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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Australia's conservative government announced plans Friday to double university fees for humanities students, in a bid to push people into more useful, "job-relevant" courses like maths and science.
Under the proposal—which critics panned as an "ideological assault"—the cost of degrees like history or cultural studies will rise up to 113 percent to around US$29,000, while other courses such as nursing and information technology will become cheaper.
Education Minister Dan Tehan—an arts graduate with two advanced degrees in international relations—said the government wanted to corral young people towards "jobs of the future" to boost the country's economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
"If you are wanting to do philosophy, which will be great for your critical thinking, also think about doing IT," Tehan said.
The plan would help pay for an additional 39,000 university places by 2023 and for cost cuts for courses like science, agriculture, maths and languages.
[...] "I'm an arts graduate and so is the minister for education so I'm not sure you can draw the conclusion that we're completely unemployable," said opposition lawmaker Tanya Plibersek.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @08:19PM (11 children)
Marx also thought he had solutions. He just had the good sense to die before anybody tried them.
I'm not just joking. In chess many consider Bobby Fischer to be one of if not the single strongest player to have ever lived. And indeed he was world champion. And he defended his title exactly 0 times, and played just about as many games as world champion. After winning the title, he almost immediately disappeared. Consequently his legacy was cemented as who he was at the absolute peak of his powers when people had not yet managed to adapt to him. In the early years of online chess there was a guy using an computer program, much stronger than any human in fast time controls, to beat players while playing absurdly in the opening. And he pretended to be Fischer in a somewhat well played role.
So broken was people's perception of Fischer, that our little cheater managed to convince countless players, including a former world champion challenger, that he was indeed Fischer. That the man who had disappeared, with no meaningful practice in decades, was just inconceivably better than any other human alive. The current world champion is Magnus Carlsen. And indeed his rise to the top was perhaps even more magical than Fischer's in many ways. But he's now played thousands of games as world champion - and players have adapted to his style and strengths. He remains dominant, but he's now very much a human - instead of a mythical figure.
Had Marx been a man of political influence, I do believe there's a very real chance that Marxism would have been a short lived disaster instead of the rather prolonged one further on by a never-ending demonstration of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
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Ultimately I think critique, even critical theory, can be productive. But only when engaged in intelligently, impartially, and with due consideration to alternatives. As in reality there are many problems for which there is no good solution, and so the best solution is simply the least awful solution. Many who engage in critique now a days seem to conveniently forget this, or perhaps they're simply stupid. In either case they view the dismantling of one target as sufficient evidence that an alternative must be superior, without even consideration of said alternative. Equivalently the alternative is considered in idealized instead of realistic terms. The most traditional and obvious example is capitalism vs socialism. Proving capitalism is awful does not mean socialism is better. And comparing real capitalism to idealized socialism, without consideration of the human condition, is no better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @09:22PM (1 child)
Marxism is a moral crusade, not a system for implementing anything.
It is close to a religion in that it shall be analyzed only within its own framework. Never mind the experimental evidence that it is impossible to actually implement because you stay stuck at the "socialism" stage, never reaching Communist nirvana. Ruin and mass murder of a society is the inevitable result.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @10:13PM
Do you ever get tired of spewing the same nonsense?
ahahhaah who am i kidding
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 23 2020, @12:37AM
Well, yes, he thought he had solutions. And people tried them, and they sucked hideously, because he didn't consider human nature. Now the concept of Dunbar's Number ("the monkeysphere") wasn't around then, but I can't believe it would be THAT difficult to stop and ask himself "Wait a moment, how exactly do we implement this so that it scales?"
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @08:02AM (7 children)
How, Preying Mantis tell, do you know this? How could you possibly know this? And more to the point, how could you possibly tell that you are wrong? Your ignorance does not reality make. Mediocre!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:51AM (6 children)
People hold different and frequently mutually exclusive values. An action one supports is frequently vehemently opposed by the other. You could argue well then you do nothing, yet then that will also piss off another side who will argue that doing nothing is, in and of itself, an action that they also hate. And in most cases this is more the norm than the exception. So you get to pick between tyranny - advancing the interests of the minority, or oppression - advancing the interests of the majority.
You might argue for outcomes and that is reasonable, but the problem is that what we perceive to happen through some series of actions is rarely what actually happens. This is why Machiavellianism is so absurd a concept. And indeed even once a desired end is reached it's often far from what one expected. Nuclear weapons ended the eternal wars of humanity, and that is something that seemingly is bordering on utopia. Yet developed nations have replaced wars between themselves with wars within themselves. And these wars seem likely to be equivalently perpetual.
Indeed I suspect one thing we may have ultimately missed out on in the formula of humanity is that people seem to *need* a cause. Indeed I suspect a realistic inspection of war of times past may find that ultimately they were more about ideology than material. The never-ending religious wars, missionaries, and so on would have been clear evidence of such. And so too today we seek causes. Lacking external enemies we create internal ones and turn on one another, all righteously ensured that our cause is just, and that of the enemy tainted. It's the exact same shit, except perhaps even more destructive in the longrun because "unity" is itself becoming more and more fractious.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @02:29AM (5 children)
So what? Why should we desire such "wars" to end? I for one find that there are important parameters missing from your discussion of wars - such as body count. A war that kills a few people every few years is vastly preferable to a war that kills tens of millions of people every year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @07:06PM (4 children)
What makes you think these are mutually exclusive ideas? As the divides grow sharper, we trend towards climax. If Trump had chosen to deploy the military to quell the rioting, it's very possible that we'd be in the middle of Civil War 2 today.
And wars within are destroying people's minds. They're seeing enemies where none exist and gradually growing literally insane with quantifiably skyrocketing rates of mental illness alongside general emotion and psychological instability.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:06PM (3 children)
The parameter fixes one important part, creating exclusion in that way.
Indefinite "war" doesn't imply divides grow sharper. Something else is going on.
{Citation needed}
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @06:18AM (2 children)
Come on, now you're just being both lazy and uninformed. This [psychiatryonline.org] study references the state of mental health in the US and references several other papers as well. It is mentioned in passing since this is now, I thought, common knowledge. You can also get data from the National Institute of Mental Health. [nih.gov] I think they probably made a conscious decision to avoid offering graphs (because the trend looks *bad*), but you can remedy this in two ways. First, the sites they reference for their data do often offer trend charts. Second, you can be lazy and just use something like the Internet Archive. [archive.org] That link is their statistics page from about a decade ago.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 26 2020, @11:01PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 27 2020, @03:02AM
My take is that your "skyrocketing" will vanish once we take into account the fact that many cases are being recognized now which would be roundly ignored in earlier decades - observation bias. If you look for more mental illness, you will find more mental illness. It doesn't mean that there's an actual increase.