• New York Times writer Sarah Jeong won't be fired after making racist tweets
    198 replies, posted
Quakerism originated in England but there are plenty of people who converted to Quakerism in America.
She wasn't actually hurting anyone with her tweets, there's no endemic racism against whites in america. It was in bad taste, but that's all. Claim "whataboutism" all you want but it's really telling when racism and oppression against poc regularly gets off the hook in the judicial system and in public to this day, and there's a sizable reactionary group that keeps a vigilant look for anytime someone says anything negative about white people, ignoring any context, to try to prove that white people have it just as bad as others. I might have even sided with you back before 2016 but electing trump just threw off any wool, this country is saturated with prejudice and the people in power are utilizing everything at their disposal to keep being in power.
Other people being racist never excuses yourself being a racist. How is this difficult to understand?
I'm 100% white and I see this as someone who has probably consistently been a victim of old white men and their baby boomer ideology venting. TBH I don't really even care about this all that much. Got to be realistic, because it's actually a lot different than saying the same thing about old black men, or any other race for that matter, since old white men make up the majority of our gov, our CEO, and our bosses. Speaking out against the "tyranny of the majority" is more or less free speech, while doing the same to a minority is seen as abstractly the opposite for good reason.
This might be the absolute dumbest comparison I've heard from you dude. There's a few worlds of difference between teaching a dog to do a Nazi salute as a joke and going on Twitter gloating about how you're cruel to elderly white people-- in fact, why am I even replying to something so stupid? Either you already know your comparison is disingenuous and plain stupid, or something is seriously so wrong with your brain that me trying to explain why you're wrong is totally useless.
It would be easier to understand if it wasn't so lopsided to whites getting let off the hook and PoC getting disproportionate punishments. She got reprimanded. She apologized. That's about all people generally expect from whites, though usually they get off with less, like Zimmerman,  Drejka, a whole lot of cops, and even politicians get. And all the cases that get no media attention. All you're doing is wagging your finger at people who have every right to be upset. Iraqis got royally fucked in an imperialistic war that had no reason to even happen, are they allowed to be upset at white people? Are native americans who had the majority of their people genocided and all of their land taken allowed to be upset at white people? You treat racism like it's this zero sum game about verbal insults, and if both sides just shut up it'll go away. But it's an ongoing/systemic problem, it's going to continue to be an ongoing problem, because colonialism never ended, and people are still reaping the benefits of ill-gotten gains from all over the world. And the justification might ultimately be money, but it's shrouded racial discrimination. You know how we fought nazis, in 1941? They were some big evil, and we beat them, and we were the good guys? Propaganda is a great thing, that was was to keep US hegemony over the world. In the decades immediately after the US initiated all sorts of proxy wars and interfered or outright funded fascist groups in other countries to prevent any sort of socialist or leftist governments from appearing. I don't understand how anyone can look at what the US has done in the last 70 years and think it was good, we didn't earn our position in the world out of status, it was won at gunpoint. And even then, we're still lagging behind the rest of the developed world in healthcare and living standards now.
Kuwait defence was justified
i think that putting the blame on white people in general is misplaced. a minority of white people have used imperialism and colonialism to grow their power, to put the blame on all white people diffuses it and makes it much easier for them to weather. it is a great way to divide and weaken the working class, though.
I honestly don't get this part. While people are lambasted all the time for this kind of stuff, and generally don't get off so easy. There's absolutely no way in hell a while person could say the same stuff she said, even in the same context of being bullied, and not get fired, and probably blacklisted for all media.
Dead people hundreds of years ago killed of the natives ... thus it's ok to be racist on Twitter. Epic
What do you think it's called when you use bad people who are part of a group as a reason to hate or discriminate against that entire group?
I guess I find it hard to read the tweets at surface value because I can't think of any anti-white hate groups that she could speaking to, much less the kind of life experience that would simultaneously result in being radically racist against white people and also get you hired at a major mainstream news publication.
It's not about blaming white people, it's about understanding historical context. I'm not flagellating myself or anything, I'd just like to see less humans suffering, and honestly, I feel defending her is better suited to that than bootlicking white supremacists that think that "anti-racists are just as racists as white nationanalists" because the white nationalists get the privilege of pretending to be civil because it's okay in this country to hold a nazi rally ala charlottesville, while anyone opposed to that is labeled as a terrorist.
Any kind of anti-white hate speech is still hate speech. We need to start making that clear, because allowing it to fester on the left will only hurt us in the long run. It needs to be called out.
Fair point.
While I'm quite aware that the reason these stories have been cropping up is because the far right is trying to dig up any dirt they can on their most vocal critics, I don't think there's really any excuse for tweets like hers. And I say this as an Indian - a member of a visible minority myself. Unless she's got a very good explanation I don't see why such unprofessional conduct shouldn't result in termination.
Its this part i agree most with regardless of how i can see her point
i mean we still use the constitution of what dead people 250 years ago wrote for us i'm not sure what your issue is
Tell me the difference without calling me stupid? Tell me why the comparison doesn't work and how I'm wrong? All I'm seeing here is you calling me dumb and telling me my comparison is bad without explaining why it is bad.
Digging into past posts from years ago and the recent alt-righters looking for any kind of dirt to discredit an entire group of critics, which makes the entire outing seem disingenuous. Like Lambeth said, people got their panties in a twist over an actual alt-right person teaching his dog tricks to gassing the jews getting the law on him, but now that its a liberal it should be frowned upon and its so wrong.
This definitely isn't my kind of humor and this person doesn't exactly sound like my kind of person, but that's tempered sharply by the fact that the New York Times is one of the oldest journalistic institutions in the world. They have a name and reputation nearly two hundred years in the making to uphold, and as far as I know they have a pretty solid track record of upholding it just in the time I've been alive, and just in the last few years seem to have made good on that old reputation I am willing to give the staff of the Times the benefit of the doubt. I'm willing to trust their judgement. I think they've more than earned that I think the age of not just the tweets, but the person in question are an important nuance. Jeong was born in 1988, she's not exactly an old woman permanently set in her ways. The tweets I've seen are from 2014-16. People can change a hell of a lot in four years, and a hell of a lot over years as densely packed as the last two have been. I know I have I get the distinct impression that this is a story that's gained momentum not so much because it's a racist person doing racist shit, but because it's a golden opportunity for the more insular and entrenched elements of the right to come out and revel in the chance for calling out the big bad lefty journalistic institution for hypocrisy and double standards. Because it's a decidedly left wing person working for a generally left leaning news company It feels this way especially after the whole big stink with James Gunn, where some older tweets just as bad and some worse were dredged up by bad faith actors and he was subsequently axed from Disney. At the time, he was largely given the benefit of the doubt and Disney is who caught the flak When that story broke, I recall someone saying something along the lines of "Good job, idiots, you've just given the alt right a bullet and a gun to fire from", and there's a post earlier in this thread talking about weaponized outrage. I think this is the second bullet. It's come completely out of left field at a time when the media is on shakey enough ground as it is It's getting nigh impossible not to think like a conspiracy theorist about this shit all the time, but it's not exactly a secret that there's no shortage of bad faith actors with a grudge against the media and a vested interest in perpetuating a narrative of a hypocritical and secretly reverse racist who are absolutely giddy at the thought of policing the left with their own PC culture Seeing as I'm a convenient example, feel free to take a gander at my post history. Even as far back as just a few months you can see changes in the way I post and generally conduct myself. Go back far enough and it starts getting kinda difficult to reconcile the posts as being from the same person Ultimately, I'm glad the NYT is standing by their reporter over this, even if I strongly disagree with the way she's conducted herself in the past, because I think doing otherwise would contribute to setting a much more harmful and dangerous precedent. Completely disregarding any and all context of the present to tar and feather a person for minor things in the past makes it just about impossible for people to change and grow as people. People can't change if you don't give them the benefit of the doubt and believe they can change, it almost makes change not allowed It's a shitty situation and I think she definitely deserves a suspicious eye, but I'm willing to trust the NYT made the best call they could under the circumstances
Honestly disagree, I think the NYT has been thoroughly centrist, but yeah I'm doing the same. It's however super demoralizing to see articles from politico like https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/02/im-a-liberal-feminist-heres-why-i-support-judge-kavanaugh-219081 which are openly supporting reactionary judges that plan to reverse decades of women's rights just because the judge was friends with the liberal author. As if violating human rights is an "ok thing" to do as long as you do it with civility.
The American right is very sensitive I'll have you know https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/112373/d9a2a59c-c26b-4871-b2d8-396fc5fd069f/CurnZB9W8AAljwX.jpg
MBFC has them at a left-center leaning, so I'm partially going off that There's also just a smidge of hyperbole, as they're often characterized as a left wing news outlet due to their habit of reporting factually on Tinyhands' and the Republican Party's sketchy doings
Center left for the US lol. The democratic party in the united states is pretty close to most conservative parties in Europe. That's not even bring into the fact that neutrality is ridiculous. As if the only way you're allowed to post a socialist article is if you post a nazi piece in opposition first. The range of what people consider acceptable is determined by the "overton window" and it's shifted quite far to the right the last few years.
Hell, the Dems in the US are further right than the Conservatives in Canada.
Wish they would've stuck to their guns earlier for Quinn Norton 6 months ago. This type of witch hunting has been going on for quite a while and the first time it came up(For things older and less terrible than what Sarah wrote), they caved and fired her. Not sure why the media is finally waking up to how awful it is, but its better late than never. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/the-new-york-times-fired-my-doppelganger/554402/
Being asymmetrical on the issue of race out of a progressive need to balance for something will not work, it's even more foolhardy than income equality, and instead will end up causing degeneration of the left in a multicultural society especially since it has been in retreat from its old labor roots for decades. Unlike a class angle, it will be interpreted as tribalism and speaking to a lower level of human behavior. Unlike a class angle, it will be seen as part of a much older kind of social strife that predates class-based societies and is outside of the scope of the left or politics in general. Whereas the left could at least pitch socialism as uniting everyone on the basis of shared material interests as proles and give us an end of history, that doesn't apply here. Trying to compensate for an idea of historical context is a fool's errand, and will perpetuate a cycle of 'barbarism' in Luxemburg's famous quote about war. Jeong's harassment is no excuse for behavior like this since every other ethnic and racial antagonism in history has been a back-and-forth cycle, and anthropology suggests blaming other cultures for a group's problems is a constant in history simply because it works.
*100 thinking emojis* https://twitter.com/virgiltexas/status/1025081318693122048
'they started the racism!' makes no fucking sense. Having a reason for your racism doesn't mean it's not racism. It just means we can explain why you might be racist. Still makes you a shitty person. Racism is bad.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.