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NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#201

Post by Person5478 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #162
da_big_ghey wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retarded is not a slur. Never was. People keep picking arbitrary words and saying they're "offensive", but there's no reason why. I have heard kids call each other "mentally challenged" and "developmentally delayed", I kid you not. Younger kids have trouble pronouncing those, so maybe that's something? Anyway, I refuse to partake in the euphemism treadmill.

My Midwestern upbringing was certainly peppered with people using ‘retard’ as a slur, so... mileage may vary?

I think the idea is that a slur is a much stronger insult typically aimed at one's ethnicity.

What's being said here is that the word retard is an insult, but does not rise to the level/strength of a slur.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#202

Post by Spivak »

betwixthewires wrote: post #179
Spivak wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything. Jeez. At least give your opponents a charitable take on their argument. This stuff isn't some make-believe silencing of online Socratic circles that just happen to have "non-approved" viwes or "wrongthink". I don't think you get how scary some of these mobs are. They're online witch-hunts fueled…

It would be much easier to take this argument seriously if the most recent example of "deplatforming" (and the prime example in the very article we are discussing in this thread) wasn't a bunch of well funded publications coming to the defense of hedge funds and calling meme culture aware day traders evil Nazis. Seeing as of late the only prominent examples of the terrible behavior you describe are by exactly the peo…

You know these things are allowed to be something other than all or nothing, right? You can hold the stance that WSB fiasco is idiotic scaremongering while also acknowledging that there are other internet mobs that do real harm. Because when it comes to WSB I completely agree with you.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#203

Post by call_me_dana »

dogman144 wrote: post #174
eitland wrote: post #6

>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram ch…

God I'm pretty lefty but "problematic" is becoming... problematic. On top of that, just completely asinine tech reporting is becoming problematic. Bloomberg supermicro? Never retracted, lead reporter on it is now BBG's cyber reporting czar. NYT's NSA hacked Baltimore author? Came out with that smooth brained "Jetbrains == SolarWinds" story. The wear and tear from a complex field only getting more complex, it governin…

When we see the rise of citizen journalism and independent media. Mainstream media is completely biased and not trustable. Matt Taibbi keeps stressing the need for a unbiased news site but if it has corporate backing, it will eventually become compromised.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#204

Post by newacct583 »

djrogers wrote: post #173
newacct583 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted: "@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything" Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied: "Thanks for clarifying that it was F…

She was completely wrong about who used the word (their voices aren't even similar), and left out critical details about the context in which it was used (it was not used casually - the person who said it was quoting /r/wallstreetbets). And when confronted on it, she said 'thanks for clarifying' and doubled down on the lack of context. No 'whoops, I was wrong', no apology, no retraction. What part of that sounds like…

... it's a tweet. I mean, the whole thing is screaming over detail that you wanted to hear in 280 characters when she was just being pissed off about something and talking about it in public.

Isn't exactly what you're doing -- which is to say condemning something for what in normal circumstances would be a mild transgression or simple misunderstanding, and drawing wild conclusions about the speaker that don't seem to be present in the original text -- exactly what the problem with "cancel culture" is supposed to be in the first place?

I mean, if you demand that Taylor Lorenz give Marc Andreessen the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith on his part, why are you not willing to grant the same to her?

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#205

Post by Person5478 »

motohagiography wrote: post #7

He's right. When I started writing in the 90's, there was an idea of journalism as telling stories in the principled defence of minority interests and as a public check on institutional power, but it has mutated into the unhinged and corrupt prosecution of deviance from official narrative lines. Social media is just a way for neighbours to denounce one another in a new snitch culture that rivals any 20th century syst…

I don't know your age, but I suspect it's more likely you're finally reaching the point of realizing how shit everyone and everything is.

My experience was stupidly believing the idealistic crap I was taught when young only to eventually be forced to realize we're not much better than the ones we villify.

I guess my point is that you should consider whether journalism has really gone to shit or if you're less idealistic than you used to be. There is hope in the thought that you're less idealistic. It means the world has always been kind of shit, yet has survived, so perhaps you're just a bit more alarmist than you should be.

Or atleast that's what I tell myself.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#206

Post by LudwigNagasena »

eitland wrote: post #6

>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?” One reporter “confess[ed] that I am worried about Telegram. Other than private messaging, people love to use Telegram for group chats — up to 200,000 people can meet inside a Telegram ch…

>the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram. This week they asked: “Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?”

I hope they mean “the next” after traditional media.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#207

Post by betwixthewires »

Spivak wrote: post #202
betwixthewires wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be much easier to take this argument seriously if the most recent example of "deplatforming" (and the prime example in the very article we are discussing in this thread) wasn't a bunch of well funded publications coming to the defense of hedge funds and calling meme culture aware day traders evil Nazis. Seeing as of late the only prominent examples of the terrible behavior you describe are by exactly the peo…

You know these things are allowed to be something other than all or nothing, right? You can hold the stance that WSB fiasco is idiotic scaremongering while also acknowledging that there are other internet mobs that do real harm. Because when it comes to WSB I completely agree with you.

My point, well I have more than one really, they are 1) if these evil mobs are really any semblance of a threat, pointing at them every time a blue check decides to go after ideological opponents desensitizes us to it, and 2) the only prominent examples of what you're saying exists and is a danger are perpetrated by the people reminding us of this ever present danger.

You can't defend baseless attacks against things like WSB by reminding us that a real mob of scumbags exist and then expect others to disassociate the two. When an article is written attacking someone that is legitimately going after the evil people on the internet, your point may very well be valid, but in this case it is not. If you want these two scenarios disassociated from one another, perhaps don't associate them with one another.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#208

Post by newacct583 »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #111
newacct583 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted: "@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything" Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied: "Thanks for clarifying that it was F…

Retarded is not a slur. Never was. People keep picking arbitrary words and saying they're "offensive", but there's no reason why. I have heard kids call each other "mentally challenged" and "developmentally delayed", I kid you not. Younger kids have trouble pronouncing those, so maybe that's something? Anyway, I refuse to partake in the euphemism treadmill.

The original context, FWIW, is that the /r/wallstreetbets community calls themselves "retards" ironically. That is absolutely a slur; calling someone "retarded" in that sense is calling them stupid by likening them to people with developmental disabilities. And that is offensive to a lot of people in the modern world. And, to be perfectly frank, that offense is exactly the reason why the WSB community adopted it in the first place. They wanted to be edgy, if it wasn't a slur they would have chosen a different term that was.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#209

Post by betwixthewires »

kgog wrote: post #147
betwixthewires wrote: post #132

If NYT or any big dinosaur media company has any shred of integrity left they'll fire and blacklist every single so called journalist engaging in this sort of behavior. They represent your brand, their behavior is your behavior. It reflects on every other employee you have, including any presumably honest ones. If you're an honest journalist and you work for one of these companies, know that their behavior makes me a…

Does that mean your employer should fire you for your HN comments and tweets from personal accounts?

A person with a blue checkmark on Twitter verifies themselves to give themselves professional legitimacy. Especially considering that in the example we are discussing, the person's profession is to reach people and share words, associating their publicly shared words with their professional life is not beyond the pail. They've associated their name with their job, not me.

Re: NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

#210

Post by tootie »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #153
tootie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure this was squarely a mistake. I'm not sure you can even assign journalistic quality controls to a personal twitter.

It's hard to trust a reporter when they behave abhorrently on Twitter, especially when their Twitter persona is based on their occupation as a journalist.

I don't see how this rates as abhorrent.
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