This time, we bring you “let’s make it illegal to call anybody ugly!”
It never ceases to amaze us how much spare time professors have on their hands to come up with insane idiocies like what’s about to be Fisked good and hard, but it does suggest to us that maybe somebody ought to give them something actually useful to do with their time. Like, perchance, work?
BEING good-looking is useful in so many ways.
In addition to whatever personal pleasure it gives you, being attractive also helps you earn more money, find a higher-earning spouse (and one who looks better, too!) and get better deals on mortgages. Each of these facts has been demonstrated over the past 20 years by many economists and other researchers. The effects are not small: one study showed that an American worker who was among the bottom one-seventh in looks, as assessed by randomly chosen observers, earned 10 to 15 percent less per year than a similar worker whose looks were assessed in the top one-third — a lifetime difference, in a typical case, of about $230,000.
Actually, boyish charm, stratospheric levels of intelligence and a .45 strapped to your hip are much more important factors.
But we’ll grant that our dashing looks haven’t hurt us either.
But enough about His Imperial Highness.
Beauty is as much an issue for men as for women. While extensive research shows that women’s looks have bigger impacts in the market for mates, another large group of studies demonstrates that men’s looks have bigger impacts on the job.
This, of course, is utter bovine fecal matter. If that were true, Chris Tingles Matthews would be making a living licking maggots off corpses and, well, so would Janeane Garawfulho. Chris has been known to change the migratory pattern of birds just by staying out in the sun for more than 5 minutes at a time, the birds lucky enough to not puke themselves to death that is, and Janeane has no discernible talent other than that of looking moderately attractive if she would only lose the glasses and wash her hair more than once a year.
Unless, of course, you wish to argue that Chris got his job because of his Cary Grant-like looks and Janeane got hers because of her razor wit. In which case, please do make your case in the comments. We positively implore you.
But other than being utter goat shit, those studies are spot on.
How could we remedy this injustice? With all the gains to being good-looking, you would think that more people would get plastic surgery or makeovers to improve their looks. Many of us do all those things, but as studies have shown, such refinements make only small differences in our beauty. All that spending may make us feel better, but it doesn’t help us much in getting a better job or a more desirable mate.
So, other than you having just demonstrated that good looks do absolutely nothing on their own to help you get a leg up in life, you still persist in your inane argument? Must you do all of our work for us, proving that you’re an utter pea brain? You just said, within a few paragraphs and allow us to paraphrase that a) Good looks are everything and b) improving your looks doesn’t help at all.
You’ve got an F so far, but we sense potential for downwards movement in your grade.
A more radical solution may be needed: why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?
Why not indeed? Imagine all the fun that thousands of overpaid, underworked government employees can have sitting around defining Ugly™. Sounds like a shovel-ready project to us, much like our current “president”, SCOAMFOTUS.
What this country really needs is a government-established definition of Beautiful™ for the rest of us uneducated plebes to try, unsuccessfully, to adhere to.
Of course, the only president likely to go with such a monumental display of idiocy is SCOAMFOTUS, which means that we’d end up with definitions of male beauty requiring ears that would make Dumbo look like a polished rock and female beauty that would require a mandible large enough to serve as a dry dock for a Nimitz class carrier.
We actually already do offer such protections in a few places, including in some jurisdictions in California, and in the District of Columbia,
And why are we not surprised?
Ugliness could be protected generally in the United States by small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Ugly people could be allowed to seek help from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies in overcoming the effects of discrimination. We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.
Bloody brilliant! We can’t wait to see the mile-long lines of people queuing up to be defined “ugly enough to make a train take a dirt road.”
The mechanics of legislating this kind of protection are not as difficult as you might think. You might argue that people can’t be classified by their looks — that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That aphorism is correct in one sense: if asked who is the most beautiful person in a group of beautiful people, you and I might well have different answers. But when it comes to differentiating classes of attractiveness, we all view beauty similarly: someone whom you consider good-looking will be viewed similarly by most others; someone you consider ugly will be viewed as ugly by most others. In one study, more than half of a group of people were assessed identically by each of two observers using a five-point scale; and very few assessments differed by more than one point.
So your suggestion is that people, prior to seeking protection under the Americans With Looks That Would Make Helen Thomas Look Like Afrodite Act™, would have to line up before a panel of twits to be scored on a scale from 1 to 10?
You might reasonably disagree and argue for protecting all deserving groups. Either way, you shouldn’t be surprised to see the United States heading toward this new legal frontier.
Alright. At this point we have to, have to assume that the writer is being satirical and, if he is, he’s actually not at all unsuccessful in his endeavors. Because to assume otherwise, we would have to suggest that he should be placed under the protection of the upcoming Americans So Fucking Useless That They Ought To Be Used For Chicken Feed Act.
And, unfortunately, we suspect that he is, indeed, being satirical, because we would be not at all surprised to see a law as stupid as he’s suggesting being passed by the terminally brainfucked blatherskates of the Potomac.
Thatisall.
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