Resignation Letter
bariweiss.com
bariweiss.com
In other words, the New York Times isn't leading. It's following the crowd on Twitter. And in abdicating the role of finding out the truth and saying it, the NYT gave up relevance. (We don't need them to echo Twitter. Twitter does that just fine. And we don't need them for performance theater, either - we've got Broadway.)
> There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one...
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Inigo Montoya
Can't anyone there see past the current insanity and think? "To be inclusive, we have to get rid of her"? Don't they even hear the words coming out of their own mouths?
The bitter lesson of the 20th century is that the answer to this question is "no". Read Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer": in this book, Hoffer looks into how mass movements compel masses of people to forego independent judgement for a sense of belonging and righteousness. He wrote the book 70 years ago, but it's as relevant as ever.
It's like they are intentionally steering the ship towards the rocks. I wonder who might be helping this effort... hmm... /s
Illiberal forces have been using capital to mess with the institutions of open and free discourse since before the printing press, Twitter is just yet another new market where power and money matter.
This article looks at just one news story+research paper alleging a Russian Twitter bot army swaying politics, but in the UK rather than the USA:
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
tl;dr - the paper is filled with fraud but was breathlessly reported by the (London) Times, and it convinced the Prime Minister despite being false.
In my opinion, they're following because we're in a period of flux or change in our society, driven by the massive impact of the internet and the barriers to publication being practically zero now.
Because there are so many voices shouting out right now, it's impossible to find the ones who are speaking "the truth" when that was something defined by a handful of editors in newspapers and TV networks 30 years ago.
Into this cacophony we also have bad actors, people, organizations, countries who intentionally set out to poison the truth and watch it die. I don't know if that problem is solvable in any way with the Internet in its current form.
Parallel with that misinformation and disinformation, society (speaking mostly about the USA) is struggling with enormous capital and power inequality. Groups of people of every political leaning know that "something is wrong" but so many are being told to blame this or that group of others.
We've been shown that those with the command of immense resources can exploit and control our laws and government to the point of being beyond the law. We've been shown that we may not be able to do anything about that without significant revolution.
So in this period of massive change, we're told we're powerless.
Yes, the New York Times is following, because we all are.
I remember some years ago, a big debate in the media was whether blogging represented some new revolution in journalism. Eventually the mainstream became obsessed with Twitter and sort of forgot about blogging, but it never went away.
By far the best journalism and analysis available during COVID-19 has been from this wider group of journalists. Some of them are both independent bloggers and writers in regular newspapers simultaneously. But many are just ordinary citizens who happen to work in mathematically or statistically rigorous fields, and found themselves with time on their hands to do analysis.
I think one reason they can do a better job is they're less conflicted than journalists are. They can write some calm, level headed articles pitched to any audience they like and don't have to worry about how many clicks they get, or whether subscriptions will grow or shrink as a consequence. A huge problem professional journalists have is that they earn more money when telling people there's a crisis, because news consumption goes way up. So anything scary is blasted out at full volume, and when it's discovered to have been a false alarm there's crickets. There's no incentive at all to tell people, OK, maybe this isn't as bad as it seemed.
I think this is also why so many journalists end up attacking vague, unnamed "deniers" and "sceptics". It's common for such people to write detailed blog posts drilling in to a specific scientific issue far deeper than newspaper or CNN talking heads can, and often concluding, actually, the issue is overhyped. They can reach that conclusion because their livelihoods don't depend on finding the opposite. But any time anyone reads this alt-journalism and concludes, hey, maybe I'm being manipulated into believing things that sell a lot of news, they drop out and stop consuming as much of the "pro" output. It makes sceptical bloggers the arch enemies of mainstream news.
Into this cacophony we also have bad actors, people, organizations, countries who intentionally set out to poison the truth and watch it die .... We've been shown that those with the command of immense resources can exploit and control our laws and government to the point of being beyond the law.
I don't think we have. I think that's another narrative newspapers like to feed people to keep them watching or reading.
In the old days you would interview enough random people in the street until you found one that said the narrative you wanted to push and that the one you showed on TV / quoted in the article.
Another technique still widely in use today is when you want to attack person x, you go collect some quotes from known opponents to criticize x, and quote a list of criticism as if somehow these were the only relevant reactions.
None of that is subtle or done subtly.
What is said here is that journalists are trying to appealing to their Twitter follower instead of doing their job. It's peer pressure, but on Twitter, not in the editing room of the NYT.
"I am the voice of reason!! All must think as I do! Can't you see?"
She has set out to be combative and say things that a lot of people find repugnant. In particular, she has publicly mocked many of her coworkers, which isn't really a great way to make friends in the workplace.
She presents no actual examples of misconduct against her either. Near as I can tell, she's leaving because she perceives people don't like her.
Well, it's their right not to like her, as long as they obey the rules. The world won't miss her strident and dishonest voice.
> Well, it's their right not to like her, as long as they obey the rules.
Yeah, that's the whole point. Bari alleges harassment that the Times wouldn't put up with if the target was a progressive and not a Jewish liberal. According to her, her colleagues weren't 'obeying the rules'.
Otherwise, I am dissapointed when I open the paper and barely see any conservative columns while half the country still is conservative. I want to see how and why people think that way in this country, read their opinions.
This is a very key point, and what are the consequences of "informing everyone of a truth" that doesn't accurately reflect -- of even contradicts! -- reality? Harm to the reputation of the NYT is the least of the problems that accrue from such a situation, in my opinion.
If you ignore these "throw the baby out with the bathwater" comments, some good discussion is being had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_State...
I discovered it on July 4 when people I passingly know on FB took a pledge to QAnon. Looking up QAnon brought me to the Deep State conspiracy belief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
One characteristic of it is a deep distrust of "the media".
I could guess that this lower circulation is, at least partly, the result of readers who don’t appreciate a false reality being reported as truth. I’m not sure how to measure this. It’s based on my own technique of when I encounter someone speaking false reality I try to understand and come to some common understanding. Sometimes I have it wrong. But if I don’t have a standing relationship with someone who frequently doesn’t operate in reality, I just ignore or unsubscribe. I assume they carry on.
In NYT’s case they carry on and have even more subscribers who like this version of reality. So it’s a bit of a spiral. I’m already surprised how long they’ve lasted.
The NYT's subscription rates are way up since Trump was elected.
> I’m already surprised how long they’ve lasted.
You already stated why they're seeing such success. "the result of readers who don’t appreciate a false reality being reported as truth."
I was thinking of their profit and revenue [1] that keeps trending down (although this year is up). That’s probably a better sign of actual readers over time, I think.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/315041/new-york-times-co... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/192848/revenue-of-the-ne...
Who is doing more collective discovery (and making it accessible to the public at a price an average person can afford)? I can only think of a handful of organizations that are serious candidates (Reuters? The BBC? Wikipedia?).
Weird puff pieces, drama on the editorial pages (what else would there be?), declining standards, you could find the same complaints any year since the first newspaper. I can't take them too seriously until I see an alternative that does the work of collective discovery.
[1] https://www.nytco.com/journalism/journalists-on-the-ground/
There is an alternative. It is you and I. The citizen journalist will become the arbiter of truth tomorrow. And that arbitration will be decided on rationality. There will be no more credentialism and gatekeeping. That is why the traditional media companies are scared shitless.
How do I tell the difference between an honest citizen journalist, a propagandist, a liar, a lunatic, or a troll?
Conventional journalism of course is not perfectly trustworthy, but at least there is some penalty for extreme untrustworthiness in the form of loss of reputation of the paper and its brand. The NYT is an illustrative case. My opinion of that paper dropped significantly after its role in providing only the most softball criticism of the (then impending) Iraq invasion. I'm not the only person I've heard say this. NYT paid a price for cheerleading for that disaster.
Critical thinking skills, independent research, and open dialogue
A lot of people stay at the dunning-Kruger peak on that for a very long time and over-evaluate their (i for sure did for several years at least).
> independent research
Those who have the time to do this for half the semi-important issues in the world are lucky(like most of of on HN i think). And i started 2 month ago informing myself about climate change and what does it mean to stop using oil, i did not have any time for myself between that and work until recently. Research takes a long, long time if you wnat to do it well. I'm still not certain about anything.
> open dialogue Yes if it mean what i think, this is very helpful. Paper journal used to offer opportunities for that.
Many prefer poisonous fast food to a healthy home cooked meal, just as many prefer to read twitter comments and click bait than to read a book
You captured a facet of climate change I feel few can properly articulate. Modeling and digesting complex systems is incredibly difficult and at this point I share the same position.
It seems to be we have no clue how severe the impacts of climate change will be but based on gut feelings we are in for the same problem as technology development.
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.[0]
That makes sense: people often buy newspapers for the analysis that reconfirms their own world views, and gives them intellectual ammo for their pre-conceived notions.
With citizen journalists (a.k.a. bloggers) they start out with no pre-existing reputation so tend to depend on other ways to quickly build credibility, like using lots of hyperlinks to sources so you can check their claims, or leaving comments open so commenters can criticise and respond. Even today in 2020 it's standard for news articles to provide no citations or hyperlinks at all, even when e.g. the entire report is about a research paper, and often comment sections are now closed. Exactly because so many commenters would often point out flaws in the articles!
The most obvious first step is to form a leadership group to manage coordination. Different people to be in charge of printing/hosting and distribution, payroll, HR, research, etc, etc.
If someone wants to publish news, they don't need those things. Just publish it.
Where would you go for information if I told you about some surprising event occurred and people on Twitter are posting very different statements of fact?
Stop trusting outlets. Find journalists with integrity and follow everything they do, no matter the outlet.
But, do you believe this is a new problem? Was it always bad to trust outlets?
That’s the state US “journalism” is in.
That much is actually true - I grew up not far from there, and it was a mistake for Khrushchev to give Crimea to Ukrainian SSR - it's been a part of Russia since 1783. But back then it was unimaginable that the USSR would fall, so nobody made much of it. Ukrainians were an ethnic minority in Crimea, and Russians were 67% of the population at the time it re-joined Russia. Not something you will find in US mainstream press. This is why Greenwald's input is valuable - he actually studied the issue rather than parroting the mainstream party line.
To see why he's right, consider this: Russia took Crimea _without any bloodshed_ and with fairly minimal military presence. This would not be possible if populace wasn't in agreement.
Leaving aside the formalities, Ukraine's grasp on Crimea was tenuous at best, and its fate was decided when Ukraine threatened to kick Russian military base out of Sevastopol - which lets Russia control the vital Black sea. With Russia no longer there, somebody else (e.g. NATO) could take its place, which Russia will not allow for geostrategical reasons.
But even ignoring Russia's interests in the region - one could argue Crimea was never really "Ukrainian" in the first place, and their temporary possession of that land was a historical mistake, which has now been corrected. It's not even clear if Khrushchev had the authority to give it away in the first place.
No opinion on the West Bank, I don't have first hand info on that.
Would Russia have annexed Crimea if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons?
No argument there.
> Would Russia have annexed Crimea if Ukraine still had nuclear weapons?
It likely would not. But that's a hypothetical, so there's no way to tell one or the other. MAD is a thing, and neither country would deploy nuclear weapons this close to itself, let alone do so in a MAD-inducing way.
What is certain is that Ukraine would be a different level of a player on the international stage if it had nuclear weapons. Other countries (including Russia) would bend over backwards to keep it stable (much like everyone bent over backwards to stop proliferation in 1991), and there'd be no talk of NATO presence at Russia's border with Ukraine.
People in the US (which never had a real, total land war on its soil) don't understand: there are kinds of things that Russia simply will not allow. In contrast with the US, Russia had total wars on its soil several times, and lost tens of millions of people in those wars - a level of sacrifice unimaginable here in the US. Russia does not have natural barriers to a land invasion. So it cannot and will not afford the "buffer states" around it (such as Ukraine or Belarus) to fall under NATO or anybody else's control. It's not even a question of cost or international law. It's a question of national security and survival. Those concerns always dominate.
One of the things Russia will not allow in particular are NATO bases within easy striking distance of Krasnodar, Rostov, and much of its agricultural base. Another is Belarus affiliating itself militarily with the West. Baltic states were lost, so now there's a NATO military base within 200 miles of Saint Petersburg (in Estonia), which is significantly raising Putin's blood pressure and could result in action if escalation continues there. These things start small. Some people, a few tanks. Then there's an air base. Then there are rockets and long range radars being deployed under the pretense of "protecting Europe from Iran" (for those who don't know where Iran is on the map). And so on and so forth.
The library
Journalism is not our fact gathering apparatus. It is our sense making and relevance deciding apparatus based on those facts.
If we don't have good journalists providing those functions, we are left with the ersatz, AI based versions to decide what to pay attention to; twitter's, youtube's recommendation algorithms, google's ranking algorithms etc. None of which is good at saying "this is the most important thing we should pay attention right now as a society", "this is how you should approach this complex topic". Algorithms only serve one god and that is the god of engagement. But the amount of engagement they drive doesn't match their performance in affording us an ability to make sense of our world.
This is precisely what Weiss criticizes, that crucial human wisdom function is now subjugated by what those algorithms promote to be relevant; twitter being the worst offender. This makes us collectively foolish, and we see the results in our society with our inability to cohere and dialog as adults. Our collective intelligence approximates that of a tantrum throwing child, because our most used discourse engine that is twitter can only sustain that level of sophistication.
Do you have a reference for this?
Well then what is? I used to live next door to a journalist - by which I mean someone who went out into the world (haiti, israel/west bank, US immigration policy) and asked questions and collected facts. They didn't always get everything right, and their work seemed to encourage a deliberate sort of fence-sitting with respect to the issues and places that they covered, but they did work that nobody else is/was doing.
Those people on social media who appear to be the "fact gathering apparatus" ? they are just echoing the work of people like my old neighbor.
Without journalists, the ones we sometimes call reporters, we've got nothing to work with.
Now certainly, their job also extends into "sense making" and "relevance deciding". But the important ones - the reporters - are the ones gathering the material that the the rest of us - including the non-reporting journalists - are working with when we try to do the same thing.
Sure, there's a frame problem in journalism just as much as there is in AI, and sure, journalists play a (possibly outsized) role in finding contemporary suboptimal solutions for it. But even with that being the case, somebody has to go out and get information for us to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about etc. etc.
That's what (good) journalists (reporters) do.
"Facts all come with points of view" (Talking Heads, early 1980s)
Allow me to reword; facts are necessary but not at all sufficient to constitute journalism, nor journalism can claim monopoly on fact gathering. E.g. we have other, more formal, fact gathering processes such as science or court of law, which cannot be substituted with journalism, damages of which we see to the extent it tries to.
The firehose of twitter, youtube etc feeds already give us facts to talk about, argue about, rage about, call for more information about. And we are not in better shape for it. We cannot sufficiently convert those facts into sense. Nor those facts are always the ones we should be interested in.
That's why it's critical not to reduce journalism to fact gathering.
But the best journalists thrive to separate their opinion from facts and make it clear to readers when it's one or the other.
It's easy to take potshots, show me a news source that's better.
I am arguing against being blind to the news source's virtues. If we don't want to be blind to the world we have to pick our poison(s).
WSJ was solid right in the editorial but pretty neutral in news (though clear ideological bias was creeping in in the last decade or so) back before News Corp bought it out to augment their right-wing propaganda empire.
Now, it's definitely more high-brow and less in-your-face, beat-you-over-the-head with unsubtle propaganda than, say, FOX News, but it's just as clearly directed at the same ends.
The incident with Scott Alexander of SSC left a particularly bad taste in my mouth.
If FT wasn't available, I'd pay for Substack newsletters from trusted authorities.
Every new organization has an editorial line, within its own Overton Window, both of which can shift over time. So it's not a new thing. Even being centrist is a bias.
Probably not as useful to you if you're US based, but I find it really useful for living in Europe.
I really like FT myself. I am not in business so much but I think business news sources often get at a lot of interesting angles that others miss.
For example, I read a BBC article a while back about a sand shortage in India. It turns out the government imposed a price-ceiling, and there was no shortage at all (sand was available in the black market) - there was just a shortage at the government mandated price point.
Any economics 101 student can tell you that if you set a price-ceiling there will be a shortage.
To be fair, lots of people in the UK don't like them because of their stance on Brexit, but I really appreciate their coverage of conservative political voices is much more restrained rather than the click-driven style of the Guardian or the NYT.
Their environmental coverage is terrible though, so I wouldn't treat them as my only news source.
Both Stephens and Weiss are not only Jewish, but pro-Israel. Weiss had even written an entire recent book about anti-Semitism [1]. Many in the far left support the anti-Semitic Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement against the only Jewish country in the world. China invaded Tibet, puts 3 million Muslims in camps, taking their DNA and facial recognition but no China BDS.
Bennet had also been Jerusalem Bureau Chief for NYT for 3 years and thus would be knowledgeable about the situation there. He may have stopped inaccuracies printed about Israel in his role.
Bennet was the likely candidate to be elevated to Exec Editor when the current one retired in a couple of years. I believe a lot of the staff didn't like Bennet because of Jewish/Israel stance and the idea of him being the Exec Editor frightened/angered them.
I believe that an external inspector general type figure should evaluate the entire situation. Weiss's complaints are consistent with a toxic work environment that nobody should have to deal with. She said the source of some of the harassment she experienced was on an internal slack channel and thus easy to investigate.
Readers of HN are analytical enough to realize that when something obvious isn't mentioned it may well be the underlying cause.
[1] Weiss: How to Fight Anti-Semitism https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07P51KC9Z/
The editor changed in January, I unsubscribed a month before. Perhaps things have changed since.
I've subscribed for over a decade, and for the first time am questioning whether I should keep paying to be misinformed.
It's very strange as FT subscribers often have money at stake and the last thing they want is to be surprised by events.
Maybe their subscription numbers are falling and Nikkei is chasing the mass market and ad revenue. I don't see that working, as divisive clickbait is available everywhere for free... looks like a doom loop to me.
I have found, in general, that there's a lot more sloppy editing across the news media, which is understandable given how much has happened.
I feel like there's a real market opening here, for a centrist, general-interest newspaper. (Suggested slogan: "Like the NYT Was 20 Years Ago.")
Are they perhaps also exaggerating and wording stories to get something that sells? And perhaps adding an ideological filter? Maybe choosing what to report and what not. E.g., all negative stories about some people will be reported and all positive stories about others will be reported.
Just because they're gathering facts does not mean they accurately describe reality.
Reuters [0], for one, which boasts "2500 journalists and 600 photojournalists."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuters
A key thing to understand about the editorial / news hybrids like the NYT, CNN, or Fox News is that they're selling multiple products under the same umbrella: the "reporting" product is side-by-side with the "editorial" product. The editorial content is almost always useless garbage, and it exists solely to generate clicks/views/etc. A lot of the whining about cancel culture is from people who tend to write editorial content, and I don't shed any tears for them, but the failure mode of these orgs is that the editorial section has developed such a strong brand (and their audiences are increasingly polarized), such that their now Twitter-policed editorial viewpoint is increasingly expected to be enforced in the "real" news products, too.
If you want less biased reporting, there are outlets that provide it, but they tend to not publish as much inflammatory clickbait and thus tend to go under the radar of many information consumers.
ProPublica is OK but falling from grace as it leans harder into manipulating heartstrings.
Both are notoriously, extremely biased on all kinds of topics, for example Brexit/the EU. The Financial Times actually flies the EU flag above its offices: rather hard to get a clearer statement of bias than that.
That's a strong claim without evidence.
I'm not sure how you'd prove this rigorously though. Just look at other comments in this thread. One commenter observes he never saw a pro-Brexit op-ed in the FT, ever. They're always anti.
The FT and Economist are both focused on economic issues. I don't think you can expect them to campaign for a cause that is (by the admission of its supporters) going to damage the economy. They do consider the positive economic outcomes and possibilities of Brexit within their reporting, but there just aren't many compared to the negative ones. I don't think that's biased, it's fact, and it's fact that is agreed upon by both sides of the debate.
The idea that Brexit will harm the economy is:
1. Highly controversial to begin with. Plenty of Leave campaigners and voters were motivated by a belief that the EU is sclerotic and adopts many anti-growth economic policies that could be reversed or ignored once out. The idea it's economically harmful is not at all agreed on by both sides, but if you read the FT you can be forgiven for having a highly one-sided view on this!
2. Discredited. The whole population was told even just voting to leave would cause a huge recession. In fact the economy grew. Economists quite clearly cannot predict the effects of Brexit because they tried already and were as wrong as wrong can be.
Even Paul Krugman admitted that the stated beliefs of economists on Brexit were "dubious" and "motivated reasoning" ... of course he only admitted this after the vote was in:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/freshwaters-wro...
What we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that it will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious. Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics — but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility.
At this point, reporting on what economists think is about as useful as reporting on what epidemiologists think. They all disagree on everything all the time, so it's a way for the journalists to speak through their chosen 'experts'.
Both papers do provide quite good coverage of particular economic topics, framed by their editorial perspective. But if your understanding of Brexit or Trump (or anything politically contentious) comes only from the FT, you are setting yourself up for a huge surprise.
Reuters, Bloomberg, the Associated Press, and Fox News all come to mind for the metrics you've brought up. The NYT is not a peerless entity. I'm sure people will bemoan Fox News being on that list but they're none the less one of the largest news orgs in the country and their actual news segments aren't wildly different from what other orgs pump out.
Why is truth not a process of collective discovery?
Is this implying that truth used to be this and now is not?
What exactly does "collective discovery" mean in the context of a newspaper?
What evidence is there that this used to be the case and now is not?
What is the new "orthodoxy"?
Are you able to describe this orthodoxy in specific terms and not just labels?
Who are these "enlightened few"?
What do you mean by "whose job it is"?
When have these "few" "informed everyone else", specifically?
I do not mean to imply there are no answers to these questions, or that the answers will fall one way or the other. I just fail to see why I should take those statements seriously as "a very key point" without a lot more explanation and evidence. She starts to explain a few things before these statements that sound interesting, but then immediately starts ranting about Twitter instead.
National Review will often have a chain of columns between two of its writers going back and forth debating the merits of a particular position. That is what collective discovery should look like - a publication should encourage views that the editors might disagree with in order to understand the different perspectives on a topic.
Now, it's all about people "canceling" each other.
> What is the new "orthodoxy"?
I thought this was made pretty clear - the new orthodoxy is the Progressive Left way of thinking. Given that a term is a label, I'm not sure what would clear it up, but she does give examples of things that went against the orthodoxy (Tom Cotton's op-ed), and what it consists of (in the paragraph starting "All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers...").
>
We accuse Republicans of being anti science (they are, it's often true), but we publish op eds criticizing protests on the right as carriers of coronavirus while praising protests of another sort. Last week Krugman criticized red states (correctly) for opening up too soon, but he said absolutely nothing about the California spike.
So what do you want in a newspaper, facts or agitprop??
The FT I've seen opinion pieces on completely opposite views side by side or issue to issue. Sometimes something would respond days later to something posted before, in a rebuttal. True both in the editorials and in the Letters section. Dear Sirs...
I don't follow this writer, but based on open letter (and the fact that the individual published an open resignation letter in itself), the individual sounds like someone who didn't function well in a work environment full of big egos. It's hard to swim upstream in that type of org.
When uncertainty and fear strikes people want strong leadership, not one that is still doing research to figure out what's next (even if that's a strong move).
I say it is way too easy to BELIEVE that the motives of people who do things we don't like ... are wrong / they're pushing a POV.
I see these types of accusations thrown around a lot, even on HN, "oh this writer doesn't like Tesla" and I very rarely see anything but what appears to be an emotional appeal to others who don't like that news story.
It's just so easy to think someone else must have some ulterior motive, otherwise they wouldn't logically have come to that conclusion...
Any sources on nCoV-2 testing program in the US? Genuinely curious, social media (that I can see from inside my bubble) is mostly buzzing with how bad things are all around, but then people rarely take the time to voice positive changes.
Naturally, publications like the New York Times have carefully worked to leave their readers with a much worse impression of where the US falls on this specific ranking than reality.
Isn't Truth == Reality by definition?
But, in 2020 you cannot question or be skeptical of the "progressive" agenda. Merely hinting that you are not fully bought in will get you labeled as a racist, or even worse these days, a "Conservative".
The group of folks that screamed to high heaven about the rise of "facism" in 2016 have become the very people they purportedly despised. Using the media as a political propaganda outlet, being intolerant of other viewpoints, using shame and ostracism to control the population etc.
Here's something I don't understand: Jeff Bezos, maybe the ultimate robber baron of our time, and no fan "of the people", is the owner of the Washington Post. Since his purchase, it has moved so far left as to become almost a caricature of a "news" paper. A skeptical person would ask - what reason could he have for pushing a major media outlet to write so much - what can only reasonably be called - propaganda? A critical thinker would be very concerned indeed about buying too far in to said agenda based on who's pushing it.
My main news source (besides HN) is the Dutch public news, which is described as left-wing, but to me it feels very objective. I find it hard to judge if that means I'm just leftist and don't see what they're leaving out, or that the right is in an alternative reality.
I can see how that works to slant the readers view of the world. I'll be careful of this, though there is little overly sensationalized news in my feed.
Is it really the case? Or is it a perception you have? I've become less and less liberal the past three months, for multiple reasons, and at least in my liberal bubble, i did not face any backlash.
However, in day to day life, there's a good chance no one will care about your political leanings, unless you live in Portland or something.
Pretty hard to answer that question in HN with anything other than another anecdote, but I would personally answer that question with "yes". I have seen this behavior on several online forums I am in (including HN) as well as in real-world settings.
The well-documented incidents with "non-left" speakers on college campuses is another data point. Take a look at the insanity that happened at Evergreen College, for example.
This sort of behavior is easily observed, from my point of view, in real-life and online.
A lot of people are becoming less liberal - your liberal bubble might be trending in the same direction.
The other day on Twitter when the couple pointing guns at the protesters in Kentucky issue was trending, someone posited "I wonder what happens to people who don't have guns". So I posted a video of a couple who were dragged out of their shop and beaten, on video, and their shop destroyed.
I posted no words, no commentary, simply linked the video that is a real example of the answer to that question - and got called a racist in response.
People are actively seeking reasons to hate, these days, and for someone like me for whom the entire exercise seems silly, all I can do is sit back and stop participating.
As to who gets labeled what for which action is a big mess, but the direction seems to be that people are very quick to call everyone else bad if they are not as far-whatever as they are. (Anyone trying to gather and assess data about anything like "race", police brutality, homicides, guns, socioeconomic status is instantly suspect. But also it's very clear that a lot of people just post incoherent unfounded stuff on twitter which happens to have citations and graphs and even some structure resembling a paper -- and of course discussing it on twitter is neigh impossible, but almost always an exercise in mental self-harm.)
Sadly the real internet hate machine is not 4chan's /b/, but serious platform like facebook and twitter, where real people grind their ideas on each other until they just become sharp sticks and slurs to poke others with.
I find this downright angering to read given the recent shenanigans with SDNY and the Stone commutation (plus everything else that has happened... oh... once a day over the past few years). And you have the gall that the left are the real fascists?
Not a secret, Amazon considers lack of diversity a risk factor for unionization.
"Whole Foods' heat map says lower rates of racial diversity increase unionization risks" https://archive.is/1khJw
It's all one big social engineering scheme designed to ensure absolute corporate hegemony by redirecting social tension it generates into racial and sex/gender identity conflicts. Extremely successful.
> The group of folks that screamed to high heaven about the rise of "facism" in 2016 have become the very people they purportedly despised.
Painting with a broad brush based on small sample sizes (exactly what you are doing) is exactly what you are complaining about. There are tons of people who call Trump's words and actions "fascist" despite not being "progressive"/"liberal".
There are people on the "political right" who have been complaining about the "liberal agenda" the same way conspiracy theorists talk about the "jewish agenda". I'm not accusing you of it, but it frequently sounds the same in the tiny bites of content that exist in social media.
I, personally, think the biggest problems with the human mind on social media involve:
- an assumption of bad faith when another commenter fails to be precise about "there exists" and "for every"
- trolling works because we humans frequently can't disable our ego when it is attacked (rightfully or otherwise)She has played gatekeeper herself quite stridently and successfully.
She is quite fine with her own "involvement in numerous campaigns to vilify and ruin the careers of several Arab and Muslim professors due to their criticisms of Israel" per Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept:
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
It's possible that Greenwald is... I think the technical term is "full of shit". In seriousness, how is anyone supposed to take this seriously? If you ignore all of the transparent ad hominem, the only bit of substance in the article is that Weiss accused her professors of racism--there's nothing to support the idea that she was trying to ruin their careers (in 2004, allegations of 'racism' didn't ruin careers--indeed, some proponents of cancellation even argue that these allegations don't ruin careers in 2020).
Anyway, even if Weiss's accusations of racism were intended to harm the careers of her professors, it was nearly 2 decades ago and she was fresh out of high school. When Nikole Hannah-Jones was her age, she was writing that whites were "the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world" and that "the descendants of these savage people … continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities". Ibram X. Kendi was writing that whites are literal aliens. Thankfully, these titans of race (and much beloved by cancellation advocates) have somewhat moderated their views before assuming command of their prominent, powerful platforms. Sarah Jeong was named Forbes "30 under 30" and hired onto the NYT only a few short years (if that) after writing some of the most overtly racist stuff I've seen in my life (worse even than Hannah-Jones' collegiate ramblings) and virtually the whole media industry went to bat for her. Let's put this criticism of Weiss' college remarks into perspective.
“Problematic” is often cited as the way extremists are labelling people they want to cancel.
This might be the most ironic and most dangerous effect of this "right think" regime: that the free expression and exchange of ideas is thwarted in advance because one doesn't want to deal with drama, fight, or insults that come with saying something not in lock-step with the prevailing group-think. This blunts the curiosity of the intellect and silences all true disciples of knowledge and science if what they say -- even if they have the math to prove their point -- contradicts the currently popular "common truth."
For this to be happening at what was THE preeminent example of American freedom of the press is chilling... and Orwellian.
"Racist" was the least of the concerns.
By printing it, NYT gave it a platform and a tacit approval. Not to mention that it came out later it wasn't even reviewed before published.
Major fuck up by them.
And I'm not sure how bad you think the rioting and looting was, but in Minnesota (mostly Minneapolis) alone, the economic loss is already estimated at $500 million dollars, with over one thousand businesses affected, and many were destroyed. Source: https://emmer.house.gov/_cache/files/b/c/bc0f4be4-4618-4786-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-no-intelligence-antifa-w...
> "U.S. police officials said they are examining both local and out-of-state actors focused on creating damage and inciting violent confrontations with police (and possibly other protesters) in the name of anarchist and antifa causes."
> "They prepared to commit property damage and directed people who were following them that this should be done selectively and only in wealthier areas or at high-end stores run by corporate entities."
> "And they developed a complex network of bicycle scouts to move ahead of demonstrators in different directions of where police were and where police were not for purposes of being able to direct groups from the larger group to places where they could commit acts of vandalism including the torching of police vehicles and Molotov cocktails where they thought officers would not be."
Beyond even Antifa and similar groups, my first point is largely about the statement "garden variety robbers unassociated with any political group."
There have been many protests throughout America's history. Most of them are done peacefully. Clearly most of them do not approach the level of violence and destruction that the recent riots and looting accomplished--riots and looting that coincided with those protests. Are we to believe this is largely coincidence?
The images and videos of the damage and looting that was done are out there. Windows, doors, and even entire buildings destroyed and ransacked, with "F* cops", "F* 12", "ACAB", &c. scrawled on the remains. Smashing, grabbing, chanting, it's all out there. There was obviously a political statement meant by many if not most of those people. This is made even more obvious when there are political groups that make statements such as: "By any means necessary", "No justice, no peace", "Give us what we want or we'll burn down the system", &c.
These are obviously politically-motivated actions. You cannot bear witness to all of the radical statements that have been made, also bear witness to the radical acts carried out and publicly supported, and then say the two are not related.
No one has proven anything criminal was organized and Tom Cotton sure as hell didn't have proof before he called for military intervention against a made up enemy.
I believe it's important to discuss who gets to decide what "dangerously wrong" is.
There's more than two sides here. Classical liberals and centrists who question or disagree with aspects of progressive beliefs are also being threatened with "consequences". That is a problem and it's time for the silent majority to start imposing some "consequences" of their own.
This post could be summarized in one sentence: Bari Weiss wanted people fired because they called her names and the NYT refused, so she quit and threatened legal action.
Also, where do you work that slandering your coworkers and putting axes next to their name wouldn’t get you fired?
As a testament to the existence of cancel culture and the stifling of any opinion against the party line in the progressive media, I can't think of a more obvious example.
I remember when people used to proudly say, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". This is not the norm for progressive thinking in 2020.
Second, Bari Weiss can write whatever she wants. Totally her right. She's got a website there in the link! She can continue to reach a global audience. Does the NYTimes need to promote her? No, that's not a right I'm willing to die for.
Third, why on earth is Bari Weiss' opinion more sacrosanct than mine? If she says something I consider offensive, I might say I think it's offensive. If she says something dumb, I might say I think it's dumb. If she says something astute, I might say I think it's astute. She has a HUGE megaphone, so of course lots of people will respond to her. That's not "cancel culture." That's a side effect of having a huge megaphone. With great power comes great responsibility, etc.
Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence. Oftentimes people in marginalized group react in a way that feels extra venomous to those of us not in those groups because they can feel their lives are constantly hindered and harmed by the sorts of thoughts that other people can just toss out and then walk away from. If this happens, I might suggest listening to the free speech from those people and trying to understand rather than writing screeds against "cancel culture" or whining about how you, as a very well-publicized and probably quite wealthy writer having your rights squashed. And that's why the Harper's Letter was annoying.
I hear this all the time, but it seems so disingenuous. There are so many national examples that no reasonable person could consider to be any of the above:
* A hispanic man was fired for accidentally making the "ok" symbol
* A data scientist was canned for citing a prominent black academic's research about the efficacy of nonviolent protest
* A journalist was forced to issue an apology for interviewing a black man who was happy about BLM but wished there was more attention on issues of violence in his community
Frothing racists indeed.
In light of cases like this, I don't know how anyone can think that cancel culture is just "punching up" or "criticizing people" or "going for people who want to use hate speech".
And did I say "frothing racists?"
Also, yeah, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. People get things wrong sometimes. It sucks and we should use our freedom of speech to help correct those errors, not argue that freedom of speech should be shut down.
There's a difference in my opinion between harassment and free speech. Notably, if you're trying to punish, threaten, or coerce someone, you fall outside of the bounds of "criticism". This may not be the legal definition, but I can't see any other definition that would be consistent with free speech ideals.
Further, because it's perhaps too difficult to legally litigate this kind of harassment, we could also approach the problem by making it more difficult for employers to terminate employees, thereby neutering the mobs (they can "speak" all they want but they can't persecute).
The difficulty here is that several things are happening at once. There is a problem with groupthink at some institutions, but there are also people who are trying to suppress legitimate criticism.
The fact that it hasn’t stifled prominent, powerful people such as the Harper’s signatories is not evidence that cancel culture doesn’t exist or that it is a weak force; it means that less powerful people are effectively suppressed. You don’t hear about what you don’t hear about. Survivorship bias.
Respectfully, I think you're missing the point. She works at a journalistic outlet that claims to be neutral and factual. When her peers demean her openly within the company for "writing about the Jews" (because she supports Israel), that shows that NYT is no longer operating like a legitimate news house. After all, their employees feel a freedom and psychological safety in openly harassing peers for their ideas and political views. The comments here are not asking to insulate Bari Weiss's ideas from intellectual critique or from public criticism. They are against biases in journalism, the censorship of ideas, and ideological bullying/discrimination in the workplace.
> Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence.
The problem is that words like "transphobic" have a wide range of meanings, and are purposely vague to dismiss anyone who doesn't pass an arbitrary purity test. There are very few people who wish violence (physical harm) against trans people. But there are lots of people, who very reasonably, think trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports and that trans women are not women. The attempts to censor or deplatform THOSE discussions are exactly the type of hate speech mission creep that characterizes "cancel culture".
You can say all kinds of dumb shit and sign your name to stupid letters and other people get to call for you to be fired, and maybe you will be! Even after that, you can continue saying dumb shit and signing your name to stupid letters, and I can go write buggy Perl 4 code, and nobody can stop us! Your dumb letters might not get published in national magazines and I probably won't get paid much for my code but in neither case is this a violation of our free speech rights.
Now, of course "the mob" can get things wrong. We see it all the time — and it's not a progressive or "cancel culture" thing specifically. It's just a side effect of these very rapid and short-burst communication platforms that many people use these days. And I'd frankly argue that the fact that bad information is so easy spread has been used to very harmful effect not by progressives but by people like Donald Trump who require these sorts of misinformation campaigns to stay afloat politically.
Maybe you disagree with that last point.
Regardless, if you dislike hate-filled mobs reacting to bad information, then you have to admit that some sort of content control has to be applied by social media platforms themselves. Or else it will continue to happen.
That said, the other part of this is that it's very easy for a large group of people to be informed of and react against something which they perceive to be harmful. Progressives — even cis white male progressives — have every right to be offended and to express their opinions against something they perceive as harmful. I imagine if you're on the receiving end of this then, yeah, it can feel like a coordinated mob and I have no doubt that it can be downright traumatizing. But that doesn't mean it's wrong or that you've been "cancelled." It is, again, a side effect of how our social media is currently designed and I'll be honest that I don't know what the solution is. But high profile writers with huge megaphones need to be aware that people have the ability to read, share, and react to what they write. And even low-level racism, sexism, etc which they maybe could get away with in the past will now be scrutinized. But that's a good thing, because we as a culture need to be scrutinizing how certain beliefs cause people real harm.
"Getting things wrong" is a symptom of social media and misinformation; cancellation and mobbing, however, are almost unique to progressive mobs. There are conservative mobs. E.g., the campaigns against Sarah Jeong, Kaepernick, and the Dixie Chicks [circa 2005]), but these are far fewer and they punch up (and in the case of Jeong, she really should have been terminated based on NYT's own policies and track record irrespective of a mob).
Misinformation is a problem, and Donald Trump wields it to great effect, and I'll happily talk about that in a pertinent thread.
> Regardless, if you dislike hate-filled mobs reacting to bad information, then you have to admit that some sort of content control has to be applied by social media platforms themselves. Or else it will continue to happen.
I certainly think that social media companies should be held to account for the consequences of their curation policies or else they should not curate at all. I don't think they should be allowed to claim to be "dumb pipes" when it suits them even though they're transparently not "dumb pipes".
> Progressives — even cis white male progressives — have every right to be offended and to express their opinions against something they perceive as harmful. I imagine if you're on the receiving end of this then, yeah, it can feel like a coordinated mob and I have no doubt that it can be downright traumatizing. But that doesn't mean it's wrong or that you've been "cancelled."
You're quite right--anyone who argues that cancellation and criticism are equivalent would indeed be mistaken. Cancellation refers to concerted campaigns to harm someone, usually by having them terminated or defaming them. This is harassment, not criticism, even if it's not prosecuted.
> It is, again, a side effect of how our social media is currently designed and I'll be honest that I don't know what the solution is.
Social media certainly plays a role, but if it were the primary driver, we would expect these mobs to be evenly distributed across the ideological matrix.
> And even low-level racism, sexism, etc which they maybe could get away with in the past will now be scrutinized. But that's a good thing, because we as a culture need to be scrutinizing how certain beliefs cause people real harm.
"Scrutinized" is one thing. The problem is that overwhelmingly there is no evidence to support claims of 'racism' whatsoever, and yet the penalties are harsh. There's simply no evidence at all that could acquit you in the court of Twitter. Kafka couldn't write fiction like this.
People aren't just expressing their opinion. Instead a whole bunch of people are engaging in actual illegal harassment, when these mobs start up.
No, I am not talking about criticism. I am talking about the actual harassment that often comes out of these mobs. Harassment such as death threats to you, your friends and your family, and the like, all because someone said something dumb on twitter or whatever.
From the perspective of free speech ideals, "speech" is the expression of an idea; it may be "persuasion" but not "coercion" or "intimidation". Cancellation is both coercive and intimidating by design and by definition, so it falls outside of the boundaries of 'speech'; however, not everything that violates free speech ideals is illegal to the great glee of free speech opponents.
Sure, but I think it is unfortunately that this is the only thing that people talk about.
The reality is that there is a whole bunch of stuff that is really really bad, such as death threats and the like, that will happen whenever there is a hate mob/harassment campaign that was started against someone.
When people try to defend these kinds of online mobs, they tend to focus more on the grey stuff, and they try to ignore the really bad stuff that happens. It is much easier to defend someone just "criticizing" another, instead of the much worse stuff that I've seen happen.
I don't think that someone should be able to distance themselves from the truly horrific stuff that can come out of these kinds of movements. It is much worse than people just be criticize, or whatever. And people need to recognize that those kinds of things happen.
IE, the stuff that happens can often be even worse than the, admittedly still very bad things that you brought up that I agree shouldn't happen either.
And by bringing up the even worse stuff, it gives less room for contrarians to make arguments and claims like "Well, actually, criticism isn't harassment", or "well actually, maybe the person deserved to be the target".
But everyone should condemn violence and harassment from their own ideological cohort.
How it is ironic? It's the explicit intention.
So are you suggesting that people not express their opinions? It sounds like you want exactly what she's complaining about.
And though the points are made up, it's always annoying to look at a post you spent half an hour typing and researching just to have it get down to -6 with no further comments.
I'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that he's "against others expressing their opinions".
The whole cancel culture thing stems from people who believe that they don't just have freedom of speech, but rather the right to force others to listen.
If a community dislikes what you say and chooses to make that content less visible in response, that's perfectly reasonable. You are not being censored, you are being rejected.
And besides, "well-researched" is highly subjective in the best of cases, and in ones like this is usually not accurate in any sense.
The problem is that any crowdsourced curation feature uses significant downvotes as a signal for spam or content which otherwise violates the site policies.
You're conflating "expressing opinions" (by clicking a button) with: making it less likely for the poster's expression to ever be seen.
What all this concern trolling really sounds like isn't an actual defense of values of free speech, but rather sheltering someone from the speech of others.
You seem to be of the opinion that the downvotes are more important than the comment they are downvoting: They are not. They are at best, equivalent, and deserve no more special recognition than the comment itself; yet the fact that a comment gets buried as a result, gives those downvotes a weight greater than that of the subject comment.
Because if that weren't the case, you'd recognize that those downvotes are ALSO apparently entitled to a private platform.
If it's good for one, it is good for both, and it is equivalent to argue that the downvotes aren't entitled to a platform either, and you're left at square one, without a meaningful conclusion.
Maybe, just maybe, that isn't a useful approach to take.
I think you and a number of other posters have alluded to or directly referenced a “progressive agenda”. And, others have mentioned attacks on “freedom”.
To me, those are some powerful and emotional phrases. And, they’re also so vague and able to encompass pretty much everything that one doesn’t agree with. To me, as someone with casual knowledge of linguistic manipulation, this seems very suspicious and designed.
Then, there’s the fact that I believe I’m a moderate. I have a subscription to the NYT. I like it. I think the journalism and writing are top notch. I generally skip the opinion page because it’s pretty boring, but when I do read it, I think it’s a often a bit tailored to the most ardent of NYT subscribers.
Because I’m a NYT subscriber, I’m often called a “progressive”, Apparently, because I’m against racism and other forms of individual oppression, I’m also considered a “progressive”. They don’t seem to care if I’m for state’s rights (I’m American) or low taxes or capitalism Or rights to firearms, or anything.
What if you’re being manipulated by a influence operation? Why do I say this? Because I genuinely try to empathize with The people who call me this (on-line, at work, family members, etc.) But, instead of giving me specific details, they just cite things that are completely unrelated to me: Antifa, Soros, Bill Gates, or whatever the buzz is that week. And, eventually they grumble some more about “freedom” and drop it.
So, here’s an opportunity for you. Lay down a believe that’s so controversial, that you think it will be censored and oppressed, and I promise to read it and empathize with your point of view. And, I’m sure others will, too.
It is supremely ironic for a famous writer, employed for years at America's paper of record, to complain about being silenced by her critics in a resignation letter that will be shared far and wide and read by tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of people.
He could have easily Had it published in the Federalist or Breitbart, but the average nytimes reader would never have had the opportunity to read it. Filter bubbles are a big problem, and getting Cotton on record in the paper of record is a valuable service.
High-level writers need to push back against illiberal and anti-free speech proponents to give cover for the lower ranks. If even the top tier writers can't speak their mind, does the lowly intern or new hire stand a chance?
Worker cooperative can be more efficient than traditional company in some sectors, did you ever read any piece on that?
I mean, the two time i went in the US, i was in really liberal and even socialist environment, and very few seems to even have heard of worker cooperative, so it would be surprising, but HN always surprise me positively, so why not.
"worker cooperatives site:nytimes.com"
For example: Harper's Magazine, which published the recent open letter on cancel culture that Bari Weiss signed, doesn't pay its interns [1], ensuring that only those who can afford to work for free are allowed on the lowest rung of the ladder. If these high–level writers were truly concerned about open debate and a culture of curiosity, they might be more concerned about breaking down barriers such as that. Instead, they're worried that they, the people already at the top of the ladder, might get knocked down to the same level as the rest of us.
What do you disagree with in the Harper's letter itself (the content, not the publication or the signatories), and why?
You claimed that they are speaking out for the benefit of less powerful writers. Since the goalposts have shifted to their intentions, attacking the source is absolutely relevant. I simply don't believe those intentions, given that these are people who themselves have prevented many diverse points of view from being heard in the first place.
I assume you also support the letter, if it had appeared in a publication you approved of?
> Initially, I was criticizing the content, which is on its face false: we are discussing multiple widely–read pieces from prominent people who claim they are being "canceled" for their views.
If Alice makes a claim about herself, it is not "attacking the source" to say the claim is false. That also doesn't mean that the same claim would be false if Bob made it about himself.
So, yes: if smaller writers who had actually been marginalized or excluded wrote an open letter claiming as much in a publication with a track record of publishing such voices, I might have supported it, because their claims might have actually been credible.
Instead, a publication that works to homogenize journalism published a letter signed by powerful writers about how they are being "silenced". By virtue of the fact that millions of people are now discussing their views, that claim is self–evidently false.
The signatories of the letter make the person who disagrees with the current orthodoxy, and still supports free speech, feel safer and in good company for doing so. Signing a letter is quick and doesn't stop them from also helping solve all the other issues they believe in - people can do two (or more!) things at once.
I am a lot less interested in political statements from people - you, me, the guy down the street - who are not luminaries in their respected fields. I am much more interested when such a diverse and respected group of people have those views.
As a footnote, you say "might have supported it". Imagine hypothetically that it was published in some underground zine signed by unknown writers. What in the letter did you disagree with? It's a brief letter, there should be something in there that is clearly risque if you "might" support it?
Please explain?
Should we cancel your opinion because of some seemingly inconsistent opinion you had in your comment history?
This is exactly the practice of arguing the arguer, rather than the argument, and it's a bad faith tactic.
Her claim is that she, herself, is being exceptionally victimized and silenced; it’s literally impossible rebut this without arguing against her, specifically.
Harper’s’ unpaid internships was a more general example. Had I been speaking about Bari Weiss specifically, I might have mentioned her support for deplatforming a Jewish speaker from Stanford [1], her attempts to get Arab professors fired [2] or her reports to other employees’ bosses in response to minor slights [3].
And even if my argument were to hinge on an orthogonal claim, you think that’s tantamount to “embodying cancel culture”? I haven’t called for any personal or professional consequences; literally all I’m doing is disagreeing with her.
This is why so many roll their eyes when people start waxing on about cancel culture. What they really mean is that they don’t want to hear criticism of their opinions.
[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1125789271959277569?s=2...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
[3] https://twitter.com/byjoelanderson/status/126865430820500684...
You are chosing to ignore the cancel culture that exists.
I don’t know what’s happening to Uncle Bob on Twitter, but right now his account has 150,000 followers. So, what consequences is he actually suffering here?
What if you switched out the MAGA hat for one bearing the rebel flag or a misogynistic slur? It seems eminently reasonable to me for a conference to kick people out for refusing to remove a superfluous article of clothing that makes other attendees feel unwelcome.
Jordan Peterson’s offer was rescinded not because of a “twitter cancel culture mob” but by students and faculty at the University, who absolutely have a right to decide whom to allow into their community: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/20/cambridge-...
Shor was accused of “anti-Blackness” for seeming to suggest, via Wasow’s research, that violent protest is counterproductive. (Wasow is Black.) “At least some employees and clients of Civis Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet threatened their safety,”
For example the case of Stephen Hsu ( https://statenews.com/article/2020/06/michigan-state-geu-cal... ) ... I have no idea if he's right or not, but it's true he's bad at PR and science communication.
We know how regular big of a backstabbing parade the regular old natural science community is (string theory boo/yaay, money for colliders, SUSY, ITER/fusion vs something else). So it's not a surprise that social-adjacent science is even more hardcore in this regard, but this is likely too much and too fast. Yes, sure activism and change needs momentum, but people will be surprised when the hysteresis rears its head due to over-dampening.
But this has happened already many times (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sociobiology:_The... and here's an another example https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/hoeqyg/stereotype_ac... ) and likely will happen again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, note, I'm not saying we shouldn't raise the bar for public (and semi-public) discourse. For example, as far as I know, adopting Codes of Conduct turned out to be quite okay, it laid the foundation for the way to deal with problems, gave a structure and rules to point at when someone crosses a line.
Any one challenging power should probably play to win.
Edit: Spoiler for all the kids: Your generation didn't invite sex either.
If we had to wait to hear an alarm until silencing was the only possibility, there wouldn't be an alarm anymore.
Basically anytime someone famous and successful comes out against cancel culture, the standard rejoinder is it can't be so bad. Doesn't seem to have stopped your career, so why are you whining?
And the point is for every high-profile person criticizing cancel culture, there's a vast dark matter of nobodies who's lives and careers have been ruined. Nobody's reading there op-eds. Things are that bad for Bari Weiss, practically a household name, and not even that conservative relative to the median American. Now imagine being an entry-level associate reporter, and a self-identified Republican.
But to be clear - it wasn't "canceled" by the NYT, at least not in the way the term canceled is commonly used nowadays. He made the decision to take the blog offline because the NYT decided to dox him, but their purpose wasn't (as far as we know) for that to happen.
“When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.”
But not in the NY times, where she seems to have been illegally harassed. I'm pretty sure you understand this.
People everywhere need to stand up and issue a firm rebuke to anyone contributing to the toxic environments she described. Either by voting with your wallet, or by being bold and speaking against it in your social circles. It's not too late to turn the ship around.
Is it this contribution, on the Joe Rogan podcast?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo3GM760a2s&feature=youtu.be - 11m, 2019 - Weiss talks about Tulsi Gabbard (?) as a sycophant. (YT person asserts dishonesty and hypocrisy.)
So many important people by now see the birdsite as a genuine net-negative yet it keeps chirping along with no changes. A bit baffling.
We should fight to make our world the ideal that it never was, but that doesn't mean we have to buy old lies about who we used to be.
The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.
I left the entire industry after my time working in that leadership group. As far as I can tell all news organizations today are chasing money and tribes over objective facts and truth.
It concerned me 10 years ago, and I can only imagine it’s gotten worse.
FWIW, this resignation letter strikes me as unfair to those it accuses, because the author provides zero concrete, specific examples of the constant public bullying she claims led her to resign from the New York Times. The accused cannot argue or defend themselves against generic accusations.
I'm not sure this is nearly as universal as you think, even on here.
The current administration and its cheerleaders have figured out how to turn trolling into a weapon, leaving the NYT befuddled as its model of well-intentioned fact-based debate (on the oped page), and "above-it-all" stenographic reporting (on the news pages), has broken down publicly. For earlier failures, see the boxes marked "Hillary's e-mails", and "Iraq, Invasion of" -- but it has gotten worse recently.
The NYT still does great info-graphics, non-politics reporting, and deep investigative scoops. Under Baquet (who I don't like as editor - I've been a regular reader since the mid-90s), it did successfully transition to a pay model for subscriptions -- and it has a lot of subscribers. This is more than most papers can say!
But, as noted, there are real problems with NYT reporting. They have not adapted in some key areas. This will require fundamental change that Baquet seems unable to do. Jay Rosen of NYU is my go-to source for analysis here (blog and twitter). See in particular: https://pressthink.org/2020/06/battleship-newspaper/
Thanks for the link to Rosen's page; I'll take a look.
There's another reason: because it directly impacts technology and the companies that many of us work with. This is a Silicon Valley news blog, at the end of the day, and it's unavoidable how Twitter, Facebook, Google and such have entered the debate. They're inextricable from the debate.
This controversy around cancel culture really could not TRULY exist without the ease with which you can search a history, stick a video on someone with a phone, or to expand on this a bit, use algorithms to target people with headlines and track how viral a headline got.
Bari Weiss never seemed very principled in her stances though, so I don't think she's a good counterpoint.
As appalling as the behaviour of these people is, that growing awareness can only be a good thing.
This is an interesting intersection. It either implies that all employers are left-aligned (not true) and therefore willing to fire employees that hold right-leaning opinions, OR that low level employees are so expendable that it literally any reason can get them fired if enough people complain.
It's mostly this. When you're a small-medium business, the last thing you want is negative PR and people canceling or DDOSing you because one of your employees wrongthinked.
But I doubt they will care until a conservative employer fires someone for tweeting support for a progressive belief.
I don't ascribe a right or left bias to them. It's the mob that has the bias (perhaps because of age or ideology or certainty or something else) and the mob uses the technology and then the HR department responds by firing the employee.
Do we need to coin the term "DDoE"? Distributed Denial of Employment. It's a hack against the socio-political system that targets find themselves in, not too dissimilar to Swatting.
It has more to do with aggregate action, which has recently been made possible with platforms like Twitter, than with the particular ideological stances.
My personal experience is a lot of HR departments do have a left-of-center bias to them, especially at the lower-levels (but at times reaching all the way to the top). A few reasons:
1) HR departments tend to skew female, and women on average skew somewhat more left-of-center than men do
2) They often have special teams for "diversity & inclusion", which inevitably tend to be filled with people with left-of-center political views
3) They'll put requirements like "commitment to diversity & inclusion" in job descriptions, which can (ironically) act as a filter to remove political diversity. Those phrases can get copy-and-pasted into job descriptions in other departments too, but while for many in engineering/sales/etc it is just compliance boilerplate with little real significance to the hiring process, HR really means it.
Of course this isn't universally true, I'm sure there are some HR departments out there full of Trump supporters. But most of the people here would not be working for those kinds of companies.
see aca5
You can criticize, you can ignore and you can boycott. Instead too many people (look at the response to JK Rowling) are threatening death and rape. Or are harassing employers until they capitulate.
But I'm sure such dogged defenders of free speech normally send other reporters after people to acccuse them of being anti-Semitic for a joke about them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hels/status/1283092586392178695?s=20
Leftist extremism is exactly avoiding the court system by applying pressure to rob people of their livelihood - a much more immediate, public, and potent method of intimidation - and an excellent way to set an example to others who might speak against the theocracy.
He said immigration was ruining the country, and that there are too many Indians / Chinese in the Bay Area. About half of my organization either have an H1B visa or a green card.
Am I a McCarthyist for rejecting him outright without hesitation?
You cannot say "there are too many (X) in the Bay Area". Period, I will not hire you.
...but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about people being punished for daring to disagree with the progressive agenda.
His feed was full of things like, "All Cops Are Bastards", many images of the hammer & sickle, and generally hating on white people. He even retweeted an illustration of the White House burning with a hammer & sickle flag being raised in front of it along with the caption "my 2020 goals".
Actually... I lied. The person I described is Steve Klabnik. Despite throwing around extremely offensive imagery and calling for violence against members of certain professions and races, that guy can get a job anywhere he wants. Meanwhile if someone simply says, "all lives matter" or makes an OK sign, they risk getting fired. The double standard could not be more obvious.
Yes.
Why can’t he have an opposing view from you on immigration?
I was on a visa and could still see the h1b program was being abused.
We often have less than ideal experiences with other cultural groups. That’s normal.
Is your work culture toxic because of your visa holders?
Would you refuse to hire feminist women because you had a mostly male team?
You can criticize H1B programs and their abuse, but saying there are too many Chinese and Indians explicitly and rejecting them for that is not "McCarthyism".
So do I and so do the vast majority of people who want less immigration.
> and rejecting them for that is not "McCarthyism".
To be fair to the parent - it would be if you tried to make sure they weren’t hired anywhere.
You were making a biased and snap judgement about a candidate - but that happens a lot in the interview process - same as if you rejected an African American candidate because you didn’t think they would fit in.
What would you do if one of your existing employees was found to have that kind of twitter account?
That is not the same as having subjective internal biases about an African American candidate.
You are saying you wouldn’t hire them because they wouldn’t fit into your work culture right?
Or are you saying you wouldn’t hire them because you don’t like their beliefs?
One is a statement made by a candidate that is at best insensitive to people of different races.
The other is a poorly specified scenario where a black person does not fit in? For what reason do they not fit in? Is it because of their race or something else.
It sounds like the parent thought the dev wouldn’t fit in with the other team members and so didn’t hire him.
> The other is a poorly specified scenario where a black person does not fit in?
It’s hard to fit in when you are a small minority.
Non government institution discriminating against people for their perceived political views.
If you remember - the majority of McCarthyism's intimidation was in his "do not employ" lists of people.
It's absolutely comparable!
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
There is a cleaving point coming for those who believe in Liberal values and the nyt has already chosen the side of extreme ideological orthodoxy.
Live by the gun -
I wouldn't say they chose it - under shareholder capitalism, they are beholden to maximizing the returns for their investors. Conservatives who like Bari Weiss (do such people exist?) probably aren't subscribing to the NY Times, while people who despise Bari Weiss and Tom Cotton are cancelling their subscriptions in protest.
I scanned the Greenwald article, but just saw quotes of other people saying she is bad, but not direct quotes of the bad things she said.
Why should I be this credulous?
Should we?
I don't always do that, hard to imagine doing so all the time, you'd experience constant whiplash of opinions.
What the writer is saying is that she no longer feels that The Times is unbiased. I don't see how that's a hard thing to take at face value.
How about I say the Times is unbiased.
Ok now what do we do? Do we take it at face value?
I might be misunderstanding what you mean, but it seems like you are in fact advocating ... 'that'.
I don't understand this phrase. I certainly wouldn't describe what I experience when I take the time to consider things at face value as causing anything I'd describe as whiplash. Just because I attempt to evaluate what I read from another's perspective doesn't mean I give up my own in the meantime.
I'm not exactly inclined to take someone's purely personal criticisms at face value if they have engaged in the same behaviour.
For all we know she might be leaving on bad terms and is taking it out on her coworkers who may have a different story to tell.
If the original complaint is a "dog whistle" then people will also respond the same way.
Otherwise know as debating
I would appreciate a better source for the claim that Weiss tried to get a professor at Columbia fired than that article by Glenn Greenwald. I dug through it (admittedly a bit quickly, so maybe I missed something), and could only find evidence that she was harshly critical of a Columbia professor, but not that she attempted to get him fired. It's also noteworthy that some or all of her criticism of that professor concerned not his expressed opinions, but the way he (allegedly) berated Israeli students in his classroom.
Ironically, I haven't generally found Greenwald himself to be the most reliable narrator, but that discussion would take us far afield.
Especially when the very arguments they are making- they were recently, actively working against
If I have a documented history of a certain type of bad behavior and turn around to say I’m a victim of exactly that same sort of behavior. If I write a screed about my victimhood it does lie in the background that my own behavior likely seeded the negativity I received in return.
In that sense this goes beyond “ad hominem attack”. The accusation is more accurately that Bari Weiss is a bad faith actor in a system of mutual journalistic integrity, accusing her current colleagues of being bad faith actors. I don’t know if her colleagues are bad faith actors are not but Weiss does seem to be a case of “the pot calling the kettle black” or whataboutism which should be taken seriously rather than dismissed as ad hominem.
Yes! That's why I'm saying it's relevant.
...because that's a bad faith argument. Arguing the arguer rather than the argument is not an honest debate.
I don't care about Wiess specifically - I care, as most here, about the cancer of Cancel Culture.
In any case, a person’s background should be fair to consider when an argument by that person is raised. The anti-pattern is to use that, among other things, at the exclusion of any direct engagement of the argument, as was done by the comment I was replying to.
We are not living in a world plagued by people ignoring the background of authors or the subtext of writing they disagree with, and blindly focusing on arguments. We are living in a world where arguments themselves are routinely ignored by focusing exclusively on their authors and presumed subtext.
Unlike the former scenario, which doesn’t exist from my vantage point, the latter scenario seems more difficult to unwind since it terminates in unfalsifiability. If you stand firm that a certain phrase signals some kind of latent subtext, and that can be used to discredit the whole thing, then that tactic basically results in an equilibrium where arguments can not stand on their own under any circumstance since a clever reframing, which cannot be disproven, is fatal to them.
Context is everything for this discussion, because if you truly don't want there to be such censorship, you have to be aware of the motivations of the people pushing for change at the top now.
Otherwise you just get them running the show again, and you've just rolled back the clock a few decades to a world with a more violent state and a more cheerleading media.
Censorship by the right, and censorship by the left are not the only two exclusive options. Free exchange of ideas in a constructive and respectful fashion should be the ideal.
So be aware of that.
Or, to frame it another way, the people who spent decades saying "We should be allowed to broadcast whatever we want, because we support equality and liberty", and "If you don't like what we broadcast then you can just avoid it", are now suddenly finding themselves drunk on the power that they have gained, and are abusing it in much the same way as the people they were complaining about before.
Who has the TIME? I mean, you have to filter what you choose to think about and engage on. The world doesn't need to pause and refute every stupid opinion someone trots out.
But a lot of people are rejecting such claims on their surface if they come from someone who smoked, or knows a smoker, or was once rumored to have sat in the smoking section of a restaurant 20 years ago. (As if that should be tolerable by anyone other than someone who, in their heart of hearts, is a smoker even if they’ve never actually been seen with a lit cigarette before.)
It's possible that these accusations are true and also that Weiss is a person with a political agenda.
There might be more to this story than Glenn Greenwald frothing at the mouth.
> Wikipedia states 'Massad has characterized Israel as "a racist Jewish state."'
Israel's own definition of self calls itself a "Jewish state" and says that the right to exercise national self-determination there is "unique to the Jewish people", so that "Jewish state" part is correct by definition.
And it defines that Judaism is a race by birthright and not a religion, and it grants special privileges to jews that aren't granted to others and it metes special discriminations against its non-jewish resident minorities, so, without even getting into any discussion of the history of arab-israeli conflict, it's hard to argue seriously with the other part as well.
That is factually incorrect. Conversions apply, in both directions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Massad#On_Israel_and_Zi...
I can’t find the part where she tries to get anyone “fired”. Just claims that she criticized Muslim scholars, and arguing that is automatically racist.
I had a hard time finding direct quotes of the bad things she said, mostly just quotes from others saying how bad she is and how much they don’t like her.
> It’s worth repeating something else Bari Weiss said [in my April 13-19 column, “Columbia Whitewashes“]: “We are doing this because we believe in the rights of all Columbia students to dissent without fear of abuse. Yes, this means for conservative students as well as left-wingers, for Zionists as well as anti-Zionists. . . . Criticizing professors does not violate their academic freedom or stifle debate. It only adds to it.”[1]
That doesn't sound like someone trying to get people fired.
[1] https://www.villagevoice.com/2005/04/19/columbia-the-awakeni...
And how does this contradict the letter?
The cry of 'these people think these things because of groupthink' is so common, and frankly so easy for an individual to believe that I find those claims to be pretty hollow all by themselves.
We live in a world where when we don't hear what we want to hear the common call is to blame 'the system' (whatever it is that is) and anyone who feels that way as being unintelligent, biased, sheep, or whatever the phrases of the moment is. It couldn't be that all these other people just have a POV that doesn't jive with our own could it?
The market would suggest otherwise.
"Normal Americans" don't read the NYT anymore, or WSJ, or the Post, they listen to Joe Rogan on Spotify and Youtube. There's virtually no limit to who Joe will have on his show, and while he's not a remarkable interviewer, he brings the often vital opinions of his guests on all sides of many issues, and he asks sincere questions for hours on end.
Really? This is the first I've heard of the guy, from anyone anywhere on the political spectrum.
Dave Chapelle, too. Comedians are lying to you (mostly), they are regular people trying to figure shit out (often times with you listening at home).
This is why they are popular.
This reads like someone who discovered it because Elon Musk showed up along with a bunch of other celebrities in the last 2 years.
Give it some more time and you'll get over this savant view of Rogan. If anything I'd recommend going back to watching some episodes when it was filmed in his living room, not his millionaire's playground shop
I think you mistook my comment as saying "Joe Rogan podcast is great and everyone should listen." I was only saying that it is a source of "opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere," and that he has obtained a remarkable amount of working class listeners.
He's still going because he has had an independent publishing platform and he's not dependent on a media network to survive. If someone else were to do the same thing.. they couldn't survive.
People paint him that way not because he has them on there, but because he almost always lets them spew their nonsense without any push back because he isn't an actually good interviewer.
The New York times these days has 6 million digital subscribers, that's about six times more than they had in print circulation during their heyday. They've also consistently grown in revenue and are in way better financial situation than they were during the slump a few years ago. So just going by your market story this narrative just doesn't check out. Rogan is doing well, but so is the times. And so is WaPo and the WSJ.
I think it's noteworthy to point out that all the major newspapers have shifted their revenue model towards subscriptions, away from ads. That means there's been a real increase in engagement with readers who pay for content.
"In January 2015, the podcast was listened to by more than 11 million people. By October 2015, it had grown to acquire 16 million downloads a month. By April 2019, the podcast had 190 million downloads a month."
That's a lot higher a number than your NYT 6 million subscribers (-1 as I just canceled in early June after it became clear how far along it is in its transformation into naked narrative-driven agitprop).
The NYT has become a niche market.
But that doesn't say anything about what the NYT has become. They have a larger audience now than they had in the past, and their status isn't just a function of size of viewership.
Pewdiepie has a hundred million subscribers or whatever, does he dwarf the New York times in terms of influence in social or political life? No. The fact that there's a new entertainment personality in mass media doesn't say anything about the state of journalism.
Who knows, though? If people influence opinions, by definition don't they influence social or political life?
He had Stefan Molyneux and Gavin McInees on, and never once challenged them on their white supremacist views.
The point is to hear what his interesting guests have to say, not for Rogan’s take on what he thinks they are saying.
Charlie Rose used to fill that role, until his bad behavior came to light.
Perhaps I should I have just relied on what Twitter and countless parrot sites say about him (try a search on his name). But I didn't.
In https://www.freedomain.com/2020/07/07/what-i-believe-stefan-... I found:
"I do not believe that any race is “superior” or “inferior.”.
"Eugenics is a government program that uses force to control people’s reproductive choices and is utterly immoral."
"Naturally, I oppose all morals and laws that create unjust advantages for either men or women."
and other reasonable statements to which which vast numbers of people would assent.
https://www.freedomain.com/2020/07/07/what-i-believe-stefan-...
Are these the views of a white supremacist? Perhaps he's a secret one for all I know. If so it would be nice if we stopped using gross simplistic labels for people and simply attacked his views head on (if we wish) quoting their actual words and not attributing views to them that they don't appear to hold.
“I don’t view humanity as a single species...” —Podcast FDR2768, “Collective Guilt for Fun and Profit”, Saturday call-in show, August 9, 2014
“The whole breeding arena of the species needs to be cleaned the fuck up!” —Podcast FDR2740, “Conformity and the Cult of ‘Friendship’,” Wednesday call-in show July 2, 2014
"Screaming 'racism' at people because blacks are collectively less intelligent...is insane." —YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“You cannot run a high IQ [white] society with low IQ [non-white] people…these [non-white] immigrants are going to fail...and they're not just going to fail a little, they are going to fail hard…they're not staying on welfare because they’re lazy...they’re doing what is economically the best option for them...you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy.” —YouTube video, The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis, October 4, 2015
“...white people will bend over backwards to accommodate you, but when they finally get that they’re just being taken advantage of...you will see a backlash, and that backlash will be quick, decisive, and brutal.” —YouTube video, The Death of Germany | European Migrant Crisis, September 16, 2015
That's the issue with all of this, people like Molyneux put on a smile and a suit, covering up with vague statements and dog whistles.
> There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
This is what claiming victimhood looks like.
Notedly, political viewpoints are not a protected trait.
If you did that kind of stuff at most places I've worked, you'd get fired for it, regardless of whether it fit the legal definition of "hostile work environment".
If the behavior is because of your race and they aren’t fired, you can (successfully) sue your employer. That’s the difference.
In her letter, she asserts that behavior that fits the first scenario is illegal- it’s not.
Agreed, I only mean it pejoratively inasmuch as the parent ("victim culture that pervades the others") did as well.
That said, she has provided no evidence in this letter, and she is appealing to her identity as a member of a historically oppressed group, so I'm curious as to why her claims of victimhood seem to be believed by people who otherwise tend toward incredulity for such things.
So, intimidation?
For example, I might uncharitably interpret your previous comment.
> it always amazes me when the people who champion "the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society" will also turn around and say something like their political beliefs being mocking by coworkers is "unlawful discrimination".
This appears to mean you think it's perfectly reasonable for a talented Jewish woman to be hounded out of her job by co-workers indulging in blatant anti-semitism with comments like "writing about the Jews again"? Would you support someone who asked a black writer if they were "writing about the blacks again?" No? Why is it OK when it's a Jew then? You appear believe that it is reasonable workplace behavior to call a Jewish colleague "a Nazi". Now, what can I deduce about your attitude to Jews from your support for this behavior? Perhaps your employer should be told about it. Etc, etc.
In Bari's case, she can be simultaneously in favor of free speech but not want to work someplace where she is incessantly criticized or where she lends her credibility to an institution that is ultimately morally corrupt. There's no contradiction here. Specifically, I don't see anything that supports "she wants her detractors silenced by the law". She asks for company policy with respect to social media harassment to apply to those who harass her as it applies to other cases in which she's not the subject of the harassment. This seems like a pretty reasonable policy and one which isn't especially at odds with free speech ideals. I grant that there's a fine line between "harassing" and "criticizing with appropriate respect", and while I think axe emojis and consistent references to her Jewish identity make this pretty clearly a case of harassment, my opinion doesn't matter--what matters is whether the NYT's own standard for harassment. For example, would the NYT consider it harassment if the target were a black progressive instead of a Jewish liberal?
Further, as far as I can tell, this all centers around things she did in college and I'm of the opinion that people shouldn't be faulted for their college antics. Ibram X. Kendi wrote that white people were literally aliens and Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote that "the white race ... is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world" and "the descendants of these savage people ... continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities". The had abhorrent views, and now they're gainfully propagating moderately improved views on an international stage. Perhaps she (like many on this forum and elsewhere in the debate) was still trying to understand the difference between "cancellation" and "criticism"?
In any case, to the extent that she participated in any cancellation, she was wrong to do so.
Not sure we read the same letter. Can you support these assertions based on the text?
> There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong
I don't think this is referring to curbing any specific opinion or view, but rather her co-workers' interactions with her.
Its entirely appropriate to speak out against, say, the pervasive denial of climate change among evangelicals. That said if you have an evangelical coworker that doesn't believe in climate change, you will still be met with repercussions if you go around calling said co-worker a backwards dumbass and repeatedly post ax emojis next to their name in slack.
Also it is worth pointing out that Weiss's job was to voice opinions. It is entirely different for someone in that role to face backlash for their bad opinions than it is for someone in the role of let's say a mid-level software developer.
Illegal is when you call the police. There's lots of behaviors that the employer is better to prevent before you have to call the police. If it rose to the level of illegal, there's a lot of things that already went wrong.
> Weiss specifically called out this behavior as unlawful discrimination.
If she was uniquely subjected to harassing and hostile behavior then it's discrimination, by definition. If that treatment is routine for anyone that dares to voice an unorthodox though in NYT, then it's not discrimination - it's just deeply sick and broken culture.
It could be that she is, not being a lawyer, wrong on the "unlawful" part (it's impossible to know without knowing the details and the NY anti-discrimination statutes and caselaw). So what? It's not an argument in a lawsuit, exact precision of all legal terms is not the most important thing here.
A correct statement, but one that skirts around the issue at hand: in this situation the people berating their evangelical coworker are creating a hostile workplace environment and the company is obligated to take actions to remidiate this situation. If the climate denier points out this hostile workplace behavior, they're not censoring any particular view. Only the hostile actions of their co-worker.
While Weiss' high profile position makes it much more likely to receive public scrutiny, she is indeed entitled to the same workplace protections as a mid level software developer. Working as a columnist doesn't absolve a company of their legal responsibility to curb workplace harassment. Your workplace is a captive audience. What is legal for some random person to say to you is not at all the same standard that is applied to co-workers. Weiss calling this behavior out as discrimination is not calling any particular belief illegal, only the treatment towards her by her coworkers.
I can call a co-worker an idiot and a worthless human being relentlessly, all day long. That's not discriminatory in nature. I'm not referring to a protected class like gender, race, or religion. Does it follow that it isn't creating a hostile workplace?
>Harassment is a form of employment discrimination...
It goes on to say:
>Harassment is unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.
They are defining harassment as requiring the behavior to be based on a protected class and categorizing it as a subset of discrimination. Therefore if a hostile environment requires harassment, it inherently requires discrimination.
And regardless even if harassment does require discrimination, Weiss has grounds to claim it on the basis of religion.
No she doesn't. The harassment isn't due to her religion, it's due to how she conducts herself as part of her job. (and it doesn't meet the line for harassment anyway, people expressing workplace disagreements isn't harassment, as much as she may want to dress it up).
> "Slg is an idiot and a worthless human being who makes the company worse with his or her presence" that's not harassment?
It could be criminal harassment (but even this is unlikely) it is not, however, workplace harassment. Speech protections in the united states are incredibly broad and protect many forms of assholery. This is not news to many people to have been subject to harassment that isn't legally harassment before.
To elaborate, a workplace certainly could take action on such harassment, as they have the right to associate how they please. But they are also free to not do that. And in fact many people face workplace harassment every day, but have no recourse except to suck it up.
Personally, I absolutely support stronger protections for workers, but they don't exist today.
I have not seen a single instance of Weiss being targeted based on religion and Weiss provided zero examples in the body of her letter. Like Weiss, I am also Jewish. Criticizing a Jewish person's political opinions on the state of Israel is not inherently antisemitism. If you can point out a specific example of Weiss being targeted based on her religion, I would concede that I am wrong.
> Harassment is unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.
So, yes, for it to be a hostile workplace under the laws you're talking about, it would need to be based on one of those aspects, not just because people disagree with her opinions.
A shape with four equal length sides is a quadrilateral. Does it mean that a shape with four sides of unequal lengths isn't quadrilateral?
Put this in a more concrete scenario. You have a co worker that stops by your desk every hour and says, "Joshua you are a worthless idiot and your team is worsened by your presence" and relentlessly bullies you throughout the day. Is this not harassment because it isn't based on a protected class like race or gender."
As I said on your other post, this would not be workplace harassment. It could possibly be criminal harassment, but that is also unlikely, since criminal harassment usually requires threats of violence.
Speech protections in the US are strong. I'm surprised people aren't just telling Weiss to "toughen up". Which to be clear isn't advice I'm giving her, and I empathize with her discomfort, but that is the advice given to people very often, so I'm curious as to the inconsistency here. Perhaps it's not as easy to tell someone to toughen up when you see yourself in them.
I’m not sure your mind reading skills are quite up to the job you’ve assigned yourself...
"this behavior" being insults, mobbing and "ax emojis + name", not "disagreement", apparently.
Wouldn't you? And if you don't, why would you draw any line? Why shouldn't it be okay to get beaten up for saying "the wrong thing", it shouldn't be "consequence free speech" after all?
Yet it's ironic because left-wing views were consistently canceled. Even being against the Iraq War in 2003 was considered treasonous for a while.
On February 25, 2003, MSNBC canceled the show.
Soon after the show's cancellation, an internal MSNBC memo was leaked to the press stating that Donahue should be fired because he opposed the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq and that he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war" and that his program could be “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda”.
> others post ax emojis next to my name.
> Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter
From how I read the letter, she's not looking for consequence-free speech. She's looking to not be attacked personally for what are beliefs that are not all that far out there. Since I stopped reading the Times a long while ago for exactly the reasons she stated ("it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers"), I haven't read anything from her before today. From what I can tell, she advances arguments for points of view that are reasonable and that one may choose to disagree with if one wishes, but she has not expressed opinions worthy of threats of violence.
So you failed to cancel your coworkers, therefore you decry being cancelled. (except you weren't you resigned)
From what I have seen, to my surprise, the NYT's opinion section does encompass diverse viewpoints and reports in general are neutral in tone!
Any criticism I have seen of NYT are either nitpicking (example: headline being too moderate) or taking an incident that is outlier and generalising it (example: Editor of opinion section didn't read a controversial opinion piece by a politician before publishing and resigned over the backlash. Instead of viewing it as an one-off incident, it was criticized as NYT not tolerant of diverse opinions).
NYT is not perfect (who else is?) but it is still one of the best organization with highest standards of journalism I have seen.
Most news reports contains statements backed by verifiable sources/references/evidence. In general, a 'news' article is and should be neutral.
A good news outlet maintains that difference. Blurring the lines between the two is an indicator of the organization's bias.
IMO, NYT is one such good organization. That was my point if I wasn't clear!
While some here are debating the credibility of the source (which is understandable), I read this idea in some form approx once a week. That is, it transcends sources.
I find it disturbing and disheartening that little has changed since 2016. One way or another we'll make it through the 2020 election. But 2024 has all the makings on a horror movie.
Heads remain pushed deep into the sand. Symptoms are passed off as root causes. Root cause - who whip up the blame-the-symptoms spin - continue to get a free pass. It's hard to imagine a healthy outcome anytime soon.
Tom Cotton is a senior leader of the ruling party in government with actual powers to trigger and support the kind of violent action his Op-Ed called for. He has power, influence, ability, and his political position is supported by ~40% of the country.
Alice Walker is none of those things, and the percent of people that believe in the lizard Illuminati is somewhere below 40%.
These two things are not like the other.
> the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”;
It...was? The Soviet union was a horrendous system that murdered millions, and was embedded to the core with systemic anti-Semitism.
Yet, when it comes to gender equality they were DECADES ahead of the United States. That's a fact.
It should have been HUMILIATING for the United States to allow the Soviet Union to have the moral high ground on ANY subject.
Instead they just categorized "But you're lynching negroes" as Whataboutism, and a distraction tactic, and continued to lynch negroes.
> the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned;
need to know the details of this...
> and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.
Bari only cares about genocide when it's her people. Typical Conservative.
About 40% of the America seems to still support Donald Trump, under most polls. It certainly isn't true that 40% of the media supports Donald Trump. As an external viewer, it's easy to imagine no-one was ever going to vote for Donald Trump, no-one ever supported him, and no-one supports him today, but that's clearly not reality.
Personally, I'd never have voted for him, but it's hard to understand why many of those who voted for him continue to support him, and it doesn't feel like the media is doing a good job here.
You seem to be missing a substantial portion of American media. You just gotta know where to look. There are far more outlets than the ones that get shared on HN, and something like talk radio is gonna be a complete black hole to the group here.
One of my historical barometers for what right-wing media is saying was talking to my parents and family, since they would try to convince me of the talking points they were hearing from Fox News and AM talk radio, and I'd try to convince them of what I was getting from the NYT or the New Yorker.
But they abandoned Fox News and most of the talk shows they listened to in 2017 because they can't stand Trump (but still yet cannot bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, because abortion). So now all I know is that those were still wildly conservative-leaning and pro-Trump 3 years ago. I'm sure they're still conservative-leaning, but I no longer have as direct a view into if they're pro-Trump.
All this to say, if you’re consuming popular American news sites and TV channels, you’ll see almost nothing that paints Trump in a positive light. The fringe sources typically portray him as the savior America needs.
I’m not a Trump supporter in the least, but I do scan some of the milder fringe sites periodically just to see what the conversation is like there. It’s useful to see what the world looks like through their eyes. But I don’t linger long, because some of it is truly awful.
What if the idea that a fair and balanced press should split equally pro and con is itself a disconnect?
Its my view that 'cancel culture' isn't a new phenomenon; in the past, those with views outside the Overton window were not 'cancelled' per-se, they were instead 'pre-cancelled', by never being allowed to attain prominent statuses in the first place (how many KKK members were members of the NYTimes Op-Ed board; was their exclusion a result of cancel culture?). IMO 'cancel culture' is the effect of the Overton window moving more quickly than in the past, where individuals who have been able to attain prominent positions now find themselves outside the shifted Overton window. So the fact that this is happening to thinkers of prominent status is new, but excluding views outside the Overton window (the fundamental bit) is not.
I draw the distinction, because in my mind there are two debates to be had; (1) cancel culture is a new phenomenon and is anti-ethical to the ideals of free speech that American society has espoused in the past, and (2) cancel culture is not new but instead the Overton window has shrunk, and is shifting more quickly.
Anecdotally I see many arguments that reject 'cancel-culture' with the logic of (1); exclusion of voices/ideas is a result of a new phenomenon ('cancel culture'), and by relying on a large dose of appealing to tradition (America has never "cancelled" voices before) we can therefore reject any exclusion as a-priori wrong. If we argue instead within the context of (2), one cannot say that exclusion of ideas is a-prori wrong, instead one has to defend whether a particular idea deserves to be included/excluded from the Overton window.
Someone mentioned about the annoyance of "tiptoing with certain groups on topics"
Someone responded with " by tiptoeing do you mean 'respecting others opinions'"
It's the lack of ability to have civil discord and respecting other's opinions (even if they're stupid or wrong) that I believe has taken over in society and it's showing a harmful effect. I do have a concern over the publications that we read and I do think that Weiss has a good point, even if his/her contributions, aren't 100% stellar.
I could care less if they're earning less money from it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpurFfcSNfU
If she's not left enough for NYT, then I don't know what is.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-el...
> And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
Was contradicted weeks later [0] and again by the bipartisan senate intelligence committee [1] this year.
Stay for reporting on Stone, which also aged poorly though I can’t blame them for not predicting the future.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-cyber-russia...
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/21/senate-intel-report...
For some reason, people think this "two-sideism" is balanced, fair reporting. That couldn't be further from the truth. Presenting flat earth rantings alongside scientific data showing the earth is round is neither balanced nor fair. It's just nonsense. It removes any signal that exists and brings into question the mental capability of the reporter who thought that such things should be presented in an equal light. The same can be said in this and many other cases, especially when dealing with the president's insane ramblings. Newspapers, if they strive to provide news and not just ad revenue, should be making it clear when the opinions provided by the people they interview are batshit crazy bordering on insane. When Cotton suggests bringing in the army or Trump suggests drinking bleach, those suggestions should be published with a heavy dose of skepticism and context clearly marking them as hateful or wrong. It seems Weiss wants to shirk those duties and just provide readers with a bunch of nonsense that masquerades as a thoughful opinion but is nothing but a hate drive call to violence.
As someone who had to create this second account because I feared stating my politics on my mail account which linked to my work would get me cancelled, I can sympathize with her a bit.
However, I also think she's herself played part in creating the very culture she's complaining about. She claimed to be a "conservative" but she's far from that. Listening her on the Joe Rogan Podcast, she's a liberal on majority of the issues. She seems to be masquerading as a "conservative" imo.
Kind of reminds me of how Tulsi Gabbard was cancelled by the left, the media, censored by Google and smeared by Hillary as a "Russian asset". That's only when Tulsi complained. She never complained when conservatives had been screaming about censorship, media bias and "russian asset" smears for the past 5 years. Seems like people only wake up when the mob comes for their own head.
Those people are here, anonymous votes give them a voice that they are socially being denied.
The first big example of an ideological bias that caught my eye was the NYT "1619 project", which recasts American history as being based on racism rather than principles of freedom. On the face of it, this sounds like an extremist perspective, and indeed the person behind the 1619 project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has had a history of extreme views. For instance she called white people "barbaric devils" (see https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1... for example), and amplified a conspiracy theory that fireworks were a government plan to attack black and brown communities (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/author-of-new-york-t...).
Leaving aside the dubious views of this staff writer, the 1619 project ultimately ignored its own fact checkers (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...), and despite widespread critique of its factual errors (see https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians... or https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Criticism), the NY Times editor in chief brushed off what historians have claimed are severe inaccuracies (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...).
More recently, The Tom Cotton fiasco, documented news room revolts at the Times, and this letter confirm that they are indeed no longer operating as a neutral and trustworthy source of news.
This trend of an ideological takeover by progressives/far left is happening in all major news rooms. Even the Wall Street Journal has its own activism from journalists (https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-newsrooms-face-a-recko...). Gerry Baker, the former top editor at WSJ, was forced to step down to a journalist role, and then just recently, at the behest of his peers and their union, he was forced to move from the news section to the opinion section (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/business/wall-street-jour...). Can you imagine a workplace where your peers openly denigrate your work, attack your character, and alter your career? This is discrimination, even if it is legal.
Unfortunately the far left cohort has turned into an enemy of the freedom of thought and inquiry. We saw it happen at tech companies with the James Damore incident, with repeated walkouts/protests since then, with censorship on Twitter, with demonetization on YouTube, and so on. We have seen it in college campuses over the last decade, with the most recent example being the absolutely unjust forced resignation of Steven Hsu (https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campai...). And we're seeing it in the ongoing campaign to pressure Facebook to censor certain views or lines of inquiry.
All of this is bad for society. The fundamental principles of free speech (going beyond legal requirements) must be defended, neutrality must be upheld in the workplace, and institutions that fail to uphold these values should be outed and abandoned by customers. This includes the NY Times.
1. Team-sports politics and Identity politics are a scourge and cancer used for fundraising, and I despise them.
2. Conservatives have been poisoning public discourse since at least the 1980's with hate and fear (see Rush Limbaugh), and I despise that tactic. I'm sure you can find instances where Liberals have done the same, but it would be VERY hard to convince me that they have done it at the same level of concerted effort.
I think reasonable people should be able to discuss differences, but I fear that any public discussion will quickly drop to rote positions and bad faith assumptions.
What exactly would it take to convince you of that?
Note: Safe spaces, affirmative action, etc do not apply for me personally. While they have at times gone off the rails, they are based on inclusiveness, not hate and fear.
And do you think it's possible for humans to claim they are driven by altruistic, while actually being primarily hateful, deceitful, divisive, and destructive?
Hundreds, at least. It's been a consistent conservative tactic for decades, to the point where it is unremarkable. Unremarkable does not mean acceptable. See also Trump's lies. Trump lies so often that it's not worth noting each instance.
> And do you think it's possible for humans to claim they are being altruistic or inclusive, while actually being primarily hateful, deceitful, and destructive?
Sure, and it's also possible to sea lion a discussion while claiming to be reasonable. http://wondermark.com/1k62/
I judge that based on outcome and intent.
* There's no activity that's safe from racism. Whether you're participating in a hobby, doing your job, or just hanging out with friends, you've gotta keep yourself worried that there might be racism hiding in the corner.
* Racism is almost never benign. If you notice even mild racism, you'd better confront it, because it might be a cover for virulent racists who want to hurt you.
Do you think that's unfair?
If you want more opinions from progressives that feel cancel culture has stifled free speech, is illiberal, and also illogical, listen to the Blocked and Reported podcast: https://barpodcast.fireside.fm/
Very brave people make that, and it's a breath of fresh air.
The most important thing is how this affects your perception of the nyt
Edit hacker News wont let me post anymore right now but the question is if she is right here or not. She doesn't owe you anything just like you dont owe her anything.
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
We're seeing the complaints of people who have lost control over what's acceptable. The people who would've wanted to come for the communists or the homosexuals are now on the wrong end of the prevailing winds, and whether that's "better" or "worse" depends on one's own beliefs on those issues... but it's not so much a societal change as just a window that has moved.
There are books that make convincing arguments that "heresy"-based reactions are ultimately detrimental - such as The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind from a few decades ago, decrying the lack of reason in the American church from an inside perspective - but that example also shows the answer to the "what are the consequences?" question: you get a *very effectively motivated" political constituency.
Is it so bad when anti-racist, pro-fact views are considered orthodoxy?
Every publication has to draw the line somewhere of what the acceptable bounds of discourse are. The NYT isn't going to, and shouldn't, print an Op-Ed defending Nazis. And a lot of conservative positions these days are simply in denial of reality and facts. Do they deserve equal space in the paper? A reasonable, or even "centrist", person will say of course not.
She claims Twitter has become "the ultimate editor" of the NYT. This is such a ridiculous strawman, where do you even start? First of all, there are tons of conservatives on Twitter too. Secondly, the NYT doesn't come even close to the ultra-left-wing voices on Twitter she's presumably referring to. Finally, she says "stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences", but seeing that the NYT is the third-most popular newspaper in the country, that would seem to be objectively untrue or else people wouldn't still be buying it.
If the quality of her analysis in her resignation letter is the same quality of work she was turning out at the NYT, no wonder she wasn't welcomed there.
No it's good, but pro-fact views are going to be anti-racist by default, if the facts are presented honestly. The problem is that NYT more often than not acts allergic to facts that they don't like, creating stories that bend (often already questionable) studies or accounts to fit what their subscribers want to hear.
> Every publication has to draw the line somewhere of what the acceptable bounds of discourse are.
And they also have to follow those rules themselves. Including not doxxing private citizens for zero public benefit, which the heroes at NYT think is a very noble cause. NYT breaks their own 'rules' all the time.
> Finally, she says "stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences", but seeing that the NYT is the third-most popular newspaper in the country, that would seem to be objectively untrue or else people wouldn't still be buying it.
This is the worst logic to go at this issue with. It being the third most popular newspaper has exactly nothing to do with whether or not it has gotten worse or more narrow in appeal. It can get loads worse and still be one of the most popular newspapers, especially since the problems in media exist through practically all major publications. How many newspaper subscriptions do you think the average person actually has?
That doesn't even get into the various negative effects of the subscription model, and the fact that there is an obvious and undeniable economic incentive to manufacture and publish stories that hit with your subscribers. It's true that it has become the standard income method for these companies, but it's hardly any better than clickbait, if not worse.
Could you say the opposite, if you believed it to be true?
There is an submission on HN "Do journalists pay too much attention to Twitter?"
I guess we know Bari Weiss's answer.