GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump backed out of the scheduled Sept. 10 debate on ABC News with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. But that's OK: he unilaterally decided to have one with her on Fox News instead, in front of a crowd in an arena. — Read the rest
The post Trump, chickening out of ABC debate, wants one on Fox News instead appeared first on Boing Boing.
Nicolás Maduro is the authoritarian leader of Venezuela. Last weekend, he declared himself the winner of that country's presidential election—an outcome that is highly disputed; the Carter Center lambasted the Maduro regime's lack of transparency and said the process "cannot be considered democratic."
Thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets in protest. In response, the government has implemented a crackdown, killing at least 16 people and detaining a thousand more. Such behavior is entirely characteristic of Maduro, an outlaw who has faced credible accusations of drug trafficking, public corruption, and crimes against humanity. His unscrupulous leadership has plunged the country into depression and poverty. As Reason's Katarina Hall wrote, "Almost 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country amid hyperinflation, shortages of essential goods, and rampant corruption. Many more have expressed their desire to leave if Maduro remains in power."
Maduro's governing ideology is not a secret: He is a socialist. He is the successor to the leftist tyrant Hugo Chávez. He heads Venezuela's ruling Socialist Party. His policy prescriptions are in line with socialism: His government has instituted price controls, seized assets from private companies, and contributed to the country's hyperinflation problem. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and wrecks the economy with a mixture of centralized planning, repression, and pure theft—well, it's a socialist duck.
So it came as something of a shock when a recent New York Times article that correctly described Venezuela's overall problems—and Maduro's perfidy in particular—nevertheless identified the government's economic policy as "brutal capitalism" rather than socialism. Here was The Times:
If the election decision holds and Mr. Maduro remains in power, he will carry Chavismo, the country's socialist-inspired movement, into its third decade in Venezuela. Founded by former President Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro's mentor, the movement initially promised to lift millions out of poverty.
For a time it did. But in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation's wealth.
Economists say what now? These economists are not identified by The Times; the given hyperlink redirects to a Times article about improvements in the Venezuelan economy. These improvements were due to the introduction of some market reforms, according to economists with actual names.
"Lifting some controls does not make Venezuela a capitalist country," writes George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen. "Moreover, the lifting of controls led to improvements."
When a small state-connected minority controls much of the nation's wealth—and maintains its grip on power by outlawing dissent and cheating in elections—then the ruling ideology is socialism, almost by definition. Maduro, it bears repeating, makes no secret of this: He is the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
Socialists will complain, as they often do, that various socialist governments are not practicing actual socialism. Under their idealized system, socialists claim, the government's centralized redistribution of resources will be fair, equal, and democratic. Yet it certainly says something about such a system that it collapses into outright tyranny every time it is attempted. Socialist governance seems to require concentrating an extraordinary amount of power in elite government decision makers; this tends to produce a new ruling class, the widespread deprivation of political rights for everyone else, and crippling poverty.
Socialism is brutal, as the people of Venezuela know perfectly well. They understand that better than The New York Times.
Amber Duke and I discuss MSNBC's confusion over what Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) really wants, President Joe Biden's plan to pack the Supreme Court, and weird affinity groups supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. (Apologies for my hoarse voice; I had too much fun at a Green Day/The Smashing Pumpkins concert the night before we filmed.)
Like most fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), I am of the opinion that things have mostly gone awry since Avengers: Endgame concluded "The Infinity Saga." (Though I enjoyed several of the post-Endgame television shows on Disney+: WandaVision, Loki, Hawkeye, and What If…?) I was thus incredibly pleased to learn that the Russo brothers—who were responsible for many of the MCU's best films, including Endgame and Infinity War—are returning to rescue the franchise. Most notably, they have enlisted a familiar face: Robert Downey Jr., who famously portrayed Tony Stark/Iron Man, the original MCU superhero who gave his life to save the universe.
Downey Jr. will not be playing Stark again, thank goodness. While there are all sorts of ways to revive the character—alternate universes, time travel, etc.—doing so would cheapen his sacrifice at the conclusion of Endgame. Instead, Downey Jr. will play Victor von Doom, a beloved villain from the Marvel comics. It seems likely that this version of Doctor Doom will have some connection to Stark; as previously mentioned, the MCU has made use (some would say overuse) of alternate realities.
In any case, the recent reveal of Downey Jr. at Comic-Con in San Diego, California, was something to behold.
The post <em>The New York Times</em> Thinks 'Brutal Capitalism,' Not Socialism, Ruined Venezuela appeared first on Reason.com.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
The New York Times is fighting to take down a game called Worldle, according to a legal filing viewed by the BBC, in which The Times apparently argued that the geography-based game is "creating confusion" by using a name that's way too similar to Wordle.
Worldle is "nearly identical in appearance, sound, meaning, and imparts the same commercial impression" to Wordle, The Times claimed.
The Times bought Wordle in 2022, paying software developer Josh Wardle seven figures for the daily word-guessing puzzle game after its breakout success during the pandemic. Around the same time, Worldle was created—along with more than 100 other Wordle spinoffs offering niche alternatives to Wordle, including versions in different languages and completely different games simply using the name construction ending in "-le." The Times filed for a Wordle trademark the day after buying the game and by March 2022, it started sending takedown requests.
Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case."
That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services—were produced after the 2016 presidential election. At that point, Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, had already paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, and Trump had already been elected. The prosecution's case against Trump, which a jury found persuasive enough to convict him on all 34 counts yesterday, was peppered with temporal puzzles like this one.
A New York Times editorial concedes that "many experts" have "expressed skepticism about the significance of this case and its legal underpinnings, which employed an unusual legal theory to seek a felony charge for what is more commonly a misdemeanor." Yet the Times also claims the jury found Trump "guilty of falsifying business records to prevent voters from learning about a sexual encounter that he believed would have been politically damaging." How did records created in 2017 "prevent voters from learning" about the Daniels tryst before they cast their ballots the previous year?
The editorial's characterization of Cohen's payment to Daniels is confounding for a similar reason. "A payoff like this is not illegal by itself," the Times concedes. "What makes it illegal is doctoring business records to mask its true purpose, which prosecutors said was to hide the story from the American people to help Mr. Trump get elected." Again, the "doctoring" of business records happened in 2017. Contrary to what the Times claims, it did not retroactively make the Daniels payment "illegal."
The Times also says the verdict "establishes that Mr. Trump committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." The verdict does not establish that. Trump was not charged with breaking the law by instructing Cohen to pay off Daniels. And while the contentious characterization of that payment as an illegal campaign contribution figured in one theory for treating the falsification charges as felonies rather than misdemeanors, the other two theories did not hinge on the assumption that the payoff was illegal.
Since the jurors were instructed that they did not need to settle on any particular theory, it is not clear that they unanimously accepted the idea that Trump "committed crimes in hiding pertinent information about himself from the American people for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election." That description, however, is consistent with the prosecution's dubious "election fraud" narrative, which falsely implied that "hiding pertinent information about himself" was inherently criminal.
Although it seems clear that the jury accepted that narrative, even the prosecutors sometimes forgot what they claimed the case was about. They argued that Trump violated an obscure, rarely invoked state law by conspiring with Cohen to influence the presidential election "by unlawful means." They further argued that Trump caused the falsification of business records with the intent of aiding or concealing that crime, which is the element that transformed the charges into felonies. But some versions of that theory were logically impossible.
According to one theory of "unlawful means," Trump facilitated a violation of New York tax law by allowing Cohen to falsely report his reimbursement as income. But since Cohen filed those allegedly fraudulent tax returns in 2018, after Trump had been president for more than a year, his misrepresentation could not possibly have helped Trump win the election.
Under another theory, Trump falsified business records to conceal the falsification of other business records, including the 1099-MISC forms in which the Trump Organization inaccurately described Cohen's reimbursement as income. Since the 1099 forms were issued after the election, it is hard to see how they could have been aimed at ensuring Trump's victory.
These logical difficulties were just one of several reasons to question the prosecution's case, which relied on convoluted theories involving interacting statutes and questionable assumptions about Trump's knowledge and intent. But instead of zeroing in on those weaknesses, Trump's lawyers, presumably at his behest, were determined to deny everything, starting with Daniels' story about sex with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.
That strategy invited embarrassingly detailed testimony by Daniels, who described a presumptuous Trump abruptly disrobing while she was in the bathroom before engaging in a "brief," condomless sexual encounter "in the missionary position." Contrary to her previous accounts, Daniels implied that the sex was less than fully consensual, citing "an imbalance of power," noting the presence of a bodyguard at the door to Trump's hotel suite, saying Trump's failure to use a condom worried her, and describing her own mental state as hazy, although she added that she was not drunk and had not been drugged.
None of this was legally relevant. When it came to the questions of whether Trump had caused the falsification of business records and his intent in doing so, it did not matter exactly what happened in that hotel suite. Even if Daniels had made the whole thing up, Trump still would have been keen to keep her quiet, whether for personal reasons, business reasons, political reasons, or some combination of the three.
The defense team also insisted that Trump really thought he was paying Cohen for legal work, even though Trump had publicly admitted that he reimbursed Cohen for the Daniels payment. And Trump's lawyers disputed that he "knew about this payment" at the time, even though it defies belief to suppose that Cohen, who was eager to please Trump and conferred with him frequently, would have hatched this scheme on his own, or that he would have fronted $130,000 of his own money without the promise of reimbursement.
Whether Trump approved the misleading records related to Cohen's reimbursement, as Cohen claimed, is less clear. Trump's lawyers hammered at Cohen's credibility on that point, saying jurors should not trust a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss. But because they were also implausibly claiming that Cohen lied when he said Trump approved the Daniels payoff, the jurors may have discounted any doubts about the veracity of Cohen's account.
If Trump had been willing to concede some of the prosecution's allegations, his lawyers could have focused on the shaky legal argument for charging him with felonies. They not only failed to do that in a cogent way; they insisted on jury instructions that ruled out convicting Trump of misdemeanors rather than felonies.
"Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump's defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks," defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti observes. "That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn't work in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Trump's team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn't a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump's attorneys was lost amid all the clutter."
The post The Prosecution's Story About Trump Featured Several Logically Impossible Claims appeared first on Reason.com.
Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.
"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."
Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.
"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.
"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."
The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.
"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."
If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.
Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.
In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."
American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.
And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.
Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.
"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.
Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.
Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.
So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.
The post World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows appeared first on Reason.com.
How much do billionaires really pay in taxes?
"Today, the superrich control a greater share of America's wealth than during the Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers," said Gabriel Zucman in a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled, "It's Time to Tax the Billionaires."
Zucman is an economist at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, and a frequent collaborator with superstar economist Thomas Piketty, author of the extremely influential book on wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
But today's guest, Phil Magness—an economic historian, author, and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute—says the work of Piketty and his circle of inequality-obsessed colleagues is deeply flawed and sometimes outright deceptive. He points out that billionaires do pay taxes…a lot of taxes. And the inequality literature is riddled with errors and bad statistics.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Sources referenced in this conversation:
Timestamps:
The post Phil Magness: Who Really Pays the Most Taxes? appeared first on Reason.com.
© Musk Photo: Haddad Media/Flickr/Creative Commons; Illustration by John Osterhoudt
It is a cold Friday in March, I turned a year older this week, and I am in a bit of a mood for no good reason besides being a cranky old guy. So perhaps it is time for some bullet point bile, broken up into three categories. Can you put each in its correct place?
The self-proclaimed “paper of record” took a bit of time from its nearly non-stop headlines about President Biden’s age to go after anybody who was out there peddling any games that seemed even Wordle adjacent.
A bit on the nose, eh Wordle?
The New York Times bought the game from its creator about two years back. The game wasn’t original, the concept wasn’t original, and even the name had been used before. But it became a hit during the pandemic and the Times wanted to expand its word games. One does not live by the Sunday crossword alone I guess.
This week their lawyers began sending out copyright based take down notices to “hundreds” of Wordle-like titles.
This should have been no surprise. The Times has a long history of sending its lawyers after any hint of what they consider infringement. I remember back in the 80s when Infocom‘s company newsletter was called the New Zork Times. They too received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action and had to change the name lest somebody mistake it for a product of the New York Times, which might cause confusion in the marketplace and tarnish the brand of the paper.
None of the regular sites I hit has gone down yet, but I will keep an eye out.
Elsewhere out on the legal front, Nintendo won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu, who acceded to the mounting pressure from the video game giant who had been framing Yuzu’s intent as being to circumvent DRM, which would put it in line for violating the DMCA.
In addition to ceasing all development and support of its emulator, Yuzu also had to agree to pay all of Nintendo’s costs, which totaled up to $2.4 million by their calculation.
Nintendo has long been as fierce as the New York Times in sending its lawyers after anybody using their intellectual property, including some innocuous fan projects, and vigorously stomping out anything that might cause one less hardware unit to sell.
Anyway, I am kind of sad I missed out on Yuzu because, for me at least, the worst thing about playing games on the Switch is actually being required to play them on the Switch. I’d much prefer them on my PC. Alas, no longer and option.
Epic went spoiling for a fight with Apple and Google a few years back because… well, Tim Sweeney wants to be as rich as possible I guess. As with his fight with Steam, he just wants to be the person collecting the tax and resents other who got there first.
The fight with Apple has gone back and forth since then and it had looked like things had settled down with Epic getting some of what it wanted, including the ability to have its own storefront. And then Apple banned Epic’s developer account in the EU.
Sweeney was immediately out with histrionics, but Apple was also declaring that Epic was “verifiably untrustworthy” and would not live up to the developer agreement they had signed. This will all draw the attention of EU regulators again, who will be wielding their Digital Markets Act, it “tax the US tech companies” regulations.
How do I feel about this?
Survey say… let them fight!
It is hard to feel sad when rich people are fighting to be incrementally more rich.
A follow up about how Apple is embracing the drama and that the EU is its real foe in this battle.
Having chased away all serious, paying advertisers on the Twitter platform… we have Cheech & Chong, Crypto scams (still!), and nazi ads left, and I block all of them besides Cheech & Chong… Elon has been thrashing around trying to find SOMETHING that will make money for his $44 billion boondoggle. And so they have announced Articles.
From the @write account
You can have BOLD, ITALIC, and STRIKETHROUGH text. And images!
Freaking amazing, right? RIGHT?!?
Oh yeah. Who needs quote blocks or inline links, just give us money and we’ll let you do long form and give them a special icon and tab on your profile. We totally won’t change our mind in three months and disappear the whole thing the next time Elon has a brain fart, we promise!
I am just waiting until he finally gets around to re-inventing Twitter… a version without him on it.
I mean, EA has a long tradition of being dumb, or at least not being able to read the room. And they are ramping up to lay off 5% of their staff. So they have to give the investors SOMETHING to be positive about, and AI is the magic wand currently. Just say that and Wall Street will love you, right? So how did EA CEO Andrew Wilson do on that? Let’s go check over at PC Gamer… and… oh my!
Truth in Headlines
I am not positive the bong hit was verified, but Andrew did ramble on about 3 billion people using EA tools to make games while he painted a picture of a future where EA simply didn’t have to pay any of those pesky creative or technical people who actually make literally everything they sell today.
There was some law of hiring I recall where bad managers only hire people dumber than they are, so when we’re at a point where the CEO of EA wants to fire everybody and I am starting to suspect that we are seeing this in action. Dumb guy achieves life goal, promoted to CEO and fires everybody.
That is probably being too hard on him. As we all know by this point, as a public company you must meet the infinite growth demands of Wall Street, and when you’ve got nothing you have to make shit up. This is a classic “making shit up” performance. He’ll probably get a huge bonus and lay off even more staff.
Finally, Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, which will remake the WoW Classic progression servers now lingering in Wrath of the Lich King into a new world, has started its closed beta test.
Can you re-run a cataclysm?
I’ve actually been waiting for this to show up, having worn out on Wrath Classic after five characters. However, closed beta doesn’t mean we’re close to actually getting it, and the roadmap that Blizzard put out at the beginning of the year made it seem like we would be into summer before the cataclysm hit. Still, it is nice to see it is finally in motion.
And on that bit of upbeat news, it is off to get through the day and to the weekend.
The New York Times has issued a takedown notice to Reactle, a Wordle clone, which has meant around 1900 other versions of the game have now been taken down.
Reactle was an open-source project created by an individual, the brilliantly-named Chase Wackerfuss, that contained instructions on how to create Wordle spin-offs, such as variations in different languages or themed answers. The code repository is no longer available on Github, following the DMCA takedown notice from the NYT.
"I write to submit a revised DMCA Notice regarding an infringing repository (and hundreds of forked repositories) hosted by Github that instruct users how to infringe The New York Times Co.'s ('The Times') copyright in its immensely popular Wordle game and create knock-off copies of the same," reads the notice, as reported by 404 Media.
Wordle was a runaway hit word-deducing game on the web, so popular that The New York Times bought it outright and moved it to its website. A couple of years in, though, and it's launching a crackdown on clones and games too similar for its lawyers' comfort. — Read the rest
The post New York Times launches copyright crackdown on Wordle clones appeared first on Boing Boing.
As someone whose commute to and from the office every day is under half an hour, I am always looking for something short and sweet to do while riding the subway. Sure, there’s the New York Times Games app and its offerings like Wordle and the more recent Connections. But as of February 26, there is a new addition to…
Adam Rubenstein is a journalist and former opinion editor at The New York Times. As a person of right-leaning political sensibilities—Rubenstein previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard—he was brought to the Times opinion pages with a mandate to help diversify its ideological offerings. His bosses said they expected him to use his contacts in conservative media to solicit, research, and improve op-eds that would advance contrarian arguments and challenge the paper's editorial point of view, as well as its readers.
This mandate resulted in the now-infamous publication of an editorial by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) on June 3, 2020—amid the nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd—headlined "Send In the Troops." In the op-ed, Cotton called for the federal government to deploy the military to end the rioting and looting in U.S. cities.
While one can raise a number of practical, philosophical, and even legal objections to such a proposal, it was not exactly a controversial suggestion, at least as far as public opinion was concerned: Polls showed that more than half of American voters wanted the feds to mount a more aggressive response to all the lawbreaking. But among The New York Times' staff, the op-ed proved to be radioactive. Times journalists went ballistic, publicly attacking their organization for daring to run such a piece. A characteristic response came from the Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project originator, who wrote on Twitter, "As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this."
There's nothing inherently wrong with opinion journalists criticizing the thoughts of a U.S. senator, of course, but many on staff did not stop there. On the contrary, they argued the Times never should have published the op-ed—that platforming such an opinion was an act of violence against black people and would cause them harm. These staff members became organized, and soon enough, many of them started tweeting nearly identical statements that the op-ed had put black writers in danger. Eventually, more than a thousand Times employees signed a letter to top NYT bosses accusing them of jeopardizing "our reporters' ability to work safely and effectively."
With hindsight, it's very clear what they were doing: appropriating the language of human resources—hostile environment, workplace safety, etc.—for the ideological project of shutting down an opinion that clashed with theirs. And the gambit worked. In an attempt to mollify the staffers, the Times published a groveling apology in the form of a self-flagellating editor's note that is still appended to the op-ed to this day. A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, forced James Bennet, the editor of the opinion pages, to resign, and he did so. Other personnel involved with the Cotton op-ed were reassigned, and Rubenstein left the paper some months later.
This sorry episode is currently being re-litigated, four years later, in light of a revelatory article published in The Atlantic earlier this week. Rubenstein is finally telling his side of the story, and he has persuasively argued that the Times threw him, Bennet, and Cotton under the bus to appease a woke mob. He debunked several criticisms of the op-ed—namely, that it had included obvious factual errors—and pointed out that Times op-eds penned by literal authoritarian dictators such as Moammar Gadhafi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Vladimir Putin had not produced any internal fury whatsoever. It's very telling whose words are described as literal violence, and whose are not.
"Last year, the page published an essay by the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City, and few seemed to mind," wrote Rubenstein in The Atlantic. "But whether the paper is willing to publish conservative views on divisive political issues, such as abortion rights and the Second Amendment, remains an open question."
His article certainly appears to confirm suspicions that the paper of record is, at least at times, in thrall to its liberal staffers.
Since the publication of Rubenstein's record-straightening account, an interesting criticism of it has appeared on social media. This criticism takes aim at a fascinating anecdote related by Rubenstein in the article's opening paragraphs.
According to Rubenstein, he participated in an orientation activity upon first joining the Times: An HR representative asked new employees to each answer a question about themselves. Rubenstein was told to describe his favorite sandwich, and volunteered the spicy chicken from Chick-fil-A. The HR person chided him for citing Chick-fil-A, a fast food chain with a socially conservative founder. "We don't do that here, they hate gay people," was the response—a self-parody of woke shibboleths, if ever there was one.
In fact, this response by a Times HR figure is so embarrassing that some liberals have decided it simply cannot be true. Enter Hannah-Jones, who opined on X (formerly Twitter) that the anecdote in question "never happened." She was hardly alone in accusing Rubenstein of making it up; writer Michael Hobbes said the anecdote was "egregiously fake."
Never mind that over the years, Rubenstein has told a number of other journalists—including yours truly—about the incident. The Atlantic actually verified it. The writer Jesse Singal reached out to the publication, and Atlantic editors said that Times employees with "contemporaneous knowledge" of the orientation session confirmed it happened.
Atlantic spokeswoman on the Chick-fil-A incident that Nikole Hannah-Jones and many others claimed must have been fabcricated: "the details were confirmed by New York Times employees who had contemporaneous knowledge of the incident in question." pic.twitter.com/KL0cptFB6B
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 27, 2024
So the next time conservative, libertarian, or independent thinkers are accused of spreading misinformation or reflexively distrusting the media, it might be helpful to remind the accusers in the mainstream press that we're all in good company.
The post <em>New York Times</em> Staffers Bullied a Conservative Writer appeared first on Reason.com.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
The day after The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, the author and systems architect Daniel Jeffries wrote an essay-length tweet arguing that the Times “has a near zero probability of winning” its lawsuit. As we write this, it has been retweeted 288 times and received 885,000 views.
“Trying to get everyone to license training data is not going to work because that's not what copyright is about,” Jeffries wrote. “Copyright law is about preventing people from producing exact copies or near exact copies of content and posting it for commercial gain. Period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or simply does not understand how copyright works.”
This article is written by two authors. One of us is a journalist who has been on the copyright beat for nearly 20 years. The other is a law professor who has taught dozens of courses on IP and Internet law. We’re pretty sure we understand how copyright works. And we’re here to warn the AI community that it needs to take these lawsuits seriously.
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