The New York Times column the New York Times didn’t want anyone to read
Last weekend, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece criticizing the rationale behind the forced ouster of Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., but it was never published. Stephens told colleagues the column was killed by publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Since then, the piece has circulated among Times staffers and others — and it was from one of them, not Stephens himself, that The Post obtained it. We publish his spiked column here in full.
Every serious moral philosophy, every decent legal system and every ethical organization cares deeply about intention.
It is the difference between murder and manslaughter. It is an aggravating or extenuating factor in judicial settings. It is a cardinal consideration in pardons (or at least it was until Donald Trump got in on the act). It’s an elementary aspect of parenting, friendship, courtship and marriage.
A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference. Read accounts about life in repressive societies — I’d recommend Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai” — and what strikes you first is how deeply the regimes care about outward conformity, and how little for personal intention.
The Bret Stephens column is about a ridiculous excuse the management of the New York Times came up with for firing their science editor. The newspaper then refused to publish a column from one of their regular columnists protesting the firing, so it was published in another newspaper.
ReplyDeleteBret Stephens is someone I might actually read if he self-published in a blog or on substack, but I gave up on trying to read the New York Times over a decade ago. I sometimes glance at the headlines when I pass the edition of the paper on sale at the local grocery store, and then usually wish I hadn't. I found it hard to get involved in the column because I can't comprehend working for the newspaper in the first place, in 2021, except as a janitor or a similar position, because you need the income.
Yes, to be a NY Times janitor might be quite amusing. One could leave chewing gum where Mr. Sulzberger might be expected to step on it, or one could nail a kipper to the underside of the desk of one of the more aggressively warmongering or politically correct hacks.
DeleteDid you notice Donald G. McNeil,Jr. is the author of the 2016 book Zika: the emerging epidemic?
ReplyDeleteFire the SOB for that, not this.
According to Trikipedia, McNeil was the NY Times's epidemics man, so naturally he wrote about zika. Was that bad?
DeleteFiring the guy for saying "nigger" (which is OK, by the way, if you put it in quotes as Wikipedia does in its article about McNeil) seems absurd. So was there something else about him. Could it be that his Covid reporting failed to keep to the right political line?
Why would the NYTimes have an epidemics man in the first place?
DeletePart of what has troubled me all along has been the way killer viruses were hyped as "on their way to kill us", starting back in the 1990's, with a Sixty Minutes report on the Ebola virus. It caused a sensation in the United States.
From that moment on, people seemed to be waiting for some horrid pathogenic virus to emerge and sweep the globe. It became a part of the popular mindset, I would say.
There have been major motion pictures made on the subject. The other night my son and I watched a movie called Quarantine, starring Harry Hamlin as President of the US, and Nastassja Kinski as a heroic CDC worker scrambling to come up with a vaccine. I bought the DVD in a secondhand store when I saw the title.) It was a bit hokey, but these are stars and the production values were quite high for something doomed to flop. I could tell by the cell phone technology the President was using the film had been made some time ago. (Probaby after the Ebola buzz, though.) And this is only one example.
There's a more recent example in the 2016 film Pandemic. I've never seen it but from what I've heard, our pandemic has been coordinated as if it is following the same script. A Japanese film made in 2009 has the same name and subject matter. I can make a list here nearly off the top of my head. There was something in the 90's called Outbreak.
These all have the same theme of heroism, resolve, loyalty, and love under the most trying circumstances. In the end, the people who step up to the plate are equivalent to some of the greatest heroes in history, having saved humankind from sure extinction. Narrowly.
I think you know where I am going with this.
I lose track of all the times I remember people getting all panicky about some new deadly flu. What was that one? Bird flu? My friends were telling me how it spread through mosquitoes. We have a lot of mosquitoes up here and they had the idea we would be particularly susceptible. I don't know a lot, but I know that's not our problem and could explain why. I still had the distinct impression they were primed for heroic measures required to deal with pandemic disasters.
From some time in the late 90's or early 2000's, I was aware of Bill Gates's interests in viruses and vaccines. And from that time onward I felt a foreboding. (How do I periodically learn this crap about Bill Gates and his interests? It is not as if I track his investments using SEC filings or something. It is out there in the popular press for popular consumption and this is not by accident or because he's a charming, fascinating personality.)
I saw Zika as one more example of hype, not solid science and reporting. There was no damned Zika epidemic coming. We know this now. All McNeil was doing was serving his masters and keeping the pot of fear stirred until the time came to put the hammer down. On our heads. This is the way we are governed. Mind control.
McNeil lived by the game and now he'll die by the game. Note he goes placidly.
Somehow this reminded me of Al Franken, the US Senator from Minnesota who was forced to resign during Trump's term of office. Speaking of intent. Who can look at the pictures of Franken "groping" women, "assaulting" them sexually, without being aware this was not Franken's intent? Besides, women do not smile and laugh and enjoy being groped...The women in the pictures were having a good time. The got the joke, which is all it was. And yet Franken went quietly into that good night....
"McNeil lived by the game and now he'll die by the game. Note he goes placidly."
DeleteIt's interesting, there seems to be nothing hypocritical about the politically correct. They actually believe the absurdities that they claim to believe.
Like that Nobel Prize winner, Tim Hunt, at University College London who was complained of by some odious lying woman because of a feeble joke that he'd made: the idiot promptly apologized, accepted his ejection from the university, and fled the country.
Thanks, CS. I hadn't looked at it that way. It's hard to believe someone like Al Franken, formerly a comedian on Saturday Night Live and therefore cynical and sarcastic, would see through the bull shit. I bet you're right, though. He copped to groping women because he thought he'd actually groped them. (He wasn't even touching their boobs. He had his hands over them as if he was going to, but he didn't. He can't even be said to get his own joke if he could be persuaded it wasn't a joke at all.)
DeleteThe thing is we were all psychologically prepared well in advance to believe we'd have no choice but comply with the harshest and most restrictive measures. Through the media, the medical discourses of routine health care, our educational system, and so on.
ReplyDeleteThe other scares could have been test balloons. Float a balloon, see which way the wind is blowing, see what works and doesn't work, and so forth.
That anthrax scare was another I forgot to mention. What I was watching was how no one paid attention to what dissenting scientists who were clearly speaking to the facts. I was watching the dissenting scientists who cried when the one scientist was driven to suicide by the FBI, which then, with almost no fanfare called it "case closed".
There has been so much to learn from these test balloons, but likely the only ones learning are the ones we wish weren't learning. That this is so is likely also something to have been learned...And was learned by the ones we wish weren't learning.
One wonders whether, after Covid, we will refuse to comply with even the harshest and most restrictive measures, even if such compliance is the only means to avoid the most catastrophic consequences. In fact, to be totally paranoid, one might think Covid is the set-up for the WDB epidemic (WDB being the ingeniously engineered World Depopulation Bug).
Delete