I’ve considered going back and getting my doctorate. The most difficult part of the work will not be my studies – most unis have dumbed things down rather a bit – but the Soviet Marxist dialectic that one must parrot while one is getting one’s doctorate. Universities, like all artifical monopolies, exist stuck in time in a largely failed organizational model. Because of the unresponsiveness to the actual market, we have the situation we have today: universities are places where social marxists go because they are incapable of working for anyone *but* the government. Campus intellectual life is . . . subdued . . . at this point, and the madness of a failed philosophy, really a failed religion and failed god, governs completely.
I’ve taught before (cheap labor being the keystone of the modern doctorate student), and in general found it to be almost exactly like teaching in the Soviet Union in the 70s: one must be very very careful who one trusts, and one can be denounced for disagreeing with the State. Classes become an exercise in going through textbooks and giving lectures on material that most students would be able to get . . . if they bothered reading textbooks. Part of the collapse of the uni system is grade inflation. By letting doctoral students and adjuncts at some universities teach a *majority* of the classes, of course, you instantly get grade inflation, as the goal of doctoral students and adjuncts is not to teach but simply to get one’s degree or to stay employed.
I’m amused by the graduates of our educational system. They know almost nothing, and their main skill is the “ability” to repeat 60s vaguely philosophical concepts whose background they’ve never learned and whose obvious failure they are unable to see. Most college degrees – and many graduate degrees – have almost no value.
Most frightening to me is that a remarkable number of graduates in letters / humanities do not actually have the ability to write coherently. Again, given the leveraged employment model of the modern universitybusiness, no one has time to grade papers for grammar, only for “content” (and not so much that, either). High schools don’t bother teaching this for similar reasons, compounded by socialism and artificial monopolies.
I often find Buchanan right on the money. I think he’s wrong in any number of ways as well, of course, but he has a pretty good sense of history and to where we’re going.
My money is on Sanders to take the election at this point. I can’t figure out whether he’ll be worse than another crony capitalist (Clinton, Bush, Obama) or not. Being of the tribes myself, I think that people are selling him far, far short on both intelligence and the ability to adhere to dogma. This is a man who is clearly familiar with Trotsky and the saints of Bolshevism, who knows his history and understands classic rhetoric.
On the flip side, it’s very clear that Trump has read Hitler. As a Jew, I applaud him, frankly. Hitler is worth reading; a brilliant man with some concepts (economics, treating Jews poorly) that I obviously disagree with.
"You can either love women, or understand women. You can't do both. Because once you understand women, you realize that there is really nothing to love."
Elric Greenstone 4 years, 2 months ago.
