[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

In public discourse in 2018? Absolutely. The issues that disproportionately affect young women get far, far more media and public attention today than the issues that affect young men. Not twice or three times as much, but five or 10 times as much.

That actually aligns with the male involvement in post-secondary education, at least in the United States. If men want to be measured as part of the mix, get into the mix. Women have a massive statistical advantage over men when it comes to attending and being successful in post-secondary education. I have no sympathy when men don't step up to the plate. That is the issue right now.

Boys today are doing worse than girls is virtually every metric. In academic achievement in every age, in the number who are dosed with behavior-modifying drugs, in dropping out of school, in drug use, in becoming totally alienated from society. In suicide. And there is no public movement to address this, because too many people are trapped in foolish, binary thinking, and believe that pointing out boys have problems mean neglecting the problems girls have. Or they have even uglier impulses - "it's their turn to suffer now."

Whose fault is that? If women want to apply themselves and become better leaders within society, is that the boy's faulty, or the girl's fault? I think we know where the blame lay.

That's why enormous media attention and government and corporate resources have been devoted to the under-representation of young women in STEM fields, while almost none has been devoted to the growing disparity in post-secondary education altogether.

You try and develop diversity by encouraging enrollment. If students enroll then you have a population to analyze. If they don't, and it remains consistent with past populations, then the statistics support the historical analysis. More women are being driven to STEM to flatten out the field, but it is still up to the men to enroll and perform. I've seen enrollment, but not performance. Isn't performance what we should be concerned with?

A recent Mount Royal University alumni magazine featured an article about the steps MRU is taking to encourage more women to enter STEM programs to redress the gender imbalance. This at an institution that has something like 64 per cent female enrollment. No word of what they're doing to address that imbalance. It makes you really wonder if these people are deeply cynical, or just deeply stupid.

The only way to address this is by males enrolling. If they don't whose fault is it? We shot all over women for not enrolling in STEM, but when men don't, whose fault is it?

You can't understand Western civilization and culture (or any culture for that matter) if you don't understand its religion. You don't have to be religious to get value from studying religion. Thinkers from Nietzsche to Jung to Joseph Campbell have looked to myth, archetype, and religion to understand human consciousness.

Really Cliff? Religion is a control mechanism. I can't explain the ridiculousness of Nietzsche and his ilk, except the did not have context to their advantage. This is important when discussing philosophical issues. Context matters, and Nietzsche's views are missing modern context.

In fact, I don't think anyone in Canada can really be regarded as well-educated, in the cultural sense, without a grounding in Christianity.

That's your problem, not the problem of those who have a proper education. Religiosity is counter to an education and proper understanding of any issue.

I know that's a big gap in my own education, and one of the reasons I don't get as much out of literature as I could. And I don't think those allegories are divisive. One of the striking things about myths and religion is how alike traditions from all over the world are.

Yes, this is a gap in your education. As someone who was raised and run through the Christian ideological perspective I think that religiosity is counter to developing a critical understanding of the world around us. Religion is a divider rather than a uniter, and as a result has seen our society fractured into the #### show it is.

For the record, Peterson is not a church-goer, and equivocates about whether he believes in god.

Peterson is a contraction and to be honest. I'm not sure he would survive the faculty castigation that would follow from the bull#### he says. I think he would be pushed to the fringe quickly, because I don't see his dogma holding up to the scrutiny of his peers at a real college or university. To be honest, I have no ####ing idea what his peers at UofT are doing? They should be embarrassed to be honest. I know at my institution he would be ripped to shreds and he would learned to keep his mouth shut. Mind you, our institution has debated the Stanford Prison Experiment with Philip Zombardo on campus, so a light weight light Peterson would be fish in barrel. I actually can't wait to see him in person on the 1st of June. Hopefully he doesn't #### the bed and prove to be the light weight he appears to be.


BTW Cliff, I enjoy our engagements, and I think we find new meaning though our discussion of the various perspectives of our two nations. I think we would have a few laughs over beers, discussing #### like this, if opportunity even presented itself.