Free College

[Metamorph]

If you live in the US, please campaign to make college free so it will stop being a breeding ground for crazy people! Thanks!

[Grendel]

I've heard it speculated that part of the reason primary schools are so crap here is because colleges have a lot of muscle, and so could hypothetically be lobbying for cruddier standards/amenities in the primary school system. That way, they'd preserve their own usefulness as a prerequisite to basic employment, since primary schools becoming competent at workforce training might threaten their hold.


And you'd probably also have to get rid of summer break, which we should. But they'll never let that happen.

[Metamorph]

Oh, if you can read between the lines, this is the kind of negative impact non-free college has on America's culture. If you pick up a German literary novel it might very well just be science fiction, but in America you just write "realist" dreck based on the MFA formula to reinforce the class system instead. I have no problem with "realist" fiction but in addition to MFA writing being dumb and awful, the way "realism" is used is to reinforce cynical views of the world in which you get raped and murdered and that's pretty much it rather than just being stories without magic or spaceships. This is exacerbated by the fact that real life often tries to include magic and spaceships and then they don't get written about.

REFLECTIONS ON HOW THE MFA PROGRAM USHERED ME INTO CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS

[Metamorph]

If you can't tell, I really want people to go to Mars instead of sniffing each others' armpits and then proceeding to mate. Of course, it won't be the same people. Where's the idealism? The upper classes in America are killing themselves and the middle classes are too. Just as I don't want to bash feminism on the misandry thread, I don't want to romance poverty, but the situation now really is the case where it's better to be poor-but-not-dirt-poor because if you look at how most wealth is accumulated, money has a negative value because people are giving up more than they gain to get it out of fear.