The systems teaching this are poisoning the well to discredit party A based on their skin color and to credit party B based on their skin color. These caste-like credits and debits (or merits and demerits) ultimately divide people based on skin color, and that makes the practice racist in and of itself. To treat people differently because of their skin color is the textbook definition of racism. I realize that critical theorists want to replace the curriculum with one of their devising, but we must think critically about what their design aims to achieve. America has made great strides towards improvement and should continue to do so in reasonable ways.
If America outlawed the for-profit prison industry, that alone would go a long way towards disincentivizing recidivism and stupid laws. The war on marijuana is worse than prohibition. That's another thing that needs to get relegated to the dustbin of history. The Harrison Bergeron approach is a dystopic one and unhelpful at that. We don't need a future that resembles our new post-modern educayshun. These are my thoughts on the matter. Jordan Peterson speaks to it further with intense clarity, considering that equity & equality are in the same wheelhouse.
do you really believe we live in a "meritocracy" now ?
Not with regards to government. If you see a competent business or business person, that is evidence of a meritocracy. If someone has built a successful business and it has not failed, generally, this means the style in which they made their business decisions were meritorious. If it was not, their business would not have thrived.
In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product, such as bananas or minerals. In 1904, the American author O. Henry coined the term to describe Honduras and neighbouring countries under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International).[1] Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites of that society.[2] The ruling class controls the primary sector of the economy by way of the exploitation of labor;[3] thus, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.[3]
A banana republic is a country with an economy of state capitalism, whereby the country is operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class. Such exploitation is enabled by collusion between the state and favored economic monopolies, in which the profit, derived from the private exploitation of public lands, is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are the financial responsibility of the public treasury. Such an imbalanced economy remains limited by the uneven economic development of town and country and usually reduces the national currency into devalued banknotes (paper money), rendering the country ineligible for international development credit.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
See, there is a difference between the country and everything else. The less healthy the people and corporations, the more the government has to feed off them to maintain its survival, and the government itself is nothing but a corporation.
the government itself is nothing but a corporation
and corporations are NOT MERITOCRACIES
(a.) the government itself is nothing but a corporation = true
(b.) and corporations are NOT MERITOCRACIES = true
There is a caveat to (b.), although corporations are not meritocracies, that doesn't mean a corporation cannot exist meritorious-like. Generally speaking, the meritorious individual or entity will rise to the top. However, if doing so allows them to receive government welfare, that's when things start to get fucky and questionable, and that's because the same merit that took them where they are can get discarded in favor of "being too big to fail." No, the failure needs to happen, and the people need to feel the pain, just like we need to feel the pain of our failing government for allowing it to get away with what we allowed. Government can only get away with what the people collectively allow.
i'm actually impressed that you think that "the best people" will "rise to the top" of an unmoderated, ungoverned system.
i guess that's why Al Capone is considered a capitalist mastermind
i wish we had "hierarchies of competence"
John Ehrlichman was a scumbag, no doubt.
You can't just throw competence out because
TPTB use blackmailed pawns to do their bidding.
The world still needs competence if we are to have
any merit as a species and avoid extinction overall.
Sure, some skill and competence and "conscientiousness" might move you from the bottom to the middle, maybe, if you're lucky, it's still a roll of the dice.
(IFF) CEOs ARE SO FUCKING SMART (THEN) WHY DID THEY NEED A BAILOUT ??
AND IF YOU THINK THEY WERE SMART BECAUSE THEY PREDICTED THE BAILOUT, THEN THEY ARE PSYCHOPATHS.
See, you are focusing on the very top CEOs that government keeps artificially afloat with corporate welfare. And this is a prime example of an entity that is not meritorious. In "realityville," the unmeritorious companies go bankrupt.
[/fullstop]That right there, realityville is a wise idea as it separates the wheat from the chaff. However, politicians are weak and for sale.And the people are idiots that don't know better who were raise on Keynesian economics, which creates much more space for failure than Austrian economics. In Keynesian economics, we keep fixing the bad-business practices of poor business decisions with more new money instead of the types of real-world consequences that would see low (and many times unmeritorious) men out of a job.
When you move from the Keynesian model to the Austrian model, successful people and corporations did it by themselves, and the market sorts out the winners and the losers without help from "free money." If a nation-state keeps crutching on free money and market manipulations of that sort, sooner or later, the world loses faith in their trade instruments, just as the world has lost faith in the dollar and our gross expansion of it.
Idiot CEOs that need a bailout, what they needed was a pink slip. And their customers who trusted them needed a taste of failure. They needed to eat shit to learn why it's a bad idea to fail. If you keep bailing them out, then nobody evolves and gets good.
If you ride a bike and fail, but instead of skinning your knee, a magical burst of wind blows up from the sewers and keeps you afloat, it doesn't make a better bike rider. The magic shit wind stops you from learning how to ride a bike. The same is true with businesses and the notion of free money that keeps getting replaced at the taxpayer's expense without consequences.
That's the thing about success in the marketplace. It's not about luck at all. There is good business that meets the market's demands, and then there are poor businesses that do not. The poor business decisions that are unmeritorious deserve to fail and not receive free and magical money.
The private/public partnership that the FED has with the U.S. government keeps it in funny money regardless of its merit, and this is why we have a shit government. We would do well to pretend that magical $ does not exist, and this is because for all practical purposes, it does not, and everything comes at a price.
Merit and hard work and skill can (sometimes) help you build a reputation and can (sometimes) help you gain wealth and power.
and can (sometimes) get your thumbs cut off.
That speaks to the actions of tyrants,
and tyrants don't often die of old age.
Anti-competitive practices often yield outsized rewards.
Most psychopaths die of old age in their lavish mansions.
a true genius rigs the game so they always win
Does that mean that everyone should
stop being good at what they do? Is it
evidence that we throw the baby out
with the bathwater? The baby being
merit. If so, this will be our future.
Keynesianism = idiocracy because it
stops people & corps from learning.
nobody is suggesting that "merit" is bad and we'd all love to live in a "meritocracy"
the sad fact is that "merit" is not always rewarded