#Tyranny of Merit

[indizombie]

A discussion on discrimination at the IITs needs to be predicated on a discussion on merit as it is the embedded idea of merit that gives license to discriminate. The political philosopher, Michael Sandel, in the book ‘The Tyranny of Merit’ presents a scathing critique of meritocracy as a social ideal and argues how hubris among the elites and a politics of humiliation are natural outcomes of meritocracy. Variations of graded inequality and, consequently, discriminatory judgements  about one’s so-called abilities are deeply entrenched within the veneer of merit at the IITs.

'Discrimination in the IITs is something to write about', Hindu

[mariocki]

"From a very early age the child becomes part of a pattern he never fully understands and is powerless to change. It is a pattern that is made up of rituals - of form periods, morning assemblies, lessons that follow each other in quick succession for no apparent reason, bells rung by other people that govern his changes of activity, milk, school dinners, homework. His life is part of a scheme that has been devised by people he does not know, and into which he is expected to fit without question.

And it is here that we come to the real content of our educational structure. At school, the child is taught by experience that it is normal for other people to organize his life. He will be told in Civics or History that he lives in a democracy, which means that people govern themselves. But he will know as an experienced fact that he must expect to be governed by other people who know better than he does."

- Albert Hunt, The Tyranny of Subjects, in Education for Democracy (2nd ed., 1972)

[2stepadmiral]

Under things the EU did better than Disney for $300, we have portrayal of the Empire.

In Disney Star Wars, the Empire is simply an exaggerated portrayal of the Third Reich. Most everyone in the Empire is shown to be fanatically loyal to the regime, and even when their motives are based in relatable reasons, like preserving order or stability following the turbulence of the Clone Wars, are usually portrayed in a fanatical light that seems excessive. Plus, the utter incompetence of most every trooper and officer in Rebels makes the Empire feel bloated and often like a parody.

In the EU, there was much more nuance to the Empire. Obviously, Palpatine, Tarkin, Isard, and other higher ups who are decidedly evil, and there are sadistic troops and officers spread throughout the ranks, but there are honorable individuals as well, and after the death of Palpatine and his immediate successors, the more noble members of the Imperial military become prominent.

Beginning especially during Thrawn’s campaign, when merit and creativity were rewarded, respectful decorum towards opponents was the order of the day, and incompetence, violent excesses, or conduct unbecoming of an officer were never tolerated, the Gilad Pellaeons of the military had a chance to shine and become the rule rather than the exception. Sure, Pellaeon himself took some more time after Thrawn to fully shake off some of the more violent tendencies of Imperial Officers and the anti-alien bias, but by the time he was supreme commander of the Empire, he had decidedly evolved into a truly good man and leader, the exact one that the Empire needed to lead it from being the absolute image of totalitarian tyranny to a well integrated society that embraced the same diversity of the New Republic and was just a bit more structured.

And don’t even get me started on the competence. It was clearly established that Stormtroopers were elite soldiers, and that their failures in the OT were due to direct orders not to kill (Death Star and Bespin) or due to being surprised and overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers (Endor). There was one novel by Timothy Zahn, Survivor’s Quest, where two 501st stormtroopers, worn down by the hundreds of adversaries they had killed, were reinforced by the arrival of two of fresh troops, and the two unharmed and non-weary troops completely finished the remaining few hundred.

Summed up, the Empire had a more complex portrayal in the EU than simply getting beaten and reformed as the even more radical second Empire, and that made the story more interesting. It’s a shame that we aren’t getting that now.

[probablyasocialecologist]

In theory, in a meritocracy, hard work leads to elevated socioeconomic status and stability, and such status and stability is available to all talented hard workers. In recent years, much ink has been spilled over the realization that meritocrats aren’t much different from the aristocrats of the past. I, for instance, have always worked hard. I also have White, married, college-educated, financially stable parents. I have both inherited and achieved their same level of education, economic stability, and social standing. In a meritocracy, social advantages can look like the reward of hard work, even if they really are inherited. Books like William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014) and Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019) have identified both the ways in which the meritocracy excludes deserving workers and how its values fail to satisfy those within it. The philosopher and Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s recent contribution to the discussion, The Tyranny of Merit (2020), goes even further in its examination of the injustice of these values and the impossibility of perfecting a meritocratic system of reward. “The problem with meritocracy is not only that the practice falls short of the ideal,” Sandel writes, but that “it is doubtful that even a perfect meritocracy would be satisfying, either morally or politically.” These books argue that the system is functionally closed. It cuts off most (not quite all, keeping the myth of mobility alive) of the people who are not already within its demographic fold. Meritocrats are indeed talented hard workers, by and large. And yet what gets them – us – to the top is not hard work. It is birth. Wealth begets wealth. Power, power. Ballet class begets ballet class. Advanced Placement courses beget Advanced Placement courses and SAT prep sessions and summer enrichment and service opportunities.

[...]

A second problem is that the meritocrats aren’t happy. The relentless pursuit of achievement and advantage engenders anxiety, which often manifests itself in working harder. We keep working to maintain our status and to ensure our children have what they are supposed to have – piano lessons and tutoring and international travel – only to face despair. Suicide, substance abuse, clinical anxiety, and depression all occur at high levels among the meritocrats. These signals of deep dissatisfaction send a warning that this life of relentless hard work, entertainment, affluence, busyness, restlessness, and achievement does not accomplish much that matters. In Sandel’s view, meritocracies are bound to fail not because they can never live up to their own ideals, but because they rest upon a foundational assumption that GDP defines the common good, that economic productiveness is the highest value for society. Sandel traces the history of meritocratic ideals through Protestantism and western philosophical traditions. In his lengthy discussion of Friedrich Hayek’s capitalist philosophy, he comes to a concise conclusion: “[Hayek] does not consider the possibility that the value of a person’s contribution to society could be something other than his or her market value.” Reducing humans to their earning potential is dehumanizing, and it fails to consider non-monetary contributions that individuals make within their families and communities.

[burningvelvet]

In a letter to W. S. Williams (14 August 1848), Charlotte Brontë compares Jane Eyre’s Rochester to the Byronic heroes of her sisters’ novels, Heathcliff from Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Huntingdon from Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

“You say Mr. Huntingdon reminds you of Mr. Rochester. Does he? Yet there is no likeness between the two; the foundation of each character is entirely different. Huntingdon is a specimen of the naturally selfish, sensual, superficial man, whose one merit of a joyous temperament only avails him while he is young and healthy, whose best days are his earliest, who never profits by experience, who is sure to grow worse the older he grows.

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them. Years improve him; the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. His nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour, but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I meant to portray.

Heathcliffe, again, of Wuthering Heights is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly treated, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. The worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the Heights.”

Source: The Brontës Life and Letters (Clement King Shorter, 2013)

[drenched-in-sunlight]

okay forgive me cuz i only just started playing elden ring and getting into the lore n such but like,,, if the dlc's main story from the player perspective has anything to do with becoming miquella's consort and elden lord like some ppl are saying, do u think maybe then messmer's thing is defending marika and her order from those would would usurp them? maybe you've talked about that before and i missed it BUT. idk. i love the mama's boy thing a lot it's very cute and honestly this early on i think it really has some merit too :3

yes i did discuss the idea that Messmer is acting as Marika's secret executioner in the shadow when the first trailer dropped, & with the newly released story trailer, i think his role is even more sinister than that: the one plunging a whole world in flames for his mother's ascension....

i never really thought about the significance behind the lore that the Haligtree had to be watered by Miquella's own blood to grow, but now if you factor in Messmer's "tyranny" and that shot of him raising his spear and the camera panning up to the giant tree either bleeding gold or absorbing it... is he destroying civilizations to nurture the Erdtree? is he the main force at the start helping Marika become a God??? hmmmm there's a lot to unpack here ...

im excited to find out what does it all mean with everyone when the DLC drops! i hope you enjoy your time with the game !! :D

[that-starlight-prince]

Tell me more of your anti-Magna Carta views. Is it simply overrated for being essentially a shift in power from one interest group (royal court) to another (more spread out nobles), or something more?

I mean the first part is true, but it's less about the actual historical merits or significance of Magna Carta and more about the way it was subsequently used, or that it was subsequently used at all.

It seems to me like English Whigs felt they needed an appeal to antiquity in their political disputes with the Stuart kings in the 17th century. The argument was that in Anglo-Saxon times the English people had been free and liberty was everywhere, but then William the Conqueror came along and crushed freedom under the Norman yoke, and in subsequent years the English tried to reclaim their ancient rights and freedoms culminating in the Magna Carta which asserted the rights of the people against royal tyranny. But then things got bad again and now we have to reassert those ancient rights.

Those same sorts of arguments were around during the Glorious Revolution, and in the 18th century they spread to the American colonies and now it was the cruel tyranny of Parliament and King George trying to trample on the ancient English liberties of the colonists as laid out in the Magna Carta and we have to restore those freedoms and etc etc

And all of it bothers me not just because it's historically illiterate about the Magna Carta but because the appeal to antiquity bothers me. The appeal to a time long past when everything was better and everyone was free but things have degenerated since then and we have to restore what we used to have - I don't like that kind of argument. "Ancient liberties" mean nothing to me, and you don't need them to have ever existed to justify having freedom now!

[lesbianshepard]

Am I a piggy bank of obsolete currency? An order of merit from country known for tyranny? Another blister pack pops, but I still feel much the same Thirty-one, and depression is a young man's game

[lesser-known-one]

Tagged by @xlemonhoneyx ♥

0 pressure tags, only if y'all wanna do it too I just wanna stalk @softly-n-sweetly @vipere-venimeuse @satanictemptation @secretsstash

[microcosme11]

Napoleon merits 12 weathervanes

"Student of the military school of Brienne, had served the Republic and swore hatred of tyranny. First Consul of the Republic, Emperor of the French and King of Italy. He abdicated in April 1814. On 20 March 1815 he claimed that he had not abdicated. Following on 22 June he abdicated again."

The little flags are either the number of times Napoleon changed with the wind, or the depth of his "girouette" character. Some people have only one or two flags. This book came to Longwood and is mentioned in Gourgaud's journal because they were laughing about it, especially since Napoleon was the only one of them listed in the book.

Eymery, Alexis (1774-1854) et al., Dictionnaire des Girouettes (weathervanes) Second edition, 1815.

Link

[bimboficationblues]

Lanthimos' (and his writing collaborators) central preoccupation throughout his filmography has always been the tyranny of domesticity, each film taking up various methods of defamiliarizing those most familiar (literally) of social conventions. Poor Things is basically a high-gloss, big-budget play on the same core idea, a hybrid Frankenstein/bildungsroman narrative where the God/human relationship between creator and created is both explicitly gendered and less openly hostile (while still antagonistic), and the diegetic circumstances of the main character's existence lets her 1) essentially speedrun the typical child-to-adult process of forming a subjectivity and how that process is informed by propriety, work, money, education, charity, suffering, existential angst, and indeed sexuality, and 2) cast judgment on the merits and demerits of those norms thanks to her perspective as a previously sheltered outsider, and find ways to reject them as incongruent with the kind of enlightened socialist-humanist worldview she adopts (in a way that I think myself and others receive as a very autistic experience). but so many people continue to filter it through Barbie-brained shit about "sexual empowerment" and whether that's good or bad lol.

it does not escape my notice that a lot of the loudest criticisms seem to be about the notion of childhood sexuality in general or about not making its portrayal of sex work a literal adaptation of Catherine MacKinnon's most voyeuristic essays

[sentenceme-leni]

Day 54. Friday. Minimum 5 sentences.

---

Neal glanced in disbelief from his father to Belle. "What are the two of you doing?!" The question increased in pitch as it went, reaching heights of flabbergasted horror. "I'm right here!"

The two of them wrenched their eyes from each other, and still had the gall to look at Neal with innocent confusion.

"What do you mean, son?"

Neal felt his mouth open, but words failed him. He gestured between them instead, wildly hoping they understood his meaning.

The cleverest couple in Storybrooke gave him a perplexed glance.

His father even tilted his head in that worried angle that Neal remembered from childhood. "Do you feel alright?"

Meanwhile Belle reached out to feel his forehead. "Perhaps the potion didn't settle well?"

Neal resigned himself to being checked for a fever by a woman three hundred years his junior. "I'm fine," he said when Belle was satisfied with her inspection. "It's... Look. We were having a normal conversation about how to handle Regina's sister, and suddenly the two of you just... switched gears."

"Oh." Belle was biting her lip. Great. Now he had distressed his papa's girlfriend. "We didn't mean to fight in front of you."

"That wasn't a fight," his father protested. "It was a discussion from different points of view."

"I wish," Neal muttered.

His comment, unsurprisingly, went unheard.

Belle was back to glaring at Neal's father. "Executions without trial aren't a point of view, Rumple. That's just tyranny."

His father scoffed. "Name a single judge who would let her go unpunished."

"I never said that!" Belle leaned forward, as if her words would make more of an impression if they were said inches away from her objective. "But she's done nothing Regina didn't, and we never would have allowed her to go on the block."

His father looked away.

"Rumple?"

"It was just an idea. Yours was better." His dad gave an ingratiating smile. "Happy?"

To Neal's mounting alarm, Belle did seem satisfied. She even placed her hand on top of her father's. "Then perhaps my idea has merit this time as well?"

By now they were in each other's personal space, eyes locked together and soft smiles on the faces...

"No!" Neal snapped. "No, no, no. That was not a discussion, you guys!"

"Beg your pardon?"

The horror. They even spoke in unison now.

Neal took a deep breath. "Look. I've had this debate with several people. It has never gone like..." He waved his hand between them. "You know!"

They exchanged a glance, no words said. Then Belle shrugged a little and his father pressed his lips together.

Neal had been around the couple enough to translate the wordless conversation: 'Your son, your turn to handle him.'

Before his father could question his health again, Neal pressed on. "You obviously lived together, by yourselves, too long. That was not a normal argument. Trust me. By the end, you were..." His brain vetoed the term 'eye-fucking' in a last ditch attempt to delete the imagery, so he settled for the milder description. "You were flirting so heavily, I'd be blushing if I weren't horrified."

Belle and his father looked at him with wide eyes, still clueless.

The most awkward pause in living history lingered...

"I believe you need to rest, son," said his father at last.

Neal decided he'd rather face a life of awkwardness than make another attempt to enlighten them. "Yes, Papa. You're probably right."

The End

24/05/24

[zee-man-chatter]

Fascinating, and very relevant to the times we're in now!

In this video, we explore Aristotle's book "Politics," where he breaks down different types of government, including oligarchy - when the rich call the shots. Aristotle didn't just theorize; he studied 158 constitutions from Greek city-states and beyond, giving us deep insights into how governments really work. Following our last video on tyranny, we now turn to oligarchy, another system Aristotle saw as problematic. We'll examine how leadership based on merit can gradually shift into rule by the wealthy, and the various forms this can take. Aristotle's keen observations help us spot the signs of wealth steering the ship of state, even in seemingly democratic systems.

We'll also discuss Aristotle's thoughts on the fall of oligarchies. How did these regimes topple if money speaks louder than the voices of ordinary citizens? Aristotle's analysis of how money and power intertwine is as relevant now as it was in ancient Greece. His insights shed light on political dynamics that continue to shape our world today.

[mrhaitch]

Hello hello Mr.Haitch !! I hope the Haitch household is doing great ^^

So, recently one of my friend’s university is all over the news, because the granddaughter of an insanely popular actor enrolled at that university.

My friend isn’t particularly thrilled about it, because that university has a very difficult entrance exam, but the celebrity’s granddaughter got in without clearing that exam.

The university claims that she has a very impressive portfolio and doesn’t need to clear the exam. But we all know that’s just bs.

So far the university board hasn’t been very subtle about their open bias towards her. Even the staff.

What is your opinion on this? Do you think people coming from influential backgrounds shouldn’t be shown such blatant favoritism? Considering how hard some people tried to get accepted at that university and afford the tuition.

I've got mixed feelings about entrance exams, and assessments in general.

Permit me to dust off my 'education is a public good' Stetson for a moment.

Much better.

Okay - for me it's all down to what you're trying to measure and why. Is the point of the exam for students to gauge the extent of their understanding, for their teachers, for awarding bodies, for future employers? And if so why?

My employer doesn't care that I got top grades in my essays on existentialism and freedom, or that I completely fucked up my exam on the pre-socratics (I objected to a question).

Is it so the university can brag that x number of students achieved a high grade? Is it to assess the quality of the teaching? What if a class' impact is more personal and profound, rather than imparting particular skills that can be measured by conventional assessment?

I know the answer to all of these questions, mostly, but the answers are - to me - unsatisfying. Learning is a lifelong pursuit with milestones, absolutely, but no real defined end. Any end that might be imposed is artificial at best, dishonest at worst. The number of people I've seen waltz into complex, nuanced debates saying "well I studied X at level y" believing it makes them an expert. I also believe the value of education has absolutely nothing to do with employability or transferrable skills (I will hiss at anyone that uses that word near me). Society cannot function without an educated populace, especially its political systems. People can and should be as informed as possible at all times, through whatever methods and by whatever means are most effective for them.

This all applies to entrance exams: it strikes me that it's all about marketing and prestige. Universities want the best students so they can SAY they have the best students, in order to attract more.of the best students. The reasons why fall broadly under, like I said, prestige and marketing - but there's also financial incentives beyond recruitment. Students from affluent backgrounds are, on average, more successful academically - largely as a reflection of the ease with which they can access high quality schooling, tutoring, additional resources, and their parents are likely to be educated as well.

While it might seem like a meritocratic system (if you're smart enough you'll make the cut) but it's another form of elitism and classism, just sneaky and underhanded. Typically this is underlined by the manner of assessment, with a written examination being the standard. That's not to say it's impossible for someone outside of the upper crust to get through, just that the odds are slim. Slim by design.

Anywho.

If it were a perfectly meritocratic system I'd be more upset about people cheating the system, and processes being overridden by nepotism. Instead all they've done is reveal the whole thing is a sham.

For anyone interested in this topic I'd recommend checking out The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel.

[mariacallous]

It’s very easy to laugh at those who earnestly demand to be taken seriously. This is especially true if they are deficient in the mitigating balms of humour and irony.

The Canadian professor Jordan Peterson evokes mirth for this very reason. The populist Right doesn’t like being laughed at and it likes even less to be sneered at by latte-swilling cultural ‘elites’. This was apparent in a piece I read this week about Peterson in The Critic which accused The Times of having a ‘strange fixation’ with the Canadian professor and of treating him with ‘condescension’. The article concluded that

‘Behind all of this lurks fear of the old media’s loss of status.’

I don’t think this observation is without merit. Traditional media gatekeepers (overwhelmingly privately educated) are gradually losing their ability to direct the public conversation as the cost of producing content goes down (as an example I don’t need to pitch this article to a legacy media gatekeeper in order for it to be published). It’s probably also true that some newspaper columnists do look down their noses with haughty contempt on the hoi polloi over at YouTube and here on Substack.

But the writer at The Critic confuses popularity with merit:

‘a freely available four-minute discussion online could barely muster a tenth of the views that Peterson’s three-hour paid lecture did.’

Moreover if Peterson is so popular, why worry what a failing legacy media is saying about him?

To state the obvious, just because something is popular it shouldn’t be beyond criticism. Much of Peterson’s output is silly, from his paranoid ramblings about ‘cultural Marxism’ to his ranting about the ‘tyranny’ of a paper towel dispenser to his claim that Britain is about to go communist under mild-mannered son of a tool maker Keir Starmer. Moreover, the man is utterly devoid of any sense of irony and regularly gets weepy during interviews (I dare somebody to watch this and conclude that he isn’t doing it at least some of the time for dramatic effect). Perhaps I’d find these tearful episodes more poignant if Peterson hadn’t sternly instructed readers of his bestselling book 12 Rules for Life to ‘Toughen Up, You Weasel’.

The thing to understand about Peterson and the wider populist Right is that they aren’t anti-elitists. They simply have their own pretensions to elite status and resent the fact that they aren’t treated with the prestige and reverence they believe they are entitled to. In the familiar populist tradition, they are the humiliated little men and women left behind by history. They are angry at not being invited to dinner at the big table and they just won’t take it anymore.

The French economist Thomas Piketty has written in the past about the ‘Brahmin Left’ and the ‘Merchant Right’ as a way of understanding political competition in contemporary society. Piketty makes four main arguments: 1. There has been a decline in class voting. 2. A wealthy ‘merchant class’ votes for Right-wing parties. 3. Educational voting has inverted, with educated voters increasingly voting for the Left. 4. All of this is feeding into a new division of globalists versus nativists*.

This argument has became more salient since Piketty first made it, at least as it pertains to social media. Something I find interesting about the so-called Merchant class is the way in which some of its members, despite being materially wealthy, strive for recognition from the same Brahmin cultural elites they publicly disdain. When that recognition isn’t forthcoming they seethe with resentment. People on the Left are frequently accused nowadays of adopting ‘luxury beliefs’ and ‘high status opinions’. I think this definitely happens; but it also smacks of projection because I don’t think any political faction is more obsessed with status than the insurgent online Right.

Elon Musk is a fitting example of this: a thin-skinned businessman who, despite being the richest man in the world, chafes bitterly at the fact that educated people scoff at his puerile frat-boy humour and culturally conservative politics. Again, here is somebody who possesses otherworldly riches yet his chief gripe is that this success isn’t reflected back at him by cultural elites, who regard him as a gauche figure of fun.

Notably one of the first things Musk did upon acquiring Twitter (apart from changing the name to X) was to get rid of legacy blue ticks, a status symbol of the online cultural elite. He was cheered to the rafters for doing this by the online Right, who immediately went out and purchased their own blue tick for $8 once Musk had made it possible to do so. Because it was never about being anti-elitist. It was a bunch of people whose pretensions to elite status were being thwarted by the old system.

Of course a blue tick is now cringe precisely because anybody can purchase it for pocket change and thus there is nothing ‘exclusive’ about it. Instead it demonstrates that you are probably trying a little too hard to look important, like the people who post photos on their Instagram grids of themselves standing next to Lamborghinis they’ve rented. Trying to look high status is low status.

Sartre once said that antisemites like to view themselves as part of an alternative intellectual elite. Conspiracy theorists - antisemitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory - are much the same, and alt-Right spaces nowadays are awash with a supercilious sense of unacknowledged intellectual superiority. They have ‘red pill awareness’ and wear t-shirts which say ‘they lied and you complied’ and have ‘pure blood’ because they didn’t get vaccinated.

Again, it’s usually the Left that is accused of being motivated by a ‘politics of envy’ - of wanting to cut down the tree because the apples are too high for them to reach. Yet today it is the Right that seeks to smash things up because late capitalism hasn’t turned out as they imagined it would. Everywhere you look today the ‘little guy’ is furiously railing against the system he has repeatedly voted for.

The row over companies pulling their ads from X/Twitter is an illuminating example of this latter point. People who have spent their adult lives arguing that capitalism is good and benevolent and that corporations can do as they please are aghast because big companies don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets by neo-Nazis. Musk and co know very well that it wasn’t ‘Left-wing censorship’ that resulted in people like Alex Jones (who was this week reinstated) being banned from Twitter. It was corporations not wanting their brands to be associated with extremists because it’s bad for business.

Something similar happened with YouTube during the so-called ‘Adpocalypse’ of 2017 when 250 brands pulled their advertising from the platform because it was appearing next to videos of hate preachers and fascists. The Adpocalypse resulted in a slew of policy changes at YouTube which made it easier for advertisers to select categories of videos they didn’t want their ads to appear alongside. A bunch of far-Right and manosphere channels subsequently found themselves demonetised. Predictably, the Right blamed political correctness and the Left for the adpocalypse, when again it was an example of corporations trying to protect their bottom line.

As I’ve pointed out previously, the contemporary Right has no coherent critique of consumer capitalism so instead it has to pretend that big corporations are secretly controlled by a cabal of ‘woke’ Marxists.

*Jan Rovny gives a good account of these changes over at the LSE page here.

[skyscratch-wc]

Skyfall: Becoming Leader

In an effort to differentiate the clans more in Skyfall, each of the clans has a different way to become leader. Some are more similar than others. Below is a summary of each clan's process for selecting a deputy who will then become leader.

ThunderClan:

ThunderClan functions as the clans all do in canon. They are a meritocracy. The leader selects a deputy based on their merit rather than any kin ties to the leader. The deputy is usually a senior warrior who has proven themselves to be an exceptional warrior and leader. This is a decision made only by the leader with no official input from other clan members.

EX: Bluestorm selecting Lionheart as her second deputy since he was known to be an exceptional warrior with strong leadership qualities.

RiverClan:

In RiverClan, the deputy is selected by a council of Senior Warriors and the Cleric. This group of cats elects a new deputy through multiple voting rounds. Typically, they elect a new deputy from within the senior warriors, but sometimes an exceptional young warrior may be elected to deputy (EX: Stormstrike aka Crookedjaw). Each cat within the council presents their choice for leader, and after some deliberation the cats select one individual from the cats suggested. This process typically takes a full day or two. The longest election took a full week.

WindClan:

WindClan is the first of two clans that follow some form of monarchy. WindClan follows a divine-right tanistry-esque system. The only cats that can be considered for the deputyship are the close kin (out two generations in either direction) of the current leader. However, the leader does not select the cat who will be their deputy. The Priest selects the deputy from among the kin of the current leader with divine help. The decision of the Priest is considered the will of StarClan. Anecdotally, the kits or grandkits of the leader are most likely to be selected.

EX: Heathersong's last deputy is Talltail, her nephew. Talltail's first deputy, Smokefoot, was his cousin. His second deputy, Mudclaw, was a departure from tanistry caused by Ryestalk insisting to Barkface that he select her son. Talltail went back to tradition on his death by having Barkface proclaim that his great nephew, Peatwhisker, would be the next leader. (as you can see, this system can be very easily manipulated by cats who want power)

ShadowClan:

ShadowClan is the second clan to follow a monarchy system. ShadowClan follows classic primogeniture, where the eldest kit of the current leader is the heir apparent. Other cats may be deputy if the kit is not old enough, but once they are a warrior they are made the deputy. Sometimes, under chaotic circumstances, the clan abandons primogeniture for other cats they deem better for the position. A great example of this is the series of leaders between Brokentail's exile and Rowanclaw's ascension. Nightpelt, Tigerclaw, and Rookfoot (Blackfoot) were not in the line of primogeniture. However, the existing heirs were either too young, unwilling to be leader, or otherwise considered a bad choice by the clan who was still recovering from the tyranny of Brokentail. Rowanclaw's leadership marks the beginning of the reestablished ShadowClan monarchy.

EX: Rowanclaw is followed by his son, Goldenheart. Goldenheart's daughter, Lightleap, is considered the next in line to the leadership of ShadowClan.

Modern SkyClan:

Modern SkyClan, both at the gorge and at the lake, are full democracies. All warriors and elders are eligible to vote for a deputy. This typically takes a few rounds as cats are eliminated from the running, however, it is rare for a voting round to take any longer than a day.

EX: Leafdapple is elected by her clanmates as the first leader of Modern SkyClan. Her deputies afterwards are also elected by the clan.

Ancient SkyClan:

Ancient SkyClan merged the roles of Head Protector and Deputy. If a warrior became Head Protector then they were the Deputy. The leader selects the Senior Warriors, so in this case it is very similar to ThunderClan's system, just without the chance for non-protectors to become deputy and then leader.

EX: Cloudstorm had been head protector, and his deputy, Buzzardtail, was also head protector.