"Meritocracy"

I hate autocorrect, but I at least still have spellcheck with it's funny lil red lines.

Ain’t that the ducking truth.

I mean, depending on the predator it can probably divide you lengthwise. Does that count?

Humans became the dominant species on the planet because we learned how to throw rocks. That was our big innovation. Our intelligence is an entirely incidental byproduct of learning how to throw rocks.

In fact we are way more intelligent is these efficient, so these people are simply more correctly synced up to the actual intelligence that is necessary to survive.

BLUEMAGA never stops whining. Go bitch at Biden and Harris for not doing the thing Trump did before he even got in office. It was on the table for like 8 months and those monsters said “nah”.

Hear*

Toddlers murder a wild number of people.

This is exactly a toddler with a gun.

Edit for numbers:

Some might assume that toddlers and young children may not be strong enough to pull a trigger, but that is not the case, experts said. At least 895 children aged 5 and under have managed to find a gun and unintentionally shoot themselves or someone else from 2015 to 2022, according to Everytown.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/children-fire-guns-toddlers-unintentional-shootings/

Remember, children cannot purchase guns in the USA. Many also lack the hand strength to fire.

I apologize for the source.

Maybe she's both?

Corespondent

Huh, TIL. That is a very different meaning but one that makes a surprising amount of sense in this administration.

So... Concubine?
Idk if they are paid tho

I agree. Sex work should not be slandered by comparing this idiot to a sex worker.

It was probably by being racist.

A certain age range of men have a Topanga fetish. Or maybe that's just me.

There is no requirement to be tolerate the intolerant.

Holy shit I love this. 🤘

Training and approachability?

She's on Steve Bannon's podcast apparently

Thin white woman, long blonde hair, lots of eye makeup, full lips, etc. It’s not that they’re twins, it’s that they’re a similar type.

And it doesn’t matter what we think. The president is the one that wants to fuck her, lol.

White House correspondent for a fucking podcast. Look where we've arrived at.

Yep Trump new press sectary said thsy would go beyond legacy media and allow influencer and podcast in on all briefing..

I am sure it meant only the right wing Podcaster and influencers though. No left wingers will be allowed.

So this lady and whoever Joe Rogen sends etc.

I mean, all hail Discordia, but this isn't how I imagined it.

Sarcasm and parody were tools used against corrupt oppressors for centuries. The problem is, it requires education, context, and the capacity for abstract thought to process and understand. If everyone requires we put “/s” after everything, then they are just taking everything at face value without any attempt at critical thinking or reading between the lines. Which I guess is why we are where we are today.

What? You mean you don't want a Tournament Nexus?

I'm really starting to feel that way lmao

But they aren't in a position of power to change anything. Maybe if we lived in a sarcastocracy though

Yeah

Power in a state should be based on how good you are at not being sarcastic and caught saying something sarcastic should be given the death penalty

The issue is how do you "meassure" merit? How do you decide who has earned what they have and who hasn't?

If you are a conservative it's very easy, the status quo defines merit. Those who have are those who deserve because the system is working as expected. So rich people ruling is meritocracy for them.

If you are a racist/xenophobe/etc then it's also very easy, those who are in the "good" (read white in the USA) group are the ones with merit, so they are the ones that should rule.

A few years back, when college degrees where just for rich people with connections, merit was having a college degree because that proved you where educated and hard working jajajaja. Now that a lot more people can get college degrees it no longer means that for some reason jajajaja.

Etc, etc. In general, people use meritocracy to justify their own biases and the decisions they make based on those biases. The USA is of course the current poster child of this, but by no means it's exclusive to them.

The reality is that when you think about it there is no such thing as merit in the general sense. For example, I get paid well by working as a programmer. And I'm the first one to say that I'm very good at it and deserve my pay. Yet, if my toilet is broken I need to call a plumber and defer to them. So, who says I deserve to earn more than a plumber? I do say so because it greatly benefits me of course jajajaja. But if push come to shove I would absolutely prefer to have a society without programmers than a society without plumbers. So who has more merit?

The simple truth is that we are all valuable in our own context and we should try to build a society where we all can participate and contribute as needed. Ideas like meritocracy are used by right wing people to justify the existence of hierarchies and social classes. If there are better people (with more merit) then of course they should be in charge and everyone else must obey. But the more you dig into the idea, the less it makes sense. Meritocracy is just a very easy trap to fall into because it's the kind of idea that sounds good to people until you really think about it, but in practice it's just a useless idea if you want to make rational decisions.

Seems like its self described well.

In theory. But in practice what you're describing tends to be the licensure of corruption. Rather than paying off a guy for a no-show job, you pay a school for a degree to show the guy (getting kickbacks from the school) that gives you the no-show job.

Great example of this was Bob Jones, Liberty, and the assorted christian conservative schools injecting whole graduating classes into the '00s Bush Administration.

When your "meritocratic" institution really starts to pay off is when it looks more and more like an MLM. The modern Ivy League/Federalist Society-based judicial system looks a lot like this. You need to be a member of a school who joined a club to get access to the clerkship that qualifies you to join a firm that will fast-track you into the appellate judiciary. So these "elite" institutions get swarmed with applicants, and now you need to go to a particular prep school or join a certain social group to get into the school/club. Now those schools/groups get flooded. So you need to join a partisan organization or work your way into a country club hierarchy to get access to the prep school / social group, and they start assigning ranks for members and fees to climb the ranks.

Now "meritocracy" is just a massive web of patronage, with access to the inner layer predicated on outclassing all your peers in the outer layer. Whole industries exist to prove "merit" either through cheating explicitly (straight up buying accreditation) or implicitly (paying for study guides that contain the exact questions to be asked) and get you special access to the people doing manual selection of applicants. Its almost exclusively pay-to-play and a lot of it is scams.

It is worth understanding why it was considered satirical.

Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" is relatively new. It was first used pejoratively by sociologist Alan Fox in 1956, and then by British politician and sociologist Michael Dunlop Young in his 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy.Young's essay pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else, being the combination of the root of Latin origin "merit" (from "mereō" meaning "earn") and the Ancient Greek suffix "-cracy" (meaning "power", "rule"). The purely Greek word is axiocracy (αξιοκρατία), from axios (αξιος, worthy) + "-cracy" (-κρατία, power).

In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group. The essay, written in the first person by a fictional historical narrator in 2034, interweaves history from the politics of pre- and post-war Britain with those of fictional future events in the short (1960 onward) and long term (2020 onward).

The essay was based upon the tendency of the then-current governments, in their striving toward intelligence, to ignore shortcomings and upon the failure of education systems to utilize correctly the gifted and talented members within their societies.

Young's fictional narrator explains that, on the one hand, the greatest contributor to society is not the "stolid mass" or majority, but the "creative minority" or members of the "restless elite". On the other hand, he claims that there are casualties of progress whose influence is underestimated and that, from such stolid adherence to natural science and intelligence, arises arrogance and complacency. This problem is encapsulated in the phrase "Every selection of one is a rejection of many".

It was also used by Hannah Arendt in her essay "Crisis in Education", which was written in 1958 and refers to the use of meritocracy in the English educational system. She too uses the term pejoratively. It was not until 1972 that Daniel Bell used the term positively. M. Young's formula to describe meritocracy is: m = IQ + E. The formula of L. Ieva instead is: m = f (IQ, Cut, ex) + E. That is, for Young, meritocracy is the sum of intelligence and energy; while, for Ieva it is represented by the function between intelligence, culture and experience, to which energy is then added.

Absolutely. Words change, and it's not an unhelpful term, but we already had a word for 'ruled by the best', aristocracy. Over time it became very apparent that aristocracies did not promote leaders who were objectively 'best' or often even 'adequate', so it began to mean a small group of privileged people who used their power to keep that privilege for themselves and their peers.

So although meritocracy started as a joke, it could be used sincerely. But unless it's pretty clear how 'merit' is assessed its hard to take it more seriously.

I get that it feels cool when you think about it, but it falls off shortly after, same as Communism :P

As soon as the same rules they want to apply to everybody else are applied to Fascists, they're immediately convinced they're victims.

So yeah, as soon as the pretty little Fascist ends up treated as a pussy-with-legs with no upsides for herself (so, not a trade but a taking by people with more power than she has) even though she's ben part of making sure that legally there is no such thing as sexual harassment, she'll feel like a victim.

Why not?

Well I would ask what they've done in addition to being a Major. Just in case it's something that qualifies them to run an organization with over a million people and a budget that's nearly a trillion dollars. You know like being a news reporter for a biased organization. (Ugh)

Good one