The May 9, 2016 “Letters from our readers” section of New Yorker raises question: can a society eventually spend 100 percent of its time, and therefore GDP, fighting about social justice?
New Yorker is magazine that crusades against injustice, e.g., the existence of Donald Trump, (actual) Republicans, single-gender bathrooms, etc. Yet all three of the letters published on May 9 complain about the magazine’s insufficient zeal in the crusade. The first letter attacks an author and the editors for not looking at misogyny in an article previously discussed here. The second letter talks about “privileged male sexual behavior.” The third letter complains that a poem was “offensive and racially insensitive.”
Obviously this is just one magazine but I wonder if this shows us what the country will be like once the current generation of college snowflakes is 50. Will they spend all of their time criticizing each other for social justice thoughtcrimes?
Aren’t YOU now spending time on it? Aren’t you wasting our time reading about it when you could tell us about a piece of technology or something in aviation that is interesting?
Your reporting on the problem is part of the problem.
There is already a country where people spend all of their time fighting for social justice – it’s called Venezuela.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world/americas/venezuela-economic-government-collapse.html
Wherever the people try to impose social justice, hoarders magically appear and cause the store shelves to be empty and the CIA compounds the problem. Were it not for the hoarders and the CIA, Venezuela would already be a paradise like Cuba.
Milo Yiannopoulos Explains Everything In Under Four Minutes:
I just read the last letter.
>>As any poet knows, tone is an important part of a poem, and Trillin’s tone is off.'<>It has been said that Trillin was mocking foodie culture, but he could have easily conveyed this message without using Chinese cuisine as an accessory and setting up the divisive narrative of “we” and “they.”<>The New Yorker considers itself a leader in writing on culture and current events, and its poetry must meet that standard, too.<<
Yes, let's hold everything to anyone's arbitrary Social Justice Warrior standards. I'm sure the New Yorker will still be interesting to read after every article has been thoroughly vetted by a panel of SJWs to make sure no one ever gets offended by words.
Ooops. somehow my text got messed up.. corrected post below. Apologies for the duplicate.
I just read the last letter.
–>As any poet knows, tone is an important part of a poem, and Trillin’s tone is off.
So now we are policing tone… in a poem. Good Lord. If you asked me the poem in its tone was in the spirit of Dr. Seuss. But I guess the letter writer was jumping at the chance to be offended.
–> It has been said that Trillin was mocking foodie culture, but he could have easily conveyed this message without using Chinese cuisine as an accessory and setting up the divisive narrative of “we” and “they.”
Look, I understand sometimes things can rub you the wrong way. But that’s life. I was pissed at Anthony-f*ckin-Bourdain when he complained in Argentina that they overcooked the beef (missing the whole point of a huge Asado where you are cooking thousands of beef cuts at a time). But never mind, go back to USA and eat your corn fed beef bloody and raw over a gas grill while we eat grass fed beef over charcoal wood and sorry if some pieces get ‘overcooked’. I could have written to Mr. Bourdain about how offended I was that he imposed his Imperial Yankee Norte Americano standards on us poor and long suffering Argentines (never mind that we are to blame for most of our own problems!).
–>The New Yorker considers itself a leader in writing on culture and current events, and its poetry must meet that standard, too.
Yes, let’s hold everything to anyone’s arbitrary Social Justice Warrior standards. I’m sure the New Yorker will still be interesting to read after every article has been thoroughly vetted by a panel of SJWs to make sure no one ever gets offended by words.
Somewhere I read the argument that GDP growth smoothes out a lot of conflicts, because it means I can increase my slice of the pie without taking some away from someone else.
When economic growth stalls, people start arguing about distribution, and, honestly, why shouldn’t they?
The gender and ethnic diversity of software development wasn’t of particular interest to anyone in the nineties, but since it’s been one of the few stable well-paid careers in the last decades, people have started pointing out that it’s dominated by white and asian males, and correctly so. I personally think the diversity problems in Software Development are actually even bigger in scope than mere race and gender.
So, I’m not sure ‘Social Justice’ will ‘consume’ GDP; it’s more likely to be a response to it.
Yes, a society can spend 100% of a nations GDP, but we’d call that nation “eloi”.
Here are the “offensive” lines:
So we sometimes do miss, I confess,
Simple days of chow mein but no stress,
When we never were faced with the threat
Of more provinces we hadn’t met.
And here is the professional SJW take on this:
“As an Asian-American poet and editor, I found it offensive and racially insensitive, as did many other readers, especially in its use of words such as “threat” and “no stress”—language that is reminiscent of the Yellow Peril of the late nineteenth century, in which people of Asian descent were viewed as dangerous to the Western world. ”
As a non-Asian-American human, I find your strained reading of Trillin’s light verse offensive and over the top, especially in such words as “racially insensitive” – language that is reminiscent of the writings of Malcolm X, in which people of white descent were viewed as dangerous to the non-Western world.
Two can play this game.
I have trouble believing that this woman writes any kind of poetry other than agit-prop – no true artist would be so eager to silence a fellow artist.
I wouldn’t worry about it. People are complaining bigotry and injustice on the internet. It’s not a big problem. If less time was spent on that, it would probably mean more time spent posting pictures of food on Facebook.
If you want to concern yourself with statements that people make on the internet, you should note that there are a lot of complaints about PC and SJW out there. Commenters who use the term SJW rarely have anything interesting to say and a large portion of them, possibly a majority, are bigots. Many of those people, in turn, are probably bigots in the real world.
I just listened to the Milo Yiannopoulos video. It’s all much ado about nothing. He rambles on about safe spaces, trigger warnings and microagressions. My guess is that the vast majority of Americans who are involved with higher education have never heard of these terms, unless they happened to hear Rush Limbaugh rant and rave about them. It’s quite possible that half the college students in America have also never heard of these things.
There’s a whole crackpot right wing media industry that exists to get people riled up over unimportant nonsense. Many Americans derive a lot of satisfaction from their own anger, so this industry brings a lot of revenue. People like Yiannopoulos even migrate to the USA to work in the industry from countries like the UK and Canada. It must be that there is no audience for their diatribes in those countries.
@Vince
I see your point, and I will agree that I derive a lot of amusement at the absurdity of things. For the record, I’m definitely not a Rush Limbaugh fan… (personally, I have given up on being on any team, be it right wing or left wing, currently I am learning towards a social market economy with libertarian leanings, if that’s even possible!). and yes, Yiannopoulus is a complete troll. Part of the entertainment factor is that he claims to be a homosexual who is interested only in black males. So this makes it hard for SJWs (darn.. now I am being a bigot, again!) to call him a white priveledged male racist. It’s all amusing really.