and as you will recall, from our drunken evening, I think that objections to meritocracies, on principle, are the kind of dreamy hogwash that could only be cooked up in the deep dark bowels of academia where actually getting things done is not considered nearly as important as deeply thinking and writing about things.

That doesn't mean I don't think there are problems with meritocracy - there are problems with everything - but rejection of meritocracy outright can only be done as a theoretical gesture, and not as any kind of approach to the real world and decision-making, at least not if you think that things that work are better than things that don't work. The kicker, by the way, is how you define merit and what qualifies - and there's where you and I will come closer to agreeing. (I don't assign much merit, for instance, to making lots of money; however I do assign merit to doing a great job of setting up really cool community-tailored digital media workshops for a bunch of kids; that's why I think *you* are good at orgainizing DLP, and not that phamaceutical rep who talked my ear off about the need to privatize medicine).

But if you make any judgments about value and quality in the universe, you are assigning merit - based on whatever criteria you wish. So rejecting "merit" means rejecting your ability to assign value - however you define your value. Which means, essentially, that you have no means to make any decisions at all. Apple or pile of rocks? Someone rejecting merit will be just as happy to eat rocks 50% of the time. And won't last very long on this fine earth of ours.

It also doesn't mean, by the way, that I don't see the value in deeply thinking about and writing about things.

More: the list I gave was in response to Julien's post about Montreal's geek community; it was not an exhaustive list of all the people I know doing cool things in Montreal. That's a longer list, and has more women on it. But if you ain't got no URL don't complain to me about not getting on a list of cool geek projects. Now *why* those women have no URLs is an interesting question that someone should think about, and if getting linked to on blogs is seen to have some value in the universe, value relevant to what these women are trying to do, then maybe someone should do something about it. Or maybe URLs and blog links are not important for what these women do - there are lots of reasons why that might be true - but if that's the case, then arguing against the evil sexist bias of people who are interested in URLs seems to me to be a misunderstanding of the fundamental laws of the universe. That is, my interest in that post is in the URLs, not in the genitalia associated with the URLs.

I guess this is evidence of systematic bias in URLs wrt genitalia, but that is a bigger issue that I have no real thoughts or comments on. It is outside of my domain of expertise ... there are many other people more qualified than me to explain, and address that problem (if indeed it is a problem).

PS: I almost left Paul S out cause he doesn't have a blog.