Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol, and Affirmative Action

I came across this brilliant story and thought it was worth passing on. It shows both conservative non-understanding of the word "meritocracy", and answers the age old question: "How does someone as consistently wrong and mind-numbingly stupid as Bill Kristol still have a job?"
I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers.

Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either 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 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 UPenn 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."
Count it.

2 comments:

  1. Man, JJ good story. Almost plays out like ancient chinese philosophy.

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  2. "bootstraps! best naturally rise to the top, etc"

    *goes on a bender and gives jobs to literally every shitty person he knows*

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