Ladies' Lament

[WARNING: Post is likely to be severely boring to anybody not associated with "Hacks in Training 'R' Us". In fact, I will go so far as to say that reading this post is a complete waste of time for anybody not involved with HITRU in a non-trivial sense.]

Oh my gawd. Barely warmed-over left wing bromides and horrendous HITRU-theory rolled into one? Where to begin?

[META: Born into the world as a point-by-point rebuttal, the twin-brother of this post foundered for a while in the Swamp of Sincerity before being exposed by its father in the Dale of Deletion. Horrified by the fate of its twin, this post decided to take itself a little less seriously.]

Once upon a time in a land far away (Maryland), a group of students at Prince George's Community College decided to start a club. It was named the 'PGCC Knitting Club', for the purpose of the club was knitting. Sure enough, the founders of the club drafted a constitution which began "Article 1: The name of this organization shall be the PGCC Knitting Club", and the founders saw that it was good.

As I mentioned before, the purpose of the PGCC Knitting Club was knitting -- all kinds of knitting! Members of the club knit hats, mittens, gloves, sweaters, and even the occasional Dr. Who Scarf. Only the most advanced members of the club knit Dr. Who Scarves, however, as they used up a dreadfully large amount of yarn.

Soon after the founding of the club, however, something strange began to happen. Members of the club who weren't very good at knitting and who were never able to get that Dr. Who Scarf just right started churning butter instead of knitting. The knitters smiled indulgently at this eccentricity; and while they were somewhat disappointed that their friends had given up so quickly on knitting, it didn't bother them that not everybody seemed to find the same pleasure in the activity -- after all, some people are just called to butter-churning.

Years passed and the butter-churners, perhaps motivated by latent subconscious ressentiment at their inability to knit, created an entire subculture and value-structure which asserted that the Really Cool People all chose to churn butter because butter-churning is better than knitting, and that in any case the true purpose of the PGCC Knitting Club was butter-churning. The knitters again smiled indulgently, for while they knew in their hearts that the butter churners were wrong, they also knew that there were far more important things in life than getting angry -- things like knitting.

Now, it happened that there were two kinds of people in the PGCC Knitting Club: blue-haired people and green-haired people. The green-hairs outnumbered the blue-hairs, but not by a huge margin. One day, however, an occasionally butter-churning (but usually knitting) blue-hair noticed that in recent times the leading butter-churners tended to be blue-hairs rather than green-hairs in an utterly statistically-insignificant (p=0.22) fashion. He proceeded to take this utterly statistically-insignificant data-point and expand it into a Manifesto which made the following claims:

1) "Despite being unwilling to renounce my occasional butter-churning, I will maintain that knitting is an objectively better usage of ones time in the PGCC Knitting Club."

2) "Knitting a Dr. Who Scarf is hard, and therefore knitting of any kind is hard."

3) "We poor, benighted blue-hairs are too weak and helpless to have any control over our own fate. Therefore, we are at the mercy of the social forces that I will outline (please ignore the angry crowd of Third-Wave Blue-Hair Activists at the door)."

4) "Since we blue-hairs are such a minority (despite having total control of the butter-churning apparatus in a wonderfully statistically-insignificant fasion), we feel pressured to "prove ourselves" by taking the easy payoff of butter-churning rather than the treacherous road to knitting."

5) "In order to remedy this disaster, we need immediate regulation from the Prince George's Community College administration which mandates that no more green-hairs shall be allowed into the PGCC Knitting Club until we have hair-colour parity."

What a manifesto! Well permit, if you will, this green-haired knitter to ask a few little questions:

1) While it is very difficult to jump into knitting by creating a Dr. Who Scarf, is it possible that gloves and mittens are more manageable?

2) Assuming that knitting gloves and mittens is roughly equivalent difficulty-wise to butter-churning, and assuming further that hair-colour does not predispose a fellow to one activity rather than the other (something which, paragon of political correctness that I am, I consider to be absolutely unquestionable); wouldn't it make the most sense to lay the blame for novice blue-hairs getting sucked into butter-churning at the self-perpetuating mythos of butter-churning superiority?

3) Regardless of the answer to the previous question, will I get to see you attacking the self-perpetuating butter-churning mythos whose falsehood lies at the premise of your Manifesto?

4) Do you understand why somebody could fairly interpret your Manifesto as unbelievably condescending and insulting to blue-hairs? I understand that as a green-hair, many believe that it is not my place to speak here.

And last but not least...

5) Why have you drawn such exciting (and alarming!!!!) conclusions from what at this point can only be regarded scientifically as a statistically-insignificant fluke?