Monday, April 22, 2013

The tale of little white Rambo

Update (error corrected, h/t Tim)
"Funny attractive Mr. Suicide bathtub plug".
Somebody dropped an annoying turd in the comments today, and here is the story.

Last May blogger Feministconservative, a PhD candidate in political science at an unnamed university, got her degree and then took a summer job at the university's admissions office.

I must say it doesn't look like a very substantial dissertation, and I wouldn't be too impressed with the school that gave her a degree for it, or too surprised if it [jump]
turned out to be fictional (there's something strangely hollow in the way she describes the defense, too, but that could just be not being a very good writer):
Basically my thesis is a comprehensive look at 21st century radical movements such as “paleo”-conservatism, men’s rights, the neo-confederate movement, anti-zionism & political islam, their inter relationship, and what steps can be made to deal with them.  For instance, enacting stronger hate speech laws and empowering secondary agencies like the ADL and SPLC to track it.  I also explore how each one threatens the discourse on, say gender or race issues, and then also dissect the movement ideologically.  Altogether it comes to about 120 pages.
Feministconservative is really a "conservative" mainly in her views about Israel (pro-Likud) and Islam ("secular humynist"); as far as the US goes she is not especially political except on culture-wars issues where she seems solidly liberal. She really hates Ron Paul, calling him out for anti-Semitism, and really likes Texas Republican Itamar Gelbman (who?? you may well ask), who primaried Joe Barton's House seat last summer. And she ended up voting for Obama in November. But first, that June, she committed a piece of snark to her blog, describing her job in admissions as it must appear in the fevered imaginings of the mediocre white boy waiting for the doom of his thin envelope:
No grout needed with this clawfoot treatment from EyeForDesignLFD.
For instance I can’t tell you how many applications I saw that were just dripping with white male privelege.  Any of those that I saw basically went straight to the garbage can regardless of how good their qualifactions were.  If I saw an application from a white male that basically was just good test scores, and activities like chess club or math club or what not then it shows me this person is not interested in a diverse environment.  Obviously he made no effort in integrating with minorities or to sympathize with them and is counting on male privelege to get in.  So that kind of application should get ignored.  In their place I admitted a female student.  This goes double especially for math/science majors....

The lesson here is that people are multi-dimensional.  We can’t boil people down to numbers or statistics, or reject people based on the color of their skin.  I’m happy to say that I approved nearly 90% of all female minority and 80% of all (white female applicants especially if the girls want to study math or science) while rejecting over 50% of  white males this week and hope this trend holds out.
Nice concept (wish I'd thought of it), could have been much funnier with some work (just because it's only a blog post doesn't mean you can't rewrite at all, dears).

And indeed it needed to be at least a little funnier, because such persons as "John Rambo" of the Australian Crimes Against Fathers Web Site and Paul Elam, self-styled "Dean of Student Affairs at FTSU" and presiding genius of A Voice for Men: Compassion for Boys and Men/False Rape Society: Community of the Wrongly Accused, thought it was an objective report of what goes on in the admissions office, and sensed a HUGE SCANDAL of the Breitbart kind—ZOMG University trashes applications just because the applicants are white males isn't that illegal??!!

Only which university was it? It's not quite clear what happened next, but it involved some bold, if not quite sound, Googling, which led them to Georgetown University and the figure of Arianna P——, an undergraduate (not graduate student) in the School of Foreign Service, Culture and Politics (not political science) whose very good 95-page senior thesis (not inferior 120-page doctoral dissertation) was on a similar (not identical) subject, and who, rather than spending her summer in the admissions department at her university, had joined the Peace Corps and gone to Madagascar, where she started her own blog (also on Wordpress). Can't be coincidence, they told themselves, this is obviously the same vicious man-hating person (after all, isn't Georgetown the one where all those lesbian sluts are demanding free birth control? a-and the use of Wordpress clinches it, I'd say, after all how many distinct Wordpress blogs can there be?).

So now the real Arianna has been forced (I imagine by the volume of hatemail from the falsely accused rapists and Australian fathers who regard themselve as her victims) to take her Madagascar blog private, and all kinds of chaos broken loose at Georgetown itself, which is apparently being threatened with lawsuits by all those freshman yahoos who believe that the imaginary Arianna is responsible for their having to go to Marymount or Villanova or (God help us all!) St. Johns. (If you want to follow up, see Man Boobz, a jaunty and enjoyable site of the Real Men Eat Quiche If They Fucking Feel Like It variety.) While the real Feministconservative, if she exists, is serenely unaware of the trouble she has caused, having abandoned her blog last August.
Oppression: If you don't install it they'll get a portable inflatable made in China and keep their swimsuits on and not invite you in.
And meanwhile—not to neglect my own self-pity here—I'm staying home today with the intention of regrouting a bathtub (that's life when you're really an oppressed white man, unlike all you wankers living with Mom), woke up to find an apparent comment on a new post turned out to be not a comment at all but Rambo's Spambo, and been typing all morning and that bathtub is still waiting. It's enough to make a neofeminist paleoliberal rage-filled angel weep.

Update:
Paul Elam has issued a retraction of the Arianna part of the story together with a non-retraction of the Georgetown part, without acknowledging that the only reason for suspecting Georgetown in the first place was that Arianna was there.
I also want to make it clear that this retraction does not mean that AVFM is abandoning its investigation into the validity of the claims made about trashing university applications based on sex and race. Additionally, we are not done with concerns about the university itself, whose unusual and somewhat cryptic manner of responding to this story leaves more questions than answers.
You don't suppose Georgetown ever rejected Elam himself? 

2 comments:

  1. Paul Elam is not affiliated with Community of the Wrongly Accused or the former False Rape Society. You obviously don't read COTWA since you assume it is a "men's rights site." In fact, if gives voice to all manner of non-men's rights matters, including recent cases where women were falsely accused of making false rape claims.

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  2. Sorry, I was confused by the design of the Voice for Men website in which an ad for the False Rape Society/COTWA looks like part of the Voice for Men heading. Thanks for pointing out the error.

    ReplyDelete