Reposted by permission from the author, John Scalzi.
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
In spirit of this being a repost, I will keep my thoughts to a minimum. Personally I thought it was a fantastic article. For those of you not familiar with RPG lingo, which is used extensively throughout this blog, here's a pretty good list.
One component I would have added to this blog would be gender. That is, being a straight white cisgendered male is the lowest difficulty setting there is. Also, one could add "able-bodied" and a list of other privileges. But that aside, wow. Epic. I'll leave Scalzi's follow-up post for a more thorough commentary, particularly for those who wish they could troll his diary or want to troll this one. Believe me, he's already covered any major concern that anyone could have. (In fact, if anyone gives a defensive response to Scalzi's blog entry, I'm going to see if I can answer it using his words alone.)