This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Meritocracy doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you — Clifton Mark in Fast Company: Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just. However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority. It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses. While this effect is most spectacular among the elite, nearly any accomplishment can be viewed through meritocratic eyes. Graduating from high school, artistic success, or simply having money can all be seen as evidence of talent and effort. By the same token, worldly failures becomes signs of personal defects, providing a reason why those at the bottom of the social hierarchy deserve to remain there.
• No, Wikipedia didn’t get Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman’s birthdate wrong — Alexandre Hocquet in the Conversation: What is then the explanation for this fuss? It is not impossible that Olivia Colman confused Wikipedia and another site. For example, in 2011 the actress Joan Collins tweeted that Wikipedia had mistakenly stated that she had an affair with a certain Arthur Lowe. After checking the facts, Wikipedians found that Collins was in fact referring to an obscure site that had nothing to do with Wikipedia (and information she denied is still there eight years later, by the way). Is there a biographic fact mentioned on the web that’s incorrect? Then surely it’s Wikipedia!
• We Need a Wall to Protect the Troops We Need Because There’s Not a Wall — Ted Rall:
  
• How to sell a massacre: NRA's playbook revealed — Peter Charley, Al Jazeera: [Rodger] Muller, Al Jazeera's undercover reporter who posed as a gun-rights campaigner, introduced One Nation's Chief of Staff, James Ashby, and the leader of its Queensland branch, Steve Dickson, to the NRA, and travelled with the pair to Washington, DC last year. Ashby and Dickson were hoping to secure up to $20m in political donations from supporters of the US gun lobby. In meetings at the NRA's Virginia headquarters, officials provided Ashby and Dickson tips to galvanise public support to change Australia's gun laws and coached the pair on how to respond to a mass shooting.
• Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) — Charlotte Lieberman pads out the NY Times with some Interesting Facts from psychology: Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond. “Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem,” said Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa. In a 2013 study, Dr. Pychyl and Dr. Sirois found that procrastination can be understood as “the primacy of short-term mood repair … over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions.” Put simply, procrastination is about being more focused on “the immediate urgency of managing negative moods” than getting on with the task, Dr. Sirois said.
• The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub: How does a new generation of researchers perceive Sci-Hub? — David Nicholas in LSE Impact blog: Much of the growth of Sci-Hub is […] ideological, no more so than in France, where nearly all our [Early Career Researchers] were Sci-Hub users. For French ECRs Sci-Hub was considered to be merely a way of providing open access to the scientific literature: part and parcel of the OA movement, which is to be supported by whatever means necessary. From this perspective, publishers are seen as the enemy, whose greediness erects unnecessary barriers, thereby obstructing the advancement of science. National infrastructures, such as HAL and ISTEX, have been created to break the publishers’ monopoly, but ECRs are wondering whether Sci-Hub (and ResearchGate) can accomplish the task more cheaply and effectively? In fact, Sci-Hub is seen as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure. There then is an element of defiance about the French use of Sci-Hub and they certainly do not view it as being wrong, because they are breaking the rules for good reason, to increase access to scientific knowledge.
• Modern Monetary Theory is On the March — Bill Black at the New Economic Perspectives blog: One of the proofs of MMT’s advances is a nearly respectable treatment by the Wall Street Journal as the feature of a news article. The other major proof is the pathetic efforts of MMT critics quoted in the article to attack MMT. The article, implicitly, admits that MMT scholars have repeatedly proved correct in their predictions that the existing and projected U.S. fiscal budget deficits would not trigger damaging shortages of real resources that will cause damaging levels of inflation. The article, implicitly, admits that nations with fully sovereign currencies are vastly less vulnerable to economic injury from budget deficits. The article implicitly admits that MMT opponents’ predictions have failed and that reality has repeatedly falsified their archaic monetary theories that described nations living under the gold standard and therefore lacked a fully sovereign currency.
• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
  
• What the Bernie Sanders 2020 Campaign Means for Progressives — Norman Solomon: In the obvious contrasts with Harris and in the less obvious yet significant contrasts with Warren on matters of economic justice as well as on foreign policy, Bernie Sanders represents a different approach to the root causes of -- and possible solutions to -- extreme economic inequality, systemic injustice and a dire shortage of democracy. It’s not mere happenstance that Bernie is willing to use the word “oligarchy” to describe the current social order in the United States. What’s more, he pointedly ties his candid analysis of reality to more far-reaching -- and potentially effective -- solutions.
• THE WAR ON VENEZUELA IS BUILT ON LIES — John Pilger: Although identity politics are all the rage in the pages of liberal newspapers in the West, race and class are two words almost never uttered in the mendacious "coverage" of Washington's latest, most naked attempt to grab the world's greatest source of oil and reclaim its "backyard". For all the chavistas' faults - such as allowing the Venezuelan economy to become hostage to the fortunes of oil and never seriously challenging big capital and corruption - they brought social justice and pride to millions of people and they did it with unprecedented democracy. "Of the 92 elections that we've monitored," said former President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre is a respected monitor of elections around the world, "I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world." By way of contrast, said Carter, the US election system, with its emphasis on campaign money, "is one of the worst".