Today on “things that Kostya cannot change so he rants about them instead” is something different from the usual political or open-source political rants.
There are several groups of people whose occupation is (in theory) to evaluate certain things. So (again, in theory) you can call them the metric for those things. In practice though they rather do the opposite and try to make things conform to the valuations they give, or at least to make public perceive those things in the way that would confirm the original claims (and truth be damned!).
Of course some would see nothing wrong with it, others would even try to tell you that they’re always right because they cannot be wrong and thus only their opinion is the true one. Well, I’ll present three examples and see for yourself.
Let’s start with the most prominent example, namely lawyers. In an ideal world, lawyers are a part of judicial process, making sure that the side they support is represented fairly—and that means that judging is done according to the laws, without glaring mistakes or prejudices. In practice though lawyers tend to get associated with paid justice, meaning that quite often the outcome of the trial or litigation depends on the pay-grades of the lawyers involved instead of actual known facts (or even laws). Which sometimes leads to the fun systems as the British one with two mandatory kinds of lawyers (barristers and solicitors) and USian one—resembling quantum dynamics—where you can call lawyers elementary particles responsible for any interactions between entities (except that quantum dynamics is easier to comprehend).
Then there’s another often disliked group of people called philosophers. In theory philosophy is a way to explain the world or some of its aspects. So one would expect philosopher to be a thinker who studies the world (or part of it) and makes some conclusions about how it works and what implications that gives for the rest of the things. For instance, science may study human morals as a thing emerging in collectives and affecting interactions between members of those collectives, while philosophy may ponder how morality defines human itself and what should be considered the ideal moral. But the modern philosophers seem to work in the reverse: first they start with a conviction (quite often a small one and benefiting them directly) and work up from that to build a system that will provide an excuse for their beliefs. Of course this is unlikely a modern trend, but history preserved enough examples of real philosophers for any epoch and different countries as well—which is hard to say about the modern world.
And finally art critics. One would naïvely expect them to be people with certain tastes who appraise certain kinds of art (paintings, sculptures, books, movies, video games etc etc) and tell public their opinion about it. You may like them or not, agree with them or not, but in either case such reviews should not merely give an abstract score but also provide an explanation of what was done right, what could be improved, and what hidden qualities may make it even better than your first impression told you. There’s a reason why people still remember and quote Roger Ebert (of Chicago Sun-Times) or Scorpia (of Computer Gaming World). But the majority of the modern art critics seem to start from the premise of having to praise the reviewed product (often, apparently, out of fear for the salary and other benefits—disappointed owners of the badly-reviewed product may stop advertising in your media or provide early access to the next products they release and so on) and construct up the review leading to the goal without mentioning the actual reasons. What makes it worse is that often it’s accompanied not by the notion “if you love X and Y then this is definitely a thing for you, otherwise you may want to skip it” but rather “if you don’t like it you’re a dumb bad person”. Thanks, I still remember a bit of Soviet Union to reject it at a visceral level.
So there you have it. Of course this effect is nothing new but I felt that for some reason I need to say it, so here it is.