Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I really should read my own blog.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

So many bastards, so little time.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

In my day, never was longer.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Sunday Morning Open Thread: Our (Willfully) Failed Media

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Our (Willfully) Failed Media

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Extracts from a much longer thread:

The disgust comes both at the intellectual slackness and inherent dishonesty of the both sides approach. Arguing that there are “different realities” is the antithesis of making an objective effort to support the truth.

The GOP “reality” of thinking or at least arguing that Democrats are responsible for the threat to American democracy is steeped in lies, deflection, projection and founded in no facts of any kind whatsoever.

On the contrary, it is like writing that we should listen to the arguments of arsonists that they care as much about the houses they are burning down as the people who are being made homeless or worse by the fires the arsonists start.

It is saying the arsonists’ reality is somehow equivalent to that of their victims, that their arguments deserve the same credence. Americans believe many things. That does not mean reporters should be treating them all the same. Belief is not a component of truth.

Truth is what is, whether you believe it or not. The world is not flat. History is what actually happened. Conspiracy theories don’t become reality based on the number of adherents they win. Vaccines are better for fighting disease that household cleaning agents.

The contempt comes because the journalists involved know better. So you ask, why does the Times (and why do other news organizations) do this over and over again? It has nothing to do with journalism, nothing to do with balance or fairness and everything to do with business.

That is where the profound concern comes in. Both sides-ing a sustained assault on democracy, freedom, decency and truth obscures the real truth–that we are in danger. And worse, it increases the danger by validating those who are responsible for the threat we face.

Only one party in America, the Republican Party, is responsible for the reality that our democracy is at risk. No Democrat nor the Democratic Party is responsible for that threat in any way. The division in our views does not alter that reality in the slightest…

Our democracy is at risk in part because our media is failing. Every rational voice with a platform–on social media, in newspapers, on TV–must speak up, make that clear, demand best practices. If not, unmoored from truth, we will soon lose the essence of what made the US great…

They think Trump is a buffoon. They gripe that his antics make their jobs harder. They are towing the line because it’s their job…

And this flips the “out of touch” accusation on its head. A lot of media critics are out of touch with the sources for a lot of media coverage

The space that both sides—media critics and the journalists they are covering—are not understanding is that a lot of GOP operatives *who do not like Trump very much* are underestimating who exactly his supporters around the country are

That’s why there is so much hollering about Biden’s speech. They really have disassociated themselves from what is plain if you talk to the whackjobs who are all in for Trump: These people would kill democracy dead to get Trump for Life

And the first half might read as a defense—it certainly is sympathetic. But it’s a very different kind of damning to think that a bunch of people are letting fascism ripen on the vine because they don’t really approve of it but are hurt that people want them to oppose it

Until our press grasps that the people they get beer with are downplaying fascism on the spurious notion that what they want matters more than what is happening we will keep getting the coverage we are getting

Media elite protecting fellow media elites:

Reader Interactions

151Comments

  2. 2.

    delphinium

    @zhena gogolia: He most definitely is, especially this part. Wish our media would take this moment in time seriously.

    Both sides-ing a sustained assault on democracy, freedom, decency and truth obscures the real truth–that we are in danger. And worse, it increases the danger by validating those who are responsible for the threat we face.

  3. 3.

    Ken

    Complacency by the media (and its owners) shows a remarkable grasp of history. Maybe they should ask themselves, “Is Trump the 1930’s business-friendly sort of fascist that lets the current owners keep their property as long as they say good things about the new regime?  Or is he the 2000’s crime-boss sort of fascist who kills the current owners so he can put everything under control of his buddies?”

    Though that might just make the owners decide they need to qualify as his buddy, so never mind.

  5. 5.

    sab

    I never before understood how divided families could become in civil wars. We aren’t there now, but I cannot bear to speak to my RWNJ brother, and he agrees. This isn’t just politics these days. It’s voting rights and various other thimgs, including the safety of my grandchildren, some being female, and some being mixed race.

    His stupid Libertarian philosophy isn’t just some stupid nutjob philosophy. It is destructive to our civil government, and I am not willimg to pretemd less is at stake just because my brother is a moron. Also too I think he is less innocent than he pretends.

  6. 6.

    Gvg

    The loss of revenue from classified ads to Craigslist and other free online sources is killing traditional newspapers. Free online news is killing traditional news plus the entertainment aspect of it and the failure to figure out how to make some sort of fairness obligation apply to cable channels and internet channels all mean that there really is no money in providing news. We can yell all we want about bias, but salaries and expenses have to come from somewhere and not altruism.

    I am not quite sure what to do about it. We can’t censor but maybe we could have stricter truth in labeling laws where say Fox News wasn’t allowed to call itself news it would have to be Fox opinions and a bunch of other shows same. Plus I don’t see why internet channels couldn’t be required to have news hours just like the old broadcast channels in return for a license, including YouTube. Still hard to make them all stick to facts instead of opinions though. With penalties for the difference.

    Its been so long since I have seen good detailed fact based reporting, that I don’t think the current crop grew up seeing it and necessarily knows what it is, or knows they aren’t doing it. It’s late.

  7. 7.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Bloomberg: Republicans backed a violent insurrection and are all in with Trump despite all of the classified, top secret documents he stole from the White House.  There are no more deeper divisions to reach.  We’re divided between those who are okay with fascism and political violence and those who want to protect and strengthen our democracy. Do pay attention.

  8. 8.

    Frankensteinbeck

    These people would kill democracy dead to get Trump for Life

    I still think it’s important that they would kill democracy dead to get ANY Republican dictatorship. They do particularly like Trump, but he is amplifying an existing mainstream Republican sentiment.

  9. 9.

    Ken

    @zhena gogolia: Putin was my model for the “2000’s crime-boss fascist”.

    Though I think TFG would be worse, since he’d layer his insecurities on top of the criminality. It wouldn’t matter if, say, Thiel supported the takeover, because Thiel has more money than TFG, and that rankles.

  10. 10.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    FTFNYT was doing “Hitler will pivot” posts for 20 years

    HITLER WILL PURGE PARTY OF RADICALS

    Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

    April 4, 1931

  11. 11.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    I see TFG spoke for two hours. I can’t imagine listening to a two-hour speech. Do people at his rally pay attention for that long? Or do they wander around, talk to one another, check their messages?

  12. 12.

    Scout211

    I have been following a story over the past few days of an Internet forum, Kiwi Farms, that has been harassing and threatening trans people. Link

     

    Kiwi Farms has become synonymous with doxxing (the release of an individual’s identifying information with malicious intent), swatting (a term for when an anonymous person sends an urgent, false tip to the police about a violent crime in a victim’s home in the hopes that law enforcement will raid it and potentially harm the person inside), and archiving controversial materials such as manifestos by mass shooters and recordings of their livestreams.
    The forum is a massive archive of sensitive information on their targets, which has been used to repeatedly harass them. Kiwi Farms’ most notorious section is titled “lolcows” and targets transgender people.
    The archive often features social media pictures of their targets’ friends and family, along with contact information of their employers. The information is used in an effort to get their targets fired or socially isolated by spreading rumors that they are pedophiles or criminals.
    Experts fear Kiwi Farms is starting to target other communities — and that their tactics are being duplicated throughout the political world to intimidate political enemies.

    . . .

    At least three people have died by suicide after becoming targets of Kiwi Farms harassment campaigns, according to Vice. In 2016, the family of a trans person who died by suicide, Lizzy Waite, was harassed by Kiwi Farms trolls for weeks after her death. She had posted a suicide note on Facebook.
    Sorrenti became a target of Kiwi Farms after she gained notoriety for speaking about the recent wave of anti-trans legislation in the U.S. and challenging conservative viewpoints and personalities online. After a streamer who criticized Sorrenti was banned from Twitch in March, Kiwi Farms users created a discussion thread about Sorrenti that included sexually explicit material of her, phone numbers and addresses belonging to Sorrenti and her family, and her dead name — the name she used before her gender transition.

     

    Sorrenti was demanding that Cloudflare drop the site and they refused.

    In a public statement posted Wednesday, under Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s byline, the company said that it will not drop security services for any of its customers.

    They finally changed their minds and will block Kiwi Farms.  Link

    Internet hosting and security services provider Cloudflare said Saturday that it would block Kiwi Farms, a website associated with harassment campaigns against transgender people.

  13. 13.

    sab

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Didn’t Castro in his prime speak for eight hours? Regardless of your politics, authoritarians speechifying should be daunting, and discourage the normies from voting for them. If they win your workplace might make you troop out to stand through a speech.

    Joking here, but not really.

  15. 15.

    sab

    @Scout211: Reading JK Rowlings new book which I like more than a lot. Nothing like most reviewers said since they obviously didn’t read it. But where the fuck is she when this is going on?

    Europe and US is that different? I  can believe it but who knows? Several trans kids in my family in USA and life is at best not easy for them, and often quite dangerous.

    ETA I really cannot understand her position. And I don’t think she is horrible and hateful. She is just very wrong.

  16. 16.

    Soprano2

    @Frankensteinbeck: They want someone who they think can make things go back to the way they were before anyone except straight Christian white men had full civil rights, full stop. They think that world was much better than the one we have now. They want a world where everyone’s role is defined simply, like apartheid South Africa, as long as they are always on top. ETA what panics them is that they know in their heart that it’s not really possible to get a world like that back. Some of them want to take the vote away from women, too, because they think that’s how the world got the way it is now.

  17. 17.

    Matt McIrvin

    i would like someone to explain to me the mechanism by which *ignoring* the anti-democratic movement in the republican party would reduce division, since the implication of this analysis is that identifying the division is what might make it deeper

    The phenomenon Bouie is complaining about reminds me very much of the “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” analysis of the Democratic Party’s 1990s-2000s troubles in the heartland, and the variant of it pushed by some of the Bernie left in the 2010s, speculating that Democrats could somehow make gains by soft-pedaling their scary cultural liberalism and concentrating on economic issues. It completely ignores that the other side is the side turning up the heat on this stuff, and we can’t just make it go away by acting nice.

  18. 18.

    Geminid

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: My Atlanta friend watched almost all of the speech. Warren said that at times trump would sense the audience’s attention drifting and bring them back by pounding familiar themes like Clinton’s emails. He had them chanting “Lock her up” at one point.

    The crowd was largely composed of true believers. Some camped outside for days to get in. I’m not sure how more normal Republican and Independent voters will react to this freak show. I doubt it will gain Mastriano or Oz many voters, which was the rally’s ostensible purpose.

    Biden, Fetterman and Shapiro will appear at Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade tomorrow. That should be a sunny contrast to the dark and dystopian trump rally.

  19. 19.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @sab:

    I don’t think she is horrible and hateful. She is just very wrong.

    Hoo boy, is she horrible and hateful.  The thing is, she’s the “I’m the real victim” kind.  Her rhetoric is ‘But I don’t hate trans people!’ while working from the assumption that trans women are men and men are inherently rapists.  She turned ‘half a dozen trans supporters hold up signs in front of the gate to her mansion that’s on the public register and pointed out on tours’ into ‘I was doxxed and harassed in my home.’  She associates with, retweets, and publicly praises the really hardcore “Wipe out trans people” bigots.  And she’s obsessed.  Holy Hell, is she obsessed.  She just.  Won’t.  Stop.  Talking about it.  It’s her overwhelming political issue, and she is certainly a highly influential person.

    Her primary message these days is “Trans people are the hateful bigots because they say bad things to me.”

  20. 20.

    germy shoemangler

    @sab:

    A local outlet reported a story about a man who was beaten and killed for being gay. JK Rowling mocked them for “virtue signaling”

    She expressed support for the man who said that AIDS was better than being trans. She expressed support for an outspoken anti-LGBT activist

    Come on

    — Nathaniel Robert (@NateLestrange) August 28, 2022

  23. 23.

    m.j.

    There was a time in this country’s history when we were so heavily invested in destroying fascists, women were doing jobs we once thought only men could handle.

    Happy labor day.

  25. 25.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Geminid: I watched a bit til I got bored. He followed his usual method ( if you can call it a method) of rambling on about his greatest grievances, see he’s losing them, and throw in some bait to liven them up, then back the the greatest whines.

  26. 26.

    catothedog

    @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:

    FTFNYT was doing “Hitler will pivot” posts for 20 years

    That narrative has never changed.  It has always been about who rules, not about how they rule. The hidden assumption in politics, an unquestioned, but unobserved reality. Like “this is water”. White privilege.

    There is a pining for “benevolent white rule” to come back. Which is why I believe Rothkopf’s take is not wrong, but misplaced.

    Both parties in the US were built on a platform of benevolent white rule.  The lines were different of course, one was more racist than the other.  And while there was general racial progress over time, liberal racism was still an unquestioned fact of life.

    But now we are in a place where one of those parties – the Democrats – are on having a debate on the white privilege of power.  There is no consensus  within that party on what will replace it;  and it’s not yet completely sorted out.  But  white privilege is being questioned.

    The other party is now explicit about the question. The political process since Obama has simply made this fight about privilege explicit where it was implied, and made it come out of the woodwork. The fundamental assumption under benevolent white rule is immoral, and defense of this immorality is impossible by moral means. Immoral principles have to be defended by immoral wars.

    The media is fighting for a restoration of  “benevolent white rule” as the unquestioned and hidden fact of the country. Why? Because most of the media is white.

    All of the media believes that once white privilege is re-established as the status quo, the Republicans will put fascism and racism back in the box, and we will go back to the days of gentle liberal racism and the arguments will only be over economic policy.

    This goes for people like Rothkopf too. The only difference is that he  sees the danger that fascism and racism wont go back into the box , even if  white privilege is re-established as the unquestioned status quo.

  27. 27.

    trnc

    i would like someone to explain to me the mechanism by which *ignoring* the anti-democratic movement in the republican party would reduce division, since the implication of this analysis is that identifying the division is what might make it deeper

    “Recognizing you have a problem is half the battle” should be the response every time someone complains that we’re pointing out the republican addiction to anti-democracy.​
     

    ETA: Also applies to the media addiction to ginned up both siderism.

  29. 29.

    sab

    @Frankensteinbeck: Did she say that or did the press say she said that? She has been trolled a lot herself.

    This issue really tears me up. My niece is trans and I love her and nothing in her choice surprised me. And the press has been nasty since the firxt time Rowling published outside of Harry Potter. MSM hates women.

    I do think Rowlingi s very wrong on trans. But I am coming from a very conservative American medical perspective. Don’t know what they are doing in UK. And my relative was male to female. I have never known a guy go from straight to gay and then change his mind. I think trans male to female is the same.

    I am not a medical professional, just a tolerant adult, and I have known many girls go from straight to gay and then back again and then back back  again. So treating female to male trans adolescents could be problematic in a way that male to female isn’t.

    Maybe Rowling is caught up in that ( my belief) or maybe she is caught up in TERF warfare.  I don’t know which, but I don’t think a truly committed TERF could have written this book.

    But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think she is very very wrong.

  31. 31.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Ken:

    Or is he the 2000’s crime-boss sort of fascist who kills the current owners so he can put everything under control of his buddies?”

    Though that might just make the owners decide they need to qualify as his buddy, so never mind.

    That’s the bit that amazes me that so many rich people don’t get if Trump got the power they want to give him, Trump would just steal everything they got.

  32. 32.

    germy shoemangler

    Cynthia Hughes, who runs a support group for J6ers, spoke at tonight's Trump rally. She told the story of her nephew Tim Cusanelli, a convicted Capitol rioter — and Nazi sympathizer, who said "Hitler should've finished the job." This is their poster child for J6 "injustice." /1 pic.twitter.com/bII5D95GXq— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) September 3, 2022

    big basket of deplorables

  33. 33.

    germy shoemangler

    Rowling’s pseudonym ‘Robert Galbraith’ is the name of a 20th century psychiatrist who pioneered gay conversion therapy.

  34. 34.

    trnc

    Americans believe many things. That does not mean reporters should be treating them all the same. Belief is not a component of truth.

    Good point. The mission of news media is to inform, which necessarily requires filtering for truth and not just acting like a megaphone for every opinion. It is also to engage, but that should not imply that engagement is more important than informing based on objective facts.

  35. 35.

    sab

    @germy shoemangler: That and the other ten thousand Robert Galbraiths in Scotland. It is a so common name as to be generic. My ancestors were Scottish. Do you know how many Catherine Mackenzies were born in the same decade even after the Highland Clearances?

  36. 36.

    trnc

    @Ken: Complacency by the media (and its owners) shows a remarkable grasp of history.

    It’s not complacency. In many cases, at least, there are active attempts to gain eyeballs by “stortytelling” (part of the CNN mission statement, and no doubt, other media outlets).

  38. 38.

    Layer8Problem

    The Times has a lot of trouble with all the divisiveness roiling our fair republic.  But there are “many fine people on both sides.”  They watch Seinfeld!  They like NPR!  In the end, it’s the things we all love that bind us together and normalize our lunatic fringes and extremists.

  39. 39.

    Frank Wilhoit

    “…Politics always seems like pageantry to [rich people] because it could hardly be anything else….”

    For “pageantry” (which has inappropriate connotations of dignity, fun, and planning) read “improv”, and that is where essentially all Americans are.  It is extremely unclear how we can ever get the audience out of the theater.  What is “outside”?  No one remembers.

  40. 40.

    sab

    @OzarkHillbilly: She ( Rowling) is and I am and I am trying not to be. I do think female to male might be different from male to female, but I might be wrong.

    I certainly won’t follow MSM on this, but I do follow Golden Bear. But I wonder if female to male might be a more crooked road.

  42. 42.

    trnc

    @Gvg: ​
     

    I am not quite sure what to do about it. We can’t censor but maybe we could have stricter truth in labeling laws where say Fox News wasn’t allowed to call itself news it would have to be Fox opinions and a bunch of other shows same.

    Yup. Judges who allow Fox to claim that their false content should be allowed because it’s intended to entertain should require that Fox drop News from the company name AND that they run regular and easily readable reminders that they are to be considered entertainment only, especially during prime time.

  43. 43.

    polyorchnid octopunch

    @sab: At this point, I’m going to have to go with horrible and hateful. She’s been shown the inevitable outcome of her position, and holds it anyway. That she’s not horrible or hateful to you or to some of the people you may like doesn’t mean she isn’t horrible or hateful.

  47. 47.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @sab: I do think female to male might be different from male to female, but I might be wrong.

    Imho, nobody chooses to be trans anymore than they choose to be gay. I don’t think the direction of trans makes any difference. What you are describing here:

    I have known many girls go from straight to gay and then back again and then back back again.

    is simply bisexual. The mother of my eldest granddaughter is bisexual. She has gone back and forth and may well continue to.

  48. 48.

    Starfish

    @Scout211: The reason that they finally dropped KiwiFarms was that companies that use Cloudflare started dropping Cloudflare. Cloudflare dug in and said that they supported “free speech.” Here is a ten-minute YouTube video of Sorrenti explaining what happened to her. It is terrifying because police do not know how to deal with this. She left the country, and the various municipalities where she is being harassed are not talking to each other.

    Doxxing people and trying to get them fired from their jobs is not “free speech.”

  50. 50.

    Starfish

    @sab: She has a bajillion dollars and a huge platform. Instead of being on a yacht somewhere hanging with her friends, she is using her platform to amplify TERFs. Is it good use of her time?

    Please go back and watch the video that I posted in the comment above and understand how right wingers and TERFs are aligning to target trans people.

  52. 52.

    Kay

    I sometimes believe we’re overthinking this. I think we can make this easy for them. They don’t have to do this:

    of course the issue is that the conventions of political reporting are such that if you simply state the facts of the matter — donald trump and his allies have essentially made pro-insurrection beliefs a matter of Republican orthodoxy — that is unacceptable “bias”

    They don’t have to draw conclusions. They don’t have to compare/contrast (“Republicans do THIS, but Democrats do THIS”). Don’t explain. Just present. People will draw their own conclusions and get there themselves if the media doesn’t jump in and try to control where the public lands on all this.
    We saw this happen. They refused to describe Trump as a liar for years. But we kept hearing him lie and eventually a majority of people polled concluded he is dishonest. A fact. They figured it out with abortion- the Right adopted the most extreme Right wing view and people said “wow- that’s bad- we don’t like that”. They didn’t need a primer on federalism or originalism or Alito’s biography as “context”. The Right wing judges on that court never shut up. We have enough “context” to make our own decision.
    Stop explaining and interpreting what are their words. Where I live, in a 70% Trump county we see the Right wing extremists up close. They don’t have to put denying the validity of elections “in context” or “compared to Democrats”. It’s what they do and say at the local board of elections.
    It’s bad in very Right wing places like where I live. It’s threatening and disturbing. They’re unhinged. Just tell us what they say and do we’ll take it from there.

  53. 53.

    MisterDancer

    @OzarkHillbilly: Agreed – – Sab,  you sound as if you’ve confused Sexual Preference (Hetero/Homo/Bisexuality) with Gender Identity, which includes Trans and NonBinary.

     

    There are good resources for educating yourself on these topics. If you have, as you say, a Trans person in your life that you care about,  it is urgent you do the study yourself. Depending on Golden Bear’s comments here is only a start,  and no single Trans person should be leaned upon to educate you, unless they directly offer.

  54. 54.

    sdhays

    @sab: Wait, JK Rowling wrote another book and got published? But I thought she had been CANCELLED??

    I don’t suppose she’ll ever apologize for the damage she’s doing to transgender people, but maybe she could admit she was full of shit about “cancel culture”.

  55. 55.

    zhena gogolia

    @Gin & Tonic: Serghii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, and Paul Robert Magocsi, Ukraine: An Illustrated History. Plus a lot of other stuff, but those are the main texts.

  56. 56.

    Ruckus

    @sab:

    I am sorry that you are in a position to have to say this about your brother. I see the issues, some want a world that looks a certain way that puts certain people in charge. They think that will make the world a better place for them. That they can’t see the inherent problems that their world would/does have is the issue and that in the long run they would be worse off, because that worse off would be, for them, a long way off. They have never seen what that world looks like after a decade or two because for the last 4 or 5 decades the world hasn’t looked like that. Underlying the things we did see the world isn’t perfect in any way but at least there was some betterment and some hope that betterment could continue. But SFB and all his ignorant, idiotic, racist, misogynistic bullshiting supporters who think that all of those things are normal and help them move up in the world rather than all the way down have found the volume switch and a father figure for their hate and bullshit. All the progress of the last few decades has met resistance but that progress was happening. This is the backlash to those changes to the world they believe in. Their world is bullshit, always has been and always will be, but it is their world and it now has a loud voice. We have to be a louder voice to get us back to normal and to move forward. We have to talk about those who only have rear view mirrors, and can’t see forward at all.

  57. 57.

    MisterDancer

    @sab:  don’t think she is horrible and hateful. She is just very wrong.

    She is, Sab. I follow a number of Trans people on Twitter. On top of that, my college bestie transitioned in the 1990s,  and she’s not the only Trans person I’ve known personally.

    I know not a single Trans person who defends Rowling, these days. I do know a lot who show signs of trauma when she comes up even in casual conversations, which is enough for me to shut out raising her and her works as a topic in those circles.

    With your distrust of the MSM I don’t know what news source I can pull from to help you understand, esp. that the UK isn’t some distant mystical realm “doing things differently” from the US. Much less your apperent(sic) confusion on how Transitioning to Male might be “different” (hint: do the research, if you need help,  ASK!)

    All I can say is that as someone who tries to do my best for the Trans people I know? I stay far the fuck away from Rowling, and encourage you,  no matter how good her book is to you, to consider same.

    Again, if you need info, ask, please. You don’t have to stay in limbo.

  58. 58.

    Barbara

    @Frankensteinbeck: This is a point I don’t agree with, at least not on the evidence presented thus far. I don’t think TFG is interchangeable with other Republican pols.  This is what makes McConnell’s life so difficult and why they can’t bring themselves to repudiate Trump. Not that someone else couldn’t elicit that kind of passion, but I haven’t seen that person.

  59. 59.

    Starfish

    @sab: Rowling is not being targeted because she is a woman. She is very definitely and explicitly siding with TERFs and conservatives who hate trans people on Twitter.

    Any discussion you want to have about how much you like her new book needs to not be had with your niece. It would likely be hurtful that you are financially supporting an author who has gone out of her way to make hatred of people like her a well known characteristic about herself.

    Rowling is trying to make herself sound like the reasonable one because there are people amplifying fake content about her, but Jesse Singal is in her posse.

    What I mean by that is Jesse is constantly posting anti-trans stuff and then going BUT SCIENCE and acting stupid if you call him on what he is propping as science being biased nonsense. (What he is doing is very Bell Curve like.)

  60. 60.

    Anyway

    @sab:

    Cuckoo’s Calling ( might be remembering the exact title) was horrible — long, poorly edited, tedious, unpleasant characters. No interest in reading anything else by RG.

  61. 61.

    gwangung

    Rich people living in blue states don’t get much tangible proof that *their* liberties are at risk

    You mean “Rich WHITE people”, don’t ya….

  62. 62.

    Edmund Dantes

    @Frankensteinbeck: Exactly. He is theirs. They are not his. Trump is also extremely aware of this fact. Every so often Trump gets a little full of himself and he’ll try pushing outside his envelope. But as soon as his followers bite back he returns to his form.

    The most easily seen example of this is the vaccine stuff. He tried lines a couple times trying to get more of them to get “his” vaccine. They booed him hard, and he quickly dropped it when he saw his numbers drop a bit.

  65. 65.

    Kristine

    I saw this is an Open Thread, so I hope this is okay. If not, please delete:

    Every summer, the small press Zombies Need Brains runs a Kickstarter for next year’s anthologies. Joshua is trying to fund four anthos this time around instead of the usual three, and there’s a lull in the pledging. If you like SFF short works, themed anthologies, or just like to support small presses, please consider pledging. Many cool pledge premiums available at all levels.

    I’ve written stories for a couple of the anthologies, and am one of the anchor authors for Solar Flare, the theme of which boils down to optimistic tales of the future. Since my preferred style is “le Carré in Space,” that will be a challenge for me, but I would like the chance to meet it.

    Thank you for your time. We now return you to your regular Open Thread discussions.

  71. 71.

    OzarkHillbilly

    For your daily outrage:

    When a young California girl purchased a baby goat last spring, the intention was to eventually sell it at a county fair livestock auction. But after feeding and caring for the animal for months, she bonded with the goat, named Cedar, and wanted to keep it.

    Instead, law enforcement officers allegedly travelled hundreds of miles to confiscate the pet, who was eventually slaughtered.

    The story is laid out in a lawsuit, first reported by the Sacramento Bee, filed by the child’s parent this week, in a case that has sparked outrage and criticism that the police and the county fair went too far to reclaim the goat and send a child’s beloved pet to slaughter.

  72. 72.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @sab:

    Did she say that or did the press say she said that?

    She said it.  Personally.  I have read her say everything I just described.  Her reaction to Dobbs was to wait a week and then add blaming trans women to her commentary.  Rowling isn’t a feminist.  She is a gender essentialist in the most literal sense, someone who believes men and women are fundamentally different, and it has sent her off the deep end and into obsession where being anti-trans is concerned.  She does love her “I’m the reasonable one” while slipping in nasty little insults.  She’s the “black on black crime” type bigot of anti-trans bigotry, but throw in being friends – not just occasionally repeating, but praising as good people – some seriously vile assholes.  And she just keeps coming back to it, over and over.  If she wasn’t anti-trans, she could let it drop, but it is definitely her political cause.

  74. 74.

    germy shoemangler

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    She spent several days mocking a police precinct and some of her critics didn’t understand why, until they learned the department had issued condolences for the family of a trans woman who’d been murdered.   I think she is less innocent than she pretends.

  75. 75.

    Starfish

    @sab:

    She ( Rowling) is and I am and I am trying not to be. I do think female to male might be different from male to female, but I might be wrong.

    Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

    Sister Golden Bear’s perspective on this is not a generic stand in for all trans people.

  79. 79.

    Ruckus

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I’d bet they listen. They seemingly have close to zero actual thoughts of their own, they like what they hear, because hate and racism are the basis of their “thought.” For any problem they have, real or imagined, they are blamers. They can’t accept that they might/could be wrong. The only solution to their problems is that the world is changing and not in a good way, that “others” are getting ahead in place of them. And in some ways that is the way the world works. There has always been a monied class and a working class. Democracy is an attempt to change that, not 100% but change it and the monied class has the means to protect their “right” to be monied and fuck over anyone who tries to make things equal. Our laws have swung towards the monied once again and we are almost back to where we were 75 yrs ago. Except that we have the ability to see and record change better than we did 75 yrs ago. That can keep us on our toes a bit better.

  82. 82.

    Heidi Mom

    @zhena gogolia:I’m reading-almost finished with–the former.  What a wealth of information!  After I finish it, I’m going to be very grateful for that timeline at the back of the book.

  83. 83.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @germy shoemangler:

    I think she is less innocent than she pretends.

    She isn’t innocent at all.  I’m only responding to how her rhetoric often sounds superficially reasonable.  She’s just trying to pretend she’s the victim, like so many conservatives do.

  88. 88.

    The Thin Black Duke

    It’s difficult when a writer one admires is bugfuck crazy. However someone squares that circle is that person’s business, but if that specific writer is negatively impacting people who can’t punch back, don’t be surprised if those punching bags aren’t as forgiving as you are.

  89. 89.

    Ivan X

    @Gvg: this. This this this.

    I’ll throw one other factor in the mix: us. Starting with cable news, and then amplified by the internet, we, the human race, now crave and expect constant news stimulation, with multiple headlines a day. The combination of our constant demand for more news with the evisceration of the news business model that you note means a news organization is actively disincentivized from writing thoughtful, in depth, truth seeking stories. So what we get is shallow, thoughtless crap, and it’s why even reference standard news pubs like NYT are hollow simulacra of their former selves.

  91. 91.

    Jinchi

    @sdhays: But I thought she had been CANCELLED??

    I don’t think you can officially earn your “CANCELLED” certification until you’ve been on at least 5 national news programs explaining just how cancelled you’ve been.

  93. 93.

    The Moar You Know

    sab:  terrible people can make great art.  In fact, in some fields of artistic endeavor  it seems to be a requirement to be a fucked-up person.  You can appreciate the work and not like the person making it.

    I liked the Harry Potter books just fine.  Great works I would not call them, but they’re fine.  Rowling can do what she wants with the few bucks she made off my purchases 20 years ago, but I would respectfully suggest to her that if she wants to keep that income stream flowing she might want to stop punching down on people who have neither her resources nor her security.  It’s not a good look, at the least.

  94. 94.

    Starfish

    @Gvg: Basically, you have to pay for the reporting you want, and even that is not enough because so much advertising money was propping it up.

    That advertising money has shifted to those ads that follow you around the internet.

    Some news is following a non-profit model. Some is propped up by some rich benefactor. There is a lot of hollowing out of local journalism being done by Alden Capital.

    I put a little money into Chalkbeat which covers issues in K-12 education. I put a little money into ProPublica. I hope with all the Roe stuff, people are putting money into Rewire News. I am not, but this is one that should be supported.

    Mississippi Free Press is doing a lot of great work and being harassed by their local conservatives.

  96. 96.

    Scout211

    A new opinion poll by the Wall Street Journal is making news.

    WASHINGTON—Voters have grown more supportive of legalizing abortion following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, with a clear majority opposing restrictions, like bans at a certain point of pregnancy or barring women from traveling to get a legal abortion, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that underscores the importance of the issue in the midterm elections.

    According to the survey, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 55% in March. Another 29% said it should be illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered, compared with 30% in March. And 6% said it should be illegal in all cases, down from 11% in March.

  97. 97.

    lowtechcyclist

    @germy shoemangler:

    She spent several days mocking a police precinct and some of her critics didn’t understand why, until they learned the department had issued condolences for the family of a trans woman who’d been murdered.

    That’s so many miles out of one’s way into hatred country that it’s ridiculous to claim she’s a well-meaning person with a different take on gender.

    It’s been years since I re-read any of the Harry Potter books, partly because of what I’d been hearing about Rowling, but I’m done with her now. I doubt I could pick up one of her books without thinking of how horrible she chooses to be.

  99. 99.

    James E Powell

    @zhena gogolia:

    I was with Rothkopf until he defended the FTFNYT & Peter Baker.

    ETA – And the recent epiphanies that some big shots are having make me laugh bitterly. While this press critique is accurate, it also something anyone could have read on a blog 20 years ago.

  101. 101.

    Scout211

    @Starfish: The reason that they finally dropped KiwiFarms was that companies that use Cloudflare started dropping Cloudflare. Cloudflare dug in and said that they supported “free speech.”

    Thanks for the additional information about what prompted Cloudflare to block Kiwi Farms.  Sorrenti’s story is indeed, terrifying.  Stalked, doxxed, swatted and threatened with violence.

    Cloudflare stated that there was “imminent danger.”  Ya think, Cloudflare?

  105. 105.

    zhena gogolia

    @James E Powell: I must have read carelessly — I didn’t see that. I’m supposed to be working, but I’ll try to go back later.

    Any defense of Peter Baker should be nuked from orbit.

  107. 107.

    RaflW

    A lot of people still believe ivermectin is a miracle cure. Should the press therefore still treat it as basically equal to paxlovid? The answer is obvious. But as soon as we get to just a single level of abstraction about democracy the press completely loses its way (or is it even an abstraction to note that 1000s of people in each of many purple or even blue counties across the country are disenfranchised or being threatened with onerous voting rules).

    One begins to wonder if they’re losing their way at all, or following a path that they prefer.

  108. 108.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @NotMax:

    Yeah, that makes me crazy. I just didn’t comment on it today, tempted though I was.

    If you’re still on your visit to NotMom, hope all is going beautifully.

  109. 109.

    James E Powell

    Bill Penzey nails it:

    From the environment, to racism/discrimination, to health, to saving our democracy at home and growing it abroad, half the time Republicans are intentionally blocking the solution to the problems we face. The other half of the time they are the problem we face.

    Nothing to add.

  110. 110.

    Ruckus

    @sab:

    I know 4 men with the same first name, middle inital and last name as me. My dad, and a man and his son who lived about 4 miles from us. There is also another vet at the VA facility that I use who has the same last name as me, and the same last 4 of our SS number, which is what they ask when you check in, last name and last 4. It is after all a rather small world. Oh and my name is not Smith or Jones.

  111. 111.

    lowtechcyclist

    I have trouble with ProofofBurden’s take on things. It just seems to be a specific failure of media types to live up to the deeper principle that reporters who are worth a damn should be able to tell if the people they’re drinking with are bullshitting them – regardless of whether they’re deliberately trying to snooker the reporter, or whether they’re really trying to fool themselves.

  112. 112.

    Another Scott

    @Scout211: I think Popehat’s take is exactly right:

    This was some impressive judo by Keffals. She knew that even though Cloudflare was inclined to keep Kiwifarms, it would pull the plug if they got overtly violent and threatening enough. And she knew Kiwifarms was full of emotionally disregulated sociopaths and subhumans. /1 https://t.co/VTWAFX10Pk

    — EmptyFolderHat (@Popehat) September 3, 2022

    /2 All she had to do was keep the pressure on and stand up to them. They couldn’t handle that and inevitably spiraled into psycho threats borne of enraged impotence. That sort of subnormal is so easily manipulated.

    — EmptyFolderHat (@Popehat) September 3, 2022

    While these monsters are dangerous, they are also totally predictable. HRC told us that, too.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  113. 113.

    James E Powell

    @zhena gogolia:

    It’s in his addenda tweets, responding to people like me who call out the FTFNYT as guilty of everything he mentions in his main thread.

    It’s the standard defense of “the best newspaper in America” that is so tiresome. Sure, their hostility & smear campaigns against Al Gore & Hillary Clinton gave us Bush II, Trump, and five supreme court justices who want to repeal the 20th century, but look, they have great reporters

    ETA – Working on Labor Day Weekend? Joe Biden & I are against it!

  116. 116.

    Scout211

    Obama for the win!

    CNN)At the Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony on Saturday, former president Barack Obama and the late actor Chadwick Boseman had notable wins.

    Obama won the outstanding narrator Emmy Award for his work on the Netflix documentary, “Our Great National Parks.”

    Higher Ground, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, created the five-part docuseries on national parks and wildlife throughout the world.

  117. 117.

    Cameron

    @Ruckus: Part of the time I lived in Philadelphia, I lived on the 300 block of north 13th Street.  I found out there was another person with my same first and last names living on the 300 block of south 13th Street when the Post Office accidentally delivered that person’s mail to me.  A mistake made only once in the eleven years I lived at that site – I thought that was a pretty good performance by USPO.

  118. 118.

    J R in WV

    I have tried to read some of the Harry Potter work, long ago. I found it turgid, derivative, and boring, and never got very far into any of the two or three I tried to read. And I love that kind of sorcery stories.

    Now, hearing about the author’s open hate for a vulnerable group of people, I won’t be going there again, ever.

    No one deserves to be scorned or hated just because of what they are or become. Best of luck to all of those folks!

  120. 120.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Scout211: could Obama EGOT? He’s got two Grammys, apparently. I don’t really care, and I doubt he does, but it would make all the right people angry

    Donald Trump thinks the Emmys were rigged against him due to politics, a position he reaffirmed during the final presidential debate Wednesday.

    During a discussion of Trump’s recent claims that the presidential election might be rigged against him, Hillary Clinton noted that Trump had made the same argument about the annual television awards back when he hosted The Apprentice.

    “There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him,” said Clinton. […]

    At the debate, Trump doubled down on his complaint about not winning an Emmy.

    “I should’ve gotten it,” he said.

    She tried to tell us, so many times. And he didn’t deny it.

  121. 121.

    Formerly disgruntled in Oregon

    @MisterDancer: Thank you, MisterDancer

    Trans rights are human rights.

    JK R is not ignorant. She actively spreads hateful lies about Trans and other LGBTQ+ people.

  123. 123.

    germy shoemangler

    Democrats: “Don’t boo, vote!”

    Republicans: “We are the rightful holders of power in this country, and if we don’t win, it’s time to get the guns out.”

    Douthat: Both parties are to blame here

    — Mollie W. O’Reilly (@MollieOReilly) September 4, 2022

  126. 126.

    dww44

    @Frankensteinbeck: This is the real truth.

    I still think it’s important that they would kill democracy dead to get ANY Republican dictatorship. They do particularly like Trump, but he is amplifying an existing mainstream Republican sentiment.

    The fact that Trump won’t go away and insists on hogging the headlines may, in the end, be what saves our democracy. Because the truth is that nothing else matters so long as they have the power and the more under the radar their machinations are the better their chances of success.

  127. 127.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @sab: I won’t go into detail because I haven’t had my fourth cup of coffee, and because others have already made the points I would make. But let me just add, that in additional to be transphobic and homophobic, among other things her books included:

    • Latent antisemistism, i.e. the goblin bankers
    • Mocked abolitionists — after all the house elves are happy slaves and Hermione  was silly to try to free team
    • Named characters using racial/ethnic stereotypes and/or acting like stereotypes, e.g. Cho Chang (which isn’t even a remotely Chinese name).
    • Had a “cross-dressing serial killer” in one her Robert Galbraith books — and come on man, of all the possible pseudonyms she just happened to pick the name of the father of conversion therapy? (I’ll note that it’s a stereotype with a long and sordid history, including Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs,” and “Dressed to Kill.”
    • Mocked spoon theory in her latest book, as disability activists have criticized her for

    It sucks when a favorite author turns out to be a terrible person. But let me make this absolutely crystal clear: The Wizard Lady. Is. Horrible. And. Hateful. And she’s actively harming trans people, while insisting she’s really the victim.

  128. 128.

    vbreakwater

    @Kay: Kay, first off, I adore you and  your writings. Second, ideally journalism would be opinion free unless otherwise labeled, but we have fallen so far down the rabbit hole that a corrective is needed before we can go back to a relatively gold age where facts mattered in the formulation of opinions. For the time being, it is important to destroy the both sides model as if they are equal and call lies lies and fascism fascism.

    BTW, I am a 3rd generation journalist. I remember my father, who at the time was the city editor of the Washington Post, bemoaning the advent of People magazine as a harbinger of the apocalypse, ie the ‘newsifactation’ of entertainment gossip. I did not understand his words then but boy do I now.

  131. 131.

    vbreakwater

    @zhena gogolia: My dad was a purist that way, seeing news as ‘just the facts m’am’ and he saw People as a break in the way news was marketed and commodified. I worked at CBS News for a while and sensed the same fear in some of the old time guys there when CBS was sold to Westinghouse.

  132. 132.

    James E Powell

    @dww44:

    The fact that Trump won’t go away and insists on hogging the headlines may, in the end, be what saves our democracy.

    If he tried to go away, the political media would drag him back. They love him & what he does to their ratings.

  134. 134.

    James E Powell

    @vbreakwater:

    I feel like the film Network made it all so clear, but instead of a warning, it was adopted as the plan.

    Journalism can never be objective because choosing which stories to publish/broadcast and how they are presented – front page with huge pictures vs. buried on A13 – are subjective, value laden decisions.

    Our political press/media have decided that “Whatever Republicans are angry about today” is their guidepost.

  135. 135.

    Ramona Rosario

    @Anyway: I tried to listen to the audiobook version several times through the course of two years but I could not get into Cuckoo Calling.

  136. 136.

    StringOnAStick

    @James E Powell: Its even more basic than that.  News is for profit, and the fiduciary duty of every corporate board is to make as much money as possible, so with news it’s either clicks or eyeballs.  I read a tweet thread this morning from someone who worked 18 years at CNN; he laid some of the recent changes there at the feet of demographics and cord cutting.  Most of the people who still have cable are older  than the coveted 18-40 age group, and as CNN lost those, they decided to go where the money and eyeballs currently are for their majority +65 demographic,  and that’s FOX.  Strictly a fiduciary decision, plus well off white people like our media elite don’t see what the big deal is from their comfy positions.

  137. 137.

    MisterDancer

    @Villago Delenda Est: Yet, by the end of the books, even Ron realized that house elves shouldn’t be enslaved.

    OK, Dead Horse time: understand that it takes the entire series to get to that point. That’s years of Chattle Slavery analogy (and it really is!) that struggles to be checked in the narrative.

    I know when I heard about House Elves – – from a Crossover Fanfic of all things – – I recoiled just from the “oh, we used to enslave them but now they choose to serve us!” approach. Hell, until I checked with Potter fans, I thought the fanfic writer had made all that up!

    Also, too: upon checking a HP wiki I do not see where either the House Elf or SPEW entries mention general freedom for House Elves. I confess I may have missed something..but I also think a lot of people have missed it, as well?

     

    I mean, I’ll be blunt – – reading that House Elf entry turns my stomach. It’s literally why I cannot watch slave narratives, but now in a Fantasy story. Too much of it, from the “but some wizards treat House Elves nice!” to the handed down clothing thing, is a brutally accurate reflection of what my ancestors lived thru. I cannot buy that it was a coincidence, having myself researched too many other slave and enforced servitude narratives across cultures.

    Rowling had Choices that did not depend on that exact invocation, is what I’m saying.

    It’s of a piece with the “Dumbledore is Gay” or tedious “Is Hermione Black” discourse. Much less the attempts to map the world of Harry Potter to various other cultures. It speaks to a sloppiness of research and, more critically, empathy to other viewpoints and cultures that is an early reflection of her current, abborant views.

    I get, I think, why Potter means so much to so many. But just understand it has had real issues from jump, y’all.

  138. 138.

    Ruckus

    @WaterGirl:

    “Holy shit these people are fucked up.”

    Understatement of the something/day.

    Yes, yes they are. Somehow they think that if they allow people to be different than them that makes them less. They need a world that is far less dimensional – single dimensional as it were, because they need the world to make sense in their terms. Real, actual people understand that everything is not cut and dried, black and white, male and female, straight, singular construction. There are 7 billion humans in the world, give or take a few million assholes, and very few of them are alike in anything other than very general terms. Walk upright, eyes in front of the head, poop out the back. Most everything else is open for discussion/differences. It’s been this way for most of the existence of humans but having to live together in close quarters meant that differences were discouraged. As we now have walls between us and world wide communications, the differences are far more open and that pisses off an unfair number of bipeds. Somehow we have to fix the communications situation and the acceptance situation. Any other concept leads to warfare, a rather unpleasant way to not solve issues.

  139. 139.

    Another Scott

    Yet more evidence that Biden knows his history and is correct in his warnings.

    Phys.org:

    Seventeen bodies found at the bottom of a mediaeval English well were likely Jews who were murdered in an anti-Semitic massacre more than 800 years ago, scientists have revealed.

    The massacre took place in 1190 AD in the eastern city of Norwich, where just decades prior the seeds had been planted for an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that persists up to the present day,” they said in a new study.

    The scientists used an array of techniques—including analysing the oldest known Jewish genomes—to unravel the mystery.

    […]

    The scientists also found indications that a young boy in the well had blues eyes and red hair—anti-Semitic stereotypes at the time often involved red hair.

    “As we did more and more analysis,” Barnes said, “everything just kept getting more and more convincing”.

    Their analysis pointed to a single event—violence during anti-Semitic riots recorded in Norwich on February 6, 1190 AD.

    Barnes said that “anti-Semitic feelings were riding high because plans were in place to conduct the Third Crusade”.

    And less than 50 years earlier, a local boy had been brutally murdered in an event that cast a long shadow. The family of the boy, who was later dubbed William of Norwich, blamed his murder on local Jews.

    It became the first known version of the anti-Semitic “blood libel” myth, in which Jews are falsely accused of killing Christian boys to use their blood in rituals.

    “This antisemitic conspiracy theory persists today, its origins lie within the soil of Norwich,” tweeted Adam Rutherford, a geneticist at University College London.

    “The bodies in the well present a unique opportunity to assess the roots of this contemporary racism.”

    More information: Mark Thomas, Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.036. cell.com

    There’s very little new under the sun when it comes to human bigotry. We have to continue to fight it every single day.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  142. 142.

    vbreakwater

    @StringOnAStick: Exactly right about corporate emphasis on profits and the theory that  CNN’s recent shift is due to viewing demographics.  Keep in mind also that all of the cable channels are part of huge corporate entities whereas up until recently both the NYT and WAPO were family held which allowed them a little more editorial freedom and courage.

    As to @James E Powell’s point, yes the news is never totally objective because someone decides what to put on the air or the front page. Every day a committee of reporters and producers gets together and pitches stories & angles to executives who then give thumbs up to certain stories. It’s a fascinating process and used to be a lot less cynical.

  145. 145.

    No One You Know

    @Kay: This. Exactly this. Tell me what to know,  not how I should think about it. They think teachers do this and that’s what gets the right wing so incensed. They think teaching opinions is what happens in the classroom.

    What actually happens is scarier: kids have to learn by figuring out the options and their opinions. Writing about it,  Arguing it with groups.

    That’s the behavior they fear.

  146. 146.

    Citizen Alan

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Did he? I remember him expressing a sentiment near the end of deathly hallows that they should do something to stop them from being massacred by death eaters. But I don’t recall him taking any position on house elf liberation  Beyond what you might expect from “a boyfriend indulging his silly girlfriend’s pet cause.”

  147. 147.

    Felanius Kootea

    @RaflW: It comes back to who owns the press and what purpose the press serves. When a Trump donor essentially buys CNN and CNN starts letting go anchors with a perceived liberal bias because they want to attract the Fox News crowd, that says a lot.

    There has to be a way to shore up a PBS type model and emphasize the need for nonprofit news versus 24-hour news entertainment.

    Some parts of the problem will eventually resolve, others need careful thought. In chatting with some younger relatives in their twenties, I discovered that not a single one watches cable news. Unfortunately, they pick up what little news they consume from TikTok and YouTube.

  148. 148.

    Citizen Alan

    @MisterDancer: Agreed.  And in particular, “black Hermione” offends me because if  Hermione had been black or even been vaguely aware of the struggles of any racial minority, I doubt she would have needed the word mudblood explain to her by Ron.  And it’s interesting, when you think about it, that Dean Thomas was expressly described as being black, and he never uttered an opinion on the issue of blood purity. Can you just imagine what the reaction would have been among readers if someone had called Dean a mud blood?

  149. 149.

    JAFD

    @zhena gogolia: ​ Opinion sought on Anna Reid’s _Borderland, a history of Ukraine_  Got my copy when I was in rehab center after heart attack, sent friend to discount bookstore with instructions to acquire anything that looked interesting …..​

  150. 150.

    zhena gogolia

    @JAFD: I don’t know it. Gin & Tonic would be a better person to ask. The main historian I know of is Serhii Plokhy.

  151. 151.

    Another Scott

    @JAFD: I’ve got a copy as well (bought years ago) but haven’t found the time to read it.  As I recall it was recommended as something like the definitive popular work on the topic. The author was Kyiv correspondent for The Economist.

    Goodreads.com reviews.

    HTH a little.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

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