[HN Gopher] NYTimes Peru N-Word: My side of the story, in four p...
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NYTimes Peru N-Word: My side of the story, in four parts
Author : FillardMillmore
Score : 198 points
Date : 2021-03-01 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com)
| khanmaytok wrote:
| TL;DR?
| Daho0n wrote:
| You can't say racist words. Not even to ask "did she really say
| <bad word>?" because then you said it yourself and hence you
| are a racist. It's woke America.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The TLDR is 'don't argue with woke, entitled, powerful/rich
| teens'. Especially don't do it by being nuanced in your usage
| of racial slurs - it will go over their heads and it's likely
| to bite you in the ass.
| eli wrote:
| According to the person who got fired. That's not how the
| other people there describe it.
| djrogers wrote:
| > That's not how the other people there describe it.
|
| Easy to say, but we don't actually have any details
| reported from any first hadn't accounts other than this
| one...
| sodality2 wrote:
| Tangent but why is medium.com so bad? CPU usage is instantly 100%
| for the first 20 seconds after loading. Disabling JS has no
| visible effect but makes it load instantly.
|
| Granted, I'm on an older laptop (AMD A6-7310 APU) but holy cow I
| thought I could at least browse the web on this thing for a few
| more years.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Medium is awful. Pages on average load in <0.5 seconds,
| including JS. Medium takes 12 seconds on average. Bandwidth is
| not the bottleneck, I have 1Gps service.
| [deleted]
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Pardon the ignorance but isn't there a significant difference in
| how you pronounce this word? There is one way to say it that is
| the taboo version (phonetic spelling sort of) and another - with
| -a in the end which is how it's used in songs etc.?
|
| I have never heard the first pronunciation used in the US, but
| the second, accepted version is used everywhere, mostly by black
| people, but by white people too.
|
| Even though white people using the accepted version may raise
| some eyebrows, it's nothing compared to what I imagine would
| happen if the first, phonetic pronunciation was used.
|
| Asking this because it seems many people here refer to rap /
| movies / street use of the word, where in 100% of the cases
| (besides maybe some historic prose) the word has been used in its
| modified, accepted form.
|
| As for the first, historic/ phonetic pronunciation, it seems
| unreasonable to use it in any context, besides maybe speaking of
| some historical usage in prose etc., unless, of course, one
| actually intends to be offensive.
| [deleted]
| koreanguy wrote:
| get a real job, news is not a job
| temp8964 wrote:
| "We make America what it is -- without a free press, democracy
| dies."
|
| The second part is certainly true. But are you sure about the
| first part? If you ask anybody who make America what it is, the
| answer "journalists" maybe won't pass 10%.
| paxys wrote:
| People might not say it, but it is absolutely true. The biggest
| thing that separates a good democracy from a bad one is a free
| press that holds government accountable by providing
| transparency into its operations.
| temp8964 wrote:
| "Who make America what it is?" != "Who make democracy what it
| is".
|
| America's uniqueness is not democracy. There are many other
| countries are democratic and have free press and have
| journalists.
| IAmWorried wrote:
| I know this will get downvoted, but in the current state of
| affairs, I would rather have no press or journalists at all
| than this woke sanctimonious ministry of truth.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The second part is certainly true. But are you sure about the
| first part? If you ask anybody who make America what it is, the
| answer "journalists" maybe won't pass 10%.
|
| Without a free press, you're left with PR (or propaganda, to
| use its original name). You can't have much of a democracy if
| that's how the citizenry are "informed." This is shown by how
| one of the first things budding authoritarians do in
| backsliding democracy is attack the free press and gain control
| over it (e.g. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/24/hungary-
| editors-sacking-...).
|
| There's a high likelihood that someone will respond to my
| comment with a false equivalency claiming journalism is
| propaganda.
| temp8964 wrote:
| The question is "Who make America what it is?", it is not
| "Who make democracy what it is".
|
| America's uniqueness is not democracy. There are many other
| countries are democratic and have free press and have
| journalists.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > America's uniqueness is not democracy. There are many
| other countries are democratic and have free press and have
| journalists.
|
| Most of those countries developed those things _after_
| America. Democracy, free press, etc. are absolutely vital
| to American identity. You can 't take them away and be left
| with something recognizably "American."
| temp8964 wrote:
| I am not sure what kind of word game are we playing here,
| but let me make it simple:
|
| 1) journalists are important to free press
|
| 2) free press is important to democracy
|
| 3) democracy is important to America
|
| because of 1->2->3, journalists make America what it is.
|
| Do you understand by this logic, basically any profession
| can fit "xxx make America what it is". At least
| "programmers make America what it is" is certainly true.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Do you understand by this logic, basically any
| profession can fit "xxx make America what it is". At
| least "programmers make America what it is" is certainly
| true.
|
| The error you're making is treating all kinds of
| "important" as equivalent. Your 3) should be something
| more like "democracy is an important part of _American
| identity_. " Programming may be important to America
| today, but it's not really part of its identity.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| By that logic, many things make America what it is.
| Journalists, but also truck drivers and the automobile
| and the electric grid and...
| temp8964 wrote:
| But I guess truck drivers won't be so arrogant to make
| that kind of statement for themselves.
| Daho0n wrote:
| The US press might be free (more than most less than
| some) but if the American identify is so tied to the
| press, that most outside of the US sees as mostly
| propaganda for one cause or the other, I fear America
| won't be for long.
|
| IMO most of the press in the US is working against
| democracy, not for it.
| westoque wrote:
| > We can befriend you for years, and then bite off your arm just
| as you're offering us a treat. We can't help it. It's the nature
| of the job.
|
| Something about this line irks me. I have a love-hate
| relationship with journalism because of this. I like that we are
| able to share stories through good communication and writing but
| on the other hand, being honest could (as the author said) "bite"
| you back. I just wish that we were honest about the interaction
| from the get go and not waiting for that a-ha moment to catch the
| person off-guard so they can support their own initiative, bias
| or story.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| It seems to me one of the prominent issues in the "racist"
| dialogue is the nuance between people who are outwardly hateful
| and people who are outwardly indifferent to racial injustice.
| This guy probably doesn't hate anyone, but it certainly doesn't
| come across to me like he cares.
|
| This part is a red flag:
|
| > So, yeah, I can be an asshole. If you're an editor, and you
| made changes in a story of mine, and I lashed out at you like
| that, I'm very sorry. It wasn't because of your race or sex or
| youth or anything else. You may have just been a set of initials
| in the margins of our editing software. That's one part of me
| that's not very nice, and I know it. If I did that to you, I
| apologize. And if you'll tell me about it, I'll apologize
| personally.
|
| This seems like a red flag:
|
| > I'm surprised by how quick some colleagues who barely know me
| were prepared to accept those accusations and even add more on a
| Times alumni Facebook page. Someone to whom I don't think I've
| spoken since 1994 said "calling him only a racist is being nice."
| An editor I happily worked side by side with in 1989 and have had
| brief but cordial chats with maybe once every ten years when we
| bump into each other on the street said I seemed "dismissive of
| people of color and their views" back then. Someone I thought I'd
| been very nice to when she left the paper attacked me for using
| the expression "third world" in a story that was, as always,
| approved by several Times editors.
|
| This sounds like a red flag:
|
| > My girlfriend thinks I have a high-functioning Asperger aspect
| to my personality -- I'm empathic about suffering but I also very
| much misread audiences. A young Haitian-American colleague and
| friend who sat behind me for three years in Science news called
| me after the Beast story. I told him what I'd actually said in
| Peru. He said, "Donald, you sound exactly like my father. He
| would also say 'You can't dress like a thug to a job interview
| and expect to get the job.' But from you, it sounds racist." I
| said "How is 'thug' racist? What about Thug Life Records?" He
| said "It's almost the equivalent of the n-word. Don't you know
| about Marshawn Lynch?'' I said: "He plays for Seattle?" I could
| hear him sigh. "No, Donald, let me explain..."
|
| You can basically feel this guy's personality as a cliche. He
| thinks he's pretty smart. He constructs logical reasons to
| justify his action and doesn't understand intuitively when others
| have strong adverse reactions to his reasoning.
|
| In part 2 he provides this passage:
|
| > The question about blackface was part of a discussion of
| cultural appropriation. The students felt that it was never, ever
| appropriate for any white person to adopt anything from another
| culture -- not clothes, not music, not anything. I counter-argued
| that all cultures grow by adopting from others. I gave examples
| -- gunpowder and paper. I said I was a San Franciscan, and we
| invented blue jeans. Did that mean they -- East Coast private
| school students -- couldn't wear blue jeans? I said we were in
| Peru, and the tomato came from Peru. Did that mean that Italians
| had to stop using tomatoes? That they had to stop eating pizza?
| Then one of the students said: "Does that mean that blackface is
| OK?" I said "No, not normally -- but is it OK for black people to
| wear blackface?" "The student, sounding outraged, said "Black
| people don't wear blackface!" I said "In South Africa, they
| absolutely do. The so-called colored people in Cape Town have a
| festival every year called the Coon Carnival* where they wear
| blackface, play Dixieland music and wear striped jackets. It
| started when a minstrel show came to South Africa in the early
| 1900's. Americans who visit South Africa tell them they're
| offended they shouldn't do it, and they answer 'Buzz off. This is
| our culture now. Don't come here from America and tell us what to
| do.' So what do you say to them? Is it up to you, a white
| American, to tell black South Africans what is and isn't their
| culture?"
|
| Another instance of him asserting pedantic reasoning against a
| hard emotional opinion. Material he knows well is making people
| uncomfortable, but believes he is not at all accountable for.
|
| I don't think he is a racist. I think he is highly likely to be
| perceived as an asshole by those around him. I think its highly
| likely that he aggravates sensitive issues, including racial
| issues, somewhat frequently. I probably wouldn't want to work
| with him.
| jariel wrote:
| Ironically it's this comment that raises Red Flags.
|
| There's really nothing whatsoever in his articulation that is
| flag worthy.
|
| He's clearly a little bit curmudgeon, and probably disagreeable
| and there's nothing wrong with that.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Repeatedly saying things that makes people uncomfortable has
| consequences. There's liberal and conservative versions of
| it. Not comprehending the social consequences of your words
| is a problem. You personally finding one specific individual
| not problematic is completely irrelevant to understand how he
| got himself in that situation.
| lokar wrote:
| Your argument reads to me as saying that the people on the
| other side if this discussion (the ones who brought up the
| subject of appropriation, etc) have a right not to be
| challenged in their views. They are entitled to be offended by
| anyone who does not simply agree with them.
|
| What is the point of going on a trip like this with a NYT
| reporter if not to be exposed to new ideas and new viewpoints?
|
| I'm all for holding people accountable when they say terrible
| things with the intent to harm others, or say terrible things
| due to indifference and refuse to apologize when confronted.
| But you should not damn someone for having a different honest
| opinion.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Framing things as one's right feels like a naively
| libertarian slant to what is not an issue of governance, but
| of getting along with others. I wholesomely support this
| guy's right to express the view that black face is not
| objectively inappropriate regardless of all contexts. And yet
| I would be utterly unsurprised if many students came out of
| that conversation feeling like he had used obscure examples
| to argue that black face isn't universally bad and we should
| therefore just deal with it in the US. I wouldn't bat an eye
| to learn that he frequently undermined racial issues with
| technicalities. There are people saying he denied the concept
| of white privilege. He says he didn't do this. I doubt he
| thinks he did, but I'm betting a lot of people disagree.
|
| Hanging around someone who frequently espouse technically
| defensible views that visibly make those around him
| uncomfortable is unpleasant. It is not difficult at all to
| imagine how a series of unpleasant encounters results in
| negative consequences. Especially if it trends into being
| seen as intentionally doing it to make others uncomfortable,
| which a lot of times it actually is when you're dealing with
| someone who revels in controversial pedantic details.
|
| I don't see this as someone being held accountable for
| harming someone directly. I see this as a guy who caused
| people to repeatedly feel uncomfortable on trendy issues and
| an org get really nervous that he's a reputational liability.
| jariel wrote:
| All of these are assumptions are based on fabricated
| conjecture. Major Red Flags.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| This is a good example of the mechanism I was describing
| whereby someone is upset by someone else portraying a
| technically defensible point of view on an opinion they
| find harshly disagreeable. This user probably thinks I'm
| being annoying. Which is a good reason why I would try
| not to talk to them like this in a professional context,
| or really just at all on this issue if I felt it was
| going to exacerbate the issue.
| lokar wrote:
| I could imagine a situation like the one you describe, but
| I don't see any of that in the presented stories about this
| situation.
|
| From what I read, the student(s) brought up a subject (eg
| appropriation) and he explained why he thought their view
| was overly simplistic and absolute.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| And I don't disagree. I can imagine a charitable way to
| handle that conversation and point of view, almost
| verbatim. My point is that reading his other words, I
| don't get the sense that he does so at all. His way of
| self-describing, especially the comment on being seen as
| an aspie, is very familiar.
|
| But hey I don't know this person.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| This is, frankly, paranoid delusional madness. These are not
| "red flags". How do you expect to function in this world when
| you are that afraid of someone communicating basic information
| in a completely non-threatening way? Have you considered that
| maybe it's you who has some things to work on, rather than the
| other person?
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Sorry I didn't really specify. By red flags, I mean, an
| indicator that he comes off to other people as a huge asshole
| but doesn't realize it. It seems like he is likely to
| regularly make people uncomfortable and then not notice, or
| out of self-righteousness, intentionally ignore, obvious
| social cues that a normal person would respond to.
|
| He says his girlfriend suggested he was a high functioning
| Aspie. It sounds like she's right. I think I'm a high
| functioning Aspie. Learning not to do exactly this kind of
| shit was something I needed to do manually. I don't feel he's
| done that.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| What. Reading this comment and several others, assholes has
| been changed to "people I dont like". There was nothing
| assholish or wrong that he did. He gave a answer that is
| considered "wrong" by the woke and thats it. How the hell
| is anything that he said asshole-ish?
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > So, yeah, I can be an asshole.
|
| snark aside. Being perceived as an asshole is undoubtedly
| subjective. It's going to happen if you don't take care
| to try and be aware of your audience.
|
| Later he says:
|
| > I'm empathic about suffering but I also very much
| misread audiences
|
| So we've got a guy who acknowledges he can be an asshole,
| and acknowledges that he is very bad at reading
| audiences, and who gives several examples of upsetting
| people with technical arguments. That is why I think he
| comes off to others as an asshole.
|
| This is a common problem for aspies, much like blaming
| thoughtless comments that offend people on aspergers
| (sp?).
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you go on a short trip with some people and afterwards half
| the people independently complain that you're an offensive
| racist, there's more to the situation than you "misjudged your
| audience."
| underwater wrote:
| He was just discussing blackface, racial slurs, and systematic
| racism with a bunch of teenagers who ended up thinking he was a
| racist asshole.
|
| Something makes me think this was not a calm, two-sided,
| conversation amongst equals. It sounds more like he lectured
| them and belittled their opinions.
|
| If that's the case, it doesn't automatically make him racist,
| but it does mean he misjudged the situation and what he was
| supposed to be doing.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Depends who the people are. In this case, the complainants are
| mostly ultra-privileged white kids whose parents can afford to
| send their privately schooled kids on a resume-building field
| trip to another country with a veteran NYTimes journalist.
|
| In this case, the audience are connected and powerful people
| exchanging phony victimhood for social capital.
|
| If anything, he gave his audience too much credit.
| ralfd wrote:
| > > From day one, the 2019 trip was very different from the
| 2018 one. The three leaders -- who were with the students for a
| week before I joined -- were different from the more apolitical
| "adventure tourism" leaders of the 2018 trip. The tone felt
| more like a big lesson in how to be an anti-colonialist and to
| romanticize indigenous medicine. ... In 2018, some students and
| I spent hours trying to top each others' bad puns. On the 2019
| trip, talk at the table constantly turned to politics.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Every wrongful conviction was a result of the majority agreeing
| the person in question was indeed guilty.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > If you go on a short trip with some people and afterwards
| half the people independently complain that you're an offensive
| racist, there's more to the situation than you "misjudged your
| audience."
|
| I don't think it's that simple, especially when the "some
| people" are teenagers. Teenagers, more often than most, can be
| a rather inflammatory combination of ignorant and zealous.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There's a Principal Skinner meme in here somewhere, if I can
| just put my finger on it...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > There's a Principal Skinner meme in here somewhere, if I
| can just put my finger on it...
|
| Memes can be funny and express pretty dumb generalizations,
| all at the same time.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Ignorant, zealous, eager to impress each other, and easily
| impressed by each other.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Yeah there's a lot of stuff in those four pieces, this is from
| the third one
|
| _" I described covering it and said there was one awkward
| moment -- I asked a "dance captain" if I could interview one of
| her girls. She said they were mostly too shy, but there was a
| bold one she would introduce me too. I started the interview,
| and immediately 20 topless girls cluster around wanting to talk
| too. My photographer sees me in the middle of this throng --
| I'm in deep Zululand, miles from a paved road, but I'm wearing
| a coat and tie like a good Timesman -- and he starts to shoot a
| picture. The picture catches me yelling: "Don't take a picture!
| My wife will kill me!" Apparently, some students took offense
| at that."_
|
| mind you he was talking to an audience of almost exclusively
| teenage girls here when telling that story. I don't think he
| ever used the n-word maliciously but from the sound of the
| entire thing he might also not fully be aware of how he comes
| across when he talks.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| I don't understand what's wrong with the quoted passage. How
| can that be interpreted in any way that is even the least bit
| offensive?
| [deleted]
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, that seems to be one example of particularly bad
| judgment, sharing this type of story with teenagers.
| Especially when, to a teenager, you often seem a million
| years old, and frozen in time in that way. Kids often can't
| realize that adults were once young and caught out too,
| especially ones with the gravitas of a NYT veteran reporter.
|
| I'm sure to him it seems like a story of a young-ish man
| embarrassed and in over his head, but to a teen (especially
| one primed to think about colonialism and imperialism) it
| probably comes off as a story of an old white man with
| authority receiving vaguely sexual favors from young girls.
| refurb wrote:
| What's bad judgement?
|
| "Vaguely sexual favors"? How? I don't see that in the
| least.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I dont understand, what was wrong here?
| leephillips wrote:
| In this case (or were you talking about some other, unrelated
| case?) nothing like "half the people" complained, and of those
| that did, most of those said nothing like "offensive racist".
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Good point. That's why I don't have much of an issue with the
| Red Scare, McCarthyism, and blacklisting. Those people were
| accused by multiple colleagues...so there had to be a little
| more to the situation than what those people tried to explain.
|
| edit: My original comment was something along the lines that if
| 4 people accuse someone of being a witch, then there must be
| something there. I edited my post within a minute, and no one
| had replied to it yet(from my perspective). Maybe HN should
| support append-only edits, because I didn't realize what I was
| doing was wrong. In my mind I was just rephrasing my point
| without using cliches("witch hunt")
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| so look at his past record. Clearly not a racist.
| robarr wrote:
| I appreciate sarcasm but the use of '/s' can clarify
| intentions to others not so inclined to enjoy it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Witches don't exist, whereas racists do exist.
|
| I know that these threads on HN bring out the absolute
| dumbest comments, but yours really takes the prize.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Witches don't exist
|
| Yes, they do (and, ironically, they probably do now in
| substantial part because of past witch hunts.)
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| It took me a while to realize that you were replying to a
| comment that has since been edited. Still, please don't
| post in the flamewar style or call names on HN. Your post
| here would be fine without that last swipe.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dang wrote:
| Please don't stealth-edit your comments in a way that
| deprives replies of their context.
|
| If you want to replace your original argument (about witches)
| with a better one (about McCarthyism), that's great. But once
| there are replies whose meaning depends on your original
| post, you need to do so by appending it. Otherwise it's
| unfair to the other user and raises suspicions of malice.
| moogleii wrote:
| I don't think life can be distilled down to such a simple rule,
| especially when emotions run high. That's why protection
| against mob rule is a thing. The "audience" that burned the
| women at Salem were likely entirely in the wrong.
|
| The author's remarks regarding cultural appropriation and
| blackface is an example. "The students felt that it was never,
| ever appropriate for any white person to adopt anything from
| another culture -- not clothes, not music, not anything. I
| counter-argued that all cultures grow by adopting from others."
|
| Emotions were already running high because he stupidly used the
| n-word (even if was used as a reference and not against
| somebody), and then he tried to cite some obscure fact that
| some black Africans also practiced blackface that they learned
| from some roadshow, but that only pissed off the students even
| more. I suspect a more academic audience would have been more
| receptive to that fact, but for everyone else, that's kind of a
| "rest of the owl" moment. And now they're saying he supports
| blackface.
| ericol wrote:
| The US has such a big issues with racism, that anti-racism is an
| even bigger and worst ism than the original one, and it has
| spilled over the entire world, up to the point of cancelling
| other cultures.
|
| Rather recently, an Uruguayan footballer was fined [1] for using
| a word that is considered "racist"- and I think had to attend
| some sort of course on "racism".
|
| His sin? Calling a friend "negrito" out in the open (In an
| Instagram story).
|
| Now, here's the thing. "Negrito" (and even "negro") is an
| entirely valid affectionate nickname to call somebody in at least
| Uruguay and Argentina.
|
| My mother called me "mi negrito" when I was young. I call my
| daughter "negrita", my girlfriend calls me "mi negro" all the
| time, and many of my friends are called "El negro <last_name>".
|
| It is really baffling that because a lot of people has a lot of
| issues with racism thousands of kilometers away from where I live
| - or where Cavani lives, to that matter - because of this.
|
| [1] https://lmgtfy.app/?q=cavani+racism
| defgeneric wrote:
| It sounds like what's happening at the New York Times is that the
| younger generation of journalists (Gen X, Millenials) want the
| older generation out. They want their jobs.
|
| In that context it's easy to see why no argument or defense would
| ever convince the "woke" mob in the newsroom.
| Shivetya wrote:
| well it has been claimed that they want to direct the news
| rather than tell it, as in they want to push what they think is
| right and that moral imperative is more important that
| presenting the facts.
|
| this is what worries me the most about the changes seen in the
| press, many publications are already bowing to pressure and far
| too many jump on the vilification bandwagon as if to say "See
| we know how to act and we agree" without regard to context or
| much else.
|
| cancel culture or whatever you want to call it is hyper
| destructive and will simply lead to a world where trust is
| never possible
|
| if you wanted to destroy Western civilization you could not do
| much better than this. McCarthyism is back on the menu.
| fullshark wrote:
| Perhaps that is just the weapon of choice to achieve the OP's
| stated goals, particularly effective in a social media
| environment outside their jobs where outrage = attention =
| name recognition.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > well it has been claimed that they want to direct the news
| rather than tell it, as in they want to push what they think
| is right and that moral imperative is more important that
| presenting the facts.
|
| This is what the corporate press has always done. There has
| never been a time where wealthy papers were paying
| journalists to follow the story and would print whatever they
| found. These are just nice stories people tell themselves.
|
| What's mostly happening right now is a combination of a
| changing of the guard, with a new generation valuing other
| moral absolutes than the previous one; and more access to the
| internals of papers because of freer accesa to information
| (and misinformation) from social media.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| The older generation has been canceling pro-socialist speech
| and agendas for decades, is that okay?
|
| How is this any different?
| [deleted]
| tengbretson wrote:
| This guy seems to really have a knack for writing with himself as
| the focus. Maybe he'll find better fortunes outside of
| journalism.
| hojjat12000 wrote:
| These are article about how something he said was taken out of
| context. He is talking about "himself" because that's the
| topic!
|
| This is not an article in the Times. This is a post in his blog
| explaining how he lost his job!
|
| Why would you say that?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Because its an easy way to bring down the content of the
| article, instead of addressing the points it makes.
| hojjat12000 wrote:
| I do not know who this guy is.
|
| I don't read the NYT.
|
| I have a hard time reading long texts. I get distracted or bored
| real quick and switch to a different tab.
|
| But these 4 articles were so interesting and horrifying to read I
| read them all in one setting. I'm sorry that this happened. This
| is a nightmare of mine. Someone gets a hold of some stupid thing
| that I said or did (as a joke back in college) or in this case as
| an honest attempt to explain stuff to teenagers, and now you have
| to go over every single word and explain yourself. and as soon as
| you start explaining yourself, you have lost the argument (I
| learned this when I tried to explain myself to my partner. I've
| learnt that no matter if I'm right or wrong, I should just
| apologize. It's faster and less painful.)
| underwater wrote:
| There are a few situations I am extremely wary of -- how I'm
| perceived when I'm interacting with children, being accused of
| inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, or being accused of
| being racist or otherwise bigotted.
|
| These moments help me empathise with people who live their
| entire lives with that fear. On the whole I have it good. I can
| walk down the street without people assuming I'm looking for
| cars to break into. Or fly on a plane without people wondering
| if I am going to blow it up.
|
| But at the same time I get the feeling that some people see
| those behaviours as punishment for my percieved privilege, and
| might even enjoy seeing me squirm. Which doesn't sit right with
| me. I think the answer to bigotry is to be aware of it, counter
| it, and fix it so we can lift everyone up. Rather than wield it
| as a weapon to cut down those you perceive as being unfairly
| advantaged by history.
| Udik wrote:
| > as soon as you start explaining yourself, you have lost the
| argument (I learned this when I tried to explain myself to my
| partner)
|
| Yes. When it's about minor things, you don't care to be right
| when the relationship with your partner is at stake.
|
| But the angry mobs fuelled by hypocrisy and bad journalism are
| not your partner. They are the problem. They need to be told
| loud and clear that they're not just dead wrong, they're also
| dangerous and bigoted.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's pretty remarkable. Every time the writer says something
| like "let me back up and explain more" I understand less and
| less who the writer is and what happened to them (apparently
| they said or were accused of saying certain things in multiple
| unrelated situations?).
| dawg- wrote:
| This article comes across as very "inside baseball" i.e. the
| crowd who are intimately familiar with the ongoing melodrama
| in journalism, the history of the NY Times, etc. See his
| reference to his "until now anonymous comments in an internal
| Times report", for example
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| It was due to this:
|
| _A student asked me: "Do you think one of my classmates
| should have been suspended for using the N-word in a video
| from two years ago?"_
|
| _I said: "Well, wait -- what exactly happened on this video?
| Did she actually call someone "nigger"? Or was she just using
| it in passing, like quoting the title of a book?"_
|
| Because when he asked for context around how the person said
| "nigger", he didn't self-censor when making reference to the
| word.
|
| That's it.
|
| That's how bad this juvenile cancel culture mob has become.
| They let some 15 year old activist wannabe complain to the
| paper and get him fired.
| eli wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McNeil_Jr.#Dismissal_fr.
| ..
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| Aye, same.
|
| The gist is that he doesn't vibe with... someone?... and
| finds that his colleagues have wildly different expectations
| about... something?
| LanceH wrote:
| Apologies are frequently taken as admission and only fan the
| flames.
| hojjat12000 wrote:
| I meant in my personal life. I make a joke, she gets
| offended. I can spend the next hour explaining the joke and
| how it wasn't supposed to be offensive. Or I just apologize.
| Of course, I'm a coward.
| autoditype wrote:
| > Or I just apologize. Of course, I'm a coward.
|
| You can apologize AND simultaneously it can be true that
| such other person is also a jerk who purposefully gets
| offended by stupid things and takes everyone out of context
| for their own benefit who leads a march to cancel you.
| mseepgood wrote:
| Maybe your jokes aren't that good.
| tjalfi wrote:
| There's nothing cowardly about apologizing when you hurt
| someone's feelings.
|
| If your jokes are frequently poorly received by her then I
| would consider telling them to other people. Some jokes can
| be told to anyone but many have a limited audience.
| j4yav wrote:
| Wow, there's something incredibly heartbreaking about
| summing things up that way.
| nickff wrote:
| I don't think that makes you a coward, it just means that
| you value other things over being 'right'. Some people are
| obsessed with always 'winning', and don't pay attention to
| how their fighting can hurt people and relationships.
|
| I obviously don't know you or the specifics of your
| disagreements, but I think you should be forgiving of
| yourself.
| dominotw wrote:
| Its game over once you apologize. Never seen anyone recover
| from an apology. Never apologize to anyone who is unwilling
| to forgive you.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| This sounds like advice from the GOP playbook. "Can't be
| shamed if you have none".
|
| A sincere apology implies that one truly feels bad about
| their behavior in some way. If someone truly feels bad
| about something that has public visibility, they should
| apologize for that for their own benefit, regardless if the
| other party accepts it.
| dominotw wrote:
| > they should apologize for that for their own benefit
|
| Whats the benefit though?
| mc32 wrote:
| It seems analogous to not asking a dog to do a trick you
| know it can't perform.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > I've learnt that no matter if I'm right or wrong, I should
| just apologize. It's faster and less painful.
|
| I'm genuinely curious if this is a good strategy, relationship-
| wise. I would expect that insincere / dishonest communication
| would put a limit on intimacy, but maybe that's preferable to
| frequent arguments?
| munchbunny wrote:
| > I'm genuinely curious if this is a good strategy,
| relationship-wise.
|
| Not in the naive "always apologize" sense. That has the risk
| of creating a dynamic where the apology can't be trusted to
| be sincere and problems don't actually get addressed.
|
| Sure, if you actually did something wrong, by all means
| apologize. But if it's somewhat of a gray matter, a healthier
| dynamic would be to establish a baseline, something that is
| only built over the long term, that whatever happened it
| wasn't either person's intention to create conflict or upset
| the other person. That might mean apologizing for triggering
| something.
|
| With a bit of space, ideally both people could talk about
| what they were thinking or perceiving, understand why the
| other person behaved the way they did, and come up with ideas
| for how to prevent the same problem from happening next time.
|
| Obviously that only works if both people are well-intended,
| able to deescalate conflicts, and willing to put in the work.
| No amount of this would fix fundamental differences or
| relationship red flags.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Its the nature of struggle sessions. No matter what, unless
| you admit to doing harm, no matter if you did, no one will
| let you rest until you admit it.
|
| I'd like to think the only winning move is to not play, but I
| dont think modern social media allows that
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| Never do this. They're playing petty fascist power games
| and it should not be tolerated.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| To be fair, it should be said that not everyone can
| afford to stand up to this.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| if you genuinely haven't done something wrong, chances are
| she's upset about something else you did.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > But these 4 articles were so interesting and horrifying to
| read I read them all in one setting.
|
| Wow, I was barely able to get through the first part and
| honestly the whole time I was thinking "I can't believe this
| guy has been a professional writer for decades. He desperately
| needs help from an editor."
|
| I find the content interesting, but the writing seems to wander
| unnecessarily and I wish he'd focus more on getting to the
| point than needlessly interject his, at least to me, obnoxious
| attempts to defend his character rather than let the audience
| decide for themselves. Yes, I realize the entire point of this
| article is to defend himself, but I'd rather read the meat of
| the story than variations of "I don't think I'm a bad guy."
|
| To each his own.
| DanBC wrote:
| > but I'd rather read the meat of the story than variations
| of "I don't think I'm a bad guy."
|
| Especially when he illustrates that with examples of him
| being the bad guy.
| mc32 wrote:
| In what instance is he being _bad_?
|
| I see instances where he makes perceptive mistakes and
| possibly cavalier. Bad? No.
|
| If he's _bad_ then if we look at the world at large, then
| over 50% of people are _bad_.
|
| He's more of a victim of a purity crusade by people who
| also are the same "bad" but either don't see it, don't
| admit to it, or are following a popular trend.
|
| It reminds me of the cultural revolution where in order to
| save themselves neighbors, friends and family would
| denounce each other for doing "bad" (baselessly accused of
| being counterrevolutionaries) just to get ahead of being
| accused of doing "bad" things. In the end there was great
| injustice, but Mao got what he wanted out of it.
| DanBC wrote:
| > In what instance is he being _bad_?
|
| In his own words, he is an asshole some of the time
|
| >> Am I really an asshole? I don't think so. Not most of
| the time.
|
| Many of us have worked with men like this and they're
| awful.
|
| I mean, this example was pretty poor because it combines
| him being an asshole and his interpretation of the word
| "drug", Dictionaries disagree with him.
|
| >> Now, there is an exception: if you're an editor and
| you write an error into my copy, I can definitely be an
| asshole.
|
| [...]
|
| >> To give an example: an editor once went through a
| story of mine and changed all the references to vaccines
| to "drugs."
|
| >> I went over and said, "Are you kidding me? Do you have
| any idea what you're doing? Vaccines and drugs are
| different. A vaccine is something you take to prevent
| illness. A drug is something you take when you're already
| ill."
|
| Chambers:
|
| > 1. Any substance used in the composition of medicine to
| cure, diagnose or prevent disease
|
| Mirriam Webster:
|
| > b: a substance used as a medication or in the
| preparation of medication c according to the Food, Drug,
| and Cosmetic Act (1) : a substance recognized in an
| official pharmacopoeia or formulary (2) : a substance
| intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation,
| treatment, or prevention of disease (3) : a substance
| other than food intended to affect the structure or
| function of the body (4) : a substance intended for use
| as a component of a medicine but not a device or a
| component, part, or accessory of a device
| stefan_ wrote:
| Oh good, you read the first part!
| rob74 wrote:
| Let him (or her) who is not sometimes an asshole cast the
| first stone...
| mc32 wrote:
| Jobs, if tales are true, would be an ass/arsehole. Does
| that make him bad? I don't think so. Toxic, yes, that's
| potentially toxic (we don't know what the editors were
| like).
|
| I think your and my definition of bad differ. Bad to me
| means being directly significantly detrimental to others
| who were not doing bad to you.
| prepend wrote:
| > He desperately needs help from an editor.
|
| Well, he did just get fired and lose al the editors he worked
| with for decades.
|
| Goes to show how important editors are and writers really
| benefit from editors.
| ceres wrote:
| Not commenting on this guy in particular but sometimes when
| people use long-winded stories to explain themselves, it's
| usually to hide something. Like hiding the truth in between
| embellishments. I don't know anything about this guy though
| so he maybe innocent of whatever thing he did? I skimmed over
| the article but still don't know what happened.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| You don't know what happened because you skimmed over it.
| Brilliant.
| roenxi wrote:
| "I don't trust his writing style" is a fallacy of mammoth
| proportions.
|
| Being a writer, he probably comes from a culture where
| people write lots of words and has many friends who respect
| people who write verbosely.
|
| Someone's level of articulateness provides no information
| whatsoever of how truthful their writing is. There are
| countless extremely articulate lies told by people with
| mastery over their medium.
| [deleted]
| argc wrote:
| I think this is true when someone is speaking--liars often
| try to hide behind details which they think makes their
| stories believable and explains the discrepancies that they
| see in their own fabricated story. But I have the opposite
| perception of this narrative, I think it was written with
| the intention of being precise, and either his background
| as a journalist or the public nature of the issue are
| reasons enough to explain why he wrote with the detail that
| he did. I often try to write with precision and detail too,
| and it certainly doesn't mean I'm lying when I do.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I also suspect that being an older journalist, he's
| accustomed to writing long-form content. There's a level of
| fluff and narrative crafting that is not at all appreciated
| in today's information saturated landscape.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Perhaps this guy really is doomed, because his defense
| depends on people being willing to read a long argument and
| understand nuance, when knee-jerk denunciations are usually
| so pithy.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| The guy's problem is he's a terrible writer, which is
| pretty unforgivable considering his career. If he could
| articulate himself better I'd be interested to learn more
| about his story. Brevity is the way to go. This guy isn't
| Faulkner.
|
| I'll regularly go hours into holes reading fascinating
| articles about obscure topics. I even wanted to learn more
| about this, but I just could not stomach his awful writing.
| He thinks he's more important than he is and he clearly
| does not know his audience, which is what got him into
| trouble in the first place.
|
| He is legitimately a bad writer. He's not even mediocre.
| And the majority of comments here on HN seem to agree, and
| this is hardly the "knee-jerk" reaction forum of the
| internet.
| [deleted]
| lefstathiou wrote:
| Imagine next: the trolls start petitioning Medium to remove his
| articles and terminate his account for violating their policies
| and or Amazon for hosting Medium which hosts content published
| by "racists". Soon the only thing left for this life-long
| journalist will be mopping floors.
|
| This may get worse before it gets better, but it will get
| better eventually.
| rob74 wrote:
| If you're referring to that other guy whose social media
| accounts were terminated, it was because he incited his
| followers to storm an important government building, which
| left five people dead. So it's quite a stretch to suggest
| that may happen to anyone...
| afavour wrote:
| Is anyone actually calling for that, though? Because if not
| we're just conjuring up things to worry about.
| will4274 wrote:
| > I learned this when I tried to explain myself to my partner.
| I've learnt that no matter if I'm right or wrong, I should just
| apologize. It's faster and less painful.
|
| Fwiw, I've always found such statements insanely baffling - in
| an amused befuddled sort of way. Why would anybody want to
| spend their life with somebody to whom they couldn't explain
| themselves and or find common ground?
| etchalon wrote:
| Because life shouldn't be spent afraid to apologize, or in
| constant debate about whether an apology is "required."
|
| If you hurt someone, whether intentional or not, apologizing
| is the least you can do.
|
| If you'd believe an apology is warranted, apologize, and sort
| though where the disconnect is later.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'll admit, I didn't read all four articles. I got about half way
| through the first one and was just wondering "I still have no
| idea what this is all about." Fortunately, the Wikipedia article
| on the author has a brief summary.
|
| In particular, I thought this quote from the Wikipedia article
| really summarizes the differences between older and younger
| generations: "there is a profound difference between using a
| racial epithet in the course of a discussion about that racial
| epithet's use, and using a racial epithet to diminish or to wound
| someone."
|
| For "socially conscious" people in my generation (Gen X), I think
| nearly all of us would find calling someone a racial epithet
| abhorrent. At the same time, while I understand culture has
| shifted and I wouldn't do it now, I still find it quite bizarre
| that _the mere utterance_ of the epithet, even in a sentence like
| "You should never call someone a <racial epithet> because that is
| extremely offensive" is considered itself racist by younger
| people.
|
| I recall hearing about a young popular YouTuber about a year or
| so ago who was accused of being racist simply for singing along
| to the lyrics of a popular rap song. Even more strange to me was
| that his defense (which was true if one looked up his Instagram
| video) was that he did NOT utter said epithet, in that he was
| singing along with the lyrics but when it got to that word he
| just skipped it and didn't say it.
|
| I understand culture changes, but it still bothers me that we've
| gotten to the point where we completely disregard intent and
| focus instead just on the syntax of what was said. To be clear,
| I'm not sure if that's indeed what occurred in Mr. McNeil's case,
| but I certainly have seen it in other examples.
| mc32 wrote:
| Part of the problem is that it's okay to say those words and
| make money off those words, if you're part of the in-group. But
| if you're not part of it, then it's forbidden. This duality
| prolongs misuse. )do as I say, not as I do)
|
| I agree epithets are uncouth and should be avoided. BUT I think
| they should be avoided by EVERYONE. And anyone who uses them
| freely should face scorn.
|
| There are epithets for just about any group. I'm inclined to
| think all the in-groups denounce internal use of the derogatory
| terms. For example the R-word. I doubt it's welcomed to be used
| internally.
|
| That said I would make an exception for meta usage. Nothing
| should be so toxic it cannot be uttered in any context.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think this is completely wrong. Use of charged words is
| governed by Trust. You have to trust the speaker that they
| are not using the word in a hurtful way - that they are
| either using it in jest, or for historical purposes, or for
| meta purposes.
|
| However, if there is no trust between the audience and
| speaker, almost any use can be misunderstood. In the
| particular example from this article, it's not that hard to
| imagine that him repeating the description the girl gave, but
| replacing 'the N word' with 'n*r' was not an attempt to be
| gratuitously shocking or even making fun of their use of more
| PC language (and not, as I do believe his intention was, an
| attempt to clarify what had been literally said). They
| already didn't trust his judgment on issues of race, and they
| had no idea of his vast experience and institutional
| standards of when it is acceptable to use this word.
|
| Another note is that, when you don't know what level of trust
| there is between your audience and you, it's better to err on
| the side of caution. For example, I don't think it would have
| been smart of me to use the full word here, because the HN
| audience doesn't know me and I haven't established my well
| meaningness and care with such matters. In fact, even if I
| had established such a reputation, it would likely be a bad
| idea, since HN is also constantly visited by many first time
| viewers who would be unlikely to know of said reputation and
| may well take my use of it as being needlessly hurtful or
| careless.
| DFHippie wrote:
| This is true for all groups, though: black, white, Asian,
| gay, Romani, Irish, Jewish, Catholic -- all of them. And it's
| a matter of degree. I'm pretty sure a white guy in Appalachia
| doesn't like being called a cracker (or maybe that's one of
| the C words) by other white guys in Appalachia, but he
| _really_ doesn 't like hearing this word come out of the
| mouth of a black person or a coastal, urban white person, or
| a tree hugger or whatever. And this isn't a new thing,
| either. It's just that people are more vocal in their
| irritation. People act like this is some new invention. It's
| not. People have never liked hearing people in some group who
| they feel has unearned power over them use the epithets that
| encapsulate and symbolize this relationship. Maybe it's
| wrong, but it's a common feature of people generally.
| mc32 wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you but I would say that to make
| this less prevalent the in-group should also shun its use
| internally. If you sell something as part of propylaea
| culture, don't be surprised if you see it used in popular
| culture.
| devchix wrote:
| > Part of the problem is that it's okay to say those words
| and make money off those words, if you're part of the in-
| group. But if you're not part of it, then it's forbidden
|
| Come now. Surely you can call your father "my old man", "that
| codger", "the dotard"; and call your wife "the ball and
| chain", "that ol' battle-axe"; but you will take offense if
| strangers and friends did that? Even when you call your
| father and wife these names in loving jest. This hangup in
| understanding who is allowed use of a word is perplexing,
| it's almost like a reflexive obtuseness.
|
| I always say "the N word", because the word itself is so ugly
| to me, as are all racial epithets. There was an incident
| where someone use the word "niggardly" meaning stingy, and
| somebody took pearl-clutching offense, and the original
| speaker retorted that he wasn't going to censure himself
| because of someone else's stupidity. Amen to that!
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > Come now. Surely you can call your father "my old man",
| "that codger", "the dotard"; and call your wife "the ball
| and chain", "that ol' battle-axe"; but you will take
| offense if strangers and friends did that?
|
| This isn't the same comparison. Everyone (baring the
| obvious exceptions) has a father that they could make words
| with, or could have a spouse to do the same. These examples
| are not the same as there being a word you must never say,
| in any context whatsoever, based on the circumstances of
| your birth.
| undefined1 wrote:
| also, as Stephen Fry famously said, "It's now very common to
| hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that
| gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a
| whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no
| purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am
| offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."
| msie wrote:
| That quote always bothered me. Does that mean that Fry
| doesn't care about other people's feelings? He sounds like an
| a-hole.
| defen wrote:
| The unbridgeable gap here is that the speaker of a phrase
| cannot with 100% certainty know whether a phrase will cause
| offense - "being offended" lives in the listener's mind. So
| we have to fall back to a "reasonable person" presumption.
| To do otherwise is to cede all control of public
| conversation to people who wield bad-faith claims of
| offense as a weapon.
|
| If I say something, and have a good-faith belief that no
| one would be offended by it, and 99.99% of people agree
| that it was not an offensive statement, but one person
| claims to be offended by it - should I be forced to
| apologize under pain of being branded an "asshole"?
|
| For the sake of argument let's say I'm offended by your
| "just asking questions" style statement that "Fry doesn't
| care about other people's feelings". Do you think it would
| be reasonable for you to apologize to me or retract your
| "question"?
| droopybuns wrote:
| It does serve a purpose. It announces to everyone in their
| vicinity that this fragile human is deficient and should only
| be interacted with via great caution.
| tootie wrote:
| This article has the best summary I've seen. It has less to do
| with the academic usage of a slur and more the arrogance and
| forcing everyone to agree with your POV and telling them how
| they should feel. It wasn't simply an utterance but their
| unwillingness to listen to opposing views. As well as some
| allegations that the n-word had been used much more casually by
| the same offenders at other times. It makes the academic
| argument seem disingenuous.
|
| https://defector.com/mike-pesca-slate-suspended/
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| The only thing that is disingenuous is this argument. It has
| nothing to do with arrogance and everything to do with virtue
| signaling and fascism. Telling people how they should feel
| and unwillingness to listen to opposing views goes both ways.
|
| The easy way to tell that it's disingenuous? Search this on
| Google:
|
| site:nytimes.com "nigger"
|
| Appearing in print in his same publication as recently as
| 2018, 2019, and even December of 2020. So it was fine to
| print in appropriate context before he said it, and after he
| said it, but that particular week it was racist and
| unforgivable. Pretty clear what's really going on here.
| etchalon wrote:
| Yes, it is clear.
|
| A cultural moment that is causing a re-evaluation on how
| the word is treated.
|
| Dismissing it as "virtue signaling and fascism" is a cheap
| way to avoid the actual debate.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Back in highschool the n-word was a daily occurrence because my
| school was 60% black, 20% hispanic, 10%white, 10% asian. It was
| also the mid 90's and gangsta rap was en vogue. I remember an
| occurrence in shop class where a student used the n-word to
| greet his friend when the teacher became infuriated and told
| the student to "Please stop using that word. Its insulting to
| all of us of african descent." The student being the usual
| class clown he was responded "You mean NI* _" shouting the
| n-word. Everyone laughed. The teacher just shook his head.
| Another time some of my classmates were singing lyrics to an
| Onyx song (judicial use of the nword in bakdafukup) and were
| messing with me saying "come on, sing with us, just say the
| word" I was petrified to say the n word and they laughed that I
| wouldn't say it "Oh the white boy is scared to say n** hahaha."
| Though they finally cracked me and I did sing along and they
| cheered when I said it. No big deal. Another time a white
| teacher was also upset with the use of the n-word that she
| strait up said to the student "So if I said to you 'whats up
| n**_' you would not be offended?" the student casually said
| "nah its cool now." Times have changed.
|
| Though casually the n-word is used all the time. My puertorican
| tenant (commercial) uses the n-word with his black coworkers in
| normal conversation. Even my Guyanese friends use the n-word
| among each other and their black friends.
|
| So when I read articles like this I am befuddled.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| It is a function of privilege. The more privileged the more
| the person feels confident being outraged. Something weird
| about people is the less problems they have the more problems
| they make up.
|
| Hence the Karen meme. It is pointing out how the most
| privileged class of humans in the history of the world (35-45
| year old white women) are also the most aggressive and
| easiest to be outraged by "injustice".
| Tycho wrote:
| It's a power play. Having a word that you can say, but others,
| under penalty of termination and ostracism, dare not utter,
| demonstrates that you have some power over them and raises your
| status. (Some people don't grasp this dynamic and take the
| stated rational for the prohibition at face value.)
| svachalek wrote:
| Yeah, I'm also Gen X and have noticed the same. I have a hard
| time comprehending incidents like this:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54107329
|
| (professor suspended for saying a Chinese word mistaken for the
| epithet, in context that clearly identified what he was saying,
| on video)
| ErrantX wrote:
| I mean, its not even ironic how racist (against Chinese) the
| response to that was :(
| foobarian wrote:
| I always found it amusing listening to my Chinese colleagues
| chat, because it always sounded they were talking about
| "n**as" and "young hoes." They were tickled pink when I
| explained this. I forgot what phrase they were saying that I
| heard as the latter but I remember it being very common in
| conversation.
| [deleted]
| Udik wrote:
| There's also a long funny history with the use of the word
| "niggardly" (which means "stingy" and is in no way related to
| the racial epithet):
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word.
| ..
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Still, Aziz Ansari has a hilarious bit about that ("Umm,
| you could have just said cheap or stingy.")
|
| I mean, perhaps it was used in the past in a
| straightforward manner, but using that word today almost
| sounds a bit like the equivalent of "Look I'm not saying
| the N-word but haha it sounds exactly like the N-word so I
| can get away with it wink wink." It's like the "I'm not
| touching you!" game that 7 year old siblings play.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| >I still find it quite bizarre that the mere utterance of the
| epithet, even in a sentence like "You should never call someone
| a <racial epithet> because that is extremely offensive" is
| considered itself racist by younger people.
|
| It isn't, it is found offensive by crazy people.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This situation is very similar to what caused the chief
| communications officer at Netflix to get fired: https://www.n
| ytimes.com/2018/06/22/business/media/jonathan-f...
| sgustard wrote:
| Is there a difference between calling someone a word and using
| the word to make a point about that word? More importantly, is
| it relevant for me as a non-POC to dictate how this word
| affects someone else?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Is there a difference between calling someone a word and
| using the word to make a point about that word?
|
| In my opinion, yes, absolutely, there is a gigantic
| difference. Though I certainly understand that times change
| and a large segment of the population no longer feels that
| way.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Singling out a student as a target of an insult is nothing
| like the situations under discussion. If a teacher said "How
| would Ronnie feel if I accused him of fucking his sister" the
| biggest problem isn't the use of the word "fucking."
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Nobody is _actually_ offended by this sort of stuff, it 's just
| one more weapon in the culture war.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Perhaps so, but it sure seems to be a weapon that's used
| indiscriminately. It's used against (almost[1]) everyone it
| possibly can be used against.
|
| That is, this guy wasn't someone that the woke were
| perpetually looking for a chance to attack, and he finally
| slipped up and they got him. This guy was just someone that
| the weapon _could_ be used against, and so it _was_ used
| against him.
|
| [1] I presume that there are people who would not be
| destroyed for using certain racial epithets. Rappers are
| certainly an exception (or else they just don't care).
| Politicians that the woke like seem to also be exempt, but
| the right tries to use the same weapon against them. But the
| weapon doesn't seem to work when the right wields it...
| phkahler wrote:
| >> But the weapon doesn't seem to work when the right
| wields it...
|
| These are weapons of the left. Your supporters have to have
| the same mindset for them to work.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Policing speech is a weapon for everyone. How often did
| you hear swear words on TV 20 years ago? Do you think it
| was the left keeping 'fuck' out of year shot of any
| impressionable teens? Did the Dixie Chicks get canceled
| by the left for saying that they didn't support the war
| in Iraq?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think that to a great extent this is a matter of trust in
| the speaker. When an audience trusts the speaker's
| opinions, they can easily accept the use of problematic
| language as benign.
|
| But when the speaker is not trusted, it's easy to take what
| to the speaker seems like benign use of a word the wrong
| way. For example, the speaker here believed they were just
| clarifying the use of a word, to distinguish between
| someone saying the literal phrase 'the N word' vs someone
| literally saying n**r. The speaker knows themselves to be
| above reproach and very conscious of their use of language,
| having often engaged in debate about appropriate VS
| inappropriate use of this word, with careful consideration
| etc. They are used to speaking to audiences who sees them
| in this way.
|
| However, one day he finds himself doing this with an
| audience who doesn't know much about their antiracist
| credentials, and who is weary of him as someone who seems
| to be pretty politically incorrect. They are probably
| primed to see him as an establishment old white man, who is
| by virtue of this alone usually, in their (real or just
| imagined) experience, on the wrong side of history on this
| issue. One of them is probing him on a sensitive issue, and
| is careful to say 'the N word' since that is what is proper
| in their view. And here this man comes and feels the need
| to use exactly the word that should be avoided, perhaps
| condescendingly or because he just isn't aware of how
| hurtful it seems to them.
|
| None of the parties is truly right or wrong here. The
| journalist didn't mean to cause any harm, and didn't think
| he could possibly be construed as meaning so. The kids
| don't trust his intentions are not easily convinced by
| nuanced debate. He should have known better than to use his
| usual discourse. They should accept that he knows better
| than them these topics and should know who to trust and who
| not to.
|
| Note that this is exactly the reason why rap is one of the
| very few places where use of the N word has persisted.
| Rappers were trusted by their audience, and their use of it
| continues to be trusted in general. But if Sean Hannity
| used it, who would believe that he was not being malicious?
| brandmeyer wrote:
| > That is, this guy wasn't someone that the woke were
| perpetually looking for a chance to attack
|
| You sure about that? The opening of part one goes like
| this.
|
| > I don't think I'm an asshole, but [describes some asshole
| behaviors].
|
| To be clear, he sounds like an ass much like Theo de Raadt,
| Linus Torvalds, and Ulric Drepper are asses. Those people
| are my kind of jerk and I don't mind it so much since their
| signal-to-noise ratio is so high. But plenty of people do
| mind. He very well could have been painting a target on his
| back all that time.
| mindslight wrote:
| At the basic level, does this even have anything to do with a
| "culture war"? More like it's simply a social weapon,
| apparently capable of moving _the New York Times_ , being
| handed to _teenagers_. Of course some of them are going to
| pull that lever to test what they can do!
| etchalon wrote:
| Of course people are actually offended by it.
| [deleted]
| ttoomm28 wrote:
| Aren't you doing a similar thing by not typing the word 'nigga'
| or 'nigger' ?
| Nacdor wrote:
| The NY Times accidentally exposed this whole charade when they
| attempted to justify McNeil's firing by saying "intent doesn't
| matter".
|
| People immediately started pointing out all the instances where
| another NY Times writer (Nikole Hannah-Jones) has used the
| N-word. Many of those instances are tweets that she has only
| very recently deleted:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210211163617/https://twitter.c...
| matwood wrote:
| I think if you place the word in a bigger context that many
| people just seem to realizing, is that racism, particularly
| against black people in the US is still common. In fact, in
| some circles it seems to be becoming ok to be openly racist.
| People are sensitive, sometimes overly sensitive, because we
| are not in some post racism utopia.
| nradov wrote:
| And yet everyone gives a pass to popular actors like Leonardo
| Dicaprio who use racial epithets in movies.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/characters/nm0000138
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| You're being sarcastic, correct? (these days it's hard to
| tell)
|
| Dicaprio plays a brutal slave owner in that movie.
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Something similar recently happened in my kids school district.
|
| In a staff meeting they were talking about what books were and
| were not allowed to be taught from. A teacher brought out a
| book and said roughly "So this book, written by a black author,
| stocked in our school library I can't teach in class because it
| contains the word n**."
|
| Cue rich white people fighting over who was the most offended
| by this in our school district that is is ~1% black, and most
| of whom have fled nearby schools that were majority latinx.
| munificent wrote:
| I find the current rapidly changing culture around the N-word
| fascinating, honestly. Decades from now, I'm sure sociologists
| will build entire careers on what we're going through. This is,
| I think, the first time in my life that I've seen a word in
| American culture become taboo.
|
| By that I mean not that _expressing the meaning_ of a word is
| forbidden, not the _idea_ , but the _utterance itself_. If,
| like me, you tend to assume that cultures become more
| progressive and tolerant over time, this is an interesting very
| strong counter-example. Having a word that you that literally
| can 't say _even in quotation or reference_ implies something
| almost akin to magical thinking. As if the two syllables
| themselves, even when stripped of meaning, still have some kind
| of power.
|
| What I _think_ is happening is that (like almost everything) it
| comes down to group membership signaling. Progressive, anti-
| racist US culture has decided that not saying the N-word is a
| marker of group membership. If you say the word, even when
| simply mentioning it, it says that you didn 't get the memo
| about not using the word. Therefore, you might not be part of
| the anti-racist in-group. And if you aren't one of "us", then
| you're probably one of "them". And therefore maybe even just
| _mentioning_ the word becomes morally akin to actually using
| it.
|
| You can look at this as similar to other arbitrary-seeming
| abstinences that groups take up. It is almost a _feature_ that
| the prohibition is arbitrary because it emphasizes that the
| abstainer is doing so for group signaling reasons and _not_ for
| pragmatic ones.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| It is easy to explain. As people become more privileged
| socially and economically they become increasingly retarded
| mentally. Young people that grow up in a bubble simply don't
| experience the real world, they are never challenged or
| corrected. The ONLY thing that is surprising is that whole
| house of cards is still standing at all. It is why AOC can be
| taken seriously when she demands free health care,
| university, housing, basic income etc. because her generation
| sees the vast amount of wealth present but has no conception
| of how it was generated.
|
| I think we are on the edge of a second dark age. All it will
| take is for an AOC to get elected, cut the military to
| replace it with hand outs and a China or Russia to step in to
| fill the void. I just hope I get to stick around long enough
| to see the fall of western civilization and be smart enough
| to profit from it. Right now that means going long on corn
| and soybean futures and buying gold and Bitcoin.
| etchalon wrote:
| You're arguing that a politician demanding the enactment of
| policies and programs that numerous other quite-wealthy
| countries enjoy, and people who agree with them, shouldn't
| be treated seriously?
|
| Hell of a take.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I've seen a word in American culture become taboo
|
| Especially one that sees such frequent use (but only by
| specific people).
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I don't think this is all that unprecedented. I think a fair
| number of curse words today were perceived as much worse in
| the past, especially when they invoked a sense of blasphemy
| in some contexts, or dishonor in another.
|
| Fuck is not much of an effective curse word in many contexts
| as people don't care if its said.
| djrogers wrote:
| > I don't think this is all that unprecedented.
|
| If you can point to a time in American history when one's
| livelihood and reputation could be utterly destroyed for
| uttering a 'magic incantation', I'd like to hear about it.
|
| Oh wait - I remember now, something in Salem in the late
| 17th century?
| klmadfejno wrote:
| My points written elsewhere are that while this
| particular moment was sensationalized, from his own posts
| I don't get the impression at all that he created a
| negative and unpopular reputation for himself by a single
| incident alone.
|
| Here's a one second google search on actual laws against
| cursing though:
| https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/2009/08/11/curses-
| blas...
| etchalon wrote:
| I think calling the word in question a "magic
| incantation" is fairly dismissive of the meaningfulness
| of that specific word, and the specific cultural reasons
| why it's treated as it is.
|
| There aren't a lot of historical analogs to it.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| It's so funny watching people trying to turn this into
| some sort of martyrdom lol.
|
| We had a guy lose his chance at a presidency over an
| excited _woop_?
|
| Are you even trying to hide the victim complex anymore
| when you act like this is the first time a word could get
| you fired?
|
| And are you actually trying to compare this to the Salem
| witch trials now? And call the n word a magic
| incantation?
|
| I'm black and I've heard "why let that word have power
| over you??????"
|
| funny how all it takes to make people of the exact race
| that says that to go off the deep end is not being
| allowed to say it.
|
| Literally the absence of a word upsets you to the point
| you start calling racial slurs "magic incantations"
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| You should look into McCarthyism.
| wxnx wrote:
| > By that I mean not that expressing the meaning of a word is
| forbidden, not the idea, but the utterance itself. If, like
| me, you tend to assume that cultures become more progressive
| and tolerant over time, this is an interesting very strong
| counter-example. Having a word that you that literally can't
| say even in quotation or reference implies something almost
| akin to magical thinking. As if the two syllables themselves,
| even when stripped of meaning, still have some kind of power.
|
| I don't know that the people who leveled accusations against
| this guy are completely equating "usage" and "meta-usage".
|
| I do know that there are people who view "meta-usage",
| particularly in casual conversation, as problematic. The
| n-word is viewed by them to have connotations of severe power
| imbalance and violence, particularly in the mouth of a white
| person. The idea that they should have to hear the word in
| casual conversation, without warning, whether it's intended
| to wound or not, is contentious. Intent matters, but so do
| the words themselves. To put it in your terms, some words
| cannot just be "stripped of meaning" to some people.
|
| I personally empathize with people who feel this way, despite
| being a white guy for whom no such word with such visceral
| effect seems to exist. Even if discussing racism in a
| conversation, I probably just wouldn't whip out a historical
| quote from someone that happened to have the n-word in it.
| And I don't think that's as ridiculous as you're making it
| out to be.
|
| Nobody is suggesting that contextualized, or (ideally, to
| some) forewarned, meta-usage will never have its place. But
| that's not really what happened in this story, is it?
| sct202 wrote:
| I don't think this is a new thing. I was raised in the 90s in
| a very suburban area and I never heard the n-word spoken and
| it was always censored when spoken when we read To Kill a
| Mockingbird.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| When in the 90s? I am very positive that the very first
| time I heard "The N word" as a euphemism for the actual
| epithet was from Johnnie Cochran during the OJ Simpson
| trial in 1995. I remember thinking that sounded awkward at
| the time because people would say things like "the F word"
| or "the S word" to substitute for those well known curse
| words, but "the N word" was brand new to me.
|
| I'm not saying Johnnie Cochran invented the term, but in my
| suburban area I had never previously heard that.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| That is a reasonable and sensitive way to handle it. Things
| have change though, now To Kill a Mockingbird is being
| removed from curriculums for being racist.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/kill-mockingbird-other-books-
| banned...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| What will they remove next, "Uncle Tom's cabin"??!
| abandonliberty wrote:
| >And if you aren't one of "us", then you're probably one of
| "them". And therefore maybe even just mentioning the word
| becomes morally akin to actually using it.
|
| I've lost my once closest friend to this. I'm not current on
| the rapidly changing landscape of acceptable left expression,
| and apparently the far-right is able to taint any word they
| choose. The moment they use it, they own it.
|
| We may agree on 70% of issues, but they've become so
| accustomed to their echo chamber that anyone with who speaks
| differently, let alone has a few different ideas, causes them
| emotional distress. They must be from the other side. They
| must be arguing in bad faith. Our beliefs are the best and
| everyone else is ignorant.
|
| It's a cancer. As destructive as the attempted insurrection
| was, these types of people cause far more damage by
| alienating vast swaths of voter population with their
| petulance. They then turn their lenses against their elected
| representatives, offices teetering on the edge of a knife,
| demanding more and criticizing inaction.
|
| These are destructive extremists with end of people to blame,
| chastise, and criticize - except themselves.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > What I think is happening is that (like almost everything)
| it comes down to group membership signaling.
|
| That's one aspect of it, but from another perspective, this
| is a simple power play. Everyone with even modicum of
| intelligence understands the use-mention distinction, that
| there is a profound difference between quoting and using the
| word. Everyone understands that it is clearly wrong and
| stupid to attack someone as evil for _mentioning_ the word,
| _especially_ if they mention it in the context of telling
| people how wrong it is to _use_ it.
|
| Nevertheless, the person is still attacked. The goal is to
| make it clear to all people observing, that no matter how
| stupid and wrong it might be, they have full, unobstructed
| power to destroy anyone at will, under flimsy circumstances,
| so you'd better not ever cross them. That this is stupid and
| wrong is the entire point: anyone can attack, shame and
| destroy people for doing wrong, evil things, but only
| powerful people and ideologies can attack and destroy people
| for absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| "Itchy trigger finger" explains this far better than
| "they're out to get me", honestly. Sure, there might be
| some machiavellian individuals using this as an opportunity
| to attack others, but by and large it's clear to see this
| is more of an overcompensation by people trying to do the
| right thing.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| what is itchy trigger finger, though, if not a yearning
| to express power?
| [deleted]
| filoeleven wrote:
| Dunno about it being the first big taboo word. I find that
| the C-word [0] inhabits kind of a similar space. The
| demographics are different, and I suspect that more people
| overall view the c-word as highly taboo, both because the
| n-word has been to a larger extent than the other reclaimed
| within some Black subcultures[1], and because the US has
| significant populations who use it with the intent of either
| causing offense to the out-group or for signaling in-group
| status with their peers.
|
| Meanwhile in England, C is still seen as quite a rude word,
| but the level of taboo is seemingly lower than in the US.
| NSFW language exchange discussion:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7059/why-is-
| cnt-...
|
| I'm not a historian, but I recall reading that a century or
| more ago, religious blasphemies occupied a similar space.
| Innocuous-sounding exclamations like "jeez!" and the half-
| archaic "zounds!" are evolved from the formerly-taboo
| "Jesus!" and "God's wounds!" respectively.
|
| Back then, taboo was concerned with offending/demeaning God,
| and now taboo is concerned with offending/demeaning black
| people and women. I see this as an improvement, because
| insulting God is between you and God, while insulting people
| can cause real harm to them.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/cR2tp5j5xD0 (Arrested Development clip,
| I'm still a little surprised they got this past the censors.
| Mild NSFW?)
|
| [1] I don't mean to imply that it's largely accepted, it's
| just that in my experience N is more widely-used publicly by
| some Black subcultures than C is used publicly by women who
| are in feminist subcultures. It has not been reclaimed to the
| same extent.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _Having a word that you that literally can 't say even in
| quotation or reference implies something almost akin to
| magical thinking._
|
| The only thing I can think of that's comparable is how Jews
| treat the divine name. I'd be uncomfortable to type it out in
| Hebrew even though I haven't been religious for many years.
| naringas wrote:
| do you mean "yaweh" ??
|
| all this reminds me of the way they treat the evil wizard's
| name "voldemort" in harry potter
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| yeah but I think in the books he has a spell that allows
| him to see into your mind or something if you say his
| name so that would make sense.
| labster wrote:
| Except that was never true and it was all superstitious
| bullshit inside the Wizarding World. Dumbledore only
| refrained from saying Tom Riddle's emo name because of
| social pressure -- if there was any chance of remote
| legilimency he'd have never said "Voldemort" because he
| was fighting a damned war against him. So no, it's just a
| normal taboo, probably initiated by Voldy himself to
| spread fear.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Spoiler alert:
|
| In one of the last books, the 3 main characters teleport
| to a London pub or something, and then the Deatheaters
| attack them. And I'm pretty sure the book says they were
| found because one of them said Voldemort's name.
|
| Edit:
|
| It was in Deathly Hallows book.
| https://screenrant.com/harry-potter-voldemort-name-not-
| spoke...
| cafard wrote:
| Somebody in an earlier discussion mentioned Monty Python's
| "Life of Brian": "No throwing rocks until I say so, I don't
| care who says 'Jehovah'!"
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I legitimately do not understand this line of thought. The
| stuff is old, going through many translations, and editing
| passes, and printings. So the divine name must have been
| destroyed in printings multiple times. Has god smote anyone
| yet for this?
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Do you not understand any disgust / taboo reactions or is
| it just the more abstract ones you have trouble with?
| Like would you get it if someone told you he'd hesitate
| to reach into a toilet even if it has just been cleaned?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Many taboos are explainable: toilet = feces = disease. I
| would be fine reaching into a toilet.
|
| Many are also just dumb: No blood transfusion, no birth
| controls, etc
| bradleyjg wrote:
| So you do understand taboos, you just wanted to signal
| how rational and strong minded you are, unlike me for
| example, by claiming it's so bizarre you don't even get
| it.
|
| You sound like a really great person.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I understand taboos that make sense. I have no idea why
| some of these taboos are a thing.
|
| I also don't have idea idea why im supposed to care about
| an attack on my person.
| [deleted]
| wahern wrote:
| Because the power to name something implies dominion over
| that thing. In Christianity you're supposed to "never use
| the Lord's name in vein" because even uttering an
| established name has implications--e.g. calling upon the
| power of that name.
|
| That basic cultural logic (which may even be partly
| innate) is as true today as it was 5000 years ago, though
| obviously the practical implications are different. More
| interestingly, the power in naming isn't something modern
| culture seems _explicitly_ aware of even though modern
| identity politics is predicated on these cultural powers.
| Thus few people seem to make the connection between
| ancient taboo words and modern identity politics.
|
| This also helps explain the power of religious texts. If
| spoken words have power, then what happens when you
| commit words to a physical representation? And pass them
| down through time? Religious texts can be easily
| conceived of as the divine made incarnate.
|
| This all may seem superficially nuts, especially if
| you're atheist, until you really dig into all the debates
| we continually have over language, including in tech
| communities (e.g. why is naming a project or even just a
| variable so difficult?), and try to understand why people
| invest themselves in these debates. Names and labels have
| power because that's how we create categories; categories
| separate things with the implication of intrinsic
| differences; they're how we attach ideas to things, and
| create meaning out of thin air. That really is a form of
| dominion and control.
| eli wrote:
| He was accused by multiple people of racist and uncomfortable
| comments beyond using the N word.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Maybe as a society we shouldn't focus too much on what those
| under the drinking age think of as offensive. If they are your
| target audience, sure, you'll need to pander, but for most, it
| really is only as consequential as you make it.
|
| I honestly don't think our norms have changed much, which is
| backed up in a few studies. I think, more than anything else,
| we've decided that outrage is worth attention. Thanks ad
| revenue.
| autarch wrote:
| But it's not just those under the drinking age who were
| offended. If you read the whole story it sounds like he was
| fired in part because some of his black colleagues at the New
| York Times also said they were offended and that they would
| no longer be willing to work with him.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Sometimes you pull a short straw and end up with shitty
| coworkers. I've worked with groups of people that were
| uniformly high functioning and understanding, and other
| groups that dwelled on political positioning and avoided
| work at all costs. Happens in every industry, some more
| than others.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The New York Times is a highly influential newspapers,
| and who draws the short straw at that workplace and why
| is capital-p Politics.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I kinda wish people in those racial classes for whatever
| <epithet> represents could find a way to instead of blacklist
| the word which ultimately gives it more power to embrace it.
|
| Say BLM for instance if they had people of all colors saying
| I'm an <epithet>... in some sort of markting videos... If you
| had the word become a different meaning instead of "stupid"
| lesser race, it can become: "strong, empowered" person of color
| with a strong identity.
|
| Example: I watched the history of swear words (excellent show
| btw) and one very controversial word is: Bitch.
|
| It's gone from bad to very bad to good to empowering to some
| women, and there's honestly a million ways and connotations to
| using the word.
|
| Gay is another word that I think has become more powerful to
| the community for using it in more positive ways.
|
| A word that cannot even be uttered becomes the pen-ultimate
| swear word for those who want to hurt someone. If it means as
| little as damn or shoot or crap - then it loses it's sting and
| I personally think we get closer to more racial tolerance....
| but that's just me.
|
| How do we get this accomplished? No effing clue and I wouldn't
| even want to broach the subject being a white guy who supports
| BLM and wants to be an advocate and not cast out. Like the
| author I'm autistic too and have that empathetic to a cause but
| bad at reading an audience or how bad things I say can have an
| effect.
| nthrowaway wrote:
| >the mere utterance of the epithet, even in a sentence like
| "You should never call someone a <racial epithet> because that
| is extremely offensive" is considered itself racist by younger
| people.
|
| I'm not sure it's really younger people, it's more a journalist
| / leftist thing. Consider pewdiepie is a Gen X and he's
| supposed to have been cancelled 10x over by now for being
| racist / anti semitic / etc. And what gen X'ers are reading the
| NYT anyways?
| leephillips wrote:
| "I got about half way through the first one and was just
| wondering "I still have no idea what this is all about.""
|
| He says what it's all about in the first paragraph, and by 100
| words in we have an outline of the whole write-up.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >He says what it's all about in the first paragraph
|
| I for one would not consider the paragraph:
|
| "On February 5 this year, one week after an article about me
| appeared in the Daily Beast, The New York Times announced
| that I would be leaving."
|
| a description of what it's all about. For what it's worth I
| already know the story, but if I didn't I certainly wouldn't
| have a clue from that paragraph.
|
| >and by 100 words in we have an outline of the whole write-
| up.
|
| The article is incredibly long-winded and has a difficulty
| getting to the point, in honor of which I should continue my
| comment, of which we are currently in the preambulatory
| phase, so yeah anyway, by 128 words we know:
|
| that the document will be in 4 parts, the first part is the
| introduction and we're in it!
|
| Something happened on January 28th!
|
| What Happened During the Investigation? (there was an
| investigation of something!!, what was it, someone got
| murdered, we don't know yet, we're in the introduction, but
| hey this guy was the lead guy on reporting covid 19 pandemic
| and he started as a copyboy in 1976, imagine!)
|
| What Happened in Peru? (something happened in Peru - was this
| after the murder investigation, don't know yet.)
|
| but hey I guess we're done with the introduction so now we
| can find out what it's about!
|
| Nope, we're still in the introduction. There are 963 more
| words were he tells you his reasons for writing on medium,
| gets flamboyant with the language about government corruption
| and gives examples of how words matter and he hates being
| misquoted etc. etc. I admit I didn't read very closely
| because it was uninteresting and as a consequence I find
| myself incapable of quoting him accurately.
|
| so now - a thousand words in he ends the introduction with:
|
| "I'll tell my story in three further parts:"
|
| This guy is not Dickens or Twain, and his rambling narrative
| is as interesting as someone whining about how their wife
| doesn't understand their drinking embedded in the middle of a
| TPS report. But hey 1000 words in and I have a good feeling
| we're gonna find out what happened with what I have to assume
| was a murder and some sort of freakout in Peru!! this is
| going to be epic!!!
|
| He now lists the three further parts:
|
| What Happened on Jan. 28 and Thereafter?
|
| What Happened during the August 2019 Times Investigation?
|
| What Happened in Peru?
|
| Now this is truly WTF territory for me - is he going to list
| what he is going to write about at the end of each section?
|
| So then he writes a couple hundred more words - he says he
| remembers what happened in Peru because of emails, but wait,
| before we find out about what happened in Peru time for a
| look backwards about being interviewed on a TV program where
| he said some stuff he thought might get him in trouble, but
| it didn't I guess because it seems like something else that
| happened in Peru got him in trouble. Oh man, I am starting to
| worry this is going to turn out not to be a murder story
| after all..
|
| actually I don't think the margins of this comment box are
| vast enough for me to recount all the details of how he comes
| to actually reveal whatever happened in Peru! and the
| investigation, which here we are nearly 1500 words and he
| hasn't actually said what that was about either.
|
| This guy tiptoeing around the subject is weird, is he trying
| to build suspense. You'd think he was trying to build
| suspense, and it was going to be the story about a voodoo
| cult, sex hippies, and a gun running cult! But it's so
| boring, it can't be that.
|
| As one keeps reading and nothing happens there starts to form
| the suspicion that in the end Peru will be some boring
| snooze-fest, like maybe he used the n-word or something and
| got fired.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I write here instead of edit - when I say he's not Twain or
| Dickens I used them as my examples because they are two of
| my favorite authors and I've been rereading them quite a
| bit, also they are verbose and perhaps given to rambling.
|
| This guy, a journalist, isn't Hemingway either. Which is a
| pity.
|
| on edit: I also notice I expected him to have a couple
| cults in his story. Can't have too many cults, nor too many
| words in your comments describing how someone has to many
| words in their version of events attempting to win the
| public to their side.
| leephillips wrote:
| You should have had at least one more cult in there.
| leephillips wrote:
| That was entertaining.
|
| I'm not defending the organization of the piece, which I
| agree is less than optimal, as well as super redundant.
| But's it's also an exaggeration to suggest that he doesn't
| tell us what it's about at the start: it's about how he got
| canned because of an article in the _Beast_.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Huh? He mentions nowhere in his first paragraph, or first
| couple paragraphs for that matter, the _reason_ for why he
| was fired, which seems like a rather important detail.
| u678u wrote:
| Its quite amazing that he's an experienced journalist and he
| knows its worth publishing your own work directly because you
| know journalists will subjectively misquote you. Its a good
| lesson.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _We can befriend you for years, and then bite off your arm just
| as you're offering us a treat. We can't help it. It's the nature
| of the job._
|
| Live by the sword, die by the sword.
| tesnirnat wrote:
| > "Recently," I told Carolyn, "I've been feeling a little like a
| Confederate Statue. I think people are getting a little sick of
| me and are waiting for me to make a mistake so they can pull me
| down and trample me."
|
| I can't be the only person who thinks that this is an odd and
| inappropriate comparison to make, can I? But it doesn't surprise
| me that someone who thinks that this is a reasonable analogy in a
| public setting would be interpreted as making racist remarks.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| i'm surprised and grateful that it wasn't
| cout wrote:
| I had a similar internal response when I read that sentence. I
| could easily interpret it as claiming that people are pulling
| down Confederate statues because they are a little sick of them
| rather than because of what the statues represent.
| jariel wrote:
| Try to grasp that 'what they represent' is maybe not what you
| think they do.
|
| The Washington Monument was built by slaves, in the name of a
| man who owned slaves, in a nation full of slaves. Does it
| represent slavery? Or that era?
|
| Even though the Civil war was to a great extent fought over
| slavery - it was fundamentally states vs. states. If it were
| _really_ about slavery, it very well have been 'sub groups'
| vs. 'sub groups' all over the US. There were economic
| jealousies as well.
|
| The statues are symbols of the ancestors of those who were
| living there, heroes to one side - and that's mostly it.
|
| They are arguably problematically offensive to some, but it's
| unlikely they are 'symbols of racism' in the sense that this
| is what White Southerners are inspired by.
|
| If rednecks were driving by, aspiring for the days when they
| 'put those blacks back in their place' - I would say raze
| them all to the ground. But that's not remotely it.
|
| What Southerners see in those monuments is just more or less
| what regular Americans seen in the Washington monument.
| That's it. Pride, while glossing over the uglier stuff.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > I can't be the only person who thinks that this is an odd and
| inappropriate comparison to make, can I?
|
| You're probably right. But I think there are also many who take
| a view opposite of yours. Maybe that's why these debates rage
| for multiple years, instead of being quickly resolved.
| tesnirnat wrote:
| My father is like this. He believes very strongly that he
| should be allowed to say anything and other people should be
| able to take it.
|
| I don't really agree, personally, but I empathize with the
| central crux of the argument (freedom of speech, or something
| like that). Nobody likes to be told what (or what not) to do.
| But I think life would be easier if we all spent some time
| thinking about how our audience would perceive our words
| before we say them out loud.
| jxy wrote:
| > Obviously, I badly misjudged my audience in Peru that year. I
| thought I was generally arguing in favor of open-mindedness and
| tolerance -- but it clearly didn't come across that way. And my
| bristliness makes me an imperfect pedagogue for sensitive
| teenagers. Although the students liked me in 2018, some of those
| in 2019 clearly detested me.
|
| So in the end, he still blamed those teenagers. Has he learned
| nothing?
| chokolad wrote:
| > So in the end, he still blamed those teenagers. Has he
| learned nothing?
|
| What should he have learned?
| etchalon wrote:
| How to behave.
| joveian wrote:
| He also compares himself to a confederate statue.
| hahahahe wrote:
| Even as a progressive who read the NYT religiously growing up in
| NYC, I stopped reading it in the past five years or so. It's
| gotten so bad that I don't think they can recover. The same goes
| for other highly regarded names in the newspaper business such as
| the Financial Times, WSJ, etc.
|
| I think it's simply a reflection of the dying industry. I get my
| news from Twitter directly from reporters that I respect.
| mc32 wrote:
| The biggest take for me is that reporters are ideologues of what
| they see as 'truth'; to wit:
|
| "...But we're still jackals. We can befriend you for years, and
| then bite off your arm just as you're offering us a treat. We
| can't help it. It's the nature of the job. At the highest levels,
| like Watergate, it's about digging for the truth, no matter what
| corrupt government official it hurts. At the basest level, when
| even the crummiest scandal erupts, you have to repeat the
| accusation, even if you know it's untrue or half-true, in order
| to explain the truth -- no matter how much you may personally
| like the source you're hurting."
|
| How can you know if you're ultimately right or wrong? What are
| you inflecting?
| bitbang wrote:
| Read an article on this last week. With the internet sucking up
| all the advertising revenue, journalism is turning into
| propaganda in order to try to retain patronage. It's eating them
| from the inside out.
|
| https://thedispatch.com/p/words-as-weapons-how-activist-jour...
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This has always been the case. Do you imagine news barons ever
| allowed journalists to publish stories that didn't suit their
| narrative?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 3JPLW wrote:
| This seems to assume some background knowledge of the situation,
| of which I had none. Here's a quick primer:
|
| > He left The New York Times in 2021 following public reports of
| making racist remarks, including use of the word "nigger", during
| a 2019 trip to Peru with high school students. McNeil claims he
| intended to quote the word in a discussion about the use of the
| slur.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_McNeil_Jr.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I know I should be paying attention to the meat of the matter,
| but I was stuck on the fact that this man's life story was
| literally "I started in the mail room in the '70s" and I'm
| flabbergasted that there are people in the modern world who got
| jobs at the most prestigious newspaper in the world that way.
|
| It's like hearing "oh yeah I used to take the trolley to work for
| a nickel and we'd go see a talky after work" from a modern
| working-age human.
| Hitton wrote:
| It's regrettable, but the author seems to forget that he was part
| of an organization that has been spreading rhetoric which leads
| directly to this for years, now when he himself is bitten by this
| too, it's surprised pikachu face.
| [deleted]
| djoldman wrote:
| Part 2: https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-
| word-p...
|
| Part 3: https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-
| word-p...
|
| Part 4: https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-
| word-p...
| lisper wrote:
| Thanks! Do you by chance also have a link to the Daily Beast
| article that started this kerfuffle?
| qnsi wrote:
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/star-new-york-times-
| reporter-d...
| stefan_ wrote:
| I assume it is intentional that this article is devoid of
| any actual quote of what is purported to have been said,
| and instead consists purely of multiple, mostly redundant
| statements of how the teenagers reacted to what is
| insinuated to have been said?
|
| The levels of indirection here don't leave a great
| impression.
| disgrunt wrote:
| > Multiple people familiar with the situation told The
| Daily Beast that an internal investigation was conducted
| about the claims and that the top science reporter was
| reprimanded. The paper also reached out to some parties who
| complained to apologize for McNeil's behavior and to assure
| the students and parents that action had been taken
| internally against him.
|
| Not a single accuser was named. Goes on to use "people
| familiar with the situation" and "Some parties". Even hit
| pieces on journalists are effectively sourceless.
| Journalism is dead.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| The accusers seem to be the students themselves and so
| were and may still be minors. If that is the case I don't
| think naming them in this situation would be the best
| thing to do.
| disgrunt wrote:
| Not by my reading of the hit piece.
|
| > After the excursion ended, according to multiple
| parents of students on the trip who spoke with The Daily
| Beast along with documents shared with the...
| FillardMillmore wrote:
| I believe this is the article in question.
|
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/star-new-york-times-
| reporter-d...
| kragen wrote:
| In the interest of holding people accountable for what they
| publish, rather than giving them the option to falsify their
| words later, or claim that others have done so:
|
| Part 1: https://archive.fo/PLa2m
|
| Part 2: https://archive.fo/cbU53
|
| Part 3: https://archive.fo/TT3B2
|
| Part 4: https://archive.fo/W12D7
|
| (As another comment points out below, these articles are also
| likely to get memory-holed by demands to censor "racist
| content", or "content by racists".)
|
| I did try things like
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210301145319/https://donaldgmc...
| but the Medium JS seems to successfully replace the page with a
| 500 error after it's loaded, _despite being served from the
| IA_. All the requests in the debug pane do go to archive.org,
| so this is probably a solvable problem.
|
| Are there other good alternatives to archive.fo for this kind
| of thing? Maybe something decentralized?
| nerdponx wrote:
| I wonder if there's something like archive.is/fo/vn/??, but
| built on IPFS.
| prepend wrote:
| The lesson here is that there's no meaningful conversations to be
| had between 60 year olds and teenagers. So just avoid them.
|
| I know I seem like an old person, but there's situations where
| I've had to talk to teenagers and the experience is surreal how
| different our realities are. And it's definitely worse when the
| teenagers are rich. It's all one can do to not freak out and
| start screaming like Annie Wilkes from Misery or Holden Caufield
| from Catcher in the Rye.
|
| I was sitting in a classroom and the sentence I remember was "My
| dad says a [Mercedes] E Class is just the poor man's S Class, I
| would never drive one even if you gave it to me."
|
| The mistake this person made was going on the trip. Trying to be
| "open minded" with teenage rich girls who chose to go on a
| Peruvian shaman vacation shows poor judgement.
|
| Author says he was trying to do his friend a favor, but a
| $300/day upside compared with just the mental pain of eating
| meals with teenagers for days is just not worth it.
|
| This seems like NYT just using an excuse to fire him and the
| ideological madness is just cover.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| > The lesson here is that there's no meaningful conversations
| to be had between 60 year olds and teenagers.
|
| > the mental pain of eating meals with teenagers for days
|
| I really think this incorrectly stereotypes an entire
| generation as this set of unreasonable and irrational fools.
| While the teenagers on the trip misjudged the author's
| intentions, it is the Times that are at fault for using those
| complaints as grounds for discipline.
| [deleted]
| asciident wrote:
| Is this mindset similar to the "Pence rule" of "never dine
| alone with a woman"? It seems like this could carry over to
| topics about race or politics. Basically, avoid potentially
| problematic situations that can be misinterpreted, regardless
| of your actual intent or beliefs?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > 1. Yes, I did use the word, in this context: A student asked me
| if I thought her high school's administration was right to
| suspend a classmate of hers for using the word in a video she'd
| made in eighth grade. I said "Did she actually call someone a
| (offending word)? Or was she singing a rap song or quoting a book
| title or something?" When the student explained that it was the
| student, who was white and Jewish, sitting with a black friend
| and the two were jokingly insulting each other by calling each
| other offensive names for a black person and a Jew, I said "She
| was suspended for that? Two years later? No, I don't think
| suspension was warranted. Somebody should have talked to her, but
| any school administrator should know that 12-year-olds say dumb
| things. It's part of growing up."
|
| > 2. I was never asked if I believed in white privilege. As
| someone who lived in South Africa in the 1990's and has reported
| in Africa almost every year since, I have a clearer idea than
| most Americans of white privilege. I was asked if I believed in
| systemic racism. I answered words to the effect of: "Yeah, of
| course, but tell me which system we're talking about. The U.S.
| military? The L.A.P.D.? The New York Times? They're all
| different."
|
| > 3. The question about blackface was part of a discussion of
| cultural appropriation. The students felt that it was never, ever
| appropriate for any white person to adopt anything from another
| culture -- not clothes, not music, not anything. I counter-argued
| that all cultures grow by adopting from others. I gave examples
| -- gunpowder and paper. I said I was a San Franciscan, and we
| invented blue jeans. Did that mean they -- East Coast private
| school students -- couldn't wear blue jeans? I said we were in
| Peru, and the tomato came from Peru. Did that mean that Italians
| had to stop using tomatoes? That they had to stop eating pizza?
| Then one of the students said: "Does that mean that blackface is
| OK?" I said "No, not normally -- but is it OK for black people to
| wear blackface?" "The student, sounding outraged, said "Black
| people don't wear blackface!" I said "In South Africa, they
| absolutely do. The so-called colored people in Cape Town have a
| festival every year called the Coon Carnival where they wear
| blackface, play Dixieland music and wear striped jackets. It
| started when a minstrel show came to South Africa in the early
| 1900's. Americans who visit South Africa tell them they're
| offended they shouldn't do it, and they answer 'Buzz off. This is
| our culture now. Don't come here from America and tell us what to
| do.' So what do you say to them? Is it up to you, a white
| American, to tell black South Africans what is and isn't their
| culture?"
|
| I fundamentally don't understand why the Times didn't explain
| this early on. Not necessarily release these statements verbatim,
| but certainly provide some of this context.
| cabaalis wrote:
| > I fundamentally don't understand why the Times didn't explain
| this early on.
|
| Sure you do! Context is not important in our age. Reaction is
| what matters. Let's hope we don't live to see the day when pre-
| action is what matters.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I agree that the internet age has made context more
| difficult, due to the sheer barrage of information it
| subjects us to.
|
| But the above quote constitutes three medium-length
| paragraphs, and I suspect a couple of good editors could have
| synthesized that down further (possibly to the author's
| chagrin, but not to his detriment, if it was done properly).
| I do not believe we are that far gone.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| A deluge of articles would have then followed, debating
| each of these points, corroborating with stuff the kids
| wrote etc. What you're saying makes sense if the purpose
| was to defend the journalist. But if the purpose is just to
| help the sorry die quickly, this wouldn't have been it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The Times as presented in the medium posts was pretty clear
| about what they wanted: they wanted the story to quickly go
| away. They judged (likely rightly) that the fastest way to do
| so would be for the journalist in question to issue a broad
| apology that admits to some wrongdoing without any kind of
| detail. This could then be spun down into a non-story (some
| kids were offended by what this guy said, you know how kids
| are; he later apologized for the dumb stuff he said, you know
| how old people are). The Times didn't care in any way if the
| reporter would remain with a reputation of being a bit of a
| racist, and the last thing they wanted was to give a point by
| point rebuttal that could in turn be rebutted point by point
| and endlessly discussed in forums and articles.
|
| I'm not in any way claiming they were right to want this, that
| they were right to fire him over not agreeing with this plan,
| or that anything that happened here is good and normal. I'm
| claiming that the motivations are pretty transparent, though.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I can see why most other corporations would behave like this
| even if it's not quite ethical, but the NYT crudely sweeping
| this kind of thing under the rug seems to more directly
| contradict their values and goals. I don't think it can
| produce honest, critical journalism if this is how it
| evaluates speech under attack. Journalism more than any other
| industry is vulnerable to this kind of shallow smear but it
| must bear it to do its job well.
| jstrong wrote:
| I disagree their judgement was right - I think it was
| catastrophically wrong. there are some things that you can
| treat this way (let it blow over), but a reporter saying the
| n word to a group of high school kids is not one of them. the
| fact that it was only said in a question to clarify what
| someone meant, rather than than as a slur, is also wholly
| exculpatory - making the real story a complete non-issue.
| also, think about how it actually turned out -- their
| strategy completely backfired, insofar as it was actually
| intended to limit the pr damage of the story.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I for one had heard nothing of this story before seeing
| this article (though I'm neither a resident nor citizen of
| America, so this is not that meaningful). We also don't
| know what the story would have been had he apologized as
| they wanted (again, I'm not saying he had any obligation to
| do so! His reputation was rightfully more important to him
| than the desires of the NYT PR team).
|
| Also, I don't agree that the context is wholly exculpatory
| and makes this a complete non issue. He was wrong in using
| this type of language with this particular audience, even
| if in a NYT article it would have been perfectly
| acceptable. He was misunderstood by the teens and seemed
| shocking to them, despite how he (or I, or you) views his
| own words. It would have actually been right to apologize
| to them, as he clearly failed in communicating the nuance
| he was trying to communicate. That's not to say that he is
| a racist! But he obviously misjudged his audience and
| caused them more harm than good with his words, even if he
| had the best intentions behind them. Especially since he
| was payed to be there and teach them, this is not some case
| of some teens finding someone's blog and taking offense at
| what they think is being said there.
| chokolad wrote:
| > But he obviously misjudged his audience and caused them
| more harm than good with his words, even if he had the
| best intentions behind them
|
| He said that people should not punish 15 year old for
| something she said said offhand, when she was 12 years
| old. How is that causing more harm than good ?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That is what he had intended to transmit, but it was
| clearly not the message that the audience received.
| Instead, the message they actually got from this
| conversation seems to have been more along the lines of
| 'this NYT reporter who is lecturing us about native
| ctures is throwing around the N word and claiming it's OK
| to use when he says it or something. This is
| uncomfortable and annoying'.
|
| If a class is just not learning from a teacher, both the
| class and the teacher share some of the blame. But since
| the teacher's job is to teach, and when the class is made
| up of children or teens, I always err on the side of
| accusing the teacher first.
|
| Again, not accusing them of Racism! Just of failing to
| create the understanding and environment they were
| supposed to create.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It's worth remembering that he was a journalist, not a
| teacher. I mean, he was _acting_ as a teacher, but he was
| invited to do so because of his background as a
| journalist. He didn 't have any pedagogical training.
|
| I do think it's relatively clear that something went
| wrong on that trip. Perhaps he should have been given
| more support from actual teachers, or perhaps he's just
| bad with kids and the position was always a terrible fit.
| But none of that should have significantly impacted his
| job at the Times, which doesn't involve teaching
| teenagers.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| His role there was as a teacher. The fact that he does
| not have pedagogical training is likely a reason why he
| failed in this role, and a reason why we shouldn't judge
| his failure harshly. It is not a reason why he shouldn't
| apologize.
|
| I'm a programmer. If I offer to fix my friend's sink but
| end up spilling a lot of water, my friend shouldn't judge
| me too incapable, but they can still expect an apology
| for the inundation I caused.
|
| Edit after your own edit: I completely agree. While I
| don't think he was right not to apologize, I absolutely
| agree that it is not normal and good that this escalated
| into him being fired/pressured into quitting. It seems
| that there was a good deal of internal politics that was
| involved in the way this escalated (of the personal
| grudge and/or inconvenient employee kind). We should also
| remember that we only have one side of the account of
| what happened at the NYT, what his exact reactions were,
| how much of what we are discussing here may have been
| discussed with there as well (and rejected) etc. Still,
| none of this is painting a nice picture.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Taking down a vicious racist gets more clicks.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Someone in power at the NYT wanted him fired, and cynically
| used this as an excuse. You're looking for good faith where
| there wasn't any.
| djoldman wrote:
| If you're a journalist, you should know better than anyone that:
| There is no such thing as off-the-record and It is
| wise to consider everything one says and writes to be saved for
| eternity and immediately sent to one's worst enemy
|
| It's interesting that we humans just can't stop talking.
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