“First, traits produce nothing of value. Me being white, my buddy Richard being black, and my friend Kari being female produces nothing and offers nothing of value to anybody. However, my buddy Kahn (gay) DOES produce something of value for society. Not because he prefers to suck dick over bang pussy, but because he’s an architect. He builds beautiful (and safe) buildings that will house people, house businesses, provide something aesthetically pleasing for the public to look at, and save some money for the owner in energy efficiency.
I produce value in authoring a suite of books that, for what meager price I charge, will save you easily 100’s of thousands of dollars in the future, not to mention decades of your life. This is regardless of me being white or liking girls with big titties.
And then there’s my buddy Atham. You in academia may be masturbating to the fact he’s Mexican, and certainly you would give him more scholarship money and job offers than his white, straight counterpart. But him simply being Mexican does not offer society anything of value. He DOES however produce value in that he is a window washer and an engineering major. He in all truth and reality produces more value in a single hour washing windows than all of the humanities and liberal arts professors do in their entire “careers.”
One of my automobiles is tan … really more of a sparkley-gold. That means about as much as a SJW’s skin color. Nothing.
Although it doesn’t ‘show’ as much dirt as my black car
Intrinsically, of course not.
However, the people responsible for the high estate in which mankind now lives are overwhelmingly white men. Had it been left to women or “people of colour,” we would never have advanced beyond subsistence farming. White males’ superior creativity and problem-solving skills made the modern world possible.
Yes, white men enjoy privileges in this world. That’s as it should be. They earned them. Most of the people who complain about that have earned nothing but the contempt of the people who made their easy lives possible—and are increasingly sick of giving gifts that aren’t appreciated.
There are two types of people. Problem-solvers, and problems to be solved. Figure out which you want to be, and soon. The problems will be solved one way or another.
“more value in a single hour washing windows than all of the humanities and liberal arts professors do in their entire careers.”
Bullshit. Humanities and liberal arts satisfy a need which can be valued and compared to other activities with a dollar sign. You might say the government, by intervening, artificially raises the value of gender studies profs but they do the same thing with engineers.
you obviously live in an alternative universe not connected with our reality. Engineers and others actually produce something of value that people will pay for with their own money. that is not so true with bird course professors and their ilk.
Anything has the value that someone will pay in an open market. People pay good money for gender studies courses. Just because you don’t doesn’t make it not so. Someone may very well value taking a gender studies course more than a particular bridge. How is it possible to be educated and not stumble accidentally trip over an economics course?
“He in all truth and reality produces more value in a single hour washing windows than all of the humanities and liberal arts professors do in their entire “careers.”
Well, he’s right about that.
Remember the movie Oh God with George Burns telling evangelists they’re not conveying his message.
Oh MLK. Oh Gandhi. The content of character is “second nature” to your “identity.” Systemic discrimination on steroids.
Luckily government is so wise and looks after our needs first. Education used to be about learning to learn. No more je regrette.
Being a monolingual American … I can only assume je regrette means self-loathing …
“He in all truth and reality produces more value in a single hour washing windows than all of the humanities and liberal arts professors do in their entire ‘careers.’ “
Well, no. An hour of window washing has an economic value and a market value. There is some minimum (market value) and some maximum (economic value) that people will voluntarily trade (usually money) for your friend’s window washing. Likewise, there are economic and market values for the career outputs of all humanities and liberal arts professors. Colleges and universities voluntarily pay the professors large sums for their output, and students voluntarily pay (to the extent of borrowing to do so) larger sums to the colleges and universities to access that professorial output. We can compare the economic and market values of an hour of Atham’s window washing with that of multiple careers of academic ejaculations, whereupon we will discover that the small number of shinier windows will be considerably less valued.
Now you and I might agree that the profs are talking a load of dingo’s kidneys, and ultimately the students might agree too. But our agreement is a long way from being all truth and reality.
Being an Engineering major has no value in and of itself (subsequent window washing might be an indicator). Beautifully designed and safely constucted buildings only have value if people want to use them; there are empty cities in China showing that if you build it they don’t always come.
One of the original puposes of (and income streams for) universities (northern European ones, at least) was for very rich people to demonstrate their status by being able to send, for years, their sons to study ostentatiously peripheral and irrelevant subject matter (arts and theology, etc). Other than to demonstrate status, learning the material had no value. And people value status very highly. A Patek Philippe is valued more than a Seiko, although both will tell the time equally well. Because status.
Another way of demonstrating status, and being able to improve (or lose) status is – traits.
Traits (specifically, genetic traits) have enormous value. Beauty, intelligence, assertiveness, nurturing, etc – these are things we are born with or without to varying degrees, and they are enormously influential on our success. As individuals we didn’t earn them (although it might be said our ancestors earned us having them) but they’ll often advantage or disadvantage us more than that we can do for ourselves.
The real problem for academia is that its current fashion for certain traits (black, lesbian working-class lard-buckets for Palestine , etc) is going to devalue its utility as a status symbol amongst those who still have the most money – rich white people. So if the loans don’t flow, the universities go.