College

The perceived and actual roles of secondary education in the modern industrialized world.

Understanding the real purposes of secondary education requires a mechanism for locating and understanding rules, particularly the absurd one.

Reciprocity is the key to showing the absurdity of any rule.

School is about rules, rules are about power, and power is about double standards. For example, the government can kill, I can not, that's power.

Formal education with regard to actually imparting career specific skill is quickly becoming obsolete in the face of technologies eliminating through automation whole career paths and spawning entirely new ones.

Education is more and more about an aristocratic pass card. A cultural and psychological filter. As many of us know from experience, the vast majority of career skill comes from experience.

College by definition cannot provide experience, it can arrange for experience to be had but but it must always do so through a potential employer. Hence the concept of internship and the death of apprenticeship.

The diplomas which colleges sell are simply membership cards. Actually getting employment is more about personal charisma and physical attractiveness in an interview, who you know that can get you said interview in the first place, or simple experience. Very rarely is it about skill acquired directly through formal education. This is not shocking given the vague nature of most education and the dated nature of specific education. Academia again by definition will always adapt more slowly than the market, since its job is to respond to the responses of the market.

If college were actually about job skills, companies would ignore diplomas generally and issue industry specific tests directly to prospective employees, indeed many do. They would have test proctoring centers where companies could even charge for tests to cover costs and motivate independent study. As it turns out they can charge quite a lot given the cost of a traditional diploma. Some companies have ended up acquiring more profit from selling training than their original business model. This was the genesis of the certification market.

The reason we still have formal secondary education is, for the most part, cultural stagnation and elitism plain and simple. Much like why we have such a fetish for abstract math classes, which is a cultural echo of a time not so long ago when computers simply didn't exist while colleges most certainly did.

Medical school and the physical sciences are potential exceptions, but they are far from perfect. The sciences are becoming quite cult/religion like as the volume of data demands greater and greater time investment and specialization to even grasp, much less contribute to.

Student government by and large is there to pacify and isolate students who labor under the misconception that the purpose of "education" is to impart career skills beyond coping mechanisms. It is also there to insulate the college administration from any cries of inequity for persons outside the university also laboring under that said misconception. As with protest the real purpose ironically is exactly the opposite of what is claimed.

Colleges don't sell education anymore so much as they collect a cover charge. And employers typically ask for a degree not out of a search for any specific knowledge, but to find a certain kind of person. IE one who is willing to submit to an authority regardless of its ineptitude for long periods of time on the promise of money.

Did you ever notice how being in a Fraternity or Sorority equals in many cases better chances in the job market? Why does being tortured by more senior students, and showing a willingness to torture those "below" you play any role in college what so ever? Because that is exactly what is required of a successful Corporate employee above and beyond any skill, which as I said can be acquired later through experience.

College is more about reeducation, then education.

This is why the military is hard on new soldiers above and beyond the physical requirements of training. The psychological habit of submitting to authority, without asking questions or complaining about perceived stupidity, is required for any complex institution to survive when its purposes are so complex as to be impossible for an individual to fully learn. Employees in such a group that stopped work or slowed down to demand answers would constitute an escalating counter productive force. One that would spread as more employees ask questions once they are exposed to them, given either innate human curiosity, or more likely the delusion that what they are doing is supposed to be personally understood.

So asking questions, spreads and causes institutional dysfunction. Sound familiar? The effect is basically institutional cancer. (unions are chemotherapy) Thus institutions have a vested interest, proportional to their size or complexity, in finding employees who obey without asking questions.

And college is about filtering out those people to produce a refined crop of intelligent but fundamentally uninquisitive automatons.

These facts are why formal secondary education is devolving into a mindless, byzantine, frat house, dating service, basketball camp, caste system, organized by familial income tier.

Rape: Mr Smith Rebuttal

Feministe The Rape of Mr. Smith

The Rape of Mr. Smith
Posted by: Jill in Feminism, Sexual Assault

The law discriminates against rape victims in a manner which would not be tolerated by victims of any other crime. In the following example, a holdup victim is asked questions similar in form to those usually asked a victim of rape.

Mr. Smith, you were held up at gunpoint on the corner of 16th and Locust?
Yes.
Did you struggle with the robber?
No.
Why not?
He was armed.
Then you made a conscious decision to comply with his demands rather than to resist?
Yes.
Did you scream? Cry out?
No. I was afraid.
I see. Have you ever been held up before?
No.
Have you ever given money away?
Yes, of course
And did you do so willingly?
What are you getting at?
Well, lets put it like this, Mr. Smith. Youve given away money in the pastin fact, you have quite a reputation for philanthropy. How can we be sure that you werent contriving to have your money taken from you by force?
Listen, if I wanted
Never mind. What time did this holdup take place, Mr. Smith?
About 11 p.m.
You were out on the streets at 11 p.m.? Doing what?
Just walking.
Just walking? You know its dangerous being out on the street that late at night. Werent you aware that you could have been held up?
I hadnt thought about it.
What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?
Lets see. A suit. Yes, a suit.
An expensive suit?
Wellyes.
In other words, Mr. Smith, you were walking around the streets late at night in a suit that practically advertised the fact that you might be a good target for some easy money, isnt that so? I mean, if we didnt know better, Mr. Smith, we might even think you were asking for this to happen, mightnt we?
Look, cant we talkin about the past history of the guy who did this to me?
Im afraid not, Mr. Smith. I dont think you would want to violate his rights, now, would you?

Just something to think about.

This demands a response. And since I'm sure everyone else is deeply afraid to be caught on the wrong side of the thousand year old sexual deviant (which is part of what rape is) witch hunt, I'm inclined to play devil's advocate here. Because there are just a few frighting implications that are made.

First off, we all know that this is a metaphor for a rape trial, and I'm not going to try and awkwardly shoehorn my point in the form of a continued metaphor since I consider such obfuscation to be intellectually dishonest.

So with that being said, I want to share some of the implications made by this little hypothetical.

1. The assumption that the victim has nothing to gain by being classified as a victim. (mentally, fiscally, etc)

2. The accused is the actual guilty party.

3. Defending an accused rapist is the same thing as defending a rapist.

4. We all know more about a case than the people involved.

Confused? Not seeing where I got those? Well I'm happy to elaborate.

Lets consider point one. Now obviously being raped is not something that can typically be regarded as profitable, but that is not to say that it is never profitable. There are an infinite number of potential situations where being raped is the goal. Use your imagination, and keep in mind people are crazy. What does that extremely low probability have to do with anything you ask? Well that concerns the next three points.

Point two three and four are linked with the concepts inherent to our court system, which we all tacitly approve of given our lack of revolt.

The duty of a prosecutor is to convict beyond shadow of a doubt, and in a complimentary role the defender's job is to create doubt, not expose actual doubt, but manufacture it. Any doubt at all no matter how unlikely, because it is the duty of the prosecutor to then crush that doubt.

In fact it is his or her (bet the bulk of you pictured the evil lawyer as a white male, and statistics had no part of that thought) duty to create any and all doubt.

Consider, if you had been falsely accused of rape, and your attorney had given you a choice between character assassinating the victim (Which most would loath on principal) or sending you to jail (to no doubt be raped yourself since the rape of males is a non-issue despite their majority among American rape victims thanks to our prison system) which would you choose? Are you telling me you'd waive your defense even in the smallest part with your own rape and life on the line just because of how it might make the victim feel? While we as a society are in the habit of coddling cute and young women, I don't think that a trial, that can only happen once, is the time to dick around.

Further, if you were the prosecutor would you be able to sleep at night knowing you convicted someone who had a defense attorney that hadn't done all that was possible to defend their client? I know if I were a prosecutor I would demand ferocious defense attorneys so I don't have to worry about a single innocent being raped because of me.

Rape in our society is a weighted issue, directly related to the female supremacy inherent to competition driven serial monogamy. This is similar to the phenomenon of the absurdly high breast cancer funding rate despite extremely low historical fatality compared to say bile duct or pancreatic cancer.

Why is rape any worse than being terrorized and then shot? Could it be because when you think of a shooting victim you think of a man? Is being shot less of a "violation"? Violation of what? Your body? No. A bullet damn sure violates the body. Your spirit? Most certainly. But then why is the rape of men a non issue? For some I'm sure its about the mentality that criminals deserve everything they get, but most aren't that brutal, I hope. I think its more about a violation of the fundamental rules of our society which are by demand of mortality, are issues of mate selection.

When you rape, in general you take sexual choice away from the female. And our entire social system is built around that choice though most of us are unaware of it like fish unaware of water. Thus it does not manifest itself directly. Much like someone who is angry at something abstract, say aging, takes out their rage on the food service workers who accidentally fudged an order, society takes its ignorant rage out on rapists and all sexual violators with particular venom. The pioneers of the homosexual rights movement will know of this blind seething hatred first hand. Everyone one of them selves must have asked "What is the big deal?" "How does what I do with my dick in my home with my friends cause you so much pain?" Answer: Sexual deviation is a threat to society itself. New species are born via sexual deviation. And since societies typically don't reproduce, they evolve directly, new species means death of the old. So as far as society is concearned all sexual deviation is cancer. Now we're getting somewhere close to an explanation of this ra ra pitch fork mentality.

And before you "accuse" me of defending rapists, I'll cut you off and say yes I am, because criminals or not, they are humans. And beyond that as stated above before they are rapists they are suspects, who are also human. They are not animals or monsters or scum or any of the other dehumanizing language we use to absolve ourselves of the tortuous atavistic rage we pretend not to have in day to day life. As if to say "It's not my fault that I am completely capable of skinning this fellow human alive, its that he's not human in the first place, and I'm just defending myself from some hostile alien ...thing."

Society is immortal and it is supposed to be impartial. That claimed impartiality is why we allow it to be immortal and rule over use utterly (in fact to put everyone beneath the law is an explicit cause many have died for). Don't like the idea of being ruled utterly? Me either, but I don't think we're quite ready for the intellectual challenge of deciding our ethics on a totally case by case basis, when we are still arguing the efficacy of gun and drug control law and its impact on crime, which are problems with statistically proved answers. (For the record: drugs are a heathcare/poverty problem not a legal one, and guns reduce crime.)

Rape is an issue as complicated and interwoven as few others. It has ties to genetics, evolutionary biology, politics, psychology, economics, you name it. From cradle to grave, literally, every facet of our lives is touched by mate selection protocol and gender roles governed by it and that adherence to or rejection of those roles and rules.

However, it may be that rape is so hideous to us because of its all encompassing nature, and that is a valid argument, but that does not excuse the malevolent incoherent burn the witch style attitude that it usually inspires.

My point is all this is that the original article is glib, incomplete, criminally devoid of context, and extremely emotional despite the clever use of a kind of limited logic to assert that we simply aren't mean enough to suspected rapists or aren't nice enough to victims.

I say rather than focusing on the homogeneity of defense tactics we take a good long look at the judicial system as a whole.

The author controls the hypothetical, and the question is loaded beyond tolerance.