The NYT has a section on Religion and Belief. If we’re going to argue that,
…then let’s really fucking mean it.
I agree with you, Andy, and unlike me, you didn’t need to write an essay. 
I didn’t say anything about “obligated”. They made an editorial decision to do so. I don’t think it was out of a sense of obligation. Perhaps they experienced a change of mind later. But I can only guess their initial reasoning was similar to mine.
I don’t have a subscription to the NYT’s so it’s hard to browse. My largest resentment over this piece is that I used one of my free articles this month to read it.
However, on the front page, is a fairly prominent headline entitled “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed”. I assume that there were others.
I would agree with the OP that just putting this in their paper, unchallenged, would be quite the mistake. But it does seem as though it is being challenged in the very same paper.
If there are several editorials tearing apart the “manifesto”, and explaining why they decided to include it, then I consider that to be a positive. This was a hateful rant that the world did need to see, IMHO, to understand the mentality behind the fascists that are trying to rule our country.
As I said, I saw that there is at least one rebuttal in the editorial section. Are there more? Has anyone read them, and if so, are they well written takedowns?
When we get secret recordings of these people talking behind closed doors, we go ahead and publish them. We don’t worry that people will be persuaded to their side by their words. This was like that. It was like a secret recording of the internal monologue of how these authoritarians think and justify their actions. But it wasn’t a secret recording, it was given to the NYT’s to publish.
It is a bit like the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, where one of the POS’s thought that his recording exonerated him and his friends, so shared it with the world.
Anyone who could be persuaded to take the side of the authoritarians has already taken that side. Airing their thoughts, motivations, and goals would, IMHO, help to convince those in the middle that one side really is worse than the other.
We sometimes get chastised for implying motives to the republicans, well we don’t have to anymore. He laid out his motivations and goals in that piece.
Personally, were I on the editorial staff, though I’m not sure if that’s good journalism practice, I would have wanted to publish the piece, but with editorial content included within the text itself. If that is not something that should be done, then posting the op-ed as is, along with several editorial rebuttals, is actually best practices, IMHO.
Oh yeah, since it’s the pit, fuck you [insert your name here]. If anyone wants any more reasonable discussion on this topic, I suggest a different forum.
That is a piece by Michelle Goldberg, who has been an opinion columnist for several years.
@k9bfriender: ^ Like. ^ Subscribe.
This reminds me of the debates we’ve had on hate speech. The assumption is that as long as we challenge hate speech, then right-thinking people who value all that is good in this world will rebut repugnant ideas and that the better ideas will win.
Take a look around now: are the better ideas winning? Have they been winning the last 5 or 10 years?
Sometimes regulating better ideas means saying “Nuh uh, I’m not even going to waste my time listening to or reading this shit,” for to do otherwise means validating these ideas in some way, even if validation isn’t what was intended. This is exactly how “Both sides do it” or “You know, the Klan does have a point” gets fertilized into an embryo, and it surprises me that we can’t see that.
On the whole, yes. Better ideas are winning. 5-10 years is a myopic view of human history and social justice, which is full of events that are two steps forward and one step back.
Oh yeah? What about the last 25 years? You’re saying that Fox News, AM radio, and right wing social media haven’t debased the quality of journalism and that better ideas are winning?
Would Donald Trump as a serious candidate have even been remotely possible 25 years ago? I’ll answer that question: No, because he ran in 2000 as a Reform Party candidate and his campaign was treated as a joke.
I’ll grant you that some progress has been made, but concurrent with that has been lots of regress as well. We’re seeing white nationalist rhetoric and propaganda at levels not seen in decades. Hate crimes reached a 16-year high last year in the US. We have president flouting the constitution and the rule of law, flirting with the idea of declaring martial law and postponing elections. And he’s still getting his usual levels of backing for taking these kinds of positions that only a decade or two ago would have scared us shitless regardless of political leanings. Better ideas winning, eh?
Reporters Sans Frontieres has listed press freedom in the US as “problematic,” ranking 48 out of 180 -this at a time when there have presumably been more outlets for the freedom of expression than ever. Are more outlets and more voices, in and of themselves, necessarily better? I don’t think so. I think it’s the quality of ideas, not just the quantity, that is as important, and likely more so, in terms of providing nutrients to democratic and progressive thought.
Hopefully, it will convince enough people that Cotton is a fascist rat bastard, that this will be his last term in any “office”.
Cite?
More likely it will boost his support, since it will be taken as the NYT supporting and validating his words.
It does mean challenging them in the public sphere. You can certainly say that you are not going to waste your time on that shit. Had it not been the subject of this thread, I likely never would have read Cotton’s drivel. By bringing attention to his op-ed, you have given him validation just the same as the NYT, in spirit if not in audience. (I am under illusions that your thread reached a 1,000th those of NYT subscribers.)
It would be better if no one thought those thoughts, but as long as they are, it’s best to know who they are and what they are thinking. If you control the medium they are in, then you can challenge the hate speech.
No one who reads Cotton’s piece is going to be persuaded. They either already agree with him or they don’t. What may persuade some people in the middle is airing the cognition that bubbles deep inside the head of a hateful racist, and openly criticizing it.
The thing that pissed me off about when Bill Maher had Yiannopoulos on his show was not that he was given a place to speak. It’s that he was given a place to speak without being challenged. Had Maher taken him to task over his behavior, rather than giving him softballs and even praising him for being brave enough to speak his mind in public, that may have not been the last time I ever watched his show. (Not that I was a big fan at that point anyway, he really lost me when he was making fun of people who shop in grocery stores.)
Don’t you foam your mouth at me, you little shit! 
I agree to a large degree that in the past 10 years we took two steps forward with the Obama administration and one step back with the GOP and Trump. Things look worse now than they did back in 2015 before the Trump circus came to town with the MAGATS clown car spilling its bile and venom while the GOP enablers shit the rugs.
However, what little good remains of the Obama administration (ACA, etc), remains to the good. Despite the damage done by Trump. I’m hopeful we’ll be rid of the callous bastard and his GOP enablers in the approaching election cycle. The MAGATS cult can fuck off back under their damp rocks.
That’s nonsense. By that logic, nothing could ever be posted in the Pit–you’d be drawing attention to anything bad, and thus be just as bad.
What’s different is that he’s reporting on something that already happened, not actively facilitating it. He’s reporting on the news and commenting on it. The NYT was actively making news.
You can go on about how we need to know that these people think these things. Guess what? WE ALREADY DID. The guy had said them on Twitter. And those tweets were widely reported in the same papers that people read who read the NYT. That was never the problem.
The problem is exactly what Maher did to Yiannopoulos. He was given an unchallenged platform to simply make his full case, uninterrupted. You say that’s bad. So then why are you going after asahi for saying that, when the NYT does that, it is also bad?
What bothers me is that, while asahi does have some bad threads, I continue to see people jump on him even in the threads where he’s just saying what most people feel. The NYT themselves agreed they fucked up. And you appear to agree with him on principle.
But you still have to find a way to make him the bad guy. Why? What’s the point?
This was wrong of the NYT. Cotton being a senator doesn’t make him better than anyone else, or more worthy of publishing. And nothing should be published without them checking the contents, to see if they’re going to be saying things that they know are untrue.
It’s a newspaper, and one of high repute at that. They have a duty to tell the truth, and to spread the truth. They have a duty to challenge lies and other things that go against the morality of truth.
I actually like asahi. I think he’s a good dude and his heart is in the right place and he means well. I just enjoy taking the piss out of him now and then.
You think they aren’t? 
As someone else noted, you aren’t really looking at the proverbial “long arc of history” here. Progress always brings periodic backlashes with it, but if you zoom out the overall direction is clear.
Let’s look at some changes in response to Gallup poll questions over time.
In 2002, around the time I taped one of those “responsible counterpoint” spots for my local TV station arguing for reparations, 6 percent of non-Hispanic whites agreed they should. By 2019, the number had nearly tripled, to 16 percent. If you asked it today, I bet it would be above 20 percent.
Among whites, 7 percent were “very dissatisfied” in 2007. By 2016, that had jumped to 15 percent; in 2018, 24 percent. Again, if you asked today it would likely be much higher.
Among whites, 16 percent said “no, do not” in 2009; by 2018, this had doubled to 32 percent. (The all-time high was actually in 1963, at 44 percent–but I’d argue that this is because the facts on the ground were far more blatantly tilted against blacks in the job market back then than they are in the 21st century, meaning that it was patently absurd for only 44 percent to agree with it then. By contrast, in 1978 this had dropped to 19 percent, but I don’t think it’s tenable to claim that the job market is more racially unequal now than it was forty years ago, meaning that the shift in this poll number is about greater sensitivity rather than different facts.)
Again, J.S. Mill:
Sorry, but I don’t need to hear the case that Jews need to be pushed into oven to prefer the opinion that Jews shouldn’t be pushed into ovens.
Your boy has limited applicability. Try thinking for yourself.
Given who Cotton represents, having the NYT support and validate him is more likely to count *against *him, unless his constituents decide that the righteousness of his position has brought the light even to the NYT, in which case they’ll vote for him in larger numbers. And if the NYT later decides that letting his OP-ED run was a bad idea, they’ll just go back to the “librul media, East Coast elite paper, not REAL Americans, he’s for us and they’re all agin us” attitude and vote for him in larger numbers.
Are people in your real life as mystified and annoyed by your lacking communication skills as many of those who are subject by your drive by posts?