A restaurant has a popular dish which they call "Ghetto Fries". Some people say that the name is insulting to blacks. I say it is insulting to blacks to assume that they all live in ghettoes! After all, the word "ghetto" originates from a place in Italy where all the Jews lived -- and we all know that Jews tend to be smart cookies. So who is insulting whom here? And how? An excerpt from the story:
"Max's Italian Beef serves a dish called "Ghetto Fries", which are French fries covered in cheddar cheese, barbeque sauce, giardiniera, gravy and raw onions. It is the restaurant's most popular dish, NBC5's Jennifer Mitchell reported. A recent marketing blitz has prompted the questions about the name -- and the negative connotations critics said go with it. "Even if we live in the nicest neighborhoods, it is always blacks who live in the ghetto," said one customer. "So, I don't approve at all." The name and recipe comes from a former white employee, who was nicknamed "Ghetto Girl," Mitchell reported. Larry Estes, the restaurant's owner, said he does get questions about the fries, but said the name is not intended to offend anyone. "It applies to any ethnic neighborhood, or any group of the same people living there," Estes said. "It has nothing to do with racial intonations or anything like that".
Source
O Vast Incorrectness!
Should this have been tongue-tied?
"The Times" of London is a highly recommendable paper for its straight-down-the middle accounts of most things (unlike a certain New York publication). The fact that it is a Rupert Murdoch publication (think Fox News) probably has something to do with that. But I think even "The Times" was a bit courageous to print the following story (excerpt):
"A study claims that the cleverest people are much more likely to be men than women. Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for "tasks of high complexity", according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded. They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees. When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, said that he was uncomfortable with the findings. But he added that the evidence was clear despite the insistence of many academics that there were "no meaningful sex differences" in levels of intelligence".
Source
Before all my female readers delete their bookmarks to this site, let me explain. I am a psychometrician by trade so I do know a little about this. First, let me point out that British Journal of Psychology is Britain's top academic psychology journal. So it needs to be reckoned with. What it reports, however, has in fact been known to psychometricians for about 100 years. And that is that men and women have the same intelligence ON AVERAGE but the scatter of intelligence differs between the sexes. Female intelligence clusters much more closely around the average -- so there are fewer very dumb women and fewer very bright women. And that, I am afraid, is how the cookie crumbles. The geniuses tend to be men but so do the dummos. And I am sure most women have met plenty of the latter.
Update:
For those who want to look at the male/female ability question more closely, there is an exhaustive (and exhausting) coverage of the question here -- and that's just covering the mathematical ability component of IQ.
A New Forbidden Word: "Boyo"!
Apparently "Boyo" is a common way of addressing people from Wales. But a Scottish Labour Party councillor has just been convicted and fined for racism because he used it to a Welshman. The councillor also told the Welshman to "f*** off" but that was apparently OK. It was the "Boyo" that earned him the fine. Excerpt:
"Danny Meikle, 57, a Labour councillor in Lanarkshire, was convicted by Lanark Sheriff Court of acting in a racially aggravated manner by repeatedly addressing Tecwyn Thomas, a recent immigrant to southern Scotland, as "Boyo".... Relating his meeting with Meikle, Mr Thomas told the court: "I asked him about some letters he hadn't replied to. His response was a torrent of foul language. He said, `I wouldn't answer any of your f***ing letters, boyo.' He emphasised the `boyo'."... Stephen McBride, representing Meikle, drew a comparison with John Hartson, Celtic's Welsh striker, who is widely known to fans as "Bhoyo". The lawyer held up a newspaper sports page article with the headline "Home Bhoyo" and challenged Mr Thomas to find it racist.... "No, it's not the word itself; it's the way it's used," Mr Thomas told the court. Meikle said in evidence that he used the word "boyo" all the time and denied that it was racist".
Source
