Trolled

This morning I got a message from a friend saying that I'd managed to tick...well, he used another word...off someone as far away as Idaho. I wondered how that happened as my reach doesn't usually extend that far.

It turns out it came from someone at a right wing "think" tank that among other things denies climate change. I don't think the article had a lot to do with what I wrote (check here). Here goes:

In his recent op-ed, “Our words say education but our actions say something else,” Rick Wilson shows himself ignorant of reality, or else intent on ignoring it.

Wilson argues for West Virginia making college tuition free, or less costly. Mr. Wilson, there’s no such thing as a “free” education. We may make education less costly for students, but what about for the taxpayers?

Giving away free college educations to everyone is a nice sentiment, but it isn’t practical, nor will doing so provide the economic and societal gains purported. Look at our situation now: The government made it so easy to get a federal student loan, it created an artificially inflated marketplace. If students didn’t have such easy access to loans, thousands fewer would be able to attend college, and colleges would be forced to lower their prices — thus reducing the student loan debt that haunts people into old age — or else go out of business.

The ease of acquiring a student loan has also been at the expense of education quality. Because more people are able to attend college, an increasing number feel it is necessary for career success to obtain a college degree, even from a mediocre or low-quality institution. College degrees are a very expensive rite of passage these days that end up meaning very little when everyone is expected to have one. A college degree has become a money-making scheme that institutions use to siphon money from students (and taxpayers), without helping them to obtain increased knowledge, skills or training.

Teresa Mull
Education Research Fellow
The Heartland Institute
Driggs, Idaho

Uhhh gee. I guess I was totally wrong. Higher ed is stupid. I recant. On the other hand, I do have the solace of a good deed since feeding trolls is a form of Christian charity.

So I'm a troll

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Karl Marx, when overcome with an outbreak of carbuncles, found solace in writing obscene Portuguese poetry. That wasn't an option for me during my week + of zombie fever, which I devoutly hope has passed. While the Spousal Unit is fluent in that language, my knowledge of it is limited to one obscenity (anatomical in nature).

Instead, as I have mentioned before, I've found what solace I could in trying to out-troll right wing trolls lurking around the Charleston Gazette website, always a target-rich environment. In one recent article about the Affordable Care Act, a troll wrote that "government should not be in the business of deciding who lives and who dies." I wrote that I totally agreed and that these decisions should be left to corporations and the market like they are now.

Recently, the Gazette ran a thoughtful editorial about how some of our political polarization is based on deep psychological factors. Yeah, well, whatever. Here's what my troll alter-ego had to say about all that:

This is just a clever attempt to take the reader's mind off the eternal struggle between the forces of Coal, which are all good, and the forces of EPA, which are all evil all the time. Remember, in the last days, Coal will triumph over its enemies and make everyone who ever lived bow down before it, the way most WV politicians do now, for the final judgment.

If nothing else, I can rest my fever-ridden body a little easier in the knowledge that I've attempted to keep the web as a refuge of sanity and rationality.

JUST ONE LINK TODAY, about the end of the world, of course.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: THE NEXT NOTCH ABOUT ELEVATED