"Ever the good student, Jeong... absorbed a bastardized version of critical legal studies and critical race studies, both prevalent at Harvard Law."

"Those by now hoary theories portray the great traditions of Anglo-American jurisprudence as just a mystifying cover for illegitimate power. 'In law school,' Jeong writes in her Rolling Stone post, 'we learned that due process is what we get in lieu of justice. And what’s due process besides a series of rules that are meant to keep things as predictable as [f***ing] possible?' It would be salutary for Jeong to live for a while in a society without due process and where the workings of justice are not 'as predictable as [f***ing] possible.'"

From "Sarah Jeong Is a Boring, Typical Product of the American Academy" by Heather Mac Donald in National Review.

I don't understand attacking Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies as "hoary." "Hoary" means "Ancient; venerable from age, time-honoured"(OED). Mac Donald objects to the disparagement of "the great traditions of Anglo-American jurisprudence." If tradition is something you like, hoariness is a plus.

I don't think cursing about the regularity of rules is much of an effort at Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies, and apparently Mac Donald doesn't either, since she calls what Jeong is doing "bastardized."

I haven't read enough of the Jeong oeuvre to have a real opinion of the quality of her mind, and I don't know what, specifically, Harvard lawprofs were teaching in the years when she attended. Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies were vibrant back in the 1980s, and lawprofs said all sorts of things under those labels back when the theories were young and fertile. The lawprofs who did this sort of thing used to argue with each other, and it wasn't boring at all.

"Part of winning retweets and likes is sending missives your community will love. Given how human beings police group boundaries, that means..."

".... making jokes only your friends understand, slamming common enemies, expressing sentiments in ways that signal group belonging. Twitter is a medium that rewards us for snark, for sick burns, for edgy jokes and cruel comments that deepen the grooves of our group. And then it’s designed to make the sickest of those burns and the worst of those jokes go viral, reaching far beyond their intended audience, with untold consequences.... [Twitter] is built to reward us for snarky in-group communication and designed to encourage unintended out-group readership. It fosters both tribalism and tribal collision. It seduces you into thinking you’re writing for one community but it gives everyone the ability to search your words and project them forward in time and space and outward into another community at the point when it’ll do you maximum damage. It leaves you explaining jokes that can’t be explained to employers that don’t like jokes anyway...."

From "The problem with Twitter, as shown by the Sarah Jeong fracas/Behind our Twitter wars lies Twitter’s problems" by Ezra Klein (Vox).

"A young woman, well known to the New York City-based chattering class, has finally let loose with what she really thinks. 'The white race is the cancer of human history,' she says..."

"'... it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.' Has this author discovered some new tweet from Sarah Jeong, the now-notorious new hire at the New York Times? Nope. The quote above dates back to 1967. It’s from Susan Sontag, the chic literary critic. Her words were mostly in response to the Vietnam War, but as we can see, her critique extended far further. We might also add that Sontag later said she regretted her quote—because it was insensitive to cancer victims...."

So begins James Pinkerton in "Social Justice Warriors Are the Democrats’ Electoral Poison/Those who don't denounce the politics of Sarah Jeong will crash and burn just as George McGovern did" (The American Conservative).

ADDED: From Sontag's book "Illness as Metaphor":

The cancer metaphor seems hard to resist for those who wish to register indignation....  D.H. Lawrence called masturbation “the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization”; and I once wrote, in the heat of despair over America’s war on Vietnam, that “the white race is the cancer of human history.”

But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of evil but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil? Trying to comprehend “radical” or “absolute” evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the epitome of evil. Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass. It is invariably an encouragement to simplify what is complex and an invitation to self-righteousness, if not to fanaticism.

But we are animals, Andrew. We are.

"One simple rule I have about describing groups of human beings is that I try not to use a term that equates them with animals," writes Andrew Sullivan in "When Racism Is Fit to Print," writing about the NYT hiring a young woman, Sarah Jeong, who used to tweet in the fuck-white-people style that you can get outraged about if you want.

I can see only one reason to rouse myself into the state of outrage various people are prodding me to flare up into. It's ironic, but I think the failure to get outraged can be interpreted as evidence that you are a white supremacist. But I'm not going to perform in the theater of outrage just because I can see why failure to emote makes me look like I'm too secure in my whiteness, too sure of the strength and power of white people to feel hurt by the fuck-white-people taunts— as if the white people are elephants and the fuck-white-people tweets are from tiny little birds.



Animals!!!

"We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history."

"She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times and we are confident that she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward."

From "NY Times Responds to Right-Wing Tantrum Over New Writer’s ‘Anti-White’ Tweets" (New York Magazine).

Can I just give this story my tag "civility bullshit"? If I do that, will you know what I mean and know what my position on the Sarah Jeong question?