{"id":7799,"date":"2006-12-13T19:23:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-14T02:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=7799"},"modified":"2006-12-13T19:23:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-14T02:23:00","slug":"decline-and-fall-post-463-in-a-series-of-oh-i-dunnoeighty-kajillion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=7799","title":{"rendered":"Decline and Fall (post 463 in a series of, oh, I dunno…eighty kajillion?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Rocky Mountain News<\/i> this morning:<\/p>\n

\n

Two New Berlin West High School students in Milwaukee were kicked out of a girls basketball game last week after they chanted “air ball” at opposing players when they touched the ball after they hit nothing but air on shots.  The students were kicked out after parents of the opposing team, Greenfield High School, whined, er, complained.\n<\/p>\n

\n“Everybody does it,” Nick Roamer, one of those kicked out, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel<\/i>.  “It’s not just like our school is the main soure of it.”\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat’s next?  No talking at Cameron Indoor Stadium?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThis story is interesting on at least two fronts—both of them PC-tinged, one tied to the feminist movement.  On the PC front, this kind of nonsense is, sadly, pandemic:  any affront to personal dignity is treated as an excuse by presumptuous self-esteem nannies—or the more sanctimonious in the civil liberties crowd—to control the content of speech or constrain a range of actions (even if such a feel-good social movement leads to, say, enemy combatants having the “right” not to be offended by their interlocutors, a consideration that is not, naturally and ironically, extended to those who disagree with said movement). \n<\/p>\n

\nTo these petty tyrants posing as social engineers, ensuring that students say the “correct” thing<\/a> (we’ll call it “content management”) is worth the attendant costs, which generally manifest themselves in either a weakening of individual speech, or else a “tolerance” pledge that must necessarily be enforced (just to be provocative and force Amanda Marcotte to take her eyes off her own vagina for a second, we’ll call it “form castration”).\n<\/p>\n

\nI’ve written many times—most often in the context of Constitutional judicial debate—about the importance (for good or ill) of “form” as a means to reaching an outcome.  In the case of jurisprudence, for instance, it is most important to reach a legal decision based on a rigorous adherence to judicial principles, chief among them, a disinterested reading of the law.  The result of such a procedure will not always lead to the desired social outcome, of course, but what it will do is keep in check the template for how the judiciary is intended to function.\n<\/p>\n

\nUnfortunately, too often these days the desired outcome is selected in advance, and legal reasoning then organized backward from that predetermined end.  This, more than anything else I suspect, provides the impetus for strained “interpretations” (which are in effect re-writings) and for an advocacy of the “living Constitution” (an animal that is more a living contradiction <\/i>— a living Constitution cannot be constrained, and so therefore is not so much a Constitution as it is a collection of suggestions allowed to mimic a legal blueprint).  To get around fixed meaning intended to block a type of extratextual activism, then, one must naturally posit the impossibility of fixed meaning—usually accomplished with the adaptation of incoherent <\/a>interpretive theories<\/a>, a topic I’ve covered at great length.\n<\/p>\n

\nHowever, what is truly fascinating in this case (well, to me, at least) is the subtext of Feminism.  How do academic feminists, whose idea of the feminist movement proceeds from an adherence to proactive political gambits designed to bring about and enforce social “adjustments” ostensibly aimed at creating “equality” (however artificially), react to cases like this, wherein “equality” is already in play (the “air ball” chant has long been a taunt in the men’s game, so taking it out of the women’s game would bespeak a double standard, the force of which is to infantilize women as thin-skinned, easily bruised creatures incapable of being subjected to jeers)?\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd the answer, it seems, is to move to eliminate such behavior altogether by labeling it “intolerant,” and—I suspect— to order it forcibly removed from both<\/i> the men’s and women’s games under the pretense that it is a type of (soft) hate speech.  Or to put it another way, the answer is to demand “good sportsmanship” not only from the games’ players, but from those who are merely witnesses to the game.\n<\/p>\n

\nIn sports, such a move robs competitive public athletics of one of its principle components—the home field advantage.  But then, when the longterm social plan is to make every “home” equal—and, by extension, every player and every play<\/i> equal—it becomes necessary, I suppose, to create strict guidelines that incrementally removes competitiveness from competition.\n<\/p>\n

\nWhich, is it any wonder that something so innocuous as keeping score is considered by many social engineers of a certain bent to be anathema to self-esteem, and so in need of “correction”?\n<\/p>\n

\nAll of which raises the question:  is heightened competition a masculine<\/i> thing?  Is it socially constructed or biologically determined? \n<\/p>\n

\nIf it is socially constructed, why then, the question becomes, should we be working to drain it from the male socialization process rather than working to augment it<\/i> in the female socialization process?  And if it is a force of physiology, how can we justify tinkering with what is in effect a natural and constitutional male imperative?\n<\/p>\n

\nChristina Hoff Sommers has some ideas<\/a>.  But I’m curious what many of you think—and I’m particularly curious what many <\/a>academic <\/a>\/ gender <\/a>\/ second wave<\/a> feminists think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Rocky Mountain News this morning: Two New Berlin West High School students in Milwaukee were kicked out of a girls basketball game last week after they chanted “air ball” at opposing players when they touched the ball after they hit nothing but air on shots.  The students were kicked out after parents of the opposing team, Greenfield High School, whined, er, complained. “Everybody does it,” Nick Roamer, one<\/p>\n

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