onfocus

You just have to think for yourself. Know what tradition you’re aligned with, whether it’s a philosophical one, a religious one, or one that rises out of a particular past oppression—or all of the above. There might even be a group or a school of thought you’re reacting against. If you haven’t thought about these things before, read less daily news and try to find an approach that reflects what matters to you.

I've been thinking about this essay quite a bit since I read it. I've been disappointed with Ezra Klein and this gets at some of the reason why. But I think Coates' reminder that knowing you're part of a tradition or school of thought that will continue after you're gone is a powerful idea. It's easy to lose sight of that in the daily news chaos and this essay was a good reminder that humanist ideas might not be very old in the grand scheme but they are powerful. Also thinking about this:

You treat people humanely—everyone.

People can come in the tent without agreeing on every policy. But you have to make the demand that all people will be treated humanely. That belief guides what you yourself will do. You don’t buy into the MAGA lies to get supporters. You give them a vision of what you support, and you call them to it.

That's a bright line that I can get behind. I appreciate hearing this.

The quote is devastating. It reveals a president who is either completely detached from reality, easily manipulated by advisors feeding him false information, or being deliberately deceived by old Fox News footage (as we now know was happening). It raises fundamental questions about who is actually running the country and whether the person with access to nuclear codes can distinguish between television clips from five years ago and reality.

We need to have a national conversation about fitness in the media so some adults in the room will feel confident about standing up.

Donald Trump did not fire any commissioners from the FTC today. Donald Trump declared that he had fired the commissioners. That is, functionally, he announced a desire that he should have the power to fire FTC commissioners and named the commissioners that he would fire if he were to have that power—a power which he does not, within the bounds of the law and the constitution, possess.  

The media is creating the reality this regime wants by acting as stenographers rather than explaining or providing context.

Framing a strike as potentially strangling the economy (with little mention of the hardship striking workers would no doubt face) serves to help the reader, whose economic situation is almost certainly closer to the workers, identify instead with the multibillion-dollar logistics companies.

News stories are always from management’s point of view. You typically have to go directly to the union to get their take.

Anyway, my point is just: none of this will change if Harris replaces Biden at the top of the ticket. The idea that the media -- with these soulless careerist court gossips in charge -- will allow it is just fantasy. They need Dems in disarray & so they will engineer it.

I don’t like to link to stuff on new Twitter but this is a nice summary of the media mode of operation. There is no move that Democrats can make that will change how the media covers them. You have to factor that into your decision making.

We found 144 articles focused on either or both Biden’s and Trump’s ages or mental acuities in the period studied, with 67% focused just on Biden’s age or mental acuity and only 7% on just Trump’s.

Look how not biased against Republicans they are! They are public opinion makers, not public opinion reporters.

If the entire press establishment sees fit to call on Biden to drop out of the race because of a bad debate, why haven't they applied this same logic to the convicted criminal who promises to destroy American democracy and rule as an authoritarian dictator?

My hunch is media owners think a Trump dictatorship would be better for their bottom line. Or maybe they’re true believers? The results are the same.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements.

This is the media functioning as its owners want: smoothing the way for autocracy in America so they can optimize profits.

I mean, yeah, I don't know why nobody else picked up on that, because the big detail that got my attention was that she says that the trafficking had started when this woman was 12, and well, then that can't—Joe Biden's only been president for three years, so he can't—it made no sense.

A good interview with the journalist who broke the SOTU rebuttal trafficking lie on TikTok.

Reporting (endlessly) that Biden is old without noting that Trump is deranged is not “independent” journalism, it’s just bad journalism.

The NYT is basically the PR division for the Republic party. They have fully embraced fascism and trolling for attention.

To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic project, but not just for the web as we know it, but also your own product. Unless you plan on subsidizing an entire internet’s worth of constantly new content with the revenue from your AI chatbot, the information it’s spitting out will get worse as people stop contributing to the network.

Speaking of newsletters that recently moved away from Substack, Garbage Day made the jump to Beehiiv. Go read about AI search nihilism and a bunch of other stuff.

The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions, driven in part by social media videos of flash-mob-style shoplifting incidents, that urban downtowns are out of control. While figures in some categories of crime are still higher than they were before the pandemic, crime overall is falling nationwide, including in cities often singled out by politicians as plagued by danger and violence.

Questions not covered here: who does rising crime stories serve? Why is the media more eager to report rising crime compared with declining crime?