There’s something profoundly perverse about the outcomes from intense competition for schooling. The striving terminally suffocates high-variance activities and their practitioners.

If you want a really great school you need to somehow simultaneously a) have the most desirable thing going, b) it not be especially appealing to the strivers, and c) select for the classically educated and well bred at the expense of the abominable mandarins.

I’ve no idea how to do this in the modern world, but I’d give my entire net worth to attend Dartmouth in 1956.

Alternatively, it’s just Musk’s answer to the Sea Org.

I’m not as comprehensively down on turn of the last century radicals as some folks. I’m with Chesterton and others in defending the ordered civilization and condemning the radicals’ worldviews, as I have been in comparable situations all my life and still am.

But one needs to keep in mind that sooner or later anyone might find themselves alienated from dominant values. Or under foreign occupation, or some mix of the two.

For that matter, those of us quite satisfied with the development of Western Civ up to a quite recent date might not find their earlier era all that hunky dory if we were transported back there. Where you stand depends on where you sit. [Graham Allison, in a different context.]

I cited Battlestar Galactica in another thread. There was also that sequence where they had settled a crappy little planet and called it New Caprica, and came under Cylon occupation. Naturally, some collaborated to make it work and some became freedom fighters/terrorists under Colonel Tigh.

Tigh eventually decided to use suicide bombers. This was intended to and did provoke debate in circa 2004 America, at least the Newsweek/Time America, about how Americans were being confronted with the “complexity” of the Iraq war by being made to sympathize with suicide bombing.

My main reaction was that suicide bombing is a hell of a thing to take up when your species has been thrown to the demographic wall and has only a few tens of thousands of sacks of DNA walking around. That’s a moral dilemma even if the bombers are volunteers. Even blowing up the humans willing to be slaves to robots partakes of that same dilemma. Blowing up robots themselves, meh.

Some SF fans are just desperate to find moral dilemmas and glom on to the most conventional interpretations of one they can find.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcqrGANcaIQ Drax’s master plan. Sound level is low.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEhcTnoa1xA Drax’s one, true, immortal moment- the greatest Bond villain dismissive remark ever made: “James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.”

My fave car bomb scene begins at 1:39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuRBU8UVhDU

So many, many things wrong with the film version of The Sum of All Fears, and all the worse in retrospect, but this sequence is poetic. Plus, Nessun Dorma. I plan to use it as my own revenge music someday.