Well, you feel very strongly about this and I respect that.
The problem is you are a liberal and a wart on our country. Liberals think they know what OTHERS should do and want to make their decisions for them. We conservatives are about freedom and personal responsibility. You think girls would be BETTER people if they were engineers and you don't trust them to make their own decisions. I guess you don't think they are smart enough to know what they want to do without your HELP.
1st things 1st: Read your response ,above when you originally posted with just the 1st sentence alone (where, in my opinion, you should have left it). That evening I hit this thread again and, disappointed, saw you had edited it with the preachy, self-righteous name-calling. My guess is the lesser half of your personality kicked in. Sort of like with Dr. Jekyll when Mr. Hyde would show up.
I want to remind you of the inception and crux of our disagreement. Our good friend, Jason, posted an ISU press release about an academic/political initiative by female faculty, staff and alumni from ISU supporting the million woman mentor initiative. I thoroughly read the article Jason posted and saw the mentorship program was actually a national and state initiative. I also surmised ISU's support for it and roll in it seemed reasonable, and did a little Google research on what was happening nationally and in the State of Indiana. What did I discover? Wherever I researched there was support for the initiative!! Miraculously, there was bipartisan political and gender support. As, no doubt you know, the State of Indiana's point person is the female lieutenant governor from Ferdinand, Sue Ellspermann. Many Republican insiders are suggesting she's a rising star in the party with impeccable credentials, including but not limited to, her undergraduate industrial engineering degree from Purdue and her industrial engineering PhD from the University of Louisville. Once, having done the research, I read your initial post and quickly reviewed your profile. I could not help but think, "Why, as a retired alum, is this guy busting on his alma mater and throwing it under the bus with a reactionary diatribe against something as meritorious and broadly supported as this initiative?" I still do not know the answer to this puzzling question. "Is this truly a Sycamore Backer with Sycamore Pride?" I asked myself.
Now my reaction to your self-righteous name-calling: You don't know me well enough to stereotype me, and certainly do not have the right to suggest I'm a blemish on my country, a blemish that normally is surgically removed as a disfigurement (a number of connotations can be taken here in your purported sarcastic humor which, I hope now, you realize crossed the line and merits an apology). For clarification here is some further information: I am as good an American as you think you are, and a better American than you actually are. The reason, because I make judgments on a case-by-case basis, while your MO appears to be one of making judgments as prophetic pronouncements based on your worldview. Your world appears to be one of absolutes. Your world, also, appears to see social and cultural change as things to be feared and stopped instead of analyzed/evaluated and, when merited, sometimes embraced. Well, SB, you and I will have a myriad of opportunities to test our approaches to social and cultural change over our remaining couple decades on this earth, because , like it or not, a tsunami of social and cultural change is at our doorstep. No longer the 7th century, SB, the 21st.
Oh by the way, trust me, I no more deserve to be categorized as a liberal as you deserve to be categorized as a conservative (my perception is that you're somewhere right of conservatism on the political continuum). My above conclusion on your categorization of me as a liberal is in recognition of my public political perception: This may surprise you, but I get equally criticized by my liberal friends for not agreeing with some of their positions because I'm "SOO conservative" as I am by my conservative friends for not agreeing with some of their positions because I'm "SOO liberal". As a result, I see myself as a centrist, factoring in proportionate amounts of self and public perception. Some food for thought for your there, SB.
So what are the options here? 1. We can call it quits with cordial adieus and acknowledgments we agreed to disagree (which I thought I had accomplished in my last post). 2. We can continue our intellectual fencing, absent the name-calling, and see where that takes us (If we do this, we could probably go on an infomercial together selling our intellectual "blog fencing" as a way to postpone the onset of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia). 3. We can invite other S P members to voice their opinion. Though all 3 have their merits, I again vote for # 1. Your call.
