Posted on 06/13/2018 4:11:21 PM PDT by DeathBeforeDishonor1
Publishing giant Penguin Random House has announced that its authors are no longer to be chosen on literary merit but according to a politically correct quota system “taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability”. This is mad, stupid, and insulting. But not nearly as mad, stupid, and insulting as the decision by the Mslexia Short Story Prize, a literary competition for women authors, to sack one of its judges Lionel Shriver as a punishment for daring to criticise the new policy.
She also has a column in the Spectator which this week she used to mock Penguin Random House’s new diversity policy.
It begins:
I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.’ The email proudly proclaims that the company has removed ‘the need for a university degree from nearly all our jobs’ — which, if my manuscript were being copy-edited and proof-read by folks whose university-educated predecessors already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation, I would find alarming.
Then she really gets going:
Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Diversity is our murderer.
I guess the company wants to go broke on the altar or PC, well go broke then.
ML/NJ
This would explain Yahoo stories that are badly written.
Excerpt: The email proudly proclaims that the company has removed ‘the need for a university degree from nearly all our jobs’ — which, if my manuscript were being copy-edited and proof-read by folks whose university-educated predecessors already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation, I would find alarming.
Sounds like a good opportunity for a real book publisher to step up to the plate.
PC suicide.
That’s a pity. I’ve read a lot of the acients and classics printed under their label.
First they came for the Science Fiction “Hugo” awards and a group of conservative authors calling themselves the sad puppies used the rules to get only conservative books nominated and the judges simply didn’t give awards that year and then changed the rules to more or less make it impossible for conservative minded authors to ever again get nominated. Then it was back to books about transgender aliens written by black lesbians winning every year. Now it to spread to the rest of the industry where is becoming an actual rule that anyone not sufficiently diverse is banned. They are almost as bad as journalists.
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All of the d Gatekeepers of “culture” are going to be nailed to the gates.
As outcasts prospective authors of the *wrong* racial and sexual standing have been relegated to the hinterlands of publishing, which aren't actually the hinterlands anymore. The Internet has offered self-publishing to all comers, and the challenge for the individual author is to connect with potential sales through social media. This is nothing like a heavily-funded publicity campaigns that the pros produce but it can be accomplished. Welcome to the back of the bus.
Guess they are going to have solicit submissions from disabled and trans authors.
Equality of outcome rather than of opportunity. The death knell of freedom.
bump
We are in the age of insanity.
...Diversity is an anti-religion, and anti-ideology, a nepotism which promotes everything except one's own family.
Diversity therefore equals the destruction of any and all religions and of all positive ideologies.
Because Diversity can only be destructive: whatever IS is insufficiently or inexactly diverse.
Whatever IS must therefore be destroyed in order to make it MORE Diverse.
And there is no conceivable or measurable end to it. Yesterday's Diversity is today's intolerable lack of Diversity.
Diversity is the destruction of Good; and it is the destruction of all types of Good - however defined. All are chewed up and spat out by Diversity.
Diversity is the promotion of chaos by the destruction of Good; and then there-naming of chaos as Good.
This is 100% true across the board in the entire entertainment industry.
Remember Rock music? It was a big deal for a few years. It’s gone. Why? Too many white men.
True.
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