4 ms·

I'm hoping someone can succinctly explain the hate for the NYT. Didn't get it before, don't get it now. It seems perfectly adequate. Same goes for WSJ, FT, the

I'm hoping someone can succinctly explain the hate for the NYT. Didn't get it before, don't get it now. It seems perfectly adequate. Same goes for WSJ, FT, the Economist, WaPo, etc. >I see it now. I see that information and truth and freedom have been oppressed. I had been silenced. We had all been bound and gagged and silenced, not directly, but indirectly, by a strange, complex, invisible, sinister force. But I see it now. I see it so clearly. There was a "guild of truth" telling us that there was a central narrative of mankind. Truth was branded. We are all being controlled and oppressed and enslaved by the evil octopus of the New York Times. This I especially don't get. No one has declared themselves the "guild of truth", and there's no paper or institution I can think of that the people have declared to be the "guild of truth". And if someone has, saying so doesn't make it true. But people not liking you, or your writing, isn't a crime.

saalweachter 6y ago
Googling [why does rob rhinehart hate the new york times] yielded https://www.vice.com/en/article/epd4je/soylent-founders-unhinged-politics-rant-shows-tech-execs-dont-understand-the-world https://www.vice.com/en/article/epd4je/soylent-founders-unhi...
- bingojess 6y ago
  Unhinged sounds about right, the blog post started out normal but it became increasingly disconnected and unsubstantiated. It read like something someone on adderall would churn out
- Udik 6y ago
  Frankly, if the Vice article is true (and it seems plausible given the rambling style of this one) he sounds pretty unhinged. Is this the effect of feeding only on Soylent?
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    It's possible, is there lead content in soylent? Like lots of lead? The guy sounds dis-associated from reality. A lot of the "everything is fake news" crowd is disjointed...I'm not sure of Soylent is the cause or not, or if they have investors/advisors if so, I'd be having a conversation about moving him out of the company and maybe into a psych ward for observation.
    - KozmoNau7 6y ago
      He has always been divorced from reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/op-ed-how-i-gave-up-alternating-current/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/op-ed-how-i-gave-up-...
      - uep 6y ago
        To me, this shows radical leadership, and that he is very unattached to societal norms. Radical leadership meaning that this is kind of the antithesis of a follower mentality. I think it's a kind of genius, but also a personal failing. I really appreciate people who are willing to "question everything", because there are a lot of things we take for granted without thinking about why. The failures I think this comes from are a form of ignorance and arrogance, and possibly a lack of empathy about how they're perceived. I personally know someone like this that is very intelligent, and thinks that they have all the right answers. There seems to be a mentality of, I have this information facts, given these facts, and that as a goal, *this* is the solution. With the person I know, a significant problem with their reasoning is that they have important gaps in their knowledge (ignorance). They believe other people just aren't as enlightened as they are (arrogance), and if they were, they would have come to the same conclusion. For my acquaintance, I believe that the mentality comes from a history of often being right, but also a prolonged social isolation that allowed them to build a myth in their head that they are always right.
        saalweachter 6y ago
        My favorite portmanteau for this was "errorgance": "errorgant means to be twice as certain as someone who is merely arrogant while possessing only one-tenth the requisite facts."
- CaptainZapp 6y ago
  From the Vice article: [...]and he refers to the New York Times more than once as an “evil octopus” that controls things behind the scenes It's hard to come up with a dog whistle that antisemitic. The guy's a fucking racist too.
  - robin21 6y ago
    Don’t you feel like a robot at this point by just calling someone a racist without any explanation...especially in response to an article that is writing against mindless cancel culture.
  - Udik 6y ago
    > It's hard to come up with a dog whistle that antisemitic Try with any representation of the Mafia in Italy (also called "the octopus"). Let's stop with this frankly stupid cousin of the "reductio ad hitlerum", where anything that might also be characteristic of anti-Semitism becomes anti-Semitism and allows you to denounce someone as an antisemite.
  - jimmygrapes 6y ago
    Why are you the only one hearing this whistle?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 6y ago
> I'm hoping someone can succinctly explain the hate for the NYT. In the past week these were enough for me to consider the NYT is done, it's rotten to the core (150 staff signed a letter against Donald McNeil) - Taylor Lorenz Donald McNeil https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128752 This article/rant is wrong about what the issues are. I assume the upvotes are the Soylent connection, the headline and an attempt at a solution (ghost.org)
- hackissimo123 6y ago
  Don't forget this, also within the last week: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-trouble-with-the-new-york-times https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-... And that's just recent events, without getting into the disgrace that was the 1619 Project.
Dma54rhs 6y ago
Because quite frankly they are not in the business of reporting things but in the business of changing the world in a way they see fit and somehow try to paint it as some sort of scientific way of seeing life while it's far away from it.
dunce2021 6y ago
It exists to manufacture your consent.
addicted 6y ago
Because they print over a 100 articles a day and a couple of them might peeve someone off who then decides the NYT sucks forever.
nickpp 6y ago
Because everything they publish is propaganda, you can feel their agenda behind every article and every paragraph. There is no diversity in their ranks, just conformity and uniformity. There is no debate of ideas, storms of conflicting concepts, just reaffirmation of the same things they all believe in, the single universal truth they subscribe to with no doubt or consideration to the possibility they may be mistaken. They do not dispassionately present facts letting the reader make up his mind. They already know what they want the reader to think and they just feed him selected facts to influence him into thinking that way. They do not write for the world, for the opposition in its diversity. They just write for their own eco chamber, reinforcing preexisting ideas and inflaming the spirits agains the "non-believers". They are a religion: the FoxNews of the Left.
- lamontcg 6y ago
  > They are a religion: the FoxNews of the Left. If you hang out with actual leftists, they've probably hated the NYT longer than you have.
soared 6y ago
Another comment below answers your question perfectly IMO: > He feels he has no voice, no power politically and seems to want to lash out at an entity that appears to have both. I don't understand it, but it's not an uncommon story, especially recently.
smsm42 6y ago
> No one has declared themselves the "guild of truth" Get back to me on this in a couple of years, when "fighting misinformation" reaches its peak. All social media already have "guild of truth", and you can be very effectively silenced if you run afoul of this guild. The formal institutionalization of this de-facto arrangement is still in the works, but there's no doubt there is a wide demand for it and wide agreement - at least among politicians, academia, news media, entertainers and big tech companies - that having a "guild of truth", tightly controlling masses' information intake, is a good and vital project. > It seems perfectly adequate Adequate for what? It is a partisan propaganda organ including some infotainment content along the way. For people that see the task of the press to be something else, it is abhorrent. For people seeing nothing wrong with a correct-minded propaganda, especially coupled with a bit of fun infotainment, it's perfectly fine.

saalweachter 6y ago

Googling [why does rob rhinehart hate the new york times] yielded https://www.vice.com/en/article/epd4je/soylent-founders-unhinged-politics-rant-shows-tech-execs-dont-understand-the-world https://www.vice.com/en/article/epd4je/soylent-founders-unhi...

bingojess 6y ago
Unhinged sounds about right, the blog post started out normal but it became increasingly disconnected and unsubstantiated. It read like something someone on adderall would churn out
Udik 6y ago
Frankly, if the Vice article is true (and it seems plausible given the rambling style of this one) he sounds pretty unhinged. Is this the effect of feeding only on Soylent?
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  It's possible, is there lead content in soylent? Like lots of lead? The guy sounds dis-associated from reality. A lot of the "everything is fake news" crowd is disjointed...I'm not sure of Soylent is the cause or not, or if they have investors/advisors if so, I'd be having a conversation about moving him out of the company and maybe into a psych ward for observation.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    He has always been divorced from reality: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/op-ed-how-i-gave-up-alternating-current/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/op-ed-how-i-gave-up-...
    - uep 6y ago
      To me, this shows radical leadership, and that he is very unattached to societal norms. Radical leadership meaning that this is kind of the antithesis of a follower mentality. I think it's a kind of genius, but also a personal failing. I really appreciate people who are willing to "question everything", because there are a lot of things we take for granted without thinking about why. The failures I think this comes from are a form of ignorance and arrogance, and possibly a lack of empathy about how they're perceived. I personally know someone like this that is very intelligent, and thinks that they have all the right answers. There seems to be a mentality of, I have this information facts, given these facts, and that as a goal, *this* is the solution. With the person I know, a significant problem with their reasoning is that they have important gaps in their knowledge (ignorance). They believe other people just aren't as enlightened as they are (arrogance), and if they were, they would have come to the same conclusion. For my acquaintance, I believe that the mentality comes from a history of often being right, but also a prolonged social isolation that allowed them to build a myth in their head that they are always right.
      - saalweachter 6y ago
        My favorite portmanteau for this was "errorgance": "errorgant means to be twice as certain as someone who is merely arrogant while possessing only one-tenth the requisite facts."
CaptainZapp 6y ago
From the Vice article: [...]and he refers to the New York Times more than once as an “evil octopus” that controls things behind the scenes It's hard to come up with a dog whistle that antisemitic. The guy's a fucking racist too.
- robin21 6y ago
  Don’t you feel like a robot at this point by just calling someone a racist without any explanation...especially in response to an article that is writing against mindless cancel culture.
- Udik 6y ago
  > It's hard to come up with a dog whistle that antisemitic Try with any representation of the Mafia in Italy (also called "the octopus"). Let's stop with this frankly stupid cousin of the "reductio ad hitlerum", where anything that might also be characteristic of anti-Semitism becomes anti-Semitism and allows you to denounce someone as an antisemite.
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  Why are you the only one hearing this whistle?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 6y ago

> I'm hoping someone can succinctly explain the hate for the NYT. In the past week these were enough for me to consider the NYT is done, it's rotten to the core (150 staff signed a letter against Donald McNeil) - Taylor Lorenz Donald McNeil https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26128752 This article/rant is wrong about what the issues are. I assume the upvotes are the Soylent connection, the headline and an attempt at a solution (ghost.org)

hackissimo123 6y ago
Don't forget this, also within the last week: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-trouble-with-the-new-york-times https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-the-... And that's just recent events, without getting into the disgrace that was the 1619 Project.

Dma54rhs 6y ago

Because quite frankly they are not in the business of reporting things but in the business of changing the world in a way they see fit and somehow try to paint it as some sort of scientific way of seeing life while it's far away from it.

dunce2021 6y ago

It exists to manufacture your consent.

addicted 6y ago

Because they print over a 100 articles a day and a couple of them might peeve someone off who then decides the NYT sucks forever.

nickpp 6y ago

Because everything they publish is propaganda, you can feel their agenda behind every article and every paragraph. There is no diversity in their ranks, just conformity and uniformity. There is no debate of ideas, storms of conflicting concepts, just reaffirmation of the same things they all believe in, the single universal truth they subscribe to with no doubt or consideration to the possibility they may be mistaken. They do not dispassionately present facts letting the reader make up his mind. They already know what they want the reader to think and they just feed him selected facts to influence him into thinking that way. They do not write for the world, for the opposition in its diversity. They just write for their own eco chamber, reinforcing preexisting ideas and inflaming the spirits agains the "non-believers". They are a religion: the FoxNews of the Left.

lamontcg 6y ago
> They are a religion: the FoxNews of the Left. If you hang out with actual leftists, they've probably hated the NYT longer than you have.

soared 6y ago

Another comment below answers your question perfectly IMO: > He feels he has no voice, no power politically and seems to want to lash out at an entity that appears to have both. I don't understand it, but it's not an uncommon story, especially recently.

smsm42 6y ago

> No one has declared themselves the "guild of truth" Get back to me on this in a couple of years, when "fighting misinformation" reaches its peak. All social media already have "guild of truth", and you can be very effectively silenced if you run afoul of this guild. The formal institutionalization of this de-facto arrangement is still in the works, but there's no doubt there is a wide demand for it and wide agreement - at least among politicians, academia, news media, entertainers and big tech companies - that having a "guild of truth", tightly controlling masses' information intake, is a good and vital project. > It seems perfectly adequate Adequate for what? It is a partisan propaganda organ including some infotainment content along the way. For people that see the task of the press to be something else, it is abhorrent. For people seeing nothing wrong with a correct-minded propaganda, especially coupled with a bit of fun infotainment, it's perfectly fine.