Adderbox76

Or…hear me out here…maybe we could try holding men accountable for their actions? I’m just spit-balling here, but it’s so crazy it just might work.

2008 wasn’t the fault of bad jobs. It was the fault of overly greedy banks offering sub-prime mortgages to people would otherwise never qualify for home ownership, and then crying for a bailout when those new homeowners (unsurprisingly) defaulted.

I majored in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology, but the truly life-changing course for me was honestly a Philosophy elective I took in third year where I was introduced to the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant as well as a few writings on Ethics by Locke and Hume.

Business Degrees are the most popular post-secondary degree in the world right now. Similarly, they learn about money money money and how to make ever increasing sums of it while completely eschewing anything else that distracts from that, like history, or ethics, or critical thought.

being a realist about how corporations value their “human resources

I was (and I guess still am) classic middle management. The day I went from “Cynical” to outright “radicalised” was when my previous employer told me that my staff would not be getting their yearly cost-of-living raise that year because “The Company didn’t make a profit.” Yet the company actually made 6 billion dollars in profit that year.

The issue is that some eggheads projected that they would make 7 billion, and giving raises would increase that shortfall and cause the stock price to drop by a few more cents than it otherwise would have. So in the corporate world, not making enough profit is equivalent to not making any profit and the workers get fucked.

But damn, did the head office muckity-mucks get THEIR bonus’ that year. Yessiree.

It’s not done yet. I’ve only just written the abstract and started collecting my sources. When it’s finished it’ll likely just go collect dust in a substack somewhere like everything else I shout into the void.

I write this stuff because if I don’t, I’ll go mad. But I hardly expect it to get widely distributed.

I agree completely. Trade-Schools are as good or as bad as the person attending. You’re going to have people like my best friend, who went to a tradeschool for bio-tech lab assistant, but reads constantly and is generally well versed in critical thinking. And then you have people like my brother-in-law, who’s a damn good Welder but doesn’t know, or care, about the wider world around him and just believes the words of whoever happens to agree with him.

Critical thinking is the most basic skill that needs to be reinforced in a democracy. But you need knowledge in order to participate in a proper dialogue, whether it’s political, social or economic. Knowledge that doesn’t come from learning how to weld good.

I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day

I call them Intellectual Oligarchies. The knowledge (of any subject, not just tech) being limited to a circle of elites while the products are made simple enough to operate that the average person doesn’t really need to know how it’s done, just how to purchase it.

The good thing about Intellectual Oligarchies, however, is that they are open to be joined by anyone who wants to learn, or is curious about things. No formal education is required; just intellectual curiosity and the ability to read. They’re entirely self-propogated; not purposefully created by some evil cabal trying to withhold knowledge from the average person. Knowledge itself is open-source, in other words. Anyone can use it if they want.

In the Greek and Roman democratic condition, people who don’t exercise that “right to knowledge” lacked the context necessary to properly partake in the citizen’s primary job…democratic rule.

Ars Liberalis doesn’t translate to “Liberal Arts”. It literally translates to “The skills of Freedom”. A citizenry of a democracy needs the skills (knowledge) to properly function in said democracy; and that included studies of history, philosophy, politics, civics, etc…

Gen-X mostly ignored and sidelined

We’ve been ready for that since we realized that our parents were never going to retire soon enough for us to have access to the “good jobs”. We went to school and majored in “whatever was available”, and then the generation that graduated after us coincided with our parents retiring and freed up the good jobs for them.

“Ignored and Sidelined” pretty much sums up my generation. If we didn’t have computers, weed, and grunge, we’d have nothing.

This is exactly why I keep beating the drum for critical thinking and media literacy, steeped within a rich liberal (in every meaning of that term) educational program.

I’ve actually begun work on an essay about that exact thing. One that I’ve put off for a very long time because the last time I dared to imply a causal relationship between the rise of Trade-Schools, where you learn to do one thing and one thing well, but have no real education otherwise, and the dumbing down of the electorate, I got shouted down for being “elitist”. But with recent events, I’ve decided to expand on my idea and throw some more research behind it because fuck it, I’m feeling vindicated.

I’m not saying that everyone who attends a trade-school is intellectually incurious; just that a broader understanding of the world is not a part of the curriculum and it’s left up to the students themselves if they want to be a well rounded individual on their own time.

Algorithms ensure that the only content that ends up getting to your eyes is content that you already agree with for the most part. Or content that you hate so much that you have an incurable urge to respond to it with swearing and vitriol. (or at least that’s why I think TikTok keeps giving me Maple Maga bullshit)

In other words, you can put up whatever you want but thanks to modern social media, the only people who will ever see it are the people who already agree with you.

“Crazy how Millennials were the only ones to learn how to use computers and we apparently are also the only ones who learned to see through disinformation,”

Whoever this Dylan jackass is can piss right off. Gen-X built your fucking computers.

Congratulations America. You put the reins of power in the hands of toddlers coming up with cool names for made up comic book superheroes.

I don’t disagree, but that’s not really my point.

What you’re arguing is basically akin to people who sat out the vote because “Genocide Joe”. Which is what gave America Trump 2.0 in the first place. Yes, the established Military Complex is flawed and in some cases downright evil. But the response to that isn’t “fuck it, let’s burn it down and give a fucking toddler direct control of it.”

You don’t fix things by picking the worse option on purpose. That’s utter lunacy.

The US can not be trusted with its own military.

I’m not a fan of U.S. foreign policy. But as far as the military chain of command, it’s specifically designed to have it’s own checks and balances against abuse of power. Precisely what Trump is wanting to topple. So if the choice is an orange toddler or a robust and effective circle of generals, I’ll go with the generals thanks.

Somebody better alert the Girl Scouts.

I don’t necessarily disagree. But I don’t exactly consider Latintimes as mainstream news. They have a decided lean to the left and are publishing a story that points to something they want to say. No different than when a conservative right leaning website with a name like “Patriot Page”, or “Freedom Force” or some other creepy MAGA bullshit name does the same thing.

There are main stream outlets, and then there are outlets that we can all tell, mostly from their content, don’t bother to hide their bent left or right.

This isn’t like CNN or CBS or BBC are broadcasting it. (Cue somebody linking to exactly that…making me look like an idiot.) Heck, AFAIK, even Fox News and MSNBC, the two “main stream media” sources that I would consider least biased in both directions, aren’t touching it as a story.

And why they seem to selectively think sexism is bad while denying women education

That’s not what they’re saying. They’re mocking American hypocrisy.

less internal European cooperation and a further move toward sovereign nation states

I call dibs on being assassinated in Kosovo this time around.

I live in Saskatchewan and I was just talking to a “right wing” friend of mine about this very issue. I had gone on a diatribe about right-wing conservatives in the US and she was getting a little upset thinking I was upset with her as a “Canadian right-winger”. So I pointed out to her that she isn’t actually “right-wing”. In fact very few people in Canada except for some nut-jobs who want to bring Trumpism to Canada are right-wing as the U.S. would describe it.

Our typical right-winger, including some very good friends of mine, are conservative, but not anti-abortion, hand-maid’s tale, anti-immigrant conservatives. Our right-wing would be considered liberal to the United States and the only reason most people here think they have to defend Trump is because they nominally share the adjective of “conservative” even though they’re VASTLY different levels of right-wing.

They’re innundated with American news 24-7 and don’t make any distinction between what they believe and what MAGA believes, but when you ask them specificially what they believe in, it’s far far far closer to an American’s concept of liberalism than of MAGA.