youzicha:

kontextmaschine:

Ivy League graduates often find themselves (well, ourselves) in contexts where it’s not unusual to have an Ivy League degree, which from the outside is “holy shit, you move in Ivy-bedecked elite circles” but from the inside is “having an Ivy League degree is not a distinction that significantly structures my status hierarchies”

Part three of gays answering the age-old question: “Where did you go to college?” #ivyleague #princeton #cornell #admissions #gay

Cornell
Ask a Cornell gay where he went to school and he’ll say “Oh! I hate this question because I don’t want to sound like I’m showing off, but… it’s an Ivy.” He wants you to know he went to an Ivy, but he doesn’t want you to know which one. And that’s because—it’s Cornell.

kontextmaschine:

eightyonekilograms:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).

If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)

@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?

Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”

The major elements were

• Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
• Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
• Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies

So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.

My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts,

Huh, is that why my Japanese classes had surprisingly few weebs? Everyone there was planning to go into foreign service and I just didn’t notice?

(I think another factor was that Cornell had a class on Japanese pop culture, and some friends who took it reported that it was full of weebs, so I just assumed that was the quarantine keeping them out of the language class)

That’s more at the grad level (and FALCON) really, but those types make it into normal language classes too. (Well, the good 6/7 credit linguistics track sleeved down from FALCON, which is really built for the Defense Language Proficiency Test, not the 4 credit “functioning as a businessman” one built for the Japanese State Department’s JLPT).

Oh god, I took the pop culture class the first year it was offered, as one of the last ones leaving class once the nihonjin Anthropology professor wearily sighed that he had NOT expected this (a sophomore girl with striped armwarmers challenging his authority on “being a person living in Japan” based on her dad having been at the branch office there in childhood)

Was Nakanishi-sensei still there when you were taking classes? She was my fave.

Oh my god @eightyonekilograms, have you listened to tapes at the Noyes Language Lab?

Cornell’s marquee sport was not football, or basketball, or even baseball, but like, hockey.

So one of the things about Cornell as a university is it’s 7 undergrad colleges, 3 are part of the State University of New York system, Cornell was actually New York’s Morill Land Grant college (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, and King’s [Columbia] had of course been colonial state universities)

And one of the state colleges is “Human Ecology”, in my day it taught textile studies (links with the NYC fashion industry), Interior Design (also Manhattan industry!), Childhood Development and Policy Analysis and Management

Except it was really a renaming of the “Home Ec.” housewife college teaching homekeeping, childraising, and decorative production, with PAM stapled on as a way for Long Island failsons to sneak into Ivy prelaw/pre-MBA and then donate