They don't think it sucks and they think they are prophets. The problem isn't the times. Its the people. Its the end result of decades of academic brainwashing.
There has never been a government in history that didn't use propaganda. The novel idea in the west used to be that the press would sift through the bullshit, and build its own narrative. The NYT and the rest of the MSM is more Pravda than media. The danger here was clear when Trump was in office. Their response to the response to Trump was predictable.
Trump is like the dude throwing the hammer at the giant head in the famous Apple 1984 commercial-and that’s literally what he is-an orange brick hurled by the populace-nothing intellectually deeper, in and of itself.
Agreed. The Left has been extremely patient, waiting a whole generation for its brainwashing to take place. It's now becoming effective and infiltrating society as a whole. My question is why some of us, going through that same educational process, didn't fall for it. To say we're just smarter is a little too self-serving. There have be some attributes of people who refuse to fall for the narrative and continue to be able to be skeptical and thing for themselves. This would make for an interesting study.
I think they are trying to ascend, and to take advantage of the duress that the nation is in to finally accomplish another major step function in their perennial agenda. Their mandate was 'not Trump', nothing more, but have taken the despicable measures to make fundamental change, when all we really wanted was just a little rest.
You are onto something. Trump was the cataclysm that fueled progressives to go for the Green New Deal (now BBB) The cataclysmic part was driven by the media and permanent government. Much the same happened with George Floyd, which Black Marxist used to push Defund and CRT.
Interestingly, the movements are failing because of overreach. They have scared America. But Republicans will fuck it up by trying ban abortions or make everyone buy a gun. AOC will be back.
They done it. 20-30% are zealots for a zeitgeist. 50% fall in inline, 30% resist. Its about the same every single time this happens. Even when the "cult" is liberty.
I think that some people are less susceptible to trusting "authority" in general, while others give whole hearted loyalty to those who society has told to trust as an authority on truth.
Since most of those who don't question the narrative are middle class white folks with some college, they have likely lived fairly privileged lives insulated from the social and political failings that effect the less privileged. Therefore, when media describes reality a certain way they have no first hand experience to compare it to.
The difference may be learned or it may be dispositional, or some combination of the two. I'm no renegade, but sometimes I just can't swallow the medicine (poison).
Part of it is being smarter. Another part is having been exposed to writing reports and reviews from actual books as opposed to clickey-dickey online content. I was a student of history from an early age. It started with WW2 history. Then I read "The Gulag Archipelago" (both volumes) in high school. Talk about innoculation from propaganda!
In all seriousness, if a diary had been stolen and taken across state lines, I might actually support the idea of a search warrant. But that's not what happened.
I'm rather inclined to believe the diary was just as authentic as the explosive devices the FBI hands out to the dupes of it's confidential informants (or undercover agents).
I had to look up misprision of a felony (one of the charges), which leaves one wondering what was the underlying felony being covered up? There has to be a predicate offense or that charge (as obscure as it is) simply has no meaning.
I'm curious to read your and other commenters' take on an observation I have. While NYT, WaPo, The Atlantic have had a clear shift in the past 20 years to producing narrative-driven, untrustworthy news, while the WSJ and FT pretty much remain the same products they were 10 and 20 yeas ago. The WSJ and FT are not without flaws, but those flaws are the same flaws they have always had (e.g., WSJ legal reporting is atrociously shallow, FT reports every financial story from the hair-on-fire perspective of a 10:1 leveraged rates trader). In other words, unlike the NYT and WaPo, which were always politically biased but which evolved to become almost caricatures, the WSJ and FT don't seem to have become more overtly political in recent years. What accounts for this difference in trajectory?
1. Ownership by a media mogul that employees have no reason to believe will reward them for pushing dishonest DNC narratives?
2. Proactive, top down policy decisions to avoid hiring those type of journalists in the first place?
3. By virtue of skewing towards business readers, their subscription base was always more politically heterodox and the journalists temper their own political passions accordingly without any need for top-down pressure to do so?
4. They have a more viable economic model (pricier subscriptions, complementary financial products, data feeds and income streams), reducing employee angst and the need to generate fake outrage?
5. Perhaps you reject the premise of the question and think they have become more overtly political?
My guess: financial news audiences need to hear real news, for practical reasons. They are not great at covering finance-sector corruption, and flatter that sector way too much, but their readers trade on both sides of the rest of the news, so they get a clearer picture of that reality.
The kinds of stories that inform investment decisions are (largely) not the kinds of stories where liberal bias and media narratives would influence the reporting, whereas there are whole sections of the WSJ that are really just straight coverage of news and politics that (largely) are not being used by anyone in formulating investment decisions. I mean, there's no investment decision reason for WSJ's coverage of, say, immigrant kids in cages not to be as misleading as the NYT's coverage.
Regarding financial industry corruption, the WSJ breaks more accounting fraud stories than any other publication. You may not want to credit their reporters with all of that, but they are undeniably the paper of record for those with financial fraud allegations to leak to. From Enron, Adelphia, 1MDB, executive options backdating scandal, to Theranos. FT broke Wirecard. Your objection is that, as a finance industry outsider, you see malevolence in a lot of mundane industry practices and want people in the industry to see it the way you do. But they don't.
FT and WSJ are the only traditional media subscriptions I still keep. This despite my being 180 degrees off the editorial slant of the WSJ. The NYT went from being an unctuous mouthpiece of the establishment to a lying propaganda rag unctuous mouthpiece of the establishment. As you say, the Journal is the Journal, yea for corporate sociopathy and all that -- but relatively transparent in their biases. Your take on FT is funny, and true.
I've always thought it's because making money trumps yay-team politics among their readers. Their readers want to know what the passage of a bill truly means -- so they can try to make a buck.
I think that's true, of course, but articles about company earnings, FICC price moves etc. aren't really the types of articles where political bias or dishonest narratives appear in the first place and the types of stories where political bias would tend to influence the coverage aren't really the type that inform investment decisions.
WaPo and the NYT have not only gone for the clickbait/outrage model, but have implemented it in the worst possible way: by hiring the "true believers" of the culture war, thereby giving them unwarranted credibility and damaging both the nation and the mental health of their readers.
A newsroom full of black-pilled cynics whoring themselves out for mediabux would be much preferable, and provide better content. (though I'm pretty sure they (and others) employ a few of those to this day.
One difference is that the WSJ has always had a paywall that they tried to make somewhat serious, and so couldn't compete to chase clicks/social media links.
This is actually a very valid point. I don't know whether that is cause or effect, but it is undeniable that, while the WSJ official twitter account itself actively tweets WSJ stories, the individual reporters do not have the heavy twitter presence that NYT and WaPo reporters do. I am a twitter user and it's odd that I never noticed that until you mentioned it. Even Matt Murray only posts like once a week. Mattioli is a seldom user except to retweet her friends' stories. Restuccia, one of their White House reporters, just tweets WSJ stories without comment. Lovably, Paul Gigot isn't even a blue check. Holman Jenkins hasn't tweeted since 2017. Hunh.
I try not to look at Twitter at all but I sometimes fail. It is funny to me that MT's account is mostly "Hey, I posted a new article on Substack" or "There's a new Useful Idiots" -- leading one to believe that it is, appropriately, run by an intern -- but then the man himself will manifest to argue with some troll buried deep in the comment thread.
WSJ has been on my sketchy list ever since a few years back when they put out a terrible hit piece on PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg). I had no idea who he was at the time and had never seen any of his content, but I ended up looking into it and realizing that it was utter garbage and obviously deliberately misleading, not just an accident of bad journalism. He's an independent creator with a huge amount of followers and influence, so I guess they see him as a threat to be taken out.
I've noticed this as well. Many of their news reporting is starting to have a serious progressive bias; I've just been able to pick out language, wording, etc. You develop a knack for this after reading a lot of WaPo and NYT articles.
I'm almost always interested in stories about willful deception by journalists (prosecutors too!), so part of me wants to research what PewDiePie is and the nature of the controversy. But then I re-read the name PewDiePie and another, bigger part of me decides that, actually, I don't.
I can't fault your reasoning, but PewPewDie was (maybe still is?) a fairly influential person. I recall reading that at least for a year or so he was the most viewed person on youtube. Maybe longer. I'm not a fan and don't know much about him other than that. I might go look up the WSJ story on him myself.
Interestingly, this is my teenage son's one datapoint on the WSJ. He just assumed it was a Buzzfeedesque scandal-for-the-clicks outlet, given that the only story he had ever heard of from them was about something he could tell from his own knowledge was nonsense.
When a news outlet lies about a thing that you know well enough to know it's a lie, why would you trust them on the things you don't know?
In this case, PewDiePie has over 100 million YouTube subscribers, and any of them familiar with his content knew it was all garbage. So this one incident probably woke up millions of young people to the untrustworthiness of all the news outlets that tried to smear him.
The Economist remains as essential as ever. It wears its bias on its sleeve as it always has, so you can filter it correctly.
The WSJ has become my go to paper for US news after they cleverly lured me in with a discounted subscription. I think their readership drifted slightly left after the educated class abandoned the GOP, so they had to move to the center as well. Or I am just becoming more conservative/pragmatic. Probably a bit of both.
I still subscribe to WashPo, mostly for sentimental reasons. There are a few times in history when they really stood up to government overreach (Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden, e.g. ?) and I am sure they still have the backbone to do that, so they deserve my support.
Plus I get a kick out of their reporting everytime one of the treasonous Jan. 6 crowd gets justice served, though I have discovered following the WUSA9 newsfeed is more viscerally satisfying as every single plea and conviction comes to my inbox. Highly recommended, if you are into that sort of thing.
Have you read a word by Glenn Greenwald since Snowden? I suspect not. The paper is a mouthpiece for the securities agencies, as Greenwald has exhaustively documented.
I follow Greenwald on Twitter. 90% of the time his Tweets are of the stunning news that Biden is old. Boooring.
The rest of the time he is chasing some conspiracy theory. Read Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman (formerly of the WashPo) if you want a more credible account of the Snowden affair.
Greenwald is mostly a blowhard tooting his own horn.
They are sure doing a shitty job of touting for the NSA and CIA. I can give you dozens of links where they blow the horn on the Security Community misdeeds.
>> I am sure they still have the backbone to do that, so they deserve my support.
Why do you assume that? Jeff Bezos is trying to win a ten billion dollar contract with the Pentagon. You seriously think his paper will back the next Snowden?
>> Plus I get a kick out of their reporting everytime one of the treasonous Jan. 6 crowd gets justice served
Not true. I've been reading it daily since the late '80s, and was a fairly sophisticated news consumer by the late '90s. Sure, you can find individual stories with this or that uncharacteristically partisan slight (either direction, I would add), but overall, I really don't detect any obvious change in the general tenor of reporting by the WSJ, either since Murdoch bought it in 2007, or more recently. I assume that the WSJs 20-something no-name reporters are basically the same type of people as at NYT and WaPo. But maybe not. I have to admit, I really don't personally know young reporters. I just know the product.
Matt, as I read this I couldn't help but wonder if you've watched or attempted to watch that Showtime doc THE FOURTH ESTATE, which was made to reflect the "inner workings" of the NYT in the aftermath of the Trump election. Calling it cringeworthy doesn't begin to describe how awful and embarrassing it actually is.
No wonder "Jill hates video"; who could blame her?!?
I think if Substack upped its game for comments using these examples there would be joy. BTW, in all the articles abt. Substack I have not seen the comment section discussed. I wonder if the msm even understands the role these play in keeping subscribers. In olden days I would try to comment at NYT or WaPo and was often moderated and I am hardly what anyone would call controversial. Was usually making a book recommendation or something librariany (am a librarian). That is their ex-cathedra mentality, I guess.
O, what a show off. How do you do this? Can you send me a message how to do this? I'm a librarian and if I could make italics in book titles in comments I would be over the moon. I honestly get a panic attack when I can't italicize a book title.
There are a gazillion out there. Try http://eder.us/unicode.php or just Google "unicode generator." Using HTML markup will usually NOT work because HTML formatting tags are typically removed when the comment is processed. This is done for security reasons beyond the scope of this comment.
Can someone please explain why it is "not done" to just delete a comment and repost with the edit? Even perhaps explaining in the reposted post that it is an edited version.
It _*is*_. But it's a pita, confusing, and somebody may already be reading, liking or commenting the one you delete. It's a crappy laborious workaround that doesn't work properly.
I did it with my post about rent extraction on this thread an hour or so ago. Fiasco. I ended up with three comments all the same. Deleted one of them and then they were all gone. Had to start over. Substack's comments app sucks but it's good enough for them so we're the ones that have to suck -- it up!
Here's an idea for the members of the corrupt MSM. How about asking Substack subscribers why they are willing to subscribe to, in my case, multiple Substack newsletters. I'm doing it with money I used to spend on traditional news sources. We, the readers, the news consumers, your customers, are not stupid. Your corruption is obvious and insulting. I have more respect for the PRAVDA writers. They had a gun to their heads. You MSM clowns all use the same words and phrases on the same day to describe some new threat to your comfy jobs or your political bosses comfy jobs. Won't one of you come clean and tell us exactly how that happens.You have no integrity. I feel like I'm being harangued not informed. You act like a holy priesthood that must not doubted. We overthrew one priesthood several hundred years ago and with the help of Matt and Glenn and Bari and Michael and others we will do it again. So FU and that over priced useless degree you'll never pay off. We, the readers, are tired of being told what words we can't use or what ideas we can't express. We're tired of being told what to think by people who were indoctrinated not educated. Please get out of the bubble and talk to people before it's too late. There are some pretty smart people out here with dirty hands who built everything around you and keep it all running. Their are folks who have devoted their whole life to protecting you. How about thanking them instead of deploring them. They make your easy life possible. How about thanking them for their service to society now and again. Read like your life depended on it. You might rediscover a new/old idea. I'm sure others here can add to the list. You won't beat the Substack bull pen (there I said it) any time soon with the same old play book that's ruined the formerly admired profession of journalism. Show some integrity, honesty and independence for a change. And Je_us Chr_st stop being such assholes.
Your observation that the media utilizes the EXACT same language and phrases over and over has always struck me like actors reading a script. The facial expressions and histrionics have a rehearsed faux stink about them also.
The way they all swarmed the Covington kids with vitriol and almost a bullies glee was the last straw for me. Although I smelled a foul stench from them for years I was sickened by their actions and false reporting about some high school kids being racists and aggressing against a poor naive American. After the facts came out few if any of the bullies and physical cowards in the MSM even acknowledged their disgusting actions. That was the end for me with these soulless evil excuses for human beings. Day after day with their arrogant, smirking distortions of the news and self aggrandizing drivel just provokes the massive, and justified, hatred now directed against them from every corner of American society. They are considered by most citizens lower than the most despised segments of our nation.
Not $250 K it was MILLION!!. WAPO 250 Million , CNN 275 Million. They all settled for an unknown amount but you can be sure it was tens of millions. They didn't learn shit though. If Rittenhouse gets off, his lawsuits could bankrupt some news organizations, commentators and maybe even Biden. I do not want to go down a Rittenhouse rabbit hole , I am merely using him as an example of blanket coverage making defaming comments without evidence or a judgment being rendered yet.
$250k is a drop in the bucket to a large corporation. If each company made more money in ratings than they lost in lawsuits then why would they stop? It's just a cost of doing business.
“Those with zero legal experience (as far as I can tell) should not be conjecturing on lawsuits they know nothing about,” said attorney Mark Zaid. “What kind of journalism is that?”
“I’ve litigated defamation cases. Sandman was undoubtedly paid nuisance value settlement & nothing more,” he added.
Tens of millions? Got a source for that? Or even a similar settlement so that we can reality check that number? I think they would not settle for more than the legal cost of defense.
And the WaPo, and NBC and the low life of media liars, Savannah Guthrie personally for an undisclosed amount… she admonished Sandmann on live TV knowing at the time, that he had not done any of the things she was shaming him for…
Bet more Black thugs and gangsters murder Black children without accountability than all the cops over the last ten years put together. That political meme is just statistically unsupportable. Most all cop shootings are public knowledge and open to scrutiny. Even one is one too many but the perception projected by the media is a fantasy.
Cops who shoot suspects dead have to be investigated by other cops, often their buddies. The real numbers of shootings of unarmed suspects is much higher than reported.
My Dad was a probation officer and he knew of cops who kept a handgun with the serial numbers filed off in case he needed it. Another one who kept a bag of coke for the same reason. If you think cops don't plant evidence you are living in lala land.
No sense getting into an extended back and forth about the need for reform and the extent of investigations by elected prosecutors after every police shooting.
The quality and depth of these investigations varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and does allow for cover-ups and poor work by reviewers. But DEAD bodies with gunshot wounds are accurately counted and they don't reach even a fraction of the numbers being bandied about by politically motivated individuals and organizations. And YES there are some very bad police officers who with criminal intent do cover-up their activities. But this idea of a large part of over 800,000 law enforcement officers actually hunting and wantonly killing innocent Back men is a weird fantasy since the actual body count is no where near what is being assured or would be a reality if this were true.
ONE is one too many but there are too many politically motivated demonstrations about legal and justified utilization of deadly force by a single P.O. who never fired his weapon or had any indication of past bias. It is as if there is the new standard -- guilty until proven innocent and even if justified someone must still pay. Courts don't count and it becomes the mobs choice like a Roman Emperor. Thumbs up or down.
Everything you say is true. The number of Black people (almost all men) shot by the police is in the low hundreds. That is not disputable.
What is often bandied about is that the number of unarmed Black men shot by the police is often stated as being a dozen or so. This number is bullshit.
A fine and well-deserved 𝑐𝑟𝑖 𝑑𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑒𝑢𝑟. I recently saw a "newswoman" interviewing some Senator and he was trying to explain what parents object to in the curricula their children are being taught. And she just said "Well, CRT is not being taught in the schools", and he was ready with quotes, examples, even receipts from payments to various Kendi/DiAngelo-inspired grifting consultancies. With each bit of evidence, she could only repeat "But...it isn't being taught.". And then to every subsequent bit of evidence contrary to her mantra, she just repeated it over and over.
By the end, she was kind of flustered. She KNEW she had just spouted contrafactual nonsense in response to real-world evidence...but still, somehow, that was all she was able to say. It was creepy, but also kind of funny.,
𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡'𝑠 where they are at. I cannot imagine this ending well, mental-heath-wise.
It is being taught. And it is a Marxist academics project. The goal is to "get'em young" so they can teach them class consciousness and teach them to be angry so they will have recruits later. Occupy was their previous 'big project'. And I have direct knowledge (that no news media were ever interested in) that the purpose of Occupy protests was to get the "bourgeoisie" to be angry enough to take up arms. I listened to two of the top people talk about how hard it was to deal with all those irritating people presenting solutions to problems. They would isolate such people with their cadres.
I marched in civil rights marches as a kid. I was interested in Occupy, and in the thick of it at UC Davis. But the core of this is vicious and evil. I evaded one of them, and enforcer, when he came after me because they knew I overheard.
One guy had a nice beard, in his later 20's. The other was a Bakunin wannabe with a shaved head and heavy boots. Looked like he lifted. The were talking Marxism-Leninism when I started paying attention. They were drinking beer after dinner. The bearded guy was talking about teaching revolutionaries in Nepal Maoist tactics. (I know all about those. Kill the police, any officials, teachers and doctors. This puts the people in your power.) I started trying to see if I could surreptitiously record them, but thought better of it.
Then conversation turned to why the "guy from headquarters in New York" Mr. shaved head and boots was there. The top guy wanted to know how to replicate the fabulous success at UC Davis. It was like listening to Marxist revolutionaries run by Wall Street, just like this article by Matt Taibbi. The same mentality - find the secret sauce.
The bearded guy, a grad student in the philosophy department, complained about how hard it was to stop solutions from emerging. He spoke disparagingly of how bourgeois the population of Davis is. They talked about how hard it was to get people angry enough to take to the streets with arms. They discussed his ratios of cadre agents coordinated with group texts to size of crowd. This was how they engineered "consensus" with the hand-waving thing.
Around this time, Mr. Shaved-head and Boots took notice of me. They got up and went outside. There was a table and chairs outside the front window on the porch, next to the door. Mr. Shaved-head and Boots sat facing toward the door and watched me while they continued to talk. I spent about 20 minutes working, and then decided I should leave before they did. I wasn't liking the situation or his observing me.
I packed up my computer, and went out the door, walking briskly, making noise. I turned right at the sidewalk, walking towards town. I expected Mr. Shaved-head and Boots to come after me because their opsec was compromised. So I took evasive action and hid where I could watch. Sure enough, about 15 seconds later, Mr. Shaved-head and Boots went by on the sidewalk, scanning around, walking fast. Beard kid went the opposite direction. Mr. Shaved-head and Boots went off into the dark, cold evening with a bit of fog. The streets were dark and deserted. A perfect evening to take someone out.
I looked up and saw Mr. Beard come in. I took a picture of him with my cell phone. He ordered his coffee, then he carefully turned around to scan the room. He saw me and jerked. Walked into the back toward the bathrooms and never came back. There is a door back there. He left his coffee after paying.
They plant their asses in seats at coffee shops. Good for the coffee shops.
I continue to be fascinated by this trotting out of Marx as a circus bugaboo, like the Bearded Lady or a bear riding a unicycle. Dude been dead for almost a sesquicentennial; he ain't doin' nothin' to nobody. But to hear the rhetoric, you would think he is The Spectre Haunting Western Civilization and he must be expurgated in the name of all that is good and holy.
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing. I've known for a long time that some of these disruptive protests are well-organized at the top, but it's very interesting to hear details.
It sounds like the guys you witnessed were very much revolutionary idealists. I wonder how--or whether--this gels with the popular narrative that OWS was heavily infiltrated by feds, who ultimately used identity politics to make neuter the movement and help keep the rabble divided.
If you have a link to that interview I would love to see it. Not surprising though: they have (and / or believe in) a narrative and they are not going to let reality get in its way. Adversus solem ne loquitor.
Legacy media on the whole, has turned into a pious religious zealot who sees everyone who might have a different opinion than their own as heretics and infidels, sadly.
they do have a proverbial gun to their head. If you seek truth (e.g. the completely discredited Russia collusion/Steele Dossier) and expose it in the traditional newsroom, or on twitter let's say, you'll be tied to a wheel, set on fire, and rolled down Park Ave. Your career is over. Unless you have a real voice and can move to substack and make a living there.
RT is really very good. Way, way, post Pravda. BTW - Pravda writers found ways to tell their readers the truth. There's a great deposition by Mitrohkin in a US court about understanding a signature evaluation from an FSB graphologist. He said, "You must pay attention to what he does not say." The guy never actually said, yes, it is the signature of Mr. Konaynikyne.
THANK YOU! My message to MSM: You’re just not all that, not even close, so stop thinking you are , you’ve met your offensive quota, we disqualified your lot long ago. And look after your fragile associate, Nicole Wallace, she’s about to lose her shit.
" If they really wanted to wipe us out, of course, they could just put out a New York Times that sucked less. In a million years, that won’t occur to them." "the overall quality level of mainstream news plunged so low so long ago, audiences were starved for anything that wasn’t rancidly, insultingly dishonest."
Heh. Kind of the same thing among the Morally Better/So Much Smarter ilk in all sections of society. They get angry at people getting the attention they think they should get, so they lash out ("ban Dave Chappelle!" "outlaw Fox!") instead of look inward at why no one wants to read their newspaper, laugh at their "comedy," trust their credentials, be around them...the people I encounter like that in life increasingly shriek that they're "experts" while saying some of the most absurd things and sneering at others in their increasingly impenetrable bubble of self-righteous cluelessness. The collective delusion is so, so tiresome.
Our elites used to be better right? I ask seriously. During even times like the gilded age, I’m not crazy in thinking they at least had some class or sophistication that modern elites are bereft of? It’s wasn’t that they just had better control of the narrative and flow of information, but that they were better?
It’s a question I ask myself because I’m shocked at how unlikable, and pathetic, the modern elite has become. I guess there could have been elites like this before, who were completely out of touch and lacking any honor, in France right before a certain revolution. Or at least that is one plausible theory if our elites really are as bad as I suspect.
Yes. Of course. I can’t stand when people answer questions like this with cynical aphorisms and personal anecdote to feign wisdom.
Rich elites have always done terrible things. But sometimes certain circumstances have restrained them.
For example, a sense of obligation, family and otherwise. Read Andrew Carnegie or any of the Roosevelt. Regardless of whether you agree with their specific acts and beliefs (you won’t), you cannot deny they were concerned about morality, God, family, community, values like hard work and courage, etc. alongside the worship of mammon.
Also, after the War, the rich felt just a tad chastened. The Depression had flattened wealth quite a bit. The War had demanded sacrifice from all. Wealthy families had seen powerful elites in other countries brought low by defeat or revolution. They had less power in a more equal society and also felt pressure to be quiet about the power they had.
Then there was the explosion of narcissism chiefly driven by affluent young people starting in the late ‘80s, particularly affecting women.
Also, a particularly childish brand of atheism triumphed without bothering to erect any new moral universe in its place, leaving society vulnerable to both nihilism and fanaticism.
So yes, Virginia, the rich were different once. Once they faced limits. Now they have none.
Those limits will be imposed, one way or another (this isn’t some veiled intention, just the laws of nature).
When new atheism came around I was sold. Now I’m kind of embarrassed to consider the moral superiority I felt then. Now I’m even considering religion where I had not before as I live around enough religious people and I can say that I see something good there that I don’t see in the people that are like myself a decade or so ago (some religious people can be the worst, there is and always will be a lot of grift in those circles, but I see genuineness in the most practitioners). Regardless, I see the same result of the atheism movement as you do and I wonder if the people most associated with it question themselves at all.
When I was in college, open adult atheists had spent more time thinking through the moral dimensions of their convictions than any random pew-warmer ever had. Now it’s mostly memes and emojis. Hardly enough to separate man from beast.
It’s clearly not working for them either. Hence the triumph of the woke cult.
One of the simple observations that really changed my outlook to religion is just asking who would help me and my family if I need it among my neighbors? The answer was, and this has since been confirmed many times over, the neighbors who were religious (and really I mean Christian since I don't have any other religion represented that I'm aware of). I want to live in a culture and community that helps each other out and values families. I looked for it within atheism but while there was plenty of philosophy that demonstrates that religion is hardly a prerequisite to these values of kindness and charity, and often times distorts it (this is the moral superiority I was talking about), my real world efforts to find it have largely been in fruitless.
I certainly don't believe you have to be religious to be a good person, I mean I personally try to go out of my way to help my neighbors, but I do think if you value strong social cohesion in your community then the community might have to be religious. In other words religion scales while atheism does not. That hardly means that Jesus is the Christ, etc, etc, but it does mean something.
Along your point, atheism's problem to me is they demonized traditional religion to the point that now people have adopted perhaps the least scalable worldview in woke-ism when they found atheism doesn't provide meaning both personally and within a community.
No doubt. John Rockefeller is the Howard Zinn lib punching bag. What did he do-put some damn efficiency in a chaotic industry and then give most of his profits to charity. Oh, and he sometimes worshipped at black churches and gave the seed $$ to start Spellman College-it’s named after his wife. Dude was as non-racist as anyone in the 19th century
No, I'm pretty sure they always sucked. Opposition parties are separated in Parliament by a specific width calibrated to the length of a sword, specifically to stop them stabbing each other in the days when, you know, it was normal to carry swords around all the time.
Some of the 'elites' greatest hits in the 20th century:
1. World War 1, a Great War in aid of a cause so moral it requires a textbook to explain and even then you won't understand it.
2. World War 2, another Great War, this time the motivation was so simple it could have come straight out of a Marvel comic book yet somehow enough elites thought this was a good idea that it took the combined efforts of the entire Anglosphere to put them back in their box.
When you factor in war things do become more clear. I was thinking they at least built institutions but then the modern university is largely to serve the interests of power and not otherwise (same as media and that doesn’t even get into the cia). Well they at least presented better than our modern elites. They at least had a modicum self respect and stoicism.
The romanticized idea of the truly superior, noblesse oblige, aristocracy comes from an age when the elites were far better educated than the peasants. This made them much more secure and put them in a position where they could actually benefit the rest.
That's all flattened now due to technology. So all we have is concentrated money at the top.
Well, you know the East Coast Rich Intellectual Liberals Bill O'Reilly used to fly off the handle at? My (ex)Partner and I got to have dinner with them one night, because she was speaking at some school in Boston the next day. They pretty much pretended we didn't even exist throughout cocktails and the subsequent meal. We wondered why they bothered inviting us at all....
Sadly, Billo was right - they truly are every bit as self-righteously puffed-up, and out of touch, as he claimed they were. It really peeved me, since I hate giving that lot credit for anything.
I didn’t watch bill or Fox News. I was the NYT reader that was sure ever word printed was the Truth (or a close approximation). That’s an interesting experience. I can’t imagine being closed off like that yet they often claim to be doing things for the people they are closed off to.
Well, they are bound to hit a target once in a while, if only by accident. It's like they find a big pile of horse shit on the sidewalk and go off on a rant about horse owners, horse radish, stables, horse racing, unicorns and horse shit on the sidewalk.
On the east coast, the second generation preferred shabby and anonymous. Smart. Their heirs however are loudmouth twitter narcissists who live in mortal fear they’ll lose their privilege
"On the east coast, the second generation preferred shabby and anonymous. Smart."
Paul Fussell writes extensively about this in CLASS, IMHO the best sociological study of the Silent and Boomer generations. Paraphrasing, but it's something like "A dentist drives a Mercedes-Benz. Old money drives an old, shitty Buick."
Aye, this has been my genesis theory for our current state as well. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And when Trump, the ultimate grandiose caricature of narcissism, came on the scene - Boom!
You could see that most overreactions to him, from leaders in politics and media, to everyday people, were actually the result of being "exposed", subconsciously.
All the man did was hold a mirror up to these people - they didn't and still do not realize that what they don't like about him is what they don't like about themselves. Sure enough, their more poised, covert form of narcissism became unravelled and the projection was off the charts.
Seriously the educated left today is really (& I don’t like this cliché either) the indoctrinated left and I despair over the knowledge and critical thinking their ‘education’ fails to give them. The bullies turn into bullies - nothing new under the sun
Thanks. I've been looking for a self-identified "progressive" that's honest and smart enough that I can stomach reading them. Maurer certainly shows those traits.
They could put out a New York Times that didn't suck, but it's too late for that. I am disillusioned with them to the point I was willing to pay you $50 a year. More voices would certainly be better, and that is what they use to offer, but I'd rather pay you to have a single truthful voice than any number of voices lying to me. Thanks for going on a limb and giving me an option. I really want to understand what is going on and the lying is so absurd these days I KNOW I'm being blatantly lied to... and it drove me to find you.
Consider giving Bari Weis a try but one can only read so much. What would be great is if sub stack were to give readers a trial period to sample writers or a much higher fee to have an all access pass. But I don't know how much of this works.
Freddie DeBoer is a good addition to the list. I probably disagree with him about more than I agree with him about, but he's smart and honest, which makes him worth listening to.
Love this list! I would add Coleman Hughes, Aaron Mate, Bari Weiss, Jeremy Lee Quinn, Wesley Yang, John McWhorter, Glen Lourey, Thomas Frank, Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Quillette, City Journal, Jimmy Dore, and Crystal & Saagar to this list. Perhaps controversially, I'd also add Megyn Kelley. I don't trust any one on this list to own the truth, and I frequently disagree with their conclusions. But their biases are easy to discern and weigh. With the exception of Dore, who accidentally shares a ton of news as proselytizes, they seem to be aware of their biases, and to make an effort to keep them in check. What I can rely on 8s their intention to be as truthful with their audiences as they're humanly capable of being.
I can't agree more. People need to grow up, and listen to what they don't want to hear, rather than be reassured in an echo chamber. You know the thing!
Yah they have kind of committed pretty hard to their current "model" and there is a lot of momentum to the resulting effects of that. If the New York Times became a wonder of truth, honesty, and hard cutting journalism that was enlightening and entertaining magically over night it would probably still take like 30 years from now or more to win back over the people they have spent so much effort disappointing and disillusioning. For all their idiocy as outlined by Matt above, they probably do recognize that on some level so they do realize that such an approach would be too expensive and big a commitment to pull off at this point leaving them with nothing left to do but double down on their hunt for better gimmicks.
Simple. They have a revenue stream other than their subscriptions, and they're not going to bite the hand that feeds them. Read: The MIC, Big Pharma, Banks.
"rancidly, insultingly dishonest". That single line says it all. All the lipstick in America can't transform these national media pigs into beauty Queens. They have lost peoples trust and their respect and won't be winning it back with their usual tricks and promises.
Their hearts and minds are just plain dishonest. They don't respect their audience and view them as uninformed sheep to be fleeced by their "betters" and intellectual superiors. Americans see through this charade and are fleeing the corporate media because they have seen what is behind the curtain and it is not a little man playing God but an evil manipulative elitist cabal of nasty control freaks without a moral bone in their flaccid snake like bodies.
In the age of the internet the falsehoods became too easy to recognize. So now they have gathered "faux fact checkers" and harnessed interned platforms to censor actual reality and information that exposes their pernicious agendas and political manipulation of voters.
Paid subscriptions have allowed people to choose their information sources or reject ones without merit. For whatever reason truth has a particular kind of beauty that reveals itself in many ways and like a well cut diamond reflects those truths in multiple shinning ways that can't be duplicated by falsehoods and skewered narratives. No intelligent person would ever pay for a platform access that consistently pushes lies and political narratives that are discredited over and over. The audience levels of CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo and so many others are in death spiral caused by their lies and incompetence. Hopefully this new paradigm will wipe them from public conscious and history will record their demise as a plus for society.
People will pay for it, just not for the reason of news. They pay to have their beliefs reinforced. They pay to look smart. They pay to be able to dish out the proper talking points.
But most of all, they pay because they are afraid. This is their comfort blanket, their therapist's chair.
Wow you are just like the TV doctors offering a diagnosis without even seeing the patient. Many of the pay publishers really don't toe a political line or publish easily discredited information. You don't seem to have much respect for the motives of subscribers. Might comment with your intuitive reasoning as to why individuals cling to obvious discredited MSM outlets. Guess everyone in your world view is driven by anything but an interest in reality or truth. What gets your undivided attention or is everything part of the matrix and only can see beyond the simulation?
Fair enough. I do know that, as Matt outlined in 𝐻𝑎𝑡𝑒, 𝐼𝑛𝑐, their business model depends on ginning up outrage by selectively featuring the worst, most outrageous, stupidest crap they can find emanating from the Left (I know, I know, "Left" is dumb).
Sadly, there's always a delusional professor or echo chamber blue check willing to provide the fodder for them, same as the legacy media can count on fundies or dumb Republican politicians to do the same for them.
I think one of the issues is that these people have such a centralized mindset, that they cannot comprehend the concept of decentralization itself. To borrow a metaphor from Mass Effect, explaining a decentralized subscription service like Substack to a New York Times executive is like trying to explain color to a creature with no eyes. It just will not compute. The only way they can make sense of it is to centralize it which of course defeats the point in the first place.
The ruling elite are becoming increasingly irrelevant as more decentralized alternatives emerge. They are shocked to find out that people are demanding they put out something of actual worth and value. When something like Substack comes around and rewards people who do put out something of value, it is a direct threat against them. Right now, they are trying to minimize independent creators. Just wait until they get more desperate after their copy-cat attempts fail. They will get nasty, but they are dinosaurs and the meteor already hit.
I subscribe to Substack writers in the same way one might hire an attorney to sort out conflicting legal theories. I hire an independent professional journalist beholden to no one but his clients. All I ask for is help sorting out the sh^t from shinola I see in the competing media narratives.
I don't think it's super significant. He's making even more and as pointed out below, he's really trying to reach people. One of his best qualities, he's a really good guy who's sincere in thinking his analyses will help people.
It's not like they said "We've got a big bag labeled "Swag" and you just have to preach CRT for us. Remember, only two answers for any negative event:
The comments area of most Substack articles are more coherent and ring truer that most featured stories by the corporate media. The average responder has more honesty and integrity that every NYT hack getting a byline and salary for writing what they are directed to by their masters in the newsrooms. The actors on the cable nets are usually readers of prepared copy who never leave the confines of the building they broadcast from. Their sources are the editors at the top of a very rancid organizational chart. It is all 1984 style disinformation by paid performers.
Remember when it came out that the young staff at NYT insisted that they talk about race more often because EVERY story is about race in some way? Imagine that world view. These people are miserable.
Also the extreme moderation of comments in the old media made them no fun. It was like being in church. The Substack commenters are mostly thoughtful and have provided many citations and ideas that expand the creator's observations.
also substack has introduced me to so many smart and talented writers...like salome sibonex, michael tracey, justin smith, Niccolo Soldo, and...kathleen mccook ;))
Really, after a year of Substack..such a relief from being voiceless it's a relief to have back & forth with some humor and the commenters here often fill in a lot of blanks or have memories or recommends that enrich the creator's initial post. And no censorship and hardly anyone seems to be hanging desperately to a party agenda.
Yes, they have a ton of money but they are also completely useless. We don't need them. We don't need their charity. We don't need their influence. We don't need their gate keeping. They are becoming culturally and socially irrelevant. They are not dictating the trajectory of culture anymore. They have all the money in the world but are losing what truly matters.
The media reacts to Substack's success the same way the Democrats react to the Virginia elections: By assuming that their product would be wildly popular if only they marketed it better.
They didn't even have that level of self-awareness when it comes to the Virginia election. Instead it's just, "if you don't like our product, you're a racist."
Let's kick the level of self-awareness down even another notch. In the tail end and aftermath of the election, there was a neck-snapping shift from trying to push a product (CRT-etc) to denying it ever existed in the first place. The best they could do was mock a few parents who couldn't give an on-the-spot grad school level critical analysis of why they opposed CRT.
AND finely parse the phrase "is not in the curriculum". Despite the fact there are tons of (pretty large) receipts from consultancies and "advising firms" and other transparent race-grifters who ARE in the schools. Which seems an approach more designed to provide plausible deniability than to properly educate children.
What ever happened to, "You don't need to sell the sizzle when you've got real steak?" Americans used to understand this--and American journalists understood it. 'Man Walks on Moon' doesn't need adornment.
I still don't understand what the point of the whole thing was. I guess dad jokes are basically dick jokes. "Hey, I walked on the moon!" See Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (1972).
You leave us to infer there must be a great deal about human motivation you don't understand. As far back as the historical record stretches, and doubtless for millennia before that, people have always wanted to see what's in the next valley or on the other side of the sea.
Ah, sorry to rehash an old comment, but I have always loved ECC's "The Fucking Moon." It is an artistic statement that adequately summarizes my feelings about the whole enterprise.
Surely just going there was accomplishment enough--and newsworthy. 'Where no man (or for that matter, any other Earth-bound creature) has gone before,' right? Career journalists of the era had been waiting their entire lives to be able to run that headline.
Nope, the threat is real and existential to legacy/corrupt/corrupt/pharma drug pushing media, it's not me -- it's you.
Cancelled the NYT....read only the WSJ Editorial page (and believe less than half of what I read)...support the Epoch Times for their stick it to the CCP stance, and several Substack writers from across the political gamut.
Moronic Mainstream Media is done -- all they are good for now is as a punchline.
The "mainstream" media is mainstream because a single publication / subscription covers a wide variety of topics. Tabbi is great but on his Substack I cannot get a lot of what you might call regular news - was there an earthquake in Indonesia today? Is inflation going higher or lower? Did the government announce a new policy? etc.
This is sort of the problem. Most newsletter writers are basically single-issue writers, and the ones the NYT stress out about are mostly writing on the topic of how much the US media suck. Well, sure. But that doesn't actually compete with them outside a tiny window of stories, it only points out how much they need competition.
While I agree entirely with your insight (and was planning to post it myself) it does make me wonder, did Trump cause that earthquake in Indonesia? Was it global warming - entirely and exclusively the fault of Trump and the GOP? Is it proof that even the earth is racist for striking Indonesia that way? So many questions for the old gray mare..er.. lady, to answer for me
Falun Gong lunatics are the main CIA "source" about Uyghur "genocide" in China.
We need to agitate for freedom and democracy in – our beloved USA. Although near term hopeless -- I believe in multi-party system, unlike current one party monopoly with two right wings.
China raised 800 million of its citizens - from periodic mass starvation into middle class -- an unprecedented success -- while DNC and GOP oligarchs essentially eliminated middle class in the US.
"53K US contractors in the Middle East versus -- for 35K troops" !!! What a lucrative business and worth unlimited donations to both DNC and GOP politicians. Highlighting just that "detail" -- tells it all....
A 1%-er War party with two right (DNC and GOP) wings -- gay marriage, abortion, "woke", and other imposed topics are just distractions to divide 99% of population into "red" and "blue" camps.
But brainwashed US citizen agitate "freeing" China and increasing hate of Moslems, Russians, Chinese, Martians - just to avoid thinking about our own beloved country.
I agree with much of what you say but everyone who things China is a runaway success story, or an unstoppable threat, should probably consider the massive structural problems they have both in the near term and long term. Short term they have the biggest housing bubble the world has seen largely because of the the restrictions placed by the CCP. long term they are facing demographic time bomb thanks again the the central meddlers.
Point being: China has massive problems and we should focus on the oligarchs at home than China’s role in the world (their problems could certainly becomes ours too though thanks to the gutting of so much industry here by the domestic managers).
China is far more capitalist than the US, Russia has not been Communist for 30+ years, while the US is a corporate socialism (more polite term for fascism)
Financial Times -- July 8, 2021:
“China’s emergence over the past four decades ranks as the biggest and longest-run economic boom in history. Its annual gross domestic product rose from a mere $191 B, or $195 per capita, in 1980 to $14.3 T, or $10,261 per capita, in 2019.
It has raised more than 770m people from poverty and transformed the Chinese economy into a high-tech powerhouse that is on course to eclipse America’s in size. This transformation is the landmark achievement of the Chinese Communist party, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on Thursday.”
But you have earned points here by confessing to consuming The Epoch Times. ET makes the Washington Examiner look like the Whole Earth Catalog. A fun read from time to time.
Pompeo's State Dept relied on Falun Gong “Epoch Times” and End Times extremist @adrianzenz to accuse China of genocide (CIA’s anti-China strategy documented several years ago).
Grayzone’s review of Zenz's papers shows wanton data abuse, absurd manipulation of source material, fabrications & huge errors.
Who is "China?" You talkin' the 800 million "middle class" or the CCP? Because they ain't the same entity. And any Chinese citizen today who identifies as "middle class" will tell you, secretly, in a whisper, they attained that status despite the CCP, not because of it. Hey Boris: the DNC and GOP are not your friends. Nor is the CCP.
The rot of the U.S. political apparatus should not invoke fawning, knee-jerk appraisals eastward toward the CCP. And in the U.S., there is no shortage of brainwashed citizens, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever likely be, but are they agitating "freeing" China? 3-4 dozen maybe.
And ask the the average American what the "Uyghurs" mean to them, and they'll more than likely respond that they're unpleasant nasal detritus to be plucked out of their noses.
We don't want hostilities with the Chinese, we must do business with the Chinese, but we also don't want to award them a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Especially since I've been on the waiting list for years for one.
From time to time I provide counterpoints to few readers who were brainwashed to think that one can't hate xxxx enough.....
(put in your pick -- China, Russia, Palestinians, Iran, Venezuela, etc. --- as served for 70+ years by CIA stenographers in the US state (i.e., corporate) media
“China’s emergence over the past four decades ranks as the biggest and longest-run economic boom in history. Its annual gross domestic product rose from a mere $191 B, or $195 per capita, in 1980 to $14.3 T, or $10,261 per capita, in 2019.
It has raised more than 770m people from poverty and transformed the Chinese economy into a high-tech powerhouse that is on course to eclipse America’s in size. This transformation is the landmark achievement of the Chinese Communist party, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on Thursday.”
And how many of those 800 million had better lives before the Cultural Revolution? I thinks it's a pretty glaring error to say all this progress was the result of CCP good will and intelligent planning.
This is still funny to me. In this narrative, Trump is the boogeyman under the bed. They need a villain to vilify and burn down; a Wicker Man, if you will.
You are a bargain! For about the cost of 1 gallon of gas ($4 -- give or take) per month, I can read an honest opinion and well researched articles. If the NYT really wants to attract readers, how about they actually print the truth?
"A New York Times that sucked less." ROFLMAO. Just classic! Salute.
"How can we regain the trust of America's readers and viewers?"
"Well, maybe we can stop lying to them all the time."
"SHUT UP! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
"YOU SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH!!!"
I actually LOL'd at this, but DIED w/ Jolly's comment! Thanks
Shut your mouth while you're talking to me!
The real funny part is not “a New York Times that sucked less”. It’s that “in a million years, that would never occur to them”. Self awareness = 0
They don't think it sucks and they think they are prophets. The problem isn't the times. Its the people. Its the end result of decades of academic brainwashing.
The problem is “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
― Edward Bernays (Gee thanks Ed!)
There has never been a government in history that didn't use propaganda. The novel idea in the west used to be that the press would sift through the bullshit, and build its own narrative. The NYT and the rest of the MSM is more Pravda than media. The danger here was clear when Trump was in office. Their response to the response to Trump was predictable.
Trump is like the dude throwing the hammer at the giant head in the famous Apple 1984 commercial-and that’s literally what he is-an orange brick hurled by the populace-nothing intellectually deeper, in and of itself.
If it's handy...
Agreed. The Left has been extremely patient, waiting a whole generation for its brainwashing to take place. It's now becoming effective and infiltrating society as a whole. My question is why some of us, going through that same educational process, didn't fall for it. To say we're just smarter is a little too self-serving. There have be some attributes of people who refuse to fall for the narrative and continue to be able to be skeptical and thing for themselves. This would make for an interesting study.
I think they are trying to ascend, and to take advantage of the duress that the nation is in to finally accomplish another major step function in their perennial agenda. Their mandate was 'not Trump', nothing more, but have taken the despicable measures to make fundamental change, when all we really wanted was just a little rest.
You are onto something. Trump was the cataclysm that fueled progressives to go for the Green New Deal (now BBB) The cataclysmic part was driven by the media and permanent government. Much the same happened with George Floyd, which Black Marxist used to push Defund and CRT.
Interestingly, the movements are failing because of overreach. They have scared America. But Republicans will fuck it up by trying ban abortions or make everyone buy a gun. AOC will be back.
And the pendulum swings. Or maybe like a tug-of-war.......and we're looped into the middle of the rope.
We are the rope.
I'm going with trust fund kids with a room full of 5th place trophies.
They done it. 20-30% are zealots for a zeitgeist. 50% fall in inline, 30% resist. Its about the same every single time this happens. Even when the "cult" is liberty.
Kind of reminds me of the Milgram experiments, in a way.
I think that some people are less susceptible to trusting "authority" in general, while others give whole hearted loyalty to those who society has told to trust as an authority on truth.
Since most of those who don't question the narrative are middle class white folks with some college, they have likely lived fairly privileged lives insulated from the social and political failings that effect the less privileged. Therefore, when media describes reality a certain way they have no first hand experience to compare it to.
The difference may be learned or it may be dispositional, or some combination of the two. I'm no renegade, but sometimes I just can't swallow the medicine (poison).
Part of it is being smarter. Another part is having been exposed to writing reports and reviews from actual books as opposed to clickey-dickey online content. I was a student of history from an early age. It started with WW2 history. Then I read "The Gulag Archipelago" (both volumes) in high school. Talk about innoculation from propaganda!
@ MartinHackworth 🤣✔
I suppose this is a signal the censorship, blacklisting and persecution are underperforming.
I think it might work better if they did all those things with zippier fonts?
You’re laughing, but that’s how they think.
Careful. You might be labeled a 'non-authentic journalist' and therefore be the target of an early morning no-knock FBI raid
Stealing diaries is DEFINITELY a Federal offense!! Is this seventh grade???
In all seriousness, if a diary had been stolen and taken across state lines, I might actually support the idea of a search warrant. But that's not what happened.
But only if it's worth $5000 or more under the federal statute used as a predicate for the warrants.
I'm rather inclined to believe the diary was just as authentic as the explosive devices the FBI hands out to the dupes of it's confidential informants (or undercover agents).
I had to look up misprision of a felony (one of the charges), which leaves one wondering what was the underlying felony being covered up? There has to be a predicate offense or that charge (as obscure as it is) simply has no meaning.
There is that.
I'm curious to read your and other commenters' take on an observation I have. While NYT, WaPo, The Atlantic have had a clear shift in the past 20 years to producing narrative-driven, untrustworthy news, while the WSJ and FT pretty much remain the same products they were 10 and 20 yeas ago. The WSJ and FT are not without flaws, but those flaws are the same flaws they have always had (e.g., WSJ legal reporting is atrociously shallow, FT reports every financial story from the hair-on-fire perspective of a 10:1 leveraged rates trader). In other words, unlike the NYT and WaPo, which were always politically biased but which evolved to become almost caricatures, the WSJ and FT don't seem to have become more overtly political in recent years. What accounts for this difference in trajectory?
1. Ownership by a media mogul that employees have no reason to believe will reward them for pushing dishonest DNC narratives?
2. Proactive, top down policy decisions to avoid hiring those type of journalists in the first place?
3. By virtue of skewing towards business readers, their subscription base was always more politically heterodox and the journalists temper their own political passions accordingly without any need for top-down pressure to do so?
4. They have a more viable economic model (pricier subscriptions, complementary financial products, data feeds and income streams), reducing employee angst and the need to generate fake outrage?
5. Perhaps you reject the premise of the question and think they have become more overtly political?
My guess: financial news audiences need to hear real news, for practical reasons. They are not great at covering finance-sector corruption, and flatter that sector way too much, but their readers trade on both sides of the rest of the news, so they get a clearer picture of that reality.
Yeah, respectfully disagree on both points.
The kinds of stories that inform investment decisions are (largely) not the kinds of stories where liberal bias and media narratives would influence the reporting, whereas there are whole sections of the WSJ that are really just straight coverage of news and politics that (largely) are not being used by anyone in formulating investment decisions. I mean, there's no investment decision reason for WSJ's coverage of, say, immigrant kids in cages not to be as misleading as the NYT's coverage.
Regarding financial industry corruption, the WSJ breaks more accounting fraud stories than any other publication. You may not want to credit their reporters with all of that, but they are undeniably the paper of record for those with financial fraud allegations to leak to. From Enron, Adelphia, 1MDB, executive options backdating scandal, to Theranos. FT broke Wirecard. Your objection is that, as a finance industry outsider, you see malevolence in a lot of mundane industry practices and want people in the industry to see it the way you do. But they don't.
FT and WSJ are the only traditional media subscriptions I still keep. This despite my being 180 degrees off the editorial slant of the WSJ. The NYT went from being an unctuous mouthpiece of the establishment to a lying propaganda rag unctuous mouthpiece of the establishment. As you say, the Journal is the Journal, yea for corporate sociopathy and all that -- but relatively transparent in their biases. Your take on FT is funny, and true.
I've always thought it's because making money trumps yay-team politics among their readers. Their readers want to know what the passage of a bill truly means -- so they can try to make a buck.
I think that's true, of course, but articles about company earnings, FICC price moves etc. aren't really the types of articles where political bias or dishonest narratives appear in the first place and the types of stories where political bias would tend to influence the coverage aren't really the type that inform investment decisions.
The old saying...money talks...still have the WSJ, NYT is gone, gave up on WaPo and spend more on substack / Rogan etc.
Little o' 2&3, lot of 4.
WaPo and the NYT have not only gone for the clickbait/outrage model, but have implemented it in the worst possible way: by hiring the "true believers" of the culture war, thereby giving them unwarranted credibility and damaging both the nation and the mental health of their readers.
A newsroom full of black-pilled cynics whoring themselves out for mediabux would be much preferable, and provide better content. (though I'm pretty sure they (and others) employ a few of those to this day.
One difference is that the WSJ has always had a paywall that they tried to make somewhat serious, and so couldn't compete to chase clicks/social media links.
Serious question: How many WSJ and FT journalists spend all day on Twitter trying to build Twitter cred? I could do my own research, but,
This is actually a very valid point. I don't know whether that is cause or effect, but it is undeniable that, while the WSJ official twitter account itself actively tweets WSJ stories, the individual reporters do not have the heavy twitter presence that NYT and WaPo reporters do. I am a twitter user and it's odd that I never noticed that until you mentioned it. Even Matt Murray only posts like once a week. Mattioli is a seldom user except to retweet her friends' stories. Restuccia, one of their White House reporters, just tweets WSJ stories without comment. Lovably, Paul Gigot isn't even a blue check. Holman Jenkins hasn't tweeted since 2017. Hunh.
I try not to look at Twitter at all but I sometimes fail. It is funny to me that MT's account is mostly "Hey, I posted a new article on Substack" or "There's a new Useful Idiots" -- leading one to believe that it is, appropriately, run by an intern -- but then the man himself will manifest to argue with some troll buried deep in the comment thread.
WSJ has been on my sketchy list ever since a few years back when they put out a terrible hit piece on PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg). I had no idea who he was at the time and had never seen any of his content, but I ended up looking into it and realizing that it was utter garbage and obviously deliberately misleading, not just an accident of bad journalism. He's an independent creator with a huge amount of followers and influence, so I guess they see him as a threat to be taken out.
WSJ news dept is WOKE. I cancelled my subscription last year. They are not as reliable as they were.
I've noticed this as well. Many of their news reporting is starting to have a serious progressive bias; I've just been able to pick out language, wording, etc. You develop a knack for this after reading a lot of WaPo and NYT articles.
I'm almost always interested in stories about willful deception by journalists (prosecutors too!), so part of me wants to research what PewDiePie is and the nature of the controversy. But then I re-read the name PewDiePie and another, bigger part of me decides that, actually, I don't.
I can't fault your reasoning, but PewPewDie was (maybe still is?) a fairly influential person. I recall reading that at least for a year or so he was the most viewed person on youtube. Maybe longer. I'm not a fan and don't know much about him other than that. I might go look up the WSJ story on him myself.
Interestingly, this is my teenage son's one datapoint on the WSJ. He just assumed it was a Buzzfeedesque scandal-for-the-clicks outlet, given that the only story he had ever heard of from them was about something he could tell from his own knowledge was nonsense.
When a news outlet lies about a thing that you know well enough to know it's a lie, why would you trust them on the things you don't know?
In this case, PewDiePie has over 100 million YouTube subscribers, and any of them familiar with his content knew it was all garbage. So this one incident probably woke up millions of young people to the untrustworthiness of all the news outlets that tried to smear him.
The Economist remains as essential as ever. It wears its bias on its sleeve as it always has, so you can filter it correctly.
The WSJ has become my go to paper for US news after they cleverly lured me in with a discounted subscription. I think their readership drifted slightly left after the educated class abandoned the GOP, so they had to move to the center as well. Or I am just becoming more conservative/pragmatic. Probably a bit of both.
I still subscribe to WashPo, mostly for sentimental reasons. There are a few times in history when they really stood up to government overreach (Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden, e.g. ?) and I am sure they still have the backbone to do that, so they deserve my support.
Plus I get a kick out of their reporting everytime one of the treasonous Jan. 6 crowd gets justice served, though I have discovered following the WUSA9 newsfeed is more viscerally satisfying as every single plea and conviction comes to my inbox. Highly recommended, if you are into that sort of thing.
Have you read a word by Glenn Greenwald since Snowden? I suspect not. The paper is a mouthpiece for the securities agencies, as Greenwald has exhaustively documented.
I follow Greenwald on Twitter. 90% of the time his Tweets are of the stunning news that Biden is old. Boooring.
The rest of the time he is chasing some conspiracy theory. Read Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman (formerly of the WashPo) if you want a more credible account of the Snowden affair.
Greenwald is mostly a blowhard tooting his own horn.
They are sure doing a shitty job of touting for the NSA and CIA. I can give you dozens of links where they blow the horn on the Security Community misdeeds.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/05/11/2013-edward-snowden-leaked-top-secret-national-security-agency-documents-showing-how-us-was-spying-its-citizens-heres-what-happened-next/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/nsa-surveillance-xkeyscore-privacy/2021/06/29/b2134e7a-d685-11eb-a53a-3b5450fdca7a_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html
>> I am sure they still have the backbone to do that, so they deserve my support.
Why do you assume that? Jeff Bezos is trying to win a ten billion dollar contract with the Pentagon. You seriously think his paper will back the next Snowden?
>> Plus I get a kick out of their reporting everytime one of the treasonous Jan. 6 crowd gets justice served
Can't say i'm surprised by this.
You write like someone who doesn’t remember the WSJ before Rupert took it over.
Not true. I've been reading it daily since the late '80s, and was a fairly sophisticated news consumer by the late '90s. Sure, you can find individual stories with this or that uncharacteristically partisan slight (either direction, I would add), but overall, I really don't detect any obvious change in the general tenor of reporting by the WSJ, either since Murdoch bought it in 2007, or more recently. I assume that the WSJs 20-something no-name reporters are basically the same type of people as at NYT and WaPo. But maybe not. I have to admit, I really don't personally know young reporters. I just know the product.
WTF is a zipper font? Should I know what this means? Do I hafta Google now????? lol
ZippIER; not zipper.
Aw! What about us zipper fonts?
¿ɥnɥ 'ʇuoɟ ɐpuıʞ ᴚƎԀԀIZ ɹǝıddız ɐ sı sıɥʇ ʞuıɥʇ I
AGH! My bad. (...must get stronger reading glasses!)
Maybe they SHOULD try a zipper font. I'm sure that would get their readers back.
Apparently it looks kind of like this....
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR6uwq1YDnz8QsOAFxX0SIVqBVsCwjElmFwRbQhCINMZWBzAfYwfO6tTJZs6JWOc1R0x7U&usqp=CAU
I misread it too, at first. Then thought, maybe they mean for the subscriber to pull the zipper and just accept what's behind it.
Just like Faith + 1.
Gotta laugh. Spoonful of sugar and all that.
Matt, as I read this I couldn't help but wonder if you've watched or attempted to watch that Showtime doc THE FOURTH ESTATE, which was made to reflect the "inner workings" of the NYT in the aftermath of the Trump election. Calling it cringeworthy doesn't begin to describe how awful and embarrassing it actually is.
No wonder "Jill hates video"; who could blame her?!?
https://www.sho.com/video/61918/next-on-part-1
It’s not just them.
https://27bslash6.com/brochure.html
Comic. Sans.
Wingdings or gtfo
"Something something Egyptian something."
I long ago realized that Font Nazis are worse than any "bad" font.
Worse than Illinois Nazis, tbh.
But not worse than Surf Nazis.
I wish you could make italics in comments section--my only wish for a change.
Well, some of us can read html code, so <i>you could try making italics like this</i>. (^_^)
That's a good idea as I used _Book Title_ and I made that up. So <i>Book Title/i> from now on. Thank you.
Good idea, like in whatsapp: _italics_ and *bold*
What else?
I think if Substack upped its game for comments using these examples there would be joy. BTW, in all the articles abt. Substack I have not seen the comment section discussed. I wonder if the msm even understands the role these play in keeping subscribers. In olden days I would try to comment at NYT or WaPo and was often moderated and I am hardly what anyone would call controversial. Was usually making a book recommendation or something librariany (am a librarian). That is their ex-cathedra mentality, I guess.
𝑱𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒂 𝒖𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒆 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒐𝒓
O, what a show off. How do you do this? Can you send me a message how to do this? I'm a librarian and if I could make italics in book titles in comments I would be over the moon. I honestly get a panic attack when I can't italicize a book title.
The unicode generators transform the text you enter into unicode, which you then copy and paste into your comment.
There are a gazillion out there. Try http://eder.us/unicode.php or just Google "unicode generator." Using HTML markup will usually NOT work because HTML formatting tags are typically removed when the comment is processed. This is done for security reasons beyond the scope of this comment.
𝐻𝑢ℎ. 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠?
Damn, that's going into the "Reference" folder.
Sincere thanks. Obviously, it never bothered me enough to actually learn this.
AND, I do have the excuse of only having had a computer for 30+ years.
O-My-Goodness. 𝑯𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝑰𝒏𝒄.: 𝑯𝒐𝒘, 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝑾𝒉𝒚, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑷𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝑴𝒂𝒌𝒆𝒔 𝑼𝒔 𝑯𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝑶𝒏𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓.
I am so happy now. Charles Anesi is a hero.. I wish I had asked this a year ago. Thank you. And bold italic, too.
𝑯𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝑰𝒏𝒄.: 𝑯𝒐𝒘, 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝑾𝒉𝒚, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑷𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝑴𝒂𝒌𝒆𝒔 𝑼𝒔 𝑯𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝑶𝒏𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓
𝓉𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔
𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔
Are you familiar with Subparstack?
https://thefsb.substack.com/p/subparstack/comment/1137234
_Gack!_
https://thefsb.substack.com/p/subparstack
didn't mean to link to a comment. Dagnabbit why can't I have a couple of minutes to edit my darned Subparstack comments?
Can someone please explain why it is "not done" to just delete a comment and repost with the edit? Even perhaps explaining in the reposted post that it is an edited version.
It _*is*_. But it's a pita, confusing, and somebody may already be reading, liking or commenting the one you delete. It's a crappy laborious workaround that doesn't work properly.
I did it with my post about rent extraction on this thread an hour or so ago. Fiasco. I ended up with three comments all the same. Deleted one of them and then they were all gone. Had to start over. Substack's comments app sucks but it's good enough for them so we're the ones that have to suck -- it up!
It is rumored that 𝑐𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑡𝑦𝑝𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑠 may also use a free-deletion feature to disrupt conversational threads.
I became used to the REASON mag comment software (sadly demised), which dates from the Babbage/Lovelace era of computing and is made of wood.
no, looks so eclectic. subbed.
I really meant to draw attention to Subparstack which is a public bug tracker for Substack https://github.com/subparstack/subparstack
It also has discussion and publishing features
And lots and lots of emojis.😉
They've never gotten over how well the McCarthy Witchhunts worked for their Corporate Masters' various bigoted - er, "anti-Communist" agendas!
Hell, we all got to see Hillary Rodham Clinton try to reignite them during all of Trump's terribly buffoonish regime!
That interview where she "outed" Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein I visualized her waving a list of "traitors" at the Senate, lol.
Here's an idea for the members of the corrupt MSM. How about asking Substack subscribers why they are willing to subscribe to, in my case, multiple Substack newsletters. I'm doing it with money I used to spend on traditional news sources. We, the readers, the news consumers, your customers, are not stupid. Your corruption is obvious and insulting. I have more respect for the PRAVDA writers. They had a gun to their heads. You MSM clowns all use the same words and phrases on the same day to describe some new threat to your comfy jobs or your political bosses comfy jobs. Won't one of you come clean and tell us exactly how that happens.You have no integrity. I feel like I'm being harangued not informed. You act like a holy priesthood that must not doubted. We overthrew one priesthood several hundred years ago and with the help of Matt and Glenn and Bari and Michael and others we will do it again. So FU and that over priced useless degree you'll never pay off. We, the readers, are tired of being told what words we can't use or what ideas we can't express. We're tired of being told what to think by people who were indoctrinated not educated. Please get out of the bubble and talk to people before it's too late. There are some pretty smart people out here with dirty hands who built everything around you and keep it all running. Their are folks who have devoted their whole life to protecting you. How about thanking them instead of deploring them. They make your easy life possible. How about thanking them for their service to society now and again. Read like your life depended on it. You might rediscover a new/old idea. I'm sure others here can add to the list. You won't beat the Substack bull pen (there I said it) any time soon with the same old play book that's ruined the formerly admired profession of journalism. Show some integrity, honesty and independence for a change. And Je_us Chr_st stop being such assholes.
Your observation that the media utilizes the EXACT same language and phrases over and over has always struck me like actors reading a script. The facial expressions and histrionics have a rehearsed faux stink about them also.
The way they all swarmed the Covington kids with vitriol and almost a bullies glee was the last straw for me. Although I smelled a foul stench from them for years I was sickened by their actions and false reporting about some high school kids being racists and aggressing against a poor naive American. After the facts came out few if any of the bullies and physical cowards in the MSM even acknowledged their disgusting actions. That was the end for me with these soulless evil excuses for human beings. Day after day with their arrogant, smirking distortions of the news and self aggrandizing drivel just provokes the massive, and justified, hatred now directed against them from every corner of American society. They are considered by most citizens lower than the most despised segments of our nation.
I don’t know who backed Nick Sandman, but I am delighted that he sued CNN for $250 K and won. Yay!
Not $250 K it was MILLION!!. WAPO 250 Million , CNN 275 Million. They all settled for an unknown amount but you can be sure it was tens of millions. They didn't learn shit though. If Rittenhouse gets off, his lawsuits could bankrupt some news organizations, commentators and maybe even Biden. I do not want to go down a Rittenhouse rabbit hole , I am merely using him as an example of blanket coverage making defaming comments without evidence or a judgment being rendered yet.
$250k is a drop in the bucket to a large corporation. If each company made more money in ratings than they lost in lawsuits then why would they stop? It's just a cost of doing business.
https://lawandcrime.com/media/some-lawyers-think-covington-catholics-nick-sandmann-walked-away-from-media-lawsuits-with-peanuts/
“Those with zero legal experience (as far as I can tell) should not be conjecturing on lawsuits they know nothing about,” said attorney Mark Zaid. “What kind of journalism is that?”
“I’ve litigated defamation cases. Sandman was undoubtedly paid nuisance value settlement & nothing more,” he added.
Tens of millions? Got a source for that? Or even a similar settlement so that we can reality check that number? I think they would not settle for more than the legal cost of defense.
And the WaPo, and NBC and the low life of media liars, Savannah Guthrie personally for an undisclosed amount… she admonished Sandmann on live TV knowing at the time, that he had not done any of the things she was shaming him for…
I like the cut of your jib!
Plop, plop, fiz, fiz.
Lower than White Cops who Murder Black Kids with Impunity?
Lower than Used Car Salesmen?
Lower than...CONGRESS?!!??
Say it ain't so, Joe!
Bet more Black thugs and gangsters murder Black children without accountability than all the cops over the last ten years put together. That political meme is just statistically unsupportable. Most all cop shootings are public knowledge and open to scrutiny. Even one is one too many but the perception projected by the media is a fantasy.
Cops who shoot suspects dead have to be investigated by other cops, often their buddies. The real numbers of shootings of unarmed suspects is much higher than reported.
My Dad was a probation officer and he knew of cops who kept a handgun with the serial numbers filed off in case he needed it. Another one who kept a bag of coke for the same reason. If you think cops don't plant evidence you are living in lala land.
No sense getting into an extended back and forth about the need for reform and the extent of investigations by elected prosecutors after every police shooting.
The quality and depth of these investigations varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and does allow for cover-ups and poor work by reviewers. But DEAD bodies with gunshot wounds are accurately counted and they don't reach even a fraction of the numbers being bandied about by politically motivated individuals and organizations. And YES there are some very bad police officers who with criminal intent do cover-up their activities. But this idea of a large part of over 800,000 law enforcement officers actually hunting and wantonly killing innocent Back men is a weird fantasy since the actual body count is no where near what is being assured or would be a reality if this were true.
ONE is one too many but there are too many politically motivated demonstrations about legal and justified utilization of deadly force by a single P.O. who never fired his weapon or had any indication of past bias. It is as if there is the new standard -- guilty until proven innocent and even if justified someone must still pay. Courts don't count and it becomes the mobs choice like a Roman Emperor. Thumbs up or down.
Everything you say is true. The number of Black people (almost all men) shot by the police is in the low hundreds. That is not disputable.
What is often bandied about is that the number of unarmed Black men shot by the police is often stated as being a dozen or so. This number is bullshit.
What's the beef with used car salesmen. They get a bad rap. No, I don't sell cars but I buy them from pretty nice people.
#MeToo. I haven't bought a new car in 24 years, I think.
As with most hyperbole, it takes one to know one, so kudos to you. Not lower, but disturbingly close. And thus why many of us are here.
A fine and well-deserved 𝑐𝑟𝑖 𝑑𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑒𝑢𝑟. I recently saw a "newswoman" interviewing some Senator and he was trying to explain what parents object to in the curricula their children are being taught. And she just said "Well, CRT is not being taught in the schools", and he was ready with quotes, examples, even receipts from payments to various Kendi/DiAngelo-inspired grifting consultancies. With each bit of evidence, she could only repeat "But...it isn't being taught.". And then to every subsequent bit of evidence contrary to her mantra, she just repeated it over and over.
By the end, she was kind of flustered. She KNEW she had just spouted contrafactual nonsense in response to real-world evidence...but still, somehow, that was all she was able to say. It was creepy, but also kind of funny.,
𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡'𝑠 where they are at. I cannot imagine this ending well, mental-heath-wise.
I just posted a plea to help Nicole Wallace… she’s about to lose it. I saw that interview… it’s like she believes in Santa Claus.
It is being taught. And it is a Marxist academics project. The goal is to "get'em young" so they can teach them class consciousness and teach them to be angry so they will have recruits later. Occupy was their previous 'big project'. And I have direct knowledge (that no news media were ever interested in) that the purpose of Occupy protests was to get the "bourgeoisie" to be angry enough to take up arms. I listened to two of the top people talk about how hard it was to deal with all those irritating people presenting solutions to problems. They would isolate such people with their cadres.
I marched in civil rights marches as a kid. I was interested in Occupy, and in the thick of it at UC Davis. But the core of this is vicious and evil. I evaded one of them, and enforcer, when he came after me because they knew I overheard.
You've definitely piqued my interest. Story time?
It was after the UC Davis pepper spray incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident I participated in teach-ins on campus, teaching about banking and how money is created. That December, 23rd, I went to Delta of Venus a grad student hangout. https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5421083,-121.7441859,3a,75y,102.04h,90.03t/data=!3m9!1e1!3m7!1s9gTHT-r4rzlC6ts0MN1gvw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!9m2!1b1!2i24 I went there to work on some things. and it was just me, and 2 guys there at a table about 8 feet away.
One guy had a nice beard, in his later 20's. The other was a Bakunin wannabe with a shaved head and heavy boots. Looked like he lifted. The were talking Marxism-Leninism when I started paying attention. They were drinking beer after dinner. The bearded guy was talking about teaching revolutionaries in Nepal Maoist tactics. (I know all about those. Kill the police, any officials, teachers and doctors. This puts the people in your power.) I started trying to see if I could surreptitiously record them, but thought better of it.
Then conversation turned to why the "guy from headquarters in New York" Mr. shaved head and boots was there. The top guy wanted to know how to replicate the fabulous success at UC Davis. It was like listening to Marxist revolutionaries run by Wall Street, just like this article by Matt Taibbi. The same mentality - find the secret sauce.
The bearded guy, a grad student in the philosophy department, complained about how hard it was to stop solutions from emerging. He spoke disparagingly of how bourgeois the population of Davis is. They talked about how hard it was to get people angry enough to take to the streets with arms. They discussed his ratios of cadre agents coordinated with group texts to size of crowd. This was how they engineered "consensus" with the hand-waving thing.
Around this time, Mr. Shaved-head and Boots took notice of me. They got up and went outside. There was a table and chairs outside the front window on the porch, next to the door. Mr. Shaved-head and Boots sat facing toward the door and watched me while they continued to talk. I spent about 20 minutes working, and then decided I should leave before they did. I wasn't liking the situation or his observing me.
I packed up my computer, and went out the door, walking briskly, making noise. I turned right at the sidewalk, walking towards town. I expected Mr. Shaved-head and Boots to come after me because their opsec was compromised. So I took evasive action and hid where I could watch. Sure enough, about 15 seconds later, Mr. Shaved-head and Boots went by on the sidewalk, scanning around, walking fast. Beard kid went the opposite direction. Mr. Shaved-head and Boots went off into the dark, cold evening with a bit of fog. The streets were dark and deserted. A perfect evening to take someone out.
I went to my car quickly and left. A few days later, I was in Mischka's https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5433618,-121.7405856,3a,75y,152.25h,88.7t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sPHup32AYcFpHFQTkzy7DEQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
I looked up and saw Mr. Beard come in. I took a picture of him with my cell phone. He ordered his coffee, then he carefully turned around to scan the room. He saw me and jerked. Walked into the back toward the bathrooms and never came back. There is a door back there. He left his coffee after paying.
Yeah there are a few Marxists in every college town. They almosts amount to nothing much.
They plant their asses in seats at coffee shops. Good for the coffee shops.
I continue to be fascinated by this trotting out of Marx as a circus bugaboo, like the Bearded Lady or a bear riding a unicycle. Dude been dead for almost a sesquicentennial; he ain't doin' nothin' to nobody. But to hear the rhetoric, you would think he is The Spectre Haunting Western Civilization and he must be expurgated in the name of all that is good and holy.
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing. I've known for a long time that some of these disruptive protests are well-organized at the top, but it's very interesting to hear details.
It sounds like the guys you witnessed were very much revolutionary idealists. I wonder how--or whether--this gels with the popular narrative that OWS was heavily infiltrated by feds, who ultimately used identity politics to make neuter the movement and help keep the rabble divided.
If you have a link to that interview I would love to see it. Not surprising though: they have (and / or believe in) a narrative and they are not going to let reality get in its way. Adversus solem ne loquitor.
ℕ𝕚𝕔𝕖 𝕚𝕥𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕔𝕤!
Legacy media on the whole, has turned into a pious religious zealot who sees everyone who might have a different opinion than their own as heretics and infidels, sadly.
Don't hold back; tell us how you really feel.
they do have a proverbial gun to their head. If you seek truth (e.g. the completely discredited Russia collusion/Steele Dossier) and expose it in the traditional newsroom, or on twitter let's say, you'll be tied to a wheel, set on fire, and rolled down Park Ave. Your career is over. Unless you have a real voice and can move to substack and make a living there.
RT is really very good. Way, way, post Pravda. BTW - Pravda writers found ways to tell their readers the truth. There's a great deposition by Mitrohkin in a US court about understanding a signature evaluation from an FSB graphologist. He said, "You must pay attention to what he does not say." The guy never actually said, yes, it is the signature of Mr. Konaynikyne.
You covered it...and the main word that stands out from all others is INTEGRITY! Isn't that why we abandoned the woke winnies
THANK YOU! My message to MSM: You’re just not all that, not even close, so stop thinking you are , you’ve met your offensive quota, we disqualified your lot long ago. And look after your fragile associate, Nicole Wallace, she’s about to lose her shit.
Amen, my man.
" If they really wanted to wipe us out, of course, they could just put out a New York Times that sucked less. In a million years, that won’t occur to them." "the overall quality level of mainstream news plunged so low so long ago, audiences were starved for anything that wasn’t rancidly, insultingly dishonest."
Heh. Kind of the same thing among the Morally Better/So Much Smarter ilk in all sections of society. They get angry at people getting the attention they think they should get, so they lash out ("ban Dave Chappelle!" "outlaw Fox!") instead of look inward at why no one wants to read their newspaper, laugh at their "comedy," trust their credentials, be around them...the people I encounter like that in life increasingly shriek that they're "experts" while saying some of the most absurd things and sneering at others in their increasingly impenetrable bubble of self-righteous cluelessness. The collective delusion is so, so tiresome.
Our elites used to be better right? I ask seriously. During even times like the gilded age, I’m not crazy in thinking they at least had some class or sophistication that modern elites are bereft of? It’s wasn’t that they just had better control of the narrative and flow of information, but that they were better?
It’s a question I ask myself because I’m shocked at how unlikable, and pathetic, the modern elite has become. I guess there could have been elites like this before, who were completely out of touch and lacking any honor, in France right before a certain revolution. Or at least that is one plausible theory if our elites really are as bad as I suspect.
Yes. Of course. I can’t stand when people answer questions like this with cynical aphorisms and personal anecdote to feign wisdom.
Rich elites have always done terrible things. But sometimes certain circumstances have restrained them.
For example, a sense of obligation, family and otherwise. Read Andrew Carnegie or any of the Roosevelt. Regardless of whether you agree with their specific acts and beliefs (you won’t), you cannot deny they were concerned about morality, God, family, community, values like hard work and courage, etc. alongside the worship of mammon.
Also, after the War, the rich felt just a tad chastened. The Depression had flattened wealth quite a bit. The War had demanded sacrifice from all. Wealthy families had seen powerful elites in other countries brought low by defeat or revolution. They had less power in a more equal society and also felt pressure to be quiet about the power they had.
Then there was the explosion of narcissism chiefly driven by affluent young people starting in the late ‘80s, particularly affecting women.
Also, a particularly childish brand of atheism triumphed without bothering to erect any new moral universe in its place, leaving society vulnerable to both nihilism and fanaticism.
So yes, Virginia, the rich were different once. Once they faced limits. Now they have none.
Those limits will be imposed, one way or another (this isn’t some veiled intention, just the laws of nature).
When new atheism came around I was sold. Now I’m kind of embarrassed to consider the moral superiority I felt then. Now I’m even considering religion where I had not before as I live around enough religious people and I can say that I see something good there that I don’t see in the people that are like myself a decade or so ago (some religious people can be the worst, there is and always will be a lot of grift in those circles, but I see genuineness in the most practitioners). Regardless, I see the same result of the atheism movement as you do and I wonder if the people most associated with it question themselves at all.
When I was in college, open adult atheists had spent more time thinking through the moral dimensions of their convictions than any random pew-warmer ever had. Now it’s mostly memes and emojis. Hardly enough to separate man from beast.
It’s clearly not working for them either. Hence the triumph of the woke cult.
One of the simple observations that really changed my outlook to religion is just asking who would help me and my family if I need it among my neighbors? The answer was, and this has since been confirmed many times over, the neighbors who were religious (and really I mean Christian since I don't have any other religion represented that I'm aware of). I want to live in a culture and community that helps each other out and values families. I looked for it within atheism but while there was plenty of philosophy that demonstrates that religion is hardly a prerequisite to these values of kindness and charity, and often times distorts it (this is the moral superiority I was talking about), my real world efforts to find it have largely been in fruitless.
I certainly don't believe you have to be religious to be a good person, I mean I personally try to go out of my way to help my neighbors, but I do think if you value strong social cohesion in your community then the community might have to be religious. In other words religion scales while atheism does not. That hardly means that Jesus is the Christ, etc, etc, but it does mean something.
Along your point, atheism's problem to me is they demonized traditional religion to the point that now people have adopted perhaps the least scalable worldview in woke-ism when they found atheism doesn't provide meaning both personally and within a community.
No doubt. John Rockefeller is the Howard Zinn lib punching bag. What did he do-put some damn efficiency in a chaotic industry and then give most of his profits to charity. Oh, and he sometimes worshipped at black churches and gave the seed $$ to start Spellman College-it’s named after his wife. Dude was as non-racist as anyone in the 19th century
No, I'm pretty sure they always sucked. Opposition parties are separated in Parliament by a specific width calibrated to the length of a sword, specifically to stop them stabbing each other in the days when, you know, it was normal to carry swords around all the time.
Some of the 'elites' greatest hits in the 20th century:
1. World War 1, a Great War in aid of a cause so moral it requires a textbook to explain and even then you won't understand it.
2. World War 2, another Great War, this time the motivation was so simple it could have come straight out of a Marvel comic book yet somehow enough elites thought this was a good idea that it took the combined efforts of the entire Anglosphere to put them back in their box.
3. Communism and its various spinoffs.
4. Vietnam, the CIA, etc.
5. The war on terror.
Our elites have never been elite.
When you factor in war things do become more clear. I was thinking they at least built institutions but then the modern university is largely to serve the interests of power and not otherwise (same as media and that doesn’t even get into the cia). Well they at least presented better than our modern elites. They at least had a modicum self respect and stoicism.
The romanticized idea of the truly superior, noblesse oblige, aristocracy comes from an age when the elites were far better educated than the peasants. This made them much more secure and put them in a position where they could actually benefit the rest.
That's all flattened now due to technology. So all we have is concentrated money at the top.
Well, you know the East Coast Rich Intellectual Liberals Bill O'Reilly used to fly off the handle at? My (ex)Partner and I got to have dinner with them one night, because she was speaking at some school in Boston the next day. They pretty much pretended we didn't even exist throughout cocktails and the subsequent meal. We wondered why they bothered inviting us at all....
Sadly, Billo was right - they truly are every bit as self-righteously puffed-up, and out of touch, as he claimed they were. It really peeved me, since I hate giving that lot credit for anything.
I didn’t watch bill or Fox News. I was the NYT reader that was sure ever word printed was the Truth (or a close approximation). That’s an interesting experience. I can’t imagine being closed off like that yet they often claim to be doing things for the people they are closed off to.
Well, they are bound to hit a target once in a while, if only by accident. It's like they find a big pile of horse shit on the sidewalk and go off on a rant about horse owners, horse radish, stables, horse racing, unicorns and horse shit on the sidewalk.
They get the sidewalk part right.
On the east coast, the second generation preferred shabby and anonymous. Smart. Their heirs however are loudmouth twitter narcissists who live in mortal fear they’ll lose their privilege
"On the east coast, the second generation preferred shabby and anonymous. Smart."
Paul Fussell writes extensively about this in CLASS, IMHO the best sociological study of the Silent and Boomer generations. Paraphrasing, but it's something like "A dentist drives a Mercedes-Benz. Old money drives an old, shitty Buick."
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60044.Class
Nice. Did you write this Goodreads review Boris ‘...refreshingly bitter and cruel? My kind of book & my kind of review
Narcissism was becoming prevalent 20 years ago, and now we're here.
Aye, this has been my genesis theory for our current state as well. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And when Trump, the ultimate grandiose caricature of narcissism, came on the scene - Boom!
You could see that most overreactions to him, from leaders in politics and media, to everyday people, were actually the result of being "exposed", subconsciously.
All the man did was hold a mirror up to these people - they didn't and still do not realize that what they don't like about him is what they don't like about themselves. Sure enough, their more poised, covert form of narcissism became unravelled and the projection was off the charts.
This.
Thanks for this rec. He is hilarious.
Seriously the educated left today is really (& I don’t like this cliché either) the indoctrinated left and I despair over the knowledge and critical thinking their ‘education’ fails to give them. The bullies turn into bullies - nothing new under the sun
He is definitely self-aware, which is nice (and rare.)
Thanks. I've been looking for a self-identified "progressive" that's honest and smart enough that I can stomach reading them. Maurer certainly shows those traits.
ps) Team Some.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Team Smidge
Taibbi, I like your thinking.
Do you have a newsletter I could subscribe to?
The New Matt Times-Post-Gazette?
Same Matt Time, Same Matt Channel!
You are quickly becoming one of my favorite posters...Of course Waltzing Matilda will be ear-worming me all day now, but still digging your posts
I cannot wait for Frank Miller's THE DARK MATT RETURNS.
We will all be too old.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
They could put out a New York Times that didn't suck, but it's too late for that. I am disillusioned with them to the point I was willing to pay you $50 a year. More voices would certainly be better, and that is what they use to offer, but I'd rather pay you to have a single truthful voice than any number of voices lying to me. Thanks for going on a limb and giving me an option. I really want to understand what is going on and the lying is so absurd these days I KNOW I'm being blatantly lied to... and it drove me to find you.
Taibbi and Greenwald are tops amongst the few remaining real journalists.
My substack money goes to:
• Taibbi
• Greenwald
• Snowden
• The Dispatch
I also have digital NYT, and The Athletic. I think I’m covered.
Consider giving Bari Weis a try but one can only read so much. What would be great is if sub stack were to give readers a trial period to sample writers or a much higher fee to have an all access pass. But I don't know how much of this works.
Great idea! It's hard to commit to a subscription based on a recommendation alone and, as it is now, you can't easily share articles with friends.
Freddie DeBoer is a good addition to the list. I probably disagree with him about more than I agree with him about, but he's smart and honest, which makes him worth listening to.
Yes, he is very interesting.
Thanks! Will give him a try!
Love this list! I would add Coleman Hughes, Aaron Mate, Bari Weiss, Jeremy Lee Quinn, Wesley Yang, John McWhorter, Glen Lourey, Thomas Frank, Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Quillette, City Journal, Jimmy Dore, and Crystal & Saagar to this list. Perhaps controversially, I'd also add Megyn Kelley. I don't trust any one on this list to own the truth, and I frequently disagree with their conclusions. But their biases are easy to discern and weigh. With the exception of Dore, who accidentally shares a ton of news as proselytizes, they seem to be aware of their biases, and to make an effort to keep them in check. What I can rely on 8s their intention to be as truthful with their audiences as they're humanly capable of being.
You seem to have a line of sight of my pod cast library
Yeah. We're in a better bubble than most, but that we're in one at all concerns me, ya know?
I can't agree more. People need to grow up, and listen to what they don't want to hear, rather than be reassured in an echo chamber. You know the thing!
Yah they have kind of committed pretty hard to their current "model" and there is a lot of momentum to the resulting effects of that. If the New York Times became a wonder of truth, honesty, and hard cutting journalism that was enlightening and entertaining magically over night it would probably still take like 30 years from now or more to win back over the people they have spent so much effort disappointing and disillusioning. For all their idiocy as outlined by Matt above, they probably do recognize that on some level so they do realize that such an approach would be too expensive and big a commitment to pull off at this point leaving them with nothing left to do but double down on their hunt for better gimmicks.
Simple. They have a revenue stream other than their subscriptions, and they're not going to bite the hand that feeds them. Read: The MIC, Big Pharma, Banks.
"rancidly, insultingly dishonest". That single line says it all. All the lipstick in America can't transform these national media pigs into beauty Queens. They have lost peoples trust and their respect and won't be winning it back with their usual tricks and promises.
Their hearts and minds are just plain dishonest. They don't respect their audience and view them as uninformed sheep to be fleeced by their "betters" and intellectual superiors. Americans see through this charade and are fleeing the corporate media because they have seen what is behind the curtain and it is not a little man playing God but an evil manipulative elitist cabal of nasty control freaks without a moral bone in their flaccid snake like bodies.
In the age of the internet the falsehoods became too easy to recognize. So now they have gathered "faux fact checkers" and harnessed interned platforms to censor actual reality and information that exposes their pernicious agendas and political manipulation of voters.
Paid subscriptions have allowed people to choose their information sources or reject ones without merit. For whatever reason truth has a particular kind of beauty that reveals itself in many ways and like a well cut diamond reflects those truths in multiple shinning ways that can't be duplicated by falsehoods and skewered narratives. No intelligent person would ever pay for a platform access that consistently pushes lies and political narratives that are discredited over and over. The audience levels of CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo and so many others are in death spiral caused by their lies and incompetence. Hopefully this new paradigm will wipe them from public conscious and history will record their demise as a plus for society.
People will pay for it, just not for the reason of news. They pay to have their beliefs reinforced. They pay to look smart. They pay to be able to dish out the proper talking points.
But most of all, they pay because they are afraid. This is their comfort blanket, their therapist's chair.
Stupid observation! You hit yourself in the head with the hammer!
Brilliant observation! You nailed it!
Wow you are just like the TV doctors offering a diagnosis without even seeing the patient. Many of the pay publishers really don't toe a political line or publish easily discredited information. You don't seem to have much respect for the motives of subscribers. Might comment with your intuitive reasoning as to why individuals cling to obvious discredited MSM outlets. Guess everyone in your world view is driven by anything but an interest in reality or truth. What gets your undivided attention or is everything part of the matrix and only can see beyond the simulation?
"CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo" please include Fox, Breitbart, and other brands of cereal on a long grocery store shelf made by two manufacturers.
Some of the prostitutes work one side of the street, some work the other, but they're all in the same business.
Fair enough. I do know that, as Matt outlined in 𝐻𝑎𝑡𝑒, 𝐼𝑛𝑐, their business model depends on ginning up outrage by selectively featuring the worst, most outrageous, stupidest crap they can find emanating from the Left (I know, I know, "Left" is dumb).
Sadly, there's always a delusional professor or echo chamber blue check willing to provide the fodder for them, same as the legacy media can count on fundies or dumb Republican politicians to do the same for them.
Now that they are directly mocking each other on their shows, how long before we see WWF style food fights on pay per view?
I think one of the issues is that these people have such a centralized mindset, that they cannot comprehend the concept of decentralization itself. To borrow a metaphor from Mass Effect, explaining a decentralized subscription service like Substack to a New York Times executive is like trying to explain color to a creature with no eyes. It just will not compute. The only way they can make sense of it is to centralize it which of course defeats the point in the first place.
The ruling elite are becoming increasingly irrelevant as more decentralized alternatives emerge. They are shocked to find out that people are demanding they put out something of actual worth and value. When something like Substack comes around and rewards people who do put out something of value, it is a direct threat against them. Right now, they are trying to minimize independent creators. Just wait until they get more desperate after their copy-cat attempts fail. They will get nasty, but they are dinosaurs and the meteor already hit.
I subscribe to Substack writers in the same way one might hire an attorney to sort out conflicting legal theories. I hire an independent professional journalist beholden to no one but his clients. All I ask for is help sorting out the sh^t from shinola I see in the competing media narratives.
My strategy as well. Is anyone else but me discouraged to see that John McWhorter abandoned his substack for a NYT newsletter?
He is likely making more money and has a platform for reaching a wider audience. He may be back when his woke bosses tire of their cute contrarian.
I don't think it's super significant. He's making even more and as pointed out below, he's really trying to reach people. One of his best qualities, he's a really good guy who's sincere in thinking his analyses will help people.
It's not like they said "We've got a big bag labeled "Swag" and you just have to preach CRT for us. Remember, only two answers for any negative event:
1) racism
2) Trump."
Yes and no. He was preaching to the choir at Substack. I no longer read him, but I know his views at this point.
Good post so true
The comments area of most Substack articles are more coherent and ring truer that most featured stories by the corporate media. The average responder has more honesty and integrity that every NYT hack getting a byline and salary for writing what they are directed to by their masters in the newsrooms. The actors on the cable nets are usually readers of prepared copy who never leave the confines of the building they broadcast from. Their sources are the editors at the top of a very rancid organizational chart. It is all 1984 style disinformation by paid performers.
Remember when it came out that the young staff at NYT insisted that they talk about race more often because EVERY story is about race in some way? Imagine that world view. These people are miserable.
Also the extreme moderation of comments in the old media made them no fun. It was like being in church. The Substack commenters are mostly thoughtful and have provided many citations and ideas that expand the creator's observations.
also substack has introduced me to so many smart and talented writers...like salome sibonex, michael tracey, justin smith, Niccolo Soldo, and...kathleen mccook ;))
I have commenter favs, too, CP
Really, after a year of Substack..such a relief from being voiceless it's a relief to have back & forth with some humor and the commenters here often fill in a lot of blanks or have memories or recommends that enrich the creator's initial post. And no censorship and hardly anyone seems to be hanging desperately to a party agenda.
We got in early on a cool scene. I hope it stays that way...
Unfortunately, the scene always seems to rapidly decay. "Hey, you remember that cool scene?"
I'm the guy who ruins it.
Before msm went online, newsletters and ‘The Well’ blog were huge
what I like so much abt. comments...all ages appreciated and knowledge of life before online.
The WELL. Sheesh. Always ALL CAPS. Which is funny, but also true.
Age (too old or too young) and historiography illiteracy
Da Duh DAH! "The ruling elite are becoming increasingly irrelevant..." meets "https://www.businessinsider.com/top-1-have-more-money-than-the-middle-class-2021-10"
Yes, they have a ton of money but they are also completely useless. We don't need them. We don't need their charity. We don't need their influence. We don't need their gate keeping. They are becoming culturally and socially irrelevant. They are not dictating the trajectory of culture anymore. They have all the money in the world but are losing what truly matters.
Let them fight among themselves no one cares
I care only to the extent I think it's funny. It's like watching a Brian De Palma movie.
So true Boris
And apologies for linking to Business Insider...fer shame fer shame...
It's OK, buddy. We all have to make the $$$
Lol. Thanks for the mea culpa. I had to, HAD TO call you out on it, lol.
Business Insider has whored themselves out so shamelessly, I won't even click on them.
The media reacts to Substack's success the same way the Democrats react to the Virginia elections: By assuming that their product would be wildly popular if only they marketed it better.
They didn't even have that level of self-awareness when it comes to the Virginia election. Instead it's just, "if you don't like our product, you're a racist."
They are actually doubling down on it everything being racist. I didn’t see that coming. I should stop having expectations.
Let's kick the level of self-awareness down even another notch. In the tail end and aftermath of the election, there was a neck-snapping shift from trying to push a product (CRT-etc) to denying it ever existed in the first place. The best they could do was mock a few parents who couldn't give an on-the-spot grad school level critical analysis of why they opposed CRT.
AND finely parse the phrase "is not in the curriculum". Despite the fact there are tons of (pretty large) receipts from consultancies and "advising firms" and other transparent race-grifters who ARE in the schools. Which seems an approach more designed to provide plausible deniability than to properly educate children.
What ever happened to, "You don't need to sell the sizzle when you've got real steak?" Americans used to understand this--and American journalists understood it. 'Man Walks on Moon' doesn't need adornment.
What exactly was accomplished by walking on the moon, though? I guess Stanley Kubrick got a movie out of it.
Dad jokes.
I’m not even kidding. Armstrong would tell really bad stories about the moon, then quip, “Guess you had to be there.”
;)
I still don't understand what the point of the whole thing was. I guess dad jokes are basically dick jokes. "Hey, I walked on the moon!" See Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS (1972).
Tang?
Remember back when Pelé was endorsing Tang? It ain't just for astronauts any more. I'm surprised Shatner didn't beat him to it.
http://yoshicast.com/transformers-review-issue-36-spacehikers/transformers-36-ad-tang/
You leave us to infer there must be a great deal about human motivation you don't understand. As far back as the historical record stretches, and doubtless for millennia before that, people have always wanted to see what's in the next valley or on the other side of the sea.
There are no more next valleys.
Let me know when Mars Colony is happening.
It ain't a Dad joke till it's full groan.
I see what you did there. Respect.
Ah, sorry to rehash an old comment, but I have always loved ECC's "The Fucking Moon." It is an artistic statement that adequately summarizes my feelings about the whole enterprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AKxsljxKhc
Surely just going there was accomplishment enough--and newsworthy. 'Where no man (or for that matter, any other Earth-bound creature) has gone before,' right? Career journalists of the era had been waiting their entire lives to be able to run that headline.
Nope, the threat is real and existential to legacy/corrupt/corrupt/pharma drug pushing media, it's not me -- it's you.
Cancelled the NYT....read only the WSJ Editorial page (and believe less than half of what I read)...support the Epoch Times for their stick it to the CCP stance, and several Substack writers from across the political gamut.
Moronic Mainstream Media is done -- all they are good for now is as a punchline.
Unfortunately it's not quite that easy.
The "mainstream" media is mainstream because a single publication / subscription covers a wide variety of topics. Tabbi is great but on his Substack I cannot get a lot of what you might call regular news - was there an earthquake in Indonesia today? Is inflation going higher or lower? Did the government announce a new policy? etc.
This is sort of the problem. Most newsletter writers are basically single-issue writers, and the ones the NYT stress out about are mostly writing on the topic of how much the US media suck. Well, sure. But that doesn't actually compete with them outside a tiny window of stories, it only points out how much they need competition.
While I agree entirely with your insight (and was planning to post it myself) it does make me wonder, did Trump cause that earthquake in Indonesia? Was it global warming - entirely and exclusively the fault of Trump and the GOP? Is it proof that even the earth is racist for striking Indonesia that way? So many questions for the old gray mare..er.. lady, to answer for me
Falun Gong fans need iteration too. Sure, I get it it. Just like the beleaguered and benighted Uighurs. Those poor bastards. OH, the Humanity!!
Hellyeah!
Turtles all the way down!
BTW-TWIMC---The above is pure, unalloyed snnnnark-asm.
Epoch Times == The Falun Gong well-financed anti-Communist "religion"... ;-))
Falun Gong lunatics are the main CIA "source" about Uyghur "genocide" in China.
We need to agitate for freedom and democracy in – our beloved USA. Although near term hopeless -- I believe in multi-party system, unlike current one party monopoly with two right wings.
China raised 800 million of its citizens - from periodic mass starvation into middle class -- an unprecedented success -- while DNC and GOP oligarchs essentially eliminated middle class in the US.
"53K US contractors in the Middle East versus -- for 35K troops" !!! What a lucrative business and worth unlimited donations to both DNC and GOP politicians. Highlighting just that "detail" -- tells it all....
A 1%-er War party with two right (DNC and GOP) wings -- gay marriage, abortion, "woke", and other imposed topics are just distractions to divide 99% of population into "red" and "blue" camps.
But brainwashed US citizen agitate "freeing" China and increasing hate of Moslems, Russians, Chinese, Martians - just to avoid thinking about our own beloved country.
1%-er overlords are playing us like a violin...
I agree with much of what you say but everyone who things China is a runaway success story, or an unstoppable threat, should probably consider the massive structural problems they have both in the near term and long term. Short term they have the biggest housing bubble the world has seen largely because of the the restrictions placed by the CCP. long term they are facing demographic time bomb thanks again the the central meddlers.
Point being: China has massive problems and we should focus on the oligarchs at home than China’s role in the world (their problems could certainly becomes ours too though thanks to the gutting of so much industry here by the domestic managers).
Thank you.
China is far more capitalist than the US, Russia has not been Communist for 30+ years, while the US is a corporate socialism (more polite term for fascism)
Financial Times -- July 8, 2021:
“China’s emergence over the past four decades ranks as the biggest and longest-run economic boom in history. Its annual gross domestic product rose from a mere $191 B, or $195 per capita, in 1980 to $14.3 T, or $10,261 per capita, in 2019.
It has raised more than 770m people from poverty and transformed the Chinese economy into a high-tech powerhouse that is on course to eclipse America’s in size. This transformation is the landmark achievement of the Chinese Communist party, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on Thursday.”
But you have earned points here by confessing to consuming The Epoch Times. ET makes the Washington Examiner look like the Whole Earth Catalog. A fun read from time to time.
Pompeo's State Dept relied on Falun Gong “Epoch Times” and End Times extremist @adrianzenz to accuse China of genocide (CIA’s anti-China strategy documented several years ago).
Grayzone’s review of Zenz's papers shows wanton data abuse, absurd manipulation of source material, fabrications & huge errors.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-genocide-relied-on-fraudulent-far-right-researcher/
Who is "China?" You talkin' the 800 million "middle class" or the CCP? Because they ain't the same entity. And any Chinese citizen today who identifies as "middle class" will tell you, secretly, in a whisper, they attained that status despite the CCP, not because of it. Hey Boris: the DNC and GOP are not your friends. Nor is the CCP.
The rot of the U.S. political apparatus should not invoke fawning, knee-jerk appraisals eastward toward the CCP. And in the U.S., there is no shortage of brainwashed citizens, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever likely be, but are they agitating "freeing" China? 3-4 dozen maybe.
And ask the the average American what the "Uyghurs" mean to them, and they'll more than likely respond that they're unpleasant nasal detritus to be plucked out of their noses.
We don't want hostilities with the Chinese, we must do business with the Chinese, but we also don't want to award them a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Especially since I've been on the waiting list for years for one.
Correct -- we fully agree on all points.
From time to time I provide counterpoints to few readers who were brainwashed to think that one can't hate xxxx enough.....
(put in your pick -- China, Russia, Palestinians, Iran, Venezuela, etc. --- as served for 70+ years by CIA stenographers in the US state (i.e., corporate) media
you should definitely start your own group!
Galun Fong
Show em how to do it!
Maybe he can run a Beijing based substack??
Pinching Pennies for People – but Endless Cash for War with China and elsewhere... ;-))
Financial Times -- July 8, 2021:
“China’s emergence over the past four decades ranks as the biggest and longest-run economic boom in history. Its annual gross domestic product rose from a mere $191 B, or $195 per capita, in 1980 to $14.3 T, or $10,261 per capita, in 2019.
It has raised more than 770m people from poverty and transformed the Chinese economy into a high-tech powerhouse that is on course to eclipse America’s in size. This transformation is the landmark achievement of the Chinese Communist party, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on Thursday.”
And how many of those 800 million had better lives before the Cultural Revolution? I thinks it's a pretty glaring error to say all this progress was the result of CCP good will and intelligent planning.
Steal Economist articles!
LOL @ The NYT... I scan it daily and still, nearly a year after Biden took office, there are more articles about Trump, than about Biden.
Will they never learn?
His name is what generates clicks unfortunately. Still milking it so they can sell advertisements.
All the click-bait and disinformation that fits in print (or on-line)
This is still funny to me. In this narrative, Trump is the boogeyman under the bed. They need a villain to vilify and burn down; a Wicker Man, if you will.
You are a bargain! For about the cost of 1 gallon of gas ($4 -- give or take) per month, I can read an honest opinion and well researched articles. If the NYT really wants to attract readers, how about they actually print the truth?
"For about the cost of 1 gallon of gas ($4 -- give or take) per month, I can read an honest opinion and well researched articles."
And laff.
Impossible! They are key organ of the Empire, which is mutually exclusive with being "reality based": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
“…technically human editor…” LMAO
As they say, all humans have own opinions and an ***-hole... MSM editors have only one of this too, therefore just "technically" human :-)
You write good
They hate Substack because it is real, bottom up truth from writers who don't want to be controlled by some fake big media editors or execs.
The NYT Substrack clone won't succeed because it is missing the key ingredients - truth and honest feedback.