All purpose news and politics thread part VII: News & Politics Total Landscaping

[Mister Mets]

The workers do get an explanation though. Exit interviews are conducted exactly as I laid out previously. I've never heard of an exit interview that played out with any opaqueness, it's never, "'You're fired!'--'Why?' --'Because I feel like it.'" It's always laid out step by step, with the documentation of the specific warnings(usually signed and dated by the employee at the time of documentation) re-presented in chronological order leading up to the tier of termination and there is nothing to suggest that wasn't the case with Gina.

Again, you sound like someone who has literally no idea how actual work places function.

Policies can differ from workplace to workplace. HR policies you're familiar with may be different elsewhere.

People often get fired for things that have nothing to do with the quality of their work, like budget cuts or mergers resulting in redundancies.

Is Jamie Reed a whistleblower in your opinion, Mets?

Despite having not met even the generous standards and interpretation you have granted -- what makes her a whistleblower?

I can find more gifs, you know.

You were dismissive earlier, and responded to a post of mine with gifs, so I do want to resolve an important question. Do you agree that people should be able to assess political bias independent of their own views (IE- should someone who is among the most conservative 20 percent of the population recognize that they're more conservative than the median voter?)

To answer your question, I think she's a whistleblower. She had a complaint, and it seems there's substance to her concerns, in that there were not enough therapists with experience in gender issues to process claims.

If she was complaining about something with a different political salience (police officers drinking on the job) I suspect her current critics would accept this level of evidence that some reforms may be helpful.

What we're actuailly seeing here is the impact of decades of right-wing attacks on the media having had their intended result, and when left-wingers complain about it, it's automatically discarded. The 'liberal media' hasn't been for a very long time, if it ever truly was.

Also, that story sounds *hella* fake.

One way to consider this is the extent to which a newsroom is politically diverse.

That would help determine if ostensibly mainstream outlets are part of the liberal media.

Nikki Haley gets first 2024 win in the Washington, D.C., GOP primary

Good for her.

Even if that story is true, so, like what is the impact? One guy feels that he was shamed for liking a sandwich made by a brand that some people boycott. So.... what? Isn't this what people call snowflake behavior?
Was he fired? Did nobody talk to him at the office ever again?
If this is what passes as traumatic experience for anyone, I don't want to be rude or dismiss anyone's feelings, but that person has it good in my opinion. People who are socially awkward feel like that on a regular basis.

If the story is real, a few things matter.

It is a bit obnoxious for an HR person to call out a new hire for their preference in sandwiches, and for new coworkers to snap fingers in affirmation.

It does suggest different norms within an ostensibly mainstream media outlet than in the larger population.

It's also important if it happened, and people in the media incorrectly reject it.

For Adam Rubenstein and his friends, it would be a matter of honor if people call him a liar when he's telling the truth.

It's bad if people within an industry don't understand its biases.

It's bad if the media is wrong. Their main job is to be correct, and to not make mistakes ordinary people make because the civilians lack the professional training to avoid blindspots and cognitive fallacies.

The media is also supposed to help people make sense of the world, so it's a problem if many of them don't understand it.

[Mister Mets]

The specific claim was that an editor who recently joined the Times was called out by an HR representative for liking Chic-Fil-A in an orientation, and that multiple coworkers snapped their fingers in affirmation.

Let's take a look at who doesn't believe this story happened.

That's not true. It was not backed up by people who were "there at the time". People say he told them a story like that back then.
It's a stupid lie he's been telling for years, and now he wrote it down. It's a completely unbelievable caricature of liberals, and the fact that you believe this really happened the way he's been describing it says a lot about the way you see us.

I'm shocked. Totally.

If I told my mom back in 1982 that I have a friend called Harvey who is a 7 ft tall bunny and now write an op-ed about it, how big is the risk that Harvey eats Mets?

Depends.

Is he wearing a shirt that, as a sample size of one, can be used to condemn all Democrats as somethingsomething ‘leftist extremists’ something?

Then the risk might be high.

Plenty of name reporters seem to think it's plausible. I posted Jonathan Chait's piece.

Jesse Singal wrote about it.

I don’t think this proves the incident occurred the way independent confirmation from someone who was in attendance would, but on the other hand, come on. The remaining skeptics are demonstrating a textbook example of an isolated demand for rigor: If something happened to a left-leaning person in 2019 that made a right-leaning group look bad, and there was this much evidence for it, of course the sandwich truthers would disseminate it without any further thought. To take one of countless examples, in 2020 Hannah-Jones helped fan an absolutely unhinged conspiracy theory about the government using fireworks to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement before (to her credit) deleting the tweet and apologizing. That theory was evidence-based enough for her to disseminate it. Hell, she had no qualms about immediately calling Rubenstein a liar — a tweet that’s still up — despite being extremely well-positioned to quietly make a call or two and learn more about this incident prior to rendering judgement. I am not particularly well-connected to the Times, but even I have dug up some further off-the-record details (update: I should have mentioned that Megan McArdle also learned more about the incident and publicly said she’s convinced it happened), and it wasn’t difficult to do so. Hannah-Jones obviously could have done the same, but it was more important to tweet and to smear.

Megan McArdle of the Washington Post believes it.

I have now spoken to yet another person about this story , this time someone at The Atlantic who is familiar with the story. They tell me that not only did they corroborate with multiple people who heard the story from Adam right after it happened, but also that they learned that the incident triggered an internal New York Times HR process that was corroborated with more than one person. And it also seems worth noting that of course they contacted the Times for comment. If Rubenstein had made the story up, it seems likely that at some point during all this someone would have said so and he’d have been fired.

Evidence for Rubenstein's version...

• He told people at the time. (This means that he's not making up an allegation after leaving the New York Times, but that he made the claim pretty early in his tenure there and shared it with others.)
• A reporter heard confirmation from someone who was there, and has heard that it triggered an internal HR process
• It matches James Bennet's descriptions of the newsroom
• As far as I know, no one who was at the orientation (This was twelve hires at the New York Times, so they're familiar with how to get the word out on a topic) denies it, nor does anyone claim that the HR process did not occur, or dispute the major part of James Bennet's story of how he got fired.

Evidence against Rubenstein's version...

• Some people in the media who don't have firsthand knowledge of it find it hard to believe.
• ?

We should agree that if you're willing to insult me because you think this is so obviously untrue, and it turns out to be true, it reflects poorly on you as an individual. It's one thing to be skeptical, but to be confident, obnoxious and wrong is bad.

[Mister Mets]

There really is no law that says you even have to have primaries. The two major parties decided to have primaries in the 1970s to "let the people decide" because they were having too many problems with protesters at the conventions (see Chicago 1968). But since they don't even have to have primaries in the first place, the 14th amendment doesn't apply here. What we should focus on now is getting Trump barred from the ballot for the general election in November.

The court didn't seem to support that.

In theory, they gave a framework in that Congress could come up with some mechanism to determine that he engaged in insurrection, but it doesn't seem anything will change before November.

They also seemed to suggest that should Trump win, Democrats in Congress can't decide his win was illegitimate and kick him off the ballot with the 14th amendment argument.

Makes a certain amount of sense that something affecting every state, like a Presidential Election, must be consistant for every state....which makes me wonder how the SCOTUS would rule if someone brought a case saying that it is wrong for individual states to use their own election process for the Presidential election instead of having a federally approved election system that all states much follow [for example: caucus versus primary election].

this could be a step towards standardizing the Presidential Elections across all states.

Primaries would be different than the general election.

There are multiple differences in states, including who gets on the ballot.

The consistency argument seems more about Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson (who probably believe this is a reasonable take on the living constitution) than the other justices.

And now, a refreshing pivot away from Trump....though this story does involve him in a way....the story of the California election to replace the late Sen. Feinstein. The players are: Adam Schiff (D), Steve Garvey (R), former Dodger great and Padre player, Katie Porter (D), running on a promise to stop eating children, and Barbara Lee (D), running on a pledge to permanently destroy the nation's economy by raising the federal minimum wage to $50 an hour.

Those are the players, but the campaign is...unusual. Garvey hasn't run a single ad; AFAIK neither has Lee. It's all Schiff and Porter, and they're running....against Garvey, who HAD no chance at all to win. It's all----"Look at Garvey, he's a Republican who voted for Trump....TWICE!".

And how is this working? Garvey, who started the race in a distant 4th to 3rd, quickly has risen to lead the former leader Schiff by a statistically significant lead over the rest of the field, including Schiff. What will happen is that he and Schiff will go on to a runoff, (the top two in a race move on regardless of party), and Schiff will win as the voters for the other candidates will vote instead for Schiff.

What I don't know is why voters have shifted TOWARD Garvey so much.

This is against the context that it is pretty much impossible for a Republican to win a statewide office in CA. So why did the polls shift so far toward the lone Republican in the race? And why did Schiff run against Garvey, a non-entity as far as CA politics go instead of his real rivals, Porter and Lee?

Schiff has mentioned Garvey a lot, because he would rather run against Garvey than Porter or Lee.

If he runs against Garvey, he's a Democrat running against a generic Republican in California. The race is pretty much over.

If he runs against Porter, it's messier, especially if either of them tries to figure out how to get some Republican votes (kinda like Dianne Feinstein versus Kevin De Leon in 2018.)

That may be the strategy, but I don't understand it, since Schiff's advertising attacks Garvey by linking him to Trump. Wouldn't that hurt Garvey in a state where Trump and indeed Republicans in general are anathema? So why is it having the opposite effect?

It's a purely academic question since as you point out, there's no way Garvey is getting elected with an R after his name in CA, but it does interest me since it seems so counter-intuitive.

Linking Garvey to Trump would hurt him in a one on one race, but it could get him to 25 percent, which would be enough for second place.

If true at all, the story is only about a single HR person not the entire “work culture”.

The coworkers snapped their fingers in affirmation.

As we’re told repeatedly by the right, ‘what works in another nation won’t work here’.

Of course, they leave out that it won’t work here because the right won’t let it…

Religious extremism is turning us into a third world nation on the verge of a dictator.

I HOPE against hope that I’m wrong and that we aren’t staring down the barrel of a dictatorship. I HOPE that enough people can see the warning signs and recognize their role in what happens next.

40+ years of paying attention to politics, though, tells me more people will tune in for the premiere of the newest season of the Bachelor than will vote against the further erosion of our rights, as the rest of the world moves forward.

A problem in the US that there wasn't a vote on abortion. The Supreme Court decided it was a right, and the argument was sketchy.

In France, they approved a constitutional amendment.

Nothing like that happened in the US, but it could.

She also absolutely took for granted that she would win some of the states she ended up losing. Because in addition to NORMAL political calculus, she failed to realize JUST HOW DESPERATE the far right was to force their greed and religious extremism on the rest of us before McConnell dies.

We can’t take for granted that California will never go red. That’s how we lose.

The far right was always going to vote for the Republican.

The problem is that enough other people went for Trump.

The Biden vs Trump polling is interesting to say the least. Trump is leading in most polls, and it looks like Biden is only scoring 51% of the Black vote and Trump actually leads among Hispanics. A disproportionate number of young voters are also leaning towards Trump.

I think this will change before election day, but two issues seem to be bad for Biden- 1. Illegal immigration 2. The War in Gaza.

I'm not sure if the Biden team knows how badly these issues are impacting these groups. There seems to be some misunderstanding that minority groups will be more sympathetic than white voters when it comes to illegal immigration which is a complete misread. Most black and hispanic voters are not immigrants and have just as big a problem with illegal immigration as white voters. Young voters have a big, big problem with how the conflict in Gaza has been approached by the US, but I don't really think they have much of a point here because Trump is not going to do better than Biden in this regard (anyone thinking otherwise is living in a fantasy).

I guess Biden has to do something serious about this before the elections because the real black mark on this admin is the mess that is illegal immigration. Whether we like it or not, perception is in many cases reality and it appears that Biden had no plan or even counternarrative regarding this issue.

With the war in Gaza, a complication is that the majority favors Israel, so appealing to young voters would turn off other voters.

[godisawesome]

I don't know anyone in real life who thinks immigration is the number one issue facing the country. In blue non-border states, people are fretting about this? Really?

I don't trust these polls. It just doesn't feel right to me. Look, in 2016, even in my blue state, I FELT that people really did hate Hillary and that was worrying. But it seems like most people didn't think Trump could really win and her problem was people sitting at home.

But what's going on right now is just weird to me. It feels like these special elections results and stuff match more than what people are apparently saying in polls. Do I feel excitement about Biden? No, but I also don't feel hatred of him from anyone like I did with Hillary, esp people who voted for him once already. He's the incumbent, and the alternative is Trump. AGAIN. They're both fucking old, but again, one's Biden and one is Trump. The choice is already clear. This doesn't make sense.

What I DO feel is that no one is paying attention to politics or the news right now. My own brother, who used to pay a LOT more (in 16 and 20, he's millennial) now barely ever knows what's going on. He's tuned it out, unless I tell him. He votes but he no longer follows any news really. I wonder if that's the case with a lot of other people too. Part of the tuning out is the lack of enthusiasm for Biden himself, which jeopardizes some turnout in the fall, potentially.

Biden's problem is people possibly staying home. He needs to solidify his base. He needs to use his bully pulpit more, show up more, get himself in the news more. But accepting the Republican framing on immigration is stupid imo. That's not what I'm worried about at all- I'm worried about reproductive rights, and losing our democracy to a wannabe dictator.

There’s this variable that may or may not have an impact on polling and performance (since there *has* been some evidence of Dem voters over performing the polling by a significant margin):

A big part of the “appeal” of Biden was the lack of drama, the sheer, old-fashioned “same-old, same-old” background noise of most presidential administrations contrasted with the reality TV show of Trump. Even at the height of his successful campaign

That’s definitely a type of apathy, regardless - but it might not be apolitical apathy, but rather just plain emotional apathy that might be rendered irrelevant whenever it’s voting day by people who vote single issue on abortion, care just enough to hate Trump, or just view him and the GOP as too weak because they lack the energy to hate him.

There’s a chance that the way the GOP’s culture wars have become their main selling point to their followers, on top of Trump as his own thing, might render it less a matter of “Trump vs Biden” and make it more “the people I don’t like vs the people I can’t afford to have wasting my time and money and are an active threat to my peace of mind.”

[lilyrose]

I also think pollsters are definitely presuming that the presidential electorate in Nov is going to look completely different than the one in the last midterms or in any of the special elections since, and that this completely different group of voters seem to prefer Trump at the moment.

But that is still so fucking weird to me. How can anyone have forgotten what that shitshow was like? How can anyone think that the guy who tried to overthrow the government on his way out should be allowed back in power UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES?

[The Cool Thatguy]

I also think pollsters are definitely presuming that the presidential electorate in Nov is going to look completely different than the one in the last midterms or in any of the special elections since, and that this completely different group of voters seem to prefer Trump at the moment.

But that is still so fucking weird to me. How can anyone have forgotten what that shitshow was like? How can anyone think that the guy who tried to overthrow the government on his way out should be allowed back in power UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igKb2DhP7Ao

At 3:22, basically

[Jack Dracula]

The coworkers snapped their fingers in affirmation.

A single HR person and a few other new hires don't constitute a "work culture".
The dumbest part of the story is how people supposedly snapped their fingers in affirmation. Why finger-snapping instead of something normal like clapping, and how were they all so completely on the same page they would all do something that weird together?

Idk, honestly the whole story comes as whiny and stupid. "I was sandwich-shamed." Big f**king deal. Call me when you have real problems.

[AnakinFlair]

A single HR person and a few other new hires don't constitute a "work culture".
The dumbest part of the story is how people supposedly snapped their fingers in affirmation. Why finger-snapping instead of something normal like clapping, and how were they all so completely on the same page they would all do something that weird together?

Idk, honestly the whole story comes as whiny and stupid. "I was sandwich-shamed." Big f**king deal. Call me when you have real problems.

Seriously. Best part of working from home is NOT having to talk to co-workers. In this guy's case, his co-workers not wanting to talk to him should be seen as a absolute win.

[Tendrin]

Jesse Singal believing something makes it less likely to be true.

[Gray Lensman]

Jesse Singal believing something makes it less likely to be true.

I'm now thinking of the Family Guy quote about a certain news channel.

"Even things which are true, when reported by Fox News, become lies."

[comictimes]

Rishi Sunak: George Galloway's victory is 'beyond alarming' as 'forces try to tear UK apart'

[Zelena]

France enshrined the right to have an abortion in its constitution today, with a massive majority vote in parliament.

Abortion has been legalized in France decades ago… Maybe it is what is happening in the US that made them to enshrine it in the Constitution.

[CaptainEurope]

She also absolutely took for granted that she would win some of the states she ended up losing. Because in addition to NORMAL political calculus, she failed to realize JUST HOW DESPERATE the far right was to force their greed and religious extremism on the rest of us before McConnell dies.

I thought that was a debunked urban myth?

[CaptainEurope]

Don't trust polls. I can list a dozen ways in which the data could be corrupted or biased or otherwise not reflective of reality.

It's also a question of what gets polled. It was pointed out that the failing New York Times included the question whether Biden is too old to serve effectively in his next term, but did not ask anything about Trump being a rapist or all his other legal woes. If you include a negative question about one candidate and then ask who you will vote for, you get the result you want.

[CaptainEurope]

Why is Trump suddenly polling so high? Do people really want a dictator that much?

Because crime is up, the economy is doing terrible and the world was a paradise when Trump was president. Haven't you heard? Everybody on Facebook and Xitter says so. I get youtube videos suggestged that prove Biden raped his daughter. Both sides!