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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#151

Post by Lammy »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #48
outoftheabyss wrote: post #14

This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-... It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for…

This is nothing new from them. The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech. Never forget that there is a side that benefits politically from telling you that the NYT is being taken over by "woke radical authoritarians". The NYT is a political organization play…

> The NYT, as the "paper of record" for America, has always been mired in politics and power. One of my favorite pieces from NYT is their blistering condemnation of MLK after his famous anti-Vietnam speech.

https://www.hfsbooks.com/books/the-rising-clamor-hadley/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

"The Agency’s relationship with the [New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers" v(._. )v

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#152

Post by mustacheemperor »

nexthash wrote: post #85

Wow, the NYT's actions on this one really made my blood boil. I don't even know how to process this... they typically put out reasonably high quality journalism that I read and enjoy on a regular basis. And then... this. They completely went beserk, like little children, with their heads firmly up their rears despite everything everyone begging them to keep Scott Alexander anonymous to preserve his profession and blo…

The simplest answer might be that the people running NYT have big egos and can make stubborn emotional decisions when their egos are threatened. I think it’s a point to consider when evaluating what’s published but not necessarily a reason to write off the paper entirely and as you said, not a political media conspiracy.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#153

Post by jhbadger »

john_moscow wrote: post #126
kortilla wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up. The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism. Take…

>The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up. It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose. >Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there. There's enough space in the U.S.…

I think you are confusing cause and effect. Cities like SF aren't crowded because megacorporations are located there, but rather megacorporations are located there because they are crowded. SF, NYC, Paris, and London are cities that people have moved to for well over a century, because they were excited to live in places with so much culture, shopping, and restaurants. This has always meant that housing in these cities is much more expensive than elsewhere. People have tried to start tech centers elsewhere, which generally fail (In the 1990s the big new thing was the so called "Silicon Prairie" in the Midwest, but that didn't really take off). Some new centers, like Austin, TX do seem to be taking off, but that's because Austin is an exciting city.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#154

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

biztos wrote: post #129
colinmhayes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The times is very pessimistic on tech, largely I believe because they're upset about being run over by google/facebook. It's definitely unfortunate, but the future of journalism is really not bright at all. No one is willing to pay for unbiased news, so you need to find a niche to attract people or churn out clickbait. The times has found their niche as technocrat skeptics.

> No one is willing to pay for unbiased news I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright. But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.

Nikkei = FT. The FT has... interesting politics, and seems far more progressive than anyone would expect, although considering the cost of a subscription it's also a fairly exclusive crowd.

WSJ and Economist are hardly unbiased. (IMO The Economist is essentially a straightforward neoliberal pro-Gilded Age propaganda outlet, and always has been.)

The NYT has always been 'dodgy' as we say in the UK. I remember finding their op-eds clownishly stupid when I first started encountered them back in the 00s, and they don't seem to have improved since then.

But there's been a shift to woke since then. And the problem with woke is that so often it operates on the level of personal witch hunts and straightforward public bullying - which makes it depressingly close to its equivalent on the far right, but without the insane weapon fetish.

You can argue that sometimes this is justified. And sometimes - as with Weinstein, etc - it is. But it's harder to support it when it becomes an exercise in tokenism and tribal identity.

It's interesting how often woke goes after individuals deemed guilty of alleged bad-think and how rarely it goes after egregious corporate behaviour. Or even how rarely it mobilises to destroy the careers of politicians who act in unconscionable ways.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#155

Post by arcsin »

eatplayrove wrote: post #138
ALittleLight wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back I mentioned to my mother that I had been to a "reddit meet up" and my mother, predictably, had never heard of reddit. Later, reddit made the news, I forget exactly what for, but in was the category of harboring child pornographers, racists, or nude celebrity photos. What I did remember is hoping my mother didn't see this news article and conclude that I was out meeting with racist pedophiles. The thing i…

I fully understand your point re reddit, but I think a single person's blog is different than that. A blog is like a book and reddit is like a bookstore if you will, if you go to a bookstore selling a book that racists read that is not concerning to me (wrongly concerning to your mom as you said), but if you bought the book in question (even if non/anti-racists read it too) I would be concerned if I were your mother…

> but if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great... that needs to be addressed as to why they are attracted there

I'll try to put this as objectively as I can. There is now a cultural overlap between those that support varying degrees of "censorship" and progressives, and between those that support "free speech" and, let's say, anti-progressives. This makes sense because now racism/sexism is more likely to be censored than extreme progressivism. Probably if it were the other way around (if extreme progressivism were more likely to be censored) then those same progressives would become staunch free-speech advocates and anti-progressives would be fighting for more "content moderation".

So if you are generally for the toleration of ideas, perhaps holding some unpopular opinions yourself, and against censorious tactics, you tend to attract extreme anti-progressives as well. For the most part, racists and sexist do not see themselves as racists and sexists, they see themselves as holding true but unpopular beliefs. Another interesting example of this is Sam Harris somehow having a fair amount of Trump-supporting listeners even though he spends a lot of time ranting about how incompetent and morally-bankrupt he thinks Trump is.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#156

Post by theobeers »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #61

I didn't perceive the NYT article as negative at all. As for naming him, that's their choice as journalists, and a risk he took with recording his thoughts online just as all of us do. I wish folks would rid themselves of the notion that the internet is anonymous or deletable. We'd all be much healthier by acknowledging the possibility that whatever you write here may be etched in stone. And if you become well known…

It’s interesting, though, that the NYT has been willing to respect the pseudonymity of other public figures in circumstances that I would consider comparable. One example is Virgil Texas, a cohost of the perennially controversial leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Virgil Texas is not his real name—and his real name can be found with a bit of searching, as in the case of Alexander/Siskind—but the Times has stuck with the pseudonym.[0] What principle is being followed here?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/us/politics/bernie-sander...

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#157

Post by konjin »

sunpar wrote: post #144
konjin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's that time where the legacy media threatened to doxx someone if they made memes they didn't like again: >CNN is not publishing "HanA*holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said h…

I don’t understand why people believe that anonymity is a right guaranteed to all people making content on the internet.

You don't have privacy in your bathroom either. Yet if CNN was to publish nude photos of you you'd be rightly upset.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#158

Post by sgtnoodle »

NhanH wrote: post #13

This is shameful, and the second time this month NYT puts out such a shameful piece (the first time was the JetBrains/ Solarwinds article). I guess this should be enough to disregard everything NYT will write, and stop reading them. Another commenter said that NYT still produces comparably some of the best journalistic content. I will have to stop reading news if this is the case. After the whole fiasco of Scott dele…

I don't trust any mainstream news other than local because it all seems like either propaganda or theater. In my opinion, NYT and The Washington Post are the two most despicable out there.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#159

Post by b112 »

runsWphotons wrote: post #128
nexthash wrote: post #85

Wow, the NYT's actions on this one really made my blood boil. I don't even know how to process this... they typically put out reasonably high quality journalism that I read and enjoy on a regular basis. And then... this. They completely went beserk, like little children, with their heads firmly up their rears despite everything everyone begging them to keep Scott Alexander anonymous to preserve his profession and blo…

This has increasingly happened with topics I know about over the past five years at accelerating rate. [If you want to be uncomfortable, consider noticing this repeatedly is part of what has driven half of the US mad.]

An interjection here. Not directly related to the NYT article, just your comment.

I feel the entire US has "gone mad". I'm a Canuck, and US and Canadian politics don't 'mesh'. So whenever I've spoken to Americans over the decades, often their politics make little sense, don't align, seem cogent to me. This, of course, I consider normal for a non-local such as myself.

However over the last decade or so, I've noticed that the "two sides" in the US now each turn into gibbering mad lunatics when you discuss certain topics. Prior, I could at least discuss topics, without enraged foaming-at-the-mouth type of responses.

IMO both sides have gone entirely, and completely mad. Politics in the US now seems to have lost all capability to talk to "the other side", and instead transitioned into immutable lines drawn in the sand, adopted with the logic often employed with religion, taken as gospel and truth merely for tribal sake.

It's almost like the death of religion, has transition that same unyielding faith-only, non-empirically backed up logic into politics. On both sides. As if the US psyche requires some faith based belief system as the central core of its existence.

Alternatively, it just could be endless whispers from external, hostile nations... designed to create endless turmoil and the eventual downfall of the US empire. Which, to me, is quite sad.

edit:

To highlight what I mean here... "talking points". In the past, I could have real, meaningful discussions with Americans about political topics.

I'd "say things", and they'd say things back, and we'd have a conversation about a specific political stance. Now, this has devolved into almost everyone, whether left or right, having "talking points". Most often, these talking points have not even been examined by those I'm talking to.

They are simply repeated, without the speaker even having thought of what it means, or even able to debate that position with any clarity.

And again, this is "both sides".

It's like each is merely repeating words from a "holy book", and heresy is the result if one diverges. It's like each side has a Pope, which issues edicts, and even if it doesn't make sense, the duty is to repeat, obey, and try to find wisdom in the words one must follow.

No longer politics. Religion.

Hence my take -- madness.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#160

Post by [deleted] »

outoftheabyss wrote: post #14

This is the second article I’ve come across today lambasting the NYT for a hit piece, the second in my opinion is much worse given what the subject has been exposed to and has had to endure. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-... It seems the publication is in the midst of a takeover by woke radical authoritarians. It used to be that you should be cancelled and/or made a pariah of society for…

[deleted]
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