Kingsley Browne, Wayne State Law Prof, Embarrasses Himself Spectacularly on The Daily Show

Jon Stew­art and com­pa­ny can make pret­ty much any­one look like an imbe­cile. Some nights they have to put a lot of elbow grease into it. Some nights less. And, some nights, they can just leave the elbow grease on the work­room shelf. Like Mon­day night, when Kings­ley Browne, law pro­fes­sor at Wayne State, gave an inter­view to The Dai­ly Show and opined on whether women should take part in front­line com­bat. While some con­ser­v­a­tives have opposed widen­ing wom­en’s role in com­bat by point­ing to “anatom­i­cal facts,” Kings­ley pulled some pop psy­cho-biol­o­gy out of his dusty store­house of patri­cian knowl­edge. “Girls become women by get­ting old­er; boys become men by accom­plish­ing some­thing, by prov­ing some­thing.” Saman­tha Bee could have just stayed home and col­lect­ed a pay­check that night. 1950s prat­tle just sounds increas­ing­ly fool­ish and fun­ny in 2013 (even if its effects are still per­ni­cious). But, even so, Bee did add the Andy Grif­fith fade-to-black & white, and that was a pret­ty nice touch.

Note: If Mr. Browne feels like his views weren’t ade­quate­ly expressed on The Dai­ly Show, we would wel­come him to elab­o­rate on his views in the com­ments sec­tion below.

Also note, if you’re look­ing for more musty mus­ings from the liv­ing muse­um, you can catch Mr. Browne on CNN.


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Comments (6)
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  • ayo says:

    ugh, fuck off with this trite pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al crap. This is the worst trope of pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al­ism: pok­ing fun at oth­ers whilst main­tain­ing an air of supe­ri­or­i­ty

  • John says:

    I’m not sure whether Col­man agrees or disagrees…too glib.
    I guess in this enlight­ened age females are not anatom­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from males, and the rest is all ego. I guess that is what he means.

  • Scott says:

    “worst trope of pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al­ism” Might be the worst, but “worst trope of pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al­ism” is pret­ty bad, too.

  • MerryMarjie says:

    Pulling out my sup­ply of pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al trope, I believe Prof. Browne is refer­ring to the “fact” that women have noth­ing to prove in becom­ing respect­ed. Oh, right, I cer­tain­ly nev­er had to com­pete with men on any lev­el oth­er than phys­i­cal while work­ing myself through the male-dom­i­nat­ed world of bank­ing, and I was able to do it with less salary than men.

  • Olave says:

    Here’s an inter­est­ing point made by David F. Bur­rel­li of the Con­gres­sion­al Research Ser­vice:

    “… the pro­pos­al rec­om­mends pur­su­ing gen­der-neu­tral phys­i­cal stan­dards seem­ing­ly to make such stan­dards a non-issue in terms of assign­ments to occu­pa­tion­al spe­cial­ties cur­rent­ly closed to women. The use of the term “gen­der-neu­tral phys­i­cal stan­dards” rais­es ques­tions depend­ing on how it is defined. A plain read­ing of the term sug­gests that men and women would be required to meet the same phys­i­cal stan­dards in order to be sim­i­lar­ly assigned. How­ev­er, in the past, the Ser­vices have used this and sim­i­lar terms to sug­gest that men and women must exert the same amount of ener­gy in a par­tic­u­lar task, regard­less of the work that is actu­al­ly accom­plished by either. Hypo­thet­i­cal­ly speak­ing, if a female sol­dier car­ries 70 pounds of equip­ment five miles and exerts the same effort as a male car­ry­ing 100 pounds of equip­ment the same dis­tance, the dif­fer­ing stan­dards could be viewed as ‘gen­der-neu­tral’ because both exert­ed the same amount of effort, with dif­fer­ing loads. Such dif­fer­ing loads, in cer­tain sce­nar­ios, may or may not mat­ter, par­tic­u­lar­ly in terms of ammu­ni­tion, med­ical equip­ment, com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment, and med­ical sup­plies, com­mon­ly car­ried by foot sol­diers. (Accord­ing to a U.S. Army Report, a rifle­man in Afghanistan can be expect­ed to car­ry an aver­age fight­ing load of 63 lbs. to an aver­age Emer­gency Approach March Load of 127 lbs.47)”

    http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42075.pdf

  • MKP says:

    How is the cunt who wrote this Open Cul­ture arti­cle?

    Pathet­ic.

    Kings­ley Browne’s work is sci­ence 101 and basic log­ic, which can’t be denied in any man­ner unless you’re delud­ed and anti-sci­ence.

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