The New Feminist Woman Isn't On The Scene Yet: Marriage, Divorce, And Income

• Married Men Outearn Single Men And Women As A Whole (St. Louis Fed Study). Translated, women are pretty comfortable letting their mates bring home the bux, and are good at choosing ones who can.
• Men Without Full-Time Jobs Are 33% More Likely To Divorce. Highlights:
  
  • "Two thirds of divorces are initiated by women, even though their chances of remarrying are slimmer than their ex-spouses’.
  • "These days guys who have jobs have a predicted divorce probability in the next year of 2.5%, whereas the same guys who do not have a probability of 3.3%."
  Presumably, this means that women kick men out, or the men are so abysmally unhappy that they file for divorce themselves.

More Women Beaten By Transsexual Women In Sex-Segregated Sports

Comes a report now that a transgender female is dominating Australian handball; some months back, I noted a transgender woman winning the UCI Masters championship; a post-victory interview contained this silliness (formatting all original):

VN: Do you feel like you have an unfair advantage because you are a transgender athlete?
Rachel McKinnon: No, absolutely not. If you look at my results at Canadian nationals, in the 500 I was like eighth place (editor: Dr. McKinnon has always competed in the female category). At masters worlds, for the 500 I was a very disappointing fourth. In the Keirin at Canadian nationals, I was fourth. I haven’t won any elite UCI races. I got a third in the Keirin at Trexlertown in June.

On it goes. Because "she" didn't win every time, we are supposed to say, well, fairness prevailed or something. The idiocy and narcissism of transsexuals, who wish to deny the substantial advantages their pre-hormone treatments confer upon them, needs mass public condemnation until this nonsense is chased back to the academy where it belongs.

Bush (And Reagan!) Versus AIDS Patients: The Blamethrowing

With the death of George Herbert Walker Bush, we now go back in time to the late 80s and early 90s, when AIDS activists blamed Reagan and Bush for AIDS deaths. Particularly, this HuffPo piece dropping the blame "nearly 10 years into the epidemic, 150,000 cases of people with HIV had been reported in the U.S., and 100,000 people had died due to AIDS."

This was largely the political view of American gay advocates at the time, who blamed AIDS deaths on Bush and his predecessor, never mind a considerable list of achievements under Reagan (a number of which that were booed as he delivered them at a 1987 speech). But as Elizabeth Whelan wrote in 1988 in Reason, there was precious little the government could do about those deaths:

Can anyone who knows the facts deny that AIDS, as it appears in the homosexual and drug-using population, is a self-inflicted disease? A promiscuous homosexual lifestyle carries inherent health risks, and gays knew this by the mid-1970s when rates of sexually transmitted diseases soared. Just because AIDS or any other fatal disease was not specified on the "morbidity menu" prior to 1982, how can they look to anyone but themselves for an explanation why these infections occurred? This is not to say that gays deserve AIDS, any more than cigarette smokers deserve lung cancer. It comes with the territory.

Was the government blasé about the AIDS epidemic in the years between 1981 and 1984? Yes and no. "Yes" in the sense that 20/20 hindsight now shows AIDS to be a more insidious and formidable opponent than was first thought. But "no" in that federal research dollars were forthcoming, progress was made, and Shilts seems to have forgotten that America had and continues to have other health concerns demanding our attention. While in mid-1983 there were some 1,279 cases of AIDS on record, in that year nearly 450,000 people died from the effects of cigarette-related disease (also the consequence of a chosen behavior).

Gay sexual behavior was always going to be hard to police and needle-sharing as well. In 2000, the CDC released a report on high-risk AIDS behaviors (PDF); its findings included

• 30% of IV drug users had used needles they suspected or were used by others (Table 10, p. 17)
• 49% of those surveyed at gay bars had four or more sexual partners in the prior year (Table 12, p. 19)
• 37% used condoms sometimes or never when having receptive anal intercourse (Table 13, p. 20)

The problems involved are those of addiction, and male evolved sexual preferences, which revolve around partner novelty. Both are hard to solve. Blaming that on Reagan or Bush fails to consider the choices gay men (and drug users) were still making nearly a decade after the latter was out of office.

Postgrad Survivor: Why Academics Won't Defend Academic Freedom

I have previously written about why the #SokalSquared hoax will go nowhere, mainly due to institutional incentives that all point the wrong way. More along this line comes today from James A. Lindsay, who asks, "Are Academics Cowards?" I incline to think his question is a tendentious way of expressing the underlying problem — and he explains, so does he. The thesis, basically, is that academics in the sciences (i.e., anything harder and more empirical than grievance studies) invest absurd amounts of their lives in very narrow areas. This extreme specialization makes them overqualified for work in the private sector (and much in government), while putting their careers increasingly at risk should they fail to advance toward a teaching spot, and more, to one with tenure.

Chances are, if you’re looking for academic jobs, especially in the sciences, you’re coming off a postdoc or two, so you’ve literally spent the last decade or more in training for the job you hope to get. You’ve made incredible sacrifices for it. You’ve invested more into getting past the first hurdle of a future career than almost anyone else. Just imagine training at double full time, paid less than minimum wage, for a decade for a job and then being able to think it’s worth risking the career you’re working for to make a political point, even a really important or necessary one.

 So, such people act rationally when confronted with a chiefly political threat: they ignore it as best they can, and defer to the extent necessary to continue their careers. The problem with this is obvious. "Social Justice approaches", Lindsay writes, "do not seek to further improve the objectivity of science. Instead, they aim to introduce opposing biases, which they see as effectively counteracting existing ones." That is, academia now is a game of Survivor. It takes the smallest offense to be voted off the island — even in the sciences. The Lysenkoist attack on these disciplines is an attack on civilization itself.