"Having met a large number of history and philosophy majors, I can tell you that they are no more politically and/or civically informed or capable than the average engineering or physics major."

Having taught both, I can confidently assure you that this is bollocks. Take a couple of A grade students. One in engineering and one in philosophy. Watch the engineer rip the philosopher to shreds in discussions about engineering, and then watch the philosophy student humiliate the engineer in an ethical argument.

That's just the way specialization works.

Now if we're talking about "C" students, it will be a different story, due to the decline of pass standards in the humanities (something which is deplorable).

I don't think you get what I am saying because you have a narrow view of what counts as a burden on society. Sure, someone who spends their life drinking away welfare checks when they could be working is a drain, but so is someone who can't or won't subject the decisions of our political masters to rational evaluation. By voting, such people lead to suboptimal political outcomes. That's one reason that compulsory civics education is so important. We also need a significant number of people with degrees like philosophy and history spread throughout society. It's like seeding our society with a bunch of people like Socrates.

To be fair, we also need to reform education in the humanities. It has become rather soft and lax for cultural reasons and needs to be returned to the hardass standards of yore. It is still like this in some places (Classics departments for example).

"We've elevated the office job and made skilled trades a thing of contempt."

I agree absolutely. I think it is disgraceful that people hold trades in contempt. There is nothing degrading about being a plumber or an electrician.

I take it that you didn't notice you were living in a democracy. Degrees like history or philosophy that have no direct application to employment (although the skills developed in doing such a degree have a general application) are exactly the sort of degrees that engender an informed and capable citizenry capable of properly holding its representatives to account. A citizenry incapable of evaluating arguments and ignorant of history is more easily duped.

It has long been a dream of fascists to eliminate such forms of education for precisely that reason.

And before anyone starts, you should already have noticed that the same phenomenon occurs with science degrees. Some of those who think science degrees are great as long as science graduates are making useful widgets tend to get very agitated when science graduates start using their education to hold policy makers to account (climate change is an obvious example, as is teaching evolution in schools).

Beware those who say that all education must be "useful". They often have a hidden agenda.

Your argument doesn't follow. Free will might well be an illusion, but that doesn't mean we should stop locking up criminals or cracking down on fraud or that the actions of such people would stop making the lives of others worse.

It depends what you mean by "the rules". If you want to be a really successful criminal, it almost always means joining or founding some form of organized crime (and before people start, I'm including being elected to political office). Organized crime is simply a replacement trust network for society at large, and while they break society's rules, they don't break their own very often, since the penalty for doing so is usually far worse than anything society metes out.

In order to live almost any kind of life that could be called a "success" you have to form and sustain trust networks with others. It's just unavoidable.

Sometimes you can get away with breaking the rules, but this is quite uncommon. The only reason we don't think this is so is that we are so used to following the rules that we don't tend to notice when we're doing it.

There's also an unexamined assumption here (yet another example of Christianity's baleful influence on our culture) that people can actually choose to be good or bad. I'm not sure that this is the case for most people. Good people tend to be pained, shamed and distressed if they do bad things, so for such people there really isn't much of a sense in which they'd be "better off" breaking moral rules. Bad folks don't seem to care, so that's not a problem for them. Given that by the time most of us are old enough to ponder it, our moral characters are already formed, the idea of a "choice" is somewhat senseless. Ask yourself how many people you know who have radically altered their moral character. All such cases I know have involved some traumatic event, like going to jail, being the victim of a terrible crime, or some sort of head injury.

WoW also has a fairly large black market in the presence of illegal gold sellers.

If anything, the economics of MMOs are far less interesting than the socio-political aspects of the game. WoW is more or less set up to maximize character freedom. The police (GMs) are relatively ineffective, and apart from a few obvious things you aren't allowed to do, like call other players faggots in public chat, most anti-social behaviour is in practice insufficiently policed or not policed at all. I'm talking about things all the way from ninja looting and node stealing up to the use of illegal hacks (like the underground mining hack, for example). The small percentage of outright asshats on any server seem to be sufficient to prevent a general climate of trust from forming (even though most people are nice, and helpful).

The guild system is the only way where people can build decent trust networks, and these of course require human leadership. Even then, a good guild (meaning a guild with reasonable leadership and adequate policing) is hard to find and it can't get too large before it's too big to serve that function. But Azeroth as a whole suffers from severe social dysfunction.

I guess it just shows to go that any social environment would work just fine if only a way could be found to get rid of the 10% who are hell bent on exploitation, cheating, griefing and bending the rules to suit themselves (and these are the people who howl loudest at any attempt to fix things). WoW's economy suffers from many honest players having a disincentive to enter the market, because people who hack and cheat have an illegal competitive advantage. It's really no different from the real free market or the real world in that respect (a friend of mine who is a cop pointed out that the people who barely stay within the letter of the law are often as much of a social nuisance as genuine criminals - knowing some people I've seen in business, I am not surprised).

I think WoW stands as a living counterexample to all those who desire a lightly policed social system based entirely on consent.

Whatever one thinks of Chavez, your post is seriously misleading.

1. "OK for the dictatorial head of a murderous socialist regimes to name himself president for life."

(a) It's a strange dictator who wins by free and fair elections, multiple times.

(b) Who has he had killed?

(c) I know he calls himself a socialist, but he's more of a New Dealer.

(d) In what universe is changing the law so that you can run for election any number of times the same as making yourself president for life? Not everyone thinks term limits are a good idea. The US did not used to have them.

2. "shut down not-propogandizing-for-him media, "disappear" elected officials that disagree with him"

(a) If a major US television station had (i) collaborated in the (unconstitutional) attempted military overthrow of the United States government, and (ii) consistently referred to Obama as "the nigger" on air, do you think that such a station would be allowed to continue to broadcast? I have a bridge for sale if you think so.

(b) What credible reports are there of Chavez having people offed? I haven't seen any.

If you don't like the guy, then fine. There's no need to make shit up.

"When was the last time you saw two armies face each other across a field in two long lines and start firing at each other?"

The Democratic caucus factions have been doing that for the last 30 years.

If the F22 didn't appear to have all the hallmarks of a lemon, there would be no problem.

The US had it right in the 50s and 60s by not putting all its eggs in one basket, so if some of the aircraft turn out to suck, at least you have something else to fall back on. The F22 is a monumental gamble, and all we get from Lockheed is talk and more talk.

"Oooh oohhh Laaady looks like a dude..."

Nah, just doesn't have the same ring to it.

No. The answer to 9/11 was to do what the Israelis did in the case of Munich. Clandestine hunting down of those responsible to capture or kill them.

If that involved putting small assassination teams into Afghanistan, then the Aussies, Kiwis and Brits were always happy to lend out the SAS, the world's finest special forces, to do it.

The election is a farce, as is the Afghan government, which relies on the support of a federation of armed tribal gangs. Another fake election just like the South Vietnamese ones, held mostly to make our moron governments look good. The BBC in particular is pushing this line of bullshit, for which its members deserve to be abandoned in Afghanistan for the amusement of the locals.

Osama and his friends are long gone to Pakistan, it seems, and so the "coalition of the idiots" is now stuck in a country where every single attempt at military imposition of a government has failed, and where the largest ethnic group is more or less excluded from power (apart from Karzai, who is a puppet). The Afghans should be left to their own uncivilized devices, but that would be to admit failure (which is inevitable).

The story is that stabilizing Afghanistan is supposed to stop the terrorists from attacking us. What a pity they've all fucked off to a completely different country then. But since that's the only excuse our glorious leaders have got, we'll just have to keep hearing the same old crap, and it will go on and on until the coalition is forced to withdraw and the terrorists will have achieved their aim of doing to the West what they did to the Soviets.

Amen brother!!

"And with that, Westerner's prior dreams of humanity being led by Western cultures, with their focus on individual freedoms, (as seen in shows like Star Trek) will be dead."

At least there won't be a fucking McDonalds on the moon.