How Embarrassing

It’s official.  Years after abandoning their inane paywall, and later the TimesSelect bullshit that forced you to shell out to read Maureen Dowd’s latest meows, there is a new bulwark against the paper’s eventual extinction.  Read up to twenty articles a month, and after that, the shit ain’t free.

That a letter from the publisher should announce the change speaks for itself.  Who better to inform us than the titular demigod who dwells in a cloud above West 44th Street?  I’m sure when the Onion follows suit, they’ll exhume T. Herman Zweibel to communicate the new policy from on high. And as all these opaque corporate thunderbolts go, it’s presented in watery biz-speak as a sweeping transformation of their service, when really all it means it that you pay more to watch journalism’s withering husk succumb to mediocrity–only more slowly now because you’re plugging a huge revenue gap for them.

But what strikes me as an even better tea leaf to decipher is the latest column by Arthur Brisbane, the fourth Public Editor.  He’s the fourth man to hold the position–and, if one can safely judge on the basis of names, the fourth white man.  (The name Arthur Brisbane suggests Skull & Bones, a membership at Stanwich, and all that.  Wasn’t Maude’s neighbor, played by Conrad Bain, named something like that?)

Anyhoo, Brisbane finally got around to looking at this Twitter thing.  His conclusion?  It has some perils but on the whole might be a net benefit for the hallowed craft of journalism.

Except that, in graf two, “I haven’t been tweeting long enough to judge its merits.”  Well, with 1985 tweets under my belt since April 2008, I can safely condemn that as a goddamn embarrassment.  If the Times thinks it’s a) necessary to explain Twitter to people in March 2011 and b) wants to install as the “readers’ representative” someone who admits he doesn’t quite get it then this is indeed a sinking ship.

This is the paper whose style guide still insists that websites are “Web sites.”  Even William Safire objected to that one.

Does Brisbane think there are any risks to reporters using Twitter?  Yes: things go out “unedited.”  The only example he’s got is a business reporter tweeting “Toyota sucks.”  Meanwhile his entire position is predicated on the serial fuck-ups when reporters when through the standard channels, complete with editors, and no less a titan than Glenn Greenwald said of Brisbane that he “has quickly proven himself to be the most pliant, vapid and useless person to occupy that position” of Public Editor for defending the Times when it allowed the Pentagon to tell it what to publish.

Yet here we are, ensconced in the future, when journalism isn’t profitable and lots of mid-size cities can’t even get decent coverage of their own goings-on.  The alternative is the Fox universe, which really isn’t conservative per se but devoted to destroying the credibility Fourth Estate itself–by which I mean the institution of the media as a check against government and corporate abuses of power.

But as with Democrats and Republicans, you can bitch about how evil the reactionaries are and always trust the liberals to do the same shit on their own.  (Sometimes, with NPR, the right provides an assist).  I give the (print version with quality journalism) New York Times ten years before it’s snuffed out, reduced to an amalgam of piddling, super-cautious blogs no one reads and one really superb full-length article per week which no one reads.  They need some serious stem-cell therapy but they’re shopping for an iron lung.

Honestly, do they really need me to tell them to ax the auto, real estate and sports sections–and anything else where true aficionados will turn to niche blogs, or no longer wait until a day later to hear results–put the crossword online?  That would be a start.

All the Frivolity That’s Fit to Shit Out

I’m not scolding.  Smart people enjoy stupid shit, and I’m as big a lover of bright, shiny things as anyone else.  But this was just hilarious.  The Times website is currently a roster of meaningless crap, bookended by truly pointless articles that come from the Week in Review and Metro sections.

When people say they hate the media and when venerable media institutions wither, this is why.  It’s nice to leaven an economic depression with inanity, but shouldn’t the Times have a marketing department with a mission statement and shit, or highly-compensated people who work on maintaining their core brand?

If people want to read these kinds of things, they’re going to go to LOLcats.

Families Deleverage: David Brooks Can’t Write, Either

Wiping his chin after seconds at the Applebee’s Salad Bar or a ride on the Mechanical Bull at Del Taco, David Brooks takes us on a tour of the not-too-distant future.  In it, the robots appointed by the Obama Administration to keep us fat and jerk us off fail to account for every single aspect of human behavior when launching their bailout, leading to an epic fail.

It must be read in full because it just doesn’t make sense and any paraphrasing or excerpting would look malicious or cherry-picked.  Here’s a middle part anyway

Essentially, Americans had migrated from one society to another — from a society of high trust to a society of low trust, from a society of optimism to a society of foreboding, from a society in which certain financial habits applied to a society in which they did not. In the new world, investors had no basis from which to calculate risk. Families slowly deleveraged. Bankers had no way to measure the future value of assets.

Cognitive scientists distinguish between normal risk-assessment decisions, which activate the reward-prediction regions of the brain, and decisions made amid extreme uncertainty, which generate activity in the amygdala. These are different mental processes using different strategies and producing different results. Americans were suddenly forced to cope with this second category, extreme uncertainty.

Economists and policy makers had no way to peer into this darkness. Their methods were largely based on the assumption that people are rational, predictable and pretty much the same. Their models work best in times of equilibrium. But in this moment of disequilibrium, behavior was nonlinear, unpredictable, emergent and stubbornly resistant to Keynesian rationalism.

All I get out of this is that extreme uncertainty makes the brain operate in unpredictable ways, which presents problems for technocrats who model their solutions on how the brain works in normal times.  This stunning conflation of macro and micro, of pop sociology with cognitive neuroscience, doesn’t make any sense at all.  Everyone knows the next 2-5 years are going to be rough.  But nobody actually looks back to some golden era circa 2004, when everything in the world was cut and dried, with fondness.  Things were fucked up then, too.  Not as bad as now, but I don’t think teams at Johns Hopkins ran some data and found the social sciences had finally found their stride: models of human behavior were working, because everything was going fine!

There was never a time of equilibrium.  Think back to innocent 1996 and try to come up with a single pressing issue in that year’s election.  I can’t think of one.  Crime?  But I bet a lot of things seemed to a lot of people as if the future of the nation depended on electing Bob Dole.

When the Right Wing Emerges on the NYT

I kvetch a lot about the Times‘ conservative leanings, but to be honest, they are generally unexamined bourgeois assumptions with only the intermittent shocker about neoliberal economics, the virtues of bloodless centrism, or the importance of not investigating Bush Administration criminal acts.  I.e., on the balance, I still read the paper.

Letters to the editor are a great place for unalloyed right-wing insanity to seep in, and it usually happens unchecked because of the universal journalistic need for “balance,” which translates into “letting one crazy conservative spew lies and invective so we don’t look biased.”  The Times will frequently compound this error by publishing a particularly stupid conservative, which only inflames the hive mind more.

There are more places to publish letters than than the editorial page.  For example, the Book Review.  Highlight:

[The] statement, quoted by the reviewer, that “there really is no example of small government among rich nations,” is unsupported nonsense. Think Dubai, free and rich.

Is there anything better than when reality destroys right-wing myths?  First, Dubai isn’t a nation.  It’s a government, for sure, but I don’t see how anything about it disproves the, um, fact that wealthy countries have high rates of taxation and large public sectors.  Plus Dubai is an authoritarian monarchy, where freedom is defined as needing a license to buy alcohol outside a hotel.

Also, there is THIS, from today’s paper.  Debtor’s prisons?  Criminalization of badmouthing the emirate’s economy?  A boomtown gone bust?  And how about

Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.

Ouch.  Plus, even while Dubai was thriving, it was more reliant on migrant labor than a cul-de-sac in Scottsdale McMansions.  The pattern of exploitation is always the same.  And with a vast underclass of neo-helots, the citizenry fear them, which generally leads to a cycle of hostility and disenfranchisement until the unsustainability of the system necessitates reform.

I guess it’s just nice to find a conservative who doesn’t shriek about Muslims.  Dubai has amazing architecture, but praising its political system as anything but an amoral, authoritarian corpocracy that’s now crashing, a steroidal Singapore, is gruesome.

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There have now been articles in both the NYT and in the New Yorker about Lehigh Aces, the Floridian suburb that has basically imploded because of real estate speculation.  Putting aside how real lives have been destroyed by all the things we know by heart by now, I want to go there and take pictures!  It would be like deadmalls.

Is It ‘Class Warfare’ to Want to Kill an Entire Class of People? It is, isn’t it. Sigh.

What the fuck?

At least there’s an obligatory throw-away line about how no one’s crying for our overlords.  But there is clearly someone embedded within the Times who greenlights these articles, because they appear again and again.  (Check it.)  Someone with the motive to rub dirt in everyone’s faces because the Times must always give off the impression that people like the people described in this article read the Times, and like to read about themselves in the Times as well.

You only need to flip through the advertising in the magazine for the past, oh, decade, to see the real estate.  Or the glossy inserts that come between the Travel section and the Book Review or whatever.

This is what the New York Times is.  It is a business aimed at the global elite.  That is its brand.  Its political liberalism is only a cover for the cosmopolitan worldliness flexed by the very same people whose actions have brought us into this mess.  These articles do not just weep over a dying world of glamour; they are literally doleful paeans to the agents of economic destruction.  The disconnect between tentacles of the NYT is sometimes too much to handle.  Suck it, bitches.

Maureen Dowd: Just a Bad Person?

In addition to bizarre full-page ads like the one I mentioned two days ago, another pleasurable thing about the dead-tree version of newspapers is the ironic juxtaposition of articles and opinion pieces.  For example, on Sunday in hte NYT there was a smart article about how in light of Rod Blagojevich (and the other 3 governors who appointed interim senators) the 17th Amendment should be updated so that, as with House vacancies, Senate seats are filled by special election.

Adjacent to this highminded contribution to public discourse is the real estate occupied by Maureen Dowd.  Her column was devoted to attacking David Paterson.  She spends the first two paragraphs lionizing Rod Blagojevich, lavishing attention on his hair in that semi-ironic way she has of dabbling at arm’s length with girlish crushes on powerful public figures–so that you think she’s kidding when she’s really not.

The rest of her column is pretty amazing.  While it’s fair to say that Paterson waited a weirdly long time to appoint Kirsten Gillibrand, Dowd takes an almost personal offense at how he didn’t appoint Caroline Kennedy.

The Democrats would have had another Kennedy int he Senate representing New York – Bobby’s niece and a smart, policy-oriented, civic-minded woman to whom the president feels deeply indebted in an era when every state has its hand out.  Instead they have Gillibrand who voted against the Wall Street – as in New York  – bailout bill.

Holy shit!  First, this obsession with the Kennedys is too much.  Why are they so fucking great?  They’re mostly just tragic.  Not even Bush got us closer to nuclear war than JFK did.  He was a mediocre president, and that’s that.  Bobby Kennedy was cool, but his assassination precluded him from doing much, either.  Being his niece is not a qualification.  It’s not even that interesting.  As for “civic-minded” and “policy-oriented,” those terms are so vague as to encompass nearly everybody.  They certainly don’t exclude Kirsten Gillibrand, about whom Dowd literally gossips:

The 42-year old Gillibrand, who has been in the House for only two years, is known as opportunisticc and sharp-elbowed.  Tracy Flick is her nickname among colleagues int he New York delegation, many of whom were M.I.A. at her Albany announcement.

Fellow Democrats were warning Harry Reid on Friday that he was going to have his hands full with te new senator because she’s “a pain.”

That unattributed quote says it all.  Maureen Dowd is a hypocrite and a malicious bitch.  She can’t even come up with a decent adjective to pump up the dynastic cipher she so desperately wanted to crown, but she will totally parrot the most cowardly kind of innuendo–and if a man spoke publicly about Gillibrand this way Maureen Dowd would be the first to call him a sexist asshole.

Gillibrand is too moderate.  But she won her election in 2006 in a Republican district and hopefully will lean leftward without the same electoral pressure.  We’ll just have to see.  Whereas Hillary Clinton, David Paterson, Andrew Cuomo and Caroline Kennedy are all married to or descended from prior politicians, Gillibrand is not.  Unless she told Maureen Dowd to go fuck herself, there is nothing on the merits that suggests the process leading to her selection as senator was corrupt or inappropriate.

Except for, you know, that neighboring opinion piece that puts this whole shit fit into perspective.

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Putting Maureen Dowd into perspective, these are the most contemptible women in the world.

Bill Kristol: A Nepotist Who’s Wrong About Everything

Ha ha ha ha ha!

When the Times took him on a little over a year ago, smart people freaked out.  This was of course cited as the secret intolerance of liberals for differing opinions.  But actually, it was mostly because in pursuit of a post-William Safire conservative the NYT mistook “wrong-about-everything” for “right-of-center.”  Worse than Kristol’s track record of bombastic inaccuracy is how his father, Irving Kristol, was buddy-buddy with Abe Rosenthal, the father of Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor who hired Bill.

Everyone knows how conservative the Times can be, but clubbiness trumps even that.  New York is the Nepotism State.

As his final thought, I love how Kristol said

“It’s been fun,” he said, adding, “It’s a lot of work.”

Yeah, having the choicest perch in all of opiniondom sure is tough!  You’re even expected to be right on occasion.  Better go back to writing for wingnuts only, because nobody there calls you out when you’re comically incorrect.

Like from April:

But a surprising number of Democrats with whom I’ve spoken expect a McCain victory. One told me he was struck by the current polls showing a dead-even race, suggesting both a surprising openness to McCain among Americans who disapprove of Bush and a striking hesitation among the same voters about Obama.

Then there’s the fact that we’re at war. As a Congressional staffer put it, “Here’s something to consider: Although Hillary will be out in May, she may determine the outcome in November. McCain’s secret weapon — among Clinton supporters — may be Hillary’s 3 a.m. national security ad.”

And an experienced Democratic operative e-mailed: “Finally, I think [McCain’s] going to win. Obama isn’t growing in stature. Once I thought he could be Jimmy Carter, but now he reminds me more of Michael Dukakis with the flag lapel thing and defending Wright. Plus he doesn’t have a clue how to talk to the middle class. He’s in the Stevenson reform mold out of Illinois, with a dash of Harvard disease thrown in.”

Or September, in a column titled “A Star is Born?”

Thursday night, after Barack Obama’s well-orchestrated, well-conceived and well-delivered acceptance speech in Denver, Republicans were demoralized. Twenty-four hours later, they were energized — even exuberant. It’s amazing what a bold vice-presidential pick who gives a sterling performance when she’s introduced will do for a party’s spirits…

I spent an afternoon with Palin a little over a year ago in Juneau, and have followed her career pretty closely ever since. I think she can pull it off.

And this is just amazing:

It’s also hilarious that his final column heralds the end of the era of conservative dominance.  What a coincidence.  He stops writing for the Times the moment conservatism died.  Nothing too egomaniacal about that.  Now all that needs to happen is for a plane carrying Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and the Big Bopper to crash.

Full disclosure: I have a friend who was expelled from college for being part of a group that pied Kristol.  But it’s not like my father and his father baked the pie.

Lesbian Double Homicide Solved

One of the weirdest articles ever.  To sum up: lesbian teenager in 1967 Virginia kills two co-workers who made fun of her while she scooped ice cream, colludes with FBI to bury murder weapon, admits guilt practically on her deathbed.  Yet mysteries abound.  Like, was she really a lesbian?  Is the article implying that 1967 was way different from 2009 and teenagers in middle America don’t get tormented by being called gay over and over, even in cases when they’re not, even to the point of blowing two bitches away?

Not to condone murder, but that’s one bad ass teenage girl.  OK, whatever.  I condone murder.  But only good murder.

Also, to reinforce my status as a young fogey, there was something in the NY Times today that you will only see in the print version: a full-page open latter from Sealy Mattress to Pres. Obama basically begging him to let them deliver a free Posturepedic to the White House.

“Just let us know and we’ll bring it straight over to Pennsylvania Avenue.

We won’t ask to take a picture with you or see the Lincoln Bedroom.  All we ask is that you let someone at the front gate know we’re coming.”

How charming.  And desperate.  Um, it’s not a Motel 6 over there.  (And you thought full-page ads only came from AIPAC or Yoko Ono anymore.  “War Is Over.  If You Want It.  Which You Don’t.  I’m Re-Releasing Grapefruit to Recoup My Losses from That Turkish Chauffeur Thingy.  Breathe.”)

SF, NYPD and Kentucky in the NYT: Odd, Odder and Ordinary

Today, an article about a proposal for congestion pricing in San Francisco, a la London and bizarro-New York.  That is, the city envisioned by Mike Bloomberg, with a sports stadium on every corner and his cruising to a third term on the Right-to-Life line and a fourth term on the Alaska Independence Party ticket.

This is the proposed area:

First, as a 3-month resident of this city I am in no way qualified to speak authoritatively on anything important but for the fact that my anecdotal observations are probably the same as anyone else’s.  I would be totally behind this idea, and even more importantly, a car-free Market Street, if not for the fact that traffic in San Francisco is not actually all that bad, and the public transportation is so much more irritating than driving, to nearly any neighborhood, at nearly any time.  I can get downtown from Bernal Heights in 7 minutes by car and no fewer than 45 by bus.  New York is not like that at all.  There would need to be some kind of simultaneous injection of hundreds of millions of dollars into public transportation, or else this will seriously result in a hellish dystopia.

You cannot simply allot more money to BART and run more trains; there is only the one Transbay tube and it already accommodates four lines.  More importantly, BART is not like the NYC Subway.  It’s more like Metro-North or the LIRR.  It exists to get people into the city from outside of it, not move them around once they’re in, unless you’re going from the Mission to Downtown.

MUNI is a goddamn nightmare.  Along with my other Fallacy of the Uninitiated–the idea that SF housing is dog-friendlier than NYC–I also erroneously believed that New York’s public transportation was a humongous pain in the ass and getting worse all the time.  (Hello, L train, I’m looking at you).  I’ve seen some shit on MUNI that makes New York look golden.  And at least in a city where people are gruff and unhappy, they shut up.  MUNI is louder than recess.

And the map is oversimplistic.  How can you give the 19th Avenue corridor a free pass to the Golden Gate Bridge?  Why are both the Castro and the Mission lopped in half?  They’ve also included some very quiet neighborhoods in the congestion zone, but since they’re on the affluent side I guess that’s not the worst thing that ever happened.

I guess my main criticism is that the Bay Area’s dirty secret is its veneer of environmentalism masking the same overreliance on cars that you see in LA or Atlanta.  Preserving vast tracts of land in the region only means the towns are that much farther apart and people need to drive that much more.  I’m sure seismological concerns are way more of a factor than I’ll ever know, but seriously, BART shouldn’t even be included in discussions of how to improve intra-SF transit unless someone’s actually talking about building more tunnels.  And I doubt anyone is.

And the whole idea failed in New York and might not last in London!  Try again with a city-imposed $1 gas tax, more 24-hr buses, a free-transit zone downtown and maybe a Velib-style free bike program.  Inducements before punishments.

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Also, there is an article that, rather balanced on the whole, does slant subtly towards calling the NYPD the sanctioned agency of urban terrorism that it is.  I can’t think of another Times piece that hammered home the connection between the garrison state mentality which has ossified in the city’s political culture since 2001, and the racist policing practices required to sustain it as is.  Plus they quote Chris Dunn, who I used to work with at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

How odd that the SF would be so bourgey and the NY-centric article so progressive.

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In a typical article in which a reporter travels to the unknown wasteland between 10th Avenue in Manhattan and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, the NYT examines a devout Christian Kentucky state legislator and his crusade to insert God’s name onto every available surface the government possesses.

This is an annoying thing that some conservatives just like to do.  It does absolutely no quantifiable good, and they always lose in court cases, but it really riles up the faithful.  Naturally, Ian Urbina got the one non-Christian lawmaker in Kentucky (who comes from my boyfriend’s hometown of Lexington), and larded up the article with good quotes from her.

Even though I hate Christianity, this is bullshit.  First, what is the point of this article?  Any reasonably informed person knows that this is just another example of the same simmering cultural battle that happens again and again, sometimes in Alabama, sometimes South Carolina or Texas.  Now Kentucky.  I wouldn’t argue that it “perpetuates stereotypes” so much as it reaffirms what lots of New Yorkers already think.  It feeds into the parochialism of the article’s consumer, rather than its subject.

What would be more interesting is a discussion of why this legislator is a Democrat and not a Republican, and why the Democratic governor–who has had some netroots support, so he can’t be all that bad–has acceded to the meaningless-except-as-cultural-flashpoint law about inscribing some God-crap on a prominent plaque.  Or, you know, maybe a response to their critics, since the article is about them and not…the critics who get the final say.

Also, the conclusion makes me cringe:

Stopping the family pickup truck in front of the City View Park housing projects on Louisville’s West End, part of her husband’s district, Ms. Riner stepped out and pointed to several houses that had the Ten Commandments on wooden signs posted in their front yards.

“Christian values are part of this country’s history,” she said. “Without God, this society would be anchorless.”

As she spoke, the sign behind her read Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

Never a good sign when a non-editorial ends with pointing out someone’s stupidity.  It sort of undermines the pretense of non-biased journalism.  Have fun staving off bankruptcy by borrowing against your ugly skyscraper, Timesy.