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Probably gonna take some arrows for this one. But the following is a perfect example of an Affirmative Action trainwreck. And if people cannot debate the pervasive damage the program does to its "beneficiaries" then those "beneficiaries" will continue to exist in their uncomfortable purgatory. I ran across this opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled, "Michelle, Meritocracy and Me." Since Michelle Obama hasn't been a proud American until this year, and is therefore unfit to be anywhere near the levers of power, I have an interest in learning anything I can about her to see what we might be...

They weren't out to make history, the eight young engineers who met secretly with investor Arthur Rock 50 years ago to form Silicon Valley's ancestral chip company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The men, among them future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, mainly wanted to escape their brilliant but batty boss, William Shockley, who had just shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the invention of the transistor. Shockley, who had started a company in Mountain View in 1955 to commercialize this breakthrough, had bullied and browbeaten his young engineering staff, whose numbers included future venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner, at...

Marxism no longer serves as Chinese society's guiding ideology. But that doesn't mean the end of ideology. Western experts hope liberal democracy will fill the void, but... In China, the moral vacuum is being filled by Christian sects, Falun Gong and extreme forms of nationalism. But the government considers that such alternatives threaten the hard-won peace and stability that underpins China's development, so it has encouraged the revival of Confucianism. ..."Confucius said, 'Harmony is something to be cherished,'" President Hu Jintao noted in February 2005. A few months later, he instructed China's party cadres to build a "harmonious society." Echoing...

The first high-level research center opened by Microsoft was in Cambridge, England. The second was in Beijing. The research and development center that was established in Beijing has served as a model center for the company as it expands to countries like India (last year) and Russia (??). Long before multinational companies had started taking China seriously, Microsoft was already there, thinking of China as NOT just a potential market, but as a source of talent. Microsoft often takes a beating for its bully attitude. What should be said about its attitude for being a forward thinker in developing countries?...

Has a fairer America also become an America with less social mobility? That is the uncomfortable question raised by John Parker's long American survey in The Economist last month. "A decline in social mobility would run counter to Americans' deepest beliefs about their country," Parker writes. "Unfortunately, that is what seems to be happening. Class is reappearing in a new form." This was the conclusion, as well, of a recent series of articles in The New York Times -- although, as the Times and Parker both note, polls show that Americans think their chances of moving up are better than...

Did you know that John Edwards is the son of mill worker? Did you? Edwards's toothy display of hopeful vacuities at the Democratic National Convention moved socialist economist Max Sawicky to lament yet "another paean to the self-made man." The American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias pushed the anti-bootstrapping point even harder, trumpeting on his blog "the insight that equality of opportunity and the cult of the self-made man is an utter fraud both empirically and morally. Meritocracy is an appalling ideal. Being born with the inclination and ability to become financially successful is no more morally praiseworthy than being born with...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. I've always loved the notion of the meritocracy. A meritocracy is where everyone gets what he or she deserves. If you work hard, you'll be fabulously wealthy and endlessly happy. If you slack off, you'll live in your parents' basement forever. It's a concept I learned in middle school, when five-syllable words were rare. I just loved the way it sounded. America, a meritocracy. The words ran together into the name of a nation: Ameritocra. "I live in a meritocracy," I would say to motivate myself when I wanted to look...

The Betrayal of Checks and Balances The philosophy of Ayn Rand has taught me and numerous other thinkers of the new intellectual Renaissance the moral groundwork for laissez-faire capitalism as the sole economic system which fully and unequivocally recognizes the individual’s objective prerequisites to survival, his natural rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and property. With slight loopholes, this was the implicit philosophy behind the founding of America, and the principal force in its first one hundred fifty years of development. Yet, in the words of Aristotle, "The least initial deviation from the truth gets multiplied later a thousandfold.”...

The supreme court just decreed that merit, effort and achievement don't count! They have condemned American technical workers who don't belong to any preferred group to a life of unemployment. American computer and engineering jobs are flying over to India faster than we can run to the unemployment office. A major reason for this is that Indian technical universities actually teach!There are no 'queer studies' courses in Indian technical universities; no 'womyns studies', no 'memories of slavery' courses. They teach the subject matter and students are expected to learn. There is strict ranking of students according to their achievement. This...

This essay is the seventh in a series designed to dissect the totalitarian mentality portrayed in George Orwell's 1984 and to draw parallels to trends in modern academia and the socipolitical arena of today. The following is an index of previous portions of this commentary: 1. Collectivism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Collectivism.html 2. Antiprogressivism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Orwells_Warning.html 3. Relativism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Relativism.html 4. Doublethink: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Doublethink.html 5. Popular Culture: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Popular_Culture.html 6. Newspeak: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Newspeak.html 7. Vaporization - You are here. Read on to continue your analysis of this topic. Dissent. The fear of that word and it alone had resulted in reactionary institutions of mass hypnotism, such as doublethink, popular...

This essay is the sixth in a series designed to dissect the totalitarian mentality portrayed in George Orwell's 1984 and to draw parallels to trends in modern academia and the socipolitical arena of today. The following is an index of previous portions of this commentary: 1. Collectivism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Collectivism.html 2. Antiprogressivism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Orwells_Warning.html 3. Relativism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Relativism.html 4. Doublethink: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Doublethink.html 5. Popular Culture: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Popular_Culture.html 6. Newspeak - You are here. Read on to continue your analysis of this topic. Nevertheless, continuous expenditures of resources for the purpose of maintaining popular complicity would seem a time drain on the Witch Doctor mechanism. It is...

This essay is the fourth in a series designed to dissect the totalitarian mentality portrayed in George Orwell's 1984 and to draw parallels to trends in modern academia and the socipolitical arena of today. The following is an index of previous portions of this commentary: 1. Collectivism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Collectivism.html 2. Antiprogressivism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Orwells_Warning.html 3. Relativism: http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Relativism.html 4. Doublethink - You are here. Read on to continue your analysis of this topic. It is apparent at present that the fallacy of relativism is littered with assertions of infantile naïveté and a complete disregard for man's welfare. Relativism, evaluated from the perspective of logic,...