This tweet is from Kassy Cho, a reporter for BuzzFeed News:
https://twitter.com/kassy/status/1093235338686984192
Comments:
1.) This reminder isn’t “friendly” at all. That word is just a smiley-face equivalent meant to take the sting out of the authoritarian diktat that she provides. Here’s lawyer Ken White’s response:
That’s more presumptuous and proprietary than friendly actually
— WhatKindOfCourtSystemIsHat (@Popehat) February 7, 2019
2.) Nobody in India, China or Japan gets to celebrate Christmas unless Christians give them permission
3.) BuzzFeed News (as opposed to BuzzFeed itself) was just touted as a great and respected journalistic venue by Jill Lepore writing in The New Yorker. When BuzzFeed News got rid of some writers as part of an industry-wide move to downsize, I’m not sure they fired the right people.
4.) There is pushback on Twitter (that is, people are clapping back at Cho and throwing shade on her). A few examples:
friendly reminder that kassy cho doesn’t represent all of us. pls celebrate the culture https://t.co/FIlS4FVogC
— oningiri (@kneeng) February 7, 2019
Friendly reminder that most of us Chinese ppl have never heard of this Kassy Cho person and never authorized her to speak on behalf of all of us
We also have no evidence that she is "someone who is from a country that does" celebrate Lunar New Year. Whatever the fuck that means https://t.co/L2SF4r8eFZ
— Goofrider 🏳️🌈 #TeamOvaltine™ (@goofrider) February 8, 2019
PUT DOWN THAT DAMN PIECE OF PIZZA, CHO
— Liza Vespi lah/di/dah (@LizaVespi) February 8, 2019
Now Cho may be trolling here, but I don’t think so. And if you say she is, give evidence for that. As for me, I may get a mooncake in Chinatown today (and yes, I know it’s the wrong moon festival).
“2.) Nobody in India, China or Japan gets to celebrate Christmas unless Christians give them permission”
No no, Jerry, you still don’t get the rules. As people like Cho will remind you, “white people have no culture,” and Christmas is considered white, and therefore does not fall under the rules of cultural appropriation. Everything from St. Patrick’s Day to Christmas can be celebrated by anyone because you can’t appropriate anything from white people. White people have already appropriated everything, so it’s just “punching up.”
A white Christmas?!
Love the pushback!
Popehat’s (famous blogging lawyer Ken White) response was the best: https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1093539868133666816
“That’s more presumptuous and proprietary than friendly actually”
Thanks; I’ve added that tweet under #1 above.
Jerry, this is EPIC!
He’s…learning. He’s LEARNNNIIIIIINNNNG
My god, what monster hath we wrought?
And of course no one but native born white Americans wear jeans or eat burgers…Although maybe only Jews should be allowed to wear Levi’s?
Only Jewish gold miners, actually.
❗️
It’s -11C here right now, I refuse to go grocery shopping with no jeans!
Went for the trifecta, huh? Must be a personal best. 🙂
Shoulda been “Twitter pushed back…” !
What do you do when reality and satire merge like this?
Express open contempt. Relentlessly.
“Told ya so”?
One side effect of the internet is that it allows total fools to express themselves unfiltered, secure in their belief that they are arbiters of manners. Cho is hardly unique. She doesn’t realize that to spite her galling ignorance and authoritarianism many people who never thought of celebrating this holiday will do so, which is a good thing. The sharing of cultural traditions in such areas as food, dance, music, etc. is a wonderful thing and powerful force in promoting world peace and understanding.
And another side effect of the internet is that is allows total anonymity so the reader has no idea if the writer is, in fact, who it claims to be . . . this could have been written by a troller wanting to stir shit up for the hell of it. I retain my right to ignore pretty much all of this drivel.
But she writes for Buzzfeed and has a blue check mark.
A twitizen of Asian decent has formally invite everyone to celebrate lunar New Year.
*invited
You are unwittingly misrepresenting Cho’s tweet, this is what she wrote “you don’t get to celebrate lunar new year unless you’re literally from a country that does or if you are invited by someone who is from a country that does.”
One must LITERALLY be from an Asian country. People of Asian descent who are born outside of Asia don’t count.
Given that Cho’s first name is Kassy, she is likely to be born outside of Asia as well.
Yeah, “kassy,” that doesn’t sound Asian unless it’s some calque and if so, that’s cultural appropriation.
Her tweet home says London!!!
I think painedumonde is referring to this response tweet: https://twitter.com/AdequateAndy/status/1093557630675681281
Nice to see it has nearly ten times more people have expressed approval of that one. (I refuse to say “likes” to refer to people giving their approval to tweets, Facebook posts, etc.).
Twitter…not that different than the bathroom walls.
It’s the year of the pig so would bacon and eggs be appropriate.
Dare we hope that the shark has been jumped and this crap is starting to wane.
I doubt it. The anti-White, anti-Western narrative has done nothing but pick up steam for some time and is now being promulgated by the mainstream media. This will get worse before it gets better.
I doubt that it will get better.
Cho is a Korean name, not Chinese.
Just sayin’
Well, it could be Chinese. If her family speaks Cantonese, 曹 would be Romanized as Tso or Cho.
-Ryan
Cho is a name in Taiwan – seems reasonably common as I see a couple of chefs & a general in the first half page of a Google search.
“You don’t get to” – so much 5-year-old-child nastiness and authority in that small statement.
+1
Should be followed by Nyah Nyah Nyah (don’t know what autocorrect insists on capitalizing Nyah)?
Really, you have to laugh.
Laughter is the best medicine, as the Reader’s Digest used to assert.
I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.”
I am also reminded of the joke: “How many gender studies professors does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: ‘That’s not funny you sexist, misogynist, homophobic jerk!'”
I will take the SJW’s more seriously about cultural appropriation when they begin to take responsibility for their appropriation of victimhood.
Even if it feels good to be a victim and make everyone feel guilty, where does it lead? How long is this dead-end street? How many future generations are going to play this game with all its limitations and self-pity? Victimhood is really not a good ambition, but when are they going to notice this?
As an Irish-American, I invite Cho to celebrate the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe if she had a few pints she’d lighten the f**k up!
My daughter took a semester abroad at the University of Limerick, and to her surprise nobody there really seemed excited about St. Patrick’s Day. Apparently the holiday was elevated to grand holiday status in the United States by homesick Irish immigrants.
So, as an Irish American, you are allowed to invite others to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day — but the Irish aren’t.
There’s no doubt that the Irish and the Irish-Americans observe this in different ways. Perhaps calling it St. Patty’s rather than St. Paddy’s, going to mass and the pub vs going to a parade and a bar, and the whole green beer thing…that’s not Irish culture, that’s more like frat boy culture, so appropriate away!
Same is true of Cinco de Mayo, which appears to be more of a Mexican-American thing than a Mexican thing.
And Halloween of course.
cr
I have the opposite situation, to an extent. My great-grandmother was from Ireland (as in, born there, came over to the USA). According to her, none of us are allowed to drink green beer. She found it annoying.
Honestly, my traditional way to celebrate the day is the way most of my ancestors in the USA have–put in a bit of overtime, crack a cold beer at the end of the day, and be in bed early, because at 5 am I’m up and doing it again.
This attitude that cultures ought to be respected as unique and separate is also behind the push towards dividing science and medicine into a “Western” version (rational, reductionistic) and an “Eastern” version (intuitive, holistic.) When you peer beneath it the motivation isn’t so much a desire for social justice as a need for spirituality.
Very nice observation. And virtually all of this emanating from non-science departments in academia. Rather embarrassing.
My lived experience tells me that Kassy Cho is Titania McGrath’s sister. Don’t ask me why.
I thought that tweet was a joke.
I can’t believe I’m living in a world in which it was not a joke.
I think we’re all living in a Philip K Dick novel.
As a woman, you are not allowed to use the word “dick”.
Oh I can’t resist this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ervOFe6QxsY
Who Dares Wins appropriating American culture (and also breaking the fourth wall and corpsing)
cr
How dare you assume my gender identity.
Sub
Chinese New Year is a lovely holiday. People return home–or really try–from where ever else they are in the world. One cleans one’s house thoroughly to sweep out all the bad luck and last year’s crap. Feasting happens and gifts are exchanged. Firecrackers are involved. It’s really completely wonderful.
Shutting other people out of the celebrations no matter which country they might be from is a contradiction of the holiday itself.
I didn’t meet and get to know every person in China when I was there, but the dozens I did meet were warm, generous, friendly and inviting, and would not hesitate to include a stranger they’d only just met in their celebrations of the New Year.
In this regard,Ms. Cho should apologize for misrepresenting her countrymen, if she is a Chinese national. If she isn’t, she should be quiet. I’m embarrassed for her.
She does not present her qualifications to make such a pronouncement. Her limited biography mentions that she attended UCLA and lives in London.
I will ask my daughter to do a Chinese language search and see what that brings up.
But really, even if we decided to comply with her conditions, it only takes one legitimate person from a country that celebrates Lunar New Year to invite all humanity to celebrate it in perpetuity.
I think Andy Wang already did that.
https://twitter.com/AdequateAndy/status/1093557630675681281
(Link appropriated from painedumonde and BJ)
cr
For some rest I can’t seem to sub to this thread alone?? Must be some kind of cultural appropriation. Gonna go cry in a corner😿
Some reason…
There are many wonderful Chinese dishes, but traditional mooncakes are the gastronomic equivalent of cruel and unusual punishment.
*gasp*
I will have you know that mooncakes are delicious and you can’t deny my Lived Experience!
-Ryan
I misappropriated ‘last’ year, now i can’t find it anywhere, i want to give it back cause it was fairly shitty and didn’t end well.
Cho claims she hails from New Zealand & Taiwan this Tweet
I see this Tweet by Cho as her purposefully stirring up the hornet’s nest – her silly post is honey to all the usual suspects who will pile on. It is unfortunately true that women who step up will be attacked harder & nastier than guys – she absolutely knows this: before Buzzfeed, London she had various news related jobs in Taiwan & LA, and a stint at a Beverly Hills talent agency. Before that in 2013 she earned a B.A. Communication Studies + a minor in Film, TV & Digital Media at UCLA.
I wish she’d put her head above the parapet for a substantial cause rather than this baiting exercise. With all that knowhow she must have a plan behind this Tweet or she hit the bottle! Anyway now there’s lots of material for her to be a journalist with.
Basically, a tweet like this runs up your total. That’s all Cho cares about, although it would be a great put on if Titania had done it.
My view: Unless someone directly involved is offended and expresses their offense, I ignore this sort of nonsense. Most of the time when someone is offended on someone else’s behalf, the allegedly offended party is actually perfectly fine with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_Gonzales
This is what turned the tide to me. The SJWs (before they were called that) tried to get Speedy Gonzales thrown out of Loony Tunes, because it was offensive to Latin Americans. The Latin Americans, in contrast, love Speedy. He’s a Hispanic character that’s not the butt of the jokes–he’s the guy MAKING the jokes!
The SJWs don’t actually care about the people on who’s behalf they are offended; they want the power, the attention, and the prestige. And the reality is that this sort of behavior DISempowers the people the SJWs ostensibly are trying to fight for.
“The SJWs don’t actually care about the people on who’s behalf they are offended; they want the power, the attention, and the prestige. ”
IMO, that is true, very well stated, and bears repeating.
This is the kind of nonsense I could have seen myself saying when I was a teenager and trying to understand the rules of the game. For that reason, I think it’s harsh to come down on people for saying things like this. Glad most of my nonsensical thinking came around before Twitter did…
“This is the kind of nonsense I could have seen myself saying when I was a teenager and trying to understand the rules of the game.”
True for many of us, but that opens another can of worms. In the 60’s we bent all kinds of long-standing and valid social and legal norms for the sake of “causes” (really the “cause”) that were deemed more important than social order.
We started paying so much attention to “the mouths of babes”, that we placed them above question. There were quite a few babies that went out with that dirty bathwater.
To (continue to) mix my metaphors, we are having a hard time getting the toothpaste back in the tube.
I think there’s a certain difficulty that open societies with heavy cultural exchange face. We are in a continual conversation about how to live, which for the most part is moral reasons detailing how not to live. When everything is morally-loaded, life becomes difficult to navigate because inevitably sometime will find moral displeasure with what you are doing.
So except for those in a closed continuity (and these can be created through association such as vegan societies), how do we construct and adhere to an ethics that’s inevitably going to draw ire from someone who can’t abide by your thinking differently? That to me was one of the things that pushed me away from the “woke left” because I realised I knew nothing about how to live, much less about how anyone else ought to live.
That, to me, is one reason to be tolerant of those who live and think differently – there is always the possibility they’ve figured out something you haven’t. It’s also the reason, I think, that historically centres of trade were the most advanced culturally, because they were excluded to different people with different ways of life, and there was always the possibility of learning something from the other.
Horrors! Yesterday, along with a whole bunch of Asians and Cauc-asians, we dined on dim sum and used chopsticks!! We then enjoyed the Houston-OKC basketball game and admired the Rockets for their jersey tribute to the Chinese and Chinese New Year. How can I send a Chinese finger trap to Cho?
Damn. I was taught how to use chopsticks by a real Chinese couple my parents knew. My brother and I used to practice by using them to eat our cheerios in the morning. I wonder if the SJWs think I should chuck the chopsticks my parents’ friends gave 60 years ago.
At the dim sum restaurant mentioned in 28, the Chinese folks smiled and nodded approvingly as our 10 year old grandson deftly downed his noodles with chopsticks. I think that I know where at least on pair of sticks should be stuck.
I think if she loves the moon so much she should bugger off there…!
I *am* from a country where Lunar New Year is celebrated – namely, Canada! 😉