AntiDem

Most people don’t know the story of how the Salem Witch Trials ended (and I mean in reality, not the Marxist/Arthur Miller version of the story). It’s a bit of history worth learning about.

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Salem is now a suburb of greater Boston, but in those days, villages were isolated and news took weeks to travel between places that were only a few miles apart. When rumors started to spread that the people in Salem were killing their own wives for being witches, the reaction was slow because, first, nobody really knew how true the rumors were, and second, because Salem had a reputation as a town full of fundamentalist nutters anyway, and thus everyone outside of Salem figured that even if it was true, it was the fools out in Salem’s problem, not theirs.

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The tipping point came when the witch hunters, having run out of people to accuse in their own town, decided to expand. They made an accusation against the wife of the minister of the town of Beverly, a few miles away. The minister of Beverly, however, was old friends with the Royal Governor down in Boston. The minister wrote a letter to the Governor, and the Governor wrote a letter to Salem, explaining that the trials would stop – NOW – or he would personally march up to Salem with a few hundred redcoats and put a stop to them with extreme prejudice. It was all fun and games while a town notoriously full of crazies were killing their own, but once they decided to ensnare normal, decent folk in their web of madness, enough was enough. Upon receipt of the letter, the trials promptly stopped.

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That is how to put an end to an out-of-control holiness spiral.

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Yeah, I saw it.

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Let me state for the record that on the occasions when I've visited the Steves family, I saw nothing that set off any alarm bells for possible domestic abuse. But the fact that I now have to say that at all is indicative of a serious messaging problem with Official NRx. It's one thing to be skeptical of feminism and womens' suffrage, or even to believe that husbands are the rightful head of a family. It's quite another to publicly advocate wifebeating. One of the most troubling aspects of Official NRx's slide into the abyss has been the development of a creepy contempt for women that is offputting enough in and of itself, but combined with its extreme emphasis on a bizarre and immature vision of male bonding, comes off reeking of repressed homosexuality that manifests itself as self-loathing projected outward into a violent hatred of the female sex.

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That both looks bad, and is bad. What exact sort of person do they think that public advocacy of wifebeating and heavy drinking is going to attract into their cabal? They already know what sort of people it drives away, which includes me.

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First, why go to college at all? (I'm not sure what you mean by the "waifu" thing, so we'll put that aside for the moment.) Unless you're going into a STEM field (including medicine), business, or want to be a teacher of some kind, you're better off skipping it or, at most, going to a two-year junior college and getting an AA.

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Second, even if you decide to go, save yourself a ton of money and aggravation and do the junior college thing anyway. They're a cheap and less ideological way to get all your general education requirements out of the way. Select yours wisely - some are better than others. Here in the SF Bay Area, a place like DeAnza College (Steve Wozniak's alma mater) has a lot of cachet, and there's no problem transferring from there even into a place like Berkeley or UCLA.

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Finally, if you do go off to college, treat it like a job, not a lifestyle. Live off-campus (and most definitely not in a dorm) in cheap-but-not-ghettoish digs like a rented room in somebody's house. Commute to campus - go there for classes and nothing else (any decent university will have an online research portal with access to JSTOR and other databases, making actually physically going to the library pointless). Especially in your major department, get to know the professors you like (or at least, can stand), and take as many classes with that select few as you can. be friendly, but put a little distance between yourself and your fellow students. You're there for a purpose, not for a party.

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Live cheap and take out as few loans as you can. Forget a car - walk or buy a bus pass. Get a Costco membership, buy nonperishables in bulk, and store them in your closet. Get used to the taste of instant ramen. Splurge on a VPN, for two reasons: to pirate the shit out of movies and TV shows instead of paying for cable, and for opsec when posting anything rightist. Take a part-time job - if you can't find one anyplace else, there will usually be some available on campus.

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In short, keep to yourself, stay out of trouble, and live responsibly. Oh, and really, don't go at all unless you have to - by which I mean unless you know how your degree is going to pay itself back by adding value to your bottom line career-wise.

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From biotech, sure. As for digital/computer technology, the Great Digital Revolution of 1975-2010 is a few years in the rearview mirror now, and the whole thing is pretty much played out. In fact, the constant cry for "MOAR INNOVATION!!" is now just bringing us change-for-change's-sake disasters like Windows 8 and taking the headphone jack out of iPhones. The list of tech products I use - both hardware and software - that have actually gotten worse in the last few years due to needless "innovation" is slowly growing larger.

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All I need is a decent smartphone, a basic laptop to write my blog posts and edit my podcasts on, and maybe an e-reader. Home automation? No thanks - I can flip a light switch on myself. Amazon Echo? I'd rather not have Bezos (which sounds like the name of some kind of evil robotic overlord - and actually kinda is) listening in on every word I say in my own home. Drones? Great - now your creepy neighbor can peep through your teenage daughter's window without having to go through the bother of climbing on a tree branch with a pair of binoculars to do it in person.

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So, no, really, I'd say not.

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