August 7, 2015, 11:42 am

John Scalzi tries to explain privilege to non-SJW-types by saying that being a white male is like playing life on "easy" difficulty.

I'll grant I benefited from a lot of things growing up others may not have had. I had parents that set high standards, taught me a work ethic, taught me the value of education, had money, and helped send me to Ivy League schools (though the performance there, I would argue, was all my own).

Well, for those of you concerned about living down a similar life of privilege, I have a solution for you: start a business. Doing so instantly converted me into a hated abused underclass. Every government agency I work with treats me with a presumption of guilt -- when I get called by the California Department of Labor, I am suddenly the young black man in St. Louis called out on the street by an angry and unaccountable cop**. Every movie and TV show and media outlet portrays me as a villain. Every failing in the economy is somehow my fault. When politicians make a proposal, it almost always depends on extracting something by force from me -- more wages for certain employees, more health care premiums, more hours of paperwork to comply with arcane laws, and always more taxes.

Postscript: I will add an alternative for younger readers -- there is also a way to play college on a higher difficulty: Try to be a vocal male libertarian there. Write editorials for the paper that never get published. Sit through hours of mindless sensitivity training explaining all the speech limitations you must live with on campus. Learn how you can be charged with rape if your sex partner regrets the sex months later. Wonder every time you honestly answer a question in class from a libertarian point of view if you are killing any chance of getting a good grade in that course. Live every moment in a stew of intellectual opinion meant mainly to strip you of your individual liberties, while the self-same authoritarians weep and cry that your observation that minimum wage laws hurt low-skilled workers somehow is an aggression against them.

** OK, this is an exaggeration. I won't likely get shot. I don't want to understate how badly abused a lot of blacks and Hispanics are by the justice system. I would much rather be in front of the DOL than be a Mexican ziptied by Sheriff Joe. But it does give one the same feeling of helplessness, of inherent unfairness, of the unreasoning presumption of guilt and built-in bias.