i have a space fleet

Seriously, sometimes he is awesome, but most of the time he's a fucking jackass and I just want to whack him with a board. And yet I can't stop watching Morning Joe, because I'm addicted to MSNBC. Yesterday, they were discussing Lawrence Summers and how there was some sort of academic conspiracy to get him thrown out of Harvard for asking a "good question". Yeah. That came from Mika. I want to like her, but I can't. She is way too conciliatory on important issues and seems to mostly have opinions on things that don't actually matter. So anyway, there was a feminist intellectual conspiracy to oust Lawrence Summers after he suggested that females were innately inferior to males in maths and sciences, because his daughter treated toy trucks like dolls. All the reasons that was a dumbass thing to say were enumerated by smarter people than I when it happened, so I won't go into it. But I couldn't believe Mika called it a conspiracy, said it was a reasonable question, and then they all agreed it was sooooo hard for poor Larry.

It's not a reasonable question, and when the president of a preeminent institution of learning makes stupid comments implying women aren't as good as men at a conference on diversity in the sciences, he should know what's coming (and he plainly did, with his disclaimers about provoking the audience). Frankly, I'm surprised that he didn't include a quaint anecdote about how girls like Easy-Bake Ovens and excel at home economics, even if they suck at regular, manly-man economics. But implying that girls are bad at maths and sciences based on flimsy (at best) scientific evidence and personal observation is bullshit, and there doesn't need to be a conspiracy of the intelligentsia to kick his ass out the door. (Honestly, university professors are too busy fighting amongst themselves to engage in conspiracy. A casual lunch is fraught with complex status issues; any discussion is likely as not to be gossip about so-and-so's doctoral students, how much the dean sucks, why the new department secretary isn't as good as the old department secretary, and how ridiculous all the university's policies are. Any conspiracy will be dedicated solely to stealing someone else's research, or possibly pinching a promising postdoc.)

And yet I still watch Morning Joe, even though I end up in frothy rage, wanting to throw things at the TV.

(I have no real opinion on Summers' possible appointment as Treasury Secretary, because I don't know what his qualifications are and I don't really care; if he can get the economy out of the tank I will take a slightly misogynist jerk, so long as he isn't in charge of HR. I will feel slightly less warm and fuzzy about Obama, though.)