I was a longtime subscriber of The NY Times in the digital era. I was not a paper (dead-tree) subscriber at any time. I had high respect for the reporting of the Times, notwithstanding the Judith Miller episode, which, in hindsight, should have been a clue.

I unsubscribed in April, 2022 and wrote about it in September. Lately, I've been reading about other folks unsubscribing.

I don't miss the reporting, I play Quartiles on Apple News+ rather than Wordle. (Current streak: 60 days. Longest streak: 60 days. Expert rate: 100%) There are other sources of good journalism, though I do recognize that there are infinitely many more sources of bad journalism.

I've managed to mostly stuff the Biden candidacy into some locked compartment in my mind. I have no say in the decision or outcome, and I will vote against Donald Trump in November regardless of who the candidate is. Any candidate the Democrats would run would be flawed and problematic in some way, and the mainstream press would make that somehow equivalent to the horror that is Donald J. Trump.

So I just don't think about it.

I'm still struggling with the Supreme Court decisions. In many ways, that's a far worse development than turmoil within the Democratic Party, yet it gets very little oxygen. That's the problem with a journalism industry built on capitalism, competing in an attention economy. We are fucked six ways from Sunday, but there's nothing to do about it now, structurally.

We must defeat Donald J. Trump, and we must place a potential Trump presidency within the context of the entirely new constitutional regime invented out of whole cloth by those six "originalist" liars on the court.

Most of the mainstream press will continue to focus on Democratic dysfunction. It will be up to citizens to write letters to the editor of local papers, using social media, speaking out in public forums, and talking to friends, neighbors and acquaintances, as civility may allow.

Heather Cox Richardson is a good source of information and historical context in this matter. Today's post is a good example. If you're not subscribed to her RSS feed, please add it. (I do get an empty entry every day, along with the day's post. She generally posts every day, if only to report that she has nothing to post that day.)

I don't know what's going to happen in the fall. I know I can make myself genuinely sick with worry. I'm trying not to. I'll do my best to "keep the faith," and do my best to help democracy and the rule of law to prevail.

I hope you will too.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:57 Wednesday, 10 July 2024