Society owes me $24.78 for gas and tolls. Pay up, society!
apparently the much-lauded "grit" is less of a factor in academic achievement than previously thought.
I only have access to the linked summary, not the full article, but is this really a fair summary? The abstract didn't seem to question that "grit" was important. It seemed instead to indicate that "grit" isn't really a new variable so much as a rebranding of an existing collection of personality traits, most notably conscientiousness.
Oh, how I love when people lightheartedly say terrible shit! It's the best.
I for one would love to see heebie' rant... Can you repost here or is that too problematic?
"grit" isn't really a new variable so much as a rebranding of an existing collection of personality traits, most notably conscientiousness.
Woo hoo, good news for me. I'm not very gritty, but I am definitely conscientious (note: I haven't read any of the links yet).
I thought "grit" was a trademark of New England Patriots football players. What does it have to do with academia?
Disclaimer: we don't need no stinking links!
I'm conscientious too. Not gritty, tho. Their definition may be off.
I thought "grit" was a trademark of New England Patriots football players.
I thought it was the Seattle Seahawks ("Renowned psychologist impressed with Seahawks' 'culture of grit'")
I've embarked on a mass shaming of my Facebook friends that roll complicated issues into images with 10-15 words of text by sarcastically pretending that they actually changed my mind about something.
Here was my rant: "I really, strongly disagree, to be honest. As humans, we have an obligation to take care of each other. Every person is entitled to food, shelter, freedom from violence, and basic health care, for starters. If a person doesn't have those, they are being let down by their society."
The actual meme was "Here is a comprehensive list of everything you're entitled to and what the world owes you," now that I'm looking at it.
I guess long-winded is an overstatement, but FB has narrow margins and I usually just lurk, so it felt big.
I was recently informed my parents think I have a work ethic. I had no idea! maybe they still think all that time in shitty bands, reading odd books, hacking on the ZX Spectrum, watching it snow, wanking over that Polish lass's incredible legs, I was actually studying or something?
Grit hell
I have recently joined the Unified Church of the Rising Death Spiral
Kamina: We brawlers are sustained by willpower! Even when mocked as reckless and crazy!
Simon: If there's a wall in our way then we smash it down! If there isn't a path, then we carve one ourselves!
Both: The magma of our soul burns with a mighty flame! Super Ultra Combining: Gurren Lagann!!
Simon: Just who...!
Kamina: In the hell...!
Both: DO YOU THINK WE ARE!?
Simon:We embark on the winding spiral path! The paths of man and beast intersect!
Viral: Join with yesterday's foe to smash fate, and grab tomorrow's path with our own hands!
So much more inspiration on that page.
(A little bit serious. I am probably the only person ever who thinks TTGL had a serious and interesting message about technology, society, and climate change. Accelerate Everything Now!!!)
I guess long-winded is an overstatement, but FB has narrow margins and I usually just lurk, so it felt big.
The User Interface design has an impact on what feels like a long or short message. (via Spike)
I thought it was the Seattle Seahawks
Blasphemy! If you had said "the Red Sox" you might not be burned as a witch traded to Cleveland.
11: I think you may have been missing the intended point of the meme.
In what sense? It looks like a straightforward "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps/we built that!/blame people for their problems!" kinda thing.
Maybe it was saying that everyone is entitled to a pencil and a piece of notebook paper.
As a response to a statement that "no one owes you anything" (or frame it as an admonition to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" if you want), the view that "every person is entitled to food, shelter, freedom from violence, and basic health care" just seems sort of orthogonal to the sentiment being expressed. It's easy to believe both simultaneously.
Aren't welfare and free medicine precisely the kind of handouts that pull-yourself-uppers are railing against?
How did the poster respond to the rant?
Heebie's right. Thankfully I'm only friends with about 15 people on FB so I don't actually see those memes there, but that's exactly the message. IME people are usually quite happy to spell it out (often with gratuitous slurs if they think you are a member of the "takers" or "moochers" class).
To me those images are either meanspirited and/or trite, depending on the person delivering it (sounds like heebie's friend was just being the latter).
Fuck grit.
Heebie have you ever even had beach sex? Don't fuck with grit. That shit hurts.
21: not in my experience. They're usually railing against an entitled attitude.
25: They may perceive themselves as up against people who see themselves as entitled to success, wealth, love, happiness, acclaim, etc. without working for it, and that can be distinguished in theory, but in practice I think the sentiment absolutely does bleed into "I never got a handout"-style middle-class kicking-down and heebie's comment was a useful corrective.
25: Well, duh. They are railing against people who feel they are entitled to food, shelter, lack of violence committed against them, and basic healthcare. Exactly as heebie says in 11.
I mean, urp, have you ever even met a conservative? The whole conservative thing is about how people shouldn't be getting free stuff, and that society isn't responsible for, say, keeping priests from raping children.
The whole conservative thing is that altar boys should carry guns - society owes them nothing.
28.last Maybe guns? Society owes them guns. I bet you can get some conservatives to sign off on that. Society owes you the means to protect your sacred 2nd Amendment rights.
13 Which Polish lass, Alex? Asking for a friend.
Maybe guns? Society owes them guns. I bet you can get some conservatives to sign off on that. Society owes you the means to protect your sacred 2nd Amendment rights.
But those guns ain't free. Gotta keep the gunmakers in business, after all.
Maybe the conservative replacement for Obamacare once they repeal it could be a similar program that requires people to buy guns or face a tax penalty.
"I got your social insurance right here!"
It is with grit that have the persistence to find fallacy of the single cause at the root of every misguided academic trend.
An armed society is a gritty society
"But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country-but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that."
Society doesn't owe you relief from unlawful imprisonment; you just need to develop your grit of habeus corpus.
The grit scale -- which is behind the research that has started this whole fad -- is, to a first approximation, easily gameable horseshit. I saw a talk by Duckworth, and what she has done is create questionnaire full of questions where the "right" answer is obvious if you're paying the slightest bit of attention, and applied it to a lot of situations where people who pay the slightest bit of attention to what the expectations are will probably do better than those who are just checked out.
I disagree with 20. If you are entitled to X then it's somebody's job to give you X and therefore somebody owes you something. There's no entitlement that doesn't obligate somebody else.
29: We're talking about when I was 15, you realise?
Would a "Grits Matter! Grit don't" bumper sticker be a big seller among southern-fried liberals?
40 is logically true (as are preceding similar comments), but my point is that this logic is not the point of the meme. The person posting this meme (typical person--I don't know heebie's friend, obviously) likely doesn't dispute that society should be structured in a way such that people are free from violence and no one is starving to death or, to use Donald Trump's phrase, "dying in the streets" for lack of healthcare. They very likely agree that anyone destitute who shows up to an ER ought to receive emergency treatment, regardless of ability to pay, as just one example. And if y walked them through it, they could almost certainly follow the logical chain of reasoning demonstrating that this belief does actually imply that, if we define our terms carefully, people are in fact "owed" certain things in certain circumstances. I think you could get them nod along to all of that while they would still be maintaining that you are totally missing the point. The point is that people on the receiving end of that sort of charity should feel grateful, not entitled. The point is that people need to work for whatever they want, not expect society to give it to them. The point is that society is not "fair" and, although you can certainly work to make it more fair at the political level (which we should all be doing!), on a personal level whining about this unfairness is not going to do you one bit of good; you have to just accept the cards you've been dealt and do the best you can with them.
39. I've always felt that way about those personality pigeonhole tests like Meyers-Briggs. If you want to show the person who is looking at the results that you fall into a particular pigeonholes, it's pretty easy.
Or so a friend told me.
The point is that people on the receiving end of that sort of charity should feel grateful, not entitled. The point is that people need to work for whatever they want, not expect society to give it to them.
It is true that the acquaintance probably agrees with this. Also she is also half-picturing a cliche about entitled rich kids.
My concern is that she is way too preoccupied with ending entitled attitudes and not nearly preoccupied with the fact that people are not being sufficiently cared for.
45 et al.
This discussion reminds me of the 19th and 20th century arguments about the "deserving poor." There is always the desired to not give "handouts," which are by definition to the undeserving poor, but to give "(emergency) assistance" to the deserving poor.
Of course, all too often the deserving/undeserving meter is just a device that measures skin color.
On preview, I see that I'm just offering a windier response than 45 and 46, but I'll do it anyway.
The person posting this meme (typical person--I don't know heebie's friend, obviously) likely doesn't dispute that society should be structured in a way such that people are ... to use Donald Trump's phrase, "dying in the streets" for lack of healthcare.
I think we just have different experiences with conservatives.
I mean, a lot of conservatives appreciate Trump, but I'm not aware of an ideological conservative who has praised this particular comment by him. They are just fine with people dying in the streets for lack of healthcare.
They very likely agree that anyone destitute who shows up to an ER ought to receive emergency treatment, regardless of ability to pay, as just one example.
Seriously, no. George W. Bush used the ER as a pathetic excuse for not otherwise providing healthcare - not as an example of how great it is that poor people get healthcare.
Ron Paul gets cheers from a conservative crowd for expressing this sort of sentiment very crudely.
I think you could get them nod along to all of that while they would still be maintaining that you are totally missing the point.
Right. Now you've got it. And try it the other way, get them to start from the premise that society doesn't owe people anything, and work them back from there to whether a 4-year-old with cancer should get free care. I've actually done this with a "moderate" conservative. The place you wind up is pretty appalling. Remember, SCHIP is a recent development in this country, and it wasn't the conservatives pushing it.
The point is that people on the receiving end of that sort of charity should feel grateful, not entitled.
Right again. They aren't entitled to that help from society, and should be grateful for anything they get from individuals.
To the extent that society provides this kind of assistance, people should be grateful for how they are able to game the system - but really, they should turn down this sort of help. (See: Republican governors and Medicaid.)
The point is that society is not "fair" and, although you can certainly work to make it more fair at the political level (which we should all be doing!)
No conservative is going to suggest that actual fairness requires government action in the provision of services. That's the whole point of being a conservative. Rich people are rich because they deserve it. Poor people are poor for the same reason.
45.2: I get this, and I agree a lot of people have that problem, but In part I think this is a legitimate desire to focus on things over which you have agency. I can't do much to make society more fair--I can try to raise public consciousness, etc., but a lot of the time that feels pretty futile. But I can control my own attitudes/reactions to circumstances, and that has the potential to move the needle quite a bit more--for me personally if not for society as a whole.
Is heebie's friend an ideological conservative? I'd missed that, if so.
whether a 4-year-old with cancer should get free care
I doubt you'd find many conservatives who would deny 4-year-olds with cancer free care. The rubber meets the road when it's a 40-year-old smoker, drug-addict, ex-con, single mom with non-white skin.
Rich people are rich because they deserve it. Poor people are poor for the same reason.
Our wonderful Calvinist/Puritan heritage. Massachusetts has a lot to answer for, still.
48: Agreed. This is why the thing that heebie's friend posted is a fundamentally conservative meme. The conservative says: I and the people I identify with are subject to the vicissitudes of fate, and those should be ameliorated. You need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
The self-aware liberal says the reverse: In my life, I need to take responsibility. In political life, it is necessary to make life as fair as possible for you (and, yes, for me too).
To go back to the original meme, it says: "Here is a list of exactly everything that society owes you." It's not "Here is a list of everything society owes me."
I'm sure heebie's friend is very nice, and isn't thinking this through, but heebie's nice friend is placing the conversation in a framework designed to echo the nastiest conservative talking points.
I doubt you'd find many conservatives who would deny 4-year-olds with cancer free care.
In fact, CHIP wasn't enacted until 1997. You think it was conservatives pushing it?
No kidding, the rightwing really doesn't care about poor 4-year-olds with cancer - at least in the sense that they think it's society's responsibility to do something about it.
(CHIP was originally passed as part of the Balanced Budget Act. The opposition, such as it was, was primarily Republican, but there was no doubt a lot of stuff in the bill designed to draw Republican votes, so the opposition to the bill probably understates the opposition to CHIP.)
Here's the Senate vote in 2015 for reauthorization. So you've got eight of 54 Republican senators against it even after it's been the law for nearly 20 years.
It seems to me that the appeal of the idea that people in need should get charitable aid and display gratitude rather than feel entitled to the things that society exists to provide people with is largely a matter of people wanting the opportunity to remind people worse off than they that they personally are superior to people doing less well, and feel power over them.* I can't think of any reason a decent society would indulge people in that desire.
*Like, for example, the anger that a surprising number of people feel when restaurants just pay their wait staff real wages rather than depending on tips to make up the difference: they really want to feel like the other person depends on their superiority.
49: Conservative, but mostly pretty religious and not extremely passionate about politics, I think.
54: I don't disagree, but who is the audience? If you're giving advice to the recipient (or possible recipient) and your advice is in the realm or the personal (not social/political), "act grateful for the generosity of others, and not like an entitled twat" is actually useful advice.
What I've seen of those memes doesn't look at all like giving advice to people - the audience is other people who also feel entitled to feeling that kind of superiority. It's a shared reinforcement of the idea that those other people need to know their place.
This topic has that Crass song stuck in my head now -- "Of course they fucking do!"
In most circumstances, I would interpret the posting of a meme like that (or any sort of aspirational saying) more as a "reminder to self". "I thought this was helpful/a good reminder, and I'm sharing it in case you might also like it", basically. Not as a "message" that the poster is hoping that one of the "undeserving" will see and internalize.
No kidding, the rightwing really doesn't care about poor 4-year-olds with cancer - at least in the sense that they think it's society's responsibility to do something about it.
This is unhelpful caricature. Many might agree that the government shouldn't necessarily do anything about it, because they worry that might have unintended consequences and ultimately do more harm than good. But they definitely want to see society help that child. E.g. they think St Jude's, Ronald McDonald House and institutions like those are doing good and important work.
E.g. they think St Jude's, Ronald McDonald House and institutions like those are doing good and important work.
Meanwhile, they are happy to bitch about the inefficiency of government, but don't recognized the massive inefficiencies inherent to the task of relying on private charitable initiatives to provide public services.
But they definitely want to see society help that child. E.g. they think St Jude's, Ronald McDonald House and institutions like those are doing good and important work.
Those institutions are designed to help out individual kids. Not 4-year-old cancer victims as a class.
As I said:
The conservative says: I and the people I identify with are subject to the vicissitudes of fate, and those should be ameliorated. You need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
If they can be made to sympathize, they'll send a few bucks to St. Jude. Otherwise, tough luck, kid.