17 thoughts on “Dennis Prager Is Right

  1. In protest of this stupidity, I am undergoing self-immolation this morning. But instead of gasoline, I’ll use water. And instead of fire, I’ll use air. I’ll call it a “shower”.

  2. I saw where the Yale campus Republicans (and try to wrap your mind around what that might look like) impishly organized a barbecue next to the “hunger strike”.

  3. $30K/year minimum+ health bennies?! Damn, must be nice to a Ph.D. student there. I had to work as a TA/RA for far less in inflation dollars when I did that.

    Then again, you’d have to pay me a lot more than $30K/yr to study doctoral level queer feminist theory, so maybe that’s why they have to pay so well.

  4. If these are grad students in the humanities, there are grim times ahead for them.
    They want tenured positions. I’ve heard that there about 300 humanities PhD’s for every tenure track job opening. Most of them are doomed to a life of misery as adjuncts, teaching undergrads the basics for $1500/course, no benefits.
    If they had gotten a teaching credential, they could be teaching in the public schools for more money, get benefits + retirement.
    So, yeah, they are stupid 🙂
    In their defense, they were almost certainly encouraged to “go on to grad school” by tenured professors. Tenured profs are judged, in part, by many PhD’s they produce.
    If they choose the life of a public school teacher, their chance of a career as an academic researcher evaporates.
    If you want some entertainment, go the chronicle of higher ed website: http://www.chronicle.com/
    Be sure to check out the comments. There are people who seriously believe that their career choice requires that tax payers must provide them a sinecure, and that their proper task when in that secure position is to criticize and provide moral instruction to the taxpayers.

  5. they were almost certainly encouraged to “go on to grad school” by tenured professors.

    Nope. By councilors paid by the school, whose intention is NEVER to graduate anyone and keep them on campus as long as there is a penny to be sucked out of the “kid’s” parent’s pocket.

  6. Liberal arts education has to be completely and massively overhauled. It’s overpriced and they do too many stupid things of all stripes.

  7. The word “liberal arts,” in the old days, meant that it was not an academic path for people that needed to work for a living. It was an education meant for the children of the aristocracy, who had the means to live independently, e.g., liberally.
    In the 17th century, John Donne complained that Oxford students of means looked down on students who intended to go on to a law degree. It meant that these students were of a lower social class who expected to work for a living.
    Why we expect liberal arts students to have a job (other than teaching) I do not understand.
    It might be good training for an undertaker. Do we have a shortage of those?

  8. It might be good training for an undertaker. Do we have a shortage of those?

    Dude! You expect liberal elites to take a job where they might break a nail? Really?

  9. I find this chart of IQ by profession to be illuminating:
    http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
    There aren’t any real surprises, though the wide spread of IQ’s in some professions tells you something about that profession. There are professions where greater IQ isn’t as important as it is in others.
    When you correlate profession and income, you find that there is a strong relationship between higher wages and higher IQ. If you then look at the bell curve showing the distribution of IQ within a population, it becomes clear that in any society, the higher IQ people will command more resources than the poor, on a per capita basis.
    So how do you create and sustain a republic when this is the case? How do you stop the poor and stupid from seizing the property of the rich, or the rich from denying the poor and stupid political rights?

  10. Liberal arts isn’t job training. It’s critical thinking and learning how to get information. I don’t think people should be forced to take it if they just want to get productive skills. This would drive the price of it down like crazy, too.

  11. Mammuthus Primigenius is the only guy I have ever seen point out what I am worried about. Stupid people that can’t think, that don’t understand the world, can’t articulate sh**, seizing the productive’s assets and income. The Democrats favorite constituency in other words.

    The stupid conversations I have on twitter about single payer and the ACA are mind boggling.

  12. I can’t recommend enough the Tom Woods show. Harvard, and PhD in History from NYU. He’s a Rothbard style libertarian, but even if you don’t agree with him on everything he’s totally worth listening to. He really will wake you up to the stupidity that is everywhere these days. People are just uneducated and they can’t think. He has another one called ContraKrugman too.

  13. How do you stop the poor and stupid from seizing the property of the rich, or the rich from denying the poor and stupid political rights?

    As I see it, the stupid are seizing property of the rich and denying them political rights by using the poor. How do you stop THAT?

  14. I’m going to disagree slightly with MP regarding the liberal arts. While it was certainly always something for the upper classes, or those sponsored by the same (e.g. Isaac Newton), it was not just training for “English gentlemen” (to draw a picture), but was simultaneously training for excellence in any endeavour. Some wasted it, some didn’t, but I’d love to see a return to the real liberal arts. It’s grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, not “a smattering of this and a touch of that and we hope you come out sort of educated.” (which is the modern definition, sad to say)

    The modern definition, of course, explains why so many liberal arts grads are as worthless as t**s on a bull.

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