Meritocracy?
Earlier this year, large swaths of the tech industry declared death to DEI and ushered in the era of Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. I wrote about it then noting that hypocrisy rhymes with meritocracy. They made themselves a website to celebrate each other.
That website has a list of familiar faces if you’ve been paying attention to the random tech people that have donated money to Trump and his super PACs, or were first in line to kiss the ring on Nov 6th.
It seems the hypocrisy continues if you pay attention to Trumps cabinet picks.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2024/trump-cabinet-picks-2025-tracker/
Nothing says meritocracy like:
- A random fox news host as secretary of defense
- A probably sex offender as attorney general
- An anti-vaxxer as secretary of health and human services.
The list goes on and teaches us that the “m” in bootlicker stands for merit.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2025
- Ladybird on Debian Stable
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Pluralistic: bunnie's piggyback hack (09 Jan 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Clicks Communicator from Chris Hannah
- A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Go Read a Book
There's a lot of shitty news happening lately, and I've been having trouble holding space for it all.
via flower.codes January 24, 2026ROSCon Korea 2026 Review
After attending my first ever ROSCon in Singapore 3 months ago, I had a chance to participate in the first ever regional ROSCon in (South) Korea! Physical AI is here I had an interesting discussion with a team lead at ROBOTIS, a major Robotics company , o…
via Junwoo Hwang January 24, 2026[RIDGELINE] Eras
Ridgeline subscribers — I like “eras.” That is, named chunks of time. Japanese history tends to periodicize based on locus of power. The Tokugawa Shogunate reigned for hundreds of years, and so: Edo, where the power was, becomes the period (a big sweeping o…
via Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer January 24, 2026Generated by openring