[toyg]

I don't know how old you are, but from a 40-yo perspective, the NYT being seen as "leftist" is a terrifying signal of how right-wing the mainstream political window has gone in the US. The traditional megaphone of the East-Coast moneyed, the newspaper that sold the Iraq War to the public with lie after lie, is now seen as a bastion of liberalism.

The US is in a very dark place right now. Last time it happened, it took Katrina to briefly break the spell. I wonder what it will take this time.

[leereeves]

The NY Times recently hired an editor who tweeted things like "kill all the men", "fuck the police", "it's sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men".

I'd like to think that's well outside the mainstream political window.

[VSTN]

This is because there is a massive confusion of the political spectrum which is better divided as 4 parts rather than 2.

The NYT isn't left at all when it comes to its views on how the economy should be run. But on social issues it certainly is a left rag. In fact, in what kind of environment but the leftomost extremist side could one tolerate the presence of an employee like Sarah Jeong who said such nice things as "white people are only fit to live underground like groveling goblins"? Not only did they not fire her but they even came to her defense.

The NYT is the poster child of the new generation of leftists, whose core obsessions are not whether the proletariat earns enough to make a decent living but whether they can dye their hair blue and still find a job.

[rainonmoon]

Arguably, the kind of environment in which one elects a President who generalises an entire nationality as criminals and rapists except for "a few, [who] I assume, are good people." If you want to find how low the bar has fallen, understand that one side of the political divide lowered it long before Jeong got there.

Your final assertion is not worth addressing.

[leereeves]

Sarah Jeong's anti-white, anti-male, anti-cop tweets date back to 2013, long before the election.

https://archive.fo/7m0Tz

I don't agree with you that "they did it first" is a valid defense for this behavior, but if it were, it would be a defense for Trump, not for Jeong.

[rainonmoon]

By "one side of the political divide" I'm not referring to Trump specifically, but the online subcultures that dovetailed into the alt-right, which most certainly existed before Jeong's tweets.

EDIT: To further clarify, I'm not saying "they did it first" is a defence. I'm explaining that this is the context that Vox article going around is saying is missing when people want to condemn those tweets -- the tone and vocabulary of a certain part of Twitter. Jeong's mistake was posting those tweets with a particular audience in mind - one that understood the touchstones of these conversations (e.g. "kill all men" being obviously not a serious rallying cry to murder males) - when, although Twitter can sometimes feel like a clubhouse, it's still a public forum. At the time, I, and many other people situated within that context, understood Jeong's meaning perfectly, and even as a white man I empathise with what she's saying. Others may not be aware of that context, or choose to ignore it, which is where the fraughtness of her comments lay, not the content itself.

I'm certain the response to this will be along the lines of "Then why are white men persecuted for making racist jokes?" and the answer is because young Asian-American women have a lot more to fear from young white men than vice versa, which is the power dynamic at the heart of why Jeong's comments can only be called "racist" in the strictest definition of the term, disregarding the present situation. But this is all getting too complex to outline in a comment unambiguously, so I hesitate to say even that much.

[leereeves]

Then don't use "the kind of environment in which one elects a President..." (in 2016) as a defense.

If you must use the "they did it first" defense, at least use specific examples from 2013 to defend her.

[rainonmoon]

I've edited my comment to reflect that that is not actually what I'm trying to do here.

[VSTN]

"some people did it first" is not worth addressing either.

[hhjinks]

The complete and irreversible collapse of several important ecosystems is on the horizon...