This Tweet from the New York Times is disgusting.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
southpaw
@nycsouthpaw
I want to know who wrote this tweet.

New York Times Opinion
@nytopinion

As terrible as it is that one in 500 Americans have died of Covid, it’s still much easier to have gone through the pandemic without having a close friend or family member die of it than it would be if the toll were one in 50, says @DouthatNYT. https://nyti.ms/3kjU6tR
6:03 PM · Sep 18, 2021

[rickyhall]

1. Captain Obvious?

[Ocelot II]

2. Ross Douchehat.

One of NYT's most repellently whataboutish conservative columnists.

[Nevilledog]

4. I think you're probably right.

[tonedevil]

14. One of the Earth's...

most disgusting wastes of resources.

[House of Roberts]

3. Maybe Ross Douthat?

The NYT article in the link was his.

[Nevilledog]

5. Or an intern who just lifted the most offensive paragraph word for word

[BlueNProud]

6. This is what Affirmative Action for " conservatives" looks like.

[madaboutharry]

7. What is his point...that it could be worse?

BTW, right-winger Ross Douthat.

I always found his writing to be dribble. His tweeting isn’t any better.

[OAITW r.2.0]

8. 1/500 is better than 1/50 Douthat? No shit.

So, until you bury your Covid dead, it really isn't an issue....amirite?

[brewens]

9. One in how many have severe health problems, maybe lasting all their lives? How many

are losing everything or took a huge financial hit they will never make up for, because of medical bills? It's not just "one in five hundred, boy that was lucky, it missed me!"

[edhopper]

11. The actual editorial is rather bland

Just musing about something Chris Hayes said about if COVID was worse.
The quote in the text is out of context.
It is a dumb tweet.

[BoycottTimHortons]

12. What?

I don’t understand.

[edhopper]

13. Read the editorial.

[BoycottTimHortons]

16. I read it

I still do not understand the author’s point. Is he telling us to be more grateful? To fear future pandemics instead of our current one? It’s not making sense to me. Yeah, it could be worse, so what?

[edhopper]

19. Quick synopsis

Chris Hayes said it the GOPers would act the same if it was 1 in 50 instead of 1 in 500. Douthat writes about if that would be the case. Gives both sides of the question.

[Docreed2003]

15. W...T...F

I have no idea what point they're trying to make. That 1/500 is better than 1/50? No shit. That 1/500 is better than having a close family member die from Covid??? Well, jackass, what about all those close family members who did watch a love one die in that 1/500 number? Are their lives less meaningful or their loss less impactful?

This is a bullshit tweet

[edhopper]

20. Douthat

was writing about Chris Hayes saying the reaction wouyld be the same if it were 1 in 50. It's not Douthat saying it.

[jrthin]

17. Only in reputation is the NYTimes considered a good paper.

In reality, it's crap. It always been crap, imho.

[maxsolomon]

21. How long have you subscribed?

You seem very certain; I presume you've made a study of it.

[jrthin]

22. I have read the Times starting in high school (early 80's).

I continued subscribing to the NYTs even during the debacle of Judith Miller claiming to know about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Still as disgruntled as we were with many of the articles and editorials, we continued our subscription. During the 1990's we went to a fundraiser of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton spoke. I read the article on the event, and the article represented an event that was devoid of the reality we saw. We continued our subscription during the early Former Guy's presidency when the NYT's headline read: Trump Reinventing the Presidency. The headline attempted to normalize the destructive behavior of tfg. At that moment, we cancelled our subscription.


Finally, I remember, how badly the paper treated Martlin Luther King Jr, as he attempted to fight for civil rights. The paper excoriated him. So, yes, to be kind, imho, the NYT's is trash!

[maxsolomon]

23. OK, then I respect your informed opinion.

so many times on DU the "Fuck the NYT" crowd only knows about Judith Miller's stenography 18 years ago, and is unaware that their local paper's front section carries 2 or 3 articles directly sourced from the Times. They don't subscribe, and probably don't subscribe to any paper at all, yet they are quite certain the NYT is the worst.

I guess I like to think I can read between the lines when they treat Trump with "journalistic objectivity", but individual reporters do still piss me off. There is definitely a bias towards a centrist, wealthy-friendly status quo.

Regardless, there is much more to the NYT than the national political reporting or giving Douchehat and Bret Stephens (or, for that matter, O'Dowd's ramblings) space on the Op-Ed page. I personally enjoy all the Art world fraud, repatriation and restitution stories.

Is there a paper that isn't trash?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

18. I'm going to recommend that everyone here read "The Doomsday Book"

by Connie Willis. In the middle of this century time travel has been invented and is in the hands of historians. A young woman is preparing for a visit to 1320 England, to research a particular town. Just as she is sent back, from 2054, a virulent flu outbreak occurs, making many people very sick and killing a fair number. A quarantine for that part of England is quickly imposed. The novel goes back and forth between 1320 and 2054, and although I'd read it several times since it was first published in 1992, a recent rereading was very resonant.

Possible plot spoiler



















After a while the young woman who is back in 1320 sees people around her dying, and clearly dying from the Black Death. She thinks she's in 1320, so she asks some one, "What the fuck year is it?" Well, okay, she doesn't use such harsh language mainly because Connie Willis is simply not that kind of writer. Anyway, the person she asks says, "It's the year of our Lord one thousand three hundred and forty-eight." Oh, crap. She was sent to the wrong year and arrived just in time for the plague.

A book club group I belong to read this book last month, and we had the spectacular joy of having Connie Willis herself participate in our zoom meeting. I've met Connie before at various science fiction things. She's a completely amazing person. What was best about this book club meeting was that she talked at some length about her writing process, and why things were as they are in the book. Totally fascinating.

[renate]

32. Have you read "Blackout"?

Same author, same premise, but about the Blitz, which I’ve always found interesting.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

33. Yes, and also All Clear which is the second half of the two-volume novel.

I've read almost everything she has written.

To Say Nothing of the Dog has people going back to Victorian England to find something called The Bishop's Stump. It's highly amusing, nothing at all like the serious tone of Blackout.

Her latest novel, which she says will be out some time next year, is The Road to Roswell which involves Roswell aliens and various shenanigans. She's currently working on another time travel novel, one in which a woman stumbles into the field of a time machine and is moved forward from the 1970s to the mid-21st century. Up to this point it was thought that a person couldn't possibly travel forward in time, other than to return to the time they set out from. I know I'm going to love that one.

Oh, Connie herself is somewhat fascinated by the Blitz, and she's written several short stories about it with time travel. She tells a story of being in England to do research, probably for Blackout and All Clear when she came across a group of elderly women having a reunion of some kind. They were essentially the contemporary women of WWII you saw in Blackout. She was able to talk with them at some length, and when she asked them what it was really like, they responded that they'd had the time of their lives, and as hard as it was, and even with many people around them being killed, they wouldn't have traded it for anything.

[Voltaire2]

24. His column was worse.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

25. But wait, one in fifty is still far better than one in five.

It is, however, far worse than one in five thousand.

NYT must have a genius statistician on staff.

[Patton French]

26. What an odd thing to say,

and doesn't even really make sense. Someone needs to take back the keys to twitter.

[Ms. Toad]

27. It's just a very awkward way of saying -

The death toll isn't high enough yet for everyone to have had a close friend or family member die of it. Until that happens, people will continue to believe it is far less serious than it is.

[Mr.Bill]

28. That is so far out of the bounds

of what journalistic editorializing is supposed to be I cannot fathom it.

[maxsolomon]

29. It is literally an Op-Ed piece.

Douchehat is not a reporter. He is an opinion writer, like Kristof or O'Dowd or Goldberg or Stephens or Bouie or Blow or Krugman, etc.

[Mr.Bill]

30. The norm in journalism in the editorial section

is to identify a problem in detail then propose a solution to it.

Or at least that is supposed to be the norm.

[Retrograde]

31. One of the many reasons I don't read Russ Doubt-that (n/t)