Comments

3

@1,

I dunno, is it possible some people like it? I mean, isn't that Beyone' person one of the most wildly popular recording artists in the history of human civilization? Honestly, I just scroll past most things pop-music focused and manage to not get all pissed off about any of it. Have you considered giving that a shot? I'm quite certain their reporting on it isn't "disturbing as hell" regardless.

5

@1:

Speaking of irrelevant crap - what are YOU still doing here?

7

@1, C'mon , I know it's a bitch when Lawrence Welk, Mantovani, and Mitch Miller ain't at the top of the pops anymore.. Cancel your Stranger subscription.

8

@6 a lil over-the-top reaction, eh?

11

@6 @8 let's see. Ableist slurs, super condescending language, baseless attacks of a stranger's (ha, Stranger, get it?) life choices, and the suggestion that the success of a predatory for-profit education and lending system relies entirely on the financial and economic savvy of literal children rather than any of the adults perpetuating and profiting off of said system.

You don't have to take out a loan, but maybe you should smoke some weed? I think they even make literal chill pills now. Also many nations send their kids to school without all the debt to great success, so students paying off 5 or 6 figure loans is only "how it works" to the extent that it's made to work that way, cuz it certainly doesn't have to.

12

@9 not 8

13

Kinda awesome that @8 posted moments before the even far more over the top reaction came in @9. Yikes.

14

@9, @11- The kids don't get all the blame here. part of the problem is poor college advising. If kids entering the journalism department (or worse yet, English) were told the truth about what the actual job markets looked like, I wonder if there would be fewer underemployed loan recipients?

And it's not just a "predatory, for-profit educational system". Most universities here are non-profit. But it costs a shitload of money to run a college, and perhaps we don't need quite so many small liberal arts schools.

Faculty are largely encouraging kids to follow their dreams they way they did. I'm sure it's generally well-intended. However, the faculty members that are talking to said students are the .01% who actually made it & got faculty jobs, so of course they think that French Literature degree is going to get you somewhere. Students don't hear from the majority who never got to work in their chosen fields and who are now slinging fries to pay their loans off.

15

Why would the stranger & its readers care if Britney is teasing out new music? You been under a rock or stuck in a room or something.
Britney has just fought off a near 14 year control, by her twisted father & others, of her LiFe.
So yeah, her music, her creativity, is gonna be interesting to hear.

16

Seriously?

"Honestly, besides COVID and the insurrection, the news is thin this week: IDK, what do you wanna know? That Britney Spears is teasing new music? That Ann Davison fired someone? That Durkan has a few regrets?"

How about catching up on a full years worth of news about Seattle cops beating & killing folks & getting away with it because of a corrupt police accountability system? Fuck, the works already been done for you but nowhere near as important as Britney
https://hjgale.tumblr.com/post/668337923167485952/2021-articles-by-carolyn-bick-on-the-failures-of

17

Heat wave in Perth, Western Australia, gonna be 42. C. Im on the east coast, it’ll be hot but not that hot. Volcanoes, earthquakes, viruses. So much going on, one has to switch off & put Music on to get a break from it.
Not sure about that cake, Chase. Go to a bakery, French one, buy a decent cake.

18

What is with the Britney bashing? Hasn’t she had enough.
Not to take away from closer analysis of other areas of social life being needed. It’s Xmas. Hard enough to generate energy to do this celebration ritual.

19

"What is with the Britney bashing?"

That reminds us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqSTXuJeTks

21

Mr. B 26 and 9 for the win. The constant refrain from my parents was "how are you going to make money with that degree? Think reasonably!". So I became an English major and am still paying off my loans at 42.

22

@6/9:

Having just sent two stepsons through high school and having a foster child going now, I can tell you unequivocally that the level of sophisticated financial expertise you assume the average 17 or 18 year old should possess before signing over their entire future prior to college simply doesn't exist. Nobody tells them about any of the things you mention - unless they happen to have a parent who is themselves an expert in such matters or conversely is wealthy enough to not need financial assistance in the first place - and I suspect the system is designed precisely to keep them in the dark. I mean, why would a for-profit financial institution want young adults to know anything about fiscal management? Especially if it would prevent them from reaping decades of usurious interest?

25

The take that the loan crisis is the result greedy lazy weed smoking teenagers is remarkably similar to every other victim blaming moral panic the far right conjures up when they have no solutions. From climate change to police brutality. The script is remarkably similar. The least powerful absorb all the blame. It is an upside-down lazy view of how the world really works.

The fact is it was the schools who took advantage of the loans and kept hiking tuitions because... why not. And banks were more than happy to go along. They made oodles of money. Where as before with with direct federal subsidies like ones I enjoyed for my graduate degree in the 1980's there were regulations in place. My degree was esoteric and yet I graduated debt free, carved out a good income, purely out of luck of order of my birth during wiser times. The same degrees now would be six figure nd the pay scales largely unchanged since 1989.

And we happen to live in a society that needs cultural tenders, curators, researchers, and cultivators. Writers, artists, creators of all kinds, the so-called soft sciences like sociology, archeology, paleontology, the fields of history. Those fields are esoteric but absolutely necessary as they give life to a society. Unfortunately the market place tends to suppress the value of that labor for al bet a very few. And even those few have most of their value harvested by the non-creating parasites with supposed market valuable "MBA's" (which by the way are glutted and expensive digress that rarely pay off themselves).

Thee people that give color and life and innovation to human society do not deserve to automatically relegated to internal poverty and debt. While the exploiters and abusers of these monetary instruments live in abundance.

I also note with irony the same people who bemoan the dearth of cultural creativity, and the poverty of ideas in Hollywood, Music etc are the same who shriek the loudest about the uselessness liberal arts underwater basket weaving degrees, etc.

26

Ha Ha Ha
You are in debt and I am not!
Time is Money Friend
Let me spend my precious time and attention
In Spades
Trolling your column
Putting you down
Down
Down
To my level


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