I just filled out my income statement for the student loan Nazis and printed off a bunch of cheques for the evil bastards. The dates are all highlighted and also written on the backs of the cheques where they are also highlighted.
I really despise these people. It's absurd. We live in a world where the right to pursue a higher education has turned into the obligation and requirement to acquire a meaningless degree at great expense.
This article from
Kim's journal sums it up nicely. If universities still actually maintained academic standards and refused to even admit idiots who pass
shite like this off as work then a degree might still mean something. There
used to be a time when having a bachelor's degree meant something, now it doesn't even necessarily imply literacy. This is a culture where
the stupid are coddled and lauded and the intelligent are isolated and derided. Merit is irrelevant as long as you
are an egomaniac "have high self-esteem". Because of this I am paying off a degree that is of absolutely no value to me.
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Last night I finally dug into a long overdue task: clearing out several banker's boxes of material retained from my university days. When I was in university the commercialization of the Internet was in its infancy, and the web was only just invented. State of the art when I graduated was at 14.4 modem and Netscape 1.1. The idea of conveniently calling up "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" or ""The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in a fraction of a second when ever one desired was unthinkable. So I kept everything for reference. I had boxes full of photocopied articles of inscrutably dense Modernist and Postmodernist theory that I was sure I would want to reference along with my own painfully sophomoric hand-written essays that I was certain were of lasting brilliance. I also squirrelled away some delightfully bizarre bits of pop-culture and souvenirs like old rave flyers and tickets, the 'zine I put out in the 80's and whatnot. Most of it has now been relegated to the garbage, but some of was too kitschy to pitch. As time permits I will have to share some of best/worst of it here.
