Quote from: Jackalope;272178I think you're on to something here.  More problematically, I suspect that these fundies have held these kinds of beliefs the entire lives of their daughters, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Note that while I like logic in my own life, I don't claim that logic is a panacea to avoid self-fulfilling prophecies.

Both sides in the cultural war are guilty of self-fulfilling prophecies.  

Quote from: Jackalope;272178If you believe your daughter has no interest in learning before she can even speak then what effort are you going to make to foster an interest in learning?

The extreme right might believe that they know their daughters want to be wives or nuns.  They have unbending, dogmatic faith that humans are meant for a particular sexuality.

The extreme left is equally dogmatic, just in the opposite direction.  They have unbending faith that sex is the meaning of life, that humans are born to be polymorphously perverse, that bisexuals are morally superior to heteros, etc.

As for me personally -- I don't have children, so I don't worry about whether I'm encouraging them to learn.

Quote from: Jackalope;272178If you believe your daughter has no prospects beyond wife and mother, then what effort will you make to encourage her to dream and have real ambitions?

Right-wing women and left-wing women are equally narrow.  I have to deal with forty-something women who hate their careers.  When they were twenty, they repeated the feminist line that their "real" ambitions had to be in the workplace.  Now they are trying to get fertility therapy and donor sperm, and they are saying their "real" ambition is to experience motherhood.

Before feminism, women worked *and* had children.  After feminism, the most conventionally leftist, Simone-de-Beauvoir women have trouble working *and* have trouble having children.  Meanwhile, the women who manage to do both work and reproduction are castigated as traitors to feminist orthodoxy.

So in response to "dreams" and "real ambitions" -- well, I've never met any human who had trouble dreaming, whether asleep or awake.  Getting dreams into reality is the hard part.

Quote from: RPGPundit;272312Yeah, I never heard anything about Palin having "jewish ancestry" either...

RPGPundit

My rabbi thinks so.  I trust his research more than I trust most of the research on therpgsite, so... I'm going to stick with that, until I'm convinced otherwise...

Quote from: StormBringer;272435To be fair, what degrees are we talking about here?

Clearly, there is a vast difference in earnings potential between a Master's (or even a Bachelor's) in Computer Science* and a Doctorate in 13th Century Norman Poetry.

I'm all about the college, and I am certainly not suggesting that universities cut out anything that won't directly contribute to getting a lucrative job, but let's face it:  many college graduates really don't have a good skill set to get those jobs you are referring to.  I don't have a college education, but I am easily earning what a college graduate would.  My circumstances, of course, are a matter of luck and technical training from the Air Force, but I am not in the industry I was while in the military.

If you buy the hype and think that college is really about learning, you're very likely to get severe problems later. E.g. gifted students are told to get theoretical degrees, paid for by loans, and then get screwed with bad jobs, tight constraints, and loan payments.

If you get a useless degree and try to fit in as a "cog" you're likely to be miserable.  E.g. the poet who gets a degree in English and tries to be an office worker.

If you get a technical degree (such as, say, Civil Engineering) you get a whiplash of earnings.  Your job is likely to be made redundant and shipped somewhere else in a few years.  (Still, technical skills are nice to have ... just not nice enough to pay for the expense of getting them.)

Regardless of the student and degree type, the university system has deep problems.

Quote from: RPGPundit;272197The women in question are the daughter of the pastor Geoffrey Botkin, who is a major figure in this particular evangelical movement. They are essentially acting as mouthpieces for his theology.

RPGPundit

Your claims will probably turn out to be true, but my casual inspection of that site doesn't turn up a lot of usable data -- in fact, not even enough data to confirm or deny.   I would probably have more success searching for "Botkin."

Edit:
So the point is ... you're operating from in-depth knowledge of the persons involved without giving your readers the links that they could use to conveniently verify the issues.

Quote from: riprock;272525People really follow American politics know which interests are funding which lobbyists to pay out which legalized bribes.  I don't go into that level of detail.

I have trouble ignoring the "democrats" like Clinton, who think that oral sex isn't sex, and the "republicans" who claim they're not gay when they have gay sex.

Again, so you were full of shit.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;272318Well, maybe so. We also have a couple of Holocaust deniers, too. But every country has a few loopy people. For example, our former Education Minister wanted to teach creationism in schools as science, but he got shouted down so it got shunted to religion and philosophy classes...

I find it very noticeable - and yet it isn't commented on in the public sphere - how many senior Australian politicians are committed Christians.

It isn't like the United States, where they have to say that to get elected. In fact if anything being 'too' religious could be a mild disadvantage. So presumably if they say they are then they really are.

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke described himself as agnostic, and John Howard I think claimed membership of something, but seemingly very nominally.

On the other side, current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a member of the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, former PM Paul Keating was a practicing Catholic, so was former Opposition Leader Kim Beazley. Former Minister Tony Abbott wanted to be a priest and actually entered a seminary...

It just doesn't seem to reflect Australian society. Well over 90% of Australian adults claim membership of a religion on the census, but I doubt that 20% are 'really religious'.

There are two religious parties in Australia with representation - the Christian Democrats (whose leader Fred Nile is quite well-known), and the Family First Party, which is apparently a front for the Assemblies of God. But I think the Greens have more representation than the two of them put together, so we're not talking about major players.

And it doesn't explain how we somehow ended up with two secular major parties whose leaders say things like "personal faith...helps shape the view I try to bring to the public space as well".

I don't have a thesis here, I actually don't know.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;272318Even the loopy Assemblies of God Christians...

I notice this section of the site is in 'US English'

Quote from: Age of Fable;272593I find it very noticeable - and yet it isn't commented on in the public sphere - how many senior Australian politicians are committed Christians.

Well, their Christianity follows the outwards forms certainly, whether it's expressed in their actions is very debatable. Tony Abbott, for example, is not famed for his gentle humility and compassion.

I would say that they're elected despite not because of their religion. It's much the same way that though Australia is generally homophobic, even those who consider the Greens to be commie lunatics simply don't know that the Greens leader is gay. It's just not an issue.

Your faith and sexuality just isn't an issue in getting you elected here. Aussies don't care. If you made a big fuss about either then you'd likely lose the next election.

It's a bit like the flag-waving stuff. Sheriff Johnny lost a lot of prestige with all his nonsense about refusing to fund schools not flying the flag, and so on. The "British stiff upper lip" came to Australia and became "keep it to yourself, mate." We don't generally make a fuss of what god or gods we believe in or don't, who we like to shag, or our country - we save all that energy for sport.

Quote from: Age of FableThere are two religious parties in Australia with representation - the Christian Democrats (whose leader Fred Nile is quite well-known), and the Family First Party, which is apparently a front for the Assemblies of God. But I think the Greens have more representation than the two of them put together, so we're not talking about major players.

The Christian Democrats have 2 seats in the NSW state Upper House, and that's all they have across the country, they ignore local elections.

Family First, which as you say is a front for AoG, has a scattering of state Upper House members across the country, but nowhere do they control the balance of power or affect government policy in the slightest; more importantly, they have one Senator in the Federal Upper House. He got in because of the bizarre vote-counting system we use for the Senate here, which nobody except the Commissioner of the Australian Electoral Commission understands. Basically if every party hates the others more than they hate you, you can get in, as described here.

Basically the major parties hated the Greens and Democrats so much that they put them last, and put Family First and a fascist party (Citizen's Electoral Council) and a few independents and single issue parties in the middle. So he got in, despite having only 1.88% of the primary vote in the state [see Senate results here].

Nobody expected the guy to get in, least of all himself.  He's spent most of his time in the Senate being shown how naive he is. "Pass this legislation, we'll write and pass some other legislation which you want, honest we will."

So there is 1 of him, 1 independent, and 5 Greens. And after the next election there will probably be none of him, 1-2 independents, and 6-8 Greens, unless it's a double dissolution election in which case there could be up to 3 independents and 11 Greens.

Quote from: riprock;272535Your claims will probably turn out to be true, but my casual inspection of that site doesn't turn up a lot of usable data -- in fact, not even enough data to confirm or deny.   I would probably have more success searching for "Botkin."

Edit:
So the point is ... you're operating from in-depth knowledge of the persons involved without giving your readers the links that they could use to conveniently verify the issues.

Jesus Christ, dude, you could just do the work yourself, you know? I get paid to do stuff like this, I don't give it away for free... but here: http://visionarydaughters.com/about-the-botkin-sisters

RPGPundit

Quote from: StormBringer;272435To be fair, what degrees are we talking about here?

My numbers were all national averages, based on census data, so it would be a wide mix.  Obviously people with more professional degrees earn more, while people with philosophy degrees or whatever earn less.

I'm only talking about probable return on investment here.  Obviously a high school dropout can win the lotto or found a multi-billion dollar company, or a business major could end up homeless.  But on the average, you are way better off with the college degree than without.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;272470*bunch of theoretical stuff*

Yes, I suppose if we created a world where education had no prestige to it, and took all of the people of the same intelligence level, then some of the economic benefit of college would decrease, particularly in non-professional areas.

But now we've entered a fantasy land which is not how the world works, nor how it is likely to work in any plausible future.

Besides, one could just as easily follow your logic in reverse.  There's not much difference in wages between HS drop outs and HS-only graduates, particularly if we eliminated the stigma.  So why bother to go to HS?  We all know there's no real learning going on there, right?

No, it's not a fantasy world. It's how the world worked prior to the ballooning of postsecondary education in the postwar era. Well, obviously education had prestige associated with it before that time, but it wasn't a given that a bachelor's degree was a prerequisite for a white-collar job--or even graduate/professional education.

I just happened across this piece while looking for some other information, and it's interesting what it says: in the US, if you want to go to college and you've got the ability, then finances aren't a significant barrier. The reason not everyone goes to college is that our K-12 system is so poor. So tell me, if college is just acting as a vetting system, what I've called a "meritocratic sieve", wouldn't we better off fixing our primary and secondary schools instead of engaging in an expensive credentialing system which imparts few real-world skills?

In the real world, this isn't either/or, and maybe fixing public schools would be more expensive than just letting people fall by the wayside. (Though, I doubt it. What largely happens is that individuals find ways to insulate themselves from the social costs.) However I believe that it's largely political problems (right, left, and center) which make reform impossible, and if high school education was really what it could be, employers might not be turning to the college diploma as the bare minimum needed for white-collar employment.

You are all missing the important point: if women are losing their virginities at college, they're doing it late

Quote from: Imperator;272856You are all missing the important point: if women are losing their virginities at college, they're doing it late

More importantly, how many virginities does each woman have?

Quote from: StormBringer;272911More importantly, how many virginities does each woman have?

They may have one or three, like God.

Quote from: Imperator;272923They may have one or three, like God.

And if they find God, then they regain their virginity. Or so says a friend of my woman's who became Born Again.

"I don't believe in premarital sex."
"But you've had it with each of several boyfriends."
"Not since I found God, I am new again."
"Did he make the hymen grow back, like with Mary?"