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Boulevardier's avatar

It seems that aside from the racial incentives, there is general society-wide tendency over the past 3-4 decades to try to redefine reality rather than accept concrete and perhaps disappointing truths. DIE, restorative justice, gender woo, etc. are all efforts to ignore rather obvious realities. To a large extent I chalk this up to cultural and economic decadence as a result of what was essentially an uninterrupted rise in American economic and cultural dominance over the course of 60 years or so. No child should be below average, so let's game the educational system to makes sure even more kids are high achievers on paper.

We are obviously entering a new era, one in which the US's influence on these fronts is under pressure and not what it once was, and could decline even further although we will still be a major player. I wonder if that will concentrate the national mind to some extent and contribute to casting aside some of the fantasies we can no longer afford to indulge in.

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Derek Leaberry's avatar

I went to Salisbury State College beginning in 1978 even before test scores were vulgarized by the egalitarians of the universities. Salisbury was a cheap place for the Eastern Shore locals and the suburbanites of Baltimore and Washington DC to go to and see whether they were college material. The Freshmen and Sophomore years weeded out the riff-raff, those who shouldn't have gone to college in the first place. I knew plenty of them. The most memorable one was a young man of Polish extraction from the Baltimore industrial suburb of Essex who left college, joined the Navy, left the Navy and became a pot farmer in California and Hells Angel. He ended up spending time in a Michigan state prison for drug smuggling.

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