Meanwhile in the west we're lead by the weakest who merely got good grades but never built a thing of their own. People who caved time and again for money and sold our infrastructure off undermining our own learning and growth as individuals and a collective

The winners in our system are just the ones who get everyone else to kowtow and do the work, leaving leadership ignorant and inexperienced but lauded for some reason

It's a weird reverential system where figments of imagination still earn great amounts of deference; figment of out imagination being the American civil religion and hierarchy of figureheads who don't even know you exist; why would they care?

How reliant this culture is on bowing to figureheads painted on walls while talking like it isn't is a bizarre cognitive dissonance that should be studied for centuries

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watwut 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> by the weakest who merely got good grades

Like who? Trump?

> The winners in our system are just the ones who get everyone else to kowtow

In soviet system, connections were literally everything. Not merit, not achievement, but who you know, who is your friends, who trades favors with you.

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qzw 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Like who? Trump?

Can’t be. Didn’t he graduate near the bottom of the class? And I think W also had mediocre grades. Eisenhower was in the lower half of his West Point class as well. There are probably numerous other examples of successful American politicians who were poor students. Just recently Gavin Newsome got into a bit of trouble touting his low SATs in front of a mostly black audience. There’s a longstanding anti-intellectual streak in the U.S. that politicians have been pandering to for ages.

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lopotubez an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In soviet system, connections were literally everything

Seems like every system is like that then and not just the soviets.

I know it is off topic but I am interested in the soviet constructivist mathematics and somehow their political system fascinates me.

	▲	watwut an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Afaik, that was the big thing that people living there commented on. And one of the big changes after fall of communism - eventually not everything depends on who you know and connections. It is not equally bad in every system.

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breezybottom an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean that's just a lie. Kolmogorov didn't achieve international recognition through party connections, he received it because of his genius and accomplishments.

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4 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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cucumber3732842 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>Meanwhile in the west we're lead by the weakest who merely got good grades but never built a thing of their own.

That's a spicy take on the political legacy of the professional managerial class. /s

(Yes I know you meant politicians and politics adjacent high level bureaucrats, academia and industry)