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I want to have power over you! And I want YOU to pay for it!

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Because their status has been ratified by a supposedly objective standard, and because they think they’ve received what they truly deserve, the meritocratic elite is “no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism.” Equating worth with credentialed intelligence, and convinced by the impeccable testing regimen of their own existential preeminence, they reckon that “their social inferiors are inferiors in other ways as well.” Dismissing the commoners as incorrigible rubes, they neither possess nor seek to cultivate “sympathy with the people whom they govern.” Hoarding their advantages for their children, the cognoscenti become as tenaciously entrenched as any earlier caste of patricians.

Welcome to the Crust.

Some of the “populist” movements of our day exhibit the morbid symptoms of a general crisis of meritocracy: Brexit, Trumpism, the gilets jaunes in France, irascible and deadly skepticism about scientific responses to the COVID pandemic, the metastasis of bizarre and grisly conspiracy theories such as QAnon.

Persons disquieted with meritocracy look for an alternative and inevitably gravitate toward socialism, which promises a solution in the form of universal equality and winds up delivering merely another corrupt hierarchy, this time with a stultifying sauce of ideology on top.

Bonus points: Count up how many times this article uses the term ‘capitalism’ incorrectly.

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A new year is almost upon us, which means a number of milestones and new changes in the pop culture landscape. Among them is the updates to the United States public domain, which often gets new intellectual properties due to the specifics of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The current rules will allow for works from 1926 to enter the public domain after a 96-year extension in 2022 — and that will include some significant names. Among them is A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh short story collection, and all of the characters within them (except for Tigger, who wasn’t introduced until 1928 and will be under copyright until 2024). Once Winnie the Pooh enter the public domain, it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed, or sampled without permission or additional cost.

This only applies to the original works, and not to the subsequent adaptations and merchandise, which allows for Disney’s incarnation of Winnie the Pooh to still be held under trademark by Disney.

The 2022 crop of public domains additions will also include Felix Saten’s Bambi, a Life in the Woods, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope, Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues, T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Kahlil Gibran’s Sand and Foam, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Aykroyd, Edna Ferber’s Showboat, William Faulker’s Soldier’s Play, Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy, D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and H. L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy.

Unless, of course, the forces of The Great Mouse get another copyright extension passed.

(KA-CHING!)

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The prefecture of l’Oise orders the temporary closing of the Great Mosque of Beauvais

The religious establishment will be closed for 6 months due to sermons “inciting hate”, “ violence”, and “defending jihad.”

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WHAT DO THE chief executives of Adobe, Alphabet, IBM, Match Group (which owns Tinder), Microsoft, OnlyFans (a subscription service featuring content creators in various stages of undress) and Twitter have in common? All seven happen to be of Indian origin. That is not surprising considering the abundance of subcontinental talent drifting into Western companies: in recent years Indians have been granted well over two-thirds of America’s H-1B visas for highly skilled workers.

But these particular bosses share something else, too. They are all top-caste Hindus. Four are Brahmins. Traditionally associated with the priesthood and learning, this pinnacle of the caste pyramid’s 25,000-plus sub-groups makes up just 50m or so of India’s 1.4bn people. The other three CEOs come from castes traditionally associated with commerce or “scribal” professions such as book-keeping. These groups account for a similarly slim section of the pyramid’s capstone: the 30% of Hindus that the government classes as “forward” castes, as opposed to the 70% who fall among such categories as “backward” or “scheduled” castes (Dalits, formerly known as untouchables) and “scheduled tribes”.

And that is surprising, because across India’s own boardrooms it is not Brahmins who predominate. Members of the former priestly caste tend to excel less in business than in fields such as academia, science and the law. A quarter of Supreme Court judges in the past 15 years have been Brahmins, and three of India’s four Nobel prizes in science have been won not just by Brahmins, but by a smaller subset of Tamil Brahmins.

Funny how nobody talks about ‘systemic racisn’ and mentions India.