domain:nytimes.com
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review compare / contrast of ancient human-sacrifice rituals for different religions with different stakes in humans harm. Even if it's just the Aztecs cutting out hearts to prevent the universe from ending, or the Carthaginians burning babies alive in honor of Moloch, the overlaps and distinctions in what they think human sacrifice will accomplish can be enlightening.
And then, once you've read that, presumably you will somehow have changed your mind and believe human sacrifice is a good thing instead of a senseless waste of human life. I know I haven't provided any reason why that should be the case, but apparently that's how this works now.
One thing is for sure, though: I have a higher opinion of the moral and ethical foundations of an Aztec priest cutting the still-beating hearts out of the chests of POWs than I do of the sorts of people who teach ethics classes. At least the Aztecs had the excuse of not having access to better information, something that cannot be said of someone who works in a modern university.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
32m ago
In Japan motherhood is still revered, and many girls see it as a definite goal, though the having-it-all delusion seems to have a certain foothold here as well. I appreciate your response in any case. Arguably many males also work absolute bullshit jobs as well. More to say but I gotta sleep.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
37m ago
DradisPing
48m ago
A lot of departments want courses in the core curriculum because it guarantees jobs lecturing. They don't particularly care if the students learn anything or if it provides any value. Forcing students to write papers on indigenous studies is just the easiest path to getting paid to write their own papers on indigenous studies.
So basically everyone involved is a fraud, and it goes forward because we've let colleges control credentialing.
The students just want the credential. The lecturers just want their money.
Dean
Flairless
51m ago
I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork.
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review a compare / contrast of ethic courses and frameworks for different professional groups with different stakes in human harm. Even if it's just regulators who enforce safety standards, medical policymakers that shape the standards, and state prosecutors who's job it is to give the people who violated the standards a bad day in court, the overlaps and distinctions in what they base their professional-ethic frameworks upon can be enlightening.
What they emphasize changes as you go from fields where harming anyone is proof of something going wrong and ethics is about avoiding it, to fields where people will be harmed regardless and ethics is about balancing it, to fields where harming people is the point and ethics is about managing it. The later can be all the more interesting for how they have to handle the simpler moral rejections that can suffice for the former.
Few classes / professors will ever frame these for you, which is why it will need to be self-driven. Bad professors can undercut even that. Still.
hydroacetylene
56m ago
Did you read my post? I said a worse job market for women.
hydroacetylene
56m ago
Women who aren’t passionate about some specific field of study or career in a for real way should just get married and have babies instead of worrying about pretending to care about a career field.
Obviously I’m not talking about nurses here, or even teachers. That cat is out of the bag. But there is a massive proliferation of pink collar jobs in modern western societies which just don’t do anything except 1) raise the female employment rate and 2) generate more bullshit for everyone else to process. We shouldn’t have more administrators than we did back in the days before copying machines and all that.
And a high female employment rate has externalities- industrial societies work much better when men have, on average, much better economic opportunities than women, because it drives up the marriage rate. In the US you can see this in towns built around the military and extractive industry, particularly the former where soldiers are directly economically incentivized to just buy the ring already. I think we can fairly point to behavioral issues with unmarried women as well, such as high rates of debt and getting way too into social justice.
None of this is blaming individual women for going to college and getting a job. She’s gotta eat, 18 year old girls are kinda impressionable, yachta yachta yachta. But the mentality of society overall on the issue is not healthy- housewives should be higher status than girlbosses, and a lot of both the degrees and the careers involved are, at best, a waste of resources. Bachelors in psychology in America really don’t involve much actual learning.
There's so much money on the table for whomever can convince employers they have a better credential than Ivy League schools. And given the level of corruption and bloat, it probably wouldn't even take that hard a push.
Inertia is powerful, but it's not all powerful.
More options
Context Copy link