Having done both professional and trade work, I can say neither is a panacea. The crowd that recommends trades for young men is right in that there are too many professional credentialed people chasing too few professional jobs, and the reverse is somewhat true in the trades, but aside from that the pay in the trades is really not that great, and it takes an enormous toll on your body over time, not including the drug and alcohol problems a lot of guys fall into either because of physical ailments, depression, or frankly just being broke all the time.
If you’re a reasonably intelligent person with a passion for working with your hands, and are good with people, you can make a go at becoming a contractor and do quite well for yourself. But absent that it’s like anything - there are no free lunches and you have to hustle.
If you’re introverted, not physically very capable, and are actually quite intelligent, you have no business in the trades, full stop. Most of the people doing that type of work are generally on the opposite end of those spectra, and you simply won’t fit in, will suck at it, and if you don’t injure yourself will run a high risk of getting fired. Stick to what you’re good at, and if it’s knowledge work, focus on being the best knowledge worker you can be.
We're talking about young men who are able to become doctors and lawyers becoming construction workers instead. Without the brainwashing med-school, and adding the hands-on, practical training of a worksite, that particular man could be running things inside of 10 years. His competence in that field could make him plenty wealthy before losing his back and knees to the lower-level jobs.
If he labors for more than 2 years, and isn't running the place before 10 years, then he wasn't going to be a good physician.
Suicide is for the weak, and anybody who thinks they should be above than where they are at, needs to stop lying to themselves. Everybody is right where they are allowing themselves to be.
I'm curious how our hypothetical construction worker is going to end up running the place in 10 years. Owning a construction company requires capital - tools, trucks, heavy equipment, working cash to pay your men's wages, insurance bonds, etc - yet construction workers (and proletarians in general) don't earn enough money to accumulate significant capital. Regulation, and the inevitable corruption that goes along with it, adds a further hurdle.
Perhaps our construction worker, having been denied medical school, will turn his talents to bank robbery? I suppose that's one way he could get the capital..
To make money in the trades you'd need about five vans (that you own) going out every morning. Running that serious of a small business doesn't strike me as being that much less mentally demanding of a task than being a country lawyer with a few associates, and in both cases, there is "unfixable, unfair competition incoming" - i.e., AI for lawyers and *unlimited low skilled immigration* for trades.
The guy I talked to who laid tile was the exception to the rule. He was a former quarterback at Wisconsin, an absolute unit of a human being. He was making unbelievable money running his own company, drove a brand new truck etc. But his body was starting to fall apart already. He should have saved the money and just retired at 32.
> If the institutions are going to be changed, it is going to come from without, not from within.
While difficult, there is some flexibility in smaller, private practices where it's difficult for bureaucrats with the eye of Sauron to trace every little action you do. My private-practice doctor, for instance, knows the thing to do, and comes up with creative doctor's notes and medical codes to get the proper paperwork to care for her patients. The paper trail looks perfectly fine, and she can use her judgement most of the time.
In Education I know several people who left schools to become pretty much mercenary tutors. The best part is some of them are funded either directly or indirectly through education dollars, and are given far more flexibility and autonomy.
In Law this is probably the most difficult, so good luck with that unless you want to create an alternative court system (this is coming though, btw).
Great article and all true - with one caveat: Licenses. In order to work in the trades (or start your own business in one) you need a license. The Left has a bureaucratic death-grip on that entire process and will begin the practice of only issuing said licenses/permits/certifications to its allies very soon (competence be damned). This will lead to a black market for qualified tradesmen and then caveat emptor. "When men who produce need permission to produce from men who produce nothing, your civilization is doomed."
No argument on the state of the professions, something I can confirm from personal experience in the academy.
Lately however I've become less certain the trades are a safe harbor. A few years ago I was advising young people to head in that direction. The advent of AI has made me less certain. I suspect before long we'll see heads-up displays that can lead relatively unskilled workers through the steps of a wide array of projects. They won't be anywhere near as effective as a skilled tradesman, but they'll be a lot cheaper. Given the current shortage in the trades, an alternative which is 50% as good but 25% the cost and 5000% the availability could rapidly make the trades untenable as a middle class vocation.
Im a highschool drop out with a 140 IQ. I would totally recommend the trades to almost anyone.
After only seven yrs I found a job making 35/hr plus bonuses. I get treated like gold and get to travel. Oh, a job in Colorado Springs in Autumn, yes pls.
Some of my Jobs I can make over 45/hr, thats well over 50/hr on overtime.
My boy will join the trades 9 months from now, and with a lil nepotism he will be making 42/hr his first job.
Btw I dropped out of highschool as a very early adopter of "the system sucks" idea.
As a drop out I make more than any of my friends who went to college.
I also have plenty of time to study whatever I want. Been doing a 5yr deep dive on Gnosis, I love the time I have and that my mind is mine.
An issue near and dear to me, particularly regarding the law.
The basic argument against it is that if the profession of Law becomes (in the next 10-20 years - as one would expect it to) functionally devoid of right-leaning attorneys, rightists are fucked. We are already fucked of course, but 0% rightists would be WORSE, if such a thing is possible, than where we are now. It would entail entering the "lawyers authoring memos on why it's legal to genocide white people" level of collapse. You can say we're already there - I don't agree. However criminally bankrupt the profession is, you are still able to mount a defense even if your client is going to get 20 years from a lunatic Ellis Island judge who donated to Hillary. Even if it's a show trial, a comical abuse of what would be considered legal norms even 30 years ago, there is still a trial. When the law is 100% lib, one wonders what necessity there will be for trials to even take place?
The authors argument - "I repeat: If you're a right-winger within these systems, you can make marginal, almost accidental improvements" is correct.
But what would you tell a guy who can't get a lawyer? Trump himself, due to his political radioactivity, routinely has to dumpster-dive for attorneys I *myself* (not rich) would not stoop to hire.
Former Trump Whitehouse Lawyer Pat Cipollone more or less betrayed Trump at Trump's critical hour (https://www.deepcapture.com/2021/02/how-djt-lost-the-white-house-chapter-3-crashing-the-white-house-december-18/ ) - my guess is that Cipollone saw the writing on the wall, and with ~10 kids he knows he needs to keep making a living to feed and educate those kids. After his work for the Trump Whitehouse, Cipollone was forced out of his former firm (where he was a named partner), to avoid alienating the firm's liberal corporate clients.
Arguments abound in both directions here:
-Law work will inevitably be a painful, often stultifying slog through arcana after which the administrative-diversity state will simply steamroll you or your client. (nature of the game to some extent)
-But this absolutely infuriating pointless slog would offer an attorney a chance to defend people with legitimate claims whose claims would otherwise go unrepresented, and who would get red-teamed by their own court-appointed attorney.
So a question remains: what would you advise a person who needs an attorney and needs that attorney to be right-leaning to do? "Simply don't commit crime" is sage advice - but as the liberal anti-white ideology metastasizes, mere white gentile existence is soon to become a criminal act. Lawyers are the last line of defense against that.
The best thing decent Americans could do right now is walk away from an education system that has so degraded itself, you could make a reasonable argument it represents a threat to national security.
We need to de-unionize K-12 wherever possible, or provide alternatives, such as "pods" and home schooling. At the college level, decent American parents and students should boycott them. Alumni should stop donating. State legislatures should halt all funding, and get out of the student loan business altogether. CEOs and other business operations should drop all requirements for a college degree from as many job openings as possible.
We have tolerated the education establishment's overt contempt for America long enough. The recent outbursts of rank anti-semitism is further proof the rot is incurable, in all its Marxist-based degeneracy. And either we choose "enough is enough," or we may ultimately see "never again" tossed on the ash heap of history
In Germany 60% learn practical skills, usually machinist or manufacturing- they’re called Professions. Until the Left and the Ukrainian war wrecked their economy, Germany was prosperous.
As for our Professions who has indicted and condemned law more than the author?
We have the rule of men, the rule of lawyers... it’s chaos.
We need a different breed to rule, and we’ll get it.
Interesting angle to this question. In my case, growing up in industrial America, with my father, uncles, and grandfather all tradesmen (machinists, tool and die makers, boilermakers, iron and steel workers), I simultaneously worked nights in a tool and die shop while going to university studying the Classics. So I became a journeyman machinist and also tool and die maker, while pursuing my BA and Masters in philosophy. I seriously considered staying in manufacturing and found myself being recruited for management positions in large manufacturing companies like GE. But I was searching for a way to apply whatever knowledge I had absorbed from my phenomenal professors, and got an almost perfect LSAT score, so law was where I went. Having done so, I will say that I have operated on the margins and periphery of conventional law practice, spending my time in emphatically non-litigation work, counseling engineers and scientists in creating and building companies, obtaining patent and other IP protections, and from time to time moving over to the management side to become CEO, CFO or even salesperson, for our companies. Having said all this, I do not encourage people to become lawyers at this juncture because with the exception of a few patent attorneys I know, all the lawyers I know are seriously unhappy, pretty depressed, and would trade their lives for almost anything else if they could afford to do so. My belief is that you have to determine your own best fit. There are plenty of cerebral and creative tradesmen in fields like machinist, tool and die, and even diesel mechanics. And there are plenty of non-cerebral lawyers and doctors. Make you choice and execute.
It may be a largely a moot point: Young white men from the middle classes and below are in the last few years increasingly excluded from higher education.
That being the case, one is well advised to learn Chinese at the same time one learns a trade.
I’m doing mostly Lsat Tutoring these days - the admittance dance between the schools and the students seems questionable in many cases, and the LSAC board itself seems to be floundering. Interesting times.
This advice also increasingly applies to the sciences, though there is still room to make outside contributions, which are (amazingly!) often best from those not in the system.
I remember Patrick Brimelow talking about the cursus honorum for the elite of his time. "I went into History, just to have the basics of an intellectual formation, and then it was either law or economics to actually have something to earn money from"
As a movement, we need Pat Brimelows, not Tony Hovaters -- which being the only noticeable figure in the US who is actually working class says everything you need to know, really. Encouraging the cadre of a political movement to pursue a trade is paradoxical. Society is built by intellectuals, not workers.
I'm in the engineering profession and work closely with the trades. Whereas I can calculate load points, the practical application of knowledge resides with the trades men and women themselves. Like many engineers, I would fail miserably if called on to build a house myself. The income a papered journeyman pulls in is comparable to the average engineer and their work is consistently in demand. AI can replace an engineer because we 'know'. It can't replace a trades man or woman because they 'do'.
The article correctly identifies the plight of the future of conservatives, both men and women (I think the plight of conservative blacks could be even worse than that of whites. The vitriol of leftists toward conservative people of color is remarkable.)
What is missing from the article, and the subsequent comments, is a reasonable response. To that point I would opine. It is not reasonable to think that an amoral society is capable of self governance. History says it hasn't happened. The founding fathers said it couldn't happen, and America today is living proof that it cannot happen. As long as the failed, union run public education system teaches the philosophy of evolution, that we are nothing more that articulate apes, then we shouldn't be surprised when we see people act like apes. The sad part is that scientists who are at the pinnacle of the evolution debate know full well that evolution only lives in the social sciences department, and has never followed traditional scientific protocol. When America takes back the public education system, (bans government unions) and teach our children that they are valued and valuable, we will be on our way ro restoring the republic.
Having done both professional and trade work, I can say neither is a panacea. The crowd that recommends trades for young men is right in that there are too many professional credentialed people chasing too few professional jobs, and the reverse is somewhat true in the trades, but aside from that the pay in the trades is really not that great, and it takes an enormous toll on your body over time, not including the drug and alcohol problems a lot of guys fall into either because of physical ailments, depression, or frankly just being broke all the time.
If you’re a reasonably intelligent person with a passion for working with your hands, and are good with people, you can make a go at becoming a contractor and do quite well for yourself. But absent that it’s like anything - there are no free lunches and you have to hustle.
If you’re introverted, not physically very capable, and are actually quite intelligent, you have no business in the trades, full stop. Most of the people doing that type of work are generally on the opposite end of those spectra, and you simply won’t fit in, will suck at it, and if you don’t injure yourself will run a high risk of getting fired. Stick to what you’re good at, and if it’s knowledge work, focus on being the best knowledge worker you can be.
We're talking about young men who are able to become doctors and lawyers becoming construction workers instead. Without the brainwashing med-school, and adding the hands-on, practical training of a worksite, that particular man could be running things inside of 10 years. His competence in that field could make him plenty wealthy before losing his back and knees to the lower-level jobs.
A man with the potential to be a physician, forced to become a construction laborer, sounds like a recipe for suicide more than success.
If he labors for more than 2 years, and isn't running the place before 10 years, then he wasn't going to be a good physician.
Suicide is for the weak, and anybody who thinks they should be above than where they are at, needs to stop lying to themselves. Everybody is right where they are allowing themselves to be.
I'm curious how our hypothetical construction worker is going to end up running the place in 10 years. Owning a construction company requires capital - tools, trucks, heavy equipment, working cash to pay your men's wages, insurance bonds, etc - yet construction workers (and proletarians in general) don't earn enough money to accumulate significant capital. Regulation, and the inevitable corruption that goes along with it, adds a further hurdle.
Perhaps our construction worker, having been denied medical school, will turn his talents to bank robbery? I suppose that's one way he could get the capital..
No, not owning the company: running the place or job/project. I'm talking about becoming a PM for a construction company.
That's how you get big paychecks with zero capital required.
That's not hypothetical.
Whatever, guy.
I'm not missing anything.
You are just making a different point about positions of power.
I was making the argument that a potential doctor could do well in many industries.
As an accelerationist, I don't really care about ourguys being lawyers.
I have another point against going into the trades: https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2022/02/23/career-advice-slash-rant-for-young-people-interested-in-trades/
tl;dr- It's a trap unless you go in with a plan and your eyes open to the unseemly parts of the trades. Most tradesmen are broken men.
To make money in the trades you'd need about five vans (that you own) going out every morning. Running that serious of a small business doesn't strike me as being that much less mentally demanding of a task than being a country lawyer with a few associates, and in both cases, there is "unfixable, unfair competition incoming" - i.e., AI for lawyers and *unlimited low skilled immigration* for trades.
Only idiots have to lay tile for 10 years.
Those guys aren't fit for much else.
The guy I talked to who laid tile was the exception to the rule. He was a former quarterback at Wisconsin, an absolute unit of a human being. He was making unbelievable money running his own company, drove a brand new truck etc. But his body was starting to fall apart already. He should have saved the money and just retired at 32.
> If the institutions are going to be changed, it is going to come from without, not from within.
While difficult, there is some flexibility in smaller, private practices where it's difficult for bureaucrats with the eye of Sauron to trace every little action you do. My private-practice doctor, for instance, knows the thing to do, and comes up with creative doctor's notes and medical codes to get the proper paperwork to care for her patients. The paper trail looks perfectly fine, and she can use her judgement most of the time.
In Education I know several people who left schools to become pretty much mercenary tutors. The best part is some of them are funded either directly or indirectly through education dollars, and are given far more flexibility and autonomy.
In Law this is probably the most difficult, so good luck with that unless you want to create an alternative court system (this is coming though, btw).
Great article and all true - with one caveat: Licenses. In order to work in the trades (or start your own business in one) you need a license. The Left has a bureaucratic death-grip on that entire process and will begin the practice of only issuing said licenses/permits/certifications to its allies very soon (competence be damned). This will lead to a black market for qualified tradesmen and then caveat emptor. "When men who produce need permission to produce from men who produce nothing, your civilization is doomed."
No argument on the state of the professions, something I can confirm from personal experience in the academy.
Lately however I've become less certain the trades are a safe harbor. A few years ago I was advising young people to head in that direction. The advent of AI has made me less certain. I suspect before long we'll see heads-up displays that can lead relatively unskilled workers through the steps of a wide array of projects. They won't be anywhere near as effective as a skilled tradesman, but they'll be a lot cheaper. Given the current shortage in the trades, an alternative which is 50% as good but 25% the cost and 5000% the availability could rapidly make the trades untenable as a middle class vocation.
Unlimited immigration + ai is likely one of the component parts in total servitude and total white annihilation
Since we can't stop the former in the short term and can't stop the latter at all, there is no alternative but adaptation.
I see alot of anti-trade sentiment lately.
Im a highschool drop out with a 140 IQ. I would totally recommend the trades to almost anyone.
After only seven yrs I found a job making 35/hr plus bonuses. I get treated like gold and get to travel. Oh, a job in Colorado Springs in Autumn, yes pls.
Some of my Jobs I can make over 45/hr, thats well over 50/hr on overtime.
My boy will join the trades 9 months from now, and with a lil nepotism he will be making 42/hr his first job.
Btw I dropped out of highschool as a very early adopter of "the system sucks" idea.
As a drop out I make more than any of my friends who went to college.
I also have plenty of time to study whatever I want. Been doing a 5yr deep dive on Gnosis, I love the time I have and that my mind is mine.
An issue near and dear to me, particularly regarding the law.
The basic argument against it is that if the profession of Law becomes (in the next 10-20 years - as one would expect it to) functionally devoid of right-leaning attorneys, rightists are fucked. We are already fucked of course, but 0% rightists would be WORSE, if such a thing is possible, than where we are now. It would entail entering the "lawyers authoring memos on why it's legal to genocide white people" level of collapse. You can say we're already there - I don't agree. However criminally bankrupt the profession is, you are still able to mount a defense even if your client is going to get 20 years from a lunatic Ellis Island judge who donated to Hillary. Even if it's a show trial, a comical abuse of what would be considered legal norms even 30 years ago, there is still a trial. When the law is 100% lib, one wonders what necessity there will be for trials to even take place?
The authors argument - "I repeat: If you're a right-winger within these systems, you can make marginal, almost accidental improvements" is correct.
But what would you tell a guy who can't get a lawyer? Trump himself, due to his political radioactivity, routinely has to dumpster-dive for attorneys I *myself* (not rich) would not stoop to hire.
Former Trump Whitehouse Lawyer Pat Cipollone more or less betrayed Trump at Trump's critical hour (https://www.deepcapture.com/2021/02/how-djt-lost-the-white-house-chapter-3-crashing-the-white-house-december-18/ ) - my guess is that Cipollone saw the writing on the wall, and with ~10 kids he knows he needs to keep making a living to feed and educate those kids. After his work for the Trump Whitehouse, Cipollone was forced out of his former firm (where he was a named partner), to avoid alienating the firm's liberal corporate clients.
Arguments abound in both directions here:
-Law work will inevitably be a painful, often stultifying slog through arcana after which the administrative-diversity state will simply steamroll you or your client. (nature of the game to some extent)
-But this absolutely infuriating pointless slog would offer an attorney a chance to defend people with legitimate claims whose claims would otherwise go unrepresented, and who would get red-teamed by their own court-appointed attorney.
So a question remains: what would you advise a person who needs an attorney and needs that attorney to be right-leaning to do? "Simply don't commit crime" is sage advice - but as the liberal anti-white ideology metastasizes, mere white gentile existence is soon to become a criminal act. Lawyers are the last line of defense against that.
What will come of us when that defense goes down?
The best thing decent Americans could do right now is walk away from an education system that has so degraded itself, you could make a reasonable argument it represents a threat to national security.
We need to de-unionize K-12 wherever possible, or provide alternatives, such as "pods" and home schooling. At the college level, decent American parents and students should boycott them. Alumni should stop donating. State legislatures should halt all funding, and get out of the student loan business altogether. CEOs and other business operations should drop all requirements for a college degree from as many job openings as possible.
We have tolerated the education establishment's overt contempt for America long enough. The recent outbursts of rank anti-semitism is further proof the rot is incurable, in all its Marxist-based degeneracy. And either we choose "enough is enough," or we may ultimately see "never again" tossed on the ash heap of history
In Germany 60% learn practical skills, usually machinist or manufacturing- they’re called Professions. Until the Left and the Ukrainian war wrecked their economy, Germany was prosperous.
As for our Professions who has indicted and condemned law more than the author?
We have the rule of men, the rule of lawyers... it’s chaos.
We need a different breed to rule, and we’ll get it.
Interesting angle to this question. In my case, growing up in industrial America, with my father, uncles, and grandfather all tradesmen (machinists, tool and die makers, boilermakers, iron and steel workers), I simultaneously worked nights in a tool and die shop while going to university studying the Classics. So I became a journeyman machinist and also tool and die maker, while pursuing my BA and Masters in philosophy. I seriously considered staying in manufacturing and found myself being recruited for management positions in large manufacturing companies like GE. But I was searching for a way to apply whatever knowledge I had absorbed from my phenomenal professors, and got an almost perfect LSAT score, so law was where I went. Having done so, I will say that I have operated on the margins and periphery of conventional law practice, spending my time in emphatically non-litigation work, counseling engineers and scientists in creating and building companies, obtaining patent and other IP protections, and from time to time moving over to the management side to become CEO, CFO or even salesperson, for our companies. Having said all this, I do not encourage people to become lawyers at this juncture because with the exception of a few patent attorneys I know, all the lawyers I know are seriously unhappy, pretty depressed, and would trade their lives for almost anything else if they could afford to do so. My belief is that you have to determine your own best fit. There are plenty of cerebral and creative tradesmen in fields like machinist, tool and die, and even diesel mechanics. And there are plenty of non-cerebral lawyers and doctors. Make you choice and execute.
It may be a largely a moot point: Young white men from the middle classes and below are in the last few years increasingly excluded from higher education.
That being the case, one is well advised to learn Chinese at the same time one learns a trade.
I’m doing mostly Lsat Tutoring these days - the admittance dance between the schools and the students seems questionable in many cases, and the LSAC board itself seems to be floundering. Interesting times.
This advice also increasingly applies to the sciences, though there is still room to make outside contributions, which are (amazingly!) often best from those not in the system.
I remember Patrick Brimelow talking about the cursus honorum for the elite of his time. "I went into History, just to have the basics of an intellectual formation, and then it was either law or economics to actually have something to earn money from"
As a movement, we need Pat Brimelows, not Tony Hovaters -- which being the only noticeable figure in the US who is actually working class says everything you need to know, really. Encouraging the cadre of a political movement to pursue a trade is paradoxical. Society is built by intellectuals, not workers.
I'm in the engineering profession and work closely with the trades. Whereas I can calculate load points, the practical application of knowledge resides with the trades men and women themselves. Like many engineers, I would fail miserably if called on to build a house myself. The income a papered journeyman pulls in is comparable to the average engineer and their work is consistently in demand. AI can replace an engineer because we 'know'. It can't replace a trades man or woman because they 'do'.
The article correctly identifies the plight of the future of conservatives, both men and women (I think the plight of conservative blacks could be even worse than that of whites. The vitriol of leftists toward conservative people of color is remarkable.)
What is missing from the article, and the subsequent comments, is a reasonable response. To that point I would opine. It is not reasonable to think that an amoral society is capable of self governance. History says it hasn't happened. The founding fathers said it couldn't happen, and America today is living proof that it cannot happen. As long as the failed, union run public education system teaches the philosophy of evolution, that we are nothing more that articulate apes, then we shouldn't be surprised when we see people act like apes. The sad part is that scientists who are at the pinnacle of the evolution debate know full well that evolution only lives in the social sciences department, and has never followed traditional scientific protocol. When America takes back the public education system, (bans government unions) and teach our children that they are valued and valuable, we will be on our way ro restoring the republic.