We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

As most LGBT activists are aware, gay white men are the most privileged members of the queer community and therefore should siphon their activism toward holding space for those who are more oppressed, like transgender women of color for example.

Ethan Jacobs, without irony.

24 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Friend of mine working for a big American bank told me that HR had recently informed him that gay white men are no longer considered as worthy of special treatment during the hiring process.

  • The Beast is beginning to devour itself.

  • CaptDMO

    Because it’s NOT about merit, it’s about failure to take ME, and MY “theory”, seriously!
    HE MUST BE DRAGGED BACK DOWN INTO THE CRAB BUCKET!
    You like to “self-identify” with intersectionality* hyphens?
    Dunning-Kreuger

    *this is only ONE of my current “trendy” words to mock *ahem* NEW discoveries in desperate pseudo-intellectual “studies” in rote mimicry of important sounding, nonsensical, credentials vocabulary.

  • Ljh

    Milo’s trolling is starting to scare them!
    For the unitiated: enjoy!
    http://www.breitbart.com/podcasts/milo/

  • As all activists are aware, there is a strict order of precedence in activism. Muslims come first – no thoughtcrime is more grave than islamophobia. Blacks (unless also muslim) come second. Trans come next – they can dump on anyone except muslims or blacks, to whose attitudes deep deference is required. Gays must defer to trans, but can dump on women, who are at the bottom of the PC heap. (All may dump on unpersons of course.)

  • Rob

    Ever noticed that the victimhood ladder just happens to also be in ascending order of ability to inflict violence and disorder on Western society?

  • liam moredburn

    Ah, dude, I am a Gay White male working for a major North American bank and I can tell you for a fact that Gay White men were NEVER worthy of “special treatment”. Methinks your friend is full of BS. Being openly Gay (for White men) is the kiss of death career-wise. Asians who are homosexual seem to get a pass and probably the blacks do too but since there are so few of them in financial services, it’s difficult to say.

  • Alisa

    The Beast is beginning to devour itself.

    The name of the outlet is Inverse.

  • John Galt III

    Not in Iran, they’re not.

  • Being openly Gay (for White men) is the kiss of death career-wise.

    Yeah, right.

  • I’m with Tim (September 25, 2016 at 7:19 pm). I contracted for a major finance house a decade ago. Despite the OP’s quote, I have a hard time thinking things have changed so very much in a decade.

  • Re-reading my comment (September 25, 2016 at 8:55 pm), I realise it might just be ambiguous. 🙂

    I’m agreeing with the OP’s attitude to what they quote, and with Tim’s ironic response to the earlier comment. My experience was that they positively cringed to all forms of political correctness. The emphatic, symbiotic union of that cringing with eagerness for profit and fear of anything that could draw PC attack produced an environment where a Brendan Eich’s career might suffer but being in a PC category was visibly beneficial. Where the sums were trivial to them – i.e. still very worth caring about in personal terms – they could be easily taken by PC scams.

  • The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

    George Orwell, Animal Farm

  • Hearing that podcast is like being on the international space station and hearing that Space X has just docked with 6 months of fresh oxygen.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray

    What does ‘holding space’ mean? Should gay men open car doors for lesbians?

  • gongcult

    As far as I can tell the most underprivileged class is white , European Christian Conservative/Libertarian married heterosexual males. Always under siege and no one likes us cause we are evil incarnate. …

  • Paul Marks

    All this stuff started as a “cunning plot” by the Frankfurt School Marxists to undermine society – but now it is just silly.

    I am sorry but even I (“Mr Angry”) can not take this stuff seriously anymore – I am more inclined to laugh than to be angry.

    “But it controls the universities and so on” – I know it does, so “defund” them. The support of “Mr and Mrs Average” for funding the P.C. universities (and the P.C. High Schools and so on) is collapsing. The obsession of the left with “race”, “gender” and “sexual orientation” may well turn out to be a massive own goal. No more of this stupid (silly) leftist “education system”, or “mainstream media”.

  • TimR

    This pecking order sounds like a sort of Rock Paper Scissors of political correctness.

  • TimR, my impression FWIW is less of rock-scissors-paper than of a hierarchy.with anti-islamophobia routinely at the top and anti-sexism routinely at the bottom. Like the London guilds (am I right that it was never settled which guild came 6th and which 7th? – the dispute just raged on till it ceased to matter), there are fights for precedence in the middle – witness the “we trans inspired you cowardly gays” version of the end-60s stonewall affray in NY (I’m slightly reminded of the Orwellian newspaper where a dozen different versions of an edition could succeed each other in the archives, as the history of that day was rewritten by Big Brother).

    Hillary saw off Bernie this year but her PC-card didn’t help against Obama in 2008: his was much higher ranked. (It didn’t protect Sarah Palin from savage abuse from the PC either.) I’m not clear in what circumstances the bottom category ever gets to be paper to rock rather than scissors to rock.

    (Meanwhile, beyond the world of appearances, the untouchable category often in fact has many wealthy members, just as Jews in old middle-eastern and european societies were often in fact more prosperous than the average of the ‘approved’ categories. This of course annoys the PC, as it did certain groups in those old societies.)

  • Bell Curve

    “Inverse” is a fountain of SJW absurdities, so what would you expect from such a site? There’s an article there about why a movie about space aliens made the author more frightened of Trump, because unlike wise Obama, Trump would start a war with them. Seriously, it’s that idiotic.

  • RRS

    Given all that transpires in human relations, it is somewhat fascinating/amazing/disheartening to consider such extensive impacts from such thin slices of the human experience which we are observing.

    Perhaps that is why it has now been assembled into a sort of “club sandwich” of LGBT as a further collectivism that is more “important” than the individual.

    Consider the infinitesimal percentage of individuals who are so imbued with sensations of their own gender limitations or reactions that can cause disruptions to everyone else, having no connections to them.

    Create a collective, or even a concept of the individuals as a collective, and you have a constituency – if you are of a mind to use one.

    But, what holds the “sandwich” together, as a coalition? Has it become just another “constituency?”

  • Michael Staab

    A staple of the left seems to be no end to the “Victim Class”, whomever they happen to currently be. I know it may appear naive to ask, but whatever happened to the idea of equal treatment of all under the law? Why must we be told, ad infinitum, that that the unequal application of the law is the only way to justice? It is no different than being told that war is peace, that slavery is freedom. Enough with the nonsense being given a spot on the stage with reality, as if wishes, hopes and dreams are equal with reality.
    Victimhood is not an obligation on society. Justice is concerned with those matters, and only when justice is factually blind in how it is applied can it be achieved. There are huge contradictions in the pursuit of justice in the law when a protected status policy, instead of equal application policies becomes the norm by which the law is applied.

  • RRS

    Once we depart from the concept that Justice is The Performance of Obligations, Law, for the purpose of determining those obligations under their varying circumstances, and securing their performance, will be replaced by Rules to impose obligations, specify performance, and create means for those ends.

    Look to the motives and objectives of those who would establish those Rules that will replace Law in the determinations of obligations, the manner of their performance and enforcements, and the modes of their impositions.