> When we think about revolutions, we envision acts of violence: the storming and overrunning of barricades
The Glorious Revolution, aka, the Bloodless Revolution.
The Revolutions of 1989, mostly bloodless in Europe except for Romania.
So ... perhaps this rhetoric is poisoning the well?
> isn't the only example of staffers at news organizations rising up against perceived deviations from the progressive orthodoxy and
Or, perhaps perceived deviations from decent and reasonable behavior?
> We've been here before — on college campuses in the late 1960s ... because they felt shamed by the moral purity, clarity, passion, and certainty of the young rebels. In all those respects, our newsroom revolutions are following the same script.
Or, perhaps because those protesters were, you know, right? That the US was engaged in illegal war in SE Asia, and that the curriculum was ideologically biased towards white European males?
> What new principles and ideals do the insurrectionists aim to institute?
Racial justice, for one.
> That news organizations need to be devoted to "the truth" rather than some spurious ideal of "objectivity."
The "objectivity" in most news today seems to be 1) what corporate America - owners of most of the news sources - does is right, 2) the goals and motives of government decisions must be respected and trusted, 3) ditto for the major political parties 4) journalists cannot say that someone is lying, even if they know it's a lie. Instead, the journalist must find someone else to say it's wrong, and cast a fake objectivity.
So perhaps the real issue is the phrase "spurious ideal".
> No one acknowledges the difficulty of achieving moral clarity.
Does the author of this editorial really think none of those people understand this? Just because people think one thing is morally clear - Black Lives Matter - doesn't mean they think all issues are morally clear.
> How many journalists have falsely testified that Cotton's op-ed advocated shooting protesters when it did no such thing?
I don't know. Now, how many did not, and reported it correctly?
> A serious news organization cannot exclude views championed by one of the country's two major political parties and held by more than 40 percent of the country's voters.
But should it give both parties equal footing and prestige? Even if one party lies out of its ass?
Is repeatedly criticizing the president usually a bad thing that inherently lacks nuance? Yes. Key word usually. Sardonically call me "woke" or whatever you want, I don't care. This president and his administration are extraordinarily bad. Your usual middle-brow heuristics don't apply.
If the criticisms are valid and fact-based, they should be made. IMO, there's been an awful lot of chaff around the wheat. That actually often works in favor of the target, but more importantly, it's part of how we evaluate the source. Credibility is easy to lose and takes a long time to get back.
These events are better analyzed in terms of the Red Team, which let itself be taken over by some egregiously moronic positions. Being for the rule of law and against the plague should be common sense American values. The idea of airing "both sides" doesn't work when one "side" has gone off the deep end and is penning op eds about using the military to help rioting police attack constitutionally-protected protests. There's nothing inherently "woke" about ignoring anti-American tripe - if the Red Team wants to be taken seriously again, it needs to develop some adult opinions to embody actual Conservative values.
I took it as a challenge to myself to think of "actual Conservative values" I would support.
Here are some of Nixon's policies that I support: SALT I and The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the EPA, OSHA, NEPA, Clean Air Act, starting the War on Cancer, enforcing school desegregation, the Revised Philadelphia Plan, endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment, support for black capitalism, and meeting with protesters in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
As a Senator: statehood for Alaska and Hawaii (which I would extend to Puerto Rico and D.C.), voted in favor of civil rights for minorities, and supported federal disaster relief for India and Yugoslavia.
Would you consider those to be actual Conservative values?
(I'm leaving out a whole slew of things I don't like about Nixon. I assume secret wars are not part of actual Conservative values.)
It used to be that dissemination of information was expensive.
Thousands of years ago you had to travel to town squares or churches to get updates on things. Then you had newspapers, radio, and television. These often were pillars of a community.
So it was logical that the same devices that would report on news ("free-press" activity) would be used for "free-speech" expressive activity like commentary, editoral, op-ed, letters to the community, etc., because it was media that a high percentage of the community was guaranteed to consume regularly.
This is no longer true and also no longer needed. Free-press and free-speech activity doesn't have to share the same platform anymore and can be separated.
Free-speech expressive activity can be done on websites, social media, etc. We don't need journalism outlets to do anything but post reports on things happening.
With the two separated there is less ethical quandary.
The idea of scheduled consumption of media is also breaking down. So we don't need journalism outlets collecting stories and deciding what to put into papers, because there shouldn't be a paper. There should be a website with reports with easily searchable keywords.
False. It is no coincidence that as we enter an unprecedented period of economic depression, all the liberal media wants to discuss is racial disparities.
The ruling class is winning the class war, and as long as they can keep the working class fighting the race ware instead, nothing will change.
These protests are being milked for every last drop by the liberal media, in cooperation with liberal activist NGOs on behalf of the Democratic party.
Hypocrites. All of them. Everyone has an agenda. If something doesn’t go their way, then, even the most outspoken, all of a sudden, just lost their voice. There’s no need for them to put their necks out on the line.
"A serious news organization cannot exclude views championed by one of the country's two major political parties and held by more than 40 percent of the country's voters."
I don't wear a "red tie" but this resonates with me, as someone who speaks daily with friends from both extremes of the spectrum. In truth, I most seek out people who think issue-by-issue, because as an adult, and not a 20 year-old revolutionary, I don't believe that reality is to be explained with glued-together social theory with axiomatic truths that the believers don't recognize are even there and can be qustioned; as an adult, I find it hard to fathom the downward spiral of the idea of truth into a weaponized all-or-nothing nihilistic battle.
In the past few weeks, the Washington Post and the NY Times, both of which I have subscriptions and I read daily, declared war. They've made that pretty clear and they've also admitted it. Gone are the days where we want unbiased reporting.
Sunday and Monday of the week prior, Manhattan had hundreds of stores looted and the streets became fully lawless as cars could drive up to broken storefronts, send organized groups in and retrieve thousands of dollars of goods. Those two days, the NYT, the home town paper, ran front page stories about Trump's (reprehensible, do I need to say it) actions. And around the front page they had commentary about the Trump actions. In short, focus on the Enemy. No focus on the rioting, and the story is even worse with Chicago, which has experienced the most murders in 60 years. Surely a story worth a visible lede.
This reminds me of the Two Minutes Hate in 1984 when the Party watches films of Goldstein, mortal enemy of the party (a Trotsky-like fellow) speaking, and everyone must scream and shout and curse and stand out of their chairs in demonstrations of fury.
"But, but, we're on the side of good" a.k.a. The End Justifies the Means has never lead to any great outcome.
I'm legitimately nervous about the state of journalism in this country. But I'm about ten times more nervous when I read comments below that say, "Well, of course the press does this. Did you see what the Red Ties did this time?"
The Cotton op-ed was essentially advocating fascism. He was positively tumescent about the thought of using the army to kill American civilians. Regardless that it was published in bad faith (see: Cotton laughing on Twitter about it), the NYT op-ed was published without context, for an audience where over half are incapable of telling the difference between news and opinion (source: https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/confusio...). It was irresponsible and dangerous to publish it in the way it was published. The NYT admits it was a mistake to publish it and there were editorial failings in the process.
The old detached civil-libertarian 1000ft view, where "all opinions, however vile, deserve a platform from which they can be debated" is for an older time when these arguments were held in good faith.
Far from "a woke revolution suppressing speech", if we wish to keep free speech intact we each must work to deny a platform to fascist ideas (and the right in America is hurtling towards fascism if it is not there already) or there will not be free platforms for much longer.
Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. We are at that point with the American far right.
Why no mention of the far left descending into its own brand of authoritarianism? It makes it hard to take your criticisms of the right seriously if you are not willing to acknowledge what the far left is becoming and encouraging.
That is not true at all, considering the recent chaos caused by people who are far left (and far right pretending to be far left, to be clear). BLM has been co-opted by far left people. Not hard to find leaders in that movement who are using it as a means for that. Left anarchists have taken over a section of Seattle and are calling it the "autonomous zone." And mainstream media supports all of this and more.
The entire Democrat party has taken a massive step to the left and shows no signs of stopping that shift. If you don't see the authoritarian tones there then you can't really be looking.
> The entire Democrat party has taken a massive step to the left and shows no signs of stopping that shift.
The democrats just rejected the closest thing they had to a far left candidate for a pretty standard liberal and there are maybe a handful of elected officials who even flirt with far left ideas.
And anarchist show their face whenever these chaotic events happen. Once things die down and the autonomous zone is dissolved you wont see or hear from them in mainstream media tillthe next mass protests.
I was giving examples of far left people not being a fringe, not saying that the specific flavor of leftism at play there is authoritarian. Although it can be construed as authoritarian if you look at the actions of the so-called anarchists there. IDs required to get in/out, checkpoints where armed hooligans demand to know where you are going and why, forceful seizure of private property...not really anarchy.
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[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 1422 ms ] threadThe Glorious Revolution, aka, the Bloodless Revolution.
The Revolutions of 1989, mostly bloodless in Europe except for Romania.
So ... perhaps this rhetoric is poisoning the well?
> isn't the only example of staffers at news organizations rising up against perceived deviations from the progressive orthodoxy and
Or, perhaps perceived deviations from decent and reasonable behavior?
> We've been here before — on college campuses in the late 1960s ... because they felt shamed by the moral purity, clarity, passion, and certainty of the young rebels. In all those respects, our newsroom revolutions are following the same script.
Or, perhaps because those protesters were, you know, right? That the US was engaged in illegal war in SE Asia, and that the curriculum was ideologically biased towards white European males?
> What new principles and ideals do the insurrectionists aim to institute?
Racial justice, for one.
> That news organizations need to be devoted to "the truth" rather than some spurious ideal of "objectivity."
The "objectivity" in most news today seems to be 1) what corporate America - owners of most of the news sources - does is right, 2) the goals and motives of government decisions must be respected and trusted, 3) ditto for the major political parties 4) journalists cannot say that someone is lying, even if they know it's a lie. Instead, the journalist must find someone else to say it's wrong, and cast a fake objectivity.
So perhaps the real issue is the phrase "spurious ideal".
> No one acknowledges the difficulty of achieving moral clarity.
Does the author of this editorial really think none of those people understand this? Just because people think one thing is morally clear - Black Lives Matter - doesn't mean they think all issues are morally clear.
> How many journalists have falsely testified that Cotton's op-ed advocated shooting protesters when it did no such thing?
I don't know. Now, how many did not, and reported it correctly?
> A serious news organization cannot exclude views championed by one of the country's two major political parties and held by more than 40 percent of the country's voters.
But should it give both parties equal footing and prestige? Even if one party lies out of its ass?
Here are some of Nixon's policies that I support: SALT I and The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the EPA, OSHA, NEPA, Clean Air Act, starting the War on Cancer, enforcing school desegregation, the Revised Philadelphia Plan, endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment, support for black capitalism, and meeting with protesters in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
As a Senator: statehood for Alaska and Hawaii (which I would extend to Puerto Rico and D.C.), voted in favor of civil rights for minorities, and supported federal disaster relief for India and Yugoslavia.
Would you consider those to be actual Conservative values?
(I'm leaving out a whole slew of things I don't like about Nixon. I assume secret wars are not part of actual Conservative values.)
Thousands of years ago you had to travel to town squares or churches to get updates on things. Then you had newspapers, radio, and television. These often were pillars of a community.
So it was logical that the same devices that would report on news ("free-press" activity) would be used for "free-speech" expressive activity like commentary, editoral, op-ed, letters to the community, etc., because it was media that a high percentage of the community was guaranteed to consume regularly.
This is no longer true and also no longer needed. Free-press and free-speech activity doesn't have to share the same platform anymore and can be separated.
Free-speech expressive activity can be done on websites, social media, etc. We don't need journalism outlets to do anything but post reports on things happening.
With the two separated there is less ethical quandary.
The idea of scheduled consumption of media is also breaking down. So we don't need journalism outlets collecting stories and deciding what to put into papers, because there shouldn't be a paper. There should be a website with reports with easily searchable keywords.
The ruling class is winning the class war, and as long as they can keep the working class fighting the race ware instead, nothing will change.
These protests are being milked for every last drop by the liberal media, in cooperation with liberal activist NGOs on behalf of the Democratic party.
Neither democrats nor republicans represent the interests of the working class at this point in time.
I don't wear a "red tie" but this resonates with me, as someone who speaks daily with friends from both extremes of the spectrum. In truth, I most seek out people who think issue-by-issue, because as an adult, and not a 20 year-old revolutionary, I don't believe that reality is to be explained with glued-together social theory with axiomatic truths that the believers don't recognize are even there and can be qustioned; as an adult, I find it hard to fathom the downward spiral of the idea of truth into a weaponized all-or-nothing nihilistic battle.
In the past few weeks, the Washington Post and the NY Times, both of which I have subscriptions and I read daily, declared war. They've made that pretty clear and they've also admitted it. Gone are the days where we want unbiased reporting.
Sunday and Monday of the week prior, Manhattan had hundreds of stores looted and the streets became fully lawless as cars could drive up to broken storefronts, send organized groups in and retrieve thousands of dollars of goods. Those two days, the NYT, the home town paper, ran front page stories about Trump's (reprehensible, do I need to say it) actions. And around the front page they had commentary about the Trump actions. In short, focus on the Enemy. No focus on the rioting, and the story is even worse with Chicago, which has experienced the most murders in 60 years. Surely a story worth a visible lede.
This reminds me of the Two Minutes Hate in 1984 when the Party watches films of Goldstein, mortal enemy of the party (a Trotsky-like fellow) speaking, and everyone must scream and shout and curse and stand out of their chairs in demonstrations of fury.
"But, but, we're on the side of good" a.k.a. The End Justifies the Means has never lead to any great outcome.
I'm legitimately nervous about the state of journalism in this country. But I'm about ten times more nervous when I read comments below that say, "Well, of course the press does this. Did you see what the Red Ties did this time?"
The old detached civil-libertarian 1000ft view, where "all opinions, however vile, deserve a platform from which they can be debated" is for an older time when these arguments were held in good faith.
Far from "a woke revolution suppressing speech", if we wish to keep free speech intact we each must work to deny a platform to fascist ideas (and the right in America is hurtling towards fascism if it is not there already) or there will not be free platforms for much longer.
Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. We are at that point with the American far right.
The entire Democrat party has taken a massive step to the left and shows no signs of stopping that shift. If you don't see the authoritarian tones there then you can't really be looking.
The democrats just rejected the closest thing they had to a far left candidate for a pretty standard liberal and there are maybe a handful of elected officials who even flirt with far left ideas.
And anarchist show their face whenever these chaotic events happen. Once things die down and the autonomous zone is dissolved you wont see or hear from them in mainstream media tillthe next mass protests.