2008 wasn’t the fault of bad jobs. It was the fault of overly greedy banks offering sub-prime mortgages to people would otherwise never qualify for home ownership, and then crying for a bailout when those new homeowners (unsurprisingly) defaulted.

I majored in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology, but the truly life-changing course for me was honestly a Philosophy elective I took in third year where I was introduced to the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant as well as a few writings on Ethics by Locke and Hume.

Business Degrees are the most popular post-secondary degree in the world right now. Similarly, they learn about money money money and how to make ever increasing sums of it while completely eschewing anything else that distracts from that, like history, or ethics, or critical thought.

being a realist about how corporations value their “human resources

I was (and I guess still am) classic middle management. The day I went from “Cynical” to outright “radicalised” was when my previous employer told me that my staff would not be getting their yearly cost-of-living raise that year because “The Company didn’t make a profit.” Yet the company actually made 6 billion dollars in profit that year.

The issue is that some eggheads projected that they would make 7 billion, and giving raises would increase that shortfall and cause the stock price to drop by a few more cents than it otherwise would have. So in the corporate world, not making enough profit is equivalent to not making any profit and the workers get fucked.

But damn, did the head office muckity-mucks get THEIR bonus’ that year. Yessiree.

It’s not done yet. I’ve only just written the abstract and started collecting my sources. When it’s finished it’ll likely just go collect dust in a substack somewhere like everything else I shout into the void.

I write this stuff because if I don’t, I’ll go mad. But I hardly expect it to get widely distributed.

I agree completely. Trade-Schools are as good or as bad as the person attending. You’re going to have people like my best friend, who went to a tradeschool for bio-tech lab assistant, but reads constantly and is generally well versed in critical thinking. And then you have people like my brother-in-law, who’s a damn good Welder but doesn’t know, or care, about the wider world around him and just believes the words of whoever happens to agree with him.

Critical thinking is the most basic skill that needs to be reinforced in a democracy. But you need knowledge in order to participate in a proper dialogue, whether it’s political, social or economic. Knowledge that doesn’t come from learning how to weld good.

I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day

I call them Intellectual Oligarchies. The knowledge (of any subject, not just tech) being limited to a circle of elites while the products are made simple enough to operate that the average person doesn’t really need to know how it’s done, just how to purchase it.

The good thing about Intellectual Oligarchies, however, is that they are open to be joined by anyone who wants to learn, or is curious about things. No formal education is required; just intellectual curiosity and the ability to read. They’re entirely self-propogated; not purposefully created by some evil cabal trying to withhold knowledge from the average person. Knowledge itself is open-source, in other words. Anyone can use it if they want.

In the Greek and Roman democratic condition, people who don’t exercise that “right to knowledge” lacked the context necessary to properly partake in the citizen’s primary job…democratic rule.

Ars Liberalis doesn’t translate to “Liberal Arts”. It literally translates to “The skills of Freedom”. A citizenry of a democracy needs the skills (knowledge) to properly function in said democracy; and that included studies of history, philosophy, politics, civics, etc…

Gen-X mostly ignored and sidelined

We’ve been ready for that since we realized that our parents were never going to retire soon enough for us to have access to the “good jobs”. We went to school and majored in “whatever was available”, and then the generation that graduated after us coincided with our parents retiring and freed up the good jobs for them.

“Ignored and Sidelined” pretty much sums up my generation. If we didn’t have computers, weed, and grunge, we’d have nothing.

This is exactly why I keep beating the drum for critical thinking and media literacy, steeped within a rich liberal (in every meaning of that term) educational program.

I’ve actually begun work on an essay about that exact thing. One that I’ve put off for a very long time because the last time I dared to imply a causal relationship between the rise of Trade-Schools, where you learn to do one thing and one thing well, but have no real education otherwise, and the dumbing down of the electorate, I got shouted down for being “elitist”. But with recent events, I’ve decided to expand on my idea and throw some more research behind it because fuck it, I’m feeling vindicated.

I’m not saying that everyone who attends a trade-school is intellectually incurious; just that a broader understanding of the world is not a part of the curriculum and it’s left up to the students themselves if they want to be a well rounded individual on their own time.

Algorithms ensure that the only content that ends up getting to your eyes is content that you already agree with for the most part. Or content that you hate so much that you have an incurable urge to respond to it with swearing and vitriol. (or at least that’s why I think TikTok keeps giving me Maple Maga bullshit)

In other words, you can put up whatever you want but thanks to modern social media, the only people who will ever see it are the people who already agree with you.

“Crazy how Millennials were the only ones to learn how to use computers and we apparently are also the only ones who learned to see through disinformation,”

Whoever this Dylan jackass is can piss right off. Gen-X built your fucking computers.

Yes. It’s ONLY supposed to be used when you find yourself leaping from life to life. Striving to put right what once went wrong. And hoping each time that your next leap will be the leap home.

I don’t make the rules. I just enforce them.

Similarly related, I remember reading The Hunt for Red October and enjoying it. But I can’t decide if I actually enjoyed it, or if I’m transposing a memory from my enjoyment of the film to my enjoyment of the book. I’m afraid to re-read it and find out, because I haven’t been a fan of much else that he’s written so I suspect I know the answer.

What puts me in awe of things like flight isn’t the act itself, but the brilliance of the people who designed it to work. I look at the aerodynamic shape of an airfoil and think “we did that…humans”.

I don’t necessarily disagree. But I don’t exactly consider Latintimes as mainstream news. They have a decided lean to the left and are publishing a story that points to something they want to say. No different than when a conservative right leaning website with a name like “Patriot Page”, or “Freedom Force” or some other creepy MAGA bullshit name does the same thing.

There are main stream outlets, and then there are outlets that we can all tell, mostly from their content, don’t bother to hide their bent left or right.

This isn’t like CNN or CBS or BBC are broadcasting it. (Cue somebody linking to exactly that…making me look like an idiot.) Heck, AFAIK, even Fox News and MSNBC, the two “main stream media” sources that I would consider least biased in both directions, aren’t touching it as a story.

And why they seem to selectively think sexism is bad while denying women education

That’s not what they’re saying. They’re mocking American hypocrisy.

less internal European cooperation and a further move toward sovereign nation states

I call dibs on being assassinated in Kosovo this time around.

I live in Saskatchewan and I was just talking to a “right wing” friend of mine about this very issue. I had gone on a diatribe about right-wing conservatives in the US and she was getting a little upset thinking I was upset with her as a “Canadian right-winger”. So I pointed out to her that she isn’t actually “right-wing”. In fact very few people in Canada except for some nut-jobs who want to bring Trumpism to Canada are right-wing as the U.S. would describe it.

Our typical right-winger, including some very good friends of mine, are conservative, but not anti-abortion, hand-maid’s tale, anti-immigrant conservatives. Our right-wing would be considered liberal to the United States and the only reason most people here think they have to defend Trump is because they nominally share the adjective of “conservative” even though they’re VASTLY different levels of right-wing.

They’re innundated with American news 24-7 and don’t make any distinction between what they believe and what MAGA believes, but when you ask them specificially what they believe in, it’s far far far closer to an American’s concept of liberalism than of MAGA.

I couldn’t remember which general it was, so I had to swallow my pride and ask ChatGPT.

The general who famously called for documentation of concentration camps during their liberation was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. When U.S. forces liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald, on April 4, 1945, Eisenhower recognized the significance of documenting the atrocities. He anticipated that future generations might doubt the extent of Nazi crimes, so he ordered extensive photographic and film documentation of the camp’s conditions.

Eisenhower even invited journalists and members of Congress to visit the camps to ensure that eyewitness accounts would back up the documentation. He felt it was crucial to make the evidence indisputable, as he feared that without such documentation, people might one day deny or downplay the horrors of the Holocaust.

neither GIMP nor Krita is really capable of acting as a replacement for Photoshop yet

I would agree with that. But in all of their defence I’d add that they’re not trying to be. They are their own pieces of kit with their own roadmaps and goals.

The biggest frustration people from Photoshop have is that the expect Gimp or Krita to be a clone of Photoshop with feature to feature parity, and that’s never been the goal of either program.

Photoshop has spent decades basically merging the features of most of their products, so that it’s now basically a photo editor with features of Illustrator and a suite of advanced drawing tools. The only replacement for that would be a hypothetical program that combines Gimp, Krita & Inkscape. But that’s never been the goal of any of those programs. They’re separate kit and as far as I’m aware always will be.