Everyone else in the blogosphere seems to be pointing out Jacob Savage's essay: The Lost Generation. It argues persuasively that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act is being widely and openly violated when it comes to male people of pallor. Example data:
The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.
In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.
In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man—and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you—in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”
More, of course, at the link. I'm glad I'm not a millennial looking for a job.
Also of note:
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In words of one syllable… Jeff Maurer explains: It's Good When Cheap Crap is Cheap.
It’s the holidays, and no matter your religion, God is commanding you to buy shit. Jesus will smite any Christians who leave their kids Nintendo Switch 2-less, and Jews who don’t buy whichever Lego set their child demands is basically spitting on the Maccabees’ graves. In America, being neither Christian nor Jewish doesn’t get you off the hook; the South Asian families near me buy gifts just to go with the flow, and atheists know that denying their kids gifts is a great way to make them super-duper, weirdly religious. So, we buy stuff, none of it needed but all of it required.
And that means that this is a good time to talk about affordability. Affordability will probably be the focal point of the next election, and Republicans are vulnerable: Trump’s tariffs have caused prices to tick up, Obamacare premiums are set to rise, and mortgages rates remain high partly because trying to fix the deficit with A.I. and enough ketamine to kill a blue whale somehow didn’t work. Trump also hasn’t helped himself with this Grinch-like promise of fewer gifts for your kids:
[Meet the Press video]
It enrages me that the president would blithely place limits on the number of pencils my child can have. My ancestors came to this country so that their descendants could be awash in pencils. My grandfather had a single, stubby golf pencil — “Graphite Gus”, he called it — and it would bring tears to his eyes to know that I have an entire room in my house filled floor-to-ceiling with high-performance, Adirondack redwood pencils. I own a platinum, hand-crafted pencil from Switzerland; I own a pencil that once belonged to Elvis. And my son shall have all the pencils he desires — every morning I wake him up by dumping a laundry basket full of pencils over his head and shouting “This is only possible in America!”
Jeff goes on to note the weirdness of Trump echoing the same doleful "Americans have too much choice in consumer products" talking point as does Bernie Sanders.
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"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help … destroy your business." Bringing us the latest example of Ronald Reagan's famous quote (which was not original with him) is Jack Nicastro: Antitrust killed Amazon’s iRobot deal. Now a Chinese firm owns Roomba.
iRobot, the creator of Roomba, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday. If Amazon had been allowed to acquire the company in 2022, consumers likely would have enjoyed improved quality and lower prices. Now, thanks to antitrust regulators, iRobot will be acquired by a massive Chinese robot vacuum manufacturer, Shenzhen Picea Robotics, instead of American-owned Amazon.
iRobot was founded in 1990 by three roboticists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After designing robots for space exploration and military use, the company released its first consumer product in 2002: the Roomba floor-vacuuming robot. By 2021, the year its stock value reached its maximum of over $133 per share, iRobot had sold over 40 million household robots. The company's value more than halved by the time Amazon offered to purchase it for $61 per share in August 2022.
This deal alarmed antitrust regulators in the United States and the European Union.
Someone should get those antitrust regulators to explain how their actions helped anyone.
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And, as noted above, they will have the robot vacuums on their side. Nikki R. Haley and John P. Walters warn: China’s Stealth War Has Already Begun.
ention China to a typical foreign-policy “expert” on the left or right, and they’ll describe it as a formidable adversary with a chance to challenge the U.S. But that conventional wisdom is way out-of-date: Communist China’s war on the U.S. has already begun. The trick is that Beijing is trying to make sure Americans never realize they’re under attack.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is working to undermine the U.S. across economic, technological, informational, diplomatic, and gray-zone military domains. Especially since Xi Jinping’s rise, Chinese leaders have committed to diminish American superpower without triggering a U.S. military response. The Chinese don’t want a shooting war today, or ever, if they can help it. Instead, they’ve chosen to erode the foundations of American power by coercing U.S. allies, commandeering global supply chains, and bending international institutions toward Chinese interests. Beijing wants to do all this while keeping the U.S. reactive, fragmented, and unsure about how seriously to take the threat.
That's Nikki Haley, the person who should be president right now.
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The usual cheerleaders aren't shaking their pom-poms. Kevin D. Williamson notes that Trump finally went too far for erstwhile fans: The Sycophants Draw a Line. (archive.today link)
Donald J. Trump, the retired game show host and quondam pornographer who serves, incredibly enough, as the current president of these United States of America, is from time to time ungracious on social media. This somehow has come to the attention of Republicans.
Trump went onto social media to mock the late Rob Reiner and his wife, both of whom had just been brutally stabbed to death by (if investigators are correct) their own son and insisted that the patricide-matricide in question was the result of the fact that Reiner, a television and film producer with the familiar kind of Hollywood politics, was a bitter critic of the incumbent president. It is not easy to embarrass Republicans, who have spent the past decade polishing Trump’s jackboots with their tongues, but Trump found a way. A few “harrumphs” were heard rising from certain Republican quarters.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Facebook troll and QAnon conspiracy kook who lately has decided that Trump is not quite dumb or irresponsible enough for her brand of politics, gently criticized the president, insisting that the bloody stabbing murder of two parents by their son was “a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York responded in similarly lily-livered terms: “This statement is wrong,” he said. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.” He couldn’t quite manage to bring himself to use Trump’s name in his criticism of Trump—these people write about Trump’s statements as though they were self-authoring, ex nihilo—but, you know, baby steps.
KDW is eloquent, as always, in his characterizations. Guess who is "a man so supine that sea slugs dwelling in the lightless depths of the deep ocean wonder why he can’t stand up for himself"?
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