Saturday, March 29, 2014

The Far Left Is Crazy: Suey Park / "Cancel Colbert" Edition

Wow.

These people are completely nuts. 

There's no sense trying to reason with them of course. Ridicule is really the only sensible response...

But, just for the record: 'oriental' is not a "racial slur." It's perfectly cool to point out things like "in general, Asians prefer 'Asian.'" There's nothing wrong with that. But 'oriental' is simply not a slur. At worst, it's outdated. (Of course the use of 'oriental' in the tweet was intentional as part of the satire...). 

The lefty-left is obsessed with words, and it loves bullying and controlling people, so it really, really loves bullying and controlling people with respect to language.

Also, you've got to love when Park says "I won't enact the labor of having to explain this to you." LOOOOOL Nice. She could have said "I won't explain this to you," and, though that would be stupid, it would at least have been grammatical. But she couldn't resist cramming in a bonus leftyspeak buzzphrase, and so she gets some kind of solecism or something. But, of course, having to explain it to you is not an act. Explaining it to you is an act. You can't enact having to explain it to you. This is how you become stupid by trying to sound smart.

Seriously, I wish liberals were better at calling bullshit on the lunatic left. I know--I understand. The right is a a more politically significant target and all that...  But calling BS on BS should know no political allegiance.

Maybe they will if its Colbert that's being targeted. (I myself don't find Colbert funny...I think his schtick got old a long time ago... But I'm in the minority.)

It's great that the interviewer calls BS on that you don't get to have an opinion on this, white devil nonsense. It's too bad that people so seldom have sensible discussions of such points. Obviously its false that, say, whites cannot have views about racism. But I think it's also obvious that people who more commonly are the targets of racism do have something like a kind of expertise about it, so their testimony about things like frequency and effects counts for more than that of, say, whites, who are rarely the target of racism. But that's a far cry from SHUT UP AND BELIEVE WHAT I TELL YOU TO BELIEVE, which is, in essence, Park's position.

Park, incidentally, is a professional victim--where 'professional' is literal. This is how she makes her living. That doesn't mean she's wrong--she's wrong for other reasons. But it may add helpful context.

(Via /r/tumblrinaction)


2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

How does Park make her living coming up with ruckus-making twitter tags? I briefly googled this, but couldn't figure it out. Is she supported by a University? Think tank? Do the tags lead back to some kind of advertising? Genuine curiosity here.

In the course of said googling, I saw that Park's previous major success was with the virally angry tag #notyourasiansidekick. The word "sidekick" struck me as weird, rather old fashioned. Do people ever refer to having sidekicks? I could think of many expressions better suited to Park's apparent meaning: "token Asian friend", &c... Then it hit me that sidekicks are what comic and serial heroes have, and that we're likely dealing with a Green Hornet/Kato reference. In the world of identity politics, it's always the late 60's to early 70's.

But look, I wouldn't call Park crazy. There is clearly a craft to what she does. If nothing else, the target of outrage has to be carefully selected: a person or group within the progressive camp but somewhat marginal to it. The target's marginality can be based on ideological difference, but could be aesthetic too. Lots of people, not just you, find Colbert's bit a little lame and one note. (My position: why do we need Colbert for satire when we have the actual career of Bill O'Reilly?) The very silly article you linked a few weeks back, the anti-Movember thing, was aimed at mustachioed hipsters, a group by and large liberal but a bit annoying. Properly targeted, the j'accuse will propagate very effectively based upon non-target liberals gleefully taking something they already don't care for down a peg, and target liberals hastily defending something about which they already feel a bit insecure.

12:45 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

LOL

I just watched that clip, and the anchor destroys her! I mean, he does so somewhat politely, even. That's impressive, HuffPo. I was not expecting that.

It's somehow satisfying to see a professional racism victim turn out to be quite racist. After all her complaints about people minimalizing her experiences and whatnot, she informs the anchor that, as a white man, not only are his experiences necessarily insufficient to produce adequate understanding of the issue at hand, but he can't really understand that, even, because he's too busy condescending to her as white men are wont to do..

Perhaps we should be easy on her, though. It must be difficult for someone to appreciate satire when her life seems to be the result of a heavenly pen moving with just that purpose in mind..

10:44 AM  

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