Toxic Sarah Jeong revisited
I originally had perceived Sarah Jeong’s anti-white tweets as really bad jokes. But jokes they were. And I stand by that, although I think that if the Times and other MSM outlets and SJWs have a zero tolerance for racist remarks, they should be consistent and extend that zero tolerance to Jeong.
But much more information has now emerged about other tweets of Jeong’s, and anti-white jokes are the least of her offenses. And the rest of it wasn’t even intended to be a joke of any sort. She’s tweeted really over-the-top hateful stuff (see this and this for more details and quotes).
My question at this point is this: How could the NY Times not have seen that extreme stuff of Jeong’s? It’s really toxic, and it doesn’t appear that she ever erased those tweets, either.
Does the paper not do any research on their young and trendy hires? Or did they see Jeong’s vile and bile-filled tweets and not care? Or do they approve of them?
I do not believe that the evidence supports a conclusion of Seong’s joking. Her SJW crusading on behalf of hard-left progressivism, predicated in part on anti-white animus, goes back many years. Since “hating whitey” is now the height of “wokeness”, she will fit in perfectly at the much-diminished NYT, which hired her, not despite her vile opinions, but because of them.
j e:
On my previous post about Jeong I explained why I thought those particular tweets of hers (the anti-white ones originally cited) were jokes. You’ll need to read those posts to see why I said it, plus this, for example.
I have not changed my opinion on those particular tweets.
However, I certainly have gotten more information about the general level of bile this woman is expressing towards many groups (men, for example), and it is very high and very toxic. Her jokes were also mean-spirited (to say the least). But they were jokes. The rest are not jokes.
The NYT knew all about her and they agree with her.
Of course the Times knew. It’s a feature, not a bug!
In the context of the 21st century, I find the analysis over joke/not-joke or comic/not-comic a mere quibble. Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Steve Colbert etc. all use a thin veil of comedy as a political delivery vehicle.
Do you find their comedy weak, stale or conventional? Response: Hey, I’m giving you rubes astute political analysis here.
Do you find the political jibes offensive or beyond the pale? Response: Hey, I’m just trying to entertain the commoners with some jokes.
Lenny Bruce got the ball rolling, and I’m not sure if the above is what he had in mind or something very different. I think he would have been honest enough to say, “Of course it’s offensive because I meant it to be.”
Q: Who reads the New York Times?
A: White people.
Lenny Bruce got the ball rolling, and I’m not sure if the above is what he had in mind or something very different. I think he would have been honest enough to say, “Of course it’s offensive because I meant it to be.”
TommyJay: Lenny Bruce’s most notorious bit was “Are There Any N*****s Here Tonight?” in which he used that and every ethnic slur repeatedly, not to demean people but to desensitize the words. Then he explained:
Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.
Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, “I would like to introduce you to all the n*****sin my cabinet,” and if he’d just say “n***** n***** n***** n***** n*****” to every n***** he saw … ’til n***** didn’t mean didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a n***** at school.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaRqDc41IFQ
TommyJay:
I agree at this point, on having learned this new information about Jeong’s other tweets, that whether or not those anti-white tweets were jokes or not is somewhat irrelevant. It was relevant when they was all the evidence there was, but there is now plenty more evidence that she is filled with hatred and bile of a quite extreme sort.
Her jokes are unfunny, too, but that’s not the point either.
I don’t think Lenny Bruce had this sort of thing in mind. Back then there were such strong taboos, he was trying to cut into that, but now the pendulum has swung WAY in the other direction. He was also more about obscenity rather than hatred of classes of people, at least to the best of my recollection.
The New York Times has been caught in a lie- they claimed they had vetted her and knew about the tweets before hiring her, but the new batch shows they never actually vetted her at all. I don’t think they can back down now- they will have to keep her after having tried to defend the initial batch as some sort of satire, which wasn’t all that clear as satire to begin with.
Either the Times didn’t actually research her before the hire, or what she said was okay with them. At this point I’m leaning towards the latter. There are plenty of examples of anti-white courses and professors in universities these days. All the cool people think this way.
It appears that Ms. Jeong had an unhappy breakup with a white boyfriend. For this, she blamed all men and in particular all whites. This is unbalanced.
She comes across as very bitter and hateful. And racist.
Just imagine the uproar if her targets were blacks. Hired and fired in less that 5 minutes.
I saw a recent photo of the NYT staff, and there were plenty of white men and women in that group. Sounds to me like there are going to be interesting days in the news room.
“Her jokes are unfunny, too, but that’s not the point either.” — Neo
I am always amused at the Left defending their outrageous verbiage as “satire” or “comedy” — see Jon Stewart, Al Franken, Kathy Gifford, et al. — when that is juxtaposed with their fact-checking and sober analysis of what Mr. Trump said, when he was obviously (to anyone with two live brain cells) making humorous comments — ones that, in most cases, actually were funny.
Maybe they are just jealous.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/24/michael-ches-lambaste-substituting-politics-comedy-spot/
One for the road – it really is funny.
https://comicallyincorrect.com/the-republican-in-a-bar-who-refused-to-get-mad/
A tiny sorrow of mine is Lenny Bruce hasn’t aged well for most people. He was dead four years before I read his routines in “The Essential Lenny Bruce,” but I laughed then and I laugh now. Maybe it’s the beatnik slang. Maybe it’s the dated references.
He was far out, folks. He broke comedy out of the its stale “Take my wife” ruts. After Bruce a comedian could go anywhere with any language. And Bruce paid the dues for that with years of legal harassment. He is an American saint of free speech.
He could be dark, his taste could be bad — such as making fun of an airplane bombing — but he was never hateful. He even did weirdly sympathetic sketches of Hitler and Nixon.
Here’s “Adolf Hitler and the MCA” in which Bruce plays a theatrical agent looking to cast the German dictator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIjOny4J2DY
You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.
A selection of representative commentary.
https://spectator.org/it-wasnt-just-a-few-tweets/#comment-4020680263
Tankerdave says:
“I am 70 years old, half Korean and American, a novelty at the time. In 1970 I was a ROTC cadet at San Jose State marching through the campus in uniform and with a rifle. A young Asian woman, walking beside me, asked me why I was in the ROTC program, because she was protesting the Vietnam War. I told her because I love the U.S. and I would be going on active duty in a couple of months. I asked her where she was from. She said she was from South Korea. I said, ” You need to know, my dad was a lieutenant during the Korean War and fought that war so your sorry ass could attend school here. I still find it hard to believe we allow these ungrateful people to live in our country!”
it-wasnt-just-a-few-tweets/#comment-4020553110
markenoff says:
” “Ms. Jeong pronounced herself a member of the “educated left wing elite.” ”
There are some ideas so ludicrous that only a member of the self-proclaimed “educated left wing elite” would believe them. ”
it-wasnt-just-a-few-tweets/#comment-4020700567
wellreadchef says:
“Just once, I would like to see these foul mouthed, hate spewing racists disavow all the inventions of white males. Ms. Jeong should toss aside her computers, health care, electricity, clean water and liberties guaranteed to her under our laws if she despises its’ inventors as much as she claims. ”
it-wasnt-just-a-few-tweets/#comment-4020824297
ridesdressage says: (nice picture of a horse, BTW)
“Give her 3 hours a day on prime time. She will help conservatives in November…”
No thread about anti-white-racism is complete without a quote from Kipling, and a threat from the Silent Conservatives (can’t guarantee any longer that it’s a majority, as even Hillary only thought the Deplorables were half of half of the country).
Notice that Kipling uses correct grammar instead of “woke” —
DerKrieger says: #comment-4020830565
‘ “Don’t make me angry. You won’t like me when I’m angry.” – white men – the most destructive force ever seen by the world.
The Chinese invented gunpowder for fireworks. We used it to make weapons.
We specialize in warfare. No one is better at it.”
Engineer IKB says: #comment-4020664212
The Left is trying very hard to ignite the Wrath of the Awakened Saxon.
THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
by Rudyard Kipling
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.
Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not suddently bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.
Are edgy, young, racist writers the future? I don’t know, but the Times is making a bet that they are. Trying to become a woman’s magazine is one thing, and not all that risky, but becoming lunatic edgy could easily go wrong. Here’s hoping 🙂
Kate said:
“Either the Times didn’t actually research her before the hire, or what she said was okay with them. At this point I’m leaning towards the latter.”
Actually, I lean toward the former, for two reasons. One, the latter explanation assumes competence on the NYT’s part, which I don’t think is characteristic of them. Two, the former explanation assumes that the NYT is lying about having vetted her thoroughly… and that IS characteristic of them.
I suspect that they vetted her in a cursory way, and are in CYA mode now, just starting to realize what they’re in for. Maybe they will fire her… but either way, things are certainly getting interesting!
despite…or…because of
How about both?
Leave her there. Some people have argued the NYT isn’t biased. You can argue endlessly about, say, faking up a story about McCain having an affair with a lobbyist and end up with fog and smoke.
This gal, now…. There’s no dispute. She is the NYT. She’s what the NYT wants. She’s what the NYT doesn’t mind looking like. She’s the unmasked face of the NYT. By extension, the rest of the MSM
And Trump can use the votes.
Checking the web, I see the left is circling their wagons around Jeong. The rationales fall into three arguments: (1) Jeong was joking, (2) internet trolls made her do it and (3) there’s no such thing as racism against whites.
Since the obvious argument to the outcome if she had switched her attacks against whites and males to SJW-privileged groups is so devastating, the left makes sure that argument can never be mounted.
So there’s no possibility of dialog here. As usual conservatives are kafkatrapped into accepting they are racist because the left says they are, or proving they are racist by arguing they are not.
In the meantime I’m looking into Jeong’s tech creds. She was hired on the basis of her alleged tech expertise but I can’t find much there beyond she’s a journalist who has written some tech articles, mostly about Silk Road, and a book titled “The Internet of Garbage.”
Her writing seems to boil down to seeing tech as a nail in need of an SJW hammer. A few quotes from S. Jeong:
Code is never neutral, and interfaces can signal all kinds of things to users.
…
When we seek to build truly equal platforms and marketplaces of ideas fit for the 21st century, we are trying to create things that have never existed and cannot be constructed by mindlessly applying principles of the past.
…
Code is never neutral; it can inhibit and enhance certain kinds of speech over others.
If Jeong has said or written anything brilliant, I haven’t found it. She just seems to be an ordinary journalist with edgy pretensions, double intersectionality as an Asian woman, and a Harvard Law degree.
Ok, let’s assume that she is a racist and a misandrist (a woman who hates men). Hell, let’s assume that she is a full on psycho-bitch and a bitter and hateful human being.
So what? You’re not dating her. You’re not inviting her to your party. The NYT hired her to write articles on technology. Is she qualified to do that? The NYT seems to think so. Should her other shortcomings as a human disqualify her from working as a reporter? I don’t think so.
Just imagine if we started disqualifying job applicants on the basis of personal opinions expressed at some time in the past. This is not the way to promote tolerance and understanding. In fact it is just the opposite.
I thought the NYT might axe Jeong quietly in a late night Friday news dump, but it didn’t happen.
Now I’m thinking, given her intact prog support, the NYT will brazen it out and retain Jeong. There’s plenty of “heighten the contradictions” upside to that for conservatives, so I’m not bothered.
But it is annoying.
PS. Listening to Lenny Bruce last night I was struck by how friendly he sounded compared to today’s comics. Almost cuddly. Not to mention, intelligent and civil.
Weird, because in his day, people were horrified by the “sick” Lenny Bruce. Consequently he titled his first album, “The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce.” The cover showed Bruce picnicking in a cemetery.
Roy:
Here is a clue, potential employers vet you and screen you based on your social media presence and use your history as a tool to screen you out. “Human Resources” personnel are not your friend; don’t expect tolerance, understanding, and respect for diversity of opinion from HR.
The NYT hired her to write articles on technology.
Roy Nathanson: Not quite. They hired her to be their “lead writer” on technology and to sit on their Editorial Board, which presumably means she weighs in on a lot more than the latest wrinkles in tech.
The NYT can hire her or fire her as far as I’m concerned. However, they fired non-SJW writer, Qunn Norton, in a hot New York minute after her Twitter history became problematic, so they ought to fire Jeong too or admit they are partisan, hypocritical hacks.
Norton was a tech writer and had far more impressive credentials in that area than Jeong. From what I can tell, Jeong is a classic SJW infiltrating tech to subvert the field for her political ends rather than to provide objective journalism or worthwhile insights.
huxley,
My personal political philosophy is practical libertarian. I am not particularly interested in “social justice” or “culture wars. What does interest me is my own personal freedom, both economic and personal.
To me, a lot of people are mounting a crusade against the NYT that, if successful, sets a dangerous precedent. They are saying that there should be some sort of political correctness litmus test for employment, and that corporations who do not abide should be held responsible for their choices of employees. I believe this to be bad policy. If you don’t agree with the NYT don’t buy their newspaper. But they have a right to hire and fire as they deem fit.
Roy:
Are you a slow learner? Corporations have political litmus tests for acceptable thought and speech, consider Google, for example.
“Corporations have political litmus tests for acceptable thought and speech…”
And I am saying they should not and should not have to.
To me, a lot of people are mounting a crusade against the NYT that, if successful, sets a dangerous precedent. They are saying that there should be some sort of political correctness litmus test for employment, and that corporations who do not abide should be held responsible for their choices of employees.
Roy Nathanson: The “dangerous precedent” has already been set by the left.
I’m not in favor of anyone’s employment being destroyed on account of social media. However, if that’s the way the left is going to play the game, the right should at least point out the hypocrisy.
Roy Nathanson:
Precedent? That precedent was set long, long ago.
In general, however, I believe in the idea that political correctness should not be a litmus test for employment. But this is somewhat different for 2 reasons. The first is that her employment is as a reporter/writer for a newspaper that prides itself, supposedly, on the “objectivity” of its writers. They are not actually objective, but objectivity is the idea of itself that the Times wishes to promote. Therefore the extremity of the views of its editorial staff matter in a way that the views of a computer programmer or a business person do not matter. But the second reason is that it’s not just that Jeong isn’t PC, it’s that she appears to be filled with consuming hatred—expressed in murderous, obscenity-filled terms over many tweets over a period of quite a few years. Not just a few tasteless jokes (as I though it was at the beginning).
And if the Times wants to employ her, it is free to do so. But it tells us quite a bit about the paper (actually, it tells us things we already knew).
The people who run The New York Times are intellectual and moral frauds. This repulsive young woman’s hiring and retention is just another indicator of that.
People, George McGovern is dead, Nat Hentoff is dead, Alan Dershowitz begins his ninth decade on this Earth this year, and Jerilyn Merritt begins her eighth. Portside figures who have fixed principles whose application they argue and against which they judge public policy are limited to the older age cohorts and to a scatter of policy wonks like Harold Pollack. As for the rest, it’s improvisation and status games all the way down and merits no deference, respect, or engagement. That’s true whether their discourse aspires to be highbrow (Corey Robin), middlebrow (Paul Krugman), or lowbrow (this ho’).
So people here understand my point of view… Although I am an American, I have not actually lived in the U.S. for nearly thirty years. But, now I am returning. So, I am taking more of an interest in what is going on.
If you tell me that political correctness for employment is now a requirement, I guess I have to believe you. But, I will never accept that it is right or just.
If you don’t like what people say, don’t listen to them. I grew up with the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Now, I am not stupid enough to not know that that was a sort of lie. But, the point was to learn how to have a thick skin and not care so much what others said.
We enshrined the right to free speech in the Constitution. It was understood that free and lively discourse was a prerequisite for a democracy to function, even though part of the cost of that right was having to listen to a lot of crap. So, what is the difference if free speech is infringed upon, not by legislation and law, but by social pressure?
I say that people MUST feel free to express the truth as they see it.
In the world you all are talking about, the little boy who said that the emperor was naked would have been hanged on the spot.
Roy
Glad to hear that you are returning to the USA after 30 years away. Principles do matter, but practice has changed substantially while you were gone. “We’re not in Kansas …Toto.”
It is not a joke to call someone (or a group) an outrageously vulgar epithet.
Tolerating that, as Neo seems to do with her “bad jokes” approach, is to add to the process of degradation of our civil society, to not stave it off from its accelerating descent even if only in a wee way.
I didn’t like Lenny Bruce way back then, for the same reason. “Nigga, nigga, nigga” is not and should not be cloaked as a joke. It had an effect then because those words were impolite in front of an all-white, paying audience. I don’t pay to have my face rubbed in dirt.
But even “Fuck Trump” is OK now, not impolite at all, because he is not being personally addressed. Would they say it one-on-one? No. They are cowards, baiting their audiences.
How about “Guppy-cruncher”? An anti-Catholic “joke” re fish on Fridays. Funny to Catholics, ya think?
OM,
Principles matter. Period.
Without them, what are we? No better than the barbarians at the gate.
“In the meantime I’m looking into Jeong’s tech creds. She was hired on the basis of her alleged tech expertise”
One suspects that Jeong’s leftist racialist viewpoints were more important factors in her hiring than her tech credentials.
Within the last two months I’ve put together a laser engraver and learned how to use related software. I’ve also started designing parts with a CAD program and printed those parts on a 3D printer that I’ve upgraded myself. Could Jeong do the same?
Jeong speaks of “code” as if she knows how to program. My guess is that she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between G-code and Morse code, let alone the difference between C++ and Fortran.
Jeong speaks of “code” as if she knows how to program.
Johann Amadeus Metesky: Speaking as a programmer, I thought she was committing a category error when she used the word, “code.”
Contrary to Jeong’s claims, “code” is as neutral as letters of the alphabet. It’s only when a designer/programmer creates a user interface with code that one encounters issues of social signaling and speech.
A for-loop which counts from 1 to 1000 is perfectly valid and typical “code” but incurs no social issues of such dear concern to the SJW heart. Programmers don’t use the word, “code,” like Jeong does.
“As for the rest, it’s improvisation and status games all the way down and merits no deference, respect, or engagement. That’s true whether their discourse aspires to be highbrow (Corey Robin), middlebrow (Paul Krugman), or lowbrow (this ho’).” -Art Deco (above) — Beautiful parallel structure. Big UPvote.
Huxley – agreed. The agitated leftists are all about category errors – and really crappy metaphors.
Roy
Principles matter indeed, except to SJWs, to them Power matters. You forget that at your peril. Wishing and hoping that the left believes in free speech or will respect your rights is naive. Assuming that your social media profile will not be used against you by the SJW mobs or by a SJW working in corporate “human resources” is foolish. That’s the USA of today, not the USA of 1988.
“Principles matter. Period. Without them, what are we? No better than the barbarians at the gate.”
Principles that you don’t enforce are just whining words not worth the breath and spittle it took to form them. If you want rule of law, you’d better enforce it, because not just the barbarians, but nature itself, will enforce its own law (Might Makes Right) all over so-called civilization if you let it.
To the responses above, I am reminded of a quotation:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Roy
Given what happened to Candace Owen in Philadephia this morning; assaulted by Antifa in a restaurant, your preening about our “Principles” in response to those who have none, is sounding to me like Concern Trolling.
The NYT has been vile since at least the 1930s. Look up the Holodomor and Walter Duranty. The NYT whitewashed genocide in support of Communism.
“I hate whitey because he’s white… W I T E” …
That was joking, then. (SNL, Eddie Murphy?)
For far too long in black majority K-12 schools, this has been implicit and is now becoming explicit.
Roy “If you tell me that political correctness for employment is now a requirement, I guess I have to believe you. But, I will never accept that it is right or just.”
Look up Google’s treatment of James Damore, try this one:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/lawsuit-goes-after-alleged-anti-conservative-bias-at-google/
It’s not right, nor just, but it IS part of the on-going culture war.
Today, Sili Valli is strongly anti-Christian, mildly or strongly anti-conservative, and very anti-Republican. Capitalism & Libertarians (both L & little “l” like me) are not yet shunned & shamed and in the closet.
It’s very true that we who fight against the monstrous Democrat post-modern PC bullies must be aware that “… the abyss is staring back”, into us.
But we are in a fight, a war, a culture war. And War Is Hell.
American good guys have been losing.
Trump, very imperfect, perhaps worse than U.S. Grant, is willing and able to fight the Dem PC bullies. Like Lincoln said of Grant: “I can’t spare this man, he fights.”
Unlike the (better man?) Romney, or GW Bush (remember, so long ago now, Bush Derangement Syndrome?). Bush fought Saddam, but not against the Dem PC bullies. Nor against Obama, but he’s willing to strike a few blows against Trump, stupidly.
McCain IS willing to fight — against Reps, so as to be a better darling token Rep of the Dem media. He’s not willing to fight much against the Dem PC bullies.
I liked Cruz, but don’t think he would be as good a fighter as Trump.
War is hell. I’m glad, glad, glad the USA nuked Hiroshima to end WW II, rather than another bloody invasion, like D-Day plus Okinawa (but 10* worse). Using nukes is monstrous.
But losing against the bad guys is worse. See Democratic Socialism, available for 20 years in Venezuela, and going … strong? … or something.
The Dem PC bullies won’t use this quote from Reagan, but they sure act like it on the culture war: “we win, they lose”.
Free Americans, the “normals”, need to win. At minimal monstrousnous, but winning is most important.