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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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some things can only ever be a hobby for us - even though there are other people who will be able to dedicate their whole lives to them

This has always been true. If you really want to make a career out of something like painting, this has been true for basically all of history.

Basically most art and artisanal crafting (woodworking, etc) falls into this bucket

Edit: to be clear I'm not denying the rest of this, I'm just saying I grew up knowing that a significant number of interesting career paths were cut off due to lack of strong economic viability, thats not a new issue

I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis: that there was a window that was previously open for white men to participate in these culture-making activities, which has been closed artificially. Of course it was never the case that everyone could e.g. write for The New Yorker - there were always too many people who would like to. But the premise before, and the ideal for which we should aim, was that whoever could do it best could get the role, regardless of their identity; and now identity is an impassable barrier.

Previously, the parental advice would have been: "It's great if you want to try and become a journalist, but try and build some hard skills as a fallback plan because it's hard to get a job in that." Now it's, "Don't try to become a journalist at all, the field is actually closed to you."

I don't dispute that, but it also doesn't engage with the article's thesis

So fair, I was really just commenting on that isolated thought

The piece addressed this point as well. Based on the stats white men did not migrate into other high-status fields like medicine, law, and tech, likely because of the same discriminatory hiring practices.

The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024.

The shift in medicine has been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”

Nor was tech much of a refuge. At Google, white men went from nearly half the workforce in 2014 to less than a third by 2024—a 34 percent decline. In 2014, at Amazon, entry-level “professionals”—college graduates just starting out—were 42.3 percent white male. These were the employees who, if they’d advanced normally over the next decade, would be the mid-level managers of today. But mid-level Amazon managers fell from 55.8 percent white male in 2014 to just 33.8 percent in 2024—a decline of nearly 40 percent.

Ding ding ding.

And then there's the added problem of "oh, and any other field you might want to try could arbitrarily be closed off to you if it ever becomes lucrative and high-status enough for entryists to target."

Professional painters exist, and I don’t even mean housepainters(which anyone who isn’t visibly high when inquiring can get). Portrait artists have no control of the creativity of their profession, is all.

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