Almost all carbon credits are a scam.
There is an answer: just tax CO2 emissions. Like, a lot. The problem is that it will take a foundational shift in US politics for that to be an acceptable answer, and we don't have time (negative time more or less) to do that. And so, a whole fuck of a lot of people are going to die and a fuck of a lot of the planet is going to become unlivable. Like, not that long from now.
Yeah, agreed. I oversimplified a little, in that in the supposed ideal, you have a news section which is "objective" and an editorial section which is "both sides" and they work in very different ways, and to me that's a pretty good system when it's working well. I think AG is distorting both sides of it to serve his agenda, in somewhat different ways of course.
I kinda read it differently. I'm not saying you're wrong, since this is of course all pretty subjective. But at least the way I read it, Bennet is saying that the NYT has a duty to help both sides understand each other, and the way to do that would be by giving a voice to the right and centrists without necessarily endorsing any faction. I agree with it to some extent - as both sides have polarised and pulled away from each other, it's gotten hard to be a neutral viewpoint in any number of topics without being roundly condemned by both sides.
Yeah, I agree with all of this -- both that it is what Bennet is saying, and that it's true and important.
I just don't think it applies to the Times's or AG's behavior, in the real world, although Bennet is saying that it does. We need quadrants, I think:
Yes I am editorializing a little bit. It's okay, I'm not a journalist. Also, it's still a quadrant; #5 just exists way, way off the bottom right-hand side of the square.
I think Bennet is saying that the Times was doing too much of #3 and is now getting back to its roots of #1, or should be. What I think is happening is that the times was doing #4 and is now starting to do #5, with a little disingenuous sprinkling of #1 to disguise the taste.
You'll notice that they don't feel any kind of need to present "both sides" of people's feelings on Biden's debate performance, or the war in Gaza (although I think the sheer humanitarian atrocity is so massive by now that they've been forced into admitting on some level that yes, a whole bunch of Palestinians many of them families and innocent children do seem to be starving and getting buried under rubble and maybe it's not an ideal outcome, although, of course, there's a lot of blame to go around on many different sides for why that is happening.)
That's a tough one. Dogwhistles, weasel words, doublespeak are all things to watch out for. He's condemning the NYT for changing the language Cotton used, but I'm not familiar enough with US politics to have an opinion if they changed the meaning or just polished the turd.
Personally, I wish the NYT would do stuff like this within the context of an interview. If you know someone is redefining words with new sinister meaning to try to justify their killing, I think you should call them out on it. Don't just let them pretend on the editorial page that they mean killing looters, certainly. But also, don't change their words and just kind of sneakily not address it (which I suspect is the result of splitting the difference between the reporter's desire to report the truth and AG's desire for the reporter to report the fascist newspeak version of it).
In a perfect world, I think you could do an interview where you say, I want to ask about about this "looters." You're clearly talking about shooting protestors, and pretending you are talking about shooting looters. What's up with that? And then in that context you give them a chance to speak and say their side. And if you're wrong, fair play, but in this case I think it is absurd to pretend that Trump and Cotton were telling the truth when they were talking about shooting looters and getting upset when people pointed out that they mean they want to shoot protestors.
AG is clearly one of those at fault in the article, but I’m not convinced that that is the voice the author is coming at it from.
It’s so long that I’m not going to read it all in depth. Maybe that means I am going to miss something but I just now made a pretty lengthy concerted effort to skim and try to see if your reading makes sense, and I’m still having trouble. So like, check this out:
The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise. It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work. After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.
Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be. The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority.
The whole framing of the article is that the “untruth” AG needs to be setting straight is overly sensitive political correctness from progressives, and analyzing everything he’s doing through that lens. Whether we have to be neutral and present progressives and “conservatives” on the same footing, or whether we should take a side and say the progressives are wrong. Right? Have I read that part right in your opinion?
I think once you’ve framed AG’s dilemma in those terms, you already fucked up. That is not AG’s dilemma. His dilemma is that part of the US political spectrum is explicitly fascist now, and his decision as far as I can tell is that we need to go further than the Times’s editorial voice being on the side of the neoliberals as it always was, and now needs to be the fascists or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, whether or not that’s the reality.
Here’s an extremely instructive example:
Cotton had tweeted that Trump should call out troops to stop the “anarchy, rioting and looting” if “local law enforcement is overwhelmed”, and Twitter had threatened to censor his account. Jim Dao, the op-ed editor, was more interested in the substance of the tweet and, via Rubenstein, asked Cotton to write an op-ed about that.
That was the right thing to do. Trump was starting to call for the use of troops, and on May 31st the mayor of Washington, DC, had requested that the National Guard be deployed in her city. After police gassed protesters before Trump posed for a photo in Lafayette Square on June 1st, the editorial board, which I led, weighed in against that use of force and Trump’s “incendiary behaviour”, and the op-ed team had pieces planned for June 3rd arguing he did not have a sound basis to call out federal forces and would be wrong to do so. In keeping with the basic practice of the op-ed page, which was created to present points of view at odds with Times editorials, Dao owed readers the counter-argument. They also needed to know someone so influential with the president was making this argument, and how he was making it.
The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.
This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s. Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”. That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest.
Right? I still won’t say I’m 100% sure on 100% of the thesis of the article, but is that not Bennet arguing that AG needs to enforce better the pro-fascist standard of truth?
How could you walk up SO close to the point and then manage to get 1,000% backwards
There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
Dude print it on a fuckin flyer that gets stapled to the shirt of every NYT reporter and editor so they can always pick it up and read again and it’s never out of sight. Have someone stop them when they walk in the building, and then read it to them like a Miranda warning, and ask for a verbal yes or no whether they have understood, before anything can continue. Fuckin do it every day. I cannot stress enough how well this gets to the heart of the point of what is wrong with US journalism and the Times in particular.
And then:
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.
Where was this careful avoidance of favoring one side or another as to Biden’s age and its importance in the campaign
Or in whether Israel is justified in the war
Or whether criticism of them is anti Semitic
The exact problem with the Times is that they are favoring one side of the national debate, and specifically somehow unerringly the wrong side. I actually agree that they should either avoid taking sides, or, even better, favour the side that is backed up by objective reality. But neither of those is what they are doing.
As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change.
What old standards are those, AG
I remember the paper favouring killing Palestinians for as long as I remember. I remember it telling my parents what a good idea the Iraq War was and them believing it. I don’t remember it ever having it lost its way into some postmodernist fog where it was careful to say that maybe Palestine has a point
SO WHAT OLD STANDARDS ARE YOU MEANING
WHAT YEAR DO YOU MEAN, AND WHAT STORIES
Because I kind of have a feeling I know exactly, precisely, what version of truth AG is talking about how very important it is for the paper to enforce, and publish exclusively, not committing the disservice that it would be for them to waver from that version of the truth.
Let me say it again:
There are many reasons for Trump’s ascent, but changes in the American news media played a critical role. Trump’s manipulation and every one of his political lies became more powerful because journalists had forfeited what had always been most valuable about their work: their credibility as arbiters of truth and brokers of ideas, which for more than a century, despite all of journalism’s flaws and failures, had been a bulwark of how Americans govern themselves.
This country used to be absolutely fuckin bonkers on a day to day level, back before TV made everyone lethargic and gullible and slow to pick up on things. I’m not saying that as a good thing or a bad thing, it was just nuts.
One of my grandad’s high school classes didn’t like their teacher, so they rushed the front of the class and grabbed him and hung him upside-down out the 2nd story window by his ankles. He never came back to class and they had to get someone else to teach who was capable of keeping the class in order.
You literally made me laugh out loud. Well done.
No. No. It did not. The problem you are describing isn’t totally imaginary, but for the most part, it’s a good thing that you can’t be an avowed racist or misogynist or general all-around ass and everyone will still love you as long as you are good at your job.
Nobody is going to go on Twitter and said they were triggered because WKUK did this skit, and then George Soros would get the show cancelled. In fact, the lions’s share of the time, the people cancelling shows or freaking out and boycotting products, because someone said the wrong thing, are on your side of the ideological divide.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think what happened was that mean dickheads with money started running everything.
I think John Oliver is still having fun. Maybe some sports panel shows, too. Offhand I can’t think of anyone else, although I don’t watch much TV.
I miss when people on TV were having fun
If not that, it would have been something else. It’s just like picking on the debate and amplifying it times 25 and playing it every single day at the top of every hour. You’re gonna be able to find something and pretend it’s a big deal.
Gore invented the internet. Kerry was stiff and unlikeable. Bush, I could have a beer with. And then, just like anything else when you practice at it, they started to get really good at it. They could just make up any bullshit they wanted and boom! That was the end of someone’s campaign. The Dean Scream was probably the peak of its application. He was talking about taxing the rich? Fuck you, out you go. We’ll just wait for something we can amplify by 25. (And somehow, the Democrats get all the blame when one of these corporate trash candidates wins the nomination as a result. All those Dean people were Democrats, too.)
They got used to being king makers, and pretty much from 1992 to 2016, they were. If someone was corporate friendly like Clinton or Obama, they’d let them pass; and if anyone tried to buck the system, we’re gonna destroy your reputation like a bunch of mean high school girls, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
With Bernie, they learned they had lost their power, and so like any capable professionals they readjusted, and kept the renewed arsenal tucked away for future use.
No no, James Carville just went on TV and told me it was definitely for Hillary Clinton to figure out what to do
Only she can save us
OOOOOOHHH
All of a sudden it makes perfect sense why the news is freaking out so hard
It’s a fucking CATASTROPHE that Biden could be tied dead even with someone as objectively horrifying as Trump
I can only imagine what dizzying height he must have fallen from down to 39/39 after that shit show of the debate, like something approaching what would make sense for someone who improved wages for working people, spent a trillion dollars on climate change, finally did good things for the American people for the first time since the ACA if we’re being kind and since Lyndon Johnson if we’re not, and running against a literal pants shitting moron who openly wants to destroy America
Er
Wait what were we freaking out about again?