New NYT Editor, a bit bigoted?

[EdithKeeler]

with a rigid ideology that appears dangerously totalitarian and oppressive. This is how I view the PC culture of the left.

How do you figure?

[IlliniDave]

Things pretty much speak for themselves on this one. No one should be surprised. In a relative sense I have a token bit more respect for people/organizations who are at least open about who they are.

[7Wannabe5]

...Everybody granted that if "Tom" were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him- it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life- that was quite another matter.
As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river. - Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson"

[jennypenny]

I applaud the NYT for standing behind the hiring. Social media mobs shouldn't dictate company policy and too many have been caving to social media pressure. Sometimes I agree with the decisions and sometimes with the objections, but I always object when companies cave to this kind of effortless emoting of the masses. Instant social media 'protests' that require nothing more than a couple of taps on a phone are system 1 group thinking at its worst.

That said, this isn't a good look for the NYT. There are plenty of good journalists who are underemployed or unemployed because of the shrinking number of jobs in the field that the Times could have hired. I question Jeong's judgement, and therefore qualifications, for not deleting the tweets before applying or after being hired, regardless of whether they represent her current views or what my opinion is of them. The Times either didn't vet her properly (despite their statement to the contrary), or did and didn't care about her background. I hope they didn't hire her just because she's asian and female ... not out of the question.

In a climate where news outlets are under such a microscope, organizations have to work hard to distinguish themselves from the Fox's and MSNBC's of the world. This was an unfortunate place for the NYT to take a stand. Her comments were vulgar and beneath the standards of the Times.

[7Wannabe5]

It's interesting to me that the right is more "guilty" of post-modernism in this debate.

[Jason]

There was a sub-plot in the television show "Billions" where the old-line, white state's attorney character played by Paul Giamatti, with the permission and occasional participation of his wife, went to a millennial Asian Dominatrix to be humiliated.

So the NYT hired a young, hot looking Asian chick who uses her keyboard to whip the white male establishment? I think the editors are just providing their Male Members Only Club readership reason to spend more time with their paper when they take it into the bathroom.

It's not bigotry and hypocrisy. It's sex and power. And in context of this current environment, The Big Switch all the old white men wanted in the first place (this writer obviously excluded).

[7Wannabe5]

@Jason:

Good point. A good deal of the allure of dominance is the release from responsibility attached to authority. Not my call. Not my decision. Etc.

[Jason]

To think that (1) The NYT did not know about that tweet (2) Didn't want that specific tweet out is absurd. They are fucking investigative journalists. The make their living digging out this type of shit.

This was above average.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/arts ... eview.html

Poor Glenn Thrush. With her walking around the office, the man must have to jerk off four times before he gets his first draft together.


Edit: What was particularly interesting about the documentary was the incredibly cordial telephone conversations that took place between Maggie Habermas and President Trump. It was like they were discussing what kind of take out they wanted. The NYT realizes not only the theatrical dimension of Trump's railing against the press, but how they benefit from taking a leading role in the production. So although they no doubt want to rattle the cages of all old white guys, there is one specific cage containing one specific old white guy who's specific shit they want slinging at them between its golden bars.

[Tyler9000]

I'm no fan of the modern trend of social media lynch mobs enforcing punishment by popular vote, but personally I have no problem with people being called out for clearly racist comments or with prominent organizations being called out for knowingly promoting these same people to leadership positions. A little shame isn't always a bad thing, as accountability to one's neighbors is a healthy check on our own inherent narcissism.

[jacob]

Maybe this short comment should be its own thread, but since PC/free speech come up, I leave it here.

See graphs here:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... georgetown
(you can pursue the to the original data if you don't like the messenger of the numbers)

WRT dis-invited speakers on university campuses. In 2016, there were 42 of such instances.

Out of those 42, 11 of them, that is >25%, was due to one.single.person

Guess who?

In statistics, we call that an outlier and this would normally be dropped from the dataset (because classical statistics doesn't work when one person is responsible for a large part of the dataset). But here it might be informative to look at the outliers in trying to understand the greater media picture.

From the article:

“Most of the incidents where presumptively conservative speech has been interrupted or squelched in the last two or three years seem to involve the same few speakers: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter ,” Sanford Ungar, the Free Speech Project’s director, writes. “In some instances, they seem to invite, and delight in, disruption.”

... that might be putting it mildly.

From the same article, when it comes to professors being terminated for political speech, 75% of terminations have been on the left! Wait what? Don't worry ... it makes sense.

Applying Occam's razor suggests that a) the so-called free speech bans are really just a handful of people seeking to expand their business platform rather than the epidemic they declare it to be; b) since there are more left-wing professors than right-wing professors, one would expect more to be terminated on the left anyway. Indeed, the tilt seems to be 46.1% purple, 44.1% blue, and 9.2% red. This means terminations over politics are pretty close to random. A t-test would reveal this.

Free speech on campuses seem to be restricted only in the sense that you can't instigate a bunch of !#@# just to get a rise out of people and then later declare it was just satire or a joke meant to provoke. Any restrictions are not about what you say but how you say it (manners matter). Same as with the rules that apply on the forum. IOW, it looks neither systematic nor widespread but rather a mediastorm caused by just a few individuals with a platform.

[prognastat]

@jacob

I would agree with some of it. I would say Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter definitely fall in to the mostly provocateur camp. I would have to disagree with Ben Shapiro and Charles Murray falling in to the same camp as even though I may disagree with them on things they have stuff to say that is worth discussing.

I would also disagree though that provocateur's should be disinvited/heavily protested. Milo's tour would have completely fizzled if he had 0 disinvitations and barely anyone showed up to protest him. The only way he was able to spin this in to more fame are those disinvitiations and violent protestors. As long as he is being invited by an on campus organisation that wants to hear him speak they should be allowed to do so even if it is a complete waste of time. Also keep in mind that the reason he got invited by so many conservative organisations is that he is a right wing provocateur and was being used as a way to kick back on a culture on many campuses that is very much left wing and intolerant of their views, not saying that makes it the best move just that it explains it a little.

[jennypenny]

From the same article, when it comes to professors being terminated for political speech, 75% of terminations have been on the left! Wait what?

But that doesn't mean those terminations on the left weren't caused by the left. Bret Weinstein gave an excellent speech describing how the far left is pressuring the moderate left on campuses. (For those who don't know him, he's an evolutionary biologist and bona fide progressive.)

[jacob]

@prognastat - I suspect universities (many of which are private anyway) do the same signal/noise math I do when I moderate the forum. It's just unrealistic to hope that trolls will go away if only everybody were to consistently ignore them. I do see the dynamics: MY is a known provocateur(*). This leads right wing student groups to invite him with the primary reason being that he can be used as a tool to provoke(+) the left wing student groups and thus prove a point. As a side-effect MY gets famous and more invitations. AC does the same on the TV platform. However, if you're not benefiting from this [somewhat sick family] dynamics, like you're a university campus or an online forum and not cable TV, I can totally see why universities don't want to provide a platform as their cost-benefit is strictly negative. Nobody learns anything from this.

Putting it into Game Theory, the provocateurs are the only winners, the left/right wing students are useful idiots (zero-sum), and the universities are the losers.

(+) Which means that it's also important to note that even if someone like BS has stuff that's worth discussing, he's also said enough stuff to ensure that it's going to be all about protesting that other stuff. Hence, if the actual goal was to invite a speaker for a learning experience, they should invite someone else.
(*) Whereas CM is someone who says provocative things (he was the guy who co-wrote the Bell Curve) which is different. Similarly, here it would make a big difference if this was part of some gradschool seminars or whether it was an invite from the student union.

@jp - Certainly. Also, see Al Franken as a example that combines everything we've discussed in this thread. If there's a difference, it's that the left seem to police their own in academia and in congress whereas the right seem rather craven/expedient in comparison. Only news example I can think of where the right is calling out the right is Shep Smith. As MA also pointed out ... it might come down to the observation that hypocrisy is practically the only deadly sin left on the [postmodern] left whereas the right operates on different values (like loyalty).

[prognastat]

@jacob

I don't quite think such a thing online and offline is the same. There is a much larger opportunity cost for both the troll(MY) and the people doing the inviting than there is for an online troll.

If MY is invited and doesn't achieve the intended effect much more time, effort and money were spent achieving nothing. An online troll however has wasted little to no effort when he trolls on a forum and gets banned.

[IlliniDave]

jacob, what I couldn't find is how they scored their data in terms of the victim (left versus right) and who exactly shut them down. Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson are both left leaning guys who have had difficulties on campuses (Peterson reprimanded, Weinstein forced off the faculty) for not being left enough. This article is a little old, but many of the speakers listed would be considered persons of the left, but were dis-invited or shut down for (apparently) not being left enough. Maybe there is somewhere in the Georgetown data to find not just whom, but by whom, in their database. But I couldn't get to it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of ... ges-2016-7

No idea how comprehensive the BI article is, but it does hint that the incidents are not overwhelmingly widespread, at least when when it comes to "name" speakers.

Sorry, did not see that my point had been made by someone above.

[jacob]

@prognastat -

I gave about 30 speeches or so when I was a physicist. The cost for a speech is a plane ticket and few nights in a motel room: $400-600 per trip, typically.

That's really cheap compared to how much income/fame/infamy/power you get from a book-sale bump following your 15 minutes of fame. I've experienced those with ERE and they're worth 10x the cost of a trip (and that's just at my level of fame). So it definitely makes good business sense if pursued as an active strategy.

Online trolling is the same dynamics but at lower cost and higher frequency.

[prognastat]

@jacob

Wouldn't you agree though if his tour had been uneventful the actual benefit to his book sales would actually have been far lesser? He was actually able to spin the disinvitations and riots into a hugely successful book/career. You can call him a troll, but he definitely is smart as he played both the left and right in to a good income.

Also I was mostly referring to the inviters rather than MY for opportunity cost. If their invitation doesn't have the effect(outraging the left/making the left look bad) they are looking for then they are out the money and MY doesn't add much value outside of actually outraging the left to them. If this happens a few times other campus groups would likely take note and I suspect invitations would quickly reduce.

[jacob]

Hmm... the way invitations go is that speakers are almost always always only invited at "higher venues" after proving themselves at "lower venues". In academia, it's group meeting talk -> contributed conference talk -> invited seminar -> invited conference talk -> invited colloquium -> invited school/lecture.

In social media, it's something like link reference -> roundup post -> guest post -> podcast -> part of newspaper article -> radio show appearance -> TV interview -> exclusive newspaper feature -> TV feature -> Movie. (I think Tedx is somewhere in there too.)

MY or whoever was not invited randomly out of the online trolling-sphere. He was hired based on established reputation thus ensuring a reaction. If the reputation is already there, it also takes some time to destroy it. IOW, it was a low-risk invite on the student group. They knew what/who they were buying.

Methinks, especially given the maturity at the student-level, outraging the-other-side would totally be worth blowing a bunch of their grant money on. Inviting someone and getting it canceled on you is the stuff of legend. Kinda like how old hippies still talk about their Vietnam war protests. "Remember that one time ..."

[prognastat]

@jacob

I agree and that's exactly why he will keep getting invited. As long as MY is invited and either the college administration disinvites him or protestors get violent both MY benefits financially and the inviting group gets what they want in pissing off the left and making them look bad. The events being uneventful wouldn't really be a negative for Milo as he will still likely get a free ticket, lodging and a speakers fee out of it though the benefit would be reduced as it wouldn't increase his brand/sales near as much and if the event is uneventful for the inviting organisation the even becomes an expense with no return.

[jacob]

Yes, it's like a dysfunctional family where one person benefits from the dysfunction and therefore tries to keep it going.

This of course being on the societal level, but same basic idea #fourthturning