Day: October 25, 2014

It all starts with Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

The doomsayer’s case amounts to this: teenagers take tests, score poorly, apply to safety schools, and borrow tens of thousands of dollars to major in Film Studies, guzzle beer, smoke weed, borrow more money, get into cocaine, pawn the Playstation, discover the concept of gender identity, sleep with anyone accordingly, study little, earn high marks and a quarter-million-dollar piece of paper, apply for jobs beyond their qualifications, settle for jobs that reflect their qualifications, default on their student loans, declare bankruptcy, discover that student loans are the only kind of debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy, die, and pass on the debt to their heirs, parents, or taxpayers. And you thought fraternity initiations were cruel.

Yet records for new college enrollment continue apace. Parents, desperately seeking a marquee university bumper sticker to show off to the neighbors, tell their children that college is the ticket to the high life, despite the fact that half of recent graduates are working jobs that do not require a college degree. Politicians bend over backward to boost student loans and keep interest rates artificially low, despite $1 trillion in loans outstanding and default rates that would make Bear Stearns blush. The only thing Americans, Right and Left, seem to agree on is that college is an unquestionable good.

Daring to speak out against the lemming-like charge toward the higher education precipice seems to invite only scorn from reporters in the press, who, like me, are a tad self-conscious about their useless, over-priced, fraudulent, academically bankrupt journalism, communications, gender studies, and poli-sci diplomas.

I caught the beginning of this; my children caught it full-force. This is one of those messes that will take generations to untangle. All done with the best of intentions.

via Instapundit

Clark at Popehat has a long post up on a little thing called GamerGate; except that it’s actually about a bigger thing that is affecting our whole society- the cultural struggle between the ‘nannystaters’ and the ‘leave-me-be-ers’ for lack of a better term. (Oh, I have better terms, they’re just ruder than I feel like being this morning.) (And, it’s a much larger struggle than just that.)

As a poet once said: Cthulhu swims slowly, but he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?

The blue team has made amazing progress over the last three hundred years. Occasionally by force of arms, but usually by a much more clever strategy: entryism.

Entryism, for those not hip to the lingo, is “a political strategy in which an organization or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. In situations where the organization being ‘entered’ is hostile to entryism, the entryists may engage in a degree of subterfuge to hide the fact that they are an organization in their own right.”

Since World War II the Blue team in the US has entered into the stodgy old universities (taking advantage of the GI Bill and the resulting explosion in size of secondary education institutions), and taken them over completely. It has taken over the media (now called the “mainstream media” or MSM by the red team), because of this. It has taken over many corporate boards (although not all attempts have succeeded).

One advantage the blue team has is the aura of inevitability: as with small Iraqi militias or army units facing ISIS in the Levant, when faced with an enemy that wins every battle, one’s priors must be that in the coming battle one will lose. Thus, the winning move is to immediately surrender, ask for forgiveness, and join the winning team (millions of years of evolution make us pretty decent players at this game of thrones, remember).

Yes, I know, tl:dr. But do read it. Follow the links. He’s done an excellent job of capturing the essence of the cultural divide that is starting to tear this civilization apart- and it’s all about video games. Funny, that.

If you’re wondering, I, like Clark, find myself aligned with Red, with misgivings. Read the article and you’ll see what I mean.