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What a train wreck this thread is turning out to be. Only on City-Data could seeking and receiving a college education be a bad thing.
Yes. There is a segment that just hates anyone with a college degree. Jealousy or whatever.
"My husband is a plumber with no college and he makes a kazillion dollar". OK. Great. But he would make 2 kazillion dollars if he did have a college degree.
The real reason for the animosity is ideas, facts, statistics, and critical thinking.
Which is lacking in the Trump world. And with the Tea Party before.
It sounds like you swallowed a heavy dose of "inoctrindation" early on nothing is static. The only thing you can be sure of is change and a new generation is taking the reigns. That sort of blind patriotism is on it's way out.
and many of us disagree with you. We grew up in a world where being proud of your country was acceptable and the way it should be. This isn't blind patriotism. We grew up believing you work for what you get, you do not expect the government to support you unless there is real need and that means severely handicapped for starters. We didn't expect anything to be handed to us. Most of us knew America wasn't perfect. Nothing in the world is perfect. We believed in parents being raised by a mom and a dad, single parents. Again there are always exception to rules, but we also assumed mom and dad would be married. Many of us were raised with some form of religion in our homes. e trusted mom and dad and didn't doubt their wisdom. I could go on and on, but it would do no good I am sure. You were not exposed to what really makes for a good life and a good country.
... the findings of an Congressional Investigation that was performed in the 1950’s called “The Reese Commision”. In this investigation ... the goal was to determine wether or not some Non-Profit foundations were engaged in anti-American activities. […] It’s not their fault. They’re being brainwashed, AS PLANNED, long ago.
This is fairly standard conspiracy-theory stuff.
First, a general observation: I don't think anyone doubts that conspiracies happen. On any given day there are probably millions of people conspiring to subvert democratic institutions, overthrow governments, rig elections, kill major political leaders, indoctrinate the minds of children with this or that ideology, etc. The question that matters is this: Which of these conspiracies produce tangible results and, when there are tangible results, how wide-spread and significant is the impact?
A hallmark of run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists is that they find evidence of a conspiracy to achieve X, then they point to the fact that X happened. In their minds (or, more importantly, in the minds of the 1000s of everyday folks who become followers of the conspiracy mentality) the assumption is that X exists because the conspirators produced X. In their minds, there is very little doubt that the conspirators made X happen. What you tend not to see is a bunch of plausible evidence showing the actual causal connections between the tangible efforts of the conspirators and the state of the world. And, of course, there is always some self-sealing logic to fall back on, if evidence turns out to be in short supply: "Well, obviously, the conspirators successfully covered it up."
In the case of the Reese Commission, there were people on the committee - both Democrats and Republicans - who did not endorse the final report, and they gave some good reasons for their skepticism. BTW: The charitable foundations accused of promoting Communism by the Reese Committee where never really given much opportunity to defend themselves or offer their own perspective to the committee before the final report was issued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United..._Organizations
Anyway, people who want to believe X generally become victims of a variety of psychological factors that make it easy for them to focus on facts and reasoning that seem to support their bias, while ignoring facts and reasoning that contradicts their bias. (A problem exacerbated these days by the targeted news feeds that tailor the news to your own personal preferences.) Conspiracy theories spread so easily because they are relatively easy to encapsulate into viral "meme" form, and there is always a significant portion of the population ready to lap the stuff up. In this case, the idea that colleges are surreptitiously indoctrinating young people with liberal ideas and values because some clever Communists effectively infiltrated the American educational system is just too delicious for some conservatives to question. In their minds it is intuitively obvious that some sort of conspiracy must have worked because, otherwise, why would such a huge proportion of college-educated people express so many liberal views?
The incredible irony today is that Russia - those nasty Communists who corrupted our youth in the 1950s and served as the #1 target for Republican accusations of subversion for many decades - are now Trump's buddies. And, in this case, the hard evidence for potential harm (and, in some cases, actual tangible harm) is overwhelming. All of our national security agencies are in virtually unanimous agreement about this, but Trump and his followers have an easy out: "Yeah, well, the national security agencies are, themselves, part of the liberal conspiracy."
Politics. Good grief. Gotta love it.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 11-17-2018 at 09:19 AM..
The point is that if you don’t have a degree, you’re much more limited in the job opportunities than you were 50/60 years ago. Non-college grads are losing jobs that they could once attain to college grads, causing the resentment you see everyday in forums like this from non-college grade. Whether you or I like it or not, it’s reality, at least in cities popular with college graduates.
And my point is that if you wish to signal employability there are far more efficient means than going to college. The skills imparted by college are dropping and the signaling mechanism is becoming weaker. The current regime will not last.
Maybe the OP should watch the movie "idiocracy" to get a a taste of where uneducated right wingers might take us....
Disclosure: former Romney/McCain voter, now NEVER trumper who's part of the 47% that pays income tax
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