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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#161

Post by linspace »

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.

Anonimity is certainly not a right but sometimes is the only protection for other rights. And we must acknowledge the consequences of technology, unintended or not. For example, nobody expects privacy in public spaces but I think everybody agrees camera surveillance can be abused. Sometimes quantity is a quality of its own.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#162

Post by dohnuts1919 »

> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”

I laughed out loud at this paragraph, and it's such a perfect example of why I love Scott's writing.

At the end of the day, whatever slimey hatchet jobs the NYT chooses to run, Scott's still an enormously influential, successful and respected figure, and most of the hacks who write these terrible hit pieces or support them can only dream of gaining 1% of the admiration Scott's earned. Envy's a cruel mistress, and if the price to pay for success is that bitter haters take misjudged pot shots at you which achieve little except to reveal their own securities... well, I haven't achieved enough success myself to know for certain that the price is worth paying, but I'd pick Scott's life over Cade Metz's any day of the week.

Keep up the good work, Scott. You're doing great things, you matter, and you're winning - three things that can't be said for Cade Metz.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#164

Post by dohnuts1919 »

konjin wrote: post #137
astrange wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Against murderism" was the last time it came up, I think? In context I believe it was supposed to be anti-anti-Trumpism, or at least that you should talk to Trumpists more rather than deplatform them. The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it.

>The reason I don't remember is that the effect of reading his essays is that they're so long you forget why he wrote them and what you were thinking before you started it. Honest question: how do you read books if a 10k word article is too long?

I'm not OP, but I find it easier to read a 50k word book than 10k blog article. The latter had better be really good (and many of Scott's are) if I'm going to make it to the end.

It's probably something about the nature of reading on a screen, on a device that's capable of fifty zillion other things at the press of a button. When I'm reading a book, there's only the book. Less willpower is required to maintain my focus.

Long blog posts are much easier to read if I send them to my Kindle, but I rarely bother.

Edit: a word

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#165

Post by read_if_gay_ »

ALittleLight wrote: post #134
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #95

Seriously, WTF is going on with NYT. I think something has seriously gone off the deep end with their newsroom, but I feel like it must be so culturally ingrained in their newsroom now that even questioning some basic assumptions will get one vilified as a racist or sexist. One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper…

It seems very and crudely racist to assume all black people have a shared culture, in the same way assuming two black people must be related, would be.

It’s just obviously untrue too.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#166

Post by vinay427 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #95

Seriously, WTF is going on with NYT. I think something has seriously gone off the deep end with their newsroom, but I feel like it must be so culturally ingrained in their newsroom now that even questioning some basic assumptions will get one vilified as a racist or sexist. One of the most recent examples that really struck me was NYT's article about why they decided to capitalize Black, but not White, in their paper…

> "white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does"

To be fair, it's not a very high bar. I don't mean this as a slight, but "white American" doesn't seem to represent any shared culture or history. It's based on an American (originally European) concept of visibly distinguishable race rather than any attempt at an ethnocultural grouping based on something like a linguistic or culinary basis. By the Census definition it includes people "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."

The problem is, most all of the above applies to black Americans as well, with the regions switched. I think I would be much more open to the idea that the descendants of slaves in the US, for instance, have a shared history and culture.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#167

Post by mnky9800n »

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…

They also outed a Chinese Twitter maker a few years ago. Or maybe that was vice and the reporter now works at nyt. I don't remember except that nyt these days is lame.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#168

Post by biztos »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #154
biztos wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ah, right, I forgot about the FT/Nikkei connection. I subscribe to the latter and not the former.

Economist is very opinionated, sure, but when I do read them I find the reporting on world business issues pretty informative and the tone a good test of how I feel about globalization that week. At least I know who's talking to me... well not literally "who" of course.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#169

Post by jimbob45 »

jherdman wrote: post #24
aetherane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last few years they have been overly focused on their agenda and many times haven't even made a visible effort to investigate fairly. NYT employees have been fired for disagreeing with the prevailing opinion in the newsroom.

> ...they have been overly focused on their agenda... Can you elaborate on this? What is their agenda?

Pushing Democratic rhetoric. They drank their own kool-aid by thinking they were responsible for the 2016 election. Perhaps they were but moving to overtly biased reporting was not the correct solution to that.

Edit: ombudsmen are the solution.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#170

Post by Quanttek »

> I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them. ... Predictably, the NYT piece came out soon after, and predictably, it was very negative

Not sure if we all read the same piece, but I wouldn't call it very negative. Pointing out the neoreactionary affiliations of the Rationalist community is neither something new nor "hit piece"-like. But apparently criticism of Silicon Valley's favorite darling cannot be tolerated here.

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