We need to stop being in shock and awe at how stupid these people are and start understanding that they are our enemies. They work in direct opposition to the welfare of average Americans. They’re also stupid. But more importantly, they are our enemies, and we need to start framing it as such.
Intelligence and Cunning are two different things.
If I’m walking through the woods and I’m being stalked by a predator the fact that it cant do long division doesnt matter for shit.
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.
We’ve been doing that for years, but people just chanted “genocide” at Kamala and let this happen.
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”.
lol wut?
Don’t bother. They’re just trying to distract and redirect by telling us we should be mad at those not directly responsible instead of those directly responsible.
Like those who said we should blame Democrats when Republicans overturned Roe v Wade.
Generally speaking, ignore anyone that uses the term “BLUEMAGA”. It’s a term trending with idiots right now.
You should be mad at both, really, but when it comes to allocating effort, the present threat is the more important one. Whether or to what extent the Dems would do the same doesn’t matter anywhere as much as the things actually happening.
If by some stroke of fortune an actual progressive party should gather enough support to be more than a spoiler, then they’ll be justified to attack the Dems: “We’re what you should have been.” But outside of that, the focus should rightly be what is happening, not what should have or might have happened.
Hear hear.
Hear*
Enemies? I disagree. It’s more like watching a toddler playing with a loaded gun.
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.
I actually know someone this happened to. Dad came home and midway through changing got a call from his father in law and went to go help him, leaving his concealed carry weapon on the nightstand. Toddler son got a hold of it and killed himself. On the day before his slightly older sister’s birthday.
Kid was buried on the property, within sight of the front porch. Mom demanded that and then couldn’t handle being there so they moved in with her folks for the next couple of years, and their living room was practically a shrine to the kid.
Fuck That is a tragic story.
She didn’t get her job by knowing how to spell or read
Go on…
It was probably by being racist.
A certain age range of men have a Topanga fetish. Or maybe that’s just me.
Boy meets inevitability. She has a special place in my heart.
Same
If the US was actually a meritocracy, I’d be rich. I built my career in comp sci and UXD from nothing. I left school in 9th grade, then taught myself programming in multiple languages – BASIC then Perl, Java, C, and on to C++, C#, ObjC, JavaScript, and markup languages, – and UXD including related important fields (psychology, sociology, philosophy), and worked my way from a delivery driver to cook, to assistant mgr in retail and restaurant to manager (to make ends meet whilst learning) to programmer, to assistant lead, to PM assistant, to project manager, to designer, to lead designer at a company where I had more than 10 million users and was submitted for an Apple design award for my design.
Then I got sick with a genetic disease for which there’s no treatment or cure. Now I can no longer work and as a result, I had to leave the career I loved and had worked so hard for – and lose the health insurance that came with that. Now I am destitute, my savings are gone, and I have nothing but social security and Medicare, and Medicare is horribly broken. I can’t afford housing, and have to choose between medicine and food.
This is in the US, obviously. I have plenty more to contribute – my mind still works fine – but I can’t contribute in this system because I can’t reliably work.
I am fucked. I can’t afford to live anymore and, regardless of what I could contribute in a system that might allow me to, I am stuck doing nothing and slowly dying because this system is designed to fuck me as hard as possible.
This is not a meritocracy. If it was, I would not be in the position of choosing whether to eat or buy medicine.
e2: and we wouldn’t have a complete moron making billions by stealing the work of others (people like me) then just casting them aside like they’re nothing. Yes, I mean that absolute shitbag poser, you all know his name.
Sorry for all the edits, this pisses me off.
late e3, because changes keep being tossed around lately with an apparent near-total lack of even the scope of a single project they’re heading and executing, and that’s quite alarming in this context:
Social security and Medicare both try hard to spend as little money as possible, often under pressure from congress, and Medicare is worse. Medicare is so much worse than people think it is, I cringed every time I’d hear someone shout ‘Medicare for all!’ – especially when they’d go on to prove their notions of Medicare were vague. Congress has been beating the shit out of it whilst big money tends to its wounds for a long time. It’s nearly functionally useless by comparison to what all but the worst insurance companies and scammers do. It’s so bad, in fact, it’s just generally known that you must buy what’s called ‘gap’ insurance so they can slather their slime into the chasms left in Medicare’s wake.
Gap insurance is private insurance. People living on Social Security cannot afford gap insurance (please read my last 4 words as though spoken with the complete inability to keep the disbelief from my voice. I’ve no idea how to annotate that.)
Been on a tear lately because people are currently worshipping a moronic, childish, nepo-baby who didn’t work for what he has, didn’t invent anything, clearly didn’t learn anything except how to use other people most effectively, perhaps designed that laughable abomination of a truck… it really does boggle my mind.
e: I also wrote a scifi novel that I can’t market because I’ve been too sick. Because I’m so desperate, I’m going to mention it here – I could use a couple of reviews. Based on current reviews, it’s not bad: Blue Are the Hills by Lilly Piper on Amazon, if you’re into dystopian fiction. I’ve tried to market myself as much as I can, but it’s hard. That’s why my Lemmy icon is my face – not because I’m a boomer, but because it’s my branding.
I resonate quite a bit with this, I just had to take a demotion because of a long term medical condition renders me unable to return to office 3 days a week. I was doing a great job as a Solutions Architect, but since they feel that the role is only good in person and not over technology I had to step down to a senior developer role. Hopefully I overcome this condition but it is lifelong but can be managed, but this feels like the first gate I’ve been hit with since starting to ascend as an IT Professional. RTO is dumb, especially with potential pandemics on the horizon. My wife is complete and total disabled and barely makes it out of our room, so I’m on the hook to bring home the money to keep everything running. It is frightening times in this shit show.
I hope it works out, I hope you keep going as best a you can. I’ve been stuck in a health crisis for years and everytime I think I’m almost out I remember that recovery is for the rest of my life. I don’t know why our society discards people who desperately WANT to be of use and I saw it a lot in retail too, there’s a lot of people I kept around in the backroom working just because I can’t imagine looking at someone in a part time minimum wage dead end job and saying ‘‘This isn’t working out, please leave’’ that’s already the bottom. I’m not telling people to start living in their car.
There are certain things which are required of those who wish to serve in the Trump Administration. None of those things happen to be intelligence.
Covfefe
In her case, T&A don’t stand for talent and ability.
Training and approachability?
Left-Wing: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
Right-Wing: Deathcamps, Extermination, Invasion
She has, uh, other qualifications.
Assets bro
How do you even misspell things, when every device you have has spell check and autocorrects you?
Auto Correct causes me a lot of grief tbh
I hate autocorrect, but I at least still have spellcheck with it’s funny lil red lines.
Ain’t that the ducking truth.
She’s a core respondent. Get woke libtard.
I almost wish that hadn’t been sarcasm, only because I haven’t seen libtard in the wild in a long time. 😀
It’s written right there on the tag: “Escort”
Hardly. Escorts charge by the hour. She’s salary.
So… Concubine?
Idk if they are paid tho
Can we not accuse people of being whores just because we dislike their politics?
I agree. Sex work should not be slandered by comparing this idiot to a sex worker.
That’s also likely true I just don’t like accusing someone of being a whore because they are a fascist.
Escorts don’t have to be whores now. But I think the idea that her sex appeal directly influenced her hiring definitely has merit. Could it be worded better? Sure, but it’s obviously not meant as an offensive to escorts.
One of the top people they’ve appointed to OPM, (yes that OPM sending scam resignation deals to civil servants), graduated high school in 2024.
When they say Meritocracy they mean Aristocracy.
What’s even fucking worse is that we live in an era of autocorrect and autofill.
“Corespondent” is a word, though. It just has a totally different meaning.
Corespondent
Huh, TIL. That is a very different meaning but one that makes a surprising amount of sense in this administration.
Maybe she’s both?
The term meritocracy was originally created as a satirical joke. It was never meant to actually be taken seriously
Maybe sarcastic people should stop inventing shit ideas ironically for a minute while we clean up this mess.
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.
I quite agree, and I tend to resent and resist the tag unless the sarcasm would otherwise rely on tone or delivery, in which case why write it at all.
I think the internet has spawned a nascent global culture, and while that is still taking shape we are often left feeling as if we share insufficient context with one another to form an understanding. We’ll grow together as a global culture in time I hope and trust, but in the meantime I think it’s an error to rely on low-context modes of communication. It is a crutch, and it only perpetuates the distance between us.
I’m really starting to feel that way lmao
What? You mean you don’t want a Tournament Nexus?
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
So was"The Donald" subreddit.
I dont see the reason why it shouldnt be used. Merit - earned, cracy - to rule. Seems like its self described well. Imo its a useful word and don’t see why we shouldnt use it just because it was meant to be satirical. Art imitates life and life imitates art.
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.
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.
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.
I get that it feels cool when you think about it, but it falls off shortly after, same as Communism :P
But “Meritocracy Has Never Been Tried!” is not something liberals constantly repeat to one another cynically.
We should totally go back to “I’m in charge because my daddy built me a goon squad”.
/s
Wasn’t it the Greeks?
see: Daylight Savings
Going for some Ivanka resemblance, perhaps?
This journalist is going to have the nuclear codes in the tabloids before long.
Looks nothing like her though? Ivanka is middle aged and looks the part.
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.
go watch idiocracy again. and again. i think they were on to something.
Elon is a DEI hire because of his Asperger’s that causes sudden nazi salutes.
As someone who was diagnosed with asperger’s syndrome when I was like three, I want to skin him alive for that piss poor excuse. The South African Nazi is just a maladapted sub-human who incapable of owning up to the fact that he is aggressively mediocre. Also im calling him sub-human cause je thinks he is better than anybody, its meant to be demeaning to his ego.
Also because he is an immigrant. This is like Dr. Strangelove, except he’s not in a wheelchair. He’s jumping around on stage. MEIN FUHRER, I CAN WALK!
