Glenn wants his listeners to question everything. Except him.
He’s talking today about his children and how they are challenging his ideas based on what they are learning in college. He’s urging them to drop out of college – the other day he suggested that he is thinking of stop paying for their education. He’s now escalating his “Good vs Evil” argument to take on the entire “progressive” university system. As I noticed and pointed out before, Glenn views college as a trade school – it’s a place where you go to learn a skill that teaches you a job, not a place where you get a better understanding of the world and the people who we share the planet with.
The world is older than 10,000 years. Deal with it.
I like Glenn’s show…or did anyhow, but he “jumped the shark” a while ago. From what I can tell, Stu’s job is sort of to keep Glenn bound to reality and down to earth (using humor it appears) but I think at this point he is just holding back a storm.
I don’t care for the agenda of the university system either but you do your best, grin and bear it. I would never advocate leaving college it was a great experience and yes I may have left a little more liberal but that changed as soon as I had children. š
Reminds me of an old joke:
“What is a conservative? A liberal with children.”
If the university is a place where students “gain a better understanding of the world,” there would be no arguments with it. However, as Glenn righly points out, the university actually closes minds rather than opening them. There is so much historical inaccuracy that is disseminated in most universities that students graduate with no comprehension of what it takes to function in society. This, of course, leads to what you see now with the OccupyWallStreet crowd. The girl who said that she is protesting because she graduated with a degree in fine arts and no one wants to hire her is a prime example – what in hell do you bring to the table of any company with a degree in fine arts? These people are mad at capitalism because it rewards people with marketable skills who trade those skills for dollars. A degree in fine arts doesn’t make you an artist, any more than a baseball card collection makes you a first baseman.
Very few of the people I worked with in the real world doing computer programming had degrees in Computer Science. At least at the undergraduate level, most of what college is about is proving that you don’t give up easily and won’t get drunk the night before the finals, and you learn how to live, communicate and interact with other people who aren’t just like you or members of your family. Most of what you actually learn in college has very little to do with your careers – the skills you need are only taught when you get your first job doing the thing you want to do. .
That gets back to Glenn’s basic misunderstanding that college is a four year vocational training program. The entire process is very much about completing the separation from your parents and becoming an independent adult with your own beliefs and view of the world. I don’t dispute that the influx of government funding and too many people going to college without knowing why is a problem – but it isn’t called “liberal arts” for nothing. Remove the government funding and interference and most of those distrotions will go away. Characterizing all colleges as “evil” is not good. Pat was even ripping Brigham Young and Hillsdale College as being “too liberal”.
Much of the success of America is that it has been a magnet where Universities are largely unencumbered by things like conforming to religions belief systems that force people t agree that the world is only 7-10,000 years old when it is painfully obvious that is not true – and letting people discover their own version of “truth”. It’s not an accident that universities in Muslim countries aren’t the ones discovering ways to use nanotechnology or exploring the nature of matter and energy and subatomic particles and making robots that make goods of higher quality at a lower cost.
Back in the “good old days”, one of the primary reasons a woman might go to college to get a degree in “fine arts” was to find a good husband – but we’re now way beyond talking about that without provoking some very basic arguments about social structure..
Art – you hit the proverbial “nail on the head”. I attended a military academy and – yes I learned engineering but – I also learned how to deal with distreputable people, arrogant people, lazy people, entitled people etc. This is key to surviving in any business organization (even your own).
If I dislike colleges these days, it’s because there is such a “support system” on most campuses that survival becomes a 4 hour lab not a bona fide experience.
I really have to agree with this stream of thought. I know what they are teaching and not teaching in collage is nearly a crime BUT…as others have said, College is more than the sum of it’s parts, the experience and knowledge you gain between classes is the most valuable thing it teaches.
For your children the best thing you can do is give them a solid foundation and hope they resist the majority of the indoctrination/re-education.
I’ll up the ante. If you try to do what Glenn and Pat are doing – using your parental authority to coerce your children to leave college because you can’t handle the questions they start asking – you’re pretty much assuring that they will never come back to your point of view as they grow older.
The first sentence summarized the problem. While Glenn says he wants everyone to challenge what they believe, he is caving like a cheap suit to his own principle when confronted by challenges from his children and invoking his understanding of God and declaring the people raising the questions as “Evil”.
People other than me have been pointing out that Glenn has fallen in with a couple people who really “cherry pick” history and rely on known unreliable sources. Just like science should not start with the conclusion and work backwards – if you want “truth” about history, you don’t look only for sources that back your preconceived notion and then ignore all the evidence that doesn’t support your conclusion.
Glenn (and others) are setting up this dynamic of opposing forces between “Conservative Christians” and “Evil”, and has now added people who go to college in the “Evil” group. Say hello to President Obama in 2012 if he keeps this divisive rhetoric up.
Indeed, college is not what it once was, even just 10 years ago.
It’s no longer a college education, but a college indoctrination.
College Republicans are shouted down, and conservative speakers are being banned from speaking engagements or delivering a commencement address… at publicly funded ‘tolerant’ universities.
I remember hearing a caller on a talk show a few years ago; the gentleman said he never truly believed in ‘brainwashing’ UNTIL his daughter returned home (for summer) from her first year in college… he subsequently cut-off her funding and told her he wasn’t paying for her to embrace an ideology he fought against on the battlefield.
Here are three quotes from the Occupy Wall Street (aka Occupy Tampa, Occupy Dallas, Occupy Sacramento, etc) crowd of Marxists:
āIām here because corporate greed and financial greed are ruining this country,ā said a retired educator.
“We’re not here to protest a single act, or a politician or a media outlet,” said Chris Dorsey, 24, a University of South Florida student.
Celeste Arredondo, 29, said protesters should plan carefully their next big move. “Four people getting arrested is not international news,” she said. “Five hundred people getting arrested is international news.”
(Why is she so concerned about turning it into an ‘international’ event?)
SOMEBODY, SOMEWHERE is coordinating these agitators, and the DNC progressives and Obama seem only too happy to fan the flames and incite them.
Today, Edward G. Griffin astutely pointed out how the Media have successfully distorted the meaning of the word capitalist to imply ‘rich republican’ when, in fact, what we have now are ‘monopoly capitalists’… i.e. socialists who’ve grown rich via lobbying and favorable legislation.
Thus, the ‘Occupy’ crowd are (in reality) protesting their own masters.
IMO, it is yet another media diversion to create more division.
The other point about Glenn’s comments is: Glenn has a sort of Diogenes facet to him. If you are going to claim to produce young adults with certain basic qualifications, than be honest with the people actually paying for your product. If you are going to charge a thoroughly outrageous sum of money do a better job….
America MUST get off this notion that college is a right for everyone. It clearly is not. And yes parents should pull the financial plug sooner. In my case it allowed me to feed my demons not slay them – that came years later.
Actually, that is part of the scam: convince everyone they need a college education… i.e. support the ma$$ive college/university system while pushing the liberal indoctrination. After all, ‘Obamacare’ will insure them until age 26… which just happens to equate to 8 years of college from age 18.
Glenn is partially correct in assessing it as 4 years of ‘vocational training’… except the value is inflated and there is little practice tied to all the theory.
Then there is the grade inflation… just visit the College of Education at most universities; this is where the ‘self esteem’ over ‘performance’ philosophy has flourished. We produce teachers who -never- leave ‘school’ their entire lives.
The truth is, we DO need to reestablish a national vocational/trade system using apprenticeships, but ‘teachers’ disparage the trades as menial labor.
(Yet, a teacher will complain about how much the plumber gets paid , even though s/he didn’t go to college, and this is somehow ‘unfair’ to teachers.)
I seem to recollect, when my daughter was in college I have to agree with the Chairman, It’s not education it’s indoctrination she was fairly consertive and independent, but when she hit the campus, after a time it became another guessing game of WTF . Finally, she graduated and got a a job with the coroner’s office,, (her major was nursing, and police sciences minor) in the process she bought a home and within a year got a promotion, from Deputy level 2 to Deputy 1 all this has seemed to re-ajust her way of indoctrination of almost becoming a left wing “nut,” back to a consertive way of thinking, since she is paying for high cost items (property and vehicles) and Taxes with- out dad’s help.
But you didn’t force her to quit college.
I think working at the coroner’s office would certainly bring a person around to reality. i.e. The absolute of life versus death… no ‘gray area’ there.
Not really connected to much of anything, but for a couple months I did computer work for a surgeon who did mostly ACL repairs (he did the work for a University in Michigan and did Willie Stargell’s while I was there). He was an interesting guy – he was a Christian Jew and made a point of letting people know he was driving a German car on purpose.
At some point, he suggested that I should go with him to cadaver lab and watch him teach his technique to younger doctors. I took a pass on his offer. He didn’t have a very clear idea why he wanted to be marketing his software package. I left shortly after that.
His program (written by a group of MSU computer science majors) had originally been based on the Motorola 68000 implementation of a long out of business company called Fortune Systems. This was around 1984. I was brought in because he was finding that no doctors wanted a buy or commit to use a program that ran only on Unix. I was tasked with converting the program (written in C) to run under MS-DOS. It was my first experience with the C language.
My opinions about *nix are not due to lack of exposure.
About 1979, I was dragged into a presentation while working at NCNB put on by AT&T or Bell Labs or whoever was selling Unix at the time. We were a primarily an IBM 370 shop using IMS DB/DC and COBOL and some CICS. I was just a kid and think I just listened and didn’t ask any of my typical pesky questions. My memory of it went something like this:
AT&T: Hi, we’re the phone company and we have this great thing called Unix that you really should think about using:
NCNB Manager: Give a listen, ask questions and I’ll want to know your opinions later
AT&T: So we have this thing called Unix – it’s great! You can connect almost any kind of terminal to it because of the termcaps file!
Coworker: We’re an IBM shop. We use IBM 3270 terminals connected by a leased VTAM SDLC network. Can we use that?
AT&T: Well no… but you could replace the network with much cheaper VT-100 terminals!
Coworker: That would mean rewriting all our applications or throwing them away
AT&T: Hey, with unix you can string together commands! You can do a directory listing, pipe it through grep and send it to a printer – in one command!
NCNB: Okay…. our network of recently installed ATMs is based on the 3270 network. Does anyone offer an ATM system that works over a VT100 async network?
AT&T: With Unix it remembers a history of your commands! You don’t have to type things over and over!
Techie: We use TSO/ISPF. We don’t have to type commands at all
AT&T: Unix supports virtual memory! and the entire operating system is written in C making it portable to any computer!
Techie2: Is there a version that works on an IBM S370?
AT&T: Well Amdahl is working on an implementation that will be comptaible!
NCNB: That’s nice. A very important thing we do here is check processing – we have those huge machines downstairs that use CPCS (Check Processing Control System) to do check sorting, routing and real time data and image capture. What system does someone have to do that work that is comptiable with Unix?
AT&T: Did you know Unix has UUCP? – it actually lets you transfer data between a network of Unix Computers overnight – for free!
NCNB Manager: Thank you very much for coming. You employees can go back to your work now.
So… is SRG running via *nix or Win software, or a combo?
That’s a chicken and egg question of course š
The web server is running on Fedora… but the whole Internet infrastructure was designed by people who used *nix. Apache is highly optimized for the Unix-like world, taking advantage of the long case sensitive directory and file names, symbolic links, pipes, shared memory, etc…
But a very large part of the business world who have the money and economic motivation run IIS and Oracle (or something similar). LAMP is perfect for a hobby system, which is what this started out as.
The reason I asked is because you had voiced a frustration with how easily *nix dependencies were broken (when Fedora foundered and was unable to recover from it gracefully, if at all).
I just wondered if perhaps you decided to try running MySQL & Apache on top of Windows.
Yes, kind of. My Development environment is on my Windows XP machine. The original mySQL people were clearly anti-Microsoft and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to create a windows implementation, which is at best half-ass. The first year I paid for a support contract, not so much because I expected to need it, but I felt an obligation to pay something for it.
Here is my one bug report to them: Windows doesn’t really support the idea of a “symbolic link” the way *unix does. NT based versions do have an obscure, very dangerous way to do that. When you have multiple disk drives and want to spread the disk load, symbolic links are a useful way to do that. Databases or tables or individual files can be spread across multiple disk drives, reducing contention and rotational delay.
So mySQL implemented a kludge (not a lot of choice)… it would look for a .lnk file that is a text file that contains the actual location of the physical file. It worked as it was supposed to – until I tried:
Create table x like y;
Error: no such table y;
Describe table y;
id int;
stuff varchar;
blah blah
To “like” routine was not following the windows specific symbolic link which is why it couldn’t find table “y”. I gently suggested that this might be a systemic problem, and it would be worth checking that all places that open tables be checked to make sure they were using the Windoze aware open routines.
They did create a fix, but did not backport it- meaning that I would have to upgrade to a beta version to get the fix. I had long ago just moved the data back to the C: drive and worked around it.
If I was a high performance database user (like I was used to being at NASDAQ), that kind of naive ignorance of the real world can be deadly and why Oracle now owns the commercial database business. mySQL resisted even the most basic things used every day in the commercial SQL world – subqueries, stored procedures, triggers, cursors…..
So the mySQL is a ticking time bomb for me – part of why I wanted to at least be on a semi current version of Fedora. mySQL was acquired by Sun in 2008… and Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2009.
Part of that deal is that the E.U. forced Oracle to not kill off mySQL – either directly or by neglect. A lot of what has happened since then appears to be that “Oracle like” features are being added to the commercial version of mySQL (cluster computing, distributed transaction management) that help mySQL users, but also probably tend to educate those people why they should buy the real deal – Oracle.
the version of mySQL that I’m using now has this reassuring disclaimer at startup:
Server version: 5.1.58-log Source distribution
Copyright (c) 2000, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL v2 license
Then again, it is worth far more than what I paid for it.