Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

College Degrees Not Worth Much

Seen On Campus

…says this study (found via Insty).

Americans are losing faith in the value of a college degree, with majorities of young adults, men and rural residents saying college isn’t worth the cost, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey shows.

No kidding. With all the PC bullshit happening on college campuses these days, not to mention crap courses like “Feminist Basket Weaving”, it’s not surprising. One finding that got my attention, however, is this one:

Some Americans believe learning a trade offers more security than going to college.

Well, yeah. Depending on the trade, it almost always did, especially when weighed against courses in the Humanities and the debt incurred by getting said degrees. (It’s not true when measured against a degree in, say, electrical engineering, of course.)

Then again, most people are more qualified to learn a trade than they are to attend college in the first place.

And the first warning sign was that government (of the Democrat / Labour Party persuasion) stated that a college degree was desirable for all young people, and put policies into place to support that idiotic idea. Billions of dollars of student debt, high unemployment rates among Millennials, lowered academic standards and staggeringly-high college tuition fees followed swiftly, to the surprise of no one except those government tools.

As seen on these pages but a couple days back, I’ve always advised young people to get a trade first, then go to college — especially if you’re not quite sure what degree you want to get — because as a fallback, a trade like carpentry or plumbing sure as hell beats begging for that barrista job at a coffee shop. And if your goal in life is to own your own business (which it should be), a trade beats the hell out of an MBA as a foundation thereof.

So yeah, it’s not surprising that the value of a college degree is being called to question. Reality will do that to ya.

You Mean “Unwise”

Advice, Patriotism

Some old codger offers advice to some wannabe mercenaries, and I can’t argue with a single thing he says. Sample:

“You’ve got no idea what road you are starting down. Romance and idealism wears off really fast when you’re lying in a pool of your own blood trying to stuff your intestines back into your torn abdomen.”

It’s the thing which sometimes keeps me awake at night: not that I’m the guy on the ground, but that I might be the cause of it.

Back To The Past

Essays

One of the many sins of Marxism is its demonization of the word “bourgeois“, the French term for the conservative middle class. The bourgeoisie had always been a target of scorn for the nobility, of course, because those worthies always thought (and in many cases were correct in thinking) that bourgeois values, customs and indeed laws didn’t apply to them, the anointed.

But the real problem arose for the bourgeoisie when Marxism became ascendant — because Marxism requires only two classes: the ruling elite and the proletariat working class, because those messy middle-class types refused to sacrifice their conservative values on the altar of the sainted Party.

And needless to say, the idea of a ruling class and worker / peasantry found (and continues to find) great favor with the so-called intelligentsia (another verbal creation of Marxism), because they have always fondly believed that they would be part of the ruling elite.

It’s not just my antipathy towards Marxism which causes me to rage occasionally about falling societal standards; it’s mostly because of my staunch support of and adherence to middle-class values, without which I believe that society descends rapidly into totalitarianism, anarchy and chaos, in no particular order. So you can imagine how much I welcome scholarly opinion which happens to agree with mine.

Apparently, this op-ed article has got its two authors in trouble with The Usual Suspects (race hustlers, the other-gendered, closet Marxists — you get the idea). But in all seriousness, please explain to me how anyone can disagree with the following statement:

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

Not only are these precepts pure common sense; history has proven them to be not only that, but that the lack or rejection thereof produces catastrophic results for any society.

And let me say right now that these principles are not just applicable to White First World societies. As Wax and Alexander note, all societies prosper when they maintain those values; the fact remains that the values originated not just in Western culture over the centuries but, at least in part, in other societies as well.

Also needless to say, those elements in our so-called modern society who are up in arms about the Wax-Alexander article are precisely those who are causing the greatest amount of division within it today.

I say: a pox on all of them. We need to reinstate those bourgeois values and principles in general, and not rely on The Remnant to keep that flickering flame alive in only their children and friends. We need to go back, and discard all the laws and customs which have attempted to overturn bourgeois values — indeed, in some cases these excrescences have already succeeded in doing so.

Note, by the way, that the above principles exist outside the Enlightenment and, for example, our own Constitution, for the simple reason that they predated them. In fact, much of today’s societal woes can be attributed to the malapplication of Constitutional precept into such silliness as “gender fluidity” under the (incorrect) aegis of, say, freedom of speech and thought, or equal protection under the law.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that the Constitution is not the wonderful document and institution that it is. But if anything, it has always relied on the good intentions of society — good intentions which have crumbled and disappeared under the weight of Marxism, post-Modernism and all the other cynical and baleful movements which have caused today’s societal ills.

I for one would welcome a return to 1950s values with open arms. I suspect I’m not alone in this sentiment, as deplorable as others may find it.

Men Only

Men & Women

I was sitting in a bar last night in Bath, trying out a pint or so of Bath’s local bitter (Gem; not too bad, but not 6X), when I became aware of loud young male voices, and lots of cursing, with what can only be called “violent language” — you know, “The next time I see him, I’m going to fuck him up”, that kind of thing.

I was only a little perturbed, because there were quite a few older women in the place, and they were visibly discomfited by both the volume and the language. Now ordinarily I would have got up and gone over to the lads and reminded them of their manners, and asked them to turn down both the volume and their fucking language because there were ladies in the house, but suddenly I realized that I was in the wrong, not them; and what was happening was the fault of modern society. Here’s why.

You see, young men are essentially wild animals, and when they’re in the company of other young men they become still more so — ’twas ever thus, and there will always be male posturing and bad behavior. Note the following little fracas between a group of adolescent male lions, rough-housing and doing essentially what the young men in the bar in Bath were doing.

Now according to the photographer, after a while they simmered down, and wandered away as though nothing had happened (which it hadn’t), and no doubt went off to kill a zebra or find a lioness to mate with — you know, guy stuff.

And this is why we need men-only bars.

Men-only bars provide an environment for young men to be themselves — i.e. to act like assholes — and basically blow off the adolescent testosterone steam building up behind their ears. It’s loud, and rude, and antisocial, but older men look at that, shrug and ignore it because they too were once young men and so they understand what’s happening: essentially, a harmless activity. Of course there may be the occasional fight, because that’s what young men do, and the only way to deal with it is for the older men to toss them out of the bar and let the young idiots finish it off where little or no damage will ensue.

But then came feminism, where men-only bars were regarded as Bastions Of Male Patriarchy or some such silliness, and bars were opened up to women, changing the dynamics of the social setting and denying to young men what was once an accepted outlet for adolescent behavior.

I’m not interested in arguments that “young men should learn to behave” — a typical  female approach when they encounter a situation they don’t like, which is to change the rules thereof and by doing so, altering someone else’s behavior but not their own. The plain fact of the matter is that this will never change, and taking away a place where young men can misbehave simply means they’re going to do it elsewhere — e.g. frat houses in college — where there is no elder-male supervision. And we’ve all seen how that works out.

In the larger sense of things, this is also an argument for an all-male armed services — at least, the part at the sharp end — where the violent nature of young men can be channeled into a worthwhile activity like killing Commies, Nazis and other assorted filth — and I hate to say it, but adding G.I. Janes to the mix is going to make that worthwhile activity less efficient.

I am likewise unmoved by the whines of feministicals who want to get involved in male behavior — “Piss off and leave us alone,” is my typical response — and I really think that we as a society have become dysfunctional because of the enforced mixing of the sexes in areas outside of relationships and mating.

I don’t know how to reverse this foolishness, or if it’s even possible. But I’d like to see men-only bars and pubs reappear as a starting-point.

Speed Bump

Culture, Politics

Via Insty, I was reading this article which talks about how the First Amendment is designed to protect unpopular speech, and everyone’s speech in general, when this little sentence stopped me in my tracks (with my emphasis on the part which did so):

For White and Czjetanovic, being white nationalists has no impact on their ability to do their jobs. Had they held other jobs in which their white nationalism would directly affect their job performance, perhaps the internet mob would be justified in its quest to take heads (white nationalists shouldn’t be teaching WWII history to impressionable middle school students, for example).

Here’s where this little thing falls apart. We conservatives have been aghast at how “impressionable middle school students” have, for decades now, been taught by Frankfurt-School socialists, who have been busy with their little Gramscian plan of inculcating Marxist principles and Weltanschauung into our kids — and now I’m supposed to bristle at the thought of white nationalists teaching in middle-school classrooms?

The author (Bethany Daniel) has done precisely what she argues against in her article: she’s conflated white supremacists with Western Civ devotees (like myself). Frankly, if a white nationalist teacher kept herself in check and kept the racist shit to herself while extolling the value of Western Civilization when teaching history to middleschoolers, I’d rather see that than some vapid socialist twerpette interpreting WWII as a struggle between the patriotic proletariat of the glorious Soviet Union and the oppressive capitalist systems of the West.

The difference is that socialists are quite unapologetic about their propagandizing — even while teaching impressionable middle school students — while we Western Civ boosters have to be constantly on the defensive about our position lest we offend someone in the Perpetually Offended Set because racism.

Screw that. Given that bias is inevitable in any teaching system, the goal should be to stop not just white nationalists from teaching, but Marxists as well. Sadly, the education hierarchy in the West is only doing half the job.

Eye Of The Beholder

Beauty, Gratuitous Chick Pics, Men & Women

So this Paris-based fitness blogger (no, I don’t know what that is either) decided to give us two views of herself — as men might see her and as she does. Here’s the object in question:

Here’s what I see: a reasonably-pretty woman, decent boobage (the bra doesn’t help), with the bandy legs and slightly large nose of the typical Parisienne. In a stone-cold sober state, I’d rank her somewhat above average: about a 7, maybe a 7.5 if she cleans up nicely. If she has a sexy walk or carries herself with confidence, she’s a definite 8, and I’d wager that most men would happily ask her out on a date.

Here, however, is the comparison she draws:

Good grief. This just goes to prove that there’s no fiercer critic of a woman’s body than the owner thereof.

Suddenly, she’s a lot less attractive. Ladies, take note: self-hatred is not sexy.

And if Miss Aubery is just doing this to attract attention to herself — what’s known today, cruelly, as “attention-whoring” — to build up her self-esteem, then that’s even less attractive.