Fuck the New York Times. They have routinely platformed bigots and claimed "well we have to represent both sides." My rights are not something to be debated. Harris has been far more supportive of trans folk than I realized, I don't think she would do this. But with this article and the insistent need for the New York Times to platform transphobic assholes, I think I'm finally going to talk my mother into getting rid of her subscription.

If anyone wants to learn more about Harris and her not so mixed background on trans rights, here's a great article my partner found recently and shared with me. I'm using a Tumblr link to get around the medium paywall and I don't know how to get around the paywall otherwise. Here's that direct medium link if anyone can get around it.

I'm so fuckin' sick of reactionaries acting like they're the reasonable ones.

Every little miniscule step in the right direction is impeded by loud, braying assholes trying to drag us back into the wastelands to prove how manly they are.

My current news feed for anyone who needs to understand why trans issues are important or why we ban transphobic content:

Can we use the phrase "focus on" instead of "target", or something that sounds less like attacking when minority groups are targeted all the time in bad ways. This is not the first article that has phrased it this way.

I had to look up the phrase "Brahmin left" as I'd never heard it before. It was apparently coined by an economist, Thomas Piketty, in a paper on wealth inequality. In it, among other ideas, he used this phrase to describe a shift in voting patterns where highly educated people, who used to vote more to the right, were now voting more left in western societies. It seems an odd choice to me as Brahmin is the name of the highest ranking caste in India's caste structure. That basically included the wealthy and the powerful and to me doesn't conjure up associations with high education. The American Enterprise Institute, a right leaning think tank, says the phrase characterizes "Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites."

I gather that the phrase has been adopted by Republicans as a slur against the left in their efforts to characterize themselves as the party of workers.

David Leonhardt is their "just the facts" COVID guy who throughout most of the pandemic just kept repeatedly saying COVID is no big deal so stop worrying.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2022/01/27/the-nyts-polarizing-pandemic-pundit-00003059

https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/covid-race-david-leonhardt-new-york-times-retraction.html

His whole deal is telling people that the status quo is fine so stop trying to change anything.