DISQUS

Nick, I agree with about two-thirds of what you wrote (and am glad to know I hold non-useless degrees!), though I'd offer the following correctives:

1) While there are a great many jobs that you can prep for in school, there are also a great many jobs that you can't -- and a *good* liberal arts degree (as opposed to something overly specific) can often help build up adaptable ways of thinking that'll enable you to work well in those situations. Something that we'd often consider a 'non-liberal arts degree', like economics, might not actually help at this level -- as undergrad economics education tends to be more theory-based and triumphal than quantitative. Whether or not these people would be better off simply forgoing the college degree (assuming they wouldn't be competing against stigma by doing so), throwing themselves into the working world, and learning by experience is another question entirely.

2) You don't really 'tell someone to go back and get a real degree', they respond to incentives. Also, we don't really have a shortage of people who have 'real degrees' if we straighten out our immigration policy and radically expand H1B visas. Immigrants with degrees tend to make better Americans than the native-born do, anyhow.

3) The MBAs in question are from California, where you have a number of reasonably good schools - the UCs, Claremont Colleges, etc., even the Cal States, that produce a big chunk of the state's middle class. They're not for nothing, these programs. They do get connections that are disproportionately California-focused (I went out of state for school, so I'd like to think I'm reasonably unbiased here), University of Phoenix this ain't.

Man, with lines like "the best sex with me is almost painfully slow"... just tell the girls where to sign on the dotted line, and you'll have knickers droppin' in no time!

Have you seen how the 'real economy' is doing, lately? I'm in Orange County, CA, which so far has weathered the economic storm better than most places. What follows is anecdote, purely anecdote.

I have a friend who's managing an office, and is hiring for low-level data entry jobs.

It pays, as best I recall, $9.35 an hour.

He's received multiple applications from people with MBAs.

(He doesn't actually care about his job, and mainly likes having the office so he can run BitTorrent at work all day and run parties in the office park for his friends over the weekend, so I've convinced him to let me stand in for him during job interviews -- I want to talk to these people in person and figure out what on earth drives an MBA to apply for such a sad position. So I'll know more then.)

Again, this is purely anecdotal, but it's in line with everything else I'm seeing, and given the scope and complexity of the topic involved here, anecdotes can be a useful check on faulty interpretations of theory and macroeconomic data.

When you talk to ordinary people -- in Orange County, in Los Angeles, in Washington DC, the areas I have the most experience with -- you don't get the sense that things are going well. A huge number of people I know are under-employed, even if they're not unemployed. A recent grad of a 5-year B.A./M.A. program at Georgetown I know, a smart cookie by any means, is currently working as a secretary. Small business owners tell me they're having a harder time getting capital.

Sometimes you have an obvious wind-sock that'll tell you which way the wind is blowing, and that works fine. But when the 'wind' is an incredibly complex economic system, and nobody can quite agree on what it does or doesn't encompass, and its inner workings are hardly transparent, sometimes there's value in simply wetting your finger and putting it in the air.

Is being 'easy' a 'bad thing'? Do 'good girls' not do 'that sort of thing'?

Also, it's even easier when you factor in the huge concentration of liberals and democrats in the creative fields. I live in Los Angeles, and nearly every person I know in a creative field is liberal; they've got all the equipment lined up for doing professional-quality video, sound, post-production, etc. at their disposal for work, so it's second nature for them to whip up something like this as a hobby.

Here's a clue-by-four: the No on Prop 8 campaign in California had way better viral marketing, production, etc. than the Yes on 8 people, because all the creatives were supporting No on 8... and yet, Yes on 8 still won.

It's almost like the quality of their youtube videos didn't reflect the divide in the population or something!

""not that there are enough right-leaning ones to make it worth launching a national advertising campaign to appeal to them.""

A "national advertising campaign"? It's a fucking shoestring operation. It's probably a dozen people and their friends that got together. Democrats tend to enjoy making funny youtube videos more than Republicans. Half the participants in *making* the video probably got laid in doing so, or were already friends, so I doubt they had to be terribly persuaded.

The idea that this is somehow indicative of the relative proportions on each side who factor in politics into their dating fails Statistics 101.

Your false dichotomy between "organized" and "personal" fails in the age of YouTube.

Remind me, again, why you're demonizing people who enjoy sex and lots of it?

Also, why are you limiting this to women? It's clearly a campaign encouraging both men and women to be selective, so why are you falling back on old-school women-are-sluts-men-are-neutral bullshit?

Missing the point much?

It's not that sex is being 'promised' to liberal guys -- I don't think there's a single girl out there that would see this and hook up with a guy she normally wouldn't. It's about being selective in who you hook up with.

I've found myself practicing this in my private life somewhat, without really thinking about it. Libertarians, liberals, conservatives, sure, as long as they're on the right side of the most important issues. Because, frankly, once you think about it, fucking someone who's perfectly happy to get their jollies but doesn't want loving gay couples to get married is a huge fucking turn-off.

It's about being more selective, not about 'rewarding' anyone sexually for their politics. Your poorly thought-out comparison is little more than unhinged whining.