Heather MacDonald on "Diversity Mongers Target the Web" on NRO:

Bad move, guys. The "diversity" mongers have just brought up the one thing that they should have stayed far far away from: the web. Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has declared that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires corrective action. The goal? A blogosphere whose elite tier "reflects the actual population" — i.e., where female- and minority-written blogs are found among the top 100 blogs in the same proportion as females and minorities are found in the general population.

Levy's complaint comes on the heels of Susan Estrich's campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing to publish female op-ed writers, a campaign that has caused widespread wringing of editorial hands about male-dominated op-ed pages.

Heather certainly doesn't need any quotas tainting her accomplishments -- she just won a $250,000 prize from the Bradley Foundation. (How do I sign up for one of those? Is there, like, an on-line form to fill in, like there is for unemployment compensation?)

What's striking is that while everybody recognizes that Estrich's hysterical (in both meanings of the term) attack on Michael Kinsley was pure menopausal hot flash, the Axiom of Equality -- the assumption that any inequality disfavoring non-white males is the product of discrimination and must be alleviated -- is so engrained in public discourse that you just know Estrich is going to win in the end. We're going to end up with disguised quotas for opinion-mongers anyway, just like there are quotas for reporters right now. Look at the Washington Monthly blog, where Kevin Drum, who knows perfectly well that this is pure stupidity, still turned his blog over for some time to brainless smear artists like Garance Franke-Ruta just because they are women.

By the way, one of the first things I noticed when I started writing op-eds for newspapers back in 1990 as a hobby was that the majority of op-ed editors I dealt with were women. Men like to get paid peanuts for the opportunity to spout off, while women like to get paid a regular salary to choose which men get to spout off.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer