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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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(Stupid) Kids These Days

Article link - no paywall

Rough summary:

At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.

(Emphasis above added)

Excellent CW quote:

Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?

UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.

And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.

The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.

I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?

10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?

There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.

10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes.

Yes, and the likely effects on outcomes are:

  • things get more dysfunctional
  • left-wing "bioleninist" patronage expands, over and above the demographic trends, further cementing the left's total lock on power
  • the remaining smart, functional people get squeezed harder to support this; and to prevent them from withdrawing or underperforming, the coercion applied will be greatly increased
  • unrest will rise, legitimizing the increasing use (in a politically-biased manner) or improving technologies of surveillance and oppression
  • the "Global American Empire" will increase its attempts to both expand the periphery, and further loot it, in hopes of directing as much of total global productivity as possible to keeping this system propped up, even as they "eat" more and more civilizational "seed corn" at home
  • and humanity hurtles further toward the inevitable and irreversible collapse of industrial civilization.

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