Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 10:18 am
Cool Breeze wrote: Sun Mar 05, 2023 11:12 pm
That's the modern age in a nutshell: hate the most competent people.
Hate the most competent people, figure out ways to hold them down, then figure out ways to temporarily avoid the consequences for holding them down.
Higgenbotham wrote: Thu Jul 30, 2020 12:28 pm
True competence in America matters not a whit. It's all about waddling up to the window for a bailout.
Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Oct 27, 2012 11:14 pm
Technical competence doesn't matter in this society - that's why Obama got elected.
South Africa has had this exact kind of policy (enforced by law) on employment for the past 25 years or so. It has without a doubt created the exact opposite of what it set out to do. Initially it was widely lauded as the means by which non-whites were to be artificially elevated to the be equal to whites, despite there being no realistic or rational way to measure such things. Very soon after its implementation the country's Indian and Chinese populations were benefiting hugely from the policy so it was changed to only blacks. And yet even so, after decades of this blatant racial discrimination, the
black population as a group are still just as poor as they always were, if not worse. All the policy did was create token positions and hence an intrinsic inequality in the perceptions of race relations. It catapulted
black people into positions they were totally unsuitable for and even if they were competent at the job, their colleagues were always suspicious that they had got there by unfair means.
In short, it has served only to undermine the very foundational idea of a meritocracy. In the UK I would imagine that someone is trying very hard to separate the governing class from being accountable to the people they represent. To create a lobby group powerful enough to override the Voice of the People itself, they will need two things:
1. a vast segment of working class drones that have zero patriotism but benefit from standing together in a labour union, and
2. govt officials that are sympathetic to the labour unions instead of to their constituents. It will still be a technical democracy, but your vote will mean nothing because lobby groups will hold all the power.