Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

[The Duck]

So this has been an incredibly eventful... two days.

Bannon removed from NSC.
Jared Kushner being made responsible for solving literally every problem
Devin Nunes recuses from Russia investigation.
Nuclear option invoked on Senate filibuster.
Summit with China.
Launching of ~50 Tomahawk missiles at an airfield in Syria.

Don't know what to say. I need to lie down forever.

[OblivionKnight]

Well, I sure awoke to a firestorm this morning

[dunie]

So this has been an incredibly eventful... two days.

Bannon removed from NSC.
Jared Kushner being made responsible for solving literally every problem
Devin Nunes recuses from Russia investigation.
Nuclear option invoked on Senate filibuster.
Summit with China.
Launching of ~50 Tomahawk missiles at an airfield in Syria.

Don't know what to say. I need to lie down forever.

^

[The Duck]

So this has been an incredibly eventful... two days.

Bannon removed from NSC.
Jared Kushner being made responsible for solving literally every problem
Devin Nunes recuses from Russia investigation.
Nuclear option invoked on Senate filibuster.
Summit with China.
Launching of ~50 Tomahawk missiles at an airfield in Syria.

Don't know what to say. I need to lie down forever.

^

oh yeah gorsuch is in

[Grefter]

So this has been an incredibly eventful... two days.

Bannon removed from NSC.
Jared Kushner being made responsible for solving literally every problem
Devin Nunes recuses from Russia investigation.
Nuclear option invoked on Senate filibuster.
Summit with China.
Launching of ~50 Tomahawk missiles at an airfield in Syria.

Don't know what to say. I need to lie down forever.

^

oh yeah gorsuch is in

Yeah i agree at least I. The mobile phone era we can post from bed while contemplating our inability to make the world a better place and decide sleep is better than trying to human.

[Shale]

Luckily everyone seems to have agreed that Iraq is just kind of a thing that happened, and Libya doesn't exist, so bombing the Middle East to get rid of a malevolent dictator is a great idea that can only improve conditions in the region!

[Dhyerwolf]

Luckily everyone seems to have agreed that Iraq is just kind of a thing that happened, and Libya doesn't exist, so bombing the Middle East to get rid of a malevolent dictator is a great idea that can only improve conditions in the region!

Plus the previous 50 years of history stretching back to 1953 and Mossadegh at minimum.

[OblivionKnight]

You guys,  don't worry - Trump knows more than our generals, and he has said multiple times that he will handle it.   And there's no one more trustworthy and honestly straightforward than our president.

[The Duck]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/sessions-orders-justice-dept-to-end-forensic-science-commission-suspend-review-policy/2017/04/10/2dada0ca-1c96-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?utm_term=.81d5560578c6
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-jeff-sessions-wants-to-bring-back-the-war-on-drugs/2017/04/08/414ce6be-132b-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html

Jeff Sessions is quietly really odious and unlike many other agencies that are being left to die, he's making a lot of sweeping moves that's going to result in a lot of bad shit domestically.

[Fenrir]

https://www.google.fr/amp/s/thinkprogress.org/amp/p/1655c23a524c

When I thought "respectable american newspaper" my mind always defaulted to the NYT
Not anymore

[The Duck]

New York Times reporters are usually quite good, but the opinion pages have been a shitshow for a long time. Brooks and Douthat are really embarrassing and I don't like Dowd or Thomas Friedman either. Bret Stephens makes that problem worse.

[SnowFire]

Give me a break.  Your average editorial slate of columnists is a mix of viewpoints, left & right.  That is utterly bog standard at most newspapers.  It is in fact the whole point of an opinion section.  The NYT is famous for having a super-duper-liberal slate comparatively.  They have the "problem" that all of the "respectable" conservatives they hired all hate Trump's guts (e.g. Brooks, or Douthat to a lesser degree) and drifted to the center.  Having a "token conservative" so that people feel their viewpoints aren't being entirely shut-out is harmless. 

It and also makes for a better barometer of opposition / support.  e.g., to pick a less contentious time period, if you polled Democrats in both 2004 and 2006 they'd say that Bush sucks and is horrible.  You can't tell the difference.  You need to ask some conservatives to see a drop in Bush support in 2006.  It's the same thing with making a test of all easy questions; you can't tell the difference between the good and the great.

The Washington Post has a similar problem, by the way - they've had *actual* conservatives for a long time being humbly allowed to contribute to their editorials (Will, Krauthammer, Rubin) but all of said conservatives despised Trump, so they're kinda up a creek as well.  Elite conservative opinion & street conservative opinion aren't the same.

--
Basically, the NYT is respectable because of its main newsroom.  The opinion writers are all free-agents who should be judged on their own merits.   This doesn't mean that the NYT is gonna hire idiots for beat reporting.

[Fenrir]

I don't believe in presenting "both sides" when one side ignores all scientific evidence, and I disagree that it is harmless, the NYT legitimizes this view by paying this guy to write an opinion piece

[The Duck]

My problem isn't so much with the different viewpoints involved but rather that the opinion writers are fucking idiots. Stephens would probably be the among the worst of them and I don't see what adding someone whose opinions are afactual and ahistorical does for you. Even being a "climate agnostic" is a ridiculous opinion to have against the preponderance of evidence out there.

[SnowFire]

Two points.

A) My hometown newspaper was run by a conservative, and tended to endorse Republicans a bit more frequently than Democrats.  (Considering they made no endorsement in 2016, when lots of explicitly conservative sources endorsed Clinton...)  Nevertheless, they ran plenty of liberal columnists (well, paid for, small newspapers & all) in their opinion section.  They printed letters to the editors from reasonable people as well as utter steaming idiots.  It was a paper for everyone.  What's the problem with that?  Asking for the NYT to run no conservatives would be like asking for my old paper to run no liberals.  It'd have caused my family to cancel their subscription.  I want conservatives to read the NYT, not the NY Post.

B) One of the most alarming changes in media is partisans only getting their news from one side.  The whole idea of "papers of record" that are a neutral source that tells-it-like-it-is is under threat.  (I know that idea never really existed in the UK, and maybe not so much in France either?  But it definitely did at one point in the US.)  The New York Times editorial section has a reputation as basically being a mouthpiece of the Democratic party.  To the extent that they can have *more credibility* in their statements by including a larger pool of viewpoints, what's the harm?  Or, to put things in reverse, if Devin Nunes says "hey guys Trump is totally innocent", are you lining up to believe him?  But if Devin Nunes and some random Democrat say "hey we looked into this and there wasn't anything there", isn't that at least *somewhat* more plausible, such that even Donald Trump would prefer it?

[Grefter]

NYT not being a main read for me might colour this a bit, but from my experience NYT where it leans left also leans hard into Neo Liberalism, they generally (again my experience) are pretty damned bad on social issues.  They don't lean hard into super racist shit or anything, but they don't push any boundaries on anything primarily socially driven.

[Fenrir]

This doesn't work for climate change because this isn't something you agree with or not. The problem is that this isn't an ideological battle, but a battle between truth and falsehood, and we need some newspapers to at least draw the line at one point

Would you be fine with the NYT hosting an opinion piece about how Pizzagate is true, Obama is actually an anti american muslim, evolution is a lie?
NYT openly hiring a flat earther to write opinion pieces going directly against what the actual journalists have been saying in the same journal? I don't think this makes the newspaper more credible


NYT has been advertising itself as a beacon of truth in the post-truth area and this is pretty messed up.


I read one French newspaper (Le monde) that stays fairly neutral on all subjects and wouldn't stoop that low, and the general public sees it as a mostly neutral newspaper

[SnowFire]

All I can say is: it's the freaking opinion section.  It's supposed to have loons who are Obviously Totally Wrong.  I dunno, it's like complaining about newspaper comics as being Fake and Made Up stories.  Well yeah, that's what they do, they're humor.  (And which writers people think are totally wrong varies.  Also, most people don't "believe in" evolution, and that's just as much a fact.) 

Now, if the NYT hired him to do beat reporting?  Sure, raise the alarm then, but for opinions, no.  (Unless he proves to be a shitty writer, in which case he should be fired on those grounds.)  Put things another way, Will / Krauthammer have been infuriating hypocrites who are ludicrously wrong over at the Washington Post for a long time, and big deal.  I know what I'm getting into if I read one of their columns, and they're decent writers at being wrong usually.

This is kinda random, but you ever read "The Road to Wigan Pier" by Orwell?  It was funded by the Left Book Club, an English socialist organization, but also included some of Orwell's idiosyncratic takes on why socialism hasn't already taken over.  Because the socialist movement was and is endlessly spending time shooting itself in the foot by Socialist A and Socialist B accusing each other of lack of purity, or not understanding the meaning of "diacletic" in the same way and thus being a class-traitor or some such, the editor, Victor Gollancz, put in a ludicrous (but very sincere!) prologue talking about how while he doesn't agree with everything Orwell says, it's a really good work, and only the worst kind of fascism could have an "official platform" where any deviation is forbidden, so I'm publishing it anyway, and please don't get mad at me fellow socialists because Orwell dared say something bad about the current socialist movement tactics.  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier  if you're curious in more.)  It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to include multiple points of view.

[Grefter]

Broadcasting multiple ideas in your content is fine, there is a bundle of other reasons to publish Orwell at the time, some of which is just moving copies.

The difference between a socialist publication publishing a dissenting but still socialist author is an ocean apart from picking up a paper with the NYT branding all over it and pushing the Opinion that the earth is flat and fossil fuels are put in the ground for us to use however we see fit.

Orwellnis still on brand and on message to some degree at least there, if NYT is actually progressive then posting something rooted completely polar to their beliefs is counter productive at best or as I take it, a sign that they aren't as progressive as they talk.

Edit - this same critique goes out stronger to Forbes and its blog section.
Is there room for conservative writers in the publication?  Sure,  throw in some talk about how the rust belt voted for conservative candidates over economic frustration or whatever, but you are still being judged by the message you are providing a platform for.

[Ranmilia]

https://crimethinc.com/2017/01/26/this-is-not-a-dialogue-not-just-free-speech-but-freedom-itself

Now THIS is fairly partisan ranting but includes a lot of accuracy for how I feel here.  Also, agree with everything Fenrir said.  Climate change denial, Holocaust denial, these are not viewpoints and a newspaper is not stronger for including them.  Not even in the opinion section.  The same people who are dumb enough to believe that stuff are also the people who do not mark any meaningful difference between "It was in the NYT!" and "It was in the NYT Opinions section!"  If it was in the publication at all, that's a legitimization, and the use of legitimizations like this is a deliberate tactic employed by the alt-right to spread and normalize their falsehoods.  Newspapers have a duty to not print falsehood, even in opinion sections.  Opinions can, in fact, be wrong.  I am deeply disappointed in the NYT for doing this.

[Shale]

Publishing "opinions" that are in fact just lies goes a long way toward legitimizing the idea that you can decide what facts you want to be true and proceed from there.

[Cotigo]

snowfire i am here to add to the voices telling you you are wrong but fenrir/alex/shale kinda already covered me on the details, so here's some bad poetry

"It's the opinion section they can do what they want"
Ignoring editorial culp-a-bility
The opinion section of the New York Times,
Shouldn't look like the comments you read on line.
The whole point of an established news source
Is to filter out fact based opinion and to have recourse
If the writer's just a lying sack of shit.

[NotMiki]

Publishing "opinions" that are in fact just lies goes a long way toward legitimizing the idea that you can decide what facts you want to be true and proceed from there.

[SnowFire]

I dunno if the meter scans on that, Zenny.

(also also obligatory "the NYT opinion slate is erratic" in that I agree Dowd & Friedman are way too one-note, Douthat & Brooks are flakes, etc.  Mixing 'em up on those grounds would be fine.)

There's lots of areas where there's some weird viewpoint that's totally right but only 5% of people agree with, and that includes you-the-person-reading-this-right-now, and it's super-bad if you can't publish that because everyone else thinks you're really wrong.  This means that some people will be published who actually ARE really wrong, rather than ahead of the curve.  Like...  we've got socialists here, right?  Would you think it would be fair if you got a job writing editorials?  Because I can find you some obligatory conservatives who would hate on such views just as hard as we (rightly) hate on climate change deniers...  they can and *do* whine when leftists get such positions.

If conservative papers stopped running liberal editorials because they're "just wrong" and "legitimizing" liberal views, it'd be bad times.  If the cost of avoiding that is running the occasional idiot conservative to laugh at in liberal papers to burnish the idea that everyone deserves to have a say, I'll pay it.

[Ranmilia]

Climate change denial is not a conservative political view.  It is not a political view at all.  It does not become a political view entitled to the same protections of equal expression as other political matters just because some number of people say that it is and will whine if it doesn't get equal treatment.  It is not, and cannot ever be, comparable to advocating a particular structure of government, because it is a matter of fact rather than opinion.