timelets

In 2016 and 2017, 27.5 percent of applicants to the screenwriters lab were white men, but they were just 14.7 percent of participants. That figure turned out to be relatively high. Since 2018, just 8 of 138 (5.8 percent) of the fellows selected have been white men. Notably, nearly all have either had some other defining characteristic (disabled, gay) or were partnered with a woman or a person of color. Today, just one in ten millennial programmers at Sundance is a straight white man.
...
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.”

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/

How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?
...
the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher
...
As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”
...
How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation.
...
Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

-- David Brooks, 7/8/2025, the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration-supporters-good/683441/

“In 1812, the first edition of their anthology, comprising eighty-six stories, came out in an edition of 600, with an apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. It was not really intended to be read for pleasure at all by the children and households of its title; it was a learned work setting out to reconfigure the cultural history of Germany along lines that would emancipate it from the monopoly of classical and French superiority. Yet this collection—by the final, standard edition of 1857 the number of tales had grown to 210—was to become the most widely translated work in the world after the Bible and the Qur’an, rendered into more than 160 languages so far, including Xhosa and Tagalog, and still counting.”
...
"Germany wasn’t yet Germany. It was a congeries made up of dozens of principalities and archdukedoms, free Hanseatic ports and archbishoprics. History shows us that the modern nation-state develops long after a national culture and its language: think of Italy and of Dante, writing five hundred years before Italian unification. For centuries, “most of the peninsula had been under German or Austrian or Spanish rule, while the Renaissance, indisputably Italian, was influencing the whole world. The Grimms were living in a time of turmoil and bloodshed. ”
...
“One response to humiliation is to assert cultural riches and distinctiveness, even pre-eminence. ”

--- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time."

But the path from dissection to formulated theory is extremely complicated, indirect, and culturally conditioned. The more clearly we visualize it, the more we will be confronted with connections in the history of ideas and psychology leading us to their originators. In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature.

-- Ludwik Fleck. Genesis and development of a scientific fact.

...it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the
vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician. There is one proviso : if there is any satire
present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be
taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.

--- J.R.R.
Tolkien,
On
Fairy
Stories
http://ieas-szeged.hu/downtherabbithole/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Tolkien-On-Fairy-Stories.pdf

To plug the widening demographic gap, Germany needs more than 400,000 net immigrants a year, the country’s Federal Employment Agency estimates. However, economists expect half that level amid limited social and political willingness to accept high immigration in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis. Language, professional qualifications and bureaucratic hurdles are also obstacles.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aging-germany-is-running-out-of-workers-putting-europes-largest-economy-at-risk-11640180607

The execution of Malaysian drug trafficker, Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam, was stayed after he tested positive for Covid-19.

He was scheduled to be hanged on Wednesday for drug trafficking.

The statement said that Nagaenthran, who opted not to be vaccinated, will receive medical attention and proceedings will resume on a date to be fixed, after he has recovered.


https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/drug-trafficker-facing-execution-gets-further-stay-after-testing-positive-for