Voldemort Wouldn’t Say It Either
I’m going to try my hand at a regular submission schedule to discuss a hodgepodge of semi-related news items that I see each week that catch and – at least briefly – hold my attention long enough to generate some reflection and reaction… and maybe not in that order. I begin this inaugural essay with the NY Times. Now, I was tempted to call it the failing New York Times because I knew that there is no better allusion at filtering out those who actually need to hear what I say the most (but will heed it the least). I don’t really believe (unfortunately) that the Times is failing and I want this post to resonate with Truth. Don’t get me wrong, the Times isn’t crushing it revenue-wise, but the fact that it even exists as a going concern bothers me. I’ll come back to the “why” of that in a bit, but let me get to the most recent cause célèbre at the Gray Lady that has drawn my ire: the sacking of 45-year veteran reporter Don MacNeil for use of the word-that-can-never-ever-be-spoken…
(N-I-G-G-E-R).
There. Let’s get that out of the way. If you can still read these words then presumably your brain has realized by now that you aren’t dead for your eyes having seen those letters above or – perhaps even worse yet? – sounding them out in your head! (You RACIST!! You pronounced it in your mind!)
For the unaware, National Review has a pretty good recap of the whole mess. MacNeil’s four-part defense was either linked or in the comments here and it’s not an unfair TL/DR summary to describe it as follows: old school, union democrat finds out that the newer, younger, more progressive wing has no use for his old ass anymore… (and that they are also vindictive, petty liars who take glee in screaming RACISM!! as loudly as they can for as long as it continues to have power). That MacNeil’s editors and management at the Times are quislings, complete gutless cowards, is an easy takeaway, but that’s just the surface skim of what’s really going on.
Let me admit that there’s no small measure of schadenfreude for me in watching the NYT implode before my eyes. (My schadenfreude is out to here and harder than Chinese arithmetic, as the old racist joke goes. Although, is it really racist to lean on a stereotype that Chinese are good at something… like math??) I’ve seen some comments by folks of a more conservative bent that MacNeil is only reaping what he sowed and so good riddance. And I must confess to not shedding many tears (okay, any tears, at all) over MacNeil’s sacking for essentially the same reasons. i.e. Even if MacNeil hasn’t participated in any cancel culture activism himself, the folks who put bread on his table have been front and center in destroying anyone who stands against the progressive narrative, from printing campus rape lies all the way back to Walter Duranty and the Holodomor, you won’t find much sympathy from me for even the tech beat guy at that commie rag finally getting his red pill the hard way. Maybe that’s unfair, maybe not – I’ll ask for you to withhold judgment until you get to the end of this piece.
But a closer look at what happened to MacNeil does give me pause.
First, a little play-by-play for those who didn’t follow it closely because the details really matter in MacNeil’s case. Some Lefty-rag – this time it was that paragon of journalistic integrity, the Daily Beast – wrote a shitty, one-sided hit job rehashing a years-old incident in which MacNeil is alleged to have used The Word That May Not Be Spoken (by white people) <GASP> IN FRONT OF ACTUAL F**KING CHILDREN!!! Now, before anyone gets the vapors, let me add some note benes: it is not alleged that MacNeil actually called someone N-WORD or directed the slur at, well, anyone. At all. As it turns out, the incident had previously been investigated by the Times, right after it happened, allegedly when some parents raised concerns about the event. But what is critical about the incident is that MacNeil was only repeating The Word that a STUDENT had used. (If you think it all sounds like a setup, you’re on my team.) MacNeil was on an overseas trip in Peru and a student recounted how her two teenage girlfriends, one Jewish and the other black – (not an accident on the punctuation, btw) – would insult each other using racial slurs; as in, the black girl called her Jewess friend a “kike” or “hebe” or other like insults. (I mean, really, who hasn’t?) In response to which, the Jewish girl would call her black friend… (oh no, not again) – a N…Nu…Nu…NO, YOU’RE NIGGARDLY. (Okay, just kidding, that’s not what she actually said).
Anyway…the girl on the bus who told this story to MacNeil asked whether he thought this was racism or not. And MacNeil, perhaps not clear on who said what, committed the most grievous sin of: asking for clarification about who used the word… by USING THE F**KING N-WORD!!!
…And Now, A Word from Our Sponsors
Again, let me say that under normal circumstances, I would take great pleasure in the fact that the Times has turned into a real life version one of Python’s quirkier bits from Holy Grail. I really would… but these aren’t normal circumstances.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
– Martin Niemoller, Lutheran pastor and concentration camp survivor
Niemoller is a pretty interesting chap. He was a German U-Boat commander during the First World War and later became a Lutheran pastor. He was also originally an enthusiastic supporter of Der Fuhrer’s Reich… until he found out that churches would be subservient to the State and that he and other pastors were having their phones tapped and being surveilled. His outspoken opposition eventually landed him in concentration camps for the last 7 years of the Nazi regime. Afterwards he uttered this famous quote in varying forms in speeches he made. Niemoller wrote a book about what he viewed as the complicity of all Germans in the horrors of the Nazi regime because of the populace’s unwillingness to stand against what they knew were the horrific acts of their government. I don’t believe in collective guilt and while I think Niemoller has a valid and trenchant point to make about government’s relationship to the people it claims to represent, he’s both wrong and right.
He’s wrong to ascribe collective guilt to an entire people simply because their government did terrible things. Guilt is an entirely individual matter, as a matter of logic, legality, and morality. Groups are not “guilty” of something collectively unless all members of the group have willingly and knowingly participated, aided, or abetted the horror the group has perpetrated. I don’t want to get bogged down in a discussion of the law around accomplices, conspiracy, or principle theories of liability, which have become so focused on minutiae that the entire area of personal responsibility in the law has been rendered meaningless. I see this same error when people discuss China, as well, as if every Chinese personally approved and supported their government’s actions. Indeed, it might be noted that one of the defining aspects of socialism its replacement of individual responsibility with only collective “group” responsibility, with the relevant “groups” being defined by the expediency of the moment that ruling class needs in order to demonize an enemy or elevate a “friend,” although it is telling how much there is of the former and how the latter is only used as an aid to carrying out the former. If this seems confusing in the abstract, consider the riots of the past summer when cities burned while mainstream politicians elevated one group – POCs in the new lingua sociala – but only as a cudgel against whites, never as a standalone act to lift up those historical out-groups.
White Power!
Now one might reasonably ask what this has to do with the Times and Don MacNeil’s firing, so let me be explicit: if the mob can get to MacNeil, they can get to you. In fact, I would go a step further and say that it’s only a matter of time before they do get to you. Sounds alarmist and crazy, you say? Please allow me to “refresh your recollection,” as trial lawyers are wont to say.
Emmanuel Cafferty was an employee at San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E). One day he was driving his truck and some activist – doing what he could for the party – and snapped a picture of Cafferty with his hand hanging out the window in traffic. To my eyes, it looks like the picture caught Cafferty just as he was trying to flick a sticky booger off of his finger. To the activist, however, Cafferty – a Mexican American – was flashing the “white power” gesture. SDGE got wind of it through social media and Cafferty was fired.
Though Cafferty appears to be making an entirely different gesture in the grainy photo, the image soon made its way back to his employer at San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E). The company fired him after a few days of deliberation, claiming it “took appropriate action.” …
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get over this, but to lose your dream job for playing with your fingers, that’s a hard pill to swallow,” Cafferty told a local NBC affiliate.
Contacted by local reporters, the man who captured the image – who has not been identified – admits he may have gotten “spun up” with emotion and misjudged the incident, adding that he never intended for Cafferty to be fired. He has since deleted his Twitter account altogether…
Now, let me repeat what I said before: if the Times woke mob can get to Don MacNeil, a forty-five year employee, and they can get to Emmanuel Cafferty (an obviously non-white guy) for a completely bullshit accusation, based on him hanging his hand out the window, then the fact that it hasn’t happened to you or someone close to you (YET) is simply a matter of happenstance. You can only hide from the mob for so long.
I’ve written here before about my brush with cancel culture after my friend was forced to sell his company because he made the mistake of taking a shot at the IHME’s claim of being able to model “systemic racism.” He mockingly Tweeted something to the effect that given the IHME’s ineptitude in modeling COVID-19 that there efforts would likely produce a race war. His life was ruined in a matter of weeks and guess who was front and center in helping destroy him? The New York Times.
The Commie Rag Cometh
My first encounter with the NY Times was in 1985, when I moved to Ozone Park, Queens, the summer before my junior year of high school. I don’t think I had ever read a single word of the Times before I fell in love with an upper middle-class girl from Flushing whose dad was a Hah-vahd man. He was a psychologist and successful enough to occasionally appear on the local NPR affiliate whenever they needed some talking head to speak on matters psychological. My girlfriend was obsessive about the Times crossword puzzle and I enjoyed trying to help out. The Paper of Record was considered holy writ in her house, the final word on all matters of public consumption; and I, the child of broke, blue-collar parents, was so desirous of entering that world, I bought the Times’ mystique in toto.
Way leads onto way, as Frost noted, and Fate destined me for the military. In 2003, the Jayson Blair affair happened. By then, I had long since left the ambit of the NYT’s bubble of self-importance. I remember reading about it at the time and thinking that if Blair could manufacture multiple stories out of whole cloth over a prolonged period, what did it say about the reliability of other pieces at the Times? Out of curiosity – and because the internet existed – I opened that Pandora’s Box and started digging in on the Times’ history. It didn’t take me too long to realize that the entire mystique around the NYT as the “paper of record” was manufactured. It was all fugazi, as they liked to say in the neighborhoods where I grew up.
Any serious look at the NY Times’ history, and the numerous scandals and “affairs” of which it has been a part, will reveal that the Gray Lady has long had a statist bent to it – regardless of whether it was owned by Republicans or a Democrats. The original press release gives more than a hint of what was to come.
We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good;—and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right or exactly wrong;—what is good we desire to preserve and improve;—what is evil, to exterminate, or reform. [1]
As an example, the original owners were (1) a Republican (cir. 1850) politician, Henry Jarvis Raymond, and a banker, George Jones. Early investors included the founder of Wells Fargo Bank (Edwin B. Morgan) and a former Whig Representative of the U.S. House of Representatives, pre-17th Amendment. Here is what I love about the Times: their telling of the history surrounding their original owner’s actions during New York City’s Civil War Draft Riots of 1863.
Mobs riot in New York to protest the draft; more than 100 killed. The Times, pro-Union and anti-slavery, is a leading target. Its Park Row building is defended by Raymond and others with rifles and a Gatling gun; mobs attack the Tribune building instead. [2]
It’s beautiful, really. Now let me add some context that make it an abject lesson in propaganda, a veritable rewriting of history – a Times specialty, as it turns out. First, for filing in the Irony-So-Big-You-Could-Choke-On-It bin: Mr. Raymond was, in deed and in word, an ardent antislavery man from the North…he is also known by many historians as “The godFather of the Republican Party.” And that doesn’t mean like Mario Puzo’s GodFather. Raymond essentially founded the “party of Lincoln.” If history were being more accurate, it would be the “party of Jarvis Raymond.” Except that he later got thrown out of the Party because he was so over-the-top. He supported more punishment of the South after the Civil War. And his great claim to fame was that he during the draft riots that he gunned down his own fellow New Yorkers who were “mostly peacefully protesting” the notion that the federal government could conscript them and force them to fight and die in the fedgov’s war. That was a very real concern animating the riots. It was not well-established in 1863 that the FedGov could conscript you, a New Yorker, for a War between “the Union” – located in some buildings in Washington, DC – and “the South” – located someplace you were unlikely to ever go to or even cared about.
So, of course, the current Times’ version focuses more on the fact that it was lower class whites – typically Irish – who were none too happy with the fact that (a) rich white people could buy their way out of service by paying for a substitute for the then-unreachable fee of $2000; and (b) the Irish knew that free blacks represented a huge threat to their section of the labor market – unskilled manual labor. In fact, one of the greatest American stories ever told (and greatest books published in American English), Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, contains the archetypical anecdote about this subject. Douglass tells the reader that the worst beating he ever endured was not from his original Virginia plantation owner, nor from the Baltimore couple to whom he was loaned out: no, the worst beating Douglass ever endured was from dockworkers in Baltimore who were incensed because Douglass was working as a shipwright because he could do the job at least as well as the dockworkers, but he had to (and would willingly) accept significantly lower wages. The dockworkers’ concerns were reflected across a swath of blue-collar labor interests: free blacks represented a potential tidal wave of cheap, domestic immigrant labor that would precipitate a “race to the bottom.” Thus did minimum wage become a plank of the Democratic party, when trade unions were essential to the party’s survival. (Sound at all familiar yet, pendejo? Insert quote about history not repeating, but rhyming.)
Interestingly, having worked for exactly $0.00 for most of his life, Douglas knew that getting even a small portion of his hard-earned labor, which his arrangement with his new, lazy Baltimore owner afforded him, meant he was now earning his own money. Concomitantly, Mr. Douglass’s understanding of the value of his hard work and the ignominy of having to hand over a portion of his wages to that man who had done nothing to earn them, made him not only impervious to, but outwardly dismissive of, a socialist speaker’s claims to brotherhood with the plight of Douglass’ people.
In November 1848 a socialist activist gave a speech at the 13th annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. “Mr. Ingliss” began his remarks well enough, reported the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who was present to give a speech of his own that day, “but strangely enough went on in an effort to show that wages slavery is as bad as chattel slavery.“*
Douglass soon became infuriated with the socialist speaker. “The attempts to place holding property in the soil—on the same footing as holding property in man, was most lame and impotent,” Douglass declared. “And the wonder is that anyone could listen with patience to such arrant nonsense.”
Frederick Douglass heard a lot of arrant nonsense from American socialists in those days. That’s because most socialists thought the anti-slavery movement had its priorities all wrong. As the left-wing historian Carl Guarneri once put it, most antebellum socialists “were hostile or at least indifferent to the abolitionist appeal because they believed that it diverted attention from the serious problems facing northern workers with the onset of industrial capitalism.” The true path to social reform, the socialists said, was the path of anti-capitalism. [3]
*Yes, kids, well-to-do, white, progressive socialists having been lecturing even actual, honest-to-God slaves about how ‘working for a living is literally slavery, OMG!!’ since even before slavery ended. It’s been their schtick for always.
The “Paper of Record” may have changed ownership in the late 1800’s, but the state-fellating ideology never did. The current complete bullshittery by the New York Times isn’t new; it’s exactly what that fishwrap has always been. The NY Times has always been an organ and advocate for government control of the deplorables; it’s the one consistent theme in its entire history. It should be no surprise that the NY Times is aligned with its sources at the government agencies who are now spying on the deplorables; and of course the Times was against those same agencies when the Times didn’t believe those agencies were ideologically aligned with the Times.
Notice that the Wiki entry on NY Times screwups doesn’t even include Walter Duranty’s lies on behalf of the Stalin regime regarding the Holodomor, nor the Times refusal to rescind the Pulitzer prize given to Duranty, an award named for the owner of the rival New York Tribune, I feel obligated to note: you know, the place that Raymond chased the rioters off to with his Holy Machine-Gun of Righteousness… That Shall Not Be Owned By The Rubes. Let me jot down a few more: the reporting on the stolen documents from Los Alamos that landed Wen Ho Lee in jail; the Valerie Plame Affair; the 1619 Project; the naming of Steven Hatfill as a suspect in the anthrax letter attacks (impugning an innocent person, yet again! This seems to be an NYT specialty, by the way); and NY Times v. Sullivan, the famous case in which the NY Times was sued for defamation and managed to get the Supreme Court to change hundreds of years of the common law of defamation – by raising the legal standard of proof – in order to protect the NY Times!
The sacking of Don MacNeil, Bari Weiss, et al, and the the hiring of racists like Sarah Jeong, and that harridan Nikole Hannah Jones, is all par for the course. The issues haven’t changed, all that has happened is that the players on the field are wearing different logos and colors. The NY Times has (for decades) managed to carve out a market as an announcer to the game, by offering a steady diet of socialist “equality” pablum for urban, upper middle-class whites who see themselves as the bulwark against all that icky racism out there – in flyover country – where there’s no civilization or culture. A Times subscription has become as much a social signal as it is for being a purveyor of facts or memorializing the “public record,” but it desperately needs the claim of being the “paper of record” in order to control the narrative in service to its fellow travelers. What Don MacNeil and Bari Weiss and other naifs at the NYT never understood was that their genuine belief as reporters in truly liberal notions of reason, objective truth, facts, etc., was always at odds with the Times’ servitude to an ideology. It just happened that for a certain period of time, MacNeil et al were able to coexist within the NY Times ecosystem until the gaze of Sauron finally landed on them.
That’s how the purges always begin.
the fact that it even exists as a going concern bothers me.
Even more incredible- The Washington Post.
They have gone into full partisan scandal-rag territory.
I’m amazed at how all of the major media outlets, the ones that 25 years ago would have easily qualified for the adjective “respectable” in common discourse, have become less reliable than the Enquirer or Globe or those other fishwraps in the grocery checkout line. I mean, it’s incredible. I’ll stop there because I don’t want my comment to wander into territory I’m currently writing about (in the third installment), but I’m with you, Brooksy. It’s amazing. OTOH, I’ll just say that journalism being what it is is a direct reflection of what the new writers’ and editors’ “educational upbringing.”
From what I understand, there was a shift from “searching out the facts” toward “starting with a narrative and reporting in a way that supports that narrative.”
“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
This happened during Bush vs Kerry. Remember they hid Edwards’ affair. The National Enquirer broke the story.
That was awesome. Not breaking the news. But thay the National Enquirer did hard news.
Who knows how many other things they’re right about that get ignored because National Enquirer.
Well, they’re right about the aliens.
Ancient astronaut theorists make everything better!
Not sure if this steps on your future post, but I have a theory on all of this.
Looking back on the late ’00s/early ’10s, it seemed like all the dead-tree (and boob tube) publications were going to die off. And so many of them did! They seemed unable to adapt to the changing media landscape, which was much less centralized than before, and this included lots of “tech” magazines as well. I fully expected NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, etc. to be gone in a few years time (and probably less). Yet, that did not happen.
Around the same time, the model now known as clickbait was being developed. So-called “A/B testing” was all the rage, where websites would put up two versions of things, one selected at random for each user, and see which got more engagement (“click-through”). Google in particular got quite adept at this, partly through its purchase of DoubleClick, and later obtained a monopoly on Internet ads. So the modern ad-funded “free content” clickbait model coalesced by the early ’10s and became the norm.
The money was good but the margins weren’t what they used to be. Enough to stay afloat and avoid foreclosure, if costs were cut, but not enough to maintain “legacy” presence (large facilities, full editorial staffs, etc.). By 2014 and GamerGate, the profession had largely been hollowed out of its old-school talent (most of whom just retired, as far as I can tell). What was left was a bunch of young(er) people for whom the pay was relatively good but who had never been trained by a previous generation of talent. The new model was all they knew, and their generation had been raised to believe itself technically fluent and holistically superior to its predecessors anyway. All they knew, morally speaking, was Hitler and Civil Rights. And who would struggle to choose between those two?
And then to add a third leg to this perfect storm, in parallel does social media develop. MySpace dies off and gives rise to Facebook, just as Nupedia dies off and gives rise to Wikipedia (which our teachers back then emphatically asserted was “not a reliable source”). A thousand turd flowers bloom, most notably Twitter (“what good is a platform where you can only communicate in messages of 140 characters at a time?”). They provide a slick appearance and a convenient interface, notably easier and friendlier to the average person than running your own blog or mailing list. And, of course, they can collect the data that makes targeting ads easier.
So the dead-tree and boob-tube media gloms onto this rising confluence of phenomena and in a feat of necromancy extends its own shelf life. Then we arrive at the emerging modern era of “disinformation” and “fact checking” and “reliable sources” where they hope to cling on for even longer despite their fading relevance never having been truly restored.
Five Reasons Media Credibility Has Declined
You won’t believe number 3.
Thanks Ozy. That is an episode in history you won’t here in the hallowed halls of public education, and i never have heard it myself.
I was once at a bit convention/meeting thing (i was required to go to), and they had a speaker who was talking about deradicalizing people. During her speech she told the story of a real neo-nazi who was de-radicalized and quoted him using the word that isn’t allowed. This was only a few years back, but even then i was leaned over to my co-worker “Not even quoting someone would i be brave enough to do that and to such a large crowd”. I don’t think what she did was wrong, i just know that given today’s society, it will be taken out of context by anyone who means to do you ill will.
Frederick Douglass holds the slot of Greatest American, in my mind.
George Washington is a worthy second. The list gets pretty shitty after that, with the exception of my grandfather.
No Lysander Spooner love?
I gotta admit, Neph, I don’t really know enough to place on the list. I’ll add it to the ever-growing list of my True Libertarian ™ education items.
Norman Borlaug for #3?
Not to go down the rabbit hole here, but I think something less than active participation (which includes ading and abetting) can carry guilt. If you know that a group you are a member of is doing Bad Things, and sit silent while remaining a member of the group, then I think you have some culpability. The Chinese people, of course, have no good options – outright opposition will get your organs harvested, and leaving the country is near impossible if you are under suspicion. It gets complicated and nuancy, unfortunately, when looking at the costs of opposition and exit – what cost is high enough to excuse remaining a member and thus, perhaps, tacitly supporting the group and its Bad Things? At what point is your continued membership, however passive, a willing membership? And at what point do we say a passive member is, or is not, supporting the actions of the group?
Correction:
If you know that a group you are a member of is doing Bad Things, and sit silent while remaining a member of the group, then I think you could have some culpability.
Are those last questions rhetorical, counselor? Because my short answer would be that individual responsibility begins where there is a meeting of the actus reus and the requisite mens rea, no? You and I might dislike, or find our own consciences too troubled by, the passive who could do something but won’t, but I guess it depends upon whether we’re discussing legal responsibility or moral responsibility, eh?
I was thinking moral responsibility. Attaching legal responsibility to inaction, in the absence of a duty to act, is not something I am a fan of.
I’m still not willing to assign moral judgment to someone who simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to buck the crowd. I know that might sound like a defense of cowardice, and perhaps in some way it is, but having an expectation about someone else’s behavior (which is really what morals are) – in this case, over their unwillingness to stand up and be pilloried (or worse) by a mob – seems to me to have a seriously elevated expectation for Others that I’m going to guess really doesn’t exist. IOW, martyrs are rare and we venerate them specifically because of the recognition of how rare (ab-normal) those acts are.
Nor I. I’ve been in survival mode too long to judge, and the underclass is too far removed from what the white liberals are doing to care.
I’m still not willing to assign moral judgment to someone who simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to buck the crowd.
Totally legitimate. I’ve been personally struggling with this as my organization edges into wokism. Its still not here, but you can see it coming. What we are starting to get is a very pablum version of critical race theory training, so far just for the c suite (I managed to miss the last session on account of being out of town for intensive handgun training).
I’d like to think I’ll stand up at some point, but I’m pretty sure I won’t, and I am not happy with myself for what feels like a moral compromise for money.
I’d like to think I’ll stand up at some point, but I’m pretty sure I won’t, and I am not happy with myself for what feels like a moral compromise for money.
Cosigned
Actually, I’ve drawn some lines in the sand. I’ll not be forced to actively participate in their bigotry. I’ll not stay once I’m in position to be harmed by their racist promotion policies. I’ll be looking for an escape for next March (when I’m eligible to waive into the Texas bar). I’ll not be forced to act like I care about I&D stuff. I’ll not lie when directly asked about social things, but I won’t volunteer my opinion.
That said, changing companies isn’t gonna fix anything. I either need to get out of the industry (into one I’m less qualified for) or I need to get out of my current line of work. Either way, it’s a waiting game until late this year as I get closer to being technically eligible to practice law here in TX.
If every German, or enough of them, had risen up the Nazis would not have stood a chance (hell, if every Jew had risen up, the same would have been true). But if one German stands up, he just ends up dead (and his family too, most likely). In the Nazi takeover scenario, the cost of individual action is very high even if the cost of collective action is a lot lower. One can see a bit of collective guilt:individual guilt::cost of collective action:cost of individual action. But how do you measure any of this, and how do you apply collective guilt without individualizing it too much?
It seems like preference cascades always take too long to happen. I expected it on masking months ago, and its still not here/just starting? I see no sign of a preference cascade against wokism, although I have little doubt the (vast?) majority who knows much about it thinks its bullshit.
Being at least marginally woke is high-status (though, as always, being a true believer is gauche). To stand against it, more people would need to realize they too can be canceled. There was glimmer of realization when Kavanaugh got railroaded, but enough people could write it off because he was just another Republican (the party of low status, though its own leaders resent that fact) and it also didn’t take ultimately, as Kav still got confirmed.
Which goes to show, in part, why the people in power and money aren’t too worried about being canceled. They have fuck-you money or fuck-you connections. They don’t need to worry too much. Cancelation games might occasionally ensnare a high-status individual but it’s primarily a social climbing contest for
moderately low-status people to set themselves apart from lower-status people (circular definition here, status basically being determined by the fact-of cancelation or at least cancel-worthy signals).
Harvey Weinstein.
(((Weinstein))) was never high status.
For me, it depends on if someone falls into a group by default (e.g., a person born in China) or actively joins a group.
If a person joins the KKK, the Westboro Baptist Church, or the Anti-Defamation League, I have no moral qualms with judging them by their membership in those groups. Doesn’t matter if they “willingly and knowingly participated, aided, or abetted the horror the group has perpetrated”. By joining that group, they are condoning and signifying acceptance of those horrors.
This assumes the free-choice of members. When you get into systems that force membership in groups, the morality becomes murky.
One of my gorked comments was along those lines. Joining a group when you know (should have known?) it does Bad Things is an affirmative act. Remaining in one after it begins doing Bad Things is more passive (although the rabbit hole of action/inaction beckons) and more ambiguous, and gets into the cost of opposition/exit more. Forced, or at least involuntary, membership, I don’t blame anyone for.
I was talking to a colleague recently about China, and I made the distinction between the Chinese people and the thoroughly evil government. I think it was a distinction he hadn’t really thought about before.
I’ve been working on writing something about this exactly. The Chinese people are NOT commies. Quite the opposite, in fact. They’re inveterate traders/capitalists. They love to haggle and get the best of a deal. They work hard, save, have stable family structures, etc. They’re almost the anti-commies in every way, but their government has them under the thumb.
Standing up to tanks has consequences.
Excellent article, Ozy.
Thank you, M’Lady.
(We’re looking at houses up your way, Moj. I think the Ozy and
HarrietMrs. Ozy are done here in the desert.)Mayhap we’ll be sipping mint julips together this summer, Insh’allah.
Don’t forget to leave an ironic statue behind.
…in the boundless and bare sand that stretches far away…?
Of course.
Should none be forthcoming, a nuclear test site could bring a new twist on the meaning of the verbiage…
*squeeeeeeee*
Wherewherewhere?!?!?!
OP or Olathe.
Wooo hoooo!!!! Mr Mojeaux and I will take you to the best restaurant ever, not including BBQ.
We had dinner with OMWC and Libertesian (lurker who actually lives in my municipality) there and then we had dinner with OMWC and SP there.
Trigger Hippie lives here too. There’s another Glib who lives in OP but he hasn’t posted in forever so far as I see.
So what brings you thisaway?
Wifey is from that area (more or less). Family on that side of KC and in SW Missour-uh.
Ugh.
Missour-eeeee
My FIL wouldn’t even argue… he’d just say Missour-uh in his laconic, soft-spoken manner.
(He’s from a town of about 2000… and those are today’s numbers.)
If ya make it down to SWMO, and have an opportunity for a beer, hit me up. And, if y’all get together up in the “big City” I’d try to make it.
Nice article
We do, Lazer. I’ll hit you up the next time and we’ll try to find time for a cold one. That’s where my wife’s parents live.
It’ll probably be this summer.
?
Oh, agreed.
Notice that the Wiki entry on NY Times screwups doesn’t even include Walter Duranty’s lies on behalf of the Stalin regime regarding the Holodomor, nor the Times refusal to rescind the Pulitzer prize given to Duranty,
Ozzy, I think you screwed up here or someone updated the wiki article since you wrote this. When I look at the NYT wiki article you link, which is the main NYT page, there is a blurb on Duranty’s lies. The NYT Controversies page doesn’t say anything about Duranty.
Whenever the NYT fails, I won’t miss it.
Unpopular Opinion (?)
I lean towards not taking the prize away from Duranty. If he were still alive, and it were more recent, i could be amiable to such a thing. But I generally don’t like the idea, because it smells like altering history to fit a narrative. Do we “un-elect” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson et. al. because they owned slaves? It doesn’t change the fact that they did serve as president, and attempts at removing awards feels like attempts at rewriting history to suite present day sentiments.
Ya know, leon, I don’t really care about the Pulitzer. I love that the award is named after the guy who was their chief publishing rival. Moreover, I wouldn’t take it away, either, because I want history to know how fucking worthless those things are. But I like holding people to their own standards – and showing just what a bunch of lying commie hypocrites (but I repeat myself) the NYT is.
“PULL DOWN RACIST ICONS!!!”
“What? Give up a Pulitzer for a guy who was on Stalin’s payroll and covered up the starvation of the Ukranians?!? NEVER!!!!”
Exactly. I want people to know how shitty the Pulitzer is. Likewise, i wouldn’t ask for Obama or Arfat to have there Peace Prizes taken away. It illustrates the vanity and lies behind these awards.
But i also get the Goose > Gander sentiments too.
I may have mis-typed that and meant to refer to the NYT page.
OK, got it.
Speaking of brain lint-
I have been not-so-quietly ranting and rambling about various things, this morning, and hit upon an idea which I think has great merit and potential: a dramatization of the Trial of Doktor Foochy for malpractice and malfeasance, which obviously takes place in a fictional, far off and not-insane universe.
I can’t seem to sit still long enough to write anything like that anymore (as if I ever could).
I bequeath it to the community, with my best wishes and blessings.
Comments getting gorked again.
Great article Ozy. Thx.
Cheers, mikey! Thx.
Hope I didn’t micro-aggress your brain.
Nah.
Actually, I’m old enough to remember hearing Thatwordthatmustnotbespoken and many more in “polte”, daily conversation.
I always thought that by far the worst one was “boy”.
#metoo
When I was still in or just out of college but still living in my mother’s house, a couple of of my mother’s cousins from rural Indiana brought us some of my late great aunt’s furniture. One commented that as they approached our house, he thought they had gotten lost. “I thought we were in jigaboo country.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
I still have no idea what that means.
Well, I grew up in a “changing neighborhood,” and my classmates and playmates gave me a thorough introduction to the music of P-Funk and (especially) the Ohio Players.
*looks around cluelessly*
Is that a “De-gentrifying neighborhood”?
Google “Philly sound”.
WP isn’t letting me link to one of their songs. Just look up their album covers – you’ll thank me.
(Ohio Players, that is. Classic Dayton funk.)
First sign of a “changing neighborhood” – One white neighbor says to another white neighbor, “I won’t move if you don’t move.”
Second sign of a changing neighborhood – Black neighbor says to a white neighbor, “I won’t move if you don’t move.” (Reportedly happened in my neighborhood.)
UCS – I don’t know that “degentrifying” would apply if the residents were never gentry.
*shrug*
I was just trying to make heads or tails of the circumstance. So you’re saying it wasn’t a socio-economic change it was undergoing?
Not really. Just more racially integrated.
I used to hear that term often in my younger days. “Hoosier” is another one and is still widely used. Has a entirely different meaning in these parts.
Yup – In Ohio (or at least Dayton) a Hoosier is just someone from Indiana. To hubby from MO, it was a…hillbilly? Redneck? Not sure of the closest equivalent.
“Although, is it really racist to lean on a stereotype that Chinese are good at something… like math??”
Yes. Obviously all asians are good at math.
Depends on whether you think racism is limited to negative stereotypes.
…like Kamala? ?
And Germans!
Ozy, this was a fantastic read, thanks. I have a media history college textbook from the late 1970s that touts the era of objective journalism as some momentary aberration of the mid-20th Century that would soon be overtaken by market forces and people’s need to be given a narrative structure.
I don’t think there ever was “objective” journalism. Ever. I think it was more honest when newspapers were open about their editorial slant and you know that from the moment you read it. I think one of the greatest acts of perfidy was Murrow (or whoever else) sold people on the idea that papers were going to be “objective” in their reporting. I don’t begrudge the NYT being a commie rag (beyond being a commie rag, that is), what I hate it their claim to both Objectivity in their presentation AND their claim to being The Source of The News AND their self-righteous, moral preening. They’re just another lefty rag, no better than Salon, as far as I’m concerned, and should be treated the same way.
I didn’t think it was possible to make me hate the NYT more than I already did but you managed it. Well done.
I hadn’t thought about metrics for success, but I like this one right here.
I’m giving myself a gold star for this week.
Well earned. Quite the article.
I’ve referred to it as a Democrat Party scandal sheet a few times. The Troo Bleevers I work with, well, let’s just say they immediately edited that remark out of their memory. I do take a perverse pleasure in (very) occasionally dropping a turd in their punchbowl, and never getting challenged on it.
Excellent, I’d add just a couple observations
-For a time during the Civil War, you could buy your way out of a given draft call by paying $300 – but you might still get your name drawn in the next call. $300 was still quite a lot back then, more than laborers could pay (thought in NYC the local politicos managed to find the $300 for their supporters out of tax money, after the riots).
-One neat thing the Times did – and this of course before the hoi polloi had Internet access – was to publish the New York Times Index – a great thick book every year where you could look up that year’s news and personalities. Your average newspaper didn’t publish its own index for posterity – it had great practical and symbolic significance that here was a Serious Paper whose output people would be studying for years, in seeking the facts about past events.
Last time my Mom and I were in Orlando together I almost convinced her that we should go piss on Duranty’s grave.
LOL!
“New York Times admits it got duped by fake terrorist: Executive editor, Dean Baquet, blames ‘institutional failure’ for making fantasist the star of its ‘Caliphate’ podcast – but stands by Pulitzer-nominated reporter who was conned by him“
Perfect. It’s as if I didn’t even need to write this article. Reality handles it for me.
The British press is trash in its own special ways, but it doesn’t seem to resort to circling the wagons the way American press so readily does. Or perhaps it’s just because they’re British and the target is American and one thing that never hurts in British media is criticizing Americans.
Love the pic.
I hate it when that happens.
Remember when The Old Grey Lady tried launching a youth-culture weekly supplement called Styles Of The Times and they led with an article about Grunge Music that contained a Grunge Lexicon, but it was all a hoax perpetrated by the receptionist at Sub-Pop Records?
Thanks Ozy.
I wrote something intelligent but the site ate it and I can’t summon the brain cells to write it again.
I’ll add some “brilliancy-cred” to your account, Scruff.
Great analysis, kb. Thank you.
Likewise, Ozy.
Thanks Ozy. I’ve been reducing my news consumption for my mental health and was unaware of this.
Understandable, Sensei. I had to take a detox as well, but I needed some Muse for writing and there isn’t much that can get my juices flowing like the NYT’s bullshit.
I’m on part three right now and I think I’ve figured out how to read and engage and draw energy from the nonsense while not letting it ruin my mental well-being. I’ve found my bliss, as it were (H/T to Joseph Campbell) even in the midst of the Dying of the Republic.
It was a long process to get to this point and even now it feels like being on a rock that gets smashed by the tides. I just try to sit and meditate and be happy that I have existence. Most of my friends didn’t get this far.
Fortunately it didn’t really creep into the personal life. But I needed a break from raging every morning reading the news.
This is relevant to the NY Times and its coverage of OMG the greatest threat to republican institutions since Catiline –
“Many Capitol rioters unlikely to serve jail time
“The cases could embarrass the Biden administration, which has portrayed the Jan. 6 siege as a dire threat to democracy….
“That reckoning is coming sooner rather than later, lawyers say, putting prosecutors in the position of wrist-slapping many participants in the riot despite framing the crimes as part of an insurrection that presented a grave threat to American democracy.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/30/jan-6-capitol-riot-jail-time-478440
I’ve done a lot of thinking about the media over the last year. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of where the industry is going. Clearly much worse than it was at any other point that I can remember, and by worse I mean wrt accuracy, and having clear political agendas. I put it to you that it’s not the media that’s causal.
The media is maximizing their profits by providing its customers with EXACTLY what the customer is asking for. The customer no longer wants a portrayal of the facts concerning a happening (news), they want the media to provide them with stories that confirm their political beliefs and to entertain them (face it, that’s why we’re here at Glibs, although I wouldn’t call this media really). Where there is demand, someone will supply it.
The only thing that will fix the media is if people decide they want news over entertainment. It’s a market.
Error messages…error messages…I can’t be asked to First under these conditions.
Sometimes it’s tough to be a Firster…
Much better to actually contribute.
He does. Quite often.
Naw, clearly those other comments are the result of someone hacking his account.
If it were a simple matter of market forces dictating coverage, I think you’d see more of the major players catering to the right instead of just Fox News. No, half the country has to resort to alternative media where as the big players, the big three and the cable networks lean hard left along with the top newspapers. There’s more at work than these hacks simply giving people what they want.
FOX was a perfect example. The big outlets were all left. FOX sees that the majors aren’t providing 50% of the population with what they want. BOOM, instant market share. Genius. But it’s still just entertainment. If it were real news, there’d be no political bent.
^this
They are actively “shaping” the news.
Why are they actively shaping the news?
And would they be actively shaping the news if doing so meant they lose enough customers as to become nonprofitable? No, they’d go out of business.
They cannot survive without the approval of their demographic. The customer of MSNBC wants to see MSNBC vilify non-progressives and they don’t really care if they lie, sensationalize, misdirect…to do it. In fact, the more shit that flies, the better, because conflict is more entertaining.
The customer of MSNBC
Two thoughts:
There probably is only one.
MSNBC’s customers, as in, the people who pay for its services, are not its viewers. They are its advertisers.
Alright, three thoughts:
I’m pretty sure MSNBC loses money hand over fist. They are being subsidized by somebody, likely because they shape the news, help set the Overton Window, drive messages that somebody wants driven. That somebody is probably their main customer, measured by the amount of money they provide.
The Mighty Jagrafress of the Holy Hadrajassic Maxaraddenfoe?
No viewers, no advertisers, no business.
I’d need some serious evidence of that. I can’t imagine how rich you’d need to be to float a 24/7 cable news network, just to voice your political agenda. Sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Cheaper ways of influencing people.
Russians can do it with $100k on Facebook.
There’s probably a feedback loop effect going on.
The NYT is run by hardcore leftist elites. I doubt that represents more than 10% of the general population. But the more the Times pushes that agenda, the more of the general population they can bring over to the dark side who will then, sure, demand more of it.
But it has to start somewhere. And it would submit that it starts with the Times pushing an ever more extremist agenda on every issue.
And…the only thing that can change, dare I say fix, the current behavior is the free market (as with most things).
I’d suggest creating a media outlet (niche market) that held itself to stringent standards and only report news instead of commentary. There’s gotta be others like me that just want fact based news. If people decide that’s more beneficial to them than entertainment it should grow market share.
There’s gotta be others like me that just want fact based news
Subscription service? Maybe.
Advertising-based service? No way.
Yes, I’d be willing to pay.
https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_speechs29.html
I’ve toyed with starting a website called “The Jeffersonian” which would follow the format laid out by Thomas Jefferson in the second paragraph.
I’m a big fan of Jefferson’s writings. His principles were sound, despite the fact that he didn’t always live up to them.
I’ve pondered a private system similar to what doctors and lawyers use to police their professions. Board certified journalists. Agree to an honorable set of principles and call certified journalists in front of the board for failure to meet them.
Not a perfect solution, but it’s free market.
I agree (mostly) and I’m taking that up a bit in my latest scrawlings (Ep. 3 – 2’s in the pending already).
The NYT is only delivering what it’s demo wants – an echo chamber.
Online media has resulted in an increasingly balkanized news consumer, where you can filter (or algorithms will do it for you) only those opinions with which you agree.
And there’s a very important reason why NYT is doing what it’s doing, but I’ll leave that for a a more detailed treatment upcoming.
Maintaining an information bubble is only a valuable service if that information bubble isn’t ruptured elsewhere and is accepted as legitimate. As such it’s the responsibility of honest observers to show what a mockery the Times’ pretense of “the paper of record” really is. If the public comes to understand the legacy “respectable” media as no better than One America News or The Epoch Times, the social signal value of the bubble collapses. If the tech gatekeepers are shown to be nothing more than hacks, their ability to remove information contrary to the narrative withers.
I agree with holding them accountable. That’s how the customer voices his preference. But until you convince the majority of their customers that your way is really what they want, there won’t be change because that’s how business succeed…give the customer what they want.
You’d think there’d be a niche market for real, unbiased news, but apparently not.
It’s impossible to provide unbiased news. Even deciding what is news and what not to print involves bias.
Taking that into account, I wonder if there is a good way to define quality journalism. There are gradations to bias and agenda making like there are gradations to wrongness.
What makes today’s media worse than the media of the 1950s?
That’s how the customer voices his preference. But until you convince the majority of their customers that your way is really what they want, there won’t be change because that’s how business succeed…give the customer what they want.
Again, though, what the Times’ (the same could be said of the Posts’) customers want is the social illusion that their particular bubble is supported by the the “respectable paper of record”. And that’s the shortcoming in their business strategy. If non-customers treated the Times as no different from One America News or The Epoch Times, the value of that bubble would collapse. You don’t have to convince the customers, which is probably as difficult a proposition as you suggest. You only need to convince third parties that aren’t particularly invested in the Times’ narrative. Then the bubble loses its prestige and either seeks a new business model or fails. But, who knows, maybe one day they can aspire to the journalistic standards of Breitbart.
The content is not really the product, it’s the delivery vehicle. The product is the shit you buy while reading the content.
It’s a market.
Ted Turner turned it into a market with the launch of CNN.
Before CNN, major network news organizations were considered cost centers. No one made money telling the news on TV. Prestige was the reward. It was a race to win awards every year.
Ted Turner proved that the news could be a profit center. It then became a race for eyeballs. More importantly, it became a race for the right demographic set of eyeballs. The new splintered and the focus became keeping eyeballs glued to your channel and only your channel. Generating outrage is the best way to keep the eyeballs where you want them.
I see this same error when people discuss China, as well, as if every Chinese personally approved and supported their government’s actions.
I’d say this also applies to considering the Chicom government as a unitary hive mind blob rather than a mishmash of jurisdictions with varying power and authority, often in conflict or rivalry with one another with slathering of paranoia on top.
OT: I blame you for having this show up in my playlist.
DCC vol.5 優勝 大阪府立登美丘高等学校 ダンス部 / テーマ：扇舞（ジュリアナ）
Sorry. There’s something horrific about high school girls dressing as 80’s OL exaggerations.
Arguing about who gets a taste of the organ-harvesting profits doesn’t strike me as exculpatory.
Not exculpatory, but “make your problem go away and stop embarrassing me” goes pretty far for explaining why things happen there.
What creepier. That the Government floated vaccine passports, or that large parts of Twitteratii are upset that libertarians are opposing it?
At least untrustworthy people usually advertise themselves?
Yes.
One of the ideas in Taibbi’s book, Hate Inc., is that the media companies have segmented the market and just feeds those markets the outrage du jour that gets the customers’ eyeballs. That’s why reporting is so bad these days. While there may be something to it, I think bad and biased reporting has always been with us. I remember my dad cancelling his subscription to the Oakland Tribune in the early 80s due to their left wing bias. Heck, in the old days there were newspapers with “Democrat” and “Republican” right in the name. In some case there still are. Perhaps the biggest lie the media have told is that there was some golden age when they weren’t biased.
Perhaps the biggest lie the media have told is that there was some golden age when they weren’t biased.
Neph and I are talking about that in the forum. I think there’s a shadow of truth to it. 80 years ago, I do think that the media was more aligned with a larger segment of the population. “Unbiased” is a joke, but less hacky seems right.
I said the same above (see comment 10). I don’t think they were ever unbiased, just (a) not so far detached from reality, and (b) open about what their paper’s “slant” was on current events.
Same with the golden age of collegiality in politics.
Politics would be collegial if it weren’t for those moral lepers on the other side.
Also, twitterati and leftists can fuck off with the ‘Disinformation’ dogma bulshit. ACLU put out today that arkansas outlawed healthcare for Trans youth. Go fuck yourself.
Puberty, unpleasant as it may be, isn’t a “disease” that needs to be “treated”.
Don’t forget the Times’ “Republicans Pounce!” articles –
“Why Transgender Girls Are Suddenly the G.O.P.’s Culture-War Focus
“Lawmakers in a growing number of Republican-led states are advancing and passing bills to bar transgender athletes in girls’ sports, a culture clash that seems to have come out of nowhere.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/us/politics/transgender-girls-sports.html
a culture clash that seems to have come out of nowhere
It’s gratuitous to say in this article, but TMITE
You have to be pretty fargin’ deep in the bubble, or really dishonest, to say this “culture clash” “came out of nowhere”.
I think the Times’ focus in on framing – in more than one sense of the word. The sense I’m referring to is, instead of framing this as “should kids born with dicks but who consider themselves girls be allowed in girls’ sports” – which might lead the reader to the “wrong” conclusion – focus the frame on Republicans doing something politically motivated and shady, hoping the reader is so indignant as not to focus too hard on the merits of the underlying issue.
Riiiiggghhhhht. No one has actually explained why having Former Men beat the piss out of Actual Women is bad. (Okay, I just tried to link to a Yahoo news story entitled “Rhonda Rousey on Fallon Fox: There’s No Undo Button…” except that it’s gone now. It doesn’t exist on Yahoo’s page. And I can’t pull it up in the wayback machine either.)
So I guess they can say our of nowhere because the news sources have scrubbed any reference to the female athletes complaining about having to get their asses kicked by a XER who has the benefit of having gotten through puberty as a male.
Un-fucking-believable with these people. Maybe when the author’s daughter gets her ass kicked by a “girl” who happens to have pythons for biceps, she’ll have a bit of an awakening.
Hah! “Lie back and think of England.”
Hilarious.
As if girl athletes regularly getting beat by dudes pretending to be girls has always been a thing. “Whycome they complain now?!”
I said the same above (see comment 10). I don’t think they were ever unbiased, just (a) not so far detached from reality, and (b) open about what their paper’s “slant” was on current events.
Not even Hearst wanted to eradicate anybody with the audacity to disagree with him. Not so openly, anyway.
Looks like SpaceX’s SN11 went kablooey on landing. Unclear what happened since there was a dense fog layer at the time. I wonder if Elon will bitch out the FAA for making him delay by a day, thus losing massively helpful observational data.
https://www.oann.com/gop-lawmakers-push-back-against-vaccine-passports/
Good.
Strange, huh?
It’s interesting to see which dems will dig in and which will give up on this talking point.
Punchline: to get a vaccine, you have to show photo ID. Otherwise, there’s no way to put you in the database.
I understand CVS and Kroger aren’t requiring IDs. Hearsay, not direct knowledge.
Possibly, for J & J. For Moderna/Pfizer, you need to schedule your follow-up shot, and they need to confirm your identity for that.
And, of course, anyone who gets a shot without showing ID can’t be confirmed as someone who got the shot, so no passport for them. Unless the passport is completely worthless, of course. If all you have to do is say “Yup, I done got it”, and you don’t even have to show an ID to get the passport, just give them a name, any old name, then they might as well put them on the internet as a fillable PDF.
(Dr S, I apologize for my comment yesterday. I have no grudge against anyone here, I am just stressed the hell out. I also know better than to kvetch to TPTB about WP.)
Wait, that was directed towards me? I thought I was reading it wrong or missing something.
No apology required, but thank you for saying so. ?
Sorry, I was just being impulsively snarky.
There’s a group of women at work who work together and, as women are wont to do, talk a lot. One of them actually brought up that argument, which pleasantly surprised me.
This is a grotesquely loathsome human being:
We need to do that for every public health/safety issue.
Let’s start with the negative externalities of masking and lockdowns. Talk about long overdue.
I would give anything to scream “fuck you” at the top of my lungs, two inches from her ear
There are several communist and/or totalitarian countries that person could choose to defect to, rather than shitting all over our freedoms. Sorry, “freedoms”.
We need to do that for every public health/safety issue.
OK, fine. The healthiest and safest lifestyle is to be white, abstinent until married, Christian, and upper middle class. Time to tax POCs, sexual encounters, heathens, and the poors. Pay up buttercup.
I’m curious: what are the negative externalities of not wearing a seatbelt? Sure, you may be injured, but that’s not an externality. You won’t injure anyone else.
Oh, the cost of your healthcare because you were injured? Either you pay it, or an insurance company you have paid to pay for it, pays for it. Not an externality.
But muh government payors! Nope. That is a cost the government has chosen to take on. Still not an externality.
Remember, externalities are costs (or benefits!) that affects someone who did not choose to incur that cost, or for whom the benefit is a windfall.
See, that’s how you steal a base.
THE GREATER GOOD!
CRUSTY JUGGLERS!
if
uh, oops.
My favorite thing is when leftists try to talk economics as a gotcha and get it all wrong anyway. Every example she gave is pretty much wrong when talking about externalities.
Whether it’s seat belts, guns, masks, vaccines, a refusal to act in the common interest imposes significant costs
Seat belts: I’m pretty sure the cost of not wearing a seatbelt is fully borne by said individual. Nary studies seem to show that the cost of _wearing_ a seatbelt is borne mostly by pedestrians who get run over by less cautious drivers. Except for the freak accident where a person is killed by a person ejected from their vehicle. And while i doubt we agree, the discussion on whether society should be built around eliminating freak accidents is another one to have.
Guns: My gun has never killed anyone, and it has not imposed any cost on anyone, but my own pocketbook. If we take her as meaning “widespread ownership of guns” is a negative, you must then also factor in the positive externalities of living in a well armed society.
Masks: If Masks worked then the cost of not wearing one would be borne by the person not wearing it.
Vaccines: The cost of not getting a vaccine is borne by the person not getting it. If people get vaccines then they are immune no? If they don’t then they bear that risk.
Another version of this is when they blather about “public goods” and then talk about things like “Education”, which is one of the _most_ private goods there are.
I’m pretty sure lefties believe externalities can only be negative. The hard work on reducing negative externalities is not reducing positive externalities by even more.
Example: we could do away entirely with pollution from motor vehicles by simply banning them. In their entirety. Pollution/negative externality gone! Utopia awaits! But even idiots have a vague sense that might not work out well.
Use/mention is hard.