Category: Uncategorized

Rod Dreher joins the Sports Guy and me in questioning the value of a university diploma:

Yesterday I was having lunch with a friend, who reflected on the fact that his plumber makes more money than he does, and has more job security, even though he holds two master’s degrees. It made me wonder: when is this higher education bubble going to pop? That is, when are enough people going to realize that investing in a college education is, for more and more people, a foolish proposition, because it’s going to get you deep in a ditch of debt that you cannot easily climb out of.

By the way, one of his commenters raised an interesting point about how the income studies favoring college graduates are between 25 and 30 years old. Considering the explosion of college attendees and the various academic nonsense that has occurred since then, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the effects of this expansion of supply and reduction of provided value have not yet been reflected in the currently available data.

The OC on Art:

The conceit that seems to be taught in fine arts departments all over America is that if you have little or no audience, it just means you’re too far ahead of the curve. “After all,” they routinely say in music, “Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was booed at its premiere.” But no one ever seems willing to consider the other alternative.

Has our society in fact produced an unprecedented number of Stravinskys, or just a lot of self-indulgent jerk-offs? I know which way I’m betting.

Having hired a number of people who have been through Art School, I find the entire scam to be hilarious. Throw out the carrot of lucrative grants that are slightly more likely than winning lottery tickets, get unbearably pretentious morons to pay for something that none of the grand masters ever required, and leave them totally unemployable upon graduation. As an award-winning cruelty artist, I can only applaud this ruthless destruction of the spirit of some of the planet’s most annoying people.

Most art school artists I’ve met are frauds. I can’t tell you how many artists wanting to go into game art would show you a portfolio that didn’t have a single halfway-competent drawing in it, or anything that looked competent in any medium, except for the requisite 3D models built by someone else that they’d incompetently rendered with unsuitable textures. I found it particularly amusing when I could identify the model they’d downloaded from one of the public catalogs.

Art school is, like the lottery, little more than a tax on being stupid.

I can’t imagine what these paranoid lunatics would make of The World in Shadow:

When Steven Barber turned in a short story this semester for his creative-writing class at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, his instructor was alarmed. The 23-year-old student had produced an imagined account of someone on the edge of a violent breakdown, touching on suicide and murder.

“It had to be acted on immediately,” says Christopher Scalia, the instructor. He alerted administrators, who reacted swiftly, searching Mr. Barber’s dorm room and car. Upon discovering three guns, they had him committed to a psychiatric institution for a weekend. Then they expelled him.

On the plus side, it’s clear that Mr. Barber has at least somewhat of a gift for writing convincing characters. And even better, it demonstrates that the educational system will never be able to wrap its head around electronic game design. “Pressing 2 brings up the chainsaw….”

Nate has an inquiring mind:

You are hearby ordered to share yours as well. Lets see a link. I wanna know… year… band… album… Lets see a youtube vid of a song off the first album you ever bought with your own money.

I don’t remember the year, but the first album I ever bought was AC/DC’s Back in Black. I still like it, despite my subsequent departures into New Wave, gangster rap, and eventually techno-industrial music. (The rap was a track thing, let’s just say that there weren’t a lot of sprinter/jumper/hurdler types particularly into Alphaville, Depeche Mode and Japan… although I have to confess that It Takes a Nation of Millions is in the CD changer at the moment.)

But let’s face it, the actual first isn’t really the point. So, more to the point, I would have to say that the most embarrassing album I ever bought has to be Face to Face. (The Nena album auf Deutsch was the other serious candidate, but I was studying German pretty heavily at the time and there were actually two or three halfway-decent songs on it that tends to somewhat mitigate that otherwise absurd purchase.) Forget today, I was wondering what in the world I had been thinking by the time the second song finished playing! Completely on the other end of the spectrum, I am still enraptured by this extraordinary CD by one of the world’s finest lyricists.

A book review by South Texian:

In The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, Vox Day examines and considers the respective claims of the New Atheists, and responds to them with sharp, logical criticism – effectively enough to show that the arguments of the New Atheists are neither scientific nor logical, but instead are based upon an irrational and ignorant view of science, religion, history, and human nature. Day points out that the New Atheists, instead of relying upon scientific studies, logical analyses, or independently verifiable facts, try to prove their case for the non-existence of the divine and/or the alleged anti-intellectual and anti-civilizational nature of religious faith by way of hyperbolic emotional pleas and circular reasoning….

Unsurprisingly given my own background, it was on the subject of history that I found Day’s critiques of the New Atheists – and of anti-Christian arguments in general – to be most convincing. Not only does Harris in particular get it wrong when it comes to understanding the relationship between religious beliefs (or the lack thereof) and warfare, but atheists in general often distort such events as the Crusades, the Inquisition, Adolf Hitler’s personal faith, and the Aztec practice of human sacrifice in their zeal to demonize all religious believers as troglodytic and potentially homicidal maniacs.

The Sports Guy reaches a conclusion that is being heard more and more of late:

All I can say about college is that anybody who thinks it’s money well-spent is insane. If you have a kid who’s a senior and you think it’s a great idea to be dropping 50k a year and it’s going to be this valuable thing for them, lower your expectations. Your kids are going to go to college, they’re going to look for every possible way to cut corners, they’re going to be out having a good time and you’re not going to get your money’s worth…. It really doesn’t matter where you go, it matters what you do, the people you meet, and the experiences that you have. The difference between you getting a B+ and a B- on a test, it really doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to care when you get out of college.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is the way those who have a nominally impressive degree from a name school but have done absolutely nothing in the real world – and sometimes have never even worked in it – tend to cling to their alma mater as a primary source of their identity. You’d probably have to attend a Meth Anonymous meeting to find a bigger bunch of losers than you’d encounter at the average Big Name College Club in a city that isn’t New York or London.

You may recall that I recently spent a few days at a technology investment conference. I met a number of impressive men there, including Blackblade. Some are massively wealthy, others are more accomplished in the technological arena. They hailed from everywhere, China, India, Sweden, Switzerland and even Israel. Some ran one-man shops; my usual bar-side companion has over three thousand employees.

And I have absolutely no idea where any of them attended university. Or even if they did; two of the most successful men I know in the game industry don’t have college degrees.

UPDATE – Just in case you aren’t buying the notion that colleges are in the con game:

“Harvard has a tradition of having a Latin oration at graduation; the speech is delivered in Latin. The amusing thing is that a translation of the speech is left on all the students’ seats. The students follow along, and cheer (when the speech says something positive about Harvard) or boo (when the speech references Yale). The parents are sitting in the back (with no translation), and listening to a speech in Latin with no idea what the speaker is saying. But the parents see their kids listening and following the Latin speech and are likely thinking, ‘It cost me a quarter of a million bucks, but check this out.'”

“Your right to your religious belief ends when it violates the law.”
– Judge Thomas Gossett

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”
– The First Amendment

There would seem to be a certain dichotomy here. How can a religious belief violate the law, if it is not permitted for laws to prohibit the free exercise of religion?

No one likes being invaded en masse:

Thousands of black immigrants in Johannesburg have fled their homes amid a growing tide of mob violence that has left at least 23 people dead and many badly injured…. The mobs hacked at their victims and set others on fire in scenes reminiscent of the township violence of the apartheid years. Up to 6,000 immigrants were reported to have fled their homes.

It’s an interesting to see how the reporter keeps describing the Zimbabweans fleeing their “homes”, considering that the entire point is that their homes are not in South Africa. When did the migratory invasion of tens of thousands, or even millions, become “immigration” anyhow? The mass migrants are not immigrants in the historical sense that the term is understood. It should be abundantly clear to even the casual observer that if this global open borders debacle is not shut down in a civil manner, it will be shut down in a very uncivil one.

Keep in mind that if the Romans had viewed the migratory Germanic tribes as “immigrants” rather than invaders, the Roman Empire would have ended before it started.

I have to admit, I’m a bit shocked:

That does it. I officially no longer support this war. Furthermore, may I encourage my sons to not reenlist? These people are fools. Politicians have always been fools, but when your military ‘leadership’ become fools, I consider every order from that point on to be an unlawful order.

My contention is that you can’t win a war without anything that remotely approaches an observable strategy to win it. Bane’s point, and I can’t say I disagree, appears to be that you can’t win a war if you’re apologizing to the enemy for harming the occasional inanimate object.

The first 3-star non-reader review I’ve ever seen:

Haven’t read this book yet…

…hence the 3-star, kind of middling star rating. I am going to read this book, as soon as I’ve finished Antony Flew’s “There is a God.” But the book I must recommend is a book by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker called “Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God.”

Apparently he thinks that book reviews are an appropriate place to recommend other books. Or something. Look, the concept really isn’t that difficult. FIRST, you read the book. THEN you write the review. This applies regardless of how much or how little you think you’re going to like the book, and regardless of how much you think you’ve read about the book or its author. I’ve read terrible books by authors I love. I’ve read really good books by authors that I happen to know from personal experience are complete idiots. That’s why you always have to read the book in order to ascertain its worth… which is largely subjective anyhow.

Now, I’m flattered that TIA has become enough of a success that other anti-New Atheist authors see fit to reference it in various ways. It was nice to see it mentioned by David Noebel in company with the books by Aikman, Berlinski, and Lennox. As you may recall, I have always contended that TIA is merely one shot in a veritable barrage that will be headed the New Atheists’ way for years to come; it may be one of the better ones to date but it probably will not turn out to be the best. But regardless… always read before you review. Always.