@dyslexia,
Quote:the point is not what dys said or didn't say, the point is that dys said something so it must b e wrong, I assume, spendi, you're familiar with that syndrome.
Very much so. Not that I mind. It discredits those who indulge in the method.
I think the GI Bill was well intentioned. Large numbers of men in that age range which is so important had been de-socialised to a certain extent. Re-integrating them into the American way of life was never goung to be easy. Society, in their absence, had been getting along fine. They were a potentially disruptive force. They had picked up some bad habits on their travels. Necessarily so I might add.
And it is a long time ago. But was there a need to continue with the process once the bulk of them had been re-oriented. The average Joe who,later, had not been away at war was a substitute to enable the business of education to continue to expand even if he had to become a Systems Analysis Co-ordinator or a Logistics Facilitation Supervisor. It blows the head right off the shoulders of the average Joe. Take Colonel Hall for example. And it is well known that the average Joe, one of whom is born every minute, cannot resist flattery of the ego, and nor can his parents because their genetic material is being flattered also. And there were millions of them and, with feminism coming in, a growing and equally average rabble of average daughters of the upthrusting and self-improving average parenthood from whose loins they had sprung.
With the institutions of higher education having succeeded, by devices and strategems which I will refrain from describing, Veblen having already covered the main points, in establishing the principle that a state's universities and colleges were flagships of their excellence, the stage was set for the application of business principles on rather a grand scale.
Anyone who raised any questions was easily labelled a luddite or worse and once media had found jobs for products of the first phase who were now co-ordinatining the analysis of all the new systems they had invented in order for there to be something to co-ordinate, fossil collections for example, some genuine, and supervising the logistical facilitations which the systems analysts had co-ordinated, no small task, as well as writing the articles wande likes to quote, all of which are the utterest drivel simplified to absurdity, such discontents and misfits were easily relegated to the sidelines, marginalised and looked down upon. They were, in short, easily ignored. Systems logistics were put in place to facilitate ignoring them in the simplest ways that can be thought of. Obviously.
It is of course self-correcting because economics is a science and as such not amenable to the hopes and aspirations of the millions of politically powerful beta minuses who have had their heads blown off their shoulders by skilled weavers of the winds.
Now- while there has been some measure of agreement to the first thesis I put forward, without acknowledgement of course, only a fool would expect the product to allow light to be deflected from his/her person, it is evident that my second idea has been ignored. Consciously or unconsciously I don't know. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between these entities.
It was, if I may be allowed to remind you all, that your picture of the US which you export at great profit to the world cannot but drive the poor and oppressed to seek the salvation, as they must see it, of your shores. I mean to say--who wants to go to Russia?
There is an old story, it may even be a myth, that the first people to land on Iceland called it by that name in order to discourage others to follow them to this empty island with hot springs and unlimited fish they had happened upon.
What must it do to a young man living in squalor beneath the borderline to see a movie of a handsome, dark-skinned chap, much like himself after a scrub down, cleaning the swimming pool in a Californian ponderosa whilst two ladies on sun loungers sip drinks and snigger about his muscles. Or of one of his nature who made the trip years ago and is shown solving all the nasty crimes in a big city and having true-born Americans under his command.
One might quote many examples of the American way of life being displayed to the marginalised to whom a chicken leg is a once a year treat. There are people who come in my pub who wear shirts showing American football and baseball messages. Your message is so strong that it can overthrow the obvious superiority of our football and cricket to your national sports.
In fact, those sports are themselves designed so any plonker can look good in the exercise of them.
But the better you look, justified or not, it will motivate people with few advantages in life to have a taste of it. With some force.
And a Darwinian evolutionist can do nothing other than approve of it. Just as he can do no other than approve of resistance to it by those in possession even when they are the cause of it.
One doesn't argue with a boulder rolling down a mountainside.
You should bring the poor up to your standards so they have no wish to leave home or present yourselves to the world as something of a malodorous dump. Like Bill Burroughs did.
