I posted two comments on Paul Krugman’s Friday column on Trump and populism.
Then, in a reply to myself, as a nod to James Baldwin on the day of his birth, I posted the following quote from Cross of Redemption:
““What I’m trying to say to this country, to us, is that we must know this, we must realize this, that no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead for twenty years. For twenty years. No other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth, and a wife, and a house with a fence, and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives — and then to marry and have the Plymouth and the house, and so forth. A great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it and do not know that when we talk about “democracy,” this is what we mean.””
That entire comment was removed. It’s so strange! There is nothing even vaguely controversial about the quote. In an era of waning democracy and unparalleled inequality, how much more appropriate a quote can one use? Right?
While I’m on the topic of the New York Times and commenting, here are a few tips to work the comment system. A lot of readers have been complaining about disappearing comments, replies to comments and recommendations that just won’t stick.
On disappearing replies:
They’re not gone.
Absolutely all replies are only visible when one clicks the time stamp link next to the poster’s name and then reloads the resulting page.
Until today, you could only see three replies to any comment either on a desktop browser or on mobile. Now, you can only see replies if you are in the “All” comments view. If you look at Readers’ Picks, you may or may not see any replies or only a portion. If you click on the timestamp, you need to reload and you will then see replies and a different number of recommendations. Absolutely all replies are only visible when one clicks the time stamp link next to the poster’s name and then reloads the resulting page.
I have no recommendations on how to get recommendations to stick. There have been many times in recent months when I’ve liked a comment I replied to and felt bad my recommendation repeatedly failed to register.
This kinda goes with the times we live in… Normally, I’d fire off an email to the person in charge of commenting. I’m tired and my wrist is killing me.
“It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evovled any place for you. The disaffection, the demoralization, and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skin, begins there and accelerates – accelerates throughout a whole lifetime – to the present when you realize you’re thirty and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen. By the time you are thirty, you have been through a certain kind of mill. And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is, again, not the catalog of disaster, the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details, twenty four hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It’s by that time that you’ve begun to see it happening, in your daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.”
95 million losers and counting… That’s me.