Writes Asra Q. Nomani in "School Is for Merit" (one of a series of 12 essays in the NYT answering the question "What is school for?").
September 1, 2022
"Merit demands excellence and rigor. It is not, as its critics often insist, an elitist, classist or racist value."
"It acknowledges that all kids have talents. Even though talents are not distributed equally, it is our obligation as parents and teachers to nurture each child’s individual spark and make sure that all children have the chance to be the best that they can be. I learned that on the Morgantown High volleyball team. I was never going to make the Olympic team. But Coach Rice encouraged me to understand that the most valiant, healthy challenge is a personal one, to strive to do and be my best.
Merit should never have become a battlefront in the culture wars. I understand the impulse to declare the system rigged when so many children, particularly Black and Hispanic children, have fallen behind academically. But the answer to racial disparities in math and reading scores and advanced academic enrollment is not to blame the game and re-rig it to favor outcomes that please certain political constituencies but do little to make life better for struggling children...."
Writes Asra Q. Nomani in "School Is for Merit" (one of a series of 12 essays in the NYT answering the question "What is school for?").
Writes Asra Q. Nomani in "School Is for Merit" (one of a series of 12 essays in the NYT answering the question "What is school for?").
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
61 comments:
Even though talents are not distributed equally
The problem is getting this through to people who think that having very few black brain surgeons and very few white guys in the NBA are both examples of white privilege.
Rigorously enforced Equity and Inclusion in the front end are dangerously burdened planes and bridges in the back end.
Talk about responsibility for the future.
In the culture wars merit is conflated with prestige.
Can't argue with what's said in the article.
Unless of course you're a race hustler.
I've become very suspicous about "Merit" in school, and i don't disagree with Blacks/Hispanics and working class whites, who think its being used to hold them back. I think quotas need to be expanded. Let colleges and law schools look like America, not just racially, but in terms of religion and economic background.
Also, its good that someone is asking "what is school for?" because most Americans can't answer the question. You'd think given they send their children to it from ages 5-22, and pay taxes to finance a Trillion dollar "education industry", they have an answer. A good answer.
But they don't want to think about it.
Nomani is right that Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) policy normalizes progress... one step forward, two steps backward.
For blacks you want school to teach good character, the biggest key to advancement.
This hits on something I've been thinking about for a while, how the movie Glory really gives insight to different approaches to racial discrimination and responses, within a curiously wide range of different expressions of racism. There's two main responses to having Black soldiers on the abolitionist side. One, represented by the 54th Massachusetts, the officers and men as well as leaders like Frederick Douglas, who pushed for equality and opportunity within the established structure of military life, to give them a chance to prove themselves (which they did). There's a potent scene where the drill instructor, who uses racist language throughout, pushes back against treating the men more easily and tells Colonel Shaw that they need to be pushed in order to find their potential. Outwardly racist but his goal was to really bring out the best and believed that was possible.
On the other side, were the officers that the 54th gets assigned to in the South, who put on a big show about wiping out abolition, but see the freed slaves as basically children, having them sing and raid towns, but only capable of manual labor or other unimportant roles. They point to freedom but their significant low expectations show how their outward rhetoric hides significant inner and deeper racism.
There's a lot more that could be said and the more I've watched it over the years the more I've been struck by how powerful and insightful it is in a lot of ways.
Cancelled in 3...
Interesting that the NYT needs 12 essays to explain to its readers what is school for.
Any disparate outcome is an ism!
Racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, etc.
Unless, of course, the worse outcome is for white hetero males. Those disparate outcomes are successes!
Here's one recent example:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/article-abstract/2795766
The takeaway from the study is "Results suggest that for a given height and weight, women are at higher risk for incident [atrial fibrillation] than men, and primary prevention with risk factor modification should be equally effective; these findings emphasize the need for AF prevention in women."
But what did the study really find?
After adjustment for age and treatment assignment, women were at lower risk for incident AF than men... The inverse association between female sex and AF persisted after adjustment for race and ethnicity, smoking, alcohol intake, hypertension, diabetes (type 1, type 2, gestational), thyroid disease, exercise, and BMI... However, female sex was positively associated with AF when height... height and weight ... or [body surface area] ... were substituted for BMI in the multivariate model.
So in almost every dimension tested, men are at greater risk. However, if you compare short men vs. tall women, the tall women have a greater risk.
So the bottom line, the authors tell us, is that it underscores the need to increase prevention for women.
Of course!
Teach properly. How about that?
ditch the woke skin color model. It's leftist and racist.
School isn't for merit.
School is so mommy doesn't have to be at home. She can instead be at work. Thus undermining the earning potential of her husband and their child's father and providing a steady 50% of workers willing to work for 75% of the money daddy used to get.
School is day-care. And a place where the pedophile groomers can do their thing in private.
All according to plan.
School isn't for merit.
School is so mommy doesn't have to be at home. She can instead be at work. Thus undermining the earning potential of her husband and their child's father and providing a steady 50% of workers willing to work for 75% of the money daddy used to get.
School is day-care. And a place where the pedophile groomers can do their thing in private.
All according to plan.
"Even though talents are not distributed equally"
The problem is you want to pretend the races are equal. They are not. The sooner you stop pretending, the sooner you can help them.
Separation of Church and State is an illusion wrapped in a myth. Whether theist, atheist, or secular, religion (i.e. behavioral protocol: morality, ethics, law) will be taught, conveyed, even brayed in diverse organizations. Choose wisely, ladies and germs.
The only modern institution based on merit is professional sports. I'll take affirmative action seriously whenever the NFL and NBA are told they must be 12 percent black, 13 percent hispanic, 5 percent asian and 70 percent white.
The schools should teach American history.
The real history of minorities in America.
The history that, at one time, Italians, Irish, Jews, East Asians, Germans, and countless other minorities were not considered "white," and were actively excluded from polite society, colleges, and good jobs.
The history that these excluded people went to work, excelled, proved that they were as good or better than the people who looked down on them, and are now represented, and in most cases, over-represented, in the elites of American society.
That history.
Then, for those with a strong stomach, the advanced course.
The advanced course teaches that all the progress described above was done without government intervention, and in many cases despite government opposition to that progress (e.g, Exclusion Acts of 19th century).
The graduate level course teaches that there are 2 large groups of people who have been subjected to express government support in overcoming their histories of oppression, Native American Indians, and black Americans.
These are the only 2 groups that have remained economically and socially left out of the American Dream.
Then, they can graduate and get on with life.
I’ve been around enough students of ivy league schools to know that merit is complete bullshit.
Q - "What is school for?"
A - Funneling vast sums of tax money into the hands of Democrats.
She is fifty years late in noticing the problem. Is she a time traveler?
The history that, at one time, Italians, Irish, Jews, East Asians, Germans, and countless other minorities were not considered "white," and were actively excluded from polite society, colleges, and good jobs.
Correct, the history of America is full of examples of recent immigrants and non-whites being thought of as inferior and/or cheap labor competition against the more deserving.
But we need to be real. Italians were once considered to be "a bit grey", but Irish and Germans were never considered to be anything other than white. Irish and Polish were considered to be inferior for sure, but not due to lack of whiteness.
It's a complex story, and insights do not come from over-simplifying it.
The history that, at one time, Italians, Irish, Jews, East Asians, Germans, and countless other minorities were not considered "white," and were actively excluded from polite society, colleges, and good jobs.
Correct, the history of America is full of examples of recent immigrants being thought of as inferior and/or cheap labor competition against the more deserving.
But we need to be real. Italians were once considered to be "a bit grey", but Irish and Germans were never considered to be anything other than white. Irish and Polish were considered to be inferior for sure, but not due to lack of whiteness.
It's a complex story, and insights do not come from over-simplifying it.
Alexisa @ 9:31 said: The problem is you want to pretend the races are equal.
No, the problem is that people want to pretend that races are not equal, that we are not all homo sapiens, and ignore the primacy of culture and values. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there is no difference between red neck whites and red neck blacks. Or, as Malcolm X stated an African American gets mistreated while an African, in the US, would not. Due to culture.
West TX Intermediate Crude is on to something.
The American Dream was to work hard and get ahead. So many immigrants have done this. Why do blacks not get ahead fast enough (in truth the black middle class has never been larger)? It is terrible urban schools, the breakdown of the black family caused by welfare, and a culture of failure ("don't act white", not having books in the home, not talking to your kids). Lowering standards does nothing to address these causes.
Penumbra at 9:30 quotes a "study" from JAMA.
Looks like a perfect example of data mining for P-value.
As often is the case, Randall got there first:
https://xkcd.com/882/
What about the greater demographic cohort of illiterate ignoramus Trumper white trash? I think AOC and the squad would agree. Character reeducation camps in every red county.
Blogger rhhardin said...
For blacks you want school to teach good character, the biggest key to advancement.
Lots of virtue signaling in the Comments in the Times.
Hypocritical bastards.
"School Is for Merit" (one of a series of 12 essays in the NYT answering the question "What is school for?").
I preferred “School Is for Wasting Time and Money.” Though it does provide convenient daycare.
"Merit demands excellence and rigor."
Michael Young said merit = IQ + effort.
"Even though talents are not distributed equally"
There's the rub. The actual unequal distribution, we could call it a bell curve, is intolerable to progs. Particularly since the distributions vary by race.
"the most valiant, healthy challenge is a personal one, to strive to do and be my best."
That's very nice, but the point of social justice is to make such personal striving irrelevant.
"But the answer to racial disparities in math and reading scores and advanced academic enrollment is not to blame the game and re-rig it to favor outcomes that please certain political constituencies but do little to make life better for struggling children...."
The real answer is that there is no real answer. We've tried for 60 years and spent trillions to "make life better" for struggling children, with little success and some counterproductive results.
"School Is for Merit"
I wish, but no. Public school, K-12, is for productive citizenship. Private school can be for a lot of things, provided certain basics are met. No one cares about the merit of gender studies majors in college.
I've been told that merit is a tool of the White patriarchy designed to oppress women and minorities.
The problem with education today in a complete inability and/or refusal to acknowledge and deal with the differences in both IQ and behavior between the races.
It's easier to dumb down everyone than to admit the differences and deal with them.
“Even though talents are not distributed equally...”
What?! Of course they are. “All men are created equal.”—Thomas Jefferson took time out from banging his slave girls to make this the foundation of our country.
School is for conditioning children to get good grade. That is full incentive of the "academic" part of schooling. Parents, teachers, colleges all reward students getting good grades, few care if students have real learning as long as they can pass the test.
Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay on 'The Lesson to Unlearn' in Dec 2019 where he offers a compelling examination of the incentive of schooling.
http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html
Here's an anecdote of an person who went on to be chairman of an economics department but was almost washed out of grad school several times because they were poor at the "gameshow" education. But this individual was pursuing real learning. An Uncommon Knowledge discussion with Andrew Ferguson and Joseph Epstein
https://youtu.be/JF2eJSHKKd0
Ultimately, school on average is to promote gameshow knowledge with stochastic chance you'll have one or two teachers that in random remarks provides something profound.
Men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature/nature. Diversity exists with individuals, a minority of one, where there is judgment of character and merit.
Blogger Howard said...
What about the greater demographic cohort of illiterate ignoramus Trumper white trash? I think AOC and the squad would agree. Character reeducation camps in every red county.
AOC qualifies as a good bartender. Her BU degree must have taught her "the Bartenders Handbook." Howard tries to puff himself up by denigrating others. Democrats seem to be following orders from the Orcs running the country. This will not end well. The economy is too close to collapse to have dummies experimenting with it.
The protests in China in 1989 started when university students found the plum jobs that were supposed to go to the top students instead somehow wound up filled by graduating sons and daughters of Communist Party members with lower grades and bad test scores. All it took was tanks and troops to end permanently the disagreement there about merit versus nepotism.
The Chinese Communist Party had become, and remains, a parasitic and kleptocratic authoritarian oppressor of the Chinese people. They sit on every board of directors. They have "management" roles in every company. They can never be judged by the people of the country. And the Democrats in the US are trying to achieve the same status for their party here.
dwshelf-
With respect, I think that you are the one who is oversimplifying it.
Today, if you're a patient in the ER, and you hear that Dr. O'Hara is on duty, you think nothing of it. Same for Dr. Goldstein, Dr. Marconi, Dr. Schmidt, Dr. Kowalski. If they were in a group picture, you couldn't tell which one was which- all "white."
Now, go back a couple of generations. The Ivies had a 10% ceiling on Jews. Beth Israel Hospital in Boston was started by Jews because Jewish doctors were not allowed on staff at Mass General. A few generations before that, "Help Wanted, No Irish Need Apply" signs were in the storefronts on New York.
[Insert your own remark about how Asians are now the Jews of the Ivy League here].
Today, black immigrants from Nigeria earn incomes above the American average. Some argue that the Nigerians who immigrate are far from a cross section of the entire universe of Nigerians, and I agree, but that just proves that talent, ambition, and hard work can and does overcome any residual racism that still exists.
My point is that at one time, prejudice against anyone who was not a WASP was a real thing in the United States, it no longer is, and benign neglect on the part of the government is the most effective way to eliminate that prejudice. Active intervention fills the coffers of politicians and race hustlers, but does nothing for the supposed beneficiaries of their condescension.
Once you subscribe to the idea that Georgetown doesn't rightfully belong to Anglo Saxon Catholics but rather can be taken by anyone, why should we acquiesce to South Asians demanding the loot be split up by their preferred metric (standardized tests) rather than the black preferred metric (violence)?
This is just one group of robbers explaining why there claim is best.
Merit has its place of course, but only once you've drawn a circle around the ingroup. I doubt Asra Normani would accept a defense of the British Raj on the basis that the Orientalists, Generals, and Balliol Men had much better credentials than you average Indian peasant.
Just go to war and see how fast merit comes to the top or see how fast you want the best doctor operating on you. Such foolishness.
I can't speak for others, but American public schools to me are excellent preparation for the absurdities and injustices of adult life.
It's there that most kids are first exposed to one of the few unifying factors left in our culture--that the most interesting and important thing is how the teams are doing.
You don't have to be racist to observe that as time goes by the things that used to be markers of education itself--literacy and numeracy, familiarity with the past and appreciation of past achievements and struggles, respect for others--have been replaced by exaltation of precisely the opposite in the name of celebrating what the Diverse are best at.
Today, black immigrants from Nigeria earn incomes above the American average. Some argue that the Nigerians who immigrate are far from a cross section of the entire universe of Nigerians, and I agree, but that just proves that talent, ambition, and hard work can and does overcome any residual racism that still exists.
Most are members of the Igbo tribe. Those are descendants of the Biafra Civil War where the residents of Biafra who were Ibos tried to seceded from Nigeria. That was about 1967. There were lots of photos of starving children at the time.
Most (all but two) of my black medical students were immigrants, as are many of those getting Affirmative Action admissions to Harvard.
People of Asia (PoA)... of Yellow (PoY)? have started to file lawsuits critical of Diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry), Inequity, and Exclusion (DIE) policies including past, present, and progressive affirmative discrimination of individuals by virtue of judgment and labels in color blocs. That said, lose your religion, your moral depravity, your ethical conundrum, your civility bullshit.
Three key concepts of Jesuit education:
1. Find God in all things.
2. Care for the individual.
3. Magis. Latin for more, excellence.
The Scholastic Aptitude Test was invented 100 years ago to allow poor children to show their ability and to get into selective colleges. When I took it in 1956 there were no "prep courses" and I did not learn my score. Since then, it has been dumbed down and the name changed to "SAT" to imply that scholarship was no longer a consideration. Now, once selective colleges like UC are dropping the SAT to allow unqualified students to be admitted and fail. I can even remember when UCLA had no tuition.
Now, merit can barely be remembered.
I'm having trouble coming up with a more inane construction than that "School is for merit", and if the writer came up with that headline for that equally inane opinion piece...? She wasn't the bright light that she thought she was in school. Although, to be honest, she probably did stand out at the New York Times.a
"Merit". WTF? "School is for merit"?
No, it is not. School is for teaching and learning. Merit is something else entirely, and this dipshit seems to have conflated "Ah dun guhd in skul" with "I am a superior being".
Sweetheart, here's the real deal. The fact that you did well in school, and graduated at the "top of your class" is essentially meaningless. You chose to compete in a game that was a waste of time, and whose umpires and judges were a bunch of halfwit dumbasses who chose to play dominance games in an environment where their only real competition consisted of children. Doing well in school only requires compliance and pleasing your teachers. It does not confer or confirm some form of superiority, merely marking that you are a consummate kiss-ass who loves getting the strokes from pleasing your halfwit teachers.
The truly intelligent and superior kids in her high school likely never got the GPA she was so proud of because they were bored spitless and refused to play the game in the first place. Merit is not determined by how well you play games in artificial environments like school; merit is determined and demonstrated by real-world performance out in an actual free-flow environment.
I'd say that from the evidence we have before us, "merit" is a null concept insofar as it does not come from the schools. Most of the idiocy we see around us stems from having put these assholes in charge of things they really don't understand, and which they are too arrogantly assured that they do. The visible evidence before us would indicate that this woman and her peers are entirely without real merit, and should not be accorded the respect that they think they've earned because they passed a course of study with high marks, graded by similarly delusional types.
In other words, you're looking at the end result of all that self-esteem bullshit they started teaching back in the 1970s. Most of these people have no earthly idea what their real capabilities are, and they're convinced that since they "did well on the tests", that they're obviously nature's noblemen, entitled and deserving of due deference from anyone who did not "do well on the (bullshit) tests".
I used to think that Pol Pot was a bit of a nutter. The more I see of today's modern "educated classes", the more I begin to think that he may well have been on to something, with his whole "slaughter all the people with diplomas and glasses". God knows that if we don't do something about them before they manage to kill all the rest of us, we're likely to wind up starving in the dark because a bunch of them convinced themselves that modern industrial civilization was "...bad, 'mmmkay?"
On, he's gonna catch some sh1t now.
"Michael Young said merit = IQ + effort."
Only a piece of the picture,
Athleticism + effort.
Entertainment Talent + effort.
Body dexterity + effort.
Courage + effort.
There are many paths to merit. The problem in the US is that Academic merit is the only thing that counts anymore. A great craftsman has no merit, an MBA at McKinsey is dreamy, a soldier who dies to save his comrades has no merit.
What is school for.
School is for many things, all at the same time.
Spending for maintenance and salaries brings income to poor districts. Bright poor kids can go to the city school and get a job as a teacher. School becomes a local industry under the rule of politicians who distribute spoils (contracts.)
School is for Academic education professors. Education Teachers School jobs depend on credentialing authority to make money.
School is for parents who want kids fed and babysat by schools.
School is for government, the Prussian idea is that school should turn out compliant workers. The American idea should be tha school produces informed citizens.
What k-12 school did for me was:
1. Taught me to speak, read, and write as an acceptably educated person.
2. Showed me where to go to get a real education.
3. Allowed me to see a cross section of my community (albeit on a USAF base most of the time) and see kids who where weak, mean, dumb, brilliant, cute, moral, and insane. I saw a few kids in my class who were apparently normal but the police came and took them away one day.
4. Teachers gave me the time to read a lot, and did not worry about it.
5. I got to learn to play piano, violin and trombone, very skillfully thanks.
this is what school did for me.
"I used to think that Pol Pot was a bit of a nutter. The more I see of today's modern "educated classes", the more I begin to think that he may well have been on to something, with his whole "slaughter all the people with diplomas and glasses". God knows that if we don't do something about them before they manage to kill all the rest of us, we're likely to wind up starving in the dark because a bunch of them convinced themselves that modern industrial civilization was "...bad, 'mmmkay?"
We all need to take a deep breath.
@Josephbleau,
Ya noticed recent "events", or do you live under a rock, somewhere? The "expert class", consisting of all those kids who "did well on the tests", and whose teachers were all really, really pleased with them are the ones who think up this crap like what our lovely President did for his speech. How do you think that's all going to work out, once the plebs figure out the people running things think they're "excess to need"?
There are more of them than there are of you, if you count yourself among the anointed "educated class", the self-declared natural nobility. Which hasn't demonstrated all that much of either actual merit or competency, of late. Seen the major cities of this nation, run by all of them along their recommended lines? Think they're going to be thanked, for turning San Francisco into an outdoor toilet?
Somewhere along the line, the entire system has gotten way out of alignment with reality. The credentialed types have run nearly everything into the ground, and if you think that the non-credentialed aren't examining things and going "Hmmm...", you'd be living in a bubble of obtuse obliviousness. The elites are rapidly discrediting themselves, and making it very obvious to the non-elite that they're mendacious, incompetent, and utterly contemptuous of their supposed social inferiors. How ya think that's going to look, when push comes to shove?
This keeps going the way it is, an Ivy League diploma may well be a death sentence "when the revolution comes", and it won't be coming from the idle educated-yet-idiot class we have running things. It's going to come from disgusted common folk who're tired of the self-declared "nature's noblemen" lording it over them and telling them that that piss streaming down their backs is actually rain...
Of course, ain't none of those geeenioous types smart enough to read the mob. They'll never see it coming, until the nooses start going around their necks and the fires are lit.
Althouse comments is where I come for a good word for Pol Pot.
Howard said...
"What about the greater demographic cohort of illiterate ignoramus Trumper white trash?"
You voted for Biden. The irony is astounding.
On a larger note. judging from the lefty comments you can tell who settled for a public sector job and then coasted.
Jealous, much?
Twenty years ago, I was telling friends of mine in the police that they'd best be changing their ways, or things were going to change for them. You could read the zeitgeist then, if you bothered to pay attention. All of them, to a man and woman, poo-pooed what I was warning them about; things could never change, they would just go on as they always had, never changing.
Couple of them worked at Seattle PD. I told them that they were working in an environment where there were a lot of perceived racists, and that their department's reputation was crap with most of the people. No, I was assured, the Seattle PD is a great place to work, and we're all loved by the public...
I said to them then, and it proved to be true: One of these days, y'all, you're going to be going into work, and it's all going to be the same as it always was. Then, the morning it all changes? You're gonna find out that things have changed for you and your department, literally overnight. You won't see it coming; you won't have a warning. It will just happen, all of a sudden. To you. Because, when you're part of the problem, you don't see the issues creeping up on you or have the warning signs that an outsider sees clearly.
Guess who was right? Wasn't them.
Cops in Seattle are now pariahs. Go figure. They can't recruit quality people to work at the department, they can't even maintain the manpower to investigate serious crimes any more. The whole thing has caved in on them, and it's only going to get worse.
Only one of my friends from back then still works at the department, and the last time I talked to him, he ruefully admitted that he'd been wrong, that I'd been right, and he never saw it coming.
(cont)
If you don't see the parallels with what I'm saying about all y'all "educated elite" types, you're as delusional as they were. You are not "key and essential" to things in this country, and you are not "doing the job" the rest of the American people expect you to. That is going to have vast downstream repercussions, and all of you are going to wake up one morning, expecting things to be as they always were. That morning, which may not be too far off, you're going to awaken and discover that your world has changed around you, and you've gone from being one of the publicly acclaimed "anointed class" to being the goats for everything that has gone wrong. You're not gonna like that, one little bit. But, y'all have been the rubes as much as anyone else has, believing in you. The majority of your fellows really, truly believe that bullshit about all of you being better, superior beings 'cos you did really well on some tests, pleased all your teachers, and worked the system.
Raw fact of that is that all of that crap is utterly meaningless. Tests and schools are mere simulations; they're not the real world, at all. And, for those of you who're still in denial, here's a cluebat across the forehead: School and all those tests you did so well on? They're not actually at all meaningful; the true sign of merit is real-world performance. Period. You don't attain merit in the simulator; you attain merit by demonstrated performance in dynamic reality, with all of its attendant nasty little surprise and things that aren't at all controlled, the way they are in school. There are no teachers or administrators to appeal to, out here in reality: You either succeed or fail, and from what I see around me in this country today, the vast majority of you freakish autists are f*cking failing and flailing about. You've been had, as much as the rest of us: Your tests and schooling did not have the sort of fidelity to reality that good training simulations have. You are not, in short, nature's noblemen entitled to lord it over the rest of humanity 'cos test scores. You're actually functionally crippled dolts, who've no real idea at all what you are doing, and it is about to catch up to you. All the self-congratulatory Jack Horner "Oh, what a good boy am I" BS is enraging the victims of your BS, and they're going to take it out on you, personally, when the time comes and all the bills have to be paid. You'll be paying them, right alongside the rest of us, and there ain't no "campus administrator" you're going to be able to appeal to so you can slip-slide away from the responsibility.
If you haven't noted the rage stemming from this latest travesty of this administration, that of "forgiving college loans" after having swindled the rest of us into taking Federal responsibility for them during the Obama years, well... You're too dumb to live. Frankly, if I'm gonna be on the hook for paying off your college, sweeties? I'm gonna take my share out of your collective hides.
(cont)
I want all you assholes to take a long, hard look at yourselves and your supposed "class". You are not better than anyone else because you got yourself a POS diploma in some BS diploma mill; you're actually something of an effective sort of dumbass autist that conforms well to simulations, pleased your infantile masters, and did well on the tests while kissing ass all the way up and out of the graduation ceremony. Not one place along the line were you ever exposed to the sad reality of life outside academia, and you are not "better" than someone who either wasn't equipped to play that game, or who eschewed the BS, having recognized it for what it was. You are exactly the same as that guy working on your car, or that girl waiting on you down at the local cafe; you're no better, no more "superior", and your education is actually revelatory of an essential inability to comprehend the world around you. If you didn't catch all the conditioning or the essential BS surrounding your "college experience", you're going to be the perfect patsies for everything that happens to your supposed "class" in the very near future. You've been set up for a fall, whether you recognize it or not. Could be conspiracy, could be that things are just going to work out this way, but the raw fact is that your "class" has utterly discredited itself over these last generations, and created these conditions. This latest travesty put off on the rest of us by this administration, making us pay for your vaunted "educations"? It's highly educational for those of us who didn't partake or who were smart enough not to load ourselves down with those loans in the first place. It ain't playin' well, playahs. All y'all are going to be in for a short, sharp shock when all this plays out, and I'm gonna tell you to form a line behind my cop friends for rueful apologies. Ain't none of them who told me twenty-odd years ago that I was nuts who aren't now telling me I was right, and that they never saw the whole "defund the police" thing coming.Pretty soon, it's gonna be "defund the colleges", and we're going to be coming after those endowments and putting a lot of people out of jobs. You've utterly failed, collectively, to do those things you implicitly assumed with all this lording over the "unwashed". The unwashed outnumber your asses, and whether or not anyone is really cognizant of that fact, you work for them, and answer to them at the end of the day. That day's end is coming up on us, soonish-like. Be prepared, at least intellectually, to recognize that inflection point. There will come a day when those Ivy League diplomas you so proudly display are going to be seen more as Marks of the Beast than they are of vast intellectual achievements and the right to lord it over the lowly.
Do note, folks: The lowly, in this country? We don't see ourselves as such; we don't acknowledge a nobility, and nearly all of us came here fleeing the bullshit incompetence of the "noble classes" in other countries and times. You're not going to be appreciated for trying to set up a new class of nobility, based on some supposed school-conferred "merit" that doesn't line up with what we see as merit, out here in the real world.
(cont)
Oh, and for the intellectually slow and challenged? My earlier use of Pol Pot was one of them thar' "allusions" that you might have learned about in an English class, if you'd bothered to apply any real scholarship past the point where your teacher smiled at you for not challenging him or making his job harder. It's a common trick of the rhetoric few of you bothered to study, because it wasn't on the tests.
Ya might, just might, want to think about that. What was on the test; what you studied; and what was left out because it was too challenging for your teachers. Who actually weren't all that f*cking bright to begin with, although you had and still have trouble recognizing that fact.
Post a Comment