It’s more important than ever, they said. We need to subscribe to the staid, sober journalistic outlets to counter the flow of crap, they said. We’ve got to keep the flow of information going — an informed citizenry is the heart of a democracy.
So I’ve gone back and forth on whether I ought to subscribe to the New York Times. It certainly is professional journalism, but I’m still bitter about their weasely “he said, she said” coverage of creationism from ten years ago, and their dishonest backing of the Iraq War through their lying reporter, Judith Miller, and their utterly execrable opinion pages — Friedman? Brooks? Christ.
And then I think about how Donald Trump hates them, which is certainly a point in their favor. And that they do publish some excellent work — Carl Zimmer, for instance. And that yeah, good journalism costs money, and I ought to contribute, not to the corporate edifice that is the NY Times, but to the principle that we ought to support a healthy journalist class for the good of the country.
And then they go and publish yet another of those shitty pieces that seeks to normalize evil, and I say fuck the New York Times. I will not support a rag that is used to polish the status quo.
The piece in question is “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door”. They’ve moved from banal stories about “Undecided Voter Weighs in on Crap They Don’t Understand” to “Gosh, Trump Voters Are Just Economically Distressed and Not Racist At All” to now, “Nazis Eat at Applebee’s and Go Grocery Shopping, Like You.” It was a story so vapid that the author, Richard Fausset, felt compelled to write another article that basically consists of him shrugging and saying, “I don’t know what the point was”…and the NY Times published that, too.
Honestly, I already knew that Nazis are human beings — horrible, awful, nasty human beings — who eat food and poop and have two arms and no horns and speak words. It’s not as if there is some widespread delusion that fascists are actually demons with wings and horns that needed to be dispelled — that’s the kind of nonsense the Nazis spread about The Jews.
If you want to learn more about the subject of that high profile piece in the big name newspaper, Tony Hovater, do not bother reading the NY Times. There is no depth or insight to it at all. Instead, just listen to Hovater’s wretched podcast on a site called Radio Aryan. Or you could just stop there and note that he’s a ranter on a site called Radio Fucking Aryan, and go no further — you’ve already learned enough.
If you do listen in, though, be prepared to hear a couple of chuckling thugs go on and on about Christian values, those degenerate “trannies”, immigrants and how they hate ’em, Hitler — misunderstood hero, the Holohoax, and The Jew, The Jew, The Jew.
Yes, New York Times, I know there are Nazis next door. You got the emphasis wrong. You completely missed the point. There are a couple of ways you can handle that phrase.
-
There are Nazis next door…they have a nice little house in the suburbs and a wedding registry at Target and oh, what lovely shrubbery.
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There are NAZIS next door…and they’re promoting a hateful ideology that wants to exterminate their neighbors, and they worship a murderous megalomaniac who tore up the planet with a world war about 80 years ago.
The New York Times chose Door #1. Fuck ’em. Not a penny from me.
The failing New York Times. Just not failing the way Donald keeps whining on about.
Shorter NYT: “Some very fine people”
Anymore, I wouldn’t line a bird cage with the Times. Not a big Bezos/Amazon fan, but the Washington Post has shown much more dedication to actual journalism in recent years.
Usually, I would suggest that a list like this would benefit greatly from some commas. This one I think is fine as is.
The NYT have been establishment lackeys for a long time. Let it die and let’s see what else appears on the market.
The elephant in the room is that the advertorial model may not be sustainable. That means that when the websites are done sucking all the oxygen from the room, they’re next.
The Guardian is still pretty good – not perfect, but good – and they have a digital-only subscription which is quite reasonable.
I read this completely differently. I find it chilling to read how apparently normal some nazis are. I think “normalizing” nazis in the sense that we are reminded that appearances are not enough to identify them is a good lesson. I dispute that they were normalizing them in the sense that they are arguing that their views somehow fall within the pale of normalcy. I don’t need the NYT to remind me how horrible they are, I already know how vile their ideology is. In fact, I would consider it an insult to their readers’ intelligence to make the article about how evil nazism is– I think they are right to assume that readers know that and that this article is about how nazis can hide in plain sight–which is much scarier. Calmly pointing out that sometimes Joe-neighbor who borrows your lawnmower is a nazi–that (to me ) is worth thinking about.
If you want to support good journalism I highly recommend ProPublica. They generally do not cover politics, but their in depth reporting on serious issues is amazing.
Yah, support Sarah Kendzior, and others such as she, who cuts to the chase, hopping over the horseshit with intelligence and knowledge.
Shocking!!!! The Nazi became a Nazi because he was influenced by Rothbard (anchro-capitalism), Charles Murray and he liked heavy metal! Insightful! Predictable!
@7
The piece is completely utterly sympathic to the Nazi…it opens with the false implication that he needs to be worried about antifa breaking up his wedding for fucks sake. Throughout the piece it positions his worldview as one that grew out of self defense. He’s so polite and Midwestern that what’s a bit of genocidal desire to kill most people in the US.
The article, apart from being morally bankrupt, is poorly written. It misses obivous parallels and rejoinders to the Nazi. It’s meandering, direction less nonsense.
If only antifa groups got such soft gloves.
Of course, the NYT has emitted a standard notpology:
I agree with Bill Buckner. Apparently some folk think that journalism should be opinion pieces, and that we’re all too stupid to process information properly. I liked the piece. Know thy enemy.
This is basically why I don’t pay for Dutch “quality” papers anymore. Fortunately the Flemish De Morgen is still OK.
This article struck me more as a comment on the banality of evil than an attempt to mainstream Nazis. Given that the intended readership was primarily Americans, they probably should have included a few “Nazi’s are bad” statements to ensure readers didn’t miss that point. We can’t assume our educational system has taught this lesson; not in the age of textbooks that describe American slavery as an importation of cheap labor and the Trail of Tears as an event that brought many native Americans to Jesus.
I can’t believe people are defending this crap. Read this, just one of many insightful takes on where this article completely fucking failed:
https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/934875769850998790?s=17
Fuck ’em.
@11 Sure, there can be disagreement about how best to tell a disagreeable story. But how do you best tell the story of disagreeable people? Hint for the NYT, it’s not by trying to paint them as less disagreeable people. It’s not by playing into their little victim narrative. It’s not by making them sympathetic figures. These people actively want the elimination of whole groups of people. Any story that does not push that fact to the forefront, is a failure as a story, at best. But it is also a fraud.
All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann
Leonard Cohen
EYES:……………………………………Medium
HAIR:……………………………………Medium
WEIGHT:………………………………Medium
HEIGHT:………………………………Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES…None
NUMBER OF FINGERS:………..Ten
NUMBER OF TOES………………Ten
INTELLIGENCE…………………….Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
Sounds like they’ve fallen in the trap of “normalization”. Writing about Notsees as people next door that one must not demonize, being neighbors and all.
Seems quite a double reverse spin on the Third Reich’s demonization of everyone’s neighbor who happened to be Jewish.
Sheesh. No words.
?
Subscribe to Mother Jones. Or the Washington Post. The NYT? They can go pound salt.
There is a really sad-ass article on Salon about the NYT fail. The lazy-ass “journalist” who wrote it just cut and pasted someone else’s commentary on twitter. Yeah, when the old media dies, new media is what we’re going to be left with.
(I’m a Guardian subscriber)
Contrasts.
Apparently they did a profile on one of the other Nazis on that podcast last year in their article An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/us/alt-right-national-socialist-movement-white-supremacy.html
The title and tone is marginally better on that one, but still leaves much to be desired.
I’m sure you’ve seen it, but this is why you subscribe to the Washington Post. It’s well worth watching the videos and reading the full story. This really illustrates what the mainstream media can do better than anyone else. The reporters are tough and persistent, but honest and fair. They’re not willing to accept the story on face value; they check and corroborate, and when they smell a rat they investigate and end up tracing their source back to Project Veritas.
It’s worth noting that it’s not Jeff Bezos running the newsroom but Marty Baron of “Spotlight” fame.
Signed, a proud subscriber of the Post for the past 20 years.
Relevant (and topical) YouTube reference: The Washington Post exposed Project Veritas’ most recent scam. Cenk Uygur, and John Iadarola the hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.
“A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets. In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
John Morales,
Wish I had thought of that. :)
What a Maroon, no worries. You motivated me.
(Vox is not too bad, either)
The nice pasta-loving Applebee Nazi has been fired.