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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

I absolutely agree! I'm tired of people acting as if we don't have a labor force. We clearly do, we have just decided to let them not work and survive on handouts and other people's largesse. It's high time the situation is remedied.

Ending the handouts seems like a better way of dealing with that then wrecking the economy.

Not only that, but I think we have a lot of over-education in America where people are choosing college as a path of least resistance who really don’t have the talent or inclination to succeed in academia. I think if given a viable alternative— trades, culinary, or general labor — a lot of people would choose that instead.

Most college educated unsuccessful people will not succeed in the trades because there is something wrong with them. That’s assuming they’re willing to take a blue collar job to begin with, and society increasingly sees a college degree as the price of admittance to the class of people who shouldn’t have to work for a living.

I’m assuming that they went to college assuming they were that good of students that such a path was open to them. For the vast majority, that was never true, and if we had a university that could only extract loan payments for those who successfully graduated and got good jobs afterwards, the university would not have admitted them. There are students in university paying 100K over 4 years and who need remedial math, reading, and writing courses. We’re letting them basically LARP for the government backed loans; they have absolutely no business going to university, and a sane education system would have told them no probably long before they got onto the college bound track in the first place.

If the students in question are not capable of college level work, then they need to get over it and look for other options more in line with their actual intellectual capacity. I’ve always been firmly convinced that schools should track kids (with periodic reassessment) so that we don’t create the glut of overeducated “failsons” that are too good to work with their hands, yet too unaccomplished to get jobs doing mental work. If you aren’t suited to the work you’ve been trained to do, it’s the education system exploiting you by dangling dreams in front of you.

Oh absolutely. I think its the #1 reason the academy has fallen apart over the last few decades. 50% of people should not be going into academia. At most it should be 15-20%, and even that is quite high imo.

If you make something less selective, it becomes much much harder to police for good behavior.