Breaching a “carbon threshold” could lead to mass extinction

Re:Breaching a “carbon threshold” could lead to mass extinction by dragonwriter on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @11:45AM (#20403060)

But capitalism is meritocracy, so the capitalist oligarchy are meritocrats (and, likewise, capitalism is an empirical testing ground for functionality of ideas, so they are also technocrats, moreso than their ivory-tower challengers)...at least, that's what the proponents of capitalism have always said.

(When you get down to it, almost everyone is a meritocrat, and almost everyone has a self-serving definition of “merit”.)

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Re:Breaching a “carbon threshold” could lead to mass extinction by JTbane on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @11:51AM (#20403119)

>But capitalism is meritocracy.

That breaks down when you have inherited wealth.

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Re:Breaching a “carbon threshold” could lead to mass extinction by dragonwriter on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @12:01PM (#20403224)

It breaks down, IMO, for any non-circular definition of merit any time you have unequal distribution of wealth, even if the unequal distribution itself is due to prior merit. Inheritance is a dramatic example, but not the whole problem.

There's a reason I said “...at least, that's what the proponents of capitalism have always said.” I'm not actually endorsing the viewpoint as correct.

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