From LRC

• Ron Paul on Afghaniscam. Good points as always — he repeats this — but I’m still a WWII revisionist (two oceans with a strong navy, a continent-wide country with many natural resources and self-sufficient industry, and an armed citizenry were good enough defences, so trade with Hirohito, like with Red China today, and let Hitler and Stalin kill each other). Pay attention to the usual fear-mongering from the gunvernment puppet at the very end of the video.
  
  
  
  
• Be very afraid: ‘A Global Force for Good’. Try again. How about ‘Guarding the Coast and Minding Our Own Business’ of trade with all and entanglements with none? Like, at the other end of pop culture, ‘Imagine’, it’s even more evil because it’s beautifully made; this appeals even more to people’s good intentions because it’s not an anti-God screed in disguise. (See above on a strong defence: I’m not a pacifist.) LRC writer Laurence Vance (an evangelical who’s not having this) has pointed that well-meaning cultural conservatives (from Southern Baptists to rust-belt Catholics) have bought into this idea of American soldiers as Christian knights since the evil of the late-1960s upheaval. But as recently as the 1930s the fundamentalists were the peace Christians with a healthy distrust of the state including the military whilst the liberal Protestants then and now are hawks ‘for your own good’. (Catholic pro-military feeling was always a little different: the honestly grateful immigrants as super-patriots trying to show the hostile Protestants they’re good Americans.) From the sickle and the swastika, good Lord, deliver us.
  
  
  
  
• Academic dishonesty. Grade inflation, related to (feeding?) the boomer/SWPL (affluent whites and their kids) arrogance that believes all their kids are gifted (the lie of egalitarianism, or arrogance disguised as humility!).
  

  After all, it’s dishonesty when a professor assigns a grade the student did not earn.
  
  An article in the Wall Street Journal (1/30/97) reported that a “bachelor of arts degree in 1997 may not be the equal of a graduation certificate from an academic high school in 1947.”
  
  The percentage of college graduates proficient in prose literacy has declined from 40 percent to 31 percent within the past decade. Employers report that many college graduates lack the basic skills of critical thinking, writing and problem-solving and some employers find they must hire English and math teachers to teach them how to write memos and perform simple computations.

  Short term: hooray, more work for me! Much of what I do is rewrite things. Long term: scary as fewer people think this skill matters.
  

  Academic dishonesty, coupled with incompetency, particularly at the undergraduate level, doesn’t bode well for the future of our nation.

  I don’t think AKMA reads this blog but as an independent thinker on education he’d probably have a few good things to say on this.

Labels: history, libertarianism, peace, politics