What’s Wrong with the World

Call me crazy, but I would think a world in which education is more attainable would correlate to a world that is more suitable for people suffering from deafness or blindness. Who knows, maybe if education is more available that this would lead to someone coming up with a new treatment or device that cures or helps people suffering from these conditions?

I suppose this also means that basketball goals will be lowered to 3-5 feet so wheelchair users can dunk too...er...wait, that just discriminates against those who cannot use their arms...Anyway, seems to me if this same reasoning were applied across the board athletics would have to go to.

Heh, don't forget the deaf people who adamantly reject hearing solutions (cochlear implants) for their deaf children because said children would then leave the "deaf community", who insist that deafness is NOT A DISABILITY, it is just another way of being able. Being able to not-hear, I suppose. Maybe UC Berkeley should trot these out and claim that because deafness is not a disability, their program doesn't discriminate against the hearing disabled.

It is also interesting to see the libs go after an institution that is a temple of liberalism.

It's always fun finding the total incoherence of the liberals. Until it makes you weep for the sheer revolting, degraded stupidity of it all.

Maybe UC Berkeley should trot these out and claim that because deafness is not a disability, their program doesn't discriminate against the hearing disabled.

As a matter of fact I believe it was two activists from Gallaudet, which is a bastion of precisely that "not a disability" attitude, who made the complaints. So it's not a disability, but it falls under the ADA anyway, and better for nobody outside of UC Berkeley to be able to use the content than for it not to be made totally "deaf-friendly."

Leftists are the ultimate dogs in the manger.

I was reading Corey Robin's blog today and this passage seems to fit the above sentiments:

"Some time around the election of George W. Bush, Irving Kristol—not Bill Kristol, but Bill’s father, the real brains of the operation—told me:

American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It’s so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left. If you read Marx, you’d learn what a political imagination could do.

That (and the end of the Cold War), he said, is “one of the reasons I really not am not writing much these days. I don’t know the answers.”

This was not the voice of a tired, old man, though he was tired and old and a man. This was the voice of a movement that had lost its way, its raison d’être."

The scandal here is the decades old pullback from properly funding public universities. During the Great Depression the fees at the UC system were around $50 and when I started they were $70. Both sums equate to well under $1000 in today's dollars. But I guess a nation that once built a trans-continental railroad and an interstate highway system, came out of the Depression with Social Security, fought and won two world wars and the Cold War as well as many other "nice things" can't figure this one out.

Oh for goodness sakes. Why would anyone credit anything Irving Kristol the neoconservative said about conservatism proper? Here is what he himself said:

WHAT EXACTLY IS NEOCONSERVATISM? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is "neoconservative," and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as "neocons" are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any "there" there?

Even I, frequently referred to as the "godfather" of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a "movement," as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a "persuasion," one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.

Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.

Neoconservatism is not, and never has been, an aspect of conservatism properly understood. It was formed by liberals, and remains a liberal pursuit. Kristol never did know what conservatism really was about, though he grasped enough to aim for undermining it "from within" by cooperating fools.

It is particularly silly hearing Kristol critique "American conservatism" for its being focused so much on business culture that was specifically the neocon main emphasis all along.

In reality, the best conservatives have always had and expressed a great deal of political imagination. What they have not expressed is a great deal of political novelty, and that's why superficial politicos can't "sell it to the masses" who hunger for something different. Of course, it is rather odd to critique conservatism for not putting forth novelty, which is why Kristol has to fall back on something as trite as lack of imagination. Pot, meet the kettle.

This is too good to pass up without a comment:

1) al writes "The scandal here is the decades old pullback from properly funding public universities. During the Great Depression the fees at the UC system were around $50 and when I started they were $70. Both sums equate to well under $1000 in today's dollars."

2) Lydia's post begins:

Occasionally liberals (or other people who are clueless about economics) will say that we should just "make such-and-such free." They will even imply that, if it weren't for the "profit motive" (which is seen as per se a bad thing, a manifestation of greed), all sorts of things could just "be free."

Patiently, the free market advocate will attempt to explain that nothing is free. If you "make" some particular medication "free," that just means that the cost of researching it, developing it, manufacturing it, prescribing it properly, shipping it, etc., are spread around somewhere else--to people paying higher insurance premiums, for example.

3) See the irony? While public university wasn't exactly "free" it was indeed cheap -- because it was heavily subsidized. What happened? Lots and lots of high school graduates who never went to university started going -- and guess what? Like Lydia patiently explains (we free market types always patiently explain) someone has to pay for the cost of educating all those students (and the cost of the bloated and crazy administration running the insane asylums.) Costs go up and up and while governments can try to cover some of these costs (via higher taxes) obviously, most of the cost is going to fall onto the students who are actually benefiting from the education (or at least used to benefit back when they learned real subject matter.)

To the liberal/leftist the government is never doing enough -- they are always more taxes to raise, more government spending, more welfare programs and education and public works. More, more, more but never a worry about cost and who will be around to pay for all of it.

So I put up a post about how UC made a whole boatload of its course content available to everybody in the whole world for free and how stupid government ninnies shut it down for not being viewable by the blind and hearable by the deaf, and Al comes along and complains about...lack of government funding for university education??? Presumably because he doesn't even have the grace to say, "Yeah, that's pretty dumb. As a liberal I'd sure like that content to continue to be available. It doesn't actually *need* to have all those extra bells and whistles. It was a good thing for them to make it available as it was. There's something wrong with a law that shuts that down. That's something we can all agree on."

Nope.

Moreover, flawed as the ADA is, I really doubt that it was the intent of Congress that, if an institution makes its material universally available for free *beyond* its own enrolled clients/students, it must help every disabled person in the whole world to access that material. So the Justice Department's actions are dubious as applications of the relevant law.

When you have no god but Caesar...

There's an article on the problems of free college at Crisis today and someone on cue gave us the "it works great in Europe!" objection that ignores the fact that European colleges are no frills and American are a sultan's paradise with a corresponding price.

The one thing I wasn't sure of was how strict European schools are academically. My understanding is that once a student reaches the point that they can't handle the work, they're out compared to the heavy tutoring available in an American university. Is that the case?

Scott, I would say you're correct. Here in Europe a student is regarded as an adult and it is left to the individual to achieve the required standard or failure will be the inevitable outcome. However, here in Ireland I see a trend developing to 'milk' foreign students with bloating of the curricula with unnecessary and irrelevant subject matter. For example, a medical student tells me he has to study 'mindfulness' and yoga(!). Of course, it is also probably necessary in order to provide employment for graduates who could not make a living in the real world.

During the Great Depression the fees at the UC system were around $50 and when I started they were $70. Both sums equate to well under $1000 in today's dollars.

I suspect that the UC system was more generous than most, even for that time. But regardless, look at it not from the theoretical "cost" of attending - the THEORETICAL tuition, fees, etc, which few students pay fully - and look at it from the standpoint of how many ACTUALLY can attend:

IN 1940 approximately 6% of the population completed a 4-year degree. In 1991 it was about 25%.

Figure 4 http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf

And according to current statistics, about 32% have a 4-year degree. Our society is providing college to a higher proportion than at any time in the past.

In 1930, the TUITION of attending a _public_ university may have been $0 or some nominal fee like $30. But the costs of room and board and books and incidentals made it such that less than 20% of the population could attend. And that picture of costs was different for private colleges and universities, but not by all that much: University of Pennsylvania says that in 1930 their tuition was $400, which was pretty substantial for the time. But the REST of the costs they reckon were about $800, which put attending out of the reach of vast majority anyway. So picking up the tuition and making it free was only a 1/3 subsidy for the actual costs. (For comparison, the Social Security wage base a few years later in 1937 was $3,000, and in 2017 it is 127,200, a 42-fold increase. That would be equal to a comparable total cost of private college at $51k today - which is in fact just a little more than a typical price of private college now of $48k.

http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmpl.jhtml?articleId=10064

(The price tag for my kids in private college is a LOT less than this amount. But then they attend a "best value" college).

Of course, there are a lot more subsidies available AFTER the stated price tag than there were in 1930, which is why 32% of the population have 4-year degrees. In other words, society has re-arranged the method of supplying the subsidies to pay for people to go to college, but still provides as subsidy much of the cost of going to college. For most, the subsidized costs exceed 1/3 of the real costs, and for those going to private colleges the real subsidies generally exceed 1/2. And, as we all know, if you subsidize something you get more of it. That's why we have more college students than we had in the past.

Since the title of the post was "This is why we can't have nice things" I went with that. We can't have nice things because we now lack the imagination and will to bring them into being. That is almost entirely due to the conservative/neo-liberal ascendancy of the past few decades. While I do agree that the law shouldn't apply to something offered gratis to non-UC students and the law does seem to offer hardship exemptions to institutions, we still need to know how much it would cost to bring all the courses into compliance (perhaps UC could cover it by firing John Yoo - law profs do well).

"As a liberal I'd sure like that content to continue to be available. "

Of course I would and as a liberal I would understand that perhaps the law needs to be fixed or, since the benefits accrue to folks across the nation and UCB already has the institutional means to fix the matter, all that is necessary is a little funding.
Which gets us to this: We can't fix this because conservatives refuse to govern and have no concept of the public good.

"Occasionally liberals (or other people who are clueless about economics) will say that we should just "make such-and-such free." They will even imply that, if it weren't for the "profit motive" (which is seen as per se a bad thing, a manifestation of greed), all sorts of things could just 'be free.'"

What's clueless is the insistence on applying kitchen table economics to the macro economy of a nation able to borrow in its own currency at rates that assure a multiplier greater then one. Since greed is wired into we plains apes assigning it to "bad things" would be sort of pointless. We could, of course, construct a polity and economy that channeled our profit motive into providing all sorts of good things.

It's no accident that transitioning from "paying it forward" to loans for public higher education has led to frills and administrative bloat. All it would take to change things is the political will to do it.

Tony, the G.I. Bill after WWII was one of the best investments (as well as a good thing) we have done as a nation. When one could have a good life by just being able to do sums and sign ones name, that's what most people did but that was then.

al, I did not propose or argue that the GI bill was a bad thing. My point was that it is NOT TRUE that we are providing less college education now than before. As a whole society, we are providing more. Your comment about education implied that we are failing to provide what we once did, and it ain't so. MORE people get college degrees than before, and our system of financing higher education entails at least as high a percentage of those costs come out of the social network as it did in 1930 or 1950, as compared to the portion that comes out of individual's pockets.

It's no accident that transitioning from "paying it forward" to loans for public higher education has led to frills and administrative bloat. All it would take to change things is the political will to do it.

One of the demonstrable and unfortunate side-effects of the GI bill and vast new social expenditures on universities is the proliferation of silly (not to mention pernicious) courses. And the ever more layers of "administration" rather than on actual teachers, texts, and lab equipment. These cannot be attributed specifically to loans as opposed to Pell Grants and all the other direct and indirect social-subsidies of colleges. Even granting the hypothesis that the GI bill was a great benefit to the nation, it would be so only by dint of providing benefits over and above the direct costs AND the indirect detrimental effects like (a) encouraging bloated administration, (b) bloatedly encouraging the development of insane courses, specialties and departments, and (c) encouraging people to go to college who would have been BETTER OFF doing something else than getting some C's and more D's and eventually ending up as a philosophically warped plumber instead of being a perfectly wholesome plumber.

Tony, I'm in agreement in general with the fact that usually the government doesn't do things well. However, as the wife of a veteran who used the GI Bill and a college teacher for 25+ years (half of those in secular universities), I do have to say that every single vet who has taken my classes knew why he was in college, had a specific goal in mind, did his absolute best in all his work, and is now living productively in our society. The difference as I see it is that once you've been in the military you are a)older and b) far more likely to know what you want and how to get it. You'll be far less likely than the just-graduated-from-high-school kid who has no idea what he wants to waste your time in college if it won't get you something specific. Also, we do little enough for those who risk everything so that we can live in relative peace, and helping those who want a higher education -- and many could not have reasonably saved for it during their time in the military -- is one of the few things I'm not especially uncomfortable with our doing. I guess I would say the problems with the GI Bill pale in comparison to so much else. I know this is a tangent from your real point, but just came from class with one of these young men and wanted to speak from what I've seen.

" My point was that it is NOT TRUE that we are providing less college education now than before."

Which I never asserted. I referenced funding which has been shifted as part of the neo-liberal scheme to break the inter-generational compact that is necessary for social democracy to work and revert society back to luck and winning the genetic lottery. (I refer those who scoff and snort about hard work to the links below.)

"Tony, I'm in agreement in general with the fact that usually the government doesn't do things well."

While Beth's comments on the G. I. Bill are apt, the statement above reflects an appalling ignorance of our history both recent and past. Most of the good things we have are the result, in whole or in part, of some forgotten or unknown government program ("keep the government out of my Medicare!") . Of course if we keep electing folks who believe such nonsense that statement will become self-fulfilling. Think about it - if you had a business there is no way you would hire a manager whose core philosophy was that your business was unworkable and in fact its very existence violated some off the wall metaphysical notion yet that is our Congressional majority - and most of you voted for them,.

A comment on the bloated administration thing. Private businesses do the same thing. While going to school I has a lowly job at a data center for a large bank. Once I figured, based on the organization chart, that I, at the bottom, was about five or six positions from the president. A few years later that number wouldn't get one out of the building. Absent oversight bloat is inevitable everywhere.

While you may have a point with the proliferation of dubious course matter and frills that has nothing to do with the G.I. Bill and everything to do with the current business model and lack of oversight again elect and appoint neo-liberal hacks and that is what you get.

These may be of interest:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-social-welfare-benefits-help-the-economy/

http://glineq.blogspot.com/2016/10/will-social-democracy-return-review-of.html

Last night TCM ran "Sunrise at Campobello." Roosevelt to Trump in one lifetime - oh well.

Beth's point about GI's using college far more appropriately than the typical 18-year old is fine. I had forgotten that reality. Nevertheless, the Democratic social plan of paying for "college for everyone" falls right in line with a number of fallacies and deformities of the modern university system in this country, and though the GI bill was not a primary cause of these defects, it is at least a secondary-order participant in the problem.

Before the GI bill, and to some degree perhaps even before Al's lauded FDR's programs, the universities took a huge hit from the modernists. They eviscerated the notion that teaching was for Truth, and even that Truth could be learned, and pushed onto the system the only other plausible pursuit that could justify state spending: job training. As a result, the principles and order of knowledge, of the studies, and of the life needed to pursue Truth well got all shunted into the dustpan of pre-modern universities. These deformities set the stage for the eventuality of all the insane courses and "Studies" and departments. But what made these weird courses actually come out of the woodwork was the vast infusion of new money into the system with the government's student grants and loans (of which the GI bill paved the way for the ones of the 60's and 70's). The people running the universities at the time were the modernists who had already given up on the prospect of a coherent approach to truth, and had no longer any will to resist the silly professors with their insane course ideas. Or any principled reason (in their befuddled minds) to do so. Al's "lack of oversight" was JUST WHAT YOU GET from modernist liberalism and vast new money flooding the system. "Oversight" ceased to have any meaning in a system that formally rejected truth, knowledge, principles, and any fundamental orientation toward the true and the good.

It wouldn't have mattered much (if at all) at that point if the government had offered the money to the universities on the OLD plan, of paying directly to the universities and thus encouraged them to pull in more students. The universities would still have allowed that money to be spent on footless students there for a long party, and on feckless professors whose main goal in life was to create a body of work "on the importance of the letter 'p'. " Including poems. Or "poems", rather. Which starts, by the way, with 'p'. Because the underlying principles to prevent this kind of nonsense were gone - ousted by people like Dewey, Charles Eliot, and so on who advocated against any order and principles that organized study internally, institutions had no basis to say 'nay' to the wild and wooly innovators. This was the fruit of educational liberalism, which always seems ready to get in bed with political liberalism. I wonder why.