Sarah Jeong Is Not The Point: Maybe Her Tweets WERE Reactions To Provocation
Just incidentally: if they were, I consider that an excusing condition. It is possible that the things are tongue-in-cheek responses to nasty comments. I'm skeptical only because anti-white racism and anti-male sexism are such central parts of contemporary PC/SJ/progressive dogma. Because of their centrality to the doctrine, I don't see them as puzzling or in need of any other explanation. I have assumed that Jeong is a fairly ordinary lefty progressive, and that she sincerely believes that whites and men suck. All very straightforward.
(Also, of course: we've been given no evidence that they were responses to provocations; my point's purely hypothetical.)
However...people are people and people are individuals, and circumstances vary and weirder things have happened. Jeong could be a perfectly nice person who got fed up and blew her stack, saying things she doesn't believe or didn't mean. Or she could have been basically playing a role in order to piss off people who deserve to be pissed off. Or she may genuinely have just been mirroring the ideas of racist antagonists back at them. There are all sorts of possibilities, and some, if true, would be excusing to at least some extent.
Just because we're fed up with the crazy left doesn't mean that we have to be as crazy as they are. In fact, it's reason not to be.
Don't aim to destroy Sarah Jeong; aim to destroy the unhinged ideas she seems to be advocating. Let God or karma or her conscience or whatever deal with Sarah Jeong.
I think the idea on the other side--the right-of-Jeong-and-the-NYT side--is that the progressive left has insisted on a certain set of rules, but they violate them all the time. They have insisted that any hint of a hint of even possible racism is grounds for the destruction of careers and lives. And yet they themselves espouse an orthodoxy that is patently, explicitly racist. And when people on their side violate the rules the left espouses, a set of laughably absurd ad hoc theses are deployed to explain (or, as we might say, misplain or displain) away the contradiction. E.g.: 'racism' doesn't mean what 'racism' means; 'racism' means something else entirely! It all seems like a paradigm case of the loony progressive chicanery and special pleading that's loose in the land.
However, it could be otherwise. I'd bet that it's not a completely clear case--some of Jeong's tweets, one would think, would be in response to provocation. You wouldn't expect all of those to just be spontaneous expressions of ant-white racism...um...would you? And I'd bet that there's at least some thread or other for the NYT to hang its defense of her on. As a wise man once said to me, bad people are rarely bad like Bond villains are bad, rubbing their hands together and saying "Bwahahaha I love evil!" There's often some degree of excuse for their badness.
Anyway: my view is: this isn't really about Sarah Jeong. None of us know her. It's hard to believe that she doesn't have a racist bone in her body...but whatever. This is about a set of ideas that cannot be explained away by circumstances. Jeong is just a kind of opportunity for discussing the insane, racist, irrationalist, pseudoscientific, neo-Lysenkoist ideas of the contemporary left. Jeong seems to be a vocal advocate of those ideas, and so much the worse for her if she is. But whether she really is or not is basically beside the point.
Hate the epistemic sin, not the epistemic sinner.
Ya lunkheads.
(Also, of course: we've been given no evidence that they were responses to provocations; my point's purely hypothetical.)
However...people are people and people are individuals, and circumstances vary and weirder things have happened. Jeong could be a perfectly nice person who got fed up and blew her stack, saying things she doesn't believe or didn't mean. Or she could have been basically playing a role in order to piss off people who deserve to be pissed off. Or she may genuinely have just been mirroring the ideas of racist antagonists back at them. There are all sorts of possibilities, and some, if true, would be excusing to at least some extent.
Just because we're fed up with the crazy left doesn't mean that we have to be as crazy as they are. In fact, it's reason not to be.
Don't aim to destroy Sarah Jeong; aim to destroy the unhinged ideas she seems to be advocating. Let God or karma or her conscience or whatever deal with Sarah Jeong.
I think the idea on the other side--the right-of-Jeong-and-the-NYT side--is that the progressive left has insisted on a certain set of rules, but they violate them all the time. They have insisted that any hint of a hint of even possible racism is grounds for the destruction of careers and lives. And yet they themselves espouse an orthodoxy that is patently, explicitly racist. And when people on their side violate the rules the left espouses, a set of laughably absurd ad hoc theses are deployed to explain (or, as we might say, misplain or displain) away the contradiction. E.g.: 'racism' doesn't mean what 'racism' means; 'racism' means something else entirely! It all seems like a paradigm case of the loony progressive chicanery and special pleading that's loose in the land.
However, it could be otherwise. I'd bet that it's not a completely clear case--some of Jeong's tweets, one would think, would be in response to provocation. You wouldn't expect all of those to just be spontaneous expressions of ant-white racism...um...would you? And I'd bet that there's at least some thread or other for the NYT to hang its defense of her on. As a wise man once said to me, bad people are rarely bad like Bond villains are bad, rubbing their hands together and saying "Bwahahaha I love evil!" There's often some degree of excuse for their badness.
Anyway: my view is: this isn't really about Sarah Jeong. None of us know her. It's hard to believe that she doesn't have a racist bone in her body...but whatever. This is about a set of ideas that cannot be explained away by circumstances. Jeong is just a kind of opportunity for discussing the insane, racist, irrationalist, pseudoscientific, neo-Lysenkoist ideas of the contemporary left. Jeong seems to be a vocal advocate of those ideas, and so much the worse for her if she is. But whether she really is or not is basically beside the point.
Hate the epistemic sin, not the epistemic sinner.
Ya lunkheads.
posted by Winston Smith at
1:08 PM
2 Comments:
"I think the idea on the other side--the right-of-Jeong-and-the-NYT side--is that the progressive left has insisted on a certain set of rules, but they violate them all the time. They have insisted that any hint of a hint of even possible racism is grounds for the destruction of careers and lives."
This is not entirely correct, because you need to consider the Left's outright anti-rationalism. Really the Left has a goal, and that is simply to capture power (presumably to achieve equality but things don't usually pan out that way), because power is the only thing that exists in their universe. It knows accusations of racism serves that end, so it leverages it as much as possible. It also leverages racism against whites to stigmatize their opposition, because that serves their objectives to achieve power as well. When they do the racism=prejudice+power schtick (always ignoring that they have plenty of power when they exercise racism...), they are simply admitting they are using "racism" for its cultural connotations, not in an ethically sane way. There simply is never a world where they consider "racism is bad" as a genuine moral rule, because moral rules are not even a part of their conceptual makeup.
The salve for this is to ignore the semantics and the name "racism", and focus on what makes racism unjust, ie causing harm to people simply due to their ancestry. One additional benefit of this is we'll stop ritualizing the accusation of racism, which god knows we need to learn to do.
A really interesting point, as usual, Anon. Thanks for it.
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