You can tell times are changing when this joke pops up in polite company:
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are sitting at the end of a bar.
A man walks in, sees them, and says to the bartender, “Isn’t that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?”
The bartender says, “Yeah, that’s them!”
With that, the guy walks over and says, “What are you guys doing in here?”
Trump says, “We’re planning World War III.”
The guy says, “Really? How are you going to fight it?”
Trump says, “Well, We are going to butcher 140 million Muslims – and one blonde with big boobs.”
The guy exclaimed, “A blonde with big boobs? Why kill a blonde with big boobs?”
Trump turns to Sanders and says, “See, I told you – no one gives a fuck about the 140 million Muslims!”
When everyone laughs, with just a hint of wide-eye’d surprise that they were caught not considering the Muslims either, that’s the start of in-grouping.
Bring the GOPocalypse Donald.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
I have a question for you and it’s somewhat off topic but I’m not sure where to post it so I’ll post it here.
I plan on going to college eventually and I want to study evolutionary psychology but I’m still not sure what my major is going to be or what it should be since, as you know, evpsych encompasses a wide range of different fields. I would also like to help spread the ideas that you provide in your book and help build on them further one day. Do you have any advice on how I should go about doing this? If you want, you can respond via email, if you prefer to keep this between the two of us. Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
If you go to college (and I am honestly not sure if that is the best move for anybody – it depends on what your goals are), then I would take a major which would let you transition into something else with practical benefit like medicine or dentistry, should you want to. Evo-Psych is great if you get tenure at a university teaching it, but I am not sure there will be many such positions in ten or fifteen years, if we are in the type of depression that may be coming. I would predict a shift back toward small businesses and hands-on work like welding, machining, car repair, etc – shit people can’t do without. That will both reduce the number of people attending college, and the perceived importance of a college degree. So I would pursue such an objective with an eye to there being an economic collapse, because I suspect there will be. We are over $19 Trillion in debt, about $11 trillion happened just in the last 8 years, that growth rate is accelerating, and at $24 Trillion the US will have passed the point of no return. I’m guessing that will be in three years or so, and I am not sure who will buy bonds then.
Have a back-up plan. Dentistry is good, because there is no putting off a toothache, school isn’t overly difficult or long, few people die in a dentist’s chair, making insurance easier, and you can set up shop anywhere there are people. In a collapse, it is a great fallback.
Your question makes me hesitant, to the extent I get a feel for you which is kind of like I had – you think college is for learning and gaining knowledge, it is supposed to challenge you, you should take the tougher courses whenever you can, and so on. That is kind of bullshit.
In retrospect, your real goal should be where you want to be in ten years, twenty years, and on, and financial security should be paramount, especially today. College is merely a tool to get you there, and in some ways kind of a racket, from the perspective of the administrators, at least at most large universities for undergraduate degrees. You give them money, they give you paper that maybe helps you get where you want to go, but if you’ll fall for it they will take your money and give you worthless paper too. The value of the paper is what you are buying, and making it as valuable as possible should be your goal. That means a useful major and a high GPA, otherwise you are just giving your tuition money away to thieves and scumbags.
Your goal should be to get through undergraduate with as high a GPA as possible, pure and simple. For that, you take the easier courses where possible, you take the harder core-courses for your major alone in summer sessions, to both concentrate on them, and free you up to devote more to your other courses during the regular year to raise your GPA, and you should play the political game where possible to get every advantage.
Don’t waste energy if you don’t have to taking that X-ray crystallography elective just because it sounds interesting and you thought the professor was funny in Biochem I. It will be a lot of extra work, and if you already have enough electives, it will only drain energy from your other courses, and lower your overall GPA. If you want to see what it is about, show up and sit through the classes (auditing), without officially taking it, or pay the money to take it later after you graduate. But don’t fuck with your GPA. Treat undergrad college like ticket punching, because to achieve your objectives that is exactly what it is.
If I were doing a major just for evo-psych, I would major in psychology because it is easy and would boost your GPA to head to the graduate level, but I’d recommend you do biology with an eye to keeping the door open on dentistry (or a full MD if you have no desire to enjoy the next eight to ten years). And I’d learn welding, just in case, because I suspect there will be more demand for that, and in what is coming survival will come first, kicking ass and knowledge for knowledge’s sake will be a far distant second.
All of that said, there is a flow to life, and if you follow the opportunities and personal relationships you build as they show up, good things can happen. Be flexible when opportunities happen.
Good luck.
Thank you for this. This was all very helpful advice. And you’re right, I was under the impression that taking the tougher courses whenever I can was the way to go. I’m glad you cleared that up for me.
Without giving away too many details, I have a job in the construction
industry (for now) and I make pretty good money (for now). I don’t
intend to give it up, at least not yet. I was thinking about going into college as a recreational, part time kinda thing but I should probably go in with the objective of learning another skill that’s in demand as you suggested.
I honestly never thought about going into dentistry because I just
never thought of myself as the “dentist type.” Plus, bodily fluids
gross me out but I’m sure I could get over that. On the other hand, I’m interested in the ideas expressed in ‘Nutrition and Physical Degeneration’ by weston price, so maybe dentistry wouldn’t be such a bad idea in the long run after all.
Here is an even crazier aspect of the tougher courses. In most large universities the undergrad science classes are all curved around a C. So if you take the more challenging biology course, it will have all the smart and motivated kids who are majoring in a biological science in it (because those are the kids who choose to take a tough course), but when the curve gets slapped on the grades it is still averaged to a C, even though all the kids there would easily outclass everyone if they took the basic course and get A’s in that class.
Meanwhile the basic course has a lot of kids who intend to be psychology and poly sci majors, so when that curve gets slapped on and averaged to a C, their low grades push the curve in the other direction. Take the harder course and you can end up much lower on the curve with a C or even a D, because you are competing against the smart kids. Meanwhile put in the same effort (or even much less effort)in the easy class, and you end up at the top of the curve because you are competing against all of the slower non-science kids. They get the C’s and D’s, and turn your effort into an A. All anyone who looks at your transcript will see is a biology course you either aced or barely made it through. Plus, undergrad is just a test of how you process information. Even if you go into research, you are not expected to remember everything, or even most of what you learn. Like most jobs, you get brought up to speed with what you need when you arrive.
Good luck.
Since I got my first full time job at 18, I’ve been unemployed for a grand total of 72 hours in the last 20 years. Even though I was underemployed for parts of that, I’ve never had the sorts of problems my friends who spend long times “looking” have.
Keep the trades job until you have something better — and when you do, keep up with your tools and have a beer every so often with the guys you worked with anyways.