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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   30970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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offer your plan

Octavian. The Red vs Blue distinction must become meaningless. Frankly Trump is already some way there with the amount of Democrats he has made switch sides.

But really, the only way to end the war is to win a victory that is incomprehensible to its own paradigm. Using the system to prosecute the other side in retaliation isn't enough. The system must be destroyed and remade to such a degree it is unrecognizable.

Abolish the CIA and turn its role over to the DoD. Turn the FBI into a statistics department. Obliterate the DoE with extreme prejudice. Collapse the entire education Ponzi by making student loans forgivable in bankruptcy. End the Fed.

Afuera. Afuera. Afuera.

And don't stop there, create two new institutions for every one you destroy.

But I wouldn't even attempt to prosecute the people staffing the old decrepit system. Just let them go. Ignore them. Make their protests a meaningless antiquated impotent gesticulation that has no effect or meaning.

It's a high bar, but I genuinely think that short of this, you are locked in an endless struggle that ends with the death of the Republic. There can't be any reds and blues anymore.

Collapse the entire education Ponzi by making student loans forgivable in bankruptcy.

That’s an extremely counterproductive idea as stated if the goal is to attack schooling industry. It would be a huge boon to schooling industry if these were dischargeable. Instead, what you need to do is to stop the federal government providing the loans.

Actually it wouldn’t. One reason that admitting thousands upon thousands of people into institutions of higher education is that no matter how poorly they do, the college gets paid. If that were no longer true, if students were no longer money buckets, then they’d either have to do without students or retool to provide value to their students. That means more practical education and lower costs. And obviously no bank is going to back a dischargable loan for “activism studies” because the student won’t be able to pay for it.

no matter how poorly they do, the college gets paid

Yes, and that’s why making them dischargeable doesn’t make sense. The schools are paid up front. The loan payments are made to Federal Government. If you allow the loans to be discharged, the schools don’t lose a penny, and it’s the taxpayer who bears the cost.

His point is that the college already got the money, so they don't care if the loan is dischargeable or not. The one on the hook if the student is allowed to default is the government, not the university.

Most student loans are from the government, not from private banks. And the government doesn't make a risk/profit calculation before lending you the money.

Private parties wouldn’t give out loans for worthless degrees and bad students when the degree is the collateral.

Why not both?

I don't even mind the FedGov providing loans, as long as it's directly linked to something FedGov cares about. Right now you can dispose of a loan by working for a nonprofit, or, say, a public school teacher, which creates a very specific incentive. Cut all of those general-purpose incentives out, and make it so that if you want the federal government to loan you money for education, it's because you're going into military service, or you're going into shipbuilding, or you're going to go work for the three-letter-agencies we haven't abolished, or w/e.

Otherwise, you can get your loan from a bank, and it will be dischargeable through bankruptcy, and they will evaluate it on the likelihood that you can pay it off. (No, I don't object to people getting a PhD on Aristotle's conception of the good life who will go on to earn $80k/year teaching at a mid-tier university, but the federal government doesn't needing to be footing the cost, and neither do the banks. That's what special interest scholarships are for.)

Frankly, I think this is less an "attack" on schooling than something that is likely to fix it (although it would be perceived as an attack).

Why not allow them to be discharged in bankruptcy, but require the schools to cosign the loans?

That would work too.

This would bankrupt pretty much every non-ivy inside of a few years. Higher ed operates on razor thin margins. I want to burn down the system, but this is too much fire.

This would bankrupt pretty much every non-ivy inside of a few years.

You say that like it's a bad thing

I want to burn down the system

Apparently you don't; or, at least we have very different ideas of what that means. My model for the minimum in dealing with Academia is Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries — complete with seizure of assets and the imprisonment or execution of resistant abbots and monks.

Private tier 1s and state schools is enough to provide education. Rest is mostly credential signaling.

There can't be any reds and blues anymore.

But that’s saying that to destroy the enemy, we have to destroy ourselves.

It’s a bit like the school I mentioned once in the UK where, to avoid religious conflicts between children, everyone is forbidden from praying and all meals are vegetarian. I grew up Church of England. I resent having to give up my religious practices because newcomers are causing trouble. I don’t want to stop the Culture War, I want to win it, at least in my local area.

But I wouldn't even attempt to prosecute the people staffing the old decrepit system. Just let them go. Ignore them. Make their protests a meaningless antiquated impotent gesticulation that has no effect or meaning.

I agree with this otoh.

But that’s saying that to destroy the enemy, we have to destroy ourselves.

Yes. The Populares must cease to exist. Because they only exist in their opposition to the Optimates, and vice versa.

You must transition from the 2 story state to the 1 story state.

The Populares must cease to exist. Because they only exist in their opposition to the Optimates, and vice versa.

You deserve a better, longer reply but to be brief, I don’t think this is true. There are real, concrete issues at stake: who is allowed into the country, who is allowed to control cultural bottlenecks like Twitter or academia, the relative privileges and duties of men and women, whether we need to destroy our economy with unilateral green policies, and so on.

Tony Blair actually tried what you suggest: he began mass migration to, in the words of his advisor, “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”. But I consider myself a British nativist populist. If you attempt to render the Culture War irrelevant by flattening the differences between natives and newcomers, I lose by default. So I can’t back that. This is what I mean when I say I want victory not peace.

Another example would be transgenders vs TERFs. There are currently irreconcilable differences between the TERF wish for single sex spaces without men, and the trans wish to be invited into single sex spaces for women. You can render this conflict irrelevant by ceasing to consider women as meaningfully different from men, or considering trans ‘women’ as equivalent to women, but either is a loss for the TERF faction.

This is actually a good point, the essential claim is that neoliberalism attempted and failed to do this synthesis.

I'd argue it actually succeeded. And ruled the world for a long time. It's just that this has now fizzled out like any other regime.

But can you really say that the political lines of today are the same as the political lines of the cold war (which are the ones that neolibs synthesized).

Saying that you're a socialist or a capitalist today has indeed become essentially meaningless. Everyone lives in a managerial mixed economy where the line between public and private enterprise is so blurry it may as well not exist.

My call is for someone to do this with the issues of the day. However impossible it indeed seems right now.

But as Corvos raises, to go from a two-tier society to a one-tier society does not necessarily mean that Populares becomes Optimates. Rather, Optimates must become Populares. This is why people have railed against communism and similar ideologies in the past, because all they really accomplished was leveling everyone in certain societies down to a level that was objectively sub-par.

I think class is something that might be impossible to eradicate. Even the Soviet Union stratified into proletarians and intellectuals. Classes must always exist in any human civilization. The best you can do is to keep resentment from building up in the first place.

It's certainly impossible to eliminate classes and groups of interest, as a concept.

But making specific groups irrelevant happens all the time.

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