Tag Archives: Mediocrity

the glorification of sub-mediocrity, by el gato malo

And the sub-mediocrities shall inherit the earth . . . well, its governments. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

why woke, ESG, and DEI are so seductive to weak leaders

one of the most ineffacable truisms of organizational structure is this:

A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s.

it’s just basic human nature. excellence seeks to surround itself with excellence that it may achieve and mediocrity seeks to surround itself with sub-mediocrity that it may prevent itself from being supplanted.

there is nothing mediocrity fears more than excellence. it’s how you get turfed out of the cushy gig you do not really merit. positions of power are slippery and when you have one that consciously or merely instinctively you know that you do not deserve and are not truly qualified for, the last thing you want is some high caliber competitor coming up behind you, showing you up, and taking your chair.

A’s don’t sweat this because competing is what they do. but B’s live in terror of it. and this is why the B’s and C’s love “woke”, ESG, and DEI:

these alleged philosophies of inclusion are, in fact, ideologies of exclusion.

and what they seek to exclude is excellence and meritocracy.

it’s the literal point of the practice and it’s the reason that so many weakling leaders gravitate to them: it’s job security for the unqualified wrapped up in a neat little philosophy that makes self-serving nepotism and plunder look like virtue.

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Mediocrity Is Now Mandatory, by Andy Kessler

Ellsworth Toohey would be proud. (If you don’t know who Ellsworth Toohey is, reading The Fountainhead isn’t a bad way to spend your reading time for a week or two. From Andy Kessler at theburningplatform.com:

Has an era of American mediocrity begun? In January the College Board announced it would eliminate the essay portion of the SAT, as well as all of the separate SAT subject tests. Their stated purpose was “reducing and simplifying demands on students.” Such a burden.

One high school near me just dropped freshman advanced-standing (honors) English “to combat the effects of academic ‘tracking” because it “ultimately separates students of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.” It turns out that middle schools from lower-income areas aren’t adequately preparing their students for high school. So rather than fix that problem, they dumbed down high school.

Then again, when the University of California system did away with racial preferences in 1996, it moved to holistic admissions. What does holistic mean? Anything you want. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities defines it as “assessing an applicant’s unique experiences alongside traditional measures of academic readiness.” Grades are only a suggestion—and SAT scores are biased, supposedly. And here you thought smart students got into good colleges. Yes, mediocrity has crept into our self-proclaimed elite colleges. Job recruiters understand this.

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Mediocre Man, by the Zman

The proportion of smart people in the population shrinks, life deteriorates, and a gaggle of mediocre government functionaries presides over it all. From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:

When trying to understand what has gone so terribly wrong with the Occident, observers often point to intelligence as the main driver. The populations of the West are getting dumber, so they are less capable than in the past. This is not to say there are no geniuses today or that there are fewer of them. It’s that their proportion of society is smaller than in the past. It is the smart fraction that is getting smaller. As a result, the progress of the West has slowed and may be in reverse.

The typical way this is explained is this way. Imagine a man dragging a sack of rocks down a road. If he is a large man and the sack has only a few rocks, he can drag the sack as fast as he could walk without it. If on the other hand, he is a small man and the sack has many rocks, he will move much smaller than his capacity. This will show up most prominently when his path is not clear. He may even come to a halt when he comes to a hill or a long incline.

Now, one reason for this decline in intelligence, is the mass invasion from outside the Occident over the last fifty years. Minneapolis is now a dysfunctional city because of the importation of sub-Saharan Africans. The sorts of people who think Ilhan Omar is a great leader will struggle with modernity. The reason these people are trapped in the Neolithic age is they lack the cognitive ability to go much further. California looks like Mexico because it is now full of Mexicans.

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