You’re really leaning into the theory that the material is taught in a meaningful way.

We’re entering a phase of US education where students are either forcefed misinformation or told to sit quietly for fear of provoking another reactionary backlash

If Zelensky is any indication, comedians make for excellent heads of state and ministers of war

:-|

At this stage of US history, only a sadist or a scam artist would want the job of President.

Stewart doesn’t strike me as either.

you’ve identified a a thing as American without looking at how the rest of the world operates

You’ve restricted your understanding of the world to the US/UK and its colonial enclaves. FFS, how do you think Cuba is pumping out so many extremely talented doctors per capita? It’s not via the American debt-for-access model.

It sounds like you’re angry at the American system

Hard not to personally experience the machine that grinds your bones and not feel a little resentful for being shoved through it. But more broadly, it has been eye-opening to travel and talk to people outside the American financing system and learn how other countries produce large numbers of professionals who aren’t crippled by debt on graduation day.

Other countries may do some things than the USA, but a lot of the basic structure that you complained out is more universal than you think.

The debt-financing model is not simply an American invention, but a very recent American invention. As in, barely ten years separate the cohort who got larded up with debt and the generation that didn’t. It came about very quickly and as a coordinated set of reforms orchestrated by privately funded think tanks primarily based in the United States.

Coming of age in the 1970s was peak Selection Bias.

Either Vietnam got you or the poisoned air and water got you or AIDS got you or traffic fatalities got you or poverty got you or you lived just long enough to tell your kids and grandkids that things were better when you were young.

And yet it appears in most countries, including Communist ones like China.

I’m not sure how we shoehorned “China Bad” into the discussion. But a country with a large public non-profit education system that’s insourced enormous amounts of industrial research and development isn’t a strong example of this model. On the contrary, the Chinese state has been particularly good at pulling domestic talent into domestic industry. It’s one of the excuses Americans regularly use to condemn Chinese manufacturers for “cheating” and “stealing” intellectual property. They’re not hiring a bunch of American Ivy League grads to run their businesses in Shanghai and Chengdu. They’re hiring and promoting from within.

That’s more due to family connections.

Eton’s family connections are economic connections. It’s one big aristocratic snarl. You’re rich because of who you know and you know these people because you’re rich.

The USA still has one of the best public university systems in the world.

20 years ago it did. Now our administrative overhead has exploded, our student-to-teacher ratios are shit, even historically prestigious state schools are becoming little more than diploma mills, and on top of all that you’ve got Trump snatching international students off campus and throwing them into blacksites based on spurious allegations of whatever-the-fuck has an online conservative frothing for blood.

Meanwhile, you can go to Berlin, Germany or Sao Paulo, Brazil or Melbourne, Australia or Singapore, China and get the same or better quality of instruction, facilities, and job prospects without the comical rent-seeking by privatized American institutions. Turns out undergrad organic chemistry isn’t something Americans have a monopoly on.

other countries have degree restrictions on their jobs as well

Which nation outside the US has anywhere near the level of college student debt? Canada and the UK are the only two countries that come close.

You keep pointing to things happening in the USA as a uniquely American

Americans pioneered the modern university system at the turn of the 20th century. That system began as a non-profit, research-oriented, academically focused public institution. And the idea of academic R&D spread globally, so that we now have university systems replicating the 20th century American model pretty much everywhere a large urban center exists to support it.

But then the Americans took a good, useful, public sector innovation and converted it into a mechanism for gatekeeping professional positions and rent-seeking young people. That particular model hasn’t metastasized as broadly as the former. Perhaps its just a matter of time. But it appears the root of the evil is the decision, back at the turn of the 21st century, to publicly defund university systems.

So much of the rot in US academia is driven by the privatization of the university model. Where you see the rot infiltrate other foreign universities tends to be where privatization has occurred the most rapidly.

Do you accept that facebook is harmful to the world

Yes. But I believe it is harmful because of the way it has been leveraged to crowd out the public sector and strangle competitive private alternatives. It has become one wing of a massive tech sector cartel.

If you accept that, it’s a small step to “They benefit from having more users on their platform”.

That doesn’t logically follow. No more than saying “Building more highways is bad for the environment, ergo the highway administrators benefit from having more cars on the road.” You’re looking at a problem of induced demand and concluding the problem is on the demand-side of the equation.

Now, getting one family to stop using facebook is a drop in the bucket.

It’s one node in a massive web. And it’s easy to say “Well, you have to do your part because <insert consumerist morality here>”. But mostly it’s just some random asshole on the internet telling me not to use my telephone because AT&T is run by a richer set of random assholes. There’s no material benefit to me and no collective coordinated action that I’m seriously participating in.

nobody responsible is doing anything to fix them

Hey now. Some people are actively working to make them worse.

We’re fully through the looking glass on Climate Change, for instance. Like, 20 years ago, you had the son of an oil tycoon family negotiating the possibility of a private scheme for capping carbon emissions. And now you’ve got liberals hashing out the acceptable degree to limit EV imports and block expansion of solar and wind installations, while they support subsidized AI data centers powered by burning methane gas.

I don’t think lack of awareness is the issue.

One of the consequences of Awareness without any meaningful policy behind it is a sustained and energetic disinformation campaign by people profiting from the system’s problems.

Like, its not even enough to inhibit a public policy of Affirmative Action. Now you’ve got to purge every minority or woman from administrative posts in order to prove you’re not voluntarily implementing DEI. We don’t talk about Defunding the Police, but about how far we can go in surveilling and arresting potential BLM/anti-genocide protesters. We openly persecute trans-people and “double Gitmo”, because radical reversals in civil rights are in vogue. We double down on gerrymandering and try to reverse the popular election of progressive government officials, because the very idea of a popular democracy is revolting to the national press corps. We raise taxes on poor people, not to do anything about a budget deficit but because we think punishing anyone who isn’t rich is some kind of civic virtue.

All “Awareness” appears to have done is to paint bullseyes on any particular liberal issue du jour.

Would love to do the right thing, but…

slaps the spreadsheet that shows company profits

Shareholders come first.

• Tariffs will force outsourced manufacturers to bring back industry to the US, because they will raise the cost of imports

• Tariffs will not raise the price of primarily imported domestic consumers goods

You cannot truly understand Trumpism until you can hold these two ideas in your brain simultaneously, without experiencing dissonance.

Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core producer prices rose 0.9% from June, biggest month-over-month jump since March 2022. Compared with a year ago, core wholesale prices rose 3.7% after posting a 2.6% year-over-year jump in June.

Globally speaking, this isn’t horrible. It’s not good, but plenty of countries that don’t enjoy a global reserve currency have experienced far worse.

However, we’ve also seen the USD slide a full 15-pts relative to the Euro since January.

That size shift in the Forex Market suggests a significant drift away from the Dollar as a reserve currency. Combined with our total disregard for accrued debts and the repeated whispers among conservative congressmen about balancing the budget through a debt default, we’re playing an incredibly dangerous game.

I haven’t seen any real evidence to that effect. Shy of handing your bank number to scammers, the “Don’t use your computer to do X, use it to do Y” consumerist internet activism never seems to impact anything. How Big Tech actually does business seems driven by FinTech investment far more than user engagement.

A lot of countries provide a multi track secondary education too account for the desire and ability of different students.

Tracking students into different careers is very different from separating students into “Smart” and “Dumb” cohorts, particularly when the membership in the “Smart” cohort is more closely aligned with one’s street address than one’s scholastic aptitude.

Even then, career tracking absolutely can and does take on a segregationist character when the wages of the labor make access to certain career paths a purchasable privilege. That’s how you get all the Eton College grads going into politics and journalism as a single congealed cohort, regardless of the competency of the school’s members.

there is an easier jump from the lower education track to college in the USA compared to other countries

The US has been at the forefront of privatized credentialing. And that’s created a rich vein of for-profit schools that exist above the High School grade, which people are obligated to assume debts to attend in order to be accredited for certain jobs.

That’s not a “jump” between tracks, though. That’s just the elementary public education system getting defunded. We’re leaving large gaps between “what you need to graduate high school” and “what you need to start your professional career”.

You have socialism when the workers receive the full benefits of their labor.

You have socialism when the community receives the full benefit of working labor. Even then, trying to slap a puritanical lens that ignores the dramatic shift in social equity between pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary China isn’t materialist. To say a modern working class Chinese resident isn’t enjoying a vastly larger share of their collective surplus labor, you’ve got to ignore a ton of social investment and commensurate benefits to the public.

But if you do want to be puritanical, we can go back to Old School Maoism. Per Michael Parenti, the Maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry. Hard to get more Communist than that. The catch was that China’s subsequent divorce from global trade crippled their domestic economy and forced urban and rural proles into conflict. Dengism was an effort at reconciling the contradictions of industrial development.

We can debate the trade-offs. We can condemn the violence during the transition. But we cannot deny that these are Chinese people setting their own domestic policy. Maoism, Dengism, and Xi’s Socialism With Chinese Characteristics aren’t being imposed by Americans on Wall Street or the British Empire or the IMF Banking Committee. Chinese people are running the Chinese economy for the benefit of the collective community of Chinese residents.

On a mass scale, I don’t see this happening anywhere in the world

If you don’t see it happening, you’re not looking.

Or, you’re attempting to apply Socialism and Communism in such an orthodox manner that you’ve defined “Real Leftism” it out of existence.

Spoken like a non-American

Pennsylvania, China?

Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail are all run by dirt bags.

Where? In a country with high quality of life, low cost of living, ample at-cost amenities, and a sub-60 retirement age? Is the material wealth of the nation distributed in an egalitarian manner Not Real Communism?

What then is Communism? Is Communism when everyone has a 401k full of private equities (worker ownership)? Is it when they all own the same number of Bitcoins? Does everyone just need their name on their company letterhead?

Marx would frown at confusing fictitious assets for material analysis.

👏 Modern 👏 Honors 👏 Programs 👏 Exist 👏 To 👏 Segregate 👏 Integrated 👏 Schools 👏

Your kid isn’t special. They just came out on the top side of a system designed to deprive a percentage of your neighbors of quality elementary education.

Am I the only one who takes some issue with tokers being portrayed as divorced from reality?

More or less, yeah.

You’re a lot more likely to do those kinds of things under the influence of alcohol than thc.

Wandering around in the dark drunk off your ass more likely ends in a goat rescuing you.

I’m not sure if this is serious but China’s a textbook definition of a mixed economy and has been since at least the 80s.

Their utilities are all state owned enterprises. They have an enormous public sector for housing, education, health care, transportation, etc. Then the private sector handles consumer logistics and private lending and luxury goods and entertainment, which is how you get a guy like Jack Ma or Hui Ka Yan arrested for embezzlement and fraud from time to time.