un-PC beliefs

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
121

Mercy, wind! I’m speechless.

Don’t read the following if you are disturbed by unpleasant stories.

I had the police scanner on one day and heard of a problem at a local swimming pool where a group of blind people were having an outing. One man had gone berserk, attacking people and tearing his ears off. As I listened I learned a brief medical history. He was blind and had lost his hearing at an early age.

So here was a fortyish man who lived in silence in the dark. Suddenly he had been introduced into an unfamiliar situation.

The staff had descibed his behavior as “acting out” which would, from a behavioral point of view, be the language one would use. But all I could think of was how this man was locked away what may seem to him like an eternity and wondering how humane it may be to drag him about as though he were enjoying himself.

Argh! Surely there must be solutions to providing profoundly incapacitated folks with quality of life (at great monetary expense.) There was, of course, the case of Helen Keller.

But I have seen people so badly damaged by mood-altering chemical use that there are times when I’ve thought taking them out behind the barn and putting them out of their misery may be a more humane response.

Euthanasia, that dangerous concept. I think the way most people with a terminal illness die in this country is atrocious. My frail, eighty-seven year-old mom died in hospice and I’m fairly certain that you could call her death a case of euthanasia, pain control being increased until death resulted.

It seemed like a much more gentle death than what the medical people recommended which was surgery followed by chemo and radiation. And certainly a bed-ridden existence until a slowly inevitable death.

My father was obligated to starve himself to death in the hospital because he would have been conscious and on life support for the rest of a life he didn’t want. It was a point where I began to understand the old couples who chose the shotgun method. We treat dogs better in this culture.

Why do we insist on “the right of all people” to have fulfilling lives when it’s so obvious that some never will?

I suppose because it seems like a nice idea.

122

Since when is Afghanistan peopled by Arabs?

123

How many Americans realize it isn’t?

Personally I regard the so-called war on terror as a war on Arabs and on Islam, largely supported by people who don’t actually realize that the two are not identical.

124

If you’d been in prison, you’d know the answer.

My un-PC opinion: there were several wars over Israel. The Israelis won. You can’t blame them for doing what every other victorious nation in a war over territory has done.

Also: people should be allowed to keep midgets as pets.

125

I don’t know. I am not omniscient. But I doubt any of the policymakers behind that war thought Afghanistan was an Arab country, and I cannot recall any instance of any policymaker or military official painting it as such in selling the war to the country.

126

What is and isn’t political correctness:

  1. Saying that we shouldn’t use the term “fruitcake” to describe a person with cognitive or behavioral problems - not political correctness.

  2. Saying that we shouldn’t use the term “fruitcake” to describe a brandied confection containing dried pieces of fruit, because the same term has been used in the past to describe people with cognitive or behavior problems - political correctness.

127

I’ve heard that we should refer to people with serious psychological disorders as differently sane…

Its madness gone politically correct

128

Ok, here we go:

I get pissed when I see a mexican family who speak no english and have no money but have a bunch of kids. Sure, you want to come here and make a better life ok, that’s great, but can’t you get your shit together a little bit before you start adding to your family?

I mean what kind of sense does that make? You can’t speak the language and you make your meager living off whatever truck picks you up in the parking lot at Walmart for a day’s work, but you’re having babies like a Rockafeller.

It is my firm unPC belief that they are having the babies because the babies make it easier to get the welfare.

There, I said it.

129

I often think that Asians in the aggregate, are better quantitative thinkers than persons from the West. In all of my stats classes at a large, public university, I was the only student who wasn’t from an Asian country. In fact, I was the only person from the Western Hemisphere. No Europeans (well, there were two Russians, so that’s makes them Eurasians). In general, there are about 30 graduate students in the mathematics department at my university; about 3 are non-Asian.

As long as I can remember (about 23 years now), I’ve always heard that the U. S. was behind Asia (China, Japan, India, Korea, etc.) in math and science. Nothing we do in the U. S. seems to make a difference. Are our methods of instruction *that *different from those of our Asian counterparts? I don’t know. I’d love to be educated out of my ignorance, though.

That willingness to reconsider a belief given new information, I think, makes most of us Dopers different from your garden-variety bigot.:slight_smile:

130

It’s worth bearing in mind that quite literally almost every other country on the planet uses the metric system. The only holdouts are the US, Liberia, and Burma.

If you want to look into education reform, that might be a good place to start…

131

How could this have a significant effect? Unit conversion is not exactly one of the hardest parts of science, and pure mathematics doesn’t even need units of measurement.

132

As someone who has taught in Chinese schools, yes, they are that different.

Here is an example: I once taught a tourism English class that had a very long boring assigned book which I did not normally use in classroom instruction. When the time for midterms came, I asked my students to write a short introduction to a number of well-known tourist sites. To my surprise, every single on of the students wrote, word for word, the exact passages from the book that we didn’t even use. They memorized the entire 500 page book, even though it wasn’t even used in the classroom.

In my experience there are benefits and drawbacks. Yes, routinely memorizing books is quite a feat, but it’s hardly an efficient way to learn. My student’s ability to actually apply the information was limited. I’d have students who memorized every word on the GRE and could probably beat most native English speakers at it, but who would have trouble giving a spontaneous recap of their day. Group work, critical thinking, project planning, time management and research skills were far below what we’d expect from American students. I think part of the disparity we see is the skills emphasized in Asian education tend to test well, while the skills the American system emphasizes are less quantifiable.

133

Well, for a start, at least US students would be starting from the same base as everyone else, instead of learning one system and then having to learn (or convert) to a different one later. Point is, when every other country except Burma and Liberia has switched to the metric system, there’s obviously something in it.

134

They don’t have any business having babies, but they don’t have babies to game the system; they don’t understand the system. They’re having tons of babies because they don’t know about, understand, or will use birth control cause they’re staunch Catholics. My SO’s little sisters are Latin American, and one of their biological mothers is a legal assistant/paralegal. She makes a good living with health insurance and benefits, has her own apartment, is a white collar professional in a major city. She, however, has had FOUR babies, all adopted by good homes in the US. Why? Cause she has sex in a Catholic country, that’s why. Obviously she’s much more educated - she goes to the local adoption clinic, informs them of her situation, etc. She takes prenatal vitamins, doesn’t drink or smoke when pregnant, etc. But in spite of all that she’s still had 4 kids by age 35 that she didn’t want because of the lack of birth control.

135

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it!

  • Abe Simpson, “A Star is Burns”
136

From the Women Against Gun Control website:

Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley,
raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally
superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker
got that fatal bullet wound.

137

Well, then here’s my answer, and one of my un PC beliefs, all rolled up into one. I think it’s not the school system at all, but the thought process behind it. I believe lots and lots of American are actually anti-intellectualism. Just look at all of the hubbub with Obama and his damn arugula. Book learning is considered high-brow and elitist, and this starts right from the parents who are content to have their children bring home Cs. And it won’t change until we change our whole attitude on education.

138

Gotta love such a clear demonstration of a False Dichotomy.

139

I think chemical weapons get a bum rap.

140

Quite true, especially hereabouts. F’instance, Memphis City Schools have a perpetual problem with students starting school weeks after the beginning of the school year, because the parents think (or say they think) that nothing really happens the first few weeks of classes. In many cases the offending parents can’t be arsed to find out when school begins and affect to be surprised when they learn their children are basically truant.