Opinions: ‘Real America’ is its own bubble

[Dill]

(12-15-2016, 09:02 AM)hollodero Wrote: I think it's funny. Yeah, it's mainly BS and I don't agree with the notion on a serious level. 

But... I do know certain types of females that kind of fit the description. They expertise in a certain form of yoga or meditation skills or prenatal massage techniques or whatever, often combined with some kind of "holistic lifestyle" idea or some ancient Indian philosophy and such. And then they stand there with their holistic yoga idea and find it hard to find clients.
And then they complain. Meh, no money no nothing the deck is stacked against us, meh meh wage gap and all that.
As if it were their gender's fault and not one of their own to just "go with your heart" and walk into a direction that is not exploitable economically.

To a small portion I actually do agree that men tend to find more realistic opportunities for themselves and that it plays its part in the wage gap, too. 
Gender discrimination plays a much bigger part, however. To deny that is populism.

There is such a thing as yoga therapy, yes.  But it is not siphoning students away from STEM courses.

To put this in a larger context--in the U.S., academia (along with the "liberal press") is one of the biggest thorns in the side of the Right, especially humanities courses which provide students in-depth learning about U.S./world history and social issues.

There has been a decades long effort to defund universities, abolish tenure, and make higher education more directly dependent upon the economy. The combined effect of all those moves is to reduce the number of humanities courses and majors (and students) and to turn universities away from traditional academic priorities and towards corporate/business forms of organization. Some state legislators don't want states funding any academic program that doesn't funnel people right into the job market.

Memes circulating about "useless" liberal arts (and to some degree social science) courses thus find a receptive audience in the U.S., where over the last 40 years there is an expanding consensus that higher education is really just higher vocational training. From this perspective, in-depth potentially radicalizing knowledge of culture and history serves no purpose in the work place. Feminism, especially of the radical lesbian variety, becomes the face of the humanities for this purpose--not, say, courses in Middle East History or 18th century antecedents to the U.S. Constitution or the history of civil rights.  If neither you nor anyone in your family went to college, tales of feminists taking over whole departments to teach "their lifestyle" at taxpayer expense can really set your imagination in motion and move you to support more defunding.

Talk radio and Fox can then take care of your civic education unimpeded.