07-14-2019, 09:31 AM
(07-13-2019, 09:11 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(06-30-2019, 04:48 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: Globalists like John and Pbrower still assume that the intellectual academic class (both progressive and conservative wings) would still be running the US when core of the crisis hits. The citizens are getting restless, globalists, we like being Homer Simpson, NOT Ned Flanders, we like our guns and second amendment remedies. We HATE free trade, the globalist demands to china is not about the issue China stealing tech from the US specifically, if it was the sanctions would be focused purely against that. Instead globalists are laughably trying to get china to change its trading practices toward ALL nations to be fair, a laughable notion. Protectionist oriented sanctions would have been far more effective rather than the globalist notion of worldwide fair trade. The American people HATE globalism and free-trade tyranny. Close the damn borders and build our own products.
The Younger generations and Non-globalist boomers despise your EFFETE globalism. An early 20th century Italian ideologist said that "the greatest mind in the world can be silenced with this (he held a knife)", we non-globalists happily and eagerly embrace those words and are ready to translate them into action against the political oligarchy's tyranny.
I wonder why a lot of people consider academia a place of free and critical thinking for most people. It's usually a place where people shout dogma where others are forced into believing what they say. Academia usually knows nothing about the real world and cares nothing for practicality. The liberals want us to go many years to be brainwashed just to get a living wage while learning no practical skills. They also claim to care about the wages of the worker while trying to import the entire third world and encouraging the worst labor abuses in places like China.
Freedom is relative, and rarely absolute. We speak of free enterprise, but we all know that the profit motive dictates practically everything in any for-profit business. Maybe someone who does creative work for an ad agency or a film studio gets to be creative, but even then one knows the constraints. One may have the obligation to make cigarette smoking seem a wholesome and reputable activity when it is the antithesis of such. If one works for Disney... then one knows the rules that go beyond aesthetic standards.
It is safe to say that people in academia have usually worked at some time in private industry, even if such was at a fast-food place. Work in a fast-food place, and you know what capitalism demands of workers. Maybe academia, like much else, has plenty of people who find profit-directed activities inhuman. Consider also creative activities, government (including the military and police work), and the professions. Or for that matter -- owning and operating a business, even if it is 'only' being an owner-operator of a tractor-trailer, is one way to avoid working under the moment-to-moment direction of a bureaucratic corporation.
It is also safe to say that people who work in a for-profit entity have a reasonable expectation of a fair wage for their efforts just so that they can be able to feed and clothe themselves, have shelter, and have the means of getting to work, among other things. The alternatives to a living wage are slavery, peonage, a KZ-lager, or Gulag; any of these indicate a serious lack of both economic and political freedom. Recognize also that any well-run firm rewards increasing proficiency on the job, which implies that one develops more skill and more knowledge specific to the needs of that firm. If one has no cause to expect an improvement in opportunity with extended service, one might as well look for other employment unless one is reasonably at the top of the field.
But academia? Most of its graduates will be going into private industry, and business-related courses are supplanting the liberal arts. I would think that conservatives would consider it delightful that more people are studying accounting and marketing than there used to be, and that fewer people are studying 'impractical' liberal arts.
But note well the original objective of the liberal arts: to improve the student as a person. It is safe to assume that the content of a person's thoughts reflect to a great extent what that person has read. A certain body of literature has long been shown to make people more adept at understanding key concepts necessary for leadership beyond command-and-control bossing. If it takes liberal arts to make people recognize that there is more to life than 'sex&drugs&rock-n-roll', material indulgence, and bureaucratic power, then so be it. The learned people of America irrespective of ethnicity, religious heritage, and race could recognize Donald Trump for the capricious demagogue that he is. It is better that people be squeamish about doing bad stuff to others.Technical training bereft of any semblance of liberal learning makes machines out of workers. It may be surprising, but the grads with bachelor's degrees in business specialties have often proved incompetent at making coherent reports at which the language, history, and literature grads do well.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
