🤖 Mitch's newsletter
Mitch's Blog
Text message spam is getting to be a problem for me. I’m thinking of activating the iPhone feature where you can shift text messages from unknown senders into their own inbox, but I do occasionally get an important message from someone not already in my contacts. How do other people handle this?
Are We About to Have Labor Camps in the United States of America? By Michael Tomasky at the New Republic — Sure looks that way. Trump is bringing back slavery. It is not an exaggeration to say that — it seems to be exactly what the Republican-led U.S. government wants to do.
Charles Pulliam-Moore at The Verge loves the new Superman movie.. I’m jazzed to see it. I’ve been burned out on superhero movies for years, but I’d love to see somebody breathe new life into the genre. This one seems written for the current political era, emphasizing Superman’s immigrant origins and painting Lex Luthor as a nativist villain.
Technicians who climb cell towers have dangerous jobs. Now they’re getting a not-for-profit group, “focused on unifying, protecting and advocating for the tower technician workforce,” organized by former tower climber Tommy Schuch. My colleague Tommy Clift reports on Fierce Network: Tower climbing veteran launches Climber Protection Group
The New York Times worked with a racist to generate a fake scandal about Zohran Mamdani
Shockingly, Mamdani, who was born in Uganada to parents of Indian descent, checked both the “Asian” and “Black or African-American” boxes on his Columbia University application in 2009. Supposedly, this was wrong of him to do, even though he is, in fact, both Asian and African-American.
Where’s the lie? Did Uganda move? Is it not in Africa anymore? Are we really going to pretend that America’s racial categories, designed primarily for descendants of American slavery, map perfectly onto the global complexity of human identity?
Also:
But here’s what kills me: they could have written a fascinating story about how a network of racist activists was trying to weaponize hacked university data that revealed nothing particularly interesting to attack a Muslim mayoral candidate. They could have exposed the whole operation. Instead, they decided to become part of it. It’s like if Woodward and Bernstein, upon discovering Watergate, had decided to focus their expose on how the security at the Watergate Hotel was top notch, with an anonymous quote from G. Gordon Liddy.
The Double Standard is Glaring
The Times’ decision becomes even more indefensible when you consider their recent editorial choices. They refused to publish hacked materials about JD Vance during the 2024 election and declined to explain why. But when a racist hands them a hacked college application from 2009 that reveals nothing of public interest, suddenly those ethical concerns disappear.
The paper also famously decided not to endorse candidates in local elections–except when it came to Mamdani, whom they specifically urged voters not to rank at all on their ballots. Interestingly, they didn’t issue similar “please don’t vote for this person” guidance about Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who resigned over sexual harassment allegations and has been plagued with scandals from his mismanagement during the pandemic. Apparently checking the objectively accurate box on a college application is more disqualifying than a pattern of sexual misconduct and mismanagement.
Manufacturing Controversy To Justify Bad Journalism
Perhaps most galling is the Times’ response to criticism. When readers and media critics pointed out how absurd this story was, an anonymous Times source told Semafor that the controversy proved they were right to publish this:
“The fact that this story engendered all the conversation and debate that it has feels like all the evidence you need that this was a legit line of reporting,” one senior reporter told Semafor.
But that’s not how any of this works. At all. Sometimes the “conversation and debate” is about how you should have known better.
The Times mostly does solid journalism. I subscribe and read it most days. But it also regularly kowtows to racist Republican interests.
JD Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence – that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” Vance said.
He explained that such a definition “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree” with the principles of the Declaration of Independence, dubbing it “the logic of America as a purely Creole nation.”
By the opposite token, Vance said, conceiving of American citizenship “purely as an idea” would “reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War,” he said, referencing the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that was founded to combat antisemitism and that, among other activities, tracks far-right groups.
“I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he concluded.
My ancestors did not serve in the Civil War. My grandparents immigrated around 1905. I suspect that by Vance’s bullshit standards I don’t qualify as a real American, even though I and both my parents were born here.
It’s a strawman argument to suggest that anybody believes that simply agreeing with the ideals of the Declaration makes a person American. There’s more to it than that. But Vance’s blood-and-soil patriotism is both wrong and traitorous, and it’s particularly shameful that he gave his talk on Independence Day weekend.
Gmail’s new subscription management is here to declutter your inbox (Ryan Whitwam at Ars Technica) — This looks like a great feature.
Businesses are hiring copywriters and web designers to fix problems caused by AI (Suzanne Bearne at BBC) — AI is great at helping with work but don’t expect it to do the work, because people will point at you and laugh.
