Jobseeker’s Amulet

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