hotel.

The engineer is awakened by a smell and gets up to check it. He finds a fire in the hallway, sees a nearby fire extinguisher and after extinguishing it, goes back to bed.

Later that night, the physicist gets up, again because of the smell of fire. He quickly gets up and sees the fire in the hallway. After calculating air pressure, flame temperature and humidity as well as distance to the fire and projected trajectory, he extinguishes the fire with the least amount of fluid.

At last, the mathematician awakes, only again to find a fire in the hallway. He instantly sees the extinguisher and thinks, “A solution exists!”, and heads back into his room.

Entropy isn’t what it used to be.

Did you hear about the suicidal homeopath? He took 1/50th of the recommended dose.

A biologist, a chemist, and a statistician are out hunting. The biologist shoots at a deer and misses 5ft to the left, the chemist takes a shot and misses 5ft to the right, the statistician yells “We got ‘em!”

There are two types of people in the world: Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets

There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure

Did you hear about the man who got cooled to absolute zero?

He’s 0K now.

The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.

Some substitute words for the Christian

As a college English instructor, I am a firm believer in clear communication. As a Christian, I also see the need for effective communication, and I see lots of ways we have failed to do this. For this blog, I want to focus on our word choice when we communicate the good news of Jesus to others.

Let's start with the word "faith." When we use this with others who don't share our views, it can come across as referencing a leap in the dark. They hear it as, "I don't have any reason to believe this. I simply take it on faith. It's my wishful thinking. " But that's not what the original biblical word meant. A much better word is "trust." We trust things that give us good reasons to trust in them – a light switch, a car, a family member, . . .

In addition, we shouldn't be talking about our "beliefs." For this postmodern generation, such a term suggests a subjective "true for me" preference, much like we would use for a flavor of ice cream. Instead, we should be saying things like, "This is what I think is true," or "These are my spiritual convictions." This will inform the listener that we are talking about actual, real-world truths.

We also make it difficult for ourselves when we refer to "the Bible" or the "Word of God." We live in a post-biblical world which sees no value to this book. Quaint images of Pilgrims or Puritans come to mind. It might be better to talk about "Jesus of Nazareth" or "those who Jesus trained" or "ancient Hebrew prophets." When we want to talk about the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John), a far better way might be to call them "the primary source historical documents for the life of Jesus." That's much closer to the way historians look at them.

What about the way we deal with those who are not Christians? We are likely to use terms like "non-Christians" or "unbelievers." Many who hear or see these references will conclude that we look at the world as an "us versus them" situation. That hardly makes us look open or inviting. Notice what I used instead in the second paragraph – "those who don't share our views." It's a little longer and clunkier, but it avoids the black/white phrasing of the other terms.

Then there's the word "sin." Today we get blank stares when that word comes up because it has very little meaning to many people. Again, it may suggest quaint visions of hellfire-and-brimstone preachers. What can we say instead? How about talking of our moral crimes against God or our acts of rebellion against our Sovereign.

I'm sure there are other words that can be used for the above terms, but I'll leave that up to the reader to think about.