I read the New York Times frequently in college, and on and off since then. I had it delivered for a while, until I had to call every time it didn't come, and that was too frequent. I was going to quit it, after the initial deal, but they kept me on with the same deal.
This is the final straw for me.
I'm reading the article about Harris making Trump her bitch in the debate, and then I come across this:
"In recent weeks, as the burst of enthusiasm around Ms. Harris’s candidacy has tempered, the questions about her policy positions and plans have grown. Very few were answered Tuesday night."
Are you serious? Harris has more answers on policy than Trump will ever have, and she actually has policies to address problems in America. Her campaign isn't just avoidance of justice, and excuse to bully judges. This but her policy bullshit has to end.
The Times wanted him to attack her on inflation, which isn't really the president, but the greed of corporations who have a monopoly in most places. And she has a policy for that too! My goodness, I've never seen such a good paper go to pot. Please comment and tell me the better paper to follow. The New York Times has turned to shit. First Musk ruins Twitter, then CNN is bought by a right wing wacko, and now the Times have swerved right. It's sickening.
The Guardian, which is an English paper, is the new paper of record, oddly.
"The bar was set low for him, but Donald Trump still didn’t manage to clear it. The former president has faced growing concerns from within his party that he no longer has the stamina, stylistic novelty or mental acuity to defeat Kamala Harris, even as polls narrow in the final weeks before November’s election. He did little to dissuade those fears on Tuesday, when he delivered a rambling, incoherent, lie-filled exposition of his own grievances in his first debate matchup against Kamala Harris – a crucial moment in the presidential contest that proved to be a disastrous humiliation for him."
That's how you report what happened.
"She goaded him with attacks on his ego and his potency – including a transparent but wildly effective remark about people leaving his rallies early from exhaustion – that caused him to explode into paroxysms of nonsensical woundedness. Trump, who initially had tried to land attacks on inflation, was soon reduced to racist ramblings, tangential defenses of his past remarks and records, attacks on Joe Biden, who is not running against him, and old lies about infanticide, fantasies about “world war three”, weird comparisons of the United States to Venezuela, a morbidly racist fantasy about immigrants killing and eating white people’s household pets, “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prisons”, and his false claims to have won the 2020 election."
"...there is reason to suspect that his performance on Tuesday may genuinely harm his re-election chances in ways that will be difficult to recover from in the dwindling number of days before voters cast their ballots."
Funny, no mention of perceived lack of policy details. The NY Times is a joke.
"Trump failed to convincingly land attacks on Harris, and instead he spent much of the night arguing on the turf that his opponent chose for him. There was no bait she offered him that he didn’t take. He kept re-litigating his past remarks, exploring grievances against former enemies living and dead, claiming to have been wronged by vast forces beyond public accounting, and indulging in references to elaborate conspiracy theories about his own righteousness and the nefariousness of his enemies."
"Harris repeatedly cast Trump as a tiresome relic of an unappealing past – and herself as a refreshing break that can carry the country into the future."
They actually link to her policy declarations! "Harris has been criticized by some in her own party for having an insufficiently clear policy agenda, but this is more the argument for her candidacy than any white paper her staff may issue: she wants to meaningfully break from the Trump era – not in a transitional period or interregnum, as Biden did, but by ushering in a new generation of political leadership that can leave Trump more decisively behind."
"A friend I watched the debate with, an expert in psychoanalysis, described Harris’s tactics as a “symbolic castration”. Trump reacted almost as if it were the real thing. He bellowed and ranted with offense, his anger giving credence to Harris’s depiction of him as thin-skinned and weak."
She took him down with abortions and the article ends:
"Early in the night, in a rare moment of lucidity and honesty, Trump spoke of his own policy plans. “I’m an open book,” he said. “Everyone knows what I’m going to do.” And it was true, though perhaps not in the way he meant it. Trump is, by now, a thoroughly familiar and predictable character, one you can always rely on to pursue narcissistic gratification and vulgar self-interest. If he’s an open book, Americans already know the ending. The Harris campaign is betting that they want to hear a different story."
Finding better takes than the New York Times is the new blocking on Twitter.
What did America need? That man cut down to size. She did the job. She understood the assignment.
You can watch the debate.
As far as I'm concerned she should have taken out a wipe to get his pedophile rapist germs off her, after they shook hands. Second time they ever met in person (first). Not sure why they said "President" Trump, should have been Ex-President.
Trump was afraid to walk up to her, she entered his space, she introduced herself as a polite human being.
Trump hangs his head when she says she was raised middle class, and that she has a plan to lift up the middle class. She even said, "actually have a plan." She wants to address real problems like housing and having a family. Trump makes a face when Harris talks about her second mother, a friend of the family who helped raise her. She really sticks it to him.
Trump's tariffs plan is a lie, and he claims this is the only real inflation plan. He says people are flowing into the country from insane asylums taking black jobs. Harris rolls her eyes, shakes her head. He says unions will be effected in a wild attempt to get the union vote, and anyone who knows anything, know that he loved how Musk fired people, he hates unions. Harris has a look of "how does this guy spout all these lies?!" He talks about immigrants at the highest levels of criminality coming it America.
She corrects the record on the economy, of the malarkey he puts out there. "Same out tired playbooks with lies, name calling and grievances." She's priming you to hear what Trump is saying. He nods his head to Project 2025.
He has the temerity to say, "We did a phenomenal job with the pandemic." When ever he says phenomenal, you know there's no details behind that malarkey. "We did things nobody thought was possible," is another lie phrase of his. Harris shakes her head and gives us that knowing look. Here you go again. "People give me credit for rebuilding the military, for a lot of things." Huh? I've seen a lot of people in military repudiate him. Not sure what he's talking about there. Give him credit for all the people dying of Covid because he did nothing. He's just bald face lying. He loves the phrase "bounceback jobs." I guess if you want to believe his narrative you have to hang it on something and that's his phrase. He understands his cult, he has to say things that sound truthful even if it's not. Bounceback jobs... you mean jobs which you lost? Making up for your poor showing? "They know it, and so does everyone else." That his assertion of conviction. He really believes in his malarkey, and he imagines others do.
Harris quotes experts and evidence. She's building a truthful narrative. It's not going to be perfect, and there are going to need to be adjustments along the way.
Already I've seen enough, not yet 9 minutes, I can't watch anymore. I was never going to vote for Trump and I was always going to vote for Harris. If not for the ability to just stand up on that stage and debate that monster. She has a lot of courage.
Along with New York Times crazy making swerve right, NPR accused Harris of word salad, a term often used about Trump (Reddit).
I'm reading Reddit, and people are making fun of his saying, "I have the concept of a plan."
He got fact checked about immigrants eating cats.
Heather Cox Richardson's account:
"The question for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s presidential debate was not how to answer policy questions, but how to counter Trump’s dominance displays while also appealing to the American people. She and her team figured it out, and today they played the former president brilliantly. He took the bait, and tonight he self-destructed. In a live debate, on national television."
"Conservative lawyer George Conway noted that it was “[i]nteresting how one campaign is extremely concerned about the emotional stability of its candidate, and how the other is not.”"
"... he has the way tariffs work entirely backward: they are paid by the consumer, not by foreign countries. As he followed with a long list of his rally lies, Harris started to smile."
"CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called “a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from former president Trump.” "No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency,” Dale said. “A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true. This wasn't little exaggerations, political spin. A lot of his false claims were untethered to reality." As Harris spoke directly to the American people, growing stronger and stronger, Trump got wilder and angrier and told more and more crazy stories."
Times does have one good person on staff: "New York Times columnist David French wrote: “It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life.”"
"Stephanie Ruhle reported that he spoke 39 times for a total of 41.9 minutes, to her 23 times for a total of 37.1 minutes. But the extra time did him no favors."
I think for the cult, there's an equal and opposite anti-cult. I'm going to try and let go of my obsession of hating Trump.
Update 9/12: I think if you're a swing voter who is undecided until the day of voting you're really weird. I don't think they exist. I think the campaign is about motivating people to bother to vote. That it would actually mean something to vote. A fair amount of voters just vote out of habit or because their parents taught them that they had to. Or they feel a strong conviction to vote against the other guy. This is where the cultic fervor of Trump helps him. If you couldn't get excited about Biden, and you just didn't vote, it was like voting for Trump and visa versa. 74 million people voted for Trump in his losing effort against Biden and he only got 62 million when he "beat" Clinton who got 65 million. That's the election, 2016, that was stolen, not 2020. His flipping that narrative is just Trump being a jerk, again. The one trait I can say that might be admirable about Trump is that he keeps trying. He even went into the spin room to try and spin a win, after the debate, which is unheard of. Today he is supposedly posting every article that claims he won according to Heather Cox Richardson.
Can I make a final comment? This is my sentiment. You could take it two ways. America has finally woken up from the nightmare, or you could be ashamed that America took 8 years to wake up from the fever dream. 8 years is a long time.
For me, when he said grab a married woman by the pussy, that was it. That he got past that totally amazes me. I'll never forgive America for those 8 years, but I'm glad it's over. So relieved the insanity is over. Lost a lot of friends.
Update 9/18/24. People are protesting outside the NY Times (source):
"As Oliver Darcy wrote for CNN in March, "Critics have also argued that The Times covers Biden and Trump with disproportionate standards, placing false equivalence on issues surrounding the current president to those of the former president, who is facing 91 criminal counts and fantasized about being a dictator on 'day one.'""
And,
"Complaints grew more recently after the Times paraphrased Trump's rambling non-answer while speaking to The Economic Club of New York. In the report, the Times reshaped his language to make sense of what he said. The reality of the comments was that none of it made sense, according to critics."
9/24/24 The New York Times is washed SFGate.
10/15/24 NPR interview of Kahn on this issue. He says it's not bothsidesism. He think it's well rounded coverage. In the interview he emphasizes their coverage of Project 2025, and Trump's tariffs ideas. They feel like they are just reporting on his plans. He thinks the left has unrealistic expectation. He doesn't think the Times should be uniform in seeing Trump as an existential threat. He feels like he made things clear that they covered that aspect, but also that he could be a president, so they're covering him. And he speaks for frustration of some voters. He feels a responsibility to cover this.
Covering Biden's age and frailty, they got it from both sides. He feels they were covering the fitness of Biden. He thinks it's important whether or not it influenced moving towards Trump. He argues without the coverage, the change might not have been made. He didn't see the paper as crusading about Biden's age. (So my question is whether they feel like they're covering Trump's age with equal fervor?) He feels the HER report and the debate performance demanded the coverage. What about Trump's rumblings now, his fascist tropes? Do they feel responsible to cover that?
They explore a leak, and they're talking about preparing for the eventuality of Trump's possibility. There was an editorial in the Washington Post.
He talked about the struggle of unfiltered microphone and amplifying him, versus putting him in context the way some people want.
He thinks they've described the sharp differences and ideas of Trump, and have to cover them. They did a piece about journalistic retribution.
I get the feeling he would say I'm not thinking journalistically. I still think they could be a little better about warning what a nightmare a second Trump term would be.
I think it's the way I feel about Israel, some people think we should do more to stop Israel. With that case, I think it's all about Israel and their leaders, and that we shouldn't meddle, but I don't feel comfortable saying that, and there's a part of me that feel like the brutality and genocide must end. You can spin it all you want about self defense, humanely conducting the war, but I think that really doesn't see the whole picture of pattern and why Hamas would even willingly sacrifice Gaza to make a point. Israel has been gradually taking more and more, from expanding its borders, to reducing the Palestinian population, deserved or not. The whole only democracy in the region thing is overblown because I don't get the sense that Netanyahu is the chosen leader, just like I don't think that Hamas is the chosen leader in Gaza. America can put the breaks on Israel, Reagan did it, and Biden could do it. I guess in a hyper partisan issue like this, they are siding with Israel.
I'm seeing Greta Thunberg is siding with the Palestinians. I do think it's legitimate to wish for a cease fire. I get that the news should just be reporting on what's happening, not endlessly editorializing.
I struggle with that on my sports blog where it's seen as unbecoming of a journalist to ask for a manager to be sacked. Instead you say a lot of people are saying this, specifics about who and what. I suppose I could be more explicit about editorials and reporting. I see my coverage, though as the experiences of a fan. That's where it becomes murky.
What do I want? More recognition of what an existential threat Trump is? I guess it does feel weird that's only being articulated by individuals on social media, not by the press.
I think what has happened to me is that the force of Trump has engendered a force of anti-Trump in me, I feel his being president is anathema to America. I know it's not just my left wing bias being triggered, because so many conservatives have been repulsed by him.
When I was younger I thought Freud's death instinct was crazy. I think people want to destroy America, even Jill Stein of the green party, everyone is not getting their way on an issue, and they're not seeing the larger picture and want to just destroy everything. In a way, I'm not sure if democracy is up to the crisis of climate change, Tump and the increased consciousness of the information age, where we're seeing things we wouldn't be seeing. The right wing solution is to impoverish everyone so they can't stop working and don't have time to consume information, bringing back fundamentalist values that sort of override things, so you don't have much choice, you have to be a trad wife, you have to produce a lot of babies so you don't have any time, and you're really hooked into the capitalist system. The people who couldn't tolerate ambivalence and the complexities, are hunkering down even more in their sureties, while the conscious and more aware are tortured by confronting every problem. There are studies that right wing people are more happy, and that's because they're sure, and they're dismissive and oblivious. Right wing women can't acknowledge female oppression, or they would just die, so they're in denial. Trump is actively trying to destroy America, and he's got his 70 million fans cheering on this death. And the newspaper of choice is focusing on reporting a balanced story, to just give the information, and that feels more threatening than ever, we need help coping with modern existence.
10/15 NY Times Pitchbot perfectly summarizes the attitude. Pitchbot on Bluesky now
10/18: Pitchbot in Thread Reader
"I think what is going on is their system isn't built to deal with a narcissistic sociopath, they don't want to change their system, so they're just hunkering down and sneering at what they see as their resistance lib wine mom critics."
"Who runs it? A nepo baby. And not even a nepo baby who is the child of someone who accomplished something. A. G. Sulzberger is the nepo baby of a nepo baby (A. O. Sulzberger Jr.). You have to go back two generations to find anyone who accomplished anything."
"So I don't think there's some exciting explanation for all the pro-Trump coverage that's going to be revealed. It's just dumb, incompetent people sticking to a system that doesn't work because they're too lazy or dumb to change the system."
Speaking of corrupt media, I stopped posting on twitter, but I continued to retweet and like things. I've scaled that back now, so that I don't retweet, I just like. I really want to retweet, but I'll quote about it on another platform, like I quoted above.
1/29/25. I see Paul Krugman has left the NY Times, and wrote a parting shot at them.
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