I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an
eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a
guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with
Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.
The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief
of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving
recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at
Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an
undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat
Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got
William an internship at the White House; how he talked to
friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and
secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and
how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach
at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving
what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving
replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'
I'm sorry, but this is just stupid. You can take literally anyone who hypocritically asserts a belief in an ideal and use it to huffily dismiss the concept overall. And you can find such a person for literally any ideal.
For example, I could say: whenever I think of anti-racism, I think of [insert quote about someone who claims to be anti-racist and then says/does something racist]. Does that say anything about the concept of anti-racism itself? Or is it just irrelevant commentary about the fact that there are dishonest people claiming the mantle of every ideal while not living up to it?
Just because Irving Kristol is too dumb to understand the concept of meritocracy doesn't mean the concept is without merit.
I assume you would agree with me, though, that it makes little sense in the present discussion to talk about "meritocracy" without taking into account how Github implemented the concept.
