When you go to Starbucks (I don't, because I'm a hipster douchebag who must have fresh-ground French press that I make myself from beans purchased from a specialty roaster who sneers at you from behind a douche-y moustache and lots of tattoos), do you check the barista's twitter account to make sure there is nothing to offend your delicate, little feelings, and demand that the manager fire his racist/misogynist ass if you discover that the dumbass voted for Trump? No, because it doesn't matter. You just want your damned coffee before you go into caffeine withdrawal. Drink your coffee like the addict you are, and be done with it. (Or am I just projecting here?)
Oh, right. I was writing about something besides coffee. Mmmmmm.... cauuufffeeeee.... For those who have missed this, the New York Times hired Sarah Jeong for its editorial board, and a bunch of right-wing trolls attacked because... Asian woman. She has some past tweets that were attackable, so the trolls engaged in the rituals of "performative outrage" and demanded that she be fired. Or un-hired, or... whatever.
This should sound familiar. James Gunn. James Gunn was fired as director for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 after some trolls dug up a few off-color jokes he made. This is a pattern. Right-wing trolls do this. They pick a target, go back through that target's social media accounts to find some reason to feign outrage, and demand that the target of their outrage be fired. They do this because they are terrible, terrible people, and anyone who participates in ritual outrage enables them. See my previous post on the subject. Note how my approach to free speech short-circuits all of this.
Gunn was an interesting case in the total disconnect between directing a movie, after having directed the previous two, and the jokes unearthed. What about Jeong, though? Can one make any connection between service on the editorial board of the New York Times and her tweets? Watch me bend over backwards trying to accommodate the right-wing trolls, and still fail. Because those people suck. This is called, "good faith argumentation." Try it sometime. Trolls don't, because they are trolls, but this is what I do.
Jeong's tweets were basically white-people-suck tweets. Hey! My house is glass! Oooooh! Pretty rock! How many times have I used my favorite Zappa quote? See, for example, here. That quote is, "I'm not black, but there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white." Zappa was responding to race riots in 1965. I use it, as a white person, when I get fed up watching white people be vile. Take that a step further. When George Cicciarello-Maher (remember him?) says he wants "white genocide," you cannot reasonably take that literally because he's white.
Jeong isn't. So, let's bend over backwards to try to make right-wing trolls' case for them. Do they deserve it? No, but this is how intellectualism works. You test your own argument by trying to make the other side's argument for them, as well as you can. Which is better than they can, because they are racist, misogynist scum. Not that I'm biased, or anything.
Do you want a society in which people don't make racially disparaging comments about each other? Then don't make racially disparaging comments about others. (There really is something to this...) Zappa can do it about himself. Cicciarello-Maher can try, but he sucks at it, because he's not Zappa. Praise be, to the great Frank. Oh, and Jeong hates Breaking Bad, but before he played Walter White, Cranston played Tim Whatley on Seinfeld, who converted to judaism to be able to make self-deprecating jokes, that goyim couldn't make. However, if what you want is a society in which people don't disparage each other on the basis of race, don't disparage others on the basis of race. Otherwise, there are white people, and men, who aren't your enemy, out there saying, "hey! What the fuck?! What'd I do?!" Don't hit your friends and get pissed off at them for getting pissed off. If you do that, you're the jerk.
Do I care? No. See my previous comments on taking offense. She was trying to joke on Twitter, and I don't care. One might pose a reasonable rule, though. Don't dish it out if you can't take it. The problem with applying that particular schoolyard rule is that the right-wing trolls fail it, and that's where this line of reasoning falls apart. The right-wing trolls attacking Sarah Jeong can't take even the slightest tweet (Trumpkins that they are), but they can dish out plenty. So, the closest I can come to a rule that would allow them to attack Jeong is a rule that the attackers, themselves, fail, in which case their best critique falls apart. I'm trying to make their case for them, and failing. Why? Because this is all bullshit. A bunch of trolls went back through someone's social media account to look for reasons to feign outrage, and that's just a vile thing to do. Vile. Nobody with a shred of decency does that. You do that? You're the villain. Period. The solution? Ignore phony outrage.
And yes, there is ludicrous outrage on the left, and plenty of it. Both sides-ism is bullshit, but this one? Oh, there's so much bullshit outrage on the left. My favorite example remains this one. At Oberlin College a few years ago (full disclosure: I taught there during the 2004-5 academic year), students actually, seriously protested the sushi at their dining hall as offensive cultural appropriation for being bad/improperly done/whatever. Yes, really.
Enough of this. This goes nowhere. The only real question, then, is whether or not Jeong can do the job. Let's really try to make the trolls' argument for them. Is there a way to argue that Jeong's tweets indicate an inability to perform the tasks on the editorial board of the New York Times?
Jeong has been a tech writer, in which case, those tweets wouldn't have mattered. As a member of the editorial board, she is supposed to be a check on what should and shouldn't be written, right? Isn't that their job? Guardians of
Key word: board. As in, more than one. The point of an editorial board is to have multiple perspectives. Dare I say, "diversity." In intellectual perspectives. That's the diversity that really matters in an editorial board, although the extent to which you can have intellectual diversity without other types of diversity, well... that gets into lots of other research. A topic for another day. I admit that I am biased in favor of smart provocateurs, but the question is the extent to which she is capable of performing the job. However, if you actually read the NYT announcement, it's basically still a tech news writing job. She isn't being brought on to make judgments about the propriety of language used to describe white people on the preciously staid pages of the Old Gray Lady.
In other words, it's her previous job, with a fancy, schmancy title, a bigger paycheck, and an even bigger target on her back for the right-wing trolls. How about that barista's twitter account? How's it lookin' this morning? Me? Even if I went to Starbucks, I wouldn't care.
You, too, can do your part by not looking for reasons to get offended. The right-wing trolls have weaponized that impulse. Come on over to the free speech side. The water's fine!
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