"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Meritocracy Is A Joke, Kavanaugh Is The Punchline
It was the first thing that set the guy who daily trolls me off, sometime in about 2009, in response to Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's "merit" based "Race To The Top" bullshit, I committed the sin of saying that Democrats should demand that there be no more prep-Ivy(equivalent) appointments as Sec. of Education who have never set foot in a public school as a student and who have never sent their children to a public school as a student. Simps went ballistic and said that I wanted them to appoint "graduates of community colleges" to those positions. I suppose when I answered that I knew graduates of community colleges who would probably do better than Barack and Arne because they weren't elitist snobs and jocks who knew real people AND WHO UNDERSTOOD THAT MOST PEOPLE WILL NEVER GET TO "THE TOP" BUT THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WERE THERE TO SERVE THEM, it pissed off Simps even more. The Baby Blue type is a true believer in educational elitism. I sinned against that dumb-fuck, play-lefty item of piety.
I liked most everything I heard in this extended exchange between Majority Report's Michael Brooks and Meagan Day, considering my skepticism of the typical Jacobin magazine writer and the magazine, itself, that's not what I expected when I clicked on it.
Update: Listening a second time, Meagan Day's point that the mythology that the prep-Ivy class is superior is not limited to the members of that class, it's also the pious belief of people lower down in the class structure. It's my experience of the college-educated who came from the blue collar, lower professional level class that they are especially prone to fall for that crap. The extent to which American education has become a means of economic advancement might have something to do with that, it being just barely possible that their great-grandchildren might marry into the upper class or might get into an Ivy League school.
I wonder if I went up to Lewis Black cold and said, Hey you know Steve Simels if he'd say, "who"?
You are such a sucker for an Ivy League boy, Simps. It really is funny how many of the play-lefties are really just the same kind of status worshiping dopes that are afraid to admit what Day and Brooks point out, that they're no more special than anywhere else. Yale produced George W. Bush and Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas. Maybe it's best product is comedians not Supreme Court members, Presidents and the people they appoint.
You are such such a nervous little upholder of convention who gets angry when someone upsets it.
Oh fuck off. I personally know way too many genuinely great people who went to Yale, starting with Lewis Black.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if I went up to Lewis Black cold and said, Hey you know Steve Simels if he'd say, "who"?
DeleteYou are such a sucker for an Ivy League boy, Simps. It really is funny how many of the play-lefties are really just the same kind of status worshiping dopes that are afraid to admit what Day and Brooks point out, that they're no more special than anywhere else. Yale produced George W. Bush and Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas. Maybe it's best product is comedians not Supreme Court members, Presidents and the people they appoint.
You are such such a nervous little upholder of convention who gets angry when someone upsets it.