It was cloudy and overcast all day yesterday, but it didn’t rain as predicted. This morning just before 5 AM, the fierce storm that was roiling the Gulf finally rolled through here. The flashes of lightning woke me up. Bill, who can sleep through anything, slept through lightning strikes that went off like bombs in the swamp.
I love a good storm, so I got up, made a cup of coffee and went out on the porch to watch. My dog Pete joined me as soon as I settled in a comfy chair, hogging half the seating area. He and Badger are both Florida dogs so not overly alarmed by thunder and lightning. But a few of the strikes were so close and loud that Pete and I both jumped.
My favorite sound on the planet is thunder rolling down a river, echoing like God’s celestial bowling alley.
***
Dr. Jill Biden told the truth about the stakes of the upcoming election in Atlanta on Friday: (CNN)
“I’ve been so proud of how Joe has placed women at the center of his agenda. But Donald Trump?” the first lady said to boos. “He spent a lifetime tearing us down and devaluing our existence. He mocks women’s bodies, disrespects our accomplishments and brags about assault. Now he’s bragging about killing Roe v. Wade.”
The first lady continued: “He took credit again for enabling states like Georgia to pass cruel abortion bans that are taking away the right of women to make their own health care decisions. How far will he go? When will he stop? You know the answer: He won’t. He won’t.”
As the first lady embarks on a three-day, four-stop battleground state campaign swing, launching the “Women for Biden-Harris” coalition, her role in the reelection effort is becoming clearer. The campaign is looking to use a top surrogate to organize – and mobilize – female voters heading into the general election, all while delivering a clear message about Trump.
“Donald Trump is dangerous to women and to our families. We simply cannot let him win,” she said in Atlanta.
Agreed, Dr. Biden.
BTW, avoid Maureen Dowd’s latest offering in The New York Times. That’s evergreen advice, but the turd she squeezed out for the Sunday edition is particularly smelly and derivative. No linky for the stinky.
Open thread!
Baud
Better yet, avoid the Times. I’m actually getting more radicalized on this issue.
eclare
Great post, Ms. Cracker, thank you.
Go Dr. Biden!
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I have to use it for work but glom onto someone else’s subscription. They lose money on me!
J.
Love Dr. Jill and don’t understand how anyone could hate her. (Okay, I do understand, but still, I have so much respect and admiration for her, as do all of the sane people I know.) As for Ms. Dowd, I stopped reading her years ago, after she continually lambasted Hillary. Then she has the nerve to whine about Trump? Please. It’s people like her — and the Times’s anti-Hillary, anti-Biden, and go light on Trump stance — that make me scream.
eclare
@Baud:
I gave up my subscription years ago.
mrmoshpotato
Sounds like the kind of storm that would get me out of bed to watch. Beverage of choice, probably hot chocolate.
J.
@Baud: Does the Games section count? I’ve thought about having the spouse cancel our subscription, but as someone born and raised in NYC who is OCD and does the various games every day, it’s hard to cut the cord. (I have a separate Games subscription, but I’d still be paying the Times.)
Betty Cracker
@J.: Dowd created a formula in the late 1990s and has churned out column after monotonous column in that same mold ever since. (Dated pop culture reference, increasingly tortured and mixed metaphors that allude to the stale reference, lame zinger at the end.) There are so many interesting and original writers, and yet that hack clings to her perch for decades. Mindboggling.
Evap
@J.: I can’t give up Spelling Bee, my addiction is stronger than my hatred of the NYT. So I subscribe to the games only. They keep offering all access for only a dollar more per week, no thanks.
Kay
Just amazing, how they indulge themselves in these middle school pile ons. What did Joe Biden ever do to the well-off NYTimes employees? This is more blatant than when they all worked together for weeks to get rid of the Harvard President.
Baud
@Kay:
There’s a club. We’re not in it.
OzarkHillbilly
Women as chattel. Just another day in GOP paradise.
lowtechcyclist
@J.:
A very concise and accurate summary of their political coverage.
I can’t remember the last time I so much as followed a gift link to a MoDo column. And there’s no way I’d pay for anything FTFNYT-related. (Fortunately Wordle is still free on my phone. I’m sure eventually they will make me either pay or drop it, at which point it’ll be the latter.)
TBone
Arrested and abused for driving while gay, and Black. SMDH. No more coffee needed, am now fully awake and not in a good way.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/mayor-parker-says-video-of-state-trooper-detaining-top-city-official-is-very-concerning/ar-BB1jeDMz
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Can we hit them over the head with it? ;-)
Kay
The entire NYTimes coverage of Joe Biden today is their stale team of conventional, boring employees pushing the NYT’s own poll.
Everyone who buys this paper recognizes they sell you the same shit two or three or four times over, right? They paid for a poll they sold you and then sold you the poll again in 4 articles. This is the business model – small nuggets, repackaged and resold in as many different ways as they can come up with. It’s like how you buy the paper but then you also have to buy their crap books to get the “news” they didn’t put in the paper.
SteveinPHX
I saw that column last night after I got home from work. Was falling for the nice words, hook, line & sinker, and THEN the shit bomb!
BellyCat
Canceled FTFNY times subscription decades ago after they attacked Frank Gehry as “un American” for refusing to submit an architectural design to the **private developers** for the 9/11 competition to replace the towers.
He said the fee offered was 1/5 his direct cost to do so and not tenable. Somehow, this was not acceptable to the FTFNYT and they raked him over the coals and questioned his patriotism.
FTFNYT revealed what they are, and I believed them. “No Ragrets”. Have not missed even one inked character since.
Kay
I’d love to see how many people they actually had on this poll. I count at least four, so it’s probably six or better. Six full time employees deriving all content from a single poll. They had SEVEN on the Harvard President story. News nugget, sell it; repackage it, sell it again, repackage it, sell it again. Probably 70% of the content is repackaging of the same “information”.
Ned F
@Baud:
I thought that yesterday, stuck on the latest poll against Biden. Obviously, it has me worried and upset. I haven’t read this morning’s edition yet, but as the paper of record, I can’t ignore it either.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
What gets me is how they will turn some bullshit into a multi-day series like that, but more newsworthy stuff that doesn’t fit their narrative is a one-day story at most.
Princess
Obviously any money you pay to the FTFNYT, be it for their news, their games, or their cooking site, goes to support their general operation. My hunch in fact is that the games and the food are floating the whole ship now (“the propaganda operation”). I’m not judging how people spend their time or money — everyone has to make their own decisions. But don’t kid yourselves that these entities aren’t all connected.
BellyCat
Been radicalized on same, for decades. What they single-handedly did to Hillary was pure misogyny AND gave us Trump. The excuses to not boycott this abject tool of fascism are entertaining, ain’t they? “But, but, their <insert: puzzles, recipes, culture, etc > are so good, I’m not sure how I can live without them!”
You’ll be fine if you boycott the FTFNYT. (And you might help save democracy in the process if you convince your friends as well.)
J.
@Betty Cracker: Agree!
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
That’s the business model. The focus is narrow because the amount of original content they produce is small – most of the paper is just extensions of one piece of real content, over and over again, for a day or a week or months.
They sell it to you once, then again, then again.
It seems narrow and repetitive because it is.
Eyeroller
@Kay: I am not going to read their dreck but I would assume they are not discussing weaknesses in their commissioned polling that have been noticed. Somebody in a thread yesterday recalled the NYT/Sienna polls and resulting coverage being the major driver of the “red wave” forecasting before the 2022 midterms. If true — and it sounds right and we certainly know that the NYT was the main source of that in any case — that means their polling has been consistently off at least in the past few years.
I don’t read them so I’ve always wondered how they write so many, many articles about some topic like the president of Harvard that doesn’t seem to have any deep information to uncover. You’re probably right that they’re all the same story with a slightly different emphasis.
I’ve had a subscription for decades that I have long intended to cancel, but lately I haven’t wanted to log in to their website to collect my subscription information. Sounds like today isn’t a good day to do that. I’ll try tomorrow.
Geminid
A very determined woman:
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1762018677598179634?s=20
BellyCat
“But, but the Nazi flag is so eye catching and I just love those natty uniforms. I just HAVE to watch those riveting parades!”.
Baud
@Geminid:
Tough lady.
Kay
Really good new content by two working journalists. It’s about how Alabama’s “personhood” amendment put 600 pregnant women in jail.
The national news outlets have almost no coverage of how these laws impact women – they all cover the issue as silent, blank “women” “carrying” fetuses.
These women have names and stories.
SFAW
@BellyCat:
I think it was part misogyny, and part Clinton-hatred. My belief is that Pinch Sulzberger hated Bill & Hill in 1992 (when he ascended to the throne), and continued to hate them until he “retired.”
Not discounting their misogyny, just believe it was more than that.
BellyCat
@Eyeroller: Ding, ding, ding! (And canceling feels great — like finally getting rid of an itchy sweater that’s been kept for far too long!)
Freemark
@Geminid: WTH was that about? I know about no depictions of Allah but calligraphy?
Kay
@Eyeroller:
Oh, my husband reads it. I get it. There’s very few options. He read the WSJ for years until the far Right bought it and ruined it. Then he switched to the Toledo Blade – but it was gutted by finance people – it’s junk now.
We have a few multi billion dollar news companies and nothing to read for news. They “cover” these stories obsessively and insanely repetitively because they’re wringing every drop of profit out of each small chunk of new content.
stacib
@Ned F: I haven’t read this morning’s edition yet, but as the “paper of record”,
Fixed it for you.
Princess
@Kay: Covering polls and covering coverage of polls is a really cheap way to produce news.
gene108
@TBone:
Damn.
It’ll be interesting to see what comes from the inevitable lawsuit about this case of police misconduct.
Also, wish the article was more consistent about where it happened. Mentions both I-76 and the Vine Street Expressway, which aren’t the same. Wonder if this makes the local TV news.
BellyCat
@SFAW: Both.
OzarkHillbilly
@Geminid: “behead her.” This is exactly what the GOP want.
Ken
@lowtechcyclist: I can’t remember if it was here on Balloon Juice or in one of the bluesky accounts I read, but there was an account from a (former, I presume) NYT reporter who said they had meetings where everyone was expected to say what stories they would be working on for the next couple months. They were a tad confused, obviously, because who knows what might be news tomorrow, much less two months from now?
Betty Cracker
Hope the folks who are getting mega-hopped up on self righteousness about NYT puzzle subscribers don’t have any Amazon boxes en route, streaming subscriptions that include Fox News, clothing and other products from countries with deplorable human rights records, paper towels manufactured by Koch Industries subsidiaries, etc., etc., etc. Criticizing the paper is fair, but it’s also nice to recognize that life is complicated and we all draw our lines in different places. Since it’s Sunday, I’ll quote the highly problematic New Testament: “There is none righteous, no, not one.”
BellyCat
@Kay: Incredibly alarming.
Ken
Though there are some additional costs when you also commission the poll that you’re covering -ing -ing -ing….
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: Yep, agreed.
stacib
@Princess: I have a similar issue with the Chicago Cubs. I’ve loved this team since I was seven years old, and I’ll be 65 this year. I have more Cubs crap than most folks can imagine (every single person in my life gives / has given me Cubs stuff). I’ve spent a lot of dollars going to games, jerseys, etc. Since the Ricketts took over ownership, I’ve had a dilemma – I can’t buy more stuff because I know where they’re political dollars go, but I’m also not going to give up my Cubs. Then, they came up with Marquee – the only way I can watch Cubs games now. As much as I hate it, they get my subscription money, so I’m still “contributing” to their causes. I just try really hard not to think about it. :-)
eclare
@Freemark:
That was my question…
Baud
@Freemark:
I don’t think it’s just Allah, but anything from the Koran.
But I don’t know about a rule against all calligraphy.
narya
@Betty Cracker: Adoring “The Good Place” as I do, thank you for this; it’s complicated. (Imagine that in Maya Rudolph’s voice.)
OzarkHillbilly
Quoting the Koran to make a point is verboten?
eclare
@stacib:
We all just do what we can do. As Ms. Cracker noted, pretty much every decision has some moral/ethical cost. I don’t do crosswords or games, so it was easy for me to give up the FTFNYT.
Eyeroller
@Ken: It wouldn’t surprise me if they cut corners to save money. I’ve repeatedly said that the low response rates make really good polling very, very expensive now. I’ll bet they are still paying based on the old rates.
Yesterday Omnes (I presume among others) noticed that they were including incomplete responses in the poll. Lowtechcyclist (I think) mused that demographic information is usually collected last. Then somebody else brought up that the number of Blacks and Hispanics recorded was substantially higher than the number who self-identified as such. That makes the poll worthless to me right there, especially for any conclusions about minorities. But I’m sure there are no mentions in any of this in the “Biden must go” wall-to-wall coverage.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think it can’t be used as decoration, like a clothing print. Obviously, ok in mosques.
But I don’t know. I wish Amir were still with us.
Geminid
@Freemark: This happened about a week ago, and some more of the story has come out since. The woman was out a having tea and wearing her new dress. Evidently this is a style that has become popular among Gulf Arab women but was new to Pakistan, and in this case the word printed on the dress is holvah, or “sweet.”
Some man, maybe illiterate or maybe just wanting to lynch a woman, started hollering blasphemy, and as a lynch mob gathered people moved her to a shop with a steel door. You can see that almost a dozen police are there already but they needed a woman cop to take her out.
There is video from the police station afterwards. The policewoman explained to reporters that there was no blasphemy intended, and then the woman sobbed out that she had meant no harm. She still had the shawl she was taken out in over her head.
M31
@stacib: might be time to ‘head for the high seas’
(internet pirated feeds of sports are pretty easy to find)
satby
@Freemark: @eclare: purely a guess, but if the crowd thought (correctly or not) that the words were from the Koran they may have considered it blasphemy.
And Geminid got there first
BellyCat
@Betty Cracker: Sure. We all get to draw our own lines. Being clear-eyed about the stakes involved is also worth contemplating.
Should we bash Walmart, too? And where do we stop. American companies are exploiting cheap labor, for sure, but the longterm benefit to these cheap labor markets is that their standard of living will (eventually) improve
As for Amazon, this is capitalism in action; the glory and the gore. A new business model tapped into GREAT demand; little different than what FEDEX did, other than the HUGE digital infrastructure they built for ordering, at first, and then for shipping. Welcomed would be one or more competitors to Amazon (similar to UPS and the post office responding to FEDEX’s expedited offering) — otherwise, maybe it’s ripe to be broken up?
No high-horse here. Life is full of difficult and imperfect choices. But for me, ultimately, I’m failing to see the connection between an entity intent on undermining democracy and just about anything else.
Eyeroller
@Geminid: Maybe the word was written in Arabic style in Arabic script, which differs a little from Urdu script and style according to unimpeachable source Wikipedia (/s), so some minimally-literate idiot could have just noticed it “looked like” the Koran. Illiteracy is certainly a possibility, however. But the Islamists in Pakistan seem particularly fanatical, apparently due to a lot of missionary work from Saudi Arabia.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Thanx for the elaboration, still seems strange to these western eyes/ears.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
opiejeanne
@BellyCat: You can play most of the games for free including Wordle and Spelling Bee, just not the current crosswords or the Sunday one. They run three older ones every week, and an older mini-crossword as well as the current mini.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Geminid
@Eyeroller: My cynical take is that some of the men who stirred the others up knew what the word meant but just wanted to lynch a woman.
rikyrah
@TBone:
Uh huh😠😠😠
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Stopped reading the Vichy Times since 2016.
Fuck the Nazi enablers.
TBone
@gene108: it’s the pile on (in all senses of that phrase), not the location that enrages me. Mayor Parker (first Black female Mayor), Black LBGTQ+ City employee, and Caucasian male State Trooper. I don’t believe a word of the official State Police crapola on this. Mayor Parker has her work cut out for her already and doesn’t need the Fani Willis treatment.
I know that’s not your primary concern either but I had to spout off again.
satby
Happy news about the Safe Skies fundraiser from Timothy Snyder. It met its initial goal and drone sensors are now helping protect 8 regions in Ukraine. The fundraiser is still open to procure more sensors and expand the protected areas. For those of us enraged by the Republican betrayal of the Ukrainian people, his post includes several good links for direct donations to Ukraine.
TBone
@rikyrah: fucking A
Eyeroller
@Geminid: I always assume stupidity unless there is significant evidence for something else. I am usually right.
sdhays
I despised George W. Bush from the moment I heard of him, but Maureen Dowd managed to write something about him early in his Presidency (pre-9/11) that so offended me, I vowed to never read her again.
Fuck you, Maureen, for making me sympathize with President Coup #1!
satby
@Geminid: absolutely. She wasn’t wearing a head covering either. Not required in Pakistan, as shown by the policewoman, but often advised for safety anyway.
gene108
@SFAW:
The political media hated the Clintons. Bill wasn’t ever part of their social circle. He also did things that did not please them, like firing the White House travel office for booking extra perks for reporters in violation of the rules.
What really helped the Obama administration and continues to help the Biden administration is the amount of stuff online allows fact checking of erroneous reporting in real time. They can brush off a lot of BS rumors that bogged down President Clinton.
I remember the story of Bill Clinton causing a 4 hour delay at LAX to get a $400 haircut. The DC press peppered White House Press Secretary George Stephanopolous with questions about it. He didn’t have a good answer.
After a couple of months of tracking information down about arrival and departure times, someone found that when (1) the delays were not close to 4 hours, and (2) the delays were not out of line with any other domestic airport AF1 is parked at. Of course the political media moved on by the time someone pieced this together.
The info online these days can have such BS fact checked in real time.
@Princess:
Games, cooking, crossword puzzles, etc. are what keeps the NYT profitable. The LA Times is struggling financially, like most newspaper, because news subscriptions don’t bring in enough money by themselves.
TBone
It’s Groundhog Day alla time but with nightmares in broad daylight. I’m gonna laugh as hard as I can right in its face! W.C. Fields, my DelCo jawn will help with that today. Inappropriate? Of course!
Here’s some DelCo accented background:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bXA9b_RroaI
Geminid
@Eyeroller: I don’t know enough about Pakistani society to make a confident judgement here.
I’m only just starting to learn about Turkish people. Last year I saw some funny Turkish video of another determined woman.
Somebody captured the scene from their apartment. A pricey sedan had pulled up in the near traffic lane and its driver was walking towards the truck stopped behind him, yelling and gesturing. When he got to the truck the woman truck driver started shouting over him and shaking her fist. After getting yelled at for 30 seconds or so the man threw one hand up in frustration and stomped back to his car.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Thank you! I can’t stand to read their political coverage, but I think it’s important to know about it. It’s part of the battle. It’s why I sometimes make myself watch the clips Julia Davis posts of Russian propaganda. Not because I like it or wish to support it.
Eyeroller
@Geminid: I would doubt that the instigator or the crowd specifically wanted to lynch a woman. I would not doubt that a woman would be judged much more harshly and rapidly than a man for perceived transgressions. That isn’t about Pakistani society in particular; that type of misogyny is widespread.
Geminid
@Eyeroller: Well, if these guys can lynch a woman from time to time it could certainly help keep the rest of them in their place.
But I think there is probably some more reporting on this incident that I might look for.
Marcopolo
@Betty Cracker: lol, this was the underlying premise of the tv series The Good Place (highly recommend all three seasons): how can we live our lives in a morally correct way (to get to the good place after we die) when we have to make thousands of decisions every day often based on inadequate knowledge. Writing is funny as hell but also goes deep philosophically.
NotMax
@TBone
Gotta chime in with a correction to the narrator. The character’s name in It’s a Gift is Harold Bissonette (Bis-o-nay), not Sam Bisbee.
;)
eclare
@Marcopolo:
Excellent, excellent show. I just googled to make sure, it’s four seasons. The series finale was one of the best series finales that I have ever seen for any show.
kalakal
Exactly what I did with the same storm. Glad of the rain too!
BellyCat
@opiejeanne: Does one have to give their email to register to play for free?
Increasingly of the opinion that the whole “free” and “trial” offerings by companies is simply a way to harvest email/mailing list data, which is sold to others.
opiejeanne
@BellyCat: no registration necessary. Just google NY Times Crossword.
https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords
kalakal
Oddly given how Fl politics is dominated by the GQP there are some pretty good local Newspapers. I can read the NYT, WSJ at the library for free but never bother. What I do do is subscribe to the Tamp Bay Times which has pretty good journalistic standards. I can also get it free at the library but I want it to survive which is why I have a sub
BellyCat
@opiejeanne: Remarkable. Somebody is going to lose their job for giving things away for free! (At least they can count the “click”)
Geminid
@kalakal: I find a lot of good reporting in the WSJ, especially international news. Their business coverage is useful too. I don’t mess with their editorials, but I generally skip op-ed pieces anyway.
kalakal
@Geminid: That makes sense. In the UK the FT (Financial Times) is pretty much the same
ETA or used to be when I last lived there, haven’t seen it in years
oldgold,
Yes, the New York Times is often annoying and sometimes absolutely worse, but it is not the problem.
Tump has been getting worse – at many levels much worse. A hellish political shit factory. Yet, he seems to pay no price for his execrable conduct. In fact, if the polls are to be believed, Trump is gaining momentum.
Something is clearly wrong with our messaging and/or our product. We are running out of time to fix this. Dropping your subscription to the New York Times is not the answer. Hard questions need to be asked. Hard decisions need to be made. Or, there is real possibility that extraordinarily hard times lie ahead.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, Haley is doing great with women … TheHill.com.
Take a glance at the top picture. Maybe 5 women behind the bunting barricade? 3-4 more who seem to be on her political team (same side of the bunting as her). And lots and lots of men.
I’m glad that women on the other side aren’t being fooled by her waffling.
Cheers,
Scott.
TBone
@NotMax: he also said “National Anthem’s Vacation” instead of Lampoon’s if I heard him correctly. My ear for accent must be getting a bit rusty! Good catch 😉
TBone
@Marcopolo: I enjoyed that too but the surreal got to me after a while. All in all, thumbs up.
Another Scott
@gene108:
The NYTimes Co (parent of FTFNYT, Wirecutter, The Athletic, etc.) gets most of its revenue from subscriptions. 4th Quarter Form 10-K (23 page .pdf). They get more money from paper subscribers, but digital subscriptions are growing faster and is about 2/3 of their subscription revenue. The Athletic is still losing money. They really, really want investors to pay attention to digital subscription growth – one hurts them by not buying one. ;-)
Look for ever more click-baity stuff so that they can try to get their news revenue and subscriptions to keep from falling further…
:-/
My $0.02. Not investment advice, consult your own tea leaves, etc., etc.
Cheers,
Scott.
TBone
@Betty Cracker: 💙
Ella in New Mexico
I really, really don’t understand who these “Joe needs to step out” folks think will have the money, time or logistics to replace him right now?
He is completely competent, and it’s pretty obvious in every interview he give. And yes, he’s old but if he becomes unable to to the job or dies, we have Kamala to step in who’ll be awesome.
Somehow I think the latter is what everyone is worried about…And I think THAT needs to be blasted in the face of every Jon Stewart or Maureen Dowd dreaming he pulls out of the race…
TBone
@NotMax: maybe I should change my nym to TBonette in hizzonor.
Ksmiami
@satby: thx just donated
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: Walmart is still bigger (total annual revenue) than Amazon (even including AWS and Whole Paycheck, and …).
From their 2024 10-K filings ((for 2023) available at SEC.gov):
Worldwide net sales for their 2023 Fiscal Years:
Amazon – $574,785 M
Walmart – $605,881 M
You’re right – giant companies are not our friends. They have their place, and they can help drive efficiency as they work to crush competitors, but they’re not our friends.
(I buy stuff from Amazon, including shopping at small companies who use Amazon for fulfillment. I don’t shop at Walmart. YMMV.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Glidwrith
@Geminid: What gets me, is it’s one word. Not a phrase, not a reference equivalent to Jeremiah 3:3, just one word. How the hell could that be claimed to be from the Koran?
KSinMA
@Betty Cracker: Thank you, Betty.
VFX Lurker
What a beautiful sentence. Love the rest of the post, but I especially love this part
Geminid
@Glidwrith: Three possibilities are illiteracy, ignorance and/or intentional misrepresentation.
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker: I’m sorry but I have to disagree with this. I understand fully that in a capitalist society it is very often impossible to avoid engaging with bad actors. But the NYT is different because it is a discreet entity, a nationally and internationally recognized newspaper that has historically been owned by a single wealthy and apparently reactionary family. I think people do have an option to register their disapproval for The Times by unsubscribing in a way that they simply don’t with amazon when it’s the only option for buying things not available in your area. Or at least no worse an option than any othor mailing distributor at this point.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
The NYT’s political coverage has been horrifyingly bad for at least 25 years now. (If you weren’t around in the late 90s – early 00s, dig around for contemporaneous articles from The Daily Howler, which chronicled the phenomenon. The Times was perfectly comfortable, for example, with their own reporter changing Al Gore’s words so that the resulting quotes were false, then using them to paint him as a liar throughout his presidential campaign.)
My folks were New Yorkers who moved away for work. They had great respect (and fondness) for the Times, and subscribed when they could afford it, so naturally I grew up believing it was at the top of American journalism, and like them I subscribed when I could afford it, feeling like a big shot in my smaller journalistic pond.
So it really stung when I started to notice that on subjects I was familiar with, they weren’t always so hot … and it just got worse, and hurt more, until I couldn’t hack it and quit.
I guess I felt betrayed… still do. “Professional journalism,” my aging ass.
montanareddog
@Geminid: Dead thread but here is my guess at the context. Most muslims will learn to read the Quran, and, even if they are not Arab (the majority of the world’s muslims), they will learn to read it in Arabic, able to make the correct (-ish) sounds, but not actually understanding it apart from the classical quotes. Very few non-Arab muslims will ever read a translation in their mother tongue.
I suspect that there is also an over-reverence of Arabic as a holy language, forgetting that it is a living language, including for non-muslim Arabs. (A Christian Arab friend once peevishly explained to me that Allah was not the muslim word for God, but the Arabic word for God, and his people have been calling Him Allah for several hundred years longer than Muslims have).
Somebody ignorant saw the dress, recognised the calligraphy as Arabic fom Quran school but did not understand it, and jumped to the conclusion that the phrases were Quranic verses. And blasphemy is an all too commonly-used accusation in Pakistan, including as a weapon in personal vendettas, and is regularly used to incide the mob (full disclosure, I lived in Pakistan for 2 years a couple of decades ago).
Manyakitty
@BellyCat: yep. I refuse to so much a click on a recipe link. As such, it’s especially dirty when people bury the links and I get a nasty surprise when I see the destination.
Manyakitty
@Betty Cracker: also, this. More than demanding purity, I try to diminish harm where I can, so maybe avoiding all NYT content can offset my streaming or a few Amazon boxes.
We live in a complicated and interconnected world. It’s impossible to be perfect but it’s always possible to strive for better. Who can even tell if any of it matters?
dnfree
@Another Scott: I just ordered solar eclipse protection glasses from WalMart online. (I did the same in 2017 for the previous eclipse.). In 2017 there was a lot of publicity to the effect that a lot of the Amazon glasses claimed to be certified but weren’t. Many were imitations. It’s pretty sad to buy from WalMart because you think they’re watching their sources more closely than Amazon is, but that’s my thinking.
JCNZ
Damn! I walked right into the Dowd trap.
Geminid
@montanareddog: I think I read once that the Koran is not supposed to be translated, but studied only in the original Arabic. That’s one of the reasons Kemal Ataturk instituteded a Roman-type alphabet for written Turkish. The Ottoman Empire used Arabic script. Ataturk knew Turkey had to modernize its society, and one way was to have a European-style alphabet. He also wanted a secular state, and the new alphabet helped by making the Koran less accessable to newer generations.
Pete Mack
I don’t know about flat Florida rivers, but the sound of thunder on NY lakes surrounded by 200-400′ hills is spectacular. (Fireworks are good, too.) It can last a full 15-20sec, echoing and re-echoing.
Kayla Rudbek
@BellyCat: if you don’t have to pay then you are the product
brantl
@Kay: The WSJ has been right wing dreck since I was a teenager and I am 67, now.