Thrag
3655
Well there’s a good faith argument meant to advance the discourse.
Thrag
3656
Some people on this thread have stated their dislike of click bait and/or whitewashing.
Others have decided that in defense of the click bait headline that predictably and by design has sparked a negative reaction it is necessary and good to level broad and insulting generalizations against the first group.
Losing one’s shit indeed.
I mean, the amazing thing is that he agrees with the criticism of the article, but that doesn’t stop him from this sort of thing:
RichVR
3658
::enters thread::
::looks around::
Oh HELL no.
::leaves quickly::
Thrag
3659
Now at first I thought “Righteousness feels soooo good!” was kind of an odd criticism of those who didn’t like the headline or article, but now I realize it wasn’t a criticism. It was foreshadowing.
Timex
3660
Virtually no one in this thread could even be bothered to read the article, and were judging it based on a screenshot of its title, from a tweet.
And in that basis, we had people say, “I’m cancelling my subscription!”
Yeah, deciding to cancel your subscription on the basis of the title of a single article, is crazy.
That was the specific premise of your question…
i.e. that this article (or series) has to have a specific public service value to justify its existence. And by implication that it shouldn’t have been published if it didn’t. That was your question, not any straw man I created.
Then I wrote two more points that you didn’t bother to address.
I’m pretty sure I don’t…
Your failure to believe that people might possibly have anything but the basest of motivations if they write something that you don’t like is certainly not something I’m buying into.
Nor this.
If you want to rewrite the history of this thread by claiming that people are just complaining about clickbait, you’ve got an uphill task ahead of you. And the idea that stating what is, after all, the bloody obvious; that even President Trump wasn’t 100% wrong is somehow supporting authoritarianism seems to me to reflect a major loss of perspective. Reality - even the reality of Trump - is nuanced, and I disagree with the idea that just saying that out loud in the media is enough to justify outrage and financial punishment.
As for clickbait, what? Are we going to act as though we’ve only just discovered that even the Washington Post indulges in clickbait? Why, today does this news produce such an outpouring of complaints? ‘Clickbait”, “engagement”, “attention economy” are modern terms of art. But the concepts they describe are, as I previously suggested, as old as newspapers.
I think people can decide not to support a publication on any basis they damn well please, but I also don’t see anyone in this thread that’s cancelling their subscription because of this single piece of irresponsible clickbait.
Thrag
3664
Assuming that this single incident is the sole reason is a little crazy. Painting others with a broad brush based on that assumption is also a little crazy. This whole conversation has been a little crazy.
Stop disliking what I don’t dislike!
Here. Let’s discuss a different article.
Biden and Democratic leaders who prioritize infrastructure in part to broaden their appeal to reluctant White supporters are making the same mistake White political allies of Black voters made in the late 19th century. That’s when the more progressive American political party of that era – the Republican Party – abandoned Black voters to focus on an economic agenda that emphasized infrastructure and uniting a country that was bitterly divided by race.
That blunder gave us a century of Jim Crow segregation, reduced the Republican Party to a “dying institution” 'in the South and forced countless Black Americans to confront an uncomfortable truth that many are now facing again:
Our White political allies are rarely willing to match the intensity and cunning of our political opponents.
I mean basically every actually marginalized group in America (AKA, people with real issues not fuckin Christians who are handed a happy holidays cup as Starbucks) has a choice between, “The party whose every member and voter works tirelessly day by day to kill me, straight up goddamn murder me and everyone like me” and “the party who sometimes put together performative pomp and circumstance while paying lip service to our struggles, and who can occasionally be relied upon to do a very limited, safe version of the right thing several years/decades late.”
It’s reflective of how utterly fucked BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, women, etc. are in this nation that option 2 can get away with doing the bare minimum for as long as they have.
No, you would never do that.
Oh, wait.
I read that entire article and I confess I have no idea what the author thinks Joe Biden should actually do about Manchin or Sinema’s apparent unwillingness to scrap the filibuster for a voting rights bill. I certainly agree with the author that Manchin and Sinema ought to do that, and I share the author’s concerns about how failing to do it could have very bad consequences for democracy, but I don’t find any suggestion at all about how to avoid them.
This passage seeks to blame Biden with links to other articles about Biden’s failure:
Yet he has refused to throw the full weight of the Oval Office behind passing two pending voting rights bills in Congress. He has stopped short of embracing calls to jettison the filibuster – the parliamentary tactic Republicans can use to halt a voting rights bill – because he says it would “throw the entire Congress into chaos.”
It sounds bad, but I followed both those links to the source articles.
The first offers this:
The bill was seen by Democrats as one of their highest priorities – a pushback against scores of ballot suppression bills by Republican-led state legislatures that threaten their ability to win future power, built on Donald Trump’s vote fraud lies.
It’s the kind of scenario that calls for the vote-moving muscle of a first-term president at the apex of his power. But in the bleak political math of contemporary Washington, such a jolt of energy from the commander in chief didn’t materialize. And it wouldn’t have mattered if it did.
The article actually argues that there isn’t anything Joe Biden could have done to produce a different outcome.
The second article is actually about Biden’s fiery speech, his angry cry for action on voting rights. That article also suggests that Biden ought to do more — that he ought to make explicit calls to abandon the filibuster — but also notes that Democrats probably don’t have the votes for the bill anyway. This is likely the case: if Manchin and Sinema don’t want to amend the rules to pass the bill, it’s almost certainly because the don’t want to help pass the bill.
Of course Fox phrased it like that but at least the CNN quote is decent. Lately I’ve felt like every news outlet has been pretty irresponsible on this subject.
Good for CNN. WaPo’s headline for this last night was unfortunately identical to Fox News, though now they’ve changed it to this:
Which doesn’t mention vaccination at all (not sure what to think of that). NYT went with:
So, in short, kudos to CNN for providing important context.
I hope he gets shingles while he is recovering.
