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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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So putting us back to the status-quo ante of 1990, and NOT expanding access to loans for college, we might be able to avoid the worst excesses of Feminism entering the mainstream.

Dealing with that will require tackling the education-managerial complex- it's a feedback loop, where the same women who benefited from the initial windfall are now in charge of expanding the problem.

It'll also require dealing with the Boomers. Boomers (and especially Boomer women) see education as an unqualified good because it was good for them, and that's the long and short of it. Of course, their preferred policies of "throwing all youth productivity into a hole because once upon a time someone was mean to a woman" is evidence that education is not the unqualified good they believe it to be.

Probably causes women's standards to rise

And that they rose artificially is the main problem here.

I had a reply to something about "progressive women having the most to offer over homemakers; they have degrees in journalism" which illuminates the issue perfectly- they think they have more to offer, but are only useful as an artifact of law- completely useless otherwise.

And nobody likes being taken down a peg, much less universally co-ordinating to do so to themselves... but that said, men have a history in the early 20th century of having done this, and we're back to that sociofinancial situation, so I don't believe expecting women to have to do that for themselves is exceptional in any way. (Men and women are equal, are we not?)

I had a reply to something about "progressive women having the most to offer over homemakers; they have degrees in journalism" which illuminates the issue perfectly- they think they have more to offer, but are only useful as an artifact of law- completely useless otherwise.

Yeah.

I really don't know how to get it through to a woman's status-seeking brain that all degrees are not created equal, and indeed some credentials are just fake all the way through. A degree in agricultural science from a state university can genuinely be more useful and impressive than a finance degree from an Ivy league, let alone a political science degree from an Ivy.

And worse, some of the most important roles in society don't come with a fancy piece of paper declaring them such.

Dealing with that will require tackling the education-managerial complex- it's a feedback loop, where the same women who benefited from the initial windfall are now in charge of expanding the problem.

Yep. But it sure looks like the early '90s was the one point in time we had the ability to adjust course as a nation... and most of the adjustments were in the wrong direction, it just wouldn't be clear until 2010 or so.

In the early '90s the GI Bill generation was rising to power: this was inevitable.

But I do agree that the women themselves will need to fix it, much as men did for women in the early 1900s. The catalyst for such a cascade is one I cannot guess, and I believe that the current US administration's support is underwritten by a populace that wants to take an off-ramp from this rather than collapse like the rest of the West prefers.