There Are Two Kinds of People . . .
"AMERICA IS NOT DIVIDED BY RACE, COLOR, GENDER, OR SEXUAL ORIENTATION. AMERICA IS DIVIDED INTO WISE PEOPLE AND FOOLS. AND FOOLS DIVIDE THEMSELVES BY RACE, COLOR, GENDER, OR SEXUAL ORIENTATION."
"AMERICA IS NOT DIVIDED BY RACE, COLOR, GENDER, OR SEXUAL ORIENTATION. AMERICA IS DIVIDED INTO WISE PEOPLE AND FOOLS. AND FOOLS DIVIDE THEMSELVES BY RACE, COLOR, GENDER, OR SEXUAL ORIENTATION."
I'm a race abolitionist. I think we should completely dispense with the categories of "black" and "white" and describe people in other, less destructive, terms. The only exception is that we should retain and enforce civil rights laws because some people enthusiastically categorize people in terms of "race," discriminating against some races and preferring others. I set forth my position in this acticle, ""Race" is Like Astrology."
I hope that someday, all of us will get back on track with the purpose of the original civil rights movement (rather than the absurd and destructive "anti-racism" movement) and that, someday, "race" will be the least useful or interesting thing we can say about people.
That said, "white" males are actively being discriminated against, especially against Millennials and beyond (Millenials were born between 1981-1996), especially in the creative fields, including writing. This oftentimes overt discrimination is well-documented by Jacob Savage in his article at Compact, "The Lost Generation." . Here's an excerpt:
In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.This is an excerpt from a much longer excellent article. I highly recommend reading the entire thing.
“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions.
Suddenly, in Andrew’s newsroom, everything was driven by identity. There were endless diversity trainings, a racial “climate” assessment—at one point, reporters were told they had to catalog, in minute detail, the identity characteristics of all their sources. Andrew had been instrumental in forming the union at his company, and objected when negotiations shifted from severance pay and parental leave to demands for racial quotas. “They wanted to do like ... emergency hires of black people,” he said.
When he questioned these new priorities, the response was swift. “On a Zoom call, women would clap back at something I was saying and other women would snap their fingers in the [chat] window,” he recalled. “It was this whole subcultural language being introduced wholesale.” ...
It’s striking how casual it all was. “Chicago Fire—the UL [upper level] can be [anyone], but we need diverse SWs [staff writers].” As in other industries, upper-level positions—writers with experience and credits—could still be filled by white men. But the entry-level jobs, the staff writer and co-producer positions that Matt and thousands of other aspiring writers were competing for, were reserved for others.
I would hope that these dire statistics don't dissuade any "white" male from pursuing their dream, of course. But this is a tough time for all creative writers, given the growing threat of AI. Grok offers these statistics showing that although Hollywood scrips are still largely being written by organics, publishers are caving to the bots: v Publishers' AI Reliance (Web, Books, Articles)
In the past, I've posted some of the most interesting quotes I've encountered. I haven't done that for awhile, but today seems like a good day for another batch of quotes from my collection. Here they are:
“If I were rich, I would have a plaque made up, and sent to every judge in America, bearing a statement made by Adam Smith more than two and a half centuries ago: ‘Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.’” — Thomas Sowell
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” - Galileo
"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." -Balzac
"You are not a traveler on this path, you are the path itself, unfolding with every step." ~ Rumi
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain
“We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.” ― Quintilian
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." - Hannah Arendt
“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.” ― George Carlin
“Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
"I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive." Lord Chesterfield
“Do not interfere with an enemy that is in the process of destroying itself.” -Sun Tzu
“Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.” - George Orwell, 1984
“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64 [or] removing lead paint that lowers a child’s IQ by five points.” - Steven Pinker
With Speechify. I can multitask and boost productivity with natural voice capabilities. I cannot say enough good things about Speechify. I've scanned most of my books over the years and I have saved them, as well as thousands of articles, in Dropbox (as pdfs). Now, with Speechify everything in my vast collection can be read out loud to me as I'm working out, cooking, cleaning. It's as if everything I own as a pdf can now be a podcast. You can also have Speechify read a live web page.
Further, they offer dozens of natural sounding voices in various languages. I've been listening to articles in Spanish (at slightly reduced speed) and it has been very helpful for improving my Spanish. I'm not making any commission for this recommendation, but I wanted to share this because I just discovered Speechify and it is a game-changer for me. Maybe some of you are looking for this capability on your phone or laptop. If so, consider Speechify. It's not free, but for me it will totally be worth $140/year.
“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
― Aldous Huxley