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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Compact published a quite thorough analysis of the discrimination millennial white men have faced since the mid-2010s, focusing on the liberal arts and cultural sectors. It does a good job of illustrating the similar dynamics at play in fields including journalism, screenwriting, and academia, interviewing a number of men who found their careers either dead on arrival or stagnating due to their race and gender. It's a bit long, but quite normie-friendly, with plenty of stats to back up the personal anecdotes. It also does a good job of illustrating the generational dynamics at play, where older white men pulled the ladder up behind them, either for ideological reasons or as a defense mechanism to protect their own positions.

A great quote from near the end of the piece that sums it up:

But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve.

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines.

Edit: typo

I have trouble sympathizing with any of this. An institution's prestige comes from the people that compose it. If you're competent, the institution doesn't grant you prestige, it leeches off you to obtain prestige. If you're useless, it is the institution that grants you prestige (at the expense of its own reputation).

Take James Watson. He recently had all his stickers revoked by the "status-granting institutions" he was a member of for being a bad man and saying mean things. Guess what? I cannot name a single one of those institutions off the top of my head. But you know what name I do remember? James Watson.

The way you respond to an institution not accepting you or granting you status is just to go succeed anyway. Then the institution will suffer the reputational damage of looking like a clown for rejecting you. What you definitely should not do is fail at life and then cry publicly that the institution rejected you, because that vindicates their rejection! You are literally granting status to the institution by telling everyone they correctly rejected a failure! If you fail, at least be quiet about it, so the institution doesn't get the status boost.

This is especially accented when you consider how many successful people abandon status-granting institutions of their own will. Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, and apparently thought it was a waste of time, so he left. This makes Harvard suffer reputational damage (though I suppose they get credit for accepting him in the first place. But still, it's at least nominally supposed to be a school, which, ya know, is supposed to be telling you the Secrets of the Universe you need to succeed. If you just leave and succeed anyway, obviously none of those secrets were necessary). Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also dropouts.

"Oh, well you're just choosing S-tier examples," you retort. "For regular humans, the world doesn't work like this." Ah, but check this out:

For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section were more likely to leave graduate school without a degree than men who scored in the lowest 25%.

So no, it's not just S-tier exceptions. Competent people do not need institutional blessing. Only the incompetent do.

This even plays out in the finances of institutions. If you're smart, you get scholarships to attend university--they pay you to go there! Why would someone pay you to teach you the secrets of the universe? Well, they're not. They anticipate you're going to be successful anyway, and so they pay you a bribe to waste some time with them so they can act like they took some part in it. For all the people that they don't anticipate will be successful, they charge tuition. This reputational laundering is, quite literally, the business model.

It should be dead obvious that being supported by the institutions of your field is better than being opposed by them. Yes, there are some people who succeed outside, but it's a much harder road they have to be that much better. And of course others fail with such opposition where they would have succeeded with support or just neutral treatment.

For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section

An interesting find, but the upshot of the article is "We should get rid of the GRE because men have an advantage in quantitative scores but no advantage in actually getting degrees". (Which I suspect is because of discrimination against them in the grad programs.) It's a call for even more enshittification of academia, and in an engineering publication no less.

ETA: He actually addresses this argument in an interview about an earlier article about white writers:

Oliver goes on to helpfully suggest that younger white men, if indeed they face institutionalized discrimination, should self-publish. Who cares about the New Yorker? A Naomi Kanakia in every kitchen, a John Pistelli in every garage!

This is just wild. Can you imagine giving that advice to any other group of people?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it? And while we're here: if Tony Tulathimutte, whose writing both Henry Oliver and I both adore, hadn't been able to publish Private Citizens with William Morrow in 2016 — what would have happened? If he'd found himself ever-so-slightly further offsides the Maginot line of identity and a mainstream publisher hadn't picked up his début, do you really think we'd all have read Rejection in 2024?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it?

I don´t mean to be overly hyperbolic, of course. But even back in Ye Olden Days, yeah, great writers were often persecuted. John Locke fled England on fear of his life. John Bunyan wrote much of Pilgrim's Progress from prison.

Today, with the advent of the internet, it's much easier. Fuentes had his bank accounts and credit cards locked, was put on a no-fly list, and booted from every major social media platform. Has that stopped him?

Or take all the AAA video game producers that have been ideologically captured. So what? Just make your own studio! Clair Obscur just won game of the year! And the runners up were like... Hollow Knight: Silksong (produced by a grand total of 3 people, if my knowledge serves me right) and Hades 2. You really can just Do Things, and out-play people with orders of magnitude more institutional privilege.

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to highlight with my post is that complaining about institutional capture is a really bad battle tactic. I won't contend that fighting to retake institutions is a bad idea (though it's not the sort of thing that inspires anything in me personally). It's probably a good idea. But complaining that you don't like the status-granting institutions lends them more status, because it looks like they correctly kept all the losers out. For anyone seeking to go on their own Long March to retake the institutions, you need a more compelling battle cry than "No, no, you can't refuse to accept me, my test scores were good!" I propose something akin to Harry Potter's line when he retook Hogwarts: "How dare you stand where he stood!"

This is a level of indifference that would never be applied to any other group in a modern context. "Oh, you think blacks are discriminated against in publishing? Well MLK Jr and Nelson Mandela wrote from jail, why can't you succeed? You think women are discriminated against? Jane Austen made it in a man's world. Gay people are getting the short end? Oscar Wilde did fine and Alan Turing made a name for himself even while being chemically castrated".

I was going to reply to Soteriologian with somewhat similar. The right phrases it to sometimes sound like a white man will never be hired again. The left will claim this is all made up and point to some really specific stats like programming being overwhelmingly men (women don't even try to go into programming at nearly the same levels) or X% of a field is still white men (even though many got the job before DEI initiatives ramped up). But there definitely is a finger on the scales towards non white man. Success is a spectrum, not a binary. The geniuses of any generation can succeed against a headwind. But for those who are around average talent to somewhat above average, having the resources to get off the ground can be huge. Hollow Knight was made by a handful of people, but in order to do that they need a stable job with time to spare to work on personal projects.

We really need to do a "you halves he picks" analysis on these types of proposals. You guys define just how hard the millstone of racial and sexual discrimination grinds on the have-nots, but I get to pick who they are. If it's truly no big deal, you won't mind it pressing down on women and minorities, right?

Every so often, someone rediscovers the original position.

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