The crop failed, but at least we’ve got gender equity in agriculture!
This is not satire.
Penn State University, where Jerry Sandusky practiced pedophilia for 15 years before they finally caught him in 2011, plans to offer a “gender fellow” thingy for doctoral students so they can “examine the relations between gender and agriculture” (https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11671).
What?
Supposedly, “promoting gender equity in agriculture” will someday, somehow, “alleviate global hunger and poverty.” Uh-huh.
As in, “Well, we couldn’t grow any food this year, but we sure got gender equity!”
And people are spending hard-earned money to send their kids to this madhouse?
Go ahead–tell me the loons who came up with this caper are in their right minds and know what they’re doing. Tell me it’s money well spent.
And I’ll tell you it’s time to cut off all public funding to the universities, and let them sink or swim in a free market.
It’s obvious that the people running this program have never worked on a farm, whether in the wheat and corn fields of America or in the rice paddies of Asia or anywhere else, and they have no idea what it takes to do farm work.
Come to think of it, they wouldn’t even have to do farm work themselves to know something about the subject, if they knew how to read and had read the myriad works of literature about farmers. And I’m talking about fiction – even children’s books – not technical agriculture manuals. But not only do these crackpots not work, they also don’t (can’t?) read.
The only farm these clowns are conversant with is the funny farm.
It’s astounding. My mother was raised on a farm and from knowing my family there was absolute gender equity in a farm family: everyone worked as hard as they could. There was plenty of work for everybody and children of either gender worked up a sweat on a regular basis. Some jobs required greater physical strength than other jobs, so a five year old might not do so well throwing hay bales, but everyone played a role.
The yahoos coming up with a program like this probably wouldn’t last 4 hours on a working farm.
Gender, schmender… it’s all a lot of crap.
Until the last few years, if you used the word gender with regard to a living thing, I would conclude that you were talking about whether that person, animal or plant was male or female. Now, if you look at a dictionary, one meaning is “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex”. That’s news to me. Accepting that definition makes all sorts of things change.
I’m not in the dictionary business so I think I’ll just stick the old definition. 🙂
These days definitions change as often as fashions. That’s what happens when you’re dealing with intellectually dishonest people who never suspect that they are out-and-out ninnies.
When I was a small, boy, I had a precocious talent for board games. I got a lot of positive attention when I won, so I would propose ad hoc rule changes to suit my current situation. It’s easy to win if you can make up the rules as you go along, but it’s illusory.
When a faction attempts to change the lexicon to suit their addenda, they can claim victory every time. But that only works for so long. To quote John Adams: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”. They can change the meaning of words all they want, but they can’t change the facts.
But they can and do ignore them.
You can only do that for so long.