The Rise Of A Violent, Fascist Left.

I’ve hesitated on posting this numerous times, because every time I’m about to hit that publish button, some new, idiotic bit of info pops up in my news feed pertaining to the topic at hand. I then feel the need to amend and add to what I’ve already written here on the subject. I’ve come to the realization however, that things are only going to get more ridiculous, so I might as well commit and move on to other things.

The fact of the matter is that there’s a disturbing trend happening as of late that I’m none to thrilled with, and quite frankly, you shouldn’t be either. It seems a portion of the population that likes to fancy themselves as “tolerant” and “accepting” are displaying quite the opposite attributes. In fact, they’re turning out to be the most violent and destructive force in our society today. By all accounts, what is being displayed is nothing short of fascism, and at its most extreme, domestic terrorism.

To bring you up to speed, in case you’ve been living under a rock, waves of young kids (and emotionally stunted adults) claiming to be liberals are displaying violent, fascist behavior under the guise of fighting the good fight. Ironically, they’re engaging in dangerous, fascist behavior, in the name of “fighting fascism”. Let that sink in for a bit. Good job, U.S. education system.

I’ve probably written about this a few times to some degree, but I don’t see this trend slowing down, and thus still view it as a problem worth writing about.

In the last few years, it’s become normalized, via the preaching of left-learning media, pandering celebrities, and the education system, to engage in violence as a means to push one’s agenda while stifling someone else’s freedoms.

This is the effect of indoctrination. When impressionable people are taught that it’s ok to violently attack people with differing views, they feel completely justified in doing so. It’s unfortunately also the result of individuals having a complete lack of education in basic history. You can’t look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you are the very fascist you claim to be against, if you don’t actually know what fascism is.To paraphrase George Santayana: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

fascism (noun) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice

Historically, fascism has been marked by one side trying to silence another side via censorship, violence, and the use of government force. This is far removed from a democratic debate of ideas, with both sides being allowed to express their ideas while remaining free from harm and prosecution.

Throughout history, from Stalin’s Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to Hitler’s National Socialist Party, to Mao’s Communist Party of China, government force has been used to control the narrative through authoritarianism.

authoritarianism (noun) the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom

When a group of people disagree with another group and make the decision to “win” the war of ideas by using violence to silence, they are engaging in fascism. Yet the folks we see engaging in these activities today, don’t seems to want to accept that they are the very enemy they claim to be fighting. I’ve come to the realization that the reasons these fascists don’t realize they are fascists, is because they are twisting definitions to conveniently omit themselves from the equation.

Their minds reason this out in the following way: Fascism is a “right wing” ideology according to the definition. They fancy themselves liberals/Democrats, therefore they can’t possibly be fascists. The problem with this logic, is that merely calling oneself liberal doesn’t make one a liberal.

liberal (adjective) open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values

Liberals, by definition, are open to differing ideas and opinions. People who try to shut down differing ideas and opinions, are by definition, not liberals. Given all the above definitions, people like Antifa, are (ironically) not liberal, or anti-fascist, but in fact anti-liberal, and the very definition of fascist. A surprising portion of the modern leftist movement shares very little in common with classical liberal values at this point. They’ve almost become the far-right of old.

Antifa represent the absolute worst of regressivism in modern society. These people are completely delusional about the way they look in the grand scheme of things. They view themselves as freedom fighters, saving the world like some sort of superhero collective. The problem is that they’re viewing themselves through a funhouse mirror. That funhouse mirror, being a lack of historical context, combined with positive reinforcement from a dishonest, delusional establishment.

A big part of this issue is that the rampant civil disobedience has been normalized as of late. Intellectual discussion and civilized debate are a thing of the past. If something doesn’t turn out in your favor, you now get to destroy stuff. If you don’t get your way, you are allowed to lash out like a child throwing a temper tantrum. Unfortunately the outgoing administration took a stance of never holding anyone accountable for their actions, so now we have bedlam every time an entitled group of people don’t get their way. What used to be an exception, is now becoming the norm.

Teachers at prestigious (citation needed) educational institutions are glamorizing, even outright encouraging this type of destructive behavior, passing down the indoctrination that was passed down to them. Instructors who were failed by their own educations, romanticizing tyrants and murderers like Castro and Guevara, continue this cycle, failing the next generation under them. It’s the educational equivalent of the child who was beaten by his father, going on to abuse his own kids.

This is all an unfortunate repeat of history. In fascist regimes, the youth were indoctrinated to fight the good fight by violently suppressing the opposition. In communist countries, this was done via smashing up evil capitalist businesses and ratting out everyone who dared dissent, to big daddy government. Anyone who showed any indication of opposing the regime was systematically destroyed. Tall poppy syndrome was in full effect.  Don’t stand out at all, lest you become the target of the violent hive mind.

The current hive mind, much like the hive minds of yore, largely consists of useful idiots, who expedite the erosion of basic liberties. Complaining to the authorities to block anyone’s dissenting opinion, effectively takes away everybody’s freedom of speech in the long run. These people are essentially fighting to limit free speech and “wrong think”, opening the doors for government to step in and limit our first amendment. After all, it’s the government that ultimately has the power to remove your freedoms,and not Nazis, the Taliban, or any other scary scapegoat.

As a matter of fact, most dystopian science fiction literature revolves around societies that were ruined by overreaching progressivism and emphasis on collectivism.  From Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Fahrenheit 451, to Brave New World, the futuristic societies portrayed were often destroyed by governments stepping in to “protect” the collective at the expense of individual rights. If your feeling get hurt by somebody else exercising their freedom of speech, the government will “fix” things by removing everybody’s freedom of speech. I’ll probably write an article about this topic another time, because it’s simultaneously interesting, and alarming.

it’s not just the uneducated educators who are guilty of pushing this dystopian future forward however. That bastion of out-of-touch arrogance know as Hollywood has been throwing it’s hat into the ring as of late. Every time there is an award show to hand out validation to these over-paid, attention-starved, professional pretenders, you can be sure somebody will take the opportunity to grandstand. Don’t expect any nuance however. People in gated, guarded communities tend to be a little out of touch with the realities us common-folk face.

Hence those glorious acts of millionaires pandering to the lowly peons who pay their salaries, by doing their best impersonations of a Braveheart speech. The problem here, is that it isn’t these clowns’ communities that are destroyed every time the irrational and lowly get whipped up into a frenzy and “protest”. It’s always the poor communities that suffer when people take out their anger with bedlam rather than words. These empty orations always garner the Hollywood elite ample media coverage the next day though, and if anything is evident, it’s that actors are desperate for any attention they can get.

It doesn’t necessarily matter if the actors, journalists, and those in the academics aren’t the ones throwing bricks and assaulting people themselves though. Those who might stoke the fire are no doubt guilty of the fire that may ensue. Inciting a riot is a felony after all.

It’s dangerous that people with this mindset are increasingly ending up in positions of power. They’ve already started to infest the media in places like BuzzFeed, i.e. the special olympics of journalism. Once these people start making it into politics, we’re going to be in for a bumpy ride. It’s already started to happen in Canada, where a guy set to go down as the least productive leader in western history is currently the Prime Minister. A ski instructor/drama teacher somehow bamboozled his way into the highest position in a country by pandering and having good hair. Of course, in the U.S. we ended up with a reality star, so I probably shouldn’t throw rocks in this glass house.

Now theses pseudo-revolutionary types are engaging in this childish act of trying to normalize violence against people they consider “Nazis”. The problem is, they consider absolutely anyone they disagree with a Nazi. So essentially the long and short of it is that they are trying to normalize being irrational and violent towards anybody they disagree with. What age group of person does this remind you of. If you guessed 3-5 years-olds, you are correct.

Which brings us back to Antifa. The revolutionary cosplayers who seems to operate on a combination of lack of historical knowledge, and emotionally-driven violent tendencies. They wear masks to hide their identities, much like bank robbers, muggers, snowboarders, and other people who often engage in degenerate, anti-humanitarian deeds. They’re essentially junior terrorists whom the extreme left refuses to call out for being terrorists.

“But their name means ‘Anti-Fascist’, so how can they be fascists?” If I had a buck for every time I’ve seen this ridiculously daft question posed, I could pay my rent for a month or two.

If I go around calling myself a Korean woman, does that make me a Korean woman? I can call myself whatever the hell I want to, but facts and actions dictate what I actually am. If I go around engaging in intimidation and political violence, I’m a terrorist by the very definition of that word. If I then want to use force to shut down any view differing from my own, I’m a fascist by the very definition of that word. Engaging in these activities dictates what I am, and not whatever cute misleading term I choose to use to label myself.

In reality, Antifa are nothing more than kids who have been failed by the education system. They “fight” fascism by ironically acting out in the same manner as Hitler youth and children in Mao’s China, “smashing capitalism” with violence and destruction. Education has failed them, in that they are completely incapable of fighting opposing idea with their brains, and thus need to rely on their fists. They act purely on emotion, and nothing else. Unfortunately, history doesn’t look back favorably on you merely because you “felt” you were doing the right thing.

I’d be willing to give some of these Antifa kids the benefit of the doubt, but the truth is that I have yet to converse with one online that didn’t give off the impression of being anything beyond a D+ student at best. You can’t expect a D+ student to have a very solid grasp of history or politics though. Hence them largely being fueled by emotion rather than intellect.

I’ll end this here, because I have no doubt I’ll end up writing about this 40 more times in the not too distant future. It would be nice if the journalists whose responsibility it is to objectively report on things like this were actually doing their jobs, but that evidently doesn’t happen any more. Partisanship and towing the line have replaced merely reporting facts and reality. One step closer to that dystopian future.

My Thoughts On The #MuslimBan.

Trump is setting all kinds of precedents as a U.S. president.  Chiefly among those is the fact that for better or worse, he’s actually following through with all his campaign promises.  Nobody who obtains the U.S. presidency actually follows through with most of the empty promises they made in order to get there, let alone this early into their term.

Obama ran on a platform including things like: 1) overturning the Patriot Act 2) protecting whistle-blowers, and 3) closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.  None of these happened, and if anything, civil liberties have been compromised further via the bolstering or renewing of the polices he was supposedly against.  This isn’t meant to be an out-and-out attack on Obama, however.  He accomplished a lot of other things he said he would.  The point being, that candidates don’t always follow through on some of the bigger things they say they will.

Trump seems dead set on actually doing everything he said he would.  I guess nobody told him that politicians pander and lie, and that we tend to accept the fact that they regularly renege on their campaign promises.  You don’t actually need to do everything you said you would in order to get voters.

So far, he’s shot down the Trans-Pacific Partnership, committed to building a border wall (I’m still not convinced he’ll actually go through with this one), and imposed his #MuslimBan.  I don’t particularly agree with these last two accomplishments, nor do I see them solving any kind of problem, but regardless, he’s actually following through, which is mind-blowing to me on many levels.

This post is strictly about the #MuslimBan though, so that’s what I’m gonna type about for a hot minute.

To start things off, the #MuslimBan isn’t even an actual #MuslimBan.  Right from the outset, the name is a misnomer being unscrupulously pushed by people who should probably know better.  It is a temporary 90-day ban on citizens from seven individual countries from gaining entry to the United States, and a 120-day ban on refugees from those countries  One of those countries (Iraq) had previously been on a ban implemented by Barack Obama back in 2011, lasting for six months.  As you may have guessed, there wasn’t much, if any outrage when this transpired.  This is to be expected in our current age of egregious double-standards, I suppose.

Secondly, the #MuslimBan isn’t even an actual #MuslimBan.  The ban is essentially blocking roughly 200 million people from entering the United States for three months.  That is a large number of people for sure, but a fraction of the 1.6 billion Muslims who would be banned by a legitimate #MuslimBan.  You can be against the ban, but also be intellectual honest enough to not mislabel something merely for hyperbolic effect.

For instance, seven Muslim countries are included in the ban, but there are eleven Muslim countries that aren’t affected by the ban at all.  By “Muslim” countries, I’m referring to countries that are at least 85% Muslim, even though most of those are above 95% Muslim.  If this were an actual ban on all Muslims, at very least, there would be 18 countries on that list, and not just seven.  The fact that only seven are in the ban leads me to believe that they were selected based on some other legitimate criteria.  Perhaps they were deemed the biggest hotbeds for terrorism, or those with the most substantial ISIS presence.  Saudi Arabia would probably have ended up on the list under those criteria however.  Emperor Donald has businesses in Saudi Arabia, so perhaps we have a conflict of interest at work here as well.  The plot thickens.

Finally, the #MuslimBan isn’t even an actual #MuslimBan.  From what I gather via reading the actual order that was released, the ban is meant to either allow the vetting process to be slightly reworked, or to allow for more thorough background checks on individuals already in line to get visas to enter the U.S.  It’s hard to get a simplified, yet honest assessment of this order from most U.S. media outlets, who have become increasingly incapable of delivering non-biased, propaganda-free articles on the matter.

Regardless, the whole point of this was to demonstrate that with a middle-school kids’ level of research, one could have ascertained that the #MuslimBan was actually a country ban, and not a “muslim ban”.  Muslims from England, Nigeria, Chile, etc. aren’t part of the ban, after all.  Why exactly those seven countries were chosen, I’d be interested to find out, but reacting to these situations like a hysterical child instead of actually researching it helps nobody.  Most of social media is only able to react like hysterical children though, so perhaps this is too much to ask.

This is the Trump presidency though, so you’re going to have to brace yourselves, like someone riding shotgun in a car next to a driver who’s had a few too many drinks.  Hopefully it all turns out for the best, and you don’t die in a horrible fireball of a crash.  I can’t be too overly critical of anything that’s transpired thus far, but tomorrow is always a new day.

How Did Trump Win The Presidency?

As you may have heard by now, Donald Trump is officially the 45th president of the United States.  He wasn’t my first choice, being that I’ve always voted third party, but I can honestly say that his win doesn’t surprise me in the least.

He was running against a corrupt, establishment, career politician, whose party had become so used to getting away with murder that they weren’t even trying to cover their tracks any more.

Between the countless WikiLeaks email revelations, the damning undercover videos released by the likes of James O’Keefe, and the sloppy reporting and blatant partisanship demonstrated by many “reputable” news organizations (CNN anyone?), anybody who was actually paying attention should have realized that the cards were grossly stacked in favor of Clinton from the outset.  Despite all this corruption being brought to light, the Democrats still felt entitled to a win due to their own rampant hubris.  When you go through life with as much self-righteous entitlement as many of them do, the possibly of failure never seems like an option. Perhaps this is why Hillary Clinton wasn’t ready to deliver a concession speech upon losing the presidency to Trump.  There was no way in her mind that she could possibly have lost with such an overwhelming advantage.

If Donald Trump had run against Bernie Sanders, perhaps he would have lost.  A large portion of the Democratic voter base wanted Bernie Sanders to be the presidential candidate.  He had an enormous groundswell of support that was inescapable on social media throughout the year.  Unfortunately what the voting public wanted and what the Democratic establishment wanted were two very different beasts.

The Democratic establishment wanted a career politician who already had his or her tendrils in every sector of the American political/financial sector, and Hillary was that candidate.  Bernie was a mere civil rights protestor who worked his way into politics to further his civil rights agenda.  The Clintons however, were both on track to be politicans since they were in their teens.  They have been a political power couple for 40 years, planning their every move around climbing the political ladder.  The Clintons both represent the very corruption that Bernie ran on a platform of purging from U.S. politics.  It’s quite ironic that the very corruption he rallied against, took him out of the running for president, and yet he refused to disavow them.

How exactly did Trump win though? For one, there was a huge discrepancy between the reality of whose corner Americans were in, and whose corner the media wanted you to believe Americans were in.  The media set Trump up as the bumbling buffoon who had no chance of winning.  These channels and sites ran the narrative over and over that Hillary was sure to win by a landslide victory, all the while, doubling down on reporting Trumps transgressions, while ignoring Clinton’s, and actively painting her as some sort of victim.  Even their scientifically-sound, factually-accurate polls continually placed Hillary as the shoe-in, despite all of those polls ending up incorrect.

The thing is, these polls were propaganda.  The weren’t there to serve as an informative litmus test for how the country as a whole was swinging politically.  They were meant to serve as an ego boost for the Democratic party, i.e. “We’re winning the battle you guys. We’re the best!”.  Unfortunately, cooking the polls by largely asking partisan Democratic voters who they are voting for, then passing it off as a sample of the entire populace doesn’t do you any favors.  The people who viewed Hillary as the guaranteed winner might have been less apt to go out and vote, while those who saw Trump as the underdog, might have doubled down in their efforts to get him elected.

Another factor that played in to Trumps favor was the fact that a large portion of modern leftists are overly emotional babies who don’t understand how government works.  This was fairly evident before the election even took place, but is as clear as ever, post-election.

In the week since the election, we’re seen numerous riots throughout the country in Hillary-voting cities, rife with violence and destruction.  Mind you, these aren’t civil-rights protests, but a bunch of self-righteous millennials throwing temper tantrums because the candidate they voted for didn’t win.  Though to be fair, about half of them, as it turns out, didn’t even vote (color me surprised).  Remember all those people who destroyed property and wasted everyone’s time because Obama won, and they voted for a different candidate?  Yea… me neither.

Not all of these brilliant protests involve violence and destruction being carried out under the amazingly ironic banner of “Love Trumps Hate” however. There is currently a change.com petition attempting to “correct” the election that 4+ million individuals felt the need to sign, because it’s unfair their chosen candidate didn’t win.  It states that Hillary won the popular vote, which they feel should be more important than the electoral college, which she lost.  Now, it’s perfectly fine to feel that way, but the electoral college trumps *rimshot* the popular vote in U.S. elections.  It did in 2000, when it George Bush beat out Al Gore, just as it did all the way back in in 1876, when Rutherford B Hayes defeated Samuel J Tilden (who?).  And now some entitled babies want to change it to their own benefit.

Why else could Trump possibly have won?  Let’s see… Perhaps it’s because of the absolute lack of ability to make a cogent argument that the Democrats have displayed time and time again.  If, whenever someone takes a stance against something like illegal immigration, your response is to not provide a viable counterpoint, but instead to hurl accusations of “racist”, you lose that argument in the eyes of a rational centrist.  If the topic of abortion comes up, the other side gives a reason why they are against it, and your response is merely to call them “sexist”, you lose that argument.  If someone expresses concern about the rise of radical Islam, or the rampant human rights violations in Islamic-state countries, and all you bring to the table is calling them “Islamophobic”, you lose the intellectual debate.  Ad hominem attacks do not equate to valid arguments.  To anybody undecided in these debates, the side who proposed extreme things like bans and walls potentially won out over the side who proposed absolutely nothing but personal attacks.

It appears a lot of the left is completely unaware of this critical flaw in their ability to debate and argue, unfortunately. One need look no further than the popular leftist folk all over the t.v. box and social media to verify this.

Trevor Noah, the current figurehead of Comedy Central’s Democrat promotion arm that masquerades as a non-partisan comedy program “The Daily Show”, non-ironically believes that Hillary Clinton lost the election because of racism, sexism, and misogyny, and that she “would have been president if she were a man”.  Never mind the fact that she has enough corruption under her belt to fill multiple books, including more death and destruction than a Michael Bay movie, while her opponent was merely a brash jackass.  Obviously, nobody ever votes on conscience, or votes for the lesser of two evils.  Everybody votes primarily on gender and race politics, always, in every election, ever.  How are you even on a political-based show, you monumental goof.

Then there are the celebrities with children’s levels of political knowledge, who never let that hinder the constant stream of regurgitated, misinformed opinions they spew out into self-constructed echo-chambers of social media group think.  Think Sarah Silverman or Patton Oswalt.  Both are comedians whom I actually find funny, but whom aren’t capable of exercising any level of nuance in their political opinions.  Both also have millions of followers on their twitter accounts, largely because of their political beliefs and constant virtue signalling, and less because of their actual comedy.

patton01

It’s amazing that for a lot of liberal comedians, writing actual material has been replaced by this virtue-signalling on social media.  Why craft a clever joke when you can just type out “Trump won because sexism and racism you guys!” and get loads of empty likes from people who would fail a basic competency test on U.S. government.  I’ll tell you why.  Because comedians generally have low self-esteem and a need for acceptance, which overrides their need to exhibit integrity and reasoning to obtain that acceptance in an intellectually honest fashion.  Hence this constant pandering to emotions in exchange for validation on social media platforms.

silvermantweet

The factor a lot of people seem to be overlooking in Trump’s win, is that for most rational people, the left has become the greater of the two evils in recent years.  The party that used to preach tolerance, has become the epitome of intolerance, hurling baseless accusations, and creating false oppression narratives to set itself up as the eternal victim.  After all, the “victim” is the one who is always on the “right side of history”.  Being the victim comes with great power in today’s fabricated oppression culture.

Anyone who disagrees with the modern leftist is immediately written off as wrong.  Any minority who proclaims to be conservative, or holds any kind of conservative value is immediately accused of “selling out”, or being an uncle Tom or “coon”.  Evidently, tolerance to these types of leftists doesn’t include the tolerance of differing views and opinions.  You must think the exact same thing I have been conditioned to think, or else there is something wrong with you, and shaming and name-calling are justified.

A lot of the young college-uneducated millennials love slinging around accusations of conservatives being fascists, and everybody and their mother being Hitler, despite having a very obvious lack of knowledge of history, or politics.  Donald Trump has nothing in common with Hitler, and anyone who is even remotely educated realizes this.  Fascists tend to believe in silencing dissenting opinions, and using violence to suppress those with differing views.  Remind me again who constantly tries to shut down rallies, and speaking engagements of people they disagree with, and continually engage in riots to “solve” their problems. Hint: 99% of them are in the #NeverTrump crowd.

This is what happens when a society fails to raise it’s children correctly though.  When kids are brought up without any adversity and are used to always getting their way, they don’t know how to react when things don’t turn out in their favor.  They throw temper tantrums and lash out.  This is what happens when everyone is given a participation award as a kid for simply showing up.  They can’t deal with the idea of losing at something.  When you lose at something in life, you either try again, or accept the loss.  You don’t break things.

This whole Clinton/Trump ordeal mirrors the Brexit vote over in Europe to an almost uncanny degree.  A vote was taken to decide if the U.K. would leave the European Union.  The vote passed by a 3.8% margin in favor of leaving the E.U.  People on the left immediately started calling everyone a racist or xenophobe because the vote didn’t turn out in their favor.  They then tried to get a petition going to redo the vote, only to have it overturned by the government.

One more possible reason that Donald Trump won the election, is that a good deal of the population had become fed up with the identity politicking of the left.  Everything has become about identity politics in the last few years.  Meritocracy has been completely thrown out the window, in favor of voting for people based on trivialities pertaining to pigment and chromosomes.  The common idiom of not judging a book by it’s cover has all but been neglected in favor of judging books solely by their covers.

There are warehouses full of people out there who voted for Hillary based solely on the fact that she is a woman.  Check out the comments section on mensa-level websites like BuzzFeed, Salon, or HuffPo to see the proof of this.  There exists zero nuance or fact in any of the comments posted under pro-Hillary, or anti-Trump articles on these sites.  It’s nothing but 24/7 identity politics and regurgitated ad nauseam arguments.

Progressive rule #36: If you don’t have a valid argument, throw out accusations of sexism

The fact of the matter is that Hillary Clinton had two types of people in her corner: those who were partisan voters, and would have voted for whomever ran as a Democrat, and those who voted for her merely because she was a female.  Nobody who was even remotely versed in politics went out and voted for Hillary because they viewed her as a good candidate.  She was a terrible candidate.  They were both terrible candidates.

Trump had three types of voters in his corner however.  Partisan voters who would have voted for the Republican candidate regardless, people who voted for him merely because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, and people who voted for him because he was the anti-establishment choice.  He wasn’t a traditional Democrat or Republican.  He was essentially a third party candidate who managed to hoodwink his way into being the Republican nomination.  He has a lot in common with Bernie Sanders in this regard.  Neither of their parties wanted them to be the nomination.  Evidently 15% of potential Bernie voters decided to vote for Trump over Clinton, which is quite telling.

I’m going to end this here, because I could ramble on forever on this topic, but I’d rather take a few of these points and expound upon them in in future posts.  Hopefully I’ll up the creative output on this site in the coming year, and maybe even try to veer back into the comedic/creative writing field a little more.  Now that this 24/7 debacle of an election cycle has come to an end, my blood pressure will slowly lower and I can focus on things other than politics and social issues for a while.  I have about a dozen half-written posts on political/social topics, and those will see the light of day, but I’ll try to work in some other content as well.  I’m out.

 

Why Free College Is a Terrible Idea

One of the platforms in the 2016 US election is pushing the premise of “free college” to appeal to the youth vote.  I’m here to explain why “free college” is potentially a waste of tax dollars and not something that political candidates should be focusing on.

Tuition Is Unregulated, And We Don’t Need More Debt

Why do people rally behind the idea of “free college”?  One would assume because of how incredibly expensive the average four-year education has become.  If college were reasonably priced, and easily afforded, nobody would be griping about it’s increasingly astronomical price tag in the first place.  So basically, the argument boils down to: college has gotten too expensive, so now it should be covered fully by the tax dollar.

There’s one problem with this mentality though.  The U.S. is currently over 19 trillion in debt.  The U.S. is in debt because it has a tendency to recklessly spend far more money than it brings in.  To put it into perspective, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the U.S. a mere 1.6 trillion.  Roughly 1/10 of our debt can be attributed to these wars.  The other 90% is due to all the other instances of annual overspending of tax dollars.  The money spent on college is estimated to be about 300-400 billion dollars annually. (20 million students at 15-20k a year: a modest estimate)  This isn’t a very small number, when you keep in mind the U.S. brings in roughly 3 trillion in taxes per year currently.  All these expenditures add up of course, which is precisely why we are 19 trillion in debt to begin with.  College would be yet another drop in the bucket, driving the country further into an increased mountain of debt.

Perhaps we could actually afford “free” college if we radically cut back on all the other expenditures that got us into debt, but this would require a little bit of fiscal responsibility.  Unfortunately the candidate(s) who push the socialized college angle are not the same candidates who also lay out a plan for cutting current government expenditures.  Their general approach is to offer a bounty of services and promises to their constituents, without ever providing an honest discussion as to the negative effect it would have on the country’s finances.  Ultimately, the people who buy into this pipe dream are those who prefer that other people get taxed more to cover the expenditures of the government, rather than expecting the government to take responsibility for controlling their own zealous overspending.

A lot of the populace doesn’t seem to understand the basic economics behind government spending.  For example, many of the same people who are behind Bernie and his platform of increased tax expenditures tend to be the same people who praise Obama for chipping away at the deficit.  It’s almost as if they have a complete lack of understanding of basic finances.  Essentially, they’re applauding one person on lowering the governments expenditures, all the while backing someone else who aims to raise those same expenditures beyond where they previously were.  Does this math work out in some bizarro universe I’m not privy to, or is this merely a product of common-core math?

If this whole “free college” movement was born out of outrageous tuition costs, why not focus on the problem at hand?  Namely the fact that colleges are gouging students based on the increasingly erroneous assumption that having a piece of paper guarantees you some sort of fruitful future.  College is by no means a necessity in life, and there are many other alternatives for education out there.  If auto companies started rapidly increasing the cost of their cars, would these same people start clamoring for the government to pay for everybody’s automobiles?  Why is an individual’s choice to go out and purchase an automobile handled differently than their decision to pay for further education?  You have myriad choices in both instances.

As a final point, if tax dollars start funding college educations, and college costs haven’t been regulated in some manner, there is nothing to stop colleges from continuing to raise tuition costs.  People complain about tuition costs, because they themselves have to pay for what they chose to purchase.  If the government started paying for everyone’s college, universities could start charging a million dollars for a degree, and nobody would complain about it, because they would never actually see the bill.  Meanwhile, we end up setting a new world record by being the first country to surpass 100 trillion in debt.

Free College Is Classist

Nobody growing up in a poor area with a terrible K-12 education system is going to benefit from receiving free college.  If you graduated from high school and were provided a substandard education, colleges aren’t going to be scrambling to admit you entrance.  The kids who grew up in nice areas with good school systems will be the ones with the grades and SAT scores to get into college.  The kids from the other side of the tracks, living in broken homes will largely be getting the shaft on this deal.

If students no longer face having to finance their own college education, the number of people applying to colleges will jump drastically.  Why would you not go to college if you could avoid working for 4+ more years, get something for free and perhaps get to do a little bit of partying on the side?  With a surge in people applying to colleges, the kids with average to lower grades will have no chance getting into a college that is already burdened with deciding who it will admit, and who is out of luck.  Perhaps they’ll still take a scant number of the poor riff-raff merely as a publicity stunt for good will, but the rest will just have to go to trade school. (Where they may or may not statistically end up making more money on average than holders of increasingly devalued college degrees, but this is beside the point.)

This is why it’s far more important for government to actually focus on improving K-12 education across the board, rather than essentially providing a free “luxury” item.  Between the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core Initiative, K-12 education has been left in ruins, and put U.S. children even further behind the rest of the world.  Early education desperately needs to be reformed, long before college education even enters the discussion.  Increasing access to a good education for everybody, is ultimately better for the country than merely giving a bonus to those who actually need it less.  15-20% of children in this country grow up in poverty and realistically won’t be benefiting from socialized higher education.  Taxes shouldn’t be used for anything this substantial that isn’t available to the entirety of the populace.

Half of College Classes Are Pointless

Colleges are businesses, and as such, need to be able to spend as little money as possible in order to make the biggest returns possible.  One way to do this is by hiring under-qualified individuals to teach pointless classes rather than to hire well-educated individuals to teach meaningful courses.  Hence it costing the same per cred hour for a class in the STEM field as it does for a throw-away course that has no viable use in the job market.

Sure it’s all shits and giggles to sign up for a class like Politicizing Beyoncé, The Sociology of Miley Cyrus, or even Zombies in Popular Media (all real courses), but you’re paying $250 per credit hour on average ($650 out-of-state) to take these classes, not including whatever books you may need.  These classes aren’t worth your money, and certainly aren’t worth taxpayer money.  Go buy a book about zombies or a pop artist, and save a few hundred dollars.

On top of the cutesy meme courses, there exist too many degrees that really aren’t worth spending over $100k on.  The problem is, kids are pushed into college right after high school, because it’s seen as something they have to do to make a good living and be successful in life.  When an aimless kids gets to college and needs to choose a major, they will likely choose something in the liberal arts field, like communications, philosophy, sociology, creative writing, psychology, or some type of history.  Most of these undergraduate degrees either aren’t specialized enough to be very useful, or require further education to be of any use in the job market.

Roughly 35% of undergraduate degrees are in the STEM fields.  These are fields that will generally be worth the money you are paying for them, assuming you have a good work ethic and are proactive in finding a good job.  Obviously STEM fields aren’t the only important jobs, but STEM degrees tend to attract the individuals who go through college with a sense of purpose, rather than doing so merely to obtain a degree.  Merely obtaining a degree won’t guarantee you anything in the workforce if you aren’t adept in the field you decided to major in.

For the record, I have nothing against liberal arts majors such as philosophy.  In writing an article such as this one, I’m essentially philosophizing about what the negative impacts of sweeping legislature might be, mixed with a little bit of research and statistical data.  However, if you have half a million kids going to college and getting philosophy degrees, what exactly are they all going to do with those degrees?  Society needs philosophers, but it doesn’t need millions of them.  Luckily with “free” college, the taxpayer would be eating the debt on that investment, and not the individuals, or their parents.  Buyers remorse from impulse purchases would become a thing of the past in the new regime.

Colleges Have Become Regressive indoctrination Centers

This point is one that practically writes itself.  Anybody actually paying attention to the news in the last year or two has seen the dramatic shift colleges have taken, from being learning centers, to becoming indoctrination stations.  There was a time in the past, where colleges were places one would go to learn how to think critically and expand one’s horizons.  Now colleges are places where kids are taught to reject any idea they have been conditioned to believe is wrong, and to segregate themselves from anyone who thinks differently.

These kids protest and actively try to block speakers from talking at their schools.  If you are too much of a child to accept that people have opinions that differ from yours, perhaps you don’t understand why you don’t get to silence or block others from speaking.  Ultimately, the colleges are to blame, since they actively cancel speaking engagements, rather than teaching the children why this isn’t an acceptable way to act.  This mindset ends up snowballing out of control, the wardens lose control of the prison, and these kids end up becoming junior terrorists, making demands where they should have no power to do so.

The universities are starting to pay for their widespread incompetence, however.  Schools that make national headlines due to pandering to these baby fascists, end up taking hits in enrollment, and consequently funding.  No rational parent is going to want to send their kid to a school that will potentially turn their offspring into a safe space, trigger warning, thought-Nazi.  If you waltz into a McDonald’s and decide to act like an asshole, you would more than likely be removed from the premises.  If you act like an asshole on one of these campuses, you shouldn’t receive any sort of fame or special treatment for doing so.  Hence the social blow-back and damaging side-effects.

Entitled middle class liberals are being conditioned to believe that they are somehow an oppressed class, despite living in one of the wealthiest, most privileged counties in the world, and attending institutions that are largely homogeneous in an ideology they overwhelmingly follow.  What exactly are you being oppressed by?  Reality?  Adulthood?  If you want to experience actual oppression, you’re going to need to leave the comfort of your bedroom or dorm.

In Conclusion

Education is important and should be a much larger focus in this country than it currently is.  K-12 education is far more important in the long run, is in dire need of reform, and should be our primary focus, long before college education is even brought up.  Candidates need to be honest with the voting public about economics, rather than constantly pandering and promising stuff that merely adds to the national debt.  Colleges need to get their shit together and stop catering to these problem contingents.  They are technically businesses that reserve the right to refuse service to children whose parents never taught them to act right.  Kids need to stop going to universities, only to major in pointless things like Cambodian Feminist Pottery Studies.  Lastly, colleges need to be more open to differing views, rather than creating environments of insular thought.

Never Forget.

It seems like only yesterday.  Life seemed so new and full of innocence back then.  Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed.  Life can be a cruel mistress sometimes.  But in the face of adversity, we have to be able to pick up the pieces and persevere.  Life is fragile, but we have to be strong and move on with our lives.

You never think these types of things could ever happen in a million years.  Then the world comes crashing down around you and you find it hard to see how you could possibly go on.  But you do, because you know that tomorrow will be a better day.

I  miss you more and more everyday Corey Haim.

Corey 9/11

Applying Logic in Times of Tragedy

 

Warning

 

It seems that every time a tragedy occurs within this country involving innocent people being killed, a witch hunt always ensues.  This witch hunt always entails finding the “cause” of the violence in an attempt to find something or someone to blame for why the tragedy happened.  The cause of these tragedies is already in front of our faces, however.  It is people who kill other people.  More specifically, people in various states of mental duress kill other people.  Guns don’t kill people.  Cars don’t kill people.  Cigarettes don’t even kill people.  Inanimate objects don’t have free will.  Blaming inanimate objects is simply a way of humans taking the blame off of humanity for the terrible things humans do to other humans or to themselves.  Putting the onus of death on an object is either a grand form of delusion, or propaganda to push an agenda, pure and simple.

If all the guns were to disappear off the face of the Earth overnight, we would not live in a society devoid of violence.  Violence would still transpire where it would have transpired before.  Knives are the tools of wanton violence in many areas where access to guns is scant.  Massacres happen in Japan, wherein knives are used in lieu of guns.  Bombs are the tools of destruction in other areas, Afghanistan being a prime example.  Bombs are easy to construct out of any number of readily available materials and have a much higher casualty rate than a gun, all the while keeping the perpetrator out of harm’s way.  You can’t outlaw or regulate bombs.  People don’t decide to engage in violence because of the existence of a particular weapon.  The will to engage in violence exists independently of the weapon used and will transpire regardless, unless the root of the problem is addressed.

You always see debates about gun control after a massacre, but what you never see is a debate about the reasons why the massacre took place in the first place.  Limiting access to weapons doesn’t stop violence.  It never will stop violence.  Even attempting to do so is a lazy, uninformed reaction to a stimulus based upon aimless passion with no real thought placed behind it.  Nobody has ever decided not to murder another human being because of not having access to a gun.  Guns are merely one of a myriad of tools at the disposal of somebody who has made the decision to do something that most people can’t even fathom doing.  If not a gun, something else would be used to commit the act, and we surely can’t limit every human being’s access to every item that could potentially be a murder weapon, can we?  What we can do however, is lessen the likelihood that somebody takes the ultimate plunge into doing something drastic.

By finding out and understanding the actual reasons behind why somebody decides to take another person’s life, we have the fundamentals to work with in attempting to take preventative measures against others making that same decision.  By focusing on the tools used in these massacres, we aren’t taking any kind of preventative measure to stop future incidents from happening.  We would merely be ensuring that different tools be used the next time such an occurrence transpires.  The root of the problem is never isolated, and ultimately, nothing actually changes.  The root of the problem is not an inanimate object.  Unfortunately, finding the legitimate roots of problems such as these will always require a lot more thought and insight than pointing a finger and blaming a scapegoat.  Thus, the path of least resistance continues to be traveled.

By educating the public in general as to the signs of individuals who are prone to engaging in these self-destructive and harmful acts, we will be better equipped to prevent them before they ever occur.  The warning signs are always there, time after time after time.  These types of things don’t “just happen”.  Parents, friends, acquaintances, teachers, and therapists, among others see the warning signs of these events long before they occur.  Educating these people as to what to look for and how to handle the situation will do more than a reactive witch hunt ever will.  The best-case end result being that nobody loses their life and somebody in need of help actually gets that help and is able to turn their life around.  It’s always easier to point a finger and blame something that can’t defend itself rather than looking inward and realizing that we as a society are continually dropping the ball on taking the necessary preventative measures to keep history from repeating itself.

Peace.