Jobseeker’s Amulet

The site also notes that employers seek out prospects that have “[a]n understanding of differences of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and social class,” and possess an “[i]nsight into the connections among different forms of oppression.”

Er, what?

Given the cost of such ‘degrees’ — and their uselessness to the holder — why exactly are they proliferating?

why exactly are they proliferating?
‘Nearly half of students think their college loans will be forgiven, new study finds’
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/02/27/nearly-half-of-students-think-their-college-loans-will-be-forgiven-new-study-finds/

A degree in Women’s and Gender Studies prepares you for almost anything.
Sure does. After graduation, degree holders quickly learn to handle requests for cheeseburgers with fries, cheeseburgers with fries and gravy, cheeseburgers with coleslaw, cheeseburgers with potato salad, and the ever-tricky just straight cheeseburgers, which the cashier hates cause there is no cheeseburger-without-a-side on the menu. There is nothing these adaptable young scholars are not prepared for.

Killer Marmot:
you forgot the all important potato salad with chips option.

Er, what?
I can’t help thinking it might be easier, and much cheaper, to just get a big, ugly tattoo that says, “I MAKE BAD DECISIONS.”

Well, aside from the factors above, there’s also the non-trivial detail that teenagers are generally unworldly, exploitable and, as it were, easy to seduce. It’s flattering to be told that you’ll be a “change agent,” an enlightened radical, fighting dark forces and remaking of the world.
I blame Young Adult Fiction myself, this is the end result of the Harry Potter/Divergent/Hunger Gamesisation of fiction. Why learn how to be an engineer, or God help us learn an actual trade, when you can save the world?
Astute observers will note that the rot began before the proliferation of the ‘lone teen saves the world’ genre but it’s hard to believe that YA fiction hasn’t helped roll the ball a little faster. I’d bet a large sum of money that the bookshelves, or Kindles, of almost all Clown Quarter students have some, or all of the series I mentioned on them.

“I do have skills, I do I do I do.”
What’s your carer’s number, dear?

I fear the jobs which exist in the private sphere, i.e. non-government, non-academe, non-nonprofit, are those which constitute Danegeld of a sort, established to prevent a lot bothersome demonstrations by SJWs, which demonstrations would otherwise interfere with good, old-fashioned profit making.

The site also notes that employers seek out prospects that have “[a]n understanding of differences of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and social class,” and possess an “[i]nsight into the connections among different forms of oppression.”
There is some truth in that. When I was in the position of having to hire people I would look out for those who “…possess an “[i]nsight into the connections among different forms of oppression…” because invariably they would be trouble makers constantly whining and filing complaints about trivial crap and imaginary bias issues.

because invariably they would be trouble makers constantly whining and filing complaints about trivial crap and imaginary bias issues.
Well, quite. As with the bewildered and resentful Andria XX, it doesn’t seem to occur to the students that their chosen use of time and money, their Big Life Decision, might have unhelpful connotations and give signals to potential employers of an unintended kind, more than almost any other degree they might have chosen.

for the British kind you need at least a Master’s in gender/cultural studies.
I think you’re all being beastly towards people who work in fast food restaurants and who, in my experience, are more likely to be civil.

When I went to college, there was no gender studies major. I wasted my time earning a computer science degree.

It’s Graun or alleged news sources to qualify for the Classic Sentences tag, right?
Up ‘til now. Though I’m tempted to widen the scope to include gems from further afield.

Fundamentally, I think, there’s a failure to separate jobs which function in the generation of wealth, jobs which enhance those jobs, and jobs which are mere parasitization. I’ve seen praised the transition away from production jobs (the most visible wealth generators) and towards the service industries, which are the latter two categories – with no regard to whether this shift is hurting wealth generation as a whole and merely enabled by technology driving generation up enough to cope – sometimes. No, best that any *dirty* producing jobs be carried out by foreigners.
There’s a reason for this, and that is that they don’t believe in wealth generation. Therefore, with State as Mother, one job’s as good as any other and as long as the fixed pie isn’t preyed on overmuch by anyone naughty, everybody can do whatever they want. Except you, perhaps. You’re not educationally refined – it’s bin collecting for you. Mother requires it.
By the sheer act of acquiring their pointless degree, they have become a Brahmin, and every class contains the best abilities and qualities of the class below (if any). It’s a matter of breeding, you see. In this vein, I seem to recall a recent individual saying he was a better speechwriter than his speechwriters and so on…

I blame Young Adult Fiction myself, this is the end result of the Harry Potter . . . . of fiction.
Permit me to present an alternate thesis.
Bit of an echo . . .
The Harry Potter series is definitely far from the show up and all are winners genre . . . HP outlines a rather messy hands on war where people get maimed, people get killed, people utterly work their butts off and then only some some of those succeed—again, some get killed—and even of that final one on one duel, that duel occurs only after an entire community of long trained and long suffering experts work as a team, and where the only reason Our Hero and The Heavy have The Duel is a matter that got set up from the beginning and had to be puzzled out through the books—again, with a bunch of heavy lifters doing major work—and sometimes getting killed . . .

it’s fashionable to have grim tales with no real heroes.
Again, I have a different interpretation. While SF has definitely vanished up its own PC anus – witness the Sad Puppies imbroglio – the problem in adult fantasy is the constant tailchasing of the market leader. For decades it was Tolkien and D&D (D&D tie-in novels are consistent bestsellers). The current fad of grim tales with no real heroes, and to a broader extent thinly veiled historical romans a clef generally, is entirely due to the popularity of Game of Thrones.
And given sales figures, that’s exactly what adult fantasy readers want.
HP outlines a rather messy hands on war where people get maimed, people get killed, people utterly work their butts off and then only some some of those succeed
Well, eventually. But HP’s meteoric rise to popularity is due to Harry himself being a cipher, an everyman with no real personality that any child can project themselves into. Harry never actually does much of anything except get pulled along by events. As a friend of mine once put it, Harry isn’t the Campbellian Hero; he’s the Cinderella.

Harry isn’t the Campbellian Hero; he’s the Cinderella.
His story checks boxes in both the Hero’s Journey and Cinderella, although the latter is mostly contained in his being kept in a closet until he receives The Calling.
After that, Harry follows the classic Hero’s Journey, including the Old Man Mentor, plenty of trials and sacrifices and Union with the Ideal Woman at the end.

“you forgot the all important potato salad with chips option.”
Point of order: Aren’t British “chips” made from potatoes? Why would one want two potato sides? What the hell is wrong with coleslaw?
Seriously, I’m starting to worry about you people. Get a grip!

The Harry Potter series is definitely far from the show up and all are winners genre
And a followup thought—quite in contrast to the all are equally intelligent lot, Hogwarts and its ilk is, effectively, a trade school, not even a Uni . . . and of that sort of trade school, the underlying practice is, basically, We don’t care if you have a magical background and ancestry or do not have one; if you can do magic, and if you work very hard, we can train you. If you can not do magic, there is no magical piece of paper that will let us be able to train you or for you to be considered a magician merely by declaration . . . .

Every time I read the line — it must by now be an MSM macro — “More women are getting college degrees”, this question rockets through my head, but is somehow never answered:

Yes, yes. But in what?

Point of order: Aren’t British “chips” made from potatoes? Why would one want two potato sides? What the hell is wrong with coleslaw?
Seriously, I’m starting to worry about you people. Get a grip!
The British are capable of serving cottage pie and chips. So meat with mashed potatoes on top, with fried potatoes. Because most people find potatoes delicious (calorie-police and assorted food nutcases aside).
The US find this barbaric. Right up to the time KFC gives you potato and gravy and chips in your order. So exactly the same thing.

Point of order, Chester: the US KFC menu does not include any combo of both mashed potatoes and potato wedges at once, much less chips (aka french fries). In fact, the US KFC menu does not include chips/french fries of any kind, other than those wedges more akin to a sliced baked potato.
Therefore, there is no fried-and-other potato combination from KFC unless a la carte.
Wendy’s offers several fried-substance-on-baked-potato sides as well as ordinary chips/french fries, but not in combination with one another. The US tendency not to offer two potato sides at once in fast food seems to bear out.

The value of a Gender Studies degree revealed*.
Compliments Harry Potter discussion upthread.

Ooh, it’s all kicking off.
I’ve been wanting to start a good food fight in the comments, even if this wasn’t quite what I’d thought of.
To admit a weakness, even as a Person of USA I had to look up the menu online to be sure, as it’s been a while since the local KFC closed up.

This wouldn’t be so bad, if the snowflakes didn’t bully the colleges into requiring that real students waste time and money on these courses as well.
I liked what David Mamet said about these types:

What is Liberal Education? It has become indoctrination in aggressive Identity Politics, a schooling, that is, in the practice of indictment, assault, exclusion, and contempt, all of which contradicts the statement of Universal Humanity upon which all its education “ideology” rests.
But here was my question: On leaving the university, what would these Young Stalinists do? Who would pay them to bravely proclaim, “That’s not funny?” In what society could they live?
They were and are children of privilege… the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a “liberal arts education” is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete – to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called “a developmental difficulty.”

— David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge, 2011

I think Tom is onto something with his young adult fiction theory. In my formative years I read way too many of my parents Ludlum novels, to this day I have refrained from getting a tattoo due to the fear that it would become an identifiable mark that the KGB could use to catch me.

Lionel,
Oh dear…
[ clicks link cautiously ]
What have we here?
“There is no doubt at all that Emma’s breasts have put back the cause of women’s rights to the late 13th Century,” said Dr Keithly Liverbird head of the university’s popular Phallocentricity in Contemporary Poetry and Football Song course, “or possibly to the age of pre-Socratic Athens. Thank Christ you couldn’t actually see her nipples, or the world would’ve ended!”…
…Her colleague, Professor Clytemnestra Brassière-en-Feu, however, disagrees. She told the Mercury: ‘In revealing her breasts to the world Emma has sounded a defiant call-to-arms that will be taken up by every woman straining under the oppressive yolk of suffocating patriarchy. I only wish she’d been given the opportunity to dispense with her clothing altogether (clothes being merely another means through which men seek to assert control over women’s bodies) and was able to spread her lady garden of liberation all over the pages of that vile organ in a glorious, gynecological battle cry of liberation! But obviously the men wouldn’t let her get her muff out, would they? Oppressive, cowardly bastards!”
[ snorts loudly ]
Oh, come on now! I no longer have any doubt that the Dalston Mercury is pure satire.
(Although… as a shamelessly heterosexual male, seeing lovely Miss Watson in the altogether would not offend me.)

Moving away from children’s books and back to the issue of academic absurdities and gender, What if Trump and The Failed Candidate had swapped genders asks …”Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD [some sort of alleged business school].”
To do this she “reached out” (as no one does something as mundane as “contacting”) one “…Joe Salvatore (a hipster who looks exactly as one would think he does), a Steinhardt clinical associate professor of educational theatre who specializes in ethnodrama…” at the formerly reputable NYU. I rather like that he is a “clinical” associate professor, because clinical sounds all sciencey and therefore implies some (actually absent) academic rigor.
This team of intellectual colossi had actors dress up as Miss bizzaro Trump and Mr. bizarro The Twice Failed Candidate, and then speak carefully selected lines from the debates. Upon presenting the resulting mess to a “…standing-room-only crowd, which appeared mostly drawn from academic circles…”, they were surprised to find that they liked lady bizzaro Trump more.
This allegedly proved something, something, something about gender, not just that The Twice Failed Candidate was a lousy candidate.

We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back.

I guess it also demonstrated that reality and leftists are antipodal.

Well, Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ABa4RdNPxU
“A few weeks ago, Dr. Oren Amitay, who has been defending me in online discussions hosted by the Ontario Psychological Association, invited me to address his psychology class (to which other students were invited). We discussed freedom of speech, ideological possession, unconscious bias and the Implicit Association test, and other issues germane to psychology and the modern world.“

I guess it also demonstrated that reality and leftists are antipodal.
Or that leftists pay more attention to the messenger than the message. Victimhood Poker dictate their entire worldview.

Summarizing commentary from a very old and still active mailing list:

The [Mailing List] is a very informal and personal list compared to “traditional” mailing lists. Your spleen and the ideas vented from it will be carefully dissected, often resulting in criticism, obscenities, and accusations of simian ancestry. The review will almost always require supporting data and improvements to your thought processes before your submission will be further entertained by list denizens. Know that this happens because everyone involved has an IQ slightly higher than a carrot and is not impressed by arguments by assertion dictated from the High Proctors of your University, but rather expect people to present credible evidence and cogent arguments to back up their positions or, to put it more succinctly and in the vernacular, Science or GTFO. This flaming process has been proven to create the most robust thinking ever, and we do not want anything to cause the quality of submissions and eventual results to ever decrease.
If, however, anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable. If so, please contact the nearest brick wall with your forehead and repeat after me: “SUCK IT UP, PUSSY, YOU’LL BE FINE.” For more information on how to suck it up, please contact your nearest Marine Corps recruiter.
As a reviewer of free thought and expression, please strive to keep things flaming and focused on questions actually posed. We are all humans, and frustrations can be high on both sides of the process, but if we are rude, uncouth, obscene, profane, or blasphemous, it is only because we care, you miserable asshole.
Try to keep in mind the immortal words of Darkness in Ridley Scott’s _Legend_: “We are all animals, my Lady.”

The “studies” people oftentimes wind up in my department (English — or what used to be English, before the “studies” got ahold of it…I’m old enough to remember lecture courses given by older profs who were not convinced of critical theory and questioned Saussure and Derrida; that would appear quaint and archaic by today’s standards).
They can’t read critically; they can’t write; they can’t think — about all they are good at is studiously demanding that students memorize (not learn, memorize the form) how to cite articles using MLA with extreme precision *which is a waste of time as the bloody things change every so often and not every department demands the same style* and bullying and butt kissing, which garners them advancements.
And so goes the humanities.
PS. If you read LoTR, Frodo isn’t exactly the only heroic character (Tolkien weaved many different forms of heroism throughout his book and none of them are without flaw), nor is he 100% heroic (he comes off as a feeble prat quite often)…and it is the character of Sam, his trusty and unpretentious batsman, who really gets ‘er done (perhaps a hold over of JRR’s war time experiences). I find his works quite enjoyable on that level…certainly a vast improvement over Rowling (ok for the 8 yo. set to cut their teeth on, but truly derivative and ultimately boring) — although I can see why the “studies” folks love her: when you can’t really read for comprehension because your education is so lacking in context and even basic grammar function, then you aren’t going to like anything weightier than HP (or any science beyond Bill Nye).

No fries with KFC in USA? Well I be buggered!
IMO KFC is the greatest fast food on the planet. It can be eaten hot or cold, whereas most fast food is disgusting if not eaten immediately. It comes with greenery in the coleslaw, because I need some greenery with every meal or I feel unwell. And you can dunk the fries in the gravy for a double carbohydrate buzz to counteract the protein and fat of the chicken.
But now I find that in the place of its birth it is substandard. That’s such a buzzkill.

I think I see what they mean by it, though. As a little person, Frodo could be seen as a metaphor for the “lone teen saves the world”.

Okay, if you seriously want to take this tack, let me note two of my further objections:
-Frodo isn’t lone. From the other hobbits to the Fellowship to Gollum, his quest is always in company. The only time he can reasonably be said to be even briefly alone is when he’s captured by orcs (and Sam has to save him). Even his last small-group segment in Mordor is enabled by people like Aragorn drawing away the eye and armies of Sauron.
-Frodo doesn’t save the world. He betrays the world at the last moment and takes the Ring for his own. Providence saves the world as evil ruins things for evil in the end. (Presumably the book is old enough now that this doesn’t need a spoiler warning.)

. . . and the Hobbit commentary is reminding me of a so far otherwsie unused commercial bit I thought up sometime back regarding Knees And Toes, the anti dandruff shampoo for hobbits . . .

I did see Jackson’s An Unfortunate Train Wreck…and then just didn’t bother with The Desolation Of Smog or The Desecration Of Smaug and finally The Battle Of The Five Accountants.
Never saw the original trilogy. Instead I found an edited version online which scrubbed all the Jacksonian twaddle and pared the three movies down to one, which was fairly loyal to the original story. Quite enjoyable if you can track it down. Something like “There and Back Again, a Hobbit’s Tale Recut”. That’s what it’s labelled as in my Videos folder anyway. Runs just over three hours.

before anyone argues pizza is a greater fast food
Until I can drive up to the window for take-away, it ain’t fast food.

And in other news of capitalism, entrepreneurship, and self reliance in action: Woman gets prison for taking over husband’s meth sales